Der Wolf und der Fuchs

[Oddric]

Ein Kashou kept his hood up as he walked through the forest. The cloak connected to it was made from fox fur. It saved Kashou from the bitter winds of northern lightning country quite often. His mother, Reinigen, had helped him craft it. She wasn't as skilled of a shinobi as his father, just a chuunin, but she had a unique connection with foxes. Summoning contract and all. The foxes of the lightning country weren't very trusting critters, but his mother was special. She was the first in a long while to gain their support. Reinigen was sweet, calm, soothing. On the day of his graduation from the academy, she gave him the fox fur cloak that he had asked about so many times before. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever given him. She said there wasn't anything special to the cloak, but she would always wink after saying it. Sometimes Kashou would ask about the cloak just to see her give joking grin. Back then, Kashou was convinced that there something to it, other than its impeccable ability to maintain warmth. Even now, so many years later, there was a part of him that believes she had done something special to it. It was a sort of... faith thing. There was a big sense of comfort knowing that there was something to discover that was left by his mom. Like a piece of her remained out there, like she still had one more thing to tell him. One more shit eating grin. He'd look in the mirror sometimes to see if he could mimic it. He couldn't quite remember if he was doing it right.

It was sprinkling, but the dark dull clouds gave the impression that it could pour at any moment. Kashou occasionally glanced up the clouds, turning his head about to make sure no one was following. The walk he was on was a familiar one, to a cabin nestled in the outskirts of Kumogakure. His father, Verbrannt, and Kashou would meet in the cabin before going on missions together. Kashou did not have the typical genin experience thus far. Many ended up joining teams, or doing solo missions, or joining some sort of militia faction. Kashou did solo missions, sure, but he was a bit behind. His father had a different plan for him-- hunting evil. It was dirty work, and work that the public was better off not knowing. There weren't many shinobi who took to this line of work, but those who did had a lifelong duty ahead of them. A constant duty. It didn't pay terribly well either, but the higher ups of Kumo were savvy to Verbrannt's line of work, giving him pay for things that directly threatened the village. Otherwise, it was villages and towns in the country that Verbrannt traveled to, following leads and occasionally being summoned by trusted contacts for a job. That pay was a little less substantial.

His father's graduation present for him was an iron sword blessed by a monk. Verbrannt gave him that blade in the cabin, and they left to track down and slay a wicked beast that same night. It was Kashou's first hunt, Verbrannt thought it was high time he started his training. Reinigen was opposed to the idea, having Kashou start so young. In truth, she was opposed to him following in his father's footsteps at all. The life of a shinobi was dangerous to begin with, this was an additional danger that he just didn't need. Verbrannt was determined to teach his son, though. He was ruthless at it, too. Thinking back on it, Kashou knew his father had his heart in the right place. Kashou had sleepless nights and constant training and studying, once he fought a savage hound of hell while his father watched from a distance. Cruel, but it was the only way for Kashou to have proper training. Kashou defended his father a lot, even now. Maybe it was pure loyalty that Kashou did it, never thinking bad of his father. Convincing himself that the man did the things he did out of love. Kashou wasn't sure if it was twisted or not, but he stuck to his opinions. His mother was so sweet, how could she have not seen something special in him?

Reinigen would call Kashou's father a wolf. He heard other older shinobi call Verbrannt names like that, too. He did share some similar traits, even a contract. He tried getting Kashou the contract, but the wolves found the boy unfit. Verbrannt had gray hair, golden brown eyes, and similar fierceness. Reinigen had soft brown hair and unusually pale skin. Verbrannt was fierce and quick like a wolf, Reinigen sly and cunning as a fox. Kashou couldn't remember if they loved each other as much as he liked to reminisce that they did.

Hand on peeling bark, Kashou looked just ahead to rundown looking cabin. It never was a great looking thing, but it had hardly received any attention in the past year. A year? Kashou reminded himself, shaking his head. It had been a full year. To the day. He wasn't even sure why he bothered to come out all this way. There was nothing there the past few times he went.

Stopping at the oak wood door, Kashou turned the rusted handle and moved inside. Pulling down his hood, Kashou looked around, a solemn expression meeting everything in the room: a few tables, chairs, desks, and some miscellaneous decorations. This was the cabin where Verbrannt would store his hunting supplies. Scrolls stored away in desks, weapons, books, ingredients. He used a special sort of fuuinjutsu that was difficult to unlock properly without knowing the right 'code', and as far as Kashou knew only the two of them had proper knowledge.

Kashou quietly closed the door behind him, walking into the large room, eyes down on the wooden floor. A brown stain of several feet stained it. It was where his mother had her throat slit. Kashou remembered it well. He couldn't find his mother in their home and his father was missing. He came out here to check and this was where he found her. She had been long dead; the blood already seeped into the floorboards. Insects inspecting her open wound. The dawn broken sun was bright, the sky was blue, and the trees were so green. He never cried over her body, he held her, but his face was stone cold. It made Kashou sick to his stomach thinking back on it, seeing his mother like that, but at the time he couldn't have been calmer.

He breathed slowly, looking over to a desk pushed against the wall. The place hadn't been changed since he came here last. When he found his mother, all of the weapons and seals and scrolls in the cabin had been removed. The only thing remaining was a note left by his father, in the same special fuuinjutsu language that he encrypted most of his seal work with. It was a vague note, telling Kashou he was in pursuit of the thing that killed his mother. That was it. No context, no mention of where he was going, what the thing was, nothing. Kashou had no one to grieve with, no one to help him, nothing made sense. He alerted the authorities and they took his mother away and reported his father missing. Verbrannt Akido was the number one suspect in the murder of Reinigen.

Verbrannt left him with nothing. No hidden notes. Nothing in the cabin was there anymore. Just a lonely home in Kumo with a spare bedroom. And in the full year he had been gone and his mother deceased, Kashou was no closer to figuring out what happened. There were no clues, no contacts, absolutely nothing. Kashou scanned the cabin, around the cabin, he analyzed damn near everything, a couch was placed over the break in the floor boards he made to search for any notes. Anything.

Kashou grabbed a handful of brown hair, looking around the place again, for what felt like the hundredth time. He didn't understand it, why would his father leave him nothing? The father he always defended, that he always loved, no matter how much it felt the opposite. Kashou never wanted to say it or admit it, but his father was a bastard. How could he do this to his only kid? Thrown to the wolves without a word of purpose or love?

"Damn it!" Kashou yelled, grabbing a chair and smashing it against the wall. "Where are you?!" Wood flickered against the floor as Kashou gave the wall a second hit. "Where are you?!" He smashed the useless chair against the wall again and again, until only two legs of it remained. He grabbed them both like a bat and broke them against the table.

With another scream, Kashou flipped the table over, snapping a leg off of it before beating the thing down to breaking. "Come on!!" With a single swipe, he tossed the reading lamp against the door, glass acting as the welcome mat. "Come on, come on, come on!!" Every hard breath was another broken desk or chair or window.

Pulling the sword from his sheath, a red-faced Kashou stopped over the brown stain in the floor. He fell to his knees, stabbing it repeatedly. "Fuck, fuck!" He screamed, hoarsely. Only managing another couple stabs before stopping. He clutched the hilt of his weapon, leaning his head against it as tears clung to the steel all the way down to the stained floor. Kashou sobbed uncontrollably, crying for the first time over his mother. He wept for his missing father. And the boy self-loathed because he irrationally blamed himself for everything that had happened to his family and his life. There was no one to be mad at, no one to yell at. There was no one but himself, and the cabin that seemed to have taken everything good from his life and sealed it away into its floorboards.