Chapter 3: IIISummary:
A bit of language learning and a new nickname for Sirius.
Notes:
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, to all my lovely readers!
I hope you're having a good day and didn't let watever lockdown restrictions there are at your place ruin your time. For those of you who don't celebrate christmas, I hope you're having a good time anyway.
There will be no new chapter until after New Year, so I wish you all a good start into the new year. Let's hope 2021 has a little less excitement to offer in terms of world politics, pandemics and some such, and more excitement in terms of me actually being able to leave the house again.
Enjoy the chaper.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Well… Kakashi didn't know what he had expected, but it wasn't a city with people who not only spoke a completely different language but even used a different alphabet.
It wasn't a particularly big place, he realized when he walked from one end to the next. Konoha was bigger, though not by much. Other than that, every attempt for comparison to Konoha was soon doomed for failure. This place was completely different. There was no protective wall or border surveillance. The architecture was different, the people wore different clothes and there were odd metal machines everywhere, that he quickly gathered, were meant for transport. Most strikingly he had to walk up and down before he realized that there was no clear administrative center. First – as he was used with Konoha – he'd gravitated towards the biggest building with the square tower, but upon coming closer, he'd realized it was likely a place for religious worship rather than government. There were other big buildings that stood out among their neighbors but none quite big enough, that he suspected it to be the seat of the city's leader. This was clearly not a shinobi-village, but more than that, it was unlike any city he had ever been in – civilian or shinobi.
The people here – that was quite clear from the way they walked – felt safe even without reinforced borders. On top of that, despite the architecture looking decidedly luxurious and rich – more so than most civilian villages he knew, which were built from wooden huts sprinkled in between sprawling fields – he could not find a Daimyo's or even a representative's seat.
Odd. Feeling lost, he sat down on a park bench next to a field of red poppy. It did not look like this village had seen any war lately. Not within the last decade or five at least. They spoke a language he had never heard, used an alphabet he'd never seen. More than anything he was certain now, that this was not the Land of Water. If he didn't think the mere idea was absurd, he'd assume that he'd left their continent entirely. How?
Absentmindedly he tickled the big black dog who was standing next to him, watching the people with a rare curiosity for a dog.
"Mah," Kakashi muttered, "can't help it." With how things turned out and having no idea how he could get home as it was… he had no other chance, but to try and learn the language. If nothing else, it was a rather new and unexpected challenge. There was a small shop, he had walked by earlier. It looked like a bit of a junk shop, selling everything from souvenirs to books to second-hand clothes.
As he entered the shop a small jingle welcomed him into the room. It smelled of dust, leather, and old wood.
"Welcome," an elderly woman greeted, hands clasped together, giving him a broad smile from where she sat behind the register. Although he didn't know the word, he understood the meaning easily enough.
"Thank you," he answered as he held the door open for the dog. The dog blinked up at him as if confused.
"Oh no, dear, your dog has to wait outside," the woman said from where she sat, quickly standing up to walk up to him. "I'm sorry."
"Your dog?" he repeated questioningly, trying to copy her way of speaking.
"My?" she shook her head confused. "No, your dog… Oh, I see, you don't understand English? English?"
He shook his head, not understanding. She pointed to the dog. "Dog," she said. Then she pointed to him and again to the dog. "Your dog. Outside." She pointed out the door.
Apparently, the dog had already understood, as it retreated quickly to wait on the street. Curious, Kakashi thought. Really well-trained.
"Dog," Kakashi repeated with a smile. "Outside. Thank you." He bowed lightly.
"Ah," the woman squealed as if not expecting the gesture. "What language do you speak? Is that Chinese? Oh wait, I know!"
To his surprise, she pushed a hand between his shoulder blades. He bristled a little at the sudden contact, but as she pushed him forward, he followed without complaint. She led him to a shelf with many brochures all designed in a similar way, and, as she pulled out a few – clearly searching for something – he realized they were all the same just in different languages. Curiously, he peered at some of them, until she gave him one with a red flag in the top right corner.
He frowned at it. Then his single eye widened. Almost, he thought. The Kanji seemed similar, but he couldn't quite make sense of it all. He shook his head. The woman handed him a different brochure.
This was it.
"Cromer," he read in Katakana, reading it out loud. "Norfolk."
"Ah Japanese, there you go." At his look of confusion, she pointed at the flag. "Japanese," she pulled out another map with a blue flag with red and white lines crisscrossing through its center. "English." The lady shook her head. "Oh, dear you really don't know a single word."
He took the other brochure. The English one. He started to understand. Glad that apparently, at least these people knew of his language. That would make it a lot easier. If he found a dictionary somewhere… but the shop did not seem big enough to randomly offer Japanese – English dictionaries. Still looking around, he found something else of interest. There were a number of small hard-cover children's stories. Among others, there was one with a big dog at the front. He picked it up, flipped through it until he found a picture of a big Labrador on one of the first pages. 'Dog' was written above it. He showed the script to the woman. "Dog?" he asked.
"Yes," she said with a pleased smile. But she also looked tired, having to communicate with him that way. Kakashi felt almost a little bad for it. It also really ruffled his feathers being treated like a kid again. And he even felt adequately helpless with his utter lack of understanding. Frustrated now, he gave the book and the brochures back to her.
"Oh no, keep them. It's a present. For such a kind boy." She ruffled his hair to his own embarrassment. As she gestured with her hands, pushing the items back to him, he understood. "A Gift."
"A gift…"
He hid all three items in a tiny little plastic bag and then left the shop. Frowning down at the dog, he thought for a moment. "Dog," he then said testily. It was as if the animal nodded happily at that.
Shaking his head, Kakashi waved for him to follow.
**
Whatever Sirius had expected of his first day as a free man, he hadn't seen himself following around a young apparently Japanese kid who did not speak a word of English and seemed to be completely without parents. He didn't think he'd follow a boy around on their first step to learning the English language. He hadn't expected to get nicknamed 'Dog' by the end of the day, and most of all… He had not expected the boy to leave the town again and climb a tree just outside its boundaries to sleep between its leaves.
Confused and worried that the kid might fall, Sirius whined and woofed up to the boy, who only said something down to him which sounded distinctly unworried and calming. Sirius gave up then and simply curled up at the tree trunk below the boy.
Cromer, he thought, Norfolk. That was where he was. He could go straight to Hogwarts, or make a detour southwest for Surrey, where he remembered Lily's sister lived.
If Sirius had thought that first day was curious, what followed was even more so. As he woke up, the boy was already up and about. Somehow, he had woken up, climbed down his tree, and apparently even searched for breakfast all without waking Sirius. It seemed impossible, but it had been the smells of raw meat that had awoken him, and now he was watching a young teenager skin and then roast a squirrel on a tiny fire as if it was a daily routine. Sirius stood up, walking around the fire, watching curiously.
The boy scratched Sirius's head when he was done with the squirrel, leaving it to roast over the fire. With the other hand he inspected a number of wild berries he must have collected. Sirius felt worried as he vaguely remembered that some of them were poisonous, though he wasn't sure entirely. But instead of just eating them, the boy would sniff them first, then squish them between his fingers sniff them again and by then he had already discarded most that Sirius was sure were poisonous. With those he hadn't already discarded before, he'd test the juice on his finger, then the entire berry. He clearly knew what he was doing. Twice in the middle of chewing he spit a berry out again. How the boy did that, Sirius didn't know. Even he with his dog senses wouldn't be able to distinguish poisonous foods from healthy ones, in most cases. Not because his nose didn't pick up the different odors but rather because he was missing the right reference framework in his memory. He simply did not know what poison smelled like unless it was so acidic that it already corroded the hairs in his nose, just by breathing in the fumes.
Ultimately – to Sirius's great surprise – the boy threw the cooked squirrel and most of the remaining berries right in front of his snout. Had he eaten already while Sirius was still asleep? Or was he not hungry? In any case, Sirius did not feel like complaining. He felt famished and hunger stuck to him like glue. He was mooching and living off this teenager, he acknowledged with some shame, but he didn't know the first thing about hunting and although he wasn't above it, he'd rather avoid digging through trash.
After breakfast, the boy led him back to the town. Sirius was a little surprised at that as he hadn't gotten the impression, that the boy had been very interested in the place. Yet, here he was again. Overnight he had apparently studied the tourist brochure he had been gifted. Now he was walking up to random people on the street, showing them random places on the tiny map, and somehow managed to transmit his question about how to get to said location. For some reason, he asked multiple people for the same directions, and then when he finally made his way to the mayor's house, the church, the park, the coast, he wasn't in the least bit interested in it, but simply asked to be led to the next big sight on his list. Sirius was utterly confused.
Not everybody of the pedestrians he spoke to, was polite. Some were quite short with the boy, others even insulting with one suggesting if the boy used both eyes, maybe he wouldn't overlook the giant church tower. Most were forthcoming, however, if with varying degrees of patience at his attempts to ask more detailed questions. It was only when Kakashi asked a young couple – they were the fifth group to who he had asked that same question – that Sirius finally understood.
"Right," Kakashi said, pointing to the right. "The third turn right?" He held up three fingers.
The young woman nodded encouragingly. "Right. very nice," as if approving of his accents.
He was learning the language! And at a tempo that was nothing short of staggering. Throughout all his time in Hogwarts, Sirius had been praised for his smarts. He and James, the Hogwarts poster-children. This kid, however... By the third day, he was stealing newspapers off the trash trying hard to decipher the letters. He was mumbling as he did it as if he was solving one of the world's greatest mysteries. Sirius just heard enough to know, that the boy was thinking about the letters of the alphabet and he didn't want to probe any further than that anyway. Sirius himself had a lot to hide, and so he felt no desire to probe into other people's business.
Sirius thought, it was safe to assume, he still didn't know half the words and pronounced a decent junk of them wrong. But he had the letter's down. He could read the signs individually or in words he knew, but outside of that the pronunciation often changed. He was starting to speak more to the people he talked to on the street. Sometimes he got the word order wrong, sometimes, he didn't make sense at all. Sometimes he was mocked for it and often he was praised for his effort. None of them, Sirius assumed, would guess that the boy hadn't spoken a word of English just a few days ago.
It was magnificent. So much so, that Sirius didn't feel any loss at all for spending the first week of his daring escape with this boy instead of making his way north toward Hogwarts. He knew he should go. There were things he had to do. But this boy… He was kind and caring beyond anything Sirius had experienced in years. He had saved him from starvation and loneliness. And at the same time, he seemed so very alone himself. Soon, a week had passed, and Sirius hadn't met any parents, or friends who might be traveling with the boy. He also didn't make contact through other means – always walking past the red boxes that Sirius remembered to be public telephones, without giving them a second glance.
Still, time was running short, Sirius knew. He was aware that the authorities would have noticed his prison break and were likely searching through the entire country for the mass murderer on the loose. He could not risk being caught. He had a job to fulfill, and he couldn't be side-tracked, no matter how at peace he felt with this strange young boy.
"Prime Minister Sir John Major met with his French colleague Édouard Balladur in Nice, France," the boy read from the dirty old newspaper. He read slowly, butchering almost every second word. The French name didn't sound at all correct, though Sirius wouldn't know. Whatever he had ever known about Muggle politics, he was thoroughly out of the loop now. "…to discuss the ongoing conflict between…"
His voice drowned on. The boy sat next to Sirius, one arm absently ruffling through shaggy fur. It was like a ritual they had started a few days ago, wherein the boy read world happenings to his dog, trying to make sense of it. This article seemed rather boring. Ostentatiously, Sirius gave a wide yawn. The boy chuckled as if he knew exactly what Sirius meant.
"Boring?" he asked with a strong accent… His brows furrowed trying to find an article where he at least understood the first two words. "Thirty people dead after violent confrontation close to Johannesburg, South Africa," he read with some trouble.
Sirius lifted his head showing that he was listening, then he put it down on the boy's lap. The boy only read part of the article, before he apparently got frustrated with the number of words he didn't know. He wasn't just lacking everyday words, but apparently also the general knowledge to place the different names of locations, peoples, and public figures. Instead of reading the last few paragraphs, he glared at the picture. Then he folded the newspaper, yawned, and climbed up into his tree for the night.
Sirius seemingly settled for the night. In truth, he had made his decision. He would leave now. It was time. He felt guilty, leaving the boy like that, but he could not turn to tell his good-byes and he couldn't stay here either. Instead, he waited for a while until the boy's breath evened out. Then he climbed on all fours, stretched, and threw one last glance at the boy before he turned to leave.
"Dog?"
How was he awake? But he clearly was. Quick as a cat he jumped off his tree landing elegantly on the ground. The boy was looking at him now, with something between surprise and sadness in his eyes. There was still the ever-present layer of boredom hiding each of his expressions, but Sirius thought he could see past that now.
"Where you are going?" he asked.
Sirius barked, giving the only response he could.
"Do you… want where?" Kakashi asked with a frown, unhappy with his own word choice.
Sirius walked back to him, nudged him in the thigh. The boy crouched down to scratch the fur on his neck. "I give real name to you," he said. "'Dog' is bad name, hm?" He didn't chuckle, but his eyes curved in the most expressive show of a smile. "How about Shaggy? Good?"
Sirius couldn't deny that it fitted. He nudged the boy's shoulder.
"I'm Kakashi." He lifted one of his hands to his own chest. "Kakashi." Then he patted the length of Sirius' snout. "Shaggy."
Something rumbled warmly in Sirius' chest. "Okay, where go?" Kakashi asked as he stood up, looking patiently down on Sirius.
Did he…? Did he want to follow Sirius? Who would follow some stray around?
But Sirius had no words to deny him, so he simply gave a short bark and then turned towards London. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could still see Harry, before the vacations ended. It was the end of July and the new school year was still a whole month away.
**
Kakashi had changed his opinion about the dog again. His initial idea that he might be a mere stray, had been disproven by how well-behaved he was around humans. Then, he'd been certain, he must have been trained by people. But the more time he spent with him the more he had to revise this opinion. He wasn't responsive enough to simple gestures and commands. In fact, there were no commands, the dog listened to. It was rather as if he listened to and understood English. He did not react to the more common hand signals, yet if Kakashi wanted him to lay down, there was a myriad of ways to tell the dog that simple desire. He could tell him to lie down, to sit, to make himself comfortable, to come and cuddle, he might just raise his arm invitingly, and the dog would perfectly understand. Kakashi had tried playing around with the different signals a little, and simply… The dog's intelligence was – he was sure – almost if not on par with Pakkun's. He understood human language, instead of listening to certain hard-trained signals as most dogs did.
Sometimes Kakashi was even convinced, he could read. The dog could certainly read the 'Dog's stay outside' signs better than Kakashi himself. He could differentiate when a door said 'push' or 'pull'. Sometimes, when Kakashi was looking for a certain shop, he led him towards the exact right one. And yet, there were so many other aspects, he was so much worse at than Kakashi had expected.
For one, the dog could not hunt. On their third day, he'd been awake when Kakashi went on his hunt. The dog had followed and hadn't known how to be quiet, how to properly lurk hidden in the bushes waiting for prey. He had about the subtlety of an angry horse. He also didn't seem adept at tracking. Once he had followed a squirrel's scent and was thrown off completely by the mere fact that the small animal had climbed a tree and jumped to another. He clearly had a sharp nose, but he didn't seem to know what to do with it. Even his instincts were off, judging by how easy Kakashi could sneak around him. And then, this one night, one week after they met, a week after Kakashi had first arrived in this strange country, the dog just up and wanted to leave.
It was maybe for the best, Kakashi decided. Cromer, Norfolk was a small town and by now, the boy roaming the area with no parents or friends had become gossip around the place. Several people had already suggested calling an institution by the name 'Police' but from what Kakashi had learned, he didn't want to be apprehended by them. It would either spell trouble or not help at all. At least, he had to know where exactly he was in relation to Konoha, how he got here and how to get back home before he could risk being caught by any foreign authority.
So, skipping town, seemed like the smart thing to do. He had no things to pack, so instead, he simply kicked down the burned-down coals of their fireplace. Then he rolled the newspaper together and followed the dog's lead.
The dog's lead. It would not be the first time, he'd do that. He was very much used to following Pakkun's lead during missions. But a dog he could barely communicate with.
Shaggy… that was his name now.
Notes:
I guess I should say, that feedback is always welcome :D
So yeah, Kakashi started learning the language and Sirius really likes this odd kid, but he has to start his journey anyway. Kakashi is a genius, so he does quite well with learning the language. Honestly, at first, I had this chapter a lot longer and an extra scene about him learning to decipher the alphabet and finding out about capitalization and such things... but that was a bit too much, and it isn't really all that exciting. Honestly, I don't know much about Japanese, so I have no idea how to write a believable Japanese accent. So I decided to not even bother with it. He speaks with an accent and, mixes up word order, sometimes forgets words completely, or doesn't know them. He has a great memory, so learning the vocabulary and using it mostly correct is fairly easy for him - though he's still only using small and easy words. Grammar is harder, as he has to piece that together himself. And of course, pronunciation is a mess. Yet, he's making quick improvement - if only because I can't wait to just let him use proper English sentences. Instead of some garbled mess. I hope you can bear with it for a few more chapters.
Also, I decided that I probably will send him to Hogwarts for a while. Don't know how yet - whether he's going to enroll or whether he's going to infiltrate it for a time. Tell me what you prefer.