Chapter 1: Prologue
Chapter Text
The Uzumaki household is a modest three bedroom home close to Hokage tower, and a beacon of mingling chakra signatures on this late October night.
Clinking dishes and murmured conversation drift beneath the front door, and warm light spills forth from the windows onto the cobblestones in front. Looking in, hazy silhouettes can be seen moving dreamily behind lace curtains like an impressionist painting.
Kakashi takes a second on the porch to breathe in deeply, both preparing himself to step inside and savouring the tranquillity of the moment in equal parts. The strong smell of Konoha, ramen and family washes over him like the first rain after a long drought, warming him through. It puzzles him a little bit, how elated he is to see everyone after visiting Obito and Shisui only a few hours earlier, and Rin and Kushina-nee just the day before. It really is odd—he can feel his cheeks heating up, stretched wide with a breathless smile—and finds himself suddenly grateful for his mask. Honestly. His bare face really does show everything like an open book, something Obito loves to remind him of, and he cannot be ruining his image. Kushina-nee would never let him go if she saw this side of him—found out he actually liked it when she fussed over him, let alone that he called her nee-san in the privacy of his mind.
From within the family home, Kakashi can hear a small explosion before Obito squawks and the boys burst into giggles. Then, Rin, calling to him through the glass: “We can all sense you moping out there, you know.”
And who is he kidding? He shuts the door gently behind him, easing into the slippers Minato-sensei keeps for him with one hand and tugging down his mask with the other, revealing his stupid, massive grin. A mistake, to be sure, when he is suddenly unbalanced by one small lump barrelling into his leg and another pushing down hard on his shoulders with every excited little jump.
“Oof,” he breathes, and wobbles precariously one foot in the air with his slipper half-on just to hear the kids squeal in delight. “Hello Naruto, Sakura. Sasuke.”
Kakashi smiles at the boy standing a few metres away in the hallway rather than following his teammates’ example. Sasuke nods back in greeting with a smile of his own. He never had been especially tactile with anyone, other than his own brother and maybe Naruto and Sakura.
“Kids!” Kushina yells from the kitchen, and Kakashi knows from her tone of voice alone that she will start living up to the Red Hot Habanero name if he doesn’t get a move on. So he sighs dramatically and starts limping his way over, Sakura clinging to one leg and Naruto hanging off his arm, Sasuke snickering at the picture they make.
In the kitchen, Kushina is bent over a chopping board, knife moving with expert swiftness. She sweeps some chopped vegetables into a sizzling pan with one hand and thrusts a plate of gyoza at him without looking.
“Here, take this through for me. Nice of you to finally show up!” she says, but he can hear the teasing smirk in her voice, even as she concentrates on the several pots she has bubbling away on the hob.
Meanwhile, Sasuke has seized Kakashi’s one free arm in a Chinese burn with a downright evil grin on his face, and Naruto and Sakura are trying their level best to hold in their laughter as Kakashi stares awkwardly at the plate in front of him, unable to take it.
Kushina begins fondly—“I kinda need my hand back, ya know,” but cuts herself off with a giddy squeal as soon as she catches sight of them.
Kakashi gives a bashful smile. “Hello to you too, Kushina-san.”
“Ahhhhh! Just look at you!” She gestures broadly with the ladle in her other hand, splashing all three of them with sauce and making the kids erupt into fresh giggles. “Minato! Get the camera!”
His sensei appears in Kushina’s personal space before she’s even finished her sentence, laden with empty dishes and sporting his frilly pink apron. From next door Kakashi can hear Obito and Rin whine in unison at his sudden absence, and notes with great affection the hiraishin seal inked delicately onto Kushina’s bracelet. He’d heard she was considering getting one as a tattoo soon, and he’d be willing to bet there was one engraved on the hidden side of her wedding ring, too. He shakes his head. They really are smitten.
Minato-sensei takes one look at the scene before him, smiles from ear to ear, and instantly disappears again to fetch the camera, leaving Kushina squawking and scrambling to catch the dishes he left midair. She hugs them in a jumble to her chest and catches one with her foot.
Peeking out from over the ceramic, she glares viciously at all four of them. “Don’t you dare move–”
But the kids are already dashing off to the dining room in a fit of laughter. Naruto blows a raspberry and Sasuke really does give Kakashi Chinese burn as a parting gift. He hisses at the unexpected sting. How charming.
“Argh! That one woulda been so cute, ya know!” Kushina throws her head back defeatedly as Kakashi, now a free man, comes to her aid. He hums in agreement as they offload dishes into the sink. “One for the album.”
A camera shutters as Minato blurs back into the room. “Did I get it? Did I get it?” He looks around eagerly.
“Sorry sensei,” Kakashi chuckles softly, but hardly means it when faced with Sensei and Kushina’s matching devastated pouts, “there’ll be plenty more opportunities tonight, I’m sure.”
“At least one of you turned out all right,” Kushina grumbles, pulling Kakashi down to give him a noogie like he’s still twelve years old. She switches to a sickeningly sweet voice. “You just love your nee-san, huh, Kashi-chan?”
He struggles half-heartedly to bat her away. “I brushed my hair for this. And don’t call me that!”
With a hearty chuckle, Minato, godsend that he is, pulls Kakashi away from his grumbling wife and starts smoothing out his shirt. Kakashi just basks in the moment, letting Minato straighten his collar and watching the way his eyes have started to wrinkle more deeply when he smiles.
“There,” a finishing pat before Minato pauses to take in his student, letting his hands linger on his shoulders. “It’s good to see you, Kakashi.”
“It’s good to see you too, sensei.” And Kakashi really means it, so he makes sure to look deep into Minato’s eyes when he says it. He has a bad habit of averting eye contact when his face is bare.
“...Aaand now that you're both here,” Kushina interjects the moment sheepishly, “I need your help with the last of the side dishes. Pretty sure I’ve managed to burn water at least twice tonight.”
“On it,” sensei assures her, and he is. Kakashi watches them work seamlessly around each for a few minutes and tries to be as useful as he can with Kushina prepping and plating and Minato doing the cooking.
Peeling a last-minute carrot, something occurs to him. “Burning water? I thought you were good with broths,” Kakashi asks genuinely, thinking of her homemade ramen.
Kushina sticks her tongue out at him. “I am.”
It’s not long before everything is done and Kakashi is having his arms piled high with plates of pickled vegetables and edamame beans. Kushina follows after him much slower with her own, heavier load looking artificially steady, as if she’d used chakra to balance everything. He doesn’t blame her. Not everyone can manage full-timing as a shinobi with part-timing as a waiter like Shisui, and Kakashi finds himself taking a leaf out of her book as he precariously shoulders open the door.
The dining room is even more noisy than the kitchen, but feels far calmer somehow; cosy. Everyone is sat practically knee to knee just to fit around the traditional short-legged table, and the space is lit warmly with soft light. He watches Sasuke nodding along sagely to something Itachi’s saying, Obito telling a story to Tenzo and Shisui about his genin days with Rin loudly interrupting (“Uchiha Obito that is not how it happened”), and Gai failing to coax Genma into an eating competition. Sakura and Naruto are pulling funny faces at each other over empty ramen bowls and Minato-sensei is humming softly in the kitchen. His father, who had always struggled to make friends and small talk, is quietly occupied with his food but notices Kakashi’s entrance immediately. The small smile he offers is dazzling.
The tender lamplight reflects off the window through tacky lace curtains, making the outside world unknowable. Everything out there is irrelevant. Kakashi’s whole world is in this home.
This, Kakashi thinks to himself with one-hundred-per-cent certainty, is what peace feels like.
He listens to Kushina’s soft footsteps as she wobbles up behind him, and realises he’s forgotten something—“Sorry I’m late, Kushina-san,” he finally murmurs to her.
“Oi!” Obito interrupts himself to wave at Kakashi, before turning back to the story he was telling. Patting the empty space next to him, Gai calls out with a beaming smile, “Rival!”
Kakashi grins back at them. He holds the door open for Kushina with his foot, and breathes in to proclaim his latest excuse: “–
Kakashi wakes up.
A white-hot flash of pain releases him from the genjutsu, so strong he can feel his sharingan shake in the socket from strain like the iris of a blind man. A genjutsu so strong that for a moment, he looks around as if to find Kushina or Rin or Minato-sensei in the same predicament as him, still in their house slippers.
All he finds is the complete and utter desolation of a Konohan redwood forest, which can only be deduced from the unique scent of their ash in the wind, greying out the landscape. He might as well be in Suna.
Someone is ranting just out of view but he struggles to turn his head and focus his eyes. There is a hot and cold, piercing and numb pain in his side. When he lays shaking hands over it, he can feel hot blood on otherwise sensationless fingers. The thought of a serious injury in the presence of an unknown jolts him into action, and he finally manages to manipulate his ravaged muscles into movement until he’s propped up on his elbows. The motion makes his whole side radiate with pain so blistering that he has to squeeze his eyes shut until it returns to more manageable levels; the constant twinge of tattered tissue when exposed to air.
He opens his eyes again to a pool of blood beneath his torso that looks more like a piece of abstract art than doom. It’s the texture of the ground that gives it that effect, Kakashi decides dizzily, ash and sawdust and upturned sandy earth that hungrily soak up his blood in strange fractals. And there is enough blood for a feast. The gash in his side is so wide and deep that he can’t feel his legs.
With that realisation, any lingering hope from the genjutsu dies in his throat. Any illusions of usefulness leave him. He knows that somewhere behind him his comrades dream helplessly inside the flesh of a monstrous tree and here he lies, half dead, chakra exhausted and crippled.
There is no way of winning. He has no rebukes left for the ranting voice he has been doing his best to ignore.
“—ut this counterfeit world. It’s rotted through—and replacing the cancer with the correct reality is the only way to end this cycle of suffering. It’s too late to just cut out the rot, Kakashi. After your dream, you have to understand.”
“Obito,” Kakashi rasps. Swallows with difficulty against the stale wind casting grit into his naked face.
“You have to. It’s the only way.” Obito looks rabid, feverish eyes at odds with his tight body language, gesturing jerkily before twitching his arms back to his chest, self-soothing. He looms closely over Kakashi.
“Obito,” he says carefully, “what happened to my stomach?”
“You’ll be alive in the dream,” Obito ploughs on, “with Rin. You would try and stop me otherwise, dog that you are.” The insult is distressingly fond. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me now even if you wanted to, so, so, it’s best to accept true peace.” He bares his teeth in a smile that looks like the necessary muscles had long ago atrophied. “You can stop fighting now, Kakashi.”
And he thinks the words are a gift.
Bile rushes up Kakashi’s throat at the thought of Obito doing this out of some twisted compassion and threatens to spill at the suggestion of just giving in, surrendering to Obito’s mad nightmare or succumbing to his injuries, whichever came first. Despite the odds, if he gave up now Kakashi would never be able to forgive himself. Fighting until he could no longer draw breath would be the only way to make their sacrifices worth it. He thinks of Naruto, Sakura, Gai, thousands of shinobi who gave their lives to have a future that was more than just a dream. And all that’s left to show for it is friend killer Kakashi, and the one friend he couldn’t even kill.
No. He still has one more ace up his sleeve. Gritting his teeth, he manages to sit up and doesn’t bother to hide his grunt of pain. Obito won’t kill him as long as he thinks Kakashi is harmless, and the streaming wound to his stomach is doing a stellar job of that.
He looks up at Obito, within touching distance but out of focus through the blood and sweat in his eyes, and easily overlays the memory of a smiling boy onto his image. A last remembrance before Kakashi enacts his plan. It’s so easy to look at his strong jaw, his aged eyes, and imagine a world where that little boy truly survived the rockfall. He wonders, not for the first time in this godforsaken war, what happened to you?
Seeing Kakashi unconvinced makes Obito’s expression fall instantly. Ah. He must’ve said that out loud.
But Obito recovers quickly. It takes only a moment for his eyes to harden and begin spinning faster in their sockets. “I’ll show you,” he hisses, and once more Kakashi is plunged into a genjutsu.
Darkness surrounds him. He is sprinting through a forest, twigs whipping his naked face and snagging the raw soles of his feet, but he doesn’t feel any pain, only a roaring, horrible panic deep in his stomach, so intense he might throw up. His throat is aching and dry from gasping in the cold air, but he can’t stop.
The smell is the only giveaway—the tang of damp soil is muted through Obito’s normal nose compared to Kakashi’s sensitive one. Briefly, Kakashi lets the pounding of feet fade into the background as he wonders why Obito is having him relive this memory through his eyes, rather than show him from an outside point of view. By doing it this way, he experiences every little detail Obito had felt at the time acutely, a wide channel of emotion and sensation opened between them.
No one has ever shown their memories like this to Kakashi before. There’s something uncomfortably intimate about it that makes him want to scream in Obito’s face that he’s his enemy, to stop trying to convince Kakashi of his deranged cause and acting like he’s the fucking messiah. Because Kakashi knows himself, and if anything would make him hesitate it would be feeling, down to the last atom, whatever horror made the Obito of childhood into this. A horror that could make someone believe in the eye of the moon plan so desperately. A horror that could motivate someone to single handedly end the world.
White shifts in his periphery as he runs, fleshy and twisting. It takes only a moment for Kakashi to identify the thing that had been a cornerstone of the war: Zetsu.
The bile returns.
It’s trying to talk to him, voice echoing strangely despite having foregoed a mouth to coil around Obito’s body. Kakashi is not willing to listen to one fucking word. He is certain he will throw up if he has to hear it. So, instead, he engages in one of the only small acts of rebellion possible in the genjutsu and focuses all of his effort on a different aspect of Obito’s memory.
He wishes he didn’t.
Faintly, but growing ever louder in the quiet forest, birds chirp their morning song.
The sky above is pitch black.
All thought screeches to a stop.
Kakashi strains his ears desperately, praying to every god be doesn’t believe in that it isn’t true. All sorts of sounds and pleads are escaping him—or Obito, he doesn’t know anymore, his terror and that of the memory have started to bleed together. Tears of frustraion and despair cut his cheeks, smarting in the frigid wind, because he is running faster than he’s ever ran before and it still won’t be enough.
It’s getting louder now. There’s no denying it any longer: this is the day Rin dies.
Kakashi feels as if he’s been cleaved in two as he barrels towards the clearing—if he gets there in time he can save her…but the events of that day have been seared into his soul forever. No matter how many iterations of this scene he’s had replayed in his nightmares, it always ends in death. And famously, Obito and Kakashi are always late. Half of him wants to run away just as strongly as the other wants to press desperately onward.
The trees are beginning to get thinner as the treeline nears, and a sickening blue light shines through their tangled branches. Kakashi stumbles forward, grunting and sobbing, bleeding hands in front of his face to deflect the twigs.
The light is blinding.
The birds are deafening.
Kakashi breaches the treeline.
There is Rin, eyes doe-wide and arms by her side, mouth half open in gentle shock. And there is Kakashi, hand plunged elbow deep into her chest cavity and out the other side.
Shattered cartilage from her ribcage and vertebrae get clogged beneath his nails. All sorts of different temperatures sear and freeze his skin—hot insides and cooling blood. The sinew of her heart muscles melts off his arm like slow cooked meat from the bone and stains the back of her dress. He can smell overcooked pork.
For that moment, the genjutsu is rendered useless as Kakashi’s own memory overlays the nightmare before him with another: seeing Rin head on as her lips move silently around the blood spilling from her mouth. A twisting brow, narrowing eyes, a set of red bared teeth, she starts shrieking his name—
No.
Rin is very still and small in the dirt.
Kakashi has just watched himself kill her through Obito’s eyes. There is no bone marrow under Obito’s nails; he is still innocent. It is Rin’s death at Kakashi’s hand that pushes him over the line.
He sees his younger self begin to fall, too, and just as he hits the ground and Obito starts to scream, Kakashi wakes up.
It’s daylight again, and Kakashi gasps in the dusty air like an addict deprived of a hit, shaking, eyes wildly mapping out the barren landscape, the lack of moss and trees, the white sun. The feverish glint in Obito’s mismatched eyes has returned tenfold, and he turns that mad gaze on Kakashi expectantly.
Kakashi is afraid he himself looks similarly crazed as he comes to the realisation—what he should have known all along, really—that everything is his fault.
If he had just followed Obito right away when Rin got kidnapped, Obito wouldn’t have fallen into Madara’s hands. And if Obito hadn’t “died” because of him, then they would’ve been a three man team—together, stronger—and Rin wouldn’t have gotten the Sanbi sealed inside her. And if that hadn’t happened, Kakashi never would have killed her.
…And if Kakashi had never killed Rin, Obito wouldn’t have ended the world.
In that moment, Kakashi knows down to his core what happened to that grinning little boy who helped old ladies with their shopping bags and welled up with tears of empathy at the drop of a hat.
“No,” Obito looks at him with eyes so wary he might as well have fallen down dead, “Why are you laughing?”
Kakashi’s laughter—half chuckles, half sobs—pitters out into a wheeze. His stomach burns. He musters his best smile, eyes scrunching up, but it must look pained.
“I understand now, Obito.”
It was Kakashi’s fault. And therefore his responsibility to rectify his mistakes.
“No… No, no,” Obito must’ve realised something, “no one man is at fault, Kakashi. It was Konoha, for sending two children,” he practically spits the word, “on that mission. And it was this world, revelling in death, and pain, and building their little happy ninja villages to profit off of war like a filthy parasite. It’s this world that’s wrong.”
And Kakashi is floored.
After everything he’s caused, Obito is still defending him. After everything he’s done.
But the shallow words of comfort have the polar opposite effect of what Obito intended, and once more bile rushes up to meet Kakashi’s utter disgust with himself. It’s second nature now to choke it back down, but when he tries to swallow the bitter pressure gets glued to his throat and jams there, sticky and thick. He splutters airlessly for several terrifying seconds, the muscles in his throat and stomach completely unresponsive due to his wound. With his oesophagus clotting and diaphragm spasming like the wings of a startled bird, Kakashi’s instincts kick in and he has no choice but to reflexively cough it out, spraying Obito’s rich purple cloak in pink vomit.
Obito doesn’t seem to care, stepping closer and looking painfully concerned for someone who’s meant to be his sworn enemy.
A sudden noise of pain lurches out of Kakashi as he drops down to one elbow so he can hang his head to the side, over the bloodied sand, trying not to suffocate in his own sick. His hair falls over his face with no headband to hold it back, and he gladly lets it hide his tears even as the strands get caught in the last of the vomit dribbling down his chin. Shaking fists clench around two handfuls of wet sand. He grits his teeth. He doesn’t even have the strength to wipe his face.
“Kakashi,” Obito says with a new weight, sounding simultaneously the most lucid and the most unhinged he’s ever been. It makes Kakashi look up.
And then Obito is kneeling in his puddle of sick and blood, and making sure they’re looking each other in the eye when he says, “It’s this world.”
He could’ve only been more tender if he’d held Kakashi’s face as he said it.
And in that deformed compassion, it’s abruptly clear that the gentle, sensitive boy Obito once was had never disappeared. His eyes may burn with mania, but they also glow with warmth as he stares into Kakashi with a look of total love and understanding. Kakashi can’t help but fixate on the puke soaking into his cloak. His exhausted mind drifts to a quote that’d stuck to him from some old epic they’d had to read in the academy, survived from all the way back in the two long centuries of the Warring States Era, or perhaps even before:
Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend.
I fear to stain your clothes with blood.
Stain them, I don’t care.
Kakashi struggles to figure who would be who through his thrumming headache. He’d graduated before he got to learn the ending.
But no matter what Obito might say or believe, Kakashi wasn’t his friend; he was his obsession. And Obito was Kakashi’s, just the same. His friends hung in white cocoons from the colossal tree behind him, dreaming in a sleep from which they would never wake up.
And Obito did that, but Kakashi made him.
It’s absurd that he’s comforting him now, trying with a desperation Kakashi can’t fathom to make him believe it’s not his fault. But Kakashi knows now that every event in his life was a catalyst for Obito’s insanity. A life so precious, wasted because he was driven to believe such hateful things about the world just to cope with Kakashi’s actions. Thousands of precious lives, wasted. All because of him.
If Obito were really the cold-blooded killer of the two of them, he wouldn’t need such a noble cause as ‘world peace’ to justify it to himself. He wouldn’t need to believe so doggedly that he was doing the right thing. And when Kakashi looks back to Obito’s earnest eyes, one red as a hot poker and the other purple as twilight, he is sure that he is too far gone. To abandon his delusions would be to confront the legions of people killed in the name of his cause. And mad, kind Obito, as warm-hearted as the day he gifted Kakashi his sharingan, would crumble under the weight of his sin. To rescue him from his madness would be tantamount to killing him all over again.
In Obito’s own words, the cancer had spread too far to amputate. It was too late to cut out the rot. There was only one remaining option.
He moves to close the distance between them but tensing any muscle in his torso lights his nerves on fire. Kakashi stutters forward in agony, tries to curl in on himself on pure instinct, and jars his injury. Instantly he is struck with pain so intense his eyes roll back and flutter dangerously. The shaky muscles in his arms give out and he collapses back into the ashy soil. Bracketed by white eyelashes he sees Obito blur forward to cushion his fall, and his touch is all Kakashi needs.
His eyes are stinging, but that might just be the smoke.
Pumping the last of his chakra into a hidden seal, Kakashi watches Obito’s expression crumple in horror as the lines become visible on his bare face. His rinnegan widens as he tries to put Kakashi back into a genjutsu induced sleep, or do anything at all to nullify the seal and the chakra loss, but it's too late. Kakashi’s own sharingan (still Obito’s) rotates at a brain-splitting speed, immortalising his best friend’s wretched expression forever before his vision whites out.
An animal screams raggedly, or it might be Obito, as the final dredges of Kakashi’s chakra are wrenched from devastated coils.
Kakashi dies peacefully, knowing that sometimes the most benevolent thing to do for a sick animal is to put it out of its misery—and with Obito dead, by all laws of chakra, the infinite genjutsu should lift and the world would be saved.
.
..
…
Kakashi wakes up.
Chapter 2: Recurrence
Notes:
lowkey hate this chapter but i feel like you guys deserve an update, so we move
might rewrite at a later date if I'm feeling fancy, but I think it would be more helpful for me to treat this whole thing like a first draft I happen to be posting, otherwise my perfectionism has me writing and rewriting paragraphs until they are just too many verbs and run on sentences, as most of this chapter is lmao
in spite of that, enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Suddenly staring at a ceiling, Kakashi white-knuckles bedsheets instead of sand and waits to bleed out from a stomach wound that doesn’t exist.
The first thing that registers is the seal, itching and burning like a colony of fire ants trooping across his face. Kakashi’s never suffered from an acid burn before, but he’s witnessed it. There was a woman on one of his old ANBU squads, a Warthog or Boar mask, maybe, who died with her skin melting at the touch of a shattered vitriol bottle. He imagines this is what it must have felt like: sweltering agony.
Concentrated under thick lines of caustic ink from jaw to temple, Kakashi’s skin bubbles and boils. Chakra surges through the seal like fire. The black lines creep down his neck to his shoulders, arms and spine as if sentient, superheating bone until it’s malleable. The blaze culminates behind his eyes in a piercing headache, and trying to alleviate the pain by channelling chakra is akin to throwing water onto an oil fire; the flame under his skin becomes enraged and his coils scream out. They’re not quite empty, but his chakra is denying him, corrosive and out of control.
All Kakashi can do is breathe through it, reminding himself of every hour of T&I resistance training he’s ever had to endure as he huffs out a half-remembered breathing technique. If his eyes weren’t so blurry from the pain, he could’ve sworn every pant came out as a puff of steam in the morning chill. Pervasive even indoors, it’s his only relief from the broad lines of ink and chakra boiling his skin.
The pre-dawn grey obscures time. It could be several minutes, or several hours before the ringing in his ears fades and the heat withers into a steady hum coiled between the fibres of his muscles, waiting. Kakashi lies stock still, half-expecting whatever the fuck that was to repeat itself at the slightest movement. He keeps his eyes closed and holds his breath until his lungs protest, counting down the seconds until the seal is triggered again.
A minute goes by. Then three.
With extreme caution, Kakashi cracks open one eye. Nothing. Risking it, he blinks both eyes open blearily, wet from being squeezed shut for so long.
The room stays fuzzy in the darkness, but he knows the peeling paint job and cracked plaster like the back of his hand. It’s familiar after many nights as a child spent searching the blemishes for faces when he should’ve been asleep.
Kakashi stares skyward, and the ceiling of his childhood bedroom stares back.
Ah. So that’s what the seal did.
Even with both eyes open, the room had stayed dark. There is no sharingan to grant him night vision, and despite lying in the bed he outgrew when he was seven, his legs don’t stick out over the end.
Somehow, some way, he’s young again. And by the looks of his room, the rest of time rewound with him. He takes a moment to think about that, grounding himself with the clammy feeling of sweat-soaked sheets pulling against his back.
It’s a bummer. Kakashi’d mostly been hoping the seal would kill him. And Obito. And save everyone from the genjutsu. If he were to wake up at all, it should’ve been in the rebuilt Konoha hospital with Sakura as his doctor and his loved ones snoring at his bedside, decidedly not taking their nap inside a giant cocoon. But he supposes that’s what he gets for taking a chance on the self-proclaimed “war-ending” scroll he’d found in the grass somewhere in Fire Country, and the decaying, water-damaged sealing instructions within.
It did, he concedes, in a way, end the war. But in ending the fourth war, Kakashi had been thrown right back into the third, and if he is when he thinks he is, it’s a matter of mere months before Konoha becomes involved in the conflict at her borders. To prevent that, to prevent it all—rig his dad’s mission, keep Obito safe, stop Rin from dying, stop everyone from… He lets out a long breath, slow and measured.
Again. He’d have to live his entire life, again. Every ache, every loss, every excruciating second. Thirty hard-fought years gone in the blink of an eye.
Kakashi scrutinises a particular water stain in the ceiling without really seeing it, his heart weighing down on his lungs.
He had been willing to die for Konoha. From the moment he’d first donned that headband aged five to his final act of contrition—rectifying his greatest mistake in killing his so-called best friend—he’d been ready. He’d served his village to the fullest, laid down his life, been revived, served it some more, and was finally ready to rest after righting his defining wrong. Obito, the one who’d rescued cats from trees and knew how to knit, could be waiting for him in the afterlife, or even the Obito driven mad by his own dream of peace—there would be infinite time to work through his crimes in the Pure Lands. Rin would be there. Sensei. Everyone from the dream…
…Kakashi is ready to die for Konoha. He’s not quite sure if he’s prepared to live for it, yet.
Living his life once was already a big ask. Reliving those tragedies all over again felt untouchable.
…Aside from the buzzing half-pint fridge and gurgling radiators in the other rooms, the house is still. Quiet. The dented clay plumbing was a hangover from when the Hatake estate was civilian-owned, before they’d settled in Konoha, and as a result the heating is loud and slow and struggles to warm the space. The only thing it ever really achieved was convincing Kakashi to use shoddily drawn seals to heat his properties from age fifteen onward.
Listening to the sounds of his childhood, Kakashi thinks. The old house creaks and settles.
Even though he’d always preferred romance books, he’d read tomes of non-fiction about dimension and time travel when Minato-sensei had enlisted him to help him research for the hiraishin in his teens. ‘The five theories of time travel’ , most books claimed, although the number would vary, and indeed the theories themselves, some written by impassioned shinobi in the Ninjutsu Research & Development Department, and some by civilians enamoured with sci-fi and the supposed magic shinobi could perform. He scrounges around for the most credible of them now, memory foggy over a subject he’d really only engaged with for sensei’s sake.
There were three he could remember, and none of them sounded particularly good: a predestined timeline, where no matter what he did the future would remain the same and all of his efforts would be futile; a timeline that split into a separate branch of reality for every change made to the past (and what good was saving everyone if sometime, in some reality, they were fated to die anyway?); and a version of time travel in which changes to the past would effect the future, but at the risk of forming a paradox. A time loop. The collapse of time itself.
Or, in layman’s terms, a fuck of a lot of pressure for one man who is famously a failure.
As such, the obscure theories from when he was thirteen don’t really help all that much as Kakashi’s left wondering—and dreading—what kind of time travel this could possibly be. In any form it’s more of a curse than a blessing, and Kakashi slowly realises that he now faces the impossible choice of killing himself or living his entire life again, perfectly. Neither is straightforward.
But then, when he’d activated the seal in the future, he’d known it would do its best to kill him. And he hadn’t hesitated then.
That thought makes something hot and discomforting weigh down his insides, reminded of his father’s suicide all those years ago. He’d since forgiven him, but the wounded little boy that lives on in his heart will always recoil at the feeling of being left behind and unloved. How would he be any different from his father if he killed himself now, when the possibility that he could make a difference exists. When right now, he is the only defence between the horrific events of the future and the people he loves, not so different from four-year-old Kakashi in their ignorance of the horrors yet to come.
…They still needed him.
It’s a lot to think about.
So, head still heat-addled and slow as if he really were in the final stages of blood loss or chakra exhaustion, Kakashi thinks. But the longer he thinks, the higher the sun creeps in the sky, and the sight of his lightening room fills him with monumental dread. For every inch the shadows shrink, the time he has to decide before he is forced to masquerade his way through a day in the past to avoid suspicion shrinks with it.
He doesn’t want to do this again. Having some good survive him the first time around—Gai, Tenzo, his students—was a total fluke. He has no idea how to achieve that again, let alone save his original team, his father and Kushina, never mind the world .
But sunshine is peeking under and around his shuriken-patterned curtains, strong enough that he knows he’s waited too long into the morning already, and Kakashi has no choice.
With one steeling breath, he banishes any thoughts of fractured timelines, Pure Land reunions and impossible expectations from his mind, and rips the blanket off the futon. He falters once when getting to his feet, distributing his weight incorrectly, but otherwise manages unscathed. On shaky legs, Kakashi forces himself to shuffle further into the house, following the sound of the radiators and fridge. He knows there is a calendar and a mirror in the hall before the kitchen, both essential to his mission: figure out exactly when he is and what he should be doing so that nobody grows suspicious. He’s sure time travel would not be at the top of their list of accusations, but there are things far more credible and more dangerous to be accused of in Konoha that Kakashi would rather avoid.
He ducks into the kitchen to drag across a stool and struggles for a minute to get on top safely with his uncooperative limbs. As gently as he can, he lifts the cloth covering from the mirror, and then Kakashi is suddenly meeting his own pair of childishly curious eyes. It’s like looking at a photograph of himself as a toddler, though he doubts any had been taken the first time around. He takes a moment to raise his arms and tilt his head in odd ways just to watch the reflection copy, confirming that the soft little boy in the mirror is actually him. Legendary Kakashi of the Sharingan, universally feared shinobi of the Leaf, now a pudgy toddler. The black half-mask on his face is the only similarity to the future, and the sight of it—what came to be a hallmark of Hatake Kakashi —on a baby’s face is so incongruous with his sense of self that Kakashi finds himself pulling down the mask to poke at the round cheeks.
Sans mask, here would be any other child in Fire Country with light hair and dark eyes. Except for the vague, patchy burns criss-crossing over the lower half of his face and disappearing under the loose fabric at his neck. Ah. So when the seal had felt like it was burning his skin, it really was burning his skin.
Kakashi leans in close, face at an angle, and stretches his skin with his fingers to get the best angle for inspection. Luckily, they only seem first-degree: superficial epidermal burns. But if that part of the seal had caused real damage, he was worried about the pain he’d felt elsewhere, the most concerning of which being his chakra system. His chakra hadn’t responded to him at all after the seal had activated, taking on a life of its own almost as if the ink had controlled it instead.
He watches the boy in the mirror worry his lip, trying to ignore the cold feeling moving from his chest outwards, like water seeping into cloth. If his chakra was compromised, the task put before him was not just implausible anymore, but impossible. Kakashi wasn’t amazing like Gai. Without chakra, he and all of his loved ones would be doomed. Without chakra, he can’t do anything even remotely meaningful. Going back in time would change nothing.
So, with great apprehension, Kakashi very tentatively feels around his meagre reservoir of chakra.
It is, he notes quite shamefully, not all that much smaller than it had been as an adult. His reserves were small, but they felt normal and stable enough. Experimentally, Kakashi channels the tiniest smidgeon of chakra towards his fingertips, gripping onto the frame of the mirror to help him balance on the stool while he concentrates—this body is far less coordinated than he’s used to, and the chakra is only familiar with being moulded for a few academy-level jutsu. Using all of his concentration, he guides just a drop of chakra in each arm from his tenketsu points to his hands, until it thrums just below his fingernails, buzzing to be released. He peers at his burns in his reflection.
Nothing.
Kakashi shakes out his hands. Okay.
With a pinch less caution, Kakashi tries channelling his chakra to where he knows the inked lines of the seal had been, focusing on his burns in the mirror to help locate their exact positions. A controlled, delicate ooze of chakra creeps towards his face—and then suddenly the lines fade into appearance like disappearing condensation, the seal awoken, but all of that is secondary to the fresh fire marring his face. Kakashi fights to keep his eyes open instead of instinctively clenching them in pain, trying to squash all of his chakra down and away from his face and watching the lines intently for any sign of disappearing.
He cries out in alarm when the black lines suddenly race down his right arm, over his knuckles still gripping the frame, no doubt about to spread their inky hieroglyphs all over the mirror too before he finally manages to subdue his chakra in the nick of time.
He pants for a few seconds, grip on the frame turning his knuckles white. There in the reflection, the burns on his face have become more pronounced, and tender pink marks glance down his arms where the seal had spread of its own accord. Kakashi makes a conscious effort to breathe through his mouth as he collects himself—the smell of burnt flesh does not hold any happy memories.
So , he concludes after a moment: he can channel chakra, but only very carefully or else he will trigger the seal. What the seal will do to him now, after having already seemingly served its purpose, is unknown.
Kakashi looks between his hands clutching the mirror frame and the marks on his face with a new suspicion. That why-not, last-hope sealing scroll is beginning to seem a lot more malignant for something that claimed to end war.
Shifting focus from the burns, Kakashi finally gives his reflection a proper appraisal now that the shock has worn off slightly. He’s never been great with kids, but the boy in the mirror looks to be between the ages of three and six—some very turbulent years for Kakashi.
A glance at the calendar to the right, if it was up to date, confirms that he is indeed three years old, turning four that September. It’s currently the end of April. Konoha didn’t join the Third War till Kakashi was four and a half, so he has roughly four months to create world peace.
Great. Sick. No problem. Coolio.
Wearily, Kakashi pulls his mask back up to better ignore his kid self in the mirror. Possibly the only advantage to being three again was that nothing too terrible had happened in his lifetime yet—at least nothing he could’ve changed. His mam had died in childbirth, and the Third War had started between Iwa, Suna, Uzushio, and the lesser villages when he was maybe one. Unfortunate, sure, but out of his hands.
Age three, though, he wasn’t even expected to attend the academy yet, and his dad hadn’t monitored what he did. He has enough independence to actually prepare for this.
Feeling bolstered by this knowledge, Kakashi looks down at himself, and then at the front door down the hall. The pyjamas he’s wearing are simple and easily passable as day clothes—certainly good enough to train in—and the house remains as silent as ever. Only the fridge and the radiator rumble on. Sakumo must be out on a mission—even better.
With that, Kakashi’s mind is made up. He carefully replaces the cloth covering the mirror, returns the stool, and leaves to find somewhere private and less expensive to repair to test the limits of his younger body.
And if things seemed hopeless, the afterlife and everyone in it would always be waiting.
Notes:
CW: mentions of suicide, brief mention of vitriol/acid attacks, burns
Ameterasu53 on Chapter 1 Sun 12 Jan 2025 04:05PM UTC
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ViViD_Haseul on Chapter 2 Sun 30 Mar 2025 08:19PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 30 Mar 2025 08:25PM UTC
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1_-Pastelva-_1 (VoyagerStannie) on Chapter 2 Sat 12 Apr 2025 07:43PM UTC
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