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“They’re already dead,” Kakashi’s face was blank, voice flat and toneless, as if commenting on the weather.
Sasuke stared, feeling as if Kakashi had just dumped a bucket of ice cold water down his back despite the burns of the ninja wire biting into his skin.
“They’re… already dead?” Sasuke echoed, voice wrecked.
Kakashi glanced away briefly, eyes settling on the Hokage mountain for a split second.
“Yes.” He answered, voice unwavering, eyes locked, body language stiff.
Sasuke’s brain scrambled to think of who might be Kakashi’s precious people. Sasuke didn’t know anyone else named Hatake. Who was his sensei’s jonin sensei? His teammates? Did this man even have friends? Sasuke thought he was just a loner, but what he was implying…
Kakashi sighed at the stricken look on his students face, loosening his grip on the ninja wire.
With a huff, Sasuke scrambled out of its hold, landing stiffly on the branch with wide eyes directed at Kakashi.
“Who were they?”
Kakashi was old. The past tense didn’t sting as much as it used to. (It still hurt.)
Kakashi gave a humorless chuckle, “How much time do you have?” He joked.
Sasuke looked even paler after that, somehow.
“Ah,” Kakashi retracted the wire, quickly wrapping it up and putting it back in his pouch. “Don’t worry about it, Sasuke. There’s no need to bother them tonight, how about we let the dead rest for now?”
With a final glance to his student, Kakashi hopped off the tree and walked in whatever direction his feet took him.
Later that night, Kakashi watched from afar as Sasuke battled Orochimaru’s henchmen. His posture screamed uncertainty, the honeyed words of the Oto nin likely sinking into his resolve like a beast’s claws on their prey’s throat.
Kakashi gripped his ninja wire tightly, uncaring of how it cut through his fingers and caused blood to well up in the creases.
Then Sasuke ran off into the woods, the sound ninja hot on his heels.
This wasn’t his battle, Kakashi knew, but how he wished to help him. The Sandaime was strict, however, in leaving the Uchiha clan heir alone.
The Sandaime wasn’t alive anymore , a voice in his head whispered.
But orders are orders , another hissed in reply.
The moon shone brightly above the village, making the forest’s shadows all the more darker.
His student — his ex-teammates’ broken little family member, the one who Kakashi saw himself reflected in near constantly — was running through the woods alone. Always so alone. They were only children, why were they always so alone?
Kakashi wasn’t a kind or honorable man. Kakashi wasn’t even a good man. He didn’t understand how to help others when it came to sensitive matters of the heart and soul.
But.
But he could try.
Kakashi had been alone. He was once half Sasuke’s age, all alone in the singular-building that constituted the Hatake’s compound in Konoha. Sasuke and himself were both so young, so small, so helpless when they were forced to scrub their kin’s blood from well-loved tatami mats and shouji doors.
Just as Kakashi gathered up the nerve to follow his student, a figure shot out from the trees.
“Sasuke is just like me,” he told Obito. “A genius, angry at the world, believing he’s all alone.”
Obito didn’t reply.
“Now that I think about it, Naruto’s a lot like you. Last of his class, a reckless, goofy, troublemaker.”
The wind carried a tinkling laugh. Kakashi turned to Rin.
“And Sakura is a lot like you. She’s really smart, but she’s got her priorities a little messed up. Obsessed with the prodigy who’s an idiot and not nearly good enough for her. She could do so much better. Of course, Naruto is head over heels for her but she doesn’t see it.”
Kakashi sighed, glancing to his left. “But that’s where the analogy ends,” he told Minato. “I’m nothing like you, sensei.”
Minato’s silence urged Kakashi on.
“You were kind and supportive, sensei. You were there for us. You were an amazing sensei, an inspiration to us all.” Kakashi glared at the rising sun. “I’m nothing like you were, sensei. What I would give to trade places with you.” Kakashi choked up a little. “Any of you, all of you.”
Kakashi rested his head on the pristine, white headstone in front of him. Obito’s.
He neglected to acknowledge the grey spots that his tears formed on the headstone.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” He said to no one and all of them. “I wasn’t supposed to live his long. I don’t deserve to be in your place.”
The grass nipped at his ankles in agreement.
“You all had so much to look forward to. I was at the end of the line. I can’t believe…” Kakashi’s voice disappeared, but the words rung clear in his head.
I can’t believe you all left me here without you.
At around noon, Kakashi stood up and nearly fell over immediately from the head rush. He had been sitting seiza for the last five or so hours, repenting.
Kakashi shook his head roughly, refusing to use the headstones for balance as he clambered to his feet and stumbled towards the hospital. He’d been telling himself that his student was long gone from here and it was completely his fault for not going after him.
Either he was right or he’d be pleasantly surprised.
Gai often said he was a major pessimist and needed a better ideology.
Kakashi usually replied with, “I’m sorry were you talking?”
“Naruto!” Sakura’s voice cut through the peaceful calm of the hospital’s hallway.
“Sakura-chan!” Naruto cried, pleading.
As Kakashi opened the door to his student’s room, he was met with a pleasantly surprising sight.
Naruto had a large welt on his head as he kneeled by Sasuke’s bed. Sakura’s sleeves were rolled up, an apple discarded on the ground with several peels, a basket, and a peeler. What was surprising was the boy settled into his bed with a minor twitch in his eyebrow. Aside from that, Sasuke looked completely serene and unbothered. He leaned against multiple pillows — was Naruto missing some? — with his eyes shut and a blank expression on his face, hands settled lightly on his lap.
Kakashi sagged a little, tension deep in his bones expelled from his body at the sight of his loose cannon of a student.
“Kakashi-sensei, save me!” Naruto wailed, arms raised in defense of Sakura’s knuckles.
At that, the pinkette froze and slowly turned to face him.
Her face flushed a deep crimson and she quickly smoothed her skirts. “Kakai-sensei,” she said pleasantly.
“If it isn’t my cute little genin,” Kakashi teased, much to their collective embarrassment, and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. “I see you are all having a pleasant morning.”
Naruto wailed in disagreement. Sakura grunted and shouted in anger, voice deeper than both her male teammates’. Sasuke gave a barely audible sigh, one eye cracked open to peer at his teammates blandly.
Perhaps I’m nothing like you, sensei, but I hope I’ll make you proud anyway.