Chapter Text
There’s a precipice before every tragedy and great fortune. It’s the moment where what’s happening is too outrageous or terrible to comprehend, a second where you doubt reality because things like that only happen in dreams and nightmares. Acknowledge it and it’s real. Ignore it, and you run the risk of being wrong. He’d had one when Akio finally set him free. One when he’d met the Spirit-Mother. One when Obito had smiled at him from underneath a boulder.
See, Kakashi is having another one of those moments. Some part of him is certain he’s unconscious and dreaming, or at least dead and hallucinating as his brain fires every synapse at random before he’s reincarnated. The other part, currently being trampled by every primal instinct in his body, knows that with the breath in his lungs and the goosebumps on his skin, that what he’s seeing is very, very real.
When he’d first fallen onto the soft, cold grass, he’d thought the blood he could smell was his own. After all, he’d just (presumably) fallen through the realm; who knows what that could do to him? Every part of him ached to some extent, so trying to pinpoint where he was bleeding from was more effort than it was worth when there’s a nonzero chance he emerged from Kamui as a pile of pulpy mush.
It was the sound of labored breathing—not his own—that clued him into the facts that he wasn’t alone and it wasn’t his blood he was smelling. So he pushed himself to his ass and opened his eyes into the dark night.
He instantly wishes he hadn’t. Maybe if he’d kept his eyes shut he would have had just a few more seconds of peace, even if from ignorance. He’s gone through enough, he thinks.
Blood coats every inch of the grass, along with dozens of bodies lying in varying states of dismemberment in their own viscera, all very, very dead. The battlefield, which is simply a small, densely grassed clearing in the forest, reeks of ozone and another smell that makes his limbs shake.
Hatake energy, spent in droves and having only settled loosely into the air, burns his lungs like fire. If it were any fresher, he’s sure he’d have gone south by now. Because it’s not his Hatake energy. Of course not.
Not too far from him, on the other side of a thick, bloody tree trunk, a man wheezes wetly. The only visible part of him is his shoulder, arm, and hand, twitching against the grass and trying to grab at air despite the obvious lack of strength.
The idea is there, already formed. Kakashi ignores it, pushing forward until he’s on unsteady feet and stumbling to the side of the tree, grasping his fingers into knots and crevices they shouldn’t be able to fit into. He peers around.
And he stands on the precipice, unsure if it's a nightmare he’s stuck in or cold, hard reality.
Because on the other side of the trunk, covered in blood yet alive and breathing is Sakumo Hatake. Who should not only be dead, but so long dead that if his grave was dug up they’d find nothing but bones and bugs.
This is flesh, however, and Kakashi is so struck by the thought of ghost, ghost, that he draws a breath in faster and louder than he would have in any other circumstance. The figure, the ghost, clearly hears him, and there’s an aborted effort of looking at him that ends in a wet gasp and an instinctive curling over his abdomen.
He’s hurt. Badly.
Slowly, Kakashi emerges from the side of the trunk and trips over himself to kneel in front of the surreal sight. His heart fails to beat any faster but beats as hard as thunder, waiting for some kind of confirmation that this is true before going haywire.
Under the blood and the haze of injury, Father looks… older. There’s weathering around his eyes and new wrinkles where blood has started to accumulate and dry. Sakumo’s half-lidded gaze pierces Kakashi to his very core, and for a moment it freezes him to the spot.
Creeping forward, Kakashi reaches a tentative hand out, toward the epicenter of the blood seeping out of Sakumo’s torso, hidden under a protective arm. It’s bad, if the blood is anything to go by. Kakashi would give him ten, fifteen minutes before he bleeds out and is gone for good.
When Kakashi’s hand gets within reach of Sakumo’s arm, his ghost-father pushes himself up against the tree trunk with an animalistic snarl. His teeth, a little less than human, bare ferociously despite his clearly waning energy. He’s running on pure instinct, but even that seems to ebb.
They push and pull for a good minute, Kakashi trying to reach out and Sakumo trying to escape out of reach further against the bark. There is no doubt that if he wanted to, Sakumo could rip his hand off —his strength had been one of his ‘key points’ in the bingo books—so Kakashi takes his time, even with the ticking clock counting until the ghost bleeds out.
Either the blood loss becomes too much to keep Sakumo ready to defend himself or he finally accepts his fate at the hands of the shadowy figure in front of him, but eventually Kakashi’s hand grasps the slick texture of his wrist before being allowed to slowly pull it away from his torso.
It’s ugly, to say the least, and there might be a more colorful vocabulary to apply to the wound if Kakashi weren’t still half-sure he was dreaming. Sakumo’s Jonin vest is shredded beyond repair, the zipper keeping it together having long since been torn open to reveal the dark stain turning the blood to a color that looks closest to black in the dark.
It’s too dark. As if set on fire, Kakashi spurs into action, groping around Sakumo’s vest until he’s able to unclip a pouch and pull out a flare—no, not a fucking flare, of course Father wouldn’t keep his items in the standard locations—after a few errors and lighting it with a sloppy flash of fire chakra.
It sputters and sparks and smokes, which is going to be a disaster if the enemy Shinobi called backup, but Kakashi can address both Sakumo’s injuries as well as a few unfriendlies if worst comes to worst. Luckily, the breeze carries the flare’s smoke away from them, leaving a violently red light for Kakashi to do whatever he’s convinced himself he’s going to do, this time.
He pulls up Sakumo’s shirt away from his wound, completely unapologetic to how it pulls and tears at the drying blood and makes him gasp. His hand readjusts over the shirt a few times as he takes it in.
During the war, some bastard in Iwa rubbed two brain cells together and developed a vicious type of kunai that would splinter upon impact. If it missed its target, it had a chance of fracturing off and scoring a few cuts. If it hits, however… mortality rates were high. Oftentimes, Konoha would lose soldiers just on the shrapnel alone.
This wasn’t thrown—it was stabbed. It had splintered in their hand, and a quick glance around proves him right; a hand, pulled right off of the body lies lamely in the grass with red criss-crossing the skin and fingers haphazardly broken and gone.
His eyes draw back to the injury. The shrapnel is still there, and it’s deep. Kakashi can get some of it out, but the moment he starts picking them away, the blood loss will accelerate and kill him before he can get it all out. Which leaves him with one half-decent option to get him out of this alive.
He hopes Father is okay with being a little metallic until he can seek proper medical attention.
With absolutely no care, Kakashi yanks out the outer pieces of shrapnel that would impede the hack-job healing he’s about to commit, then immediately sets his hands over the wound and wrestles his chakra into a sickly green. It’s slow-going. It’s only a few minutes later when blood is still seeping between his fingers that he realizes he’s not healing; he’s just prolonging his death.
His hands begin to shake as he considers his options. There’s not much to choose from. He can either keep trying to heal him with chakra, or he can attempt to staunch the blood flow with Sakumo’s already-emptied medical pouch. Or he can let him die.
Kakashi stills, the thought sending a thrum of… something through him. If this isn’t real, he can just walk away. Father’s been dead for almost thirty years. Seeing him, now, somehow alive and still dying doesn’t mean anything because he shouldn’t be here in the first place.
Sakumo’s dulling gaze meets his for a millisecond, before his neck gets too tired to support his head and lets his slump backwards against the tree. His eyes unfocus and re-focus on Kakashi, not an ounce of recognition anywhere in his dark eyes.
His mouth creaks open, his teeth bloodstained. “Do it.”
Kakashi feels irrational anger flood his body, chasing away the disbelief and detachedness like the sun on wet stones. He wants to shake his father like a ragdoll and shove his face into the dirt until he’s eating the grass. How dare he try to choose to die. Kakashi ought to leave and let him bleed, but that would still be letting Sakumo win his semi-suicide.
He growls to himself, the sudden anger lending him clarity. Why is Kakashi trying to heal him like a field medic? They’re Hatake, for spirits sake, and while Kakashi is still a little wary of energy healing after effectively dismantling Nana, he’s sure he can manage a little stab wound without turning any guts inside-out.
With his heart finally beating a rapid tat tat tat, Kakashi dives his hands back to the wound and squeezes his eyes shut, trying to prepare himself for his father’s energy. If Akio’s was enough of a resemblance to send him off the rails, it’s likely that any of Sakumo’s energy at all will trigger an episode and put them both at danger.
When spirit energy wells at Kakashi’s hands, Sakumo gasps and breaks into a fit of weak coughing. Kakashi doesn’t need much—if killing Nana had done anything, it’d given him a distinct limit to not hit when healing.
If Kakashi’s eyes were open, he’s sure Sakumo’s expression would be flabbergasted, but any mirth at the situation gets washed away when Kakashi tries to grab at his father’s energy to actually get the healing started. Like a hit to the head, everything flashes white and he finds himself curling backwards onto the grass with a pitiful cry. It takes a second to pass, and he’s none more feral than the smell of blood getting a little strong for his tastes. The scent is sweet against his tongue.
Sakumo, now somewhat more aware than a few seconds ago, looks at him as if he’d grown two heads and started speaking in tongues. Growling to himself, Kakashi fights back the haze and tries to dive back in, hands poised over the weeping wound.
A hand grabs his wrist mid-movement, and holds tight when Kakashi tries to pull it away. His father is clearly unsure, but slowly leads Kakashi’s hand to the side of the wound, against quivering muscles still slick with blood but void of injury.
With a little more caution, Kakashi once again tries to grab a hold of his father’s energy and once again finds that even the barest whisper is enough to send him spiraling. But when Kakashi tries to pull away, his father’s hand stays tight against his wrist, keeping his hand in place and gently leading Kakashi’s attention back to the task at hand.
They try again, and again, and Sakumo must be handling the progress of it all because he’s not dead and there seems to be some healing happening, even if in short bursts. A Hatake can’t heal themselves without risk of disfigurement, but a Hatake can help someone else heal them, though Kakashi’s certain the only reason this is working is because Sakumo has had extensive training in the energy arts.
Another flash, greater than the last, and Sakumo’s grips disappears and Kakashi scrambles back into the grass until his back hits a boulder, the blood in the hanten now sticky against his chest. The haze floods his head, turning everything to a harsh static, and—no, no! Clutching at his hair and pulling his scalp, Kakashi tries to chase away the burning at the back of his throat and the sudden thirst pervading his senses. He’d almost forgotten what proper ferality felt like, after all this time.
As he fights with himself, one part of him acutely recognizes the way Sakumo begins to push himself to his feet, and notes, bad option. He would be ripped apart like a branch. That part of him begins to win as the wind changes directions and he catches scent of another life in the forest, not far away and very, very vulnerable.
It smells like Iwa, a whisper. He gets to his feet, unsteady but feeling more invigorated than he has in the past week. A hunt, just for him. Forget about the old man.
He finds out soon that it’s a bad idea to forget about the ‘old man’. The moment he dashes forward to chase the scent, a rough, shaking, yet solid hand yanks on the collar of his shirt before taking advantage of his surprise and wrapping a thick hand around the back of his neck. The man is strong enough to break his spine with just his grip, he knows, so he falls still and waits for the next move.
His head is slammed against the ground, and the pain and impact sends the haze chasing away into the night. He gasps against the grass, feeling withdrawals wracking his limbs like electricity before he finally falls limp on the ground, trying in vain to fill his lungs with air.
Realizing the position he’s in, he tries to push himself to his feet to run but finds a Konoha-issue long distance boot planted on his chest, holding him to the ground. Why can’t he run? He should be strong enough to throw this off, even if weakened. But as it stands, his hands pull up grass and grab uselessly at Sakumo’s ankle.
His father’s eyes are still hazed with blood loss, and maybe Kakashi did make a mistake in healing him so well. Father is strong, and being on the wrong end of that strength while he’s also unstable… not the most safe combination.
The flare has long since burned out, and it’s hard to see. But from what he can parse out from the darkness, there’s no malice in his father’s eyes. Just quiet disbelief and what Kakashi suspects is the same feeling kids get when trying to keep a frog in their hands as it squirms and hops. But there’s no recognition. He wants to cry Tou-san, Tou-san, it’s me, stop— but there’s too much pressure on his chest to make any sounds except whimpers and breathy growls.
Father’s clouded eyes narrow. “You’re… Hatake.” He rasps.
Not Kakashi. Just Hatake.
And then, just then, does the reality of the situation slam into him like an earth jutsu, that yes, Father is alive and something is very, very wrong. Uselessly, his hand tries to rip away his father’s foot from his chest as his lungs’ ability to take in air gets impeded by something more than just the weight of the boot.
As a last-ditch effort, Kakashi wildly lashes out his energy to flash and blind his father, and the moment of surprise is all that Kakashi needs to strike the heel of his palm against the ball of Father’s ankle and send him stumbling.
He gives his stunned father a quick glance before doing all that he knows to do: run. Faced with that pale ghost, he runs into the dark and warm Konoha night until he can’t force another step out of his body.
“And then,” he says, setting his hands parallel to the ground like a great storyteller, “I landed here. The end.”
He looks to his left, up the wooden pole and finally to the old, worn work pants overstuffed with straw. In the wind, the bulging sack head nods lazily back and forth. A long time ago, someone had drawn a little smile on the material, but all that’s left is the dark smudge of a winking eye.
Sighing, he pats the wooden post. “You get me, me."
Looking out, he examines the closely shorn grass that stretches for miles even farther than he can see, so prickly to the point that it starts to look smooth and fuzzy the further out it gets. It had been harvested about three weeks ago, early for the season but only because of the heavy rains that had nearly drowned the crop several times but ended up growing them like weeds.
Of course, Kakashi doesn’t just know that. He may have spent a good couple months in a village centered on their agriculture, but very little information ended up leaking to him to an extent that would allow him to notice it. No, he got all these fun information tidbits from who owned the farm: a toothless man so painfully bald that any light whatsoever turns his dark skin to a blinding beacon.
And the man had thought Kakashi to be one of his sons, despite the lack of resemblance. While Kakashi might feel bad impersonating the senile farmer’s son, the free housing and access to food when nothing seems certain is more than welcome, especially when he’s cold, wet, and a little lost.
Because there’s some uncertainty at the moment. No-brainer, there.
Pushing himself to his feet, Kakashi lets the drying grass poke his palms before he stretches his back and faces the partially covered sun. Some things stay the same. Grass country is beautiful, if godless, in late summer. The humidity makes him sweat like ice. His hair only lays down when soaked through and stands on end the rest of the time. He is Kakashi Hatake.
Everything else, though? Up in the air at this point. Kakashi’s not exactly sure where he is besides Grass—-he must have fled over the border. An old man, who he assumes is blind, cannot tell Kakashi apart from his actual son. His actual father doesn’t recognize him.
Just putting the concept to thought makes a hysterical laugh bubble up his throat. Some part of him is glad for the distance he’d created between him and his father when he’d bolted from the scene; he’d been so delirious from the shock that he’d somehow crossed out of Fire Country and into Grass Country, where the old farmer had found him. The other part of him is mewling pathetically at the slightest hint of a possibility that yes, Father is alive and somewhat well and that he is within Kakashi’s grasp. But the impossibility of the situation does not escape him.
Breathing the deep, green smell of the drying grass, Kakashi methodically cracks every knuckle in his hands before starting the minor hike back to the farmhouse, where he plans to stay only for the next day or so. As much as he might like to lie low, he’s had four lifetime’s worth of lying low in the Hatake Village. This little motel-stay is just for some well needed coping in limited company.
The door, hinged, squeals when it opens. Despite the nontraditional door framing, most of the farmhouse is fairly old, which Kakashi supposes is a good way to reacclimate him to modern amenities. Start slow. Very. Slow.
Inside, the farmer snoozes on a worn wooden chair, his ass probably having long since worn a cast of itself into the seat after a million years of constant use. His bony frame seems near skeletal, but the gentle snoring and rising of his chest allow Kakashi to relax. If the man died, he’s not sure what he’d do.
His shoes line up neatly against a row of larger, though similar shoes. The pair he’s worn for the past two days are significantly more used than the larger pairs, though there seems to be a fine layer of dust accumulating on them. They haven’t been worn for a while.
Casting his gaze to a reserved little shelf pressed closely against the wall, Kakashi spies a few photographs decorated with smiling faces that all have the same nose. The farmer’s nose. One of them is the son he’s impersonating, using his old shoes and wearing his old clothes and calling the bald farmer ‘tou-san’ even if it feels incredibly ingenuine. He supposes he can’t be picky with his morals now, of all times, but it still smarts to deceive a helpless civilian.
The top cabinet where the cups are held is just a few inches too high for him to reach. Huffing, Kakashi grabs a crate that had once held tomatoes and drags it to his toes, nudging it into place with a quiet kick. It still requires a little fishing around with the tips of his fingers, but he manages to hook his middle finger around the bottom of a porcelain cup and pull it closer, just enough to tip it off of the ledge and into his waiting palm.
He stares at the metal faucet for a second longer than necessary before twisting the knob and hearing the well water clang up the old, probably toxic-metal pipes. It spits and hisses out of the spout before clearing to a crystal stream, and the sight is so tantalizing he has to resist just sticking his head underneath the flow and drinking it from there. The desire to almost dump the cup of water down his throat is harder to resist, and he grimaces afterwards at the cold water he’d dripped into the collar of his shirt and down his chest. He uses the hem to dry the cup before tapping it back into place in the top cabinet.
The old man jolts in his sleep, and Kakashi flinches before he can even really remember that no, a senile farmer isn’t a threat. He’s just sleeping. The crate slides back into the stack and Kakashi creeps to the bathroom with more trepidation than necessary.
The door to the bathroom is hinged as well, though he only remembers it when he tries to slide it open and instead almost jams his shoulder. He’d gotten too comfortable slamming open the nice doors in the village that he’d started to put far too much of his weight into the movement. Luckily, he doesn’t manage to injure—only startle himself.
The sink, while a luxury for the Hatake village, is shoddy by the Outside’s standards. He wouldn’t be surprised if they repurposed an old feed trough by sticking a pipe through the bottom. But the sink isn’t his focus, and neither is the toilet for that matter (though he had been unfortunately ecstatic to see some plumbing upon his arrival).
It’s the mirror he wants. An actual, honest mirror. He’s not sure what it had been exactly about the village that made a mirror so impossible, but seeing himself with such clarity—even with the grime—was a little bit of a shock… for more reasons than one.
One of the stipulations for passing as the farmer’s son had been that he probably shouldn’t wear a mask, not that he couldn’t get away with it if he put enough effort into it. For a man who he’s pretty sure couldn’t see much at all, hiding his face seems a little extraneous, not to mention the cloying heat that would make it uncomfortable.
So he tilts his jaw to the side, following the line of his neck with his finger until the mirror doesn’t dip low enough and he has to stand on his toes to keep following it. Of course there’s no actual line he’s following. Not now, at least. That scar won’t have happened for another, what, three, four years?
His hand spasms against his neck, numbness tingling up his elbow and making it weak and shaky. Balling it into a fist, he forces the strange feeling away, then sighs.
There’s a scar missing on his neck that he’d gotten from a stray kunai when he was eighteen. It was an ANBU mission gone awry. On his shoulder, there’s a blank spot where a puckered shrapnel scar usually sits. He’d been nineteen years old, too fresh to realize there’d been a paper bomb attached to the kunai. However, the massive scar along the meat of his neck and shoulder where Nana had attempted to cleave his arm off is still very there, along with the associated numbness of nerve damage. Over his shoulder, he can just barely catch a peek of the sprawling seal on his back.
He gives his face a long gander, taking in the softness of his jaw, the way that it feels like his teeth haven’t begun to sit properly in his mouth yet, the roundness to his cheeks and the spinning Sharingan. Lowering himself to his heels, he examines how short he is and how knobby his knees are. His skinny arms and poking ribs.
He’s sure that every teenager thinks of themselves as more than they actually are, but there’s no way he could have been this pathetic. When Kakashi was around this age, he had been in ANBU longer than most adults liked to even think about the ANBU corps. There’s no way he made it out of that like this. He’s so… short.
The answer doesn’t lie in his reflection, but he stares at himself anyway, baby-faced and stern. And then, for just a moment, does he let himself consider how fucked he is.