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Kakashi is five years old, almost six, and his father is dead. It’s not a surprise, not really, because Kakashi has always been an intelligent child and it was painfully clear how the world was pressing down on Sakumo, eating him from the inside out like one of those parasitic ants. But it hurts, like it’s him with a blade through his stomach and not the empty shell of what used to be his father.
He remembers his last birthday, turning five when his father grinned and told him that he should count his birthdays with happiness.
“Shinobi die fast,” his father said, grinning like it was a joke. “They go to war and don’t come back. So count your blessings, my little one. Each birthday is another year, so each birthday is something special.”
And then he left on the mission, a mere two weeks after that day. Kakashi’s father went to war and the shell that returned wasn’t his father, not in any way that mattered. It’s only eleven days until Kakashi turns six, and he wonders if his father even remembered in the end, that the last real conversation he’d had with his son was on his birthday, and that he’d abandoned Kakashi right before the next.
Kakashi holds white flowers in his hands, the only one at the gravestone, and doesn’t cry.
Kakashi turns six in the same room he turned five, in the same blood-stained room Kakashi’s father never turned another year older again. He eats plain white rice and wears white mourning robes and ignores the white sheet over the stain in the wood, and he still doesn’t cry.
His sixth birthday is white like a funeral, and he doesn’t count his blessings or happiness and instead counts his grief, innumerable and unimaginably large, like all the white stars in the bleak, dark sky.
“Happy birthday!” Rin cheers, and Kakashi just—can’t. He turns away and triggers a shunshin, carrying himself away and out of sight. He doesn’t care that it’s rude, or that Minato-sensei will scold him later. He doesn’t care that Obito will yell and Rin will look sad and the rest of the genin his age will give him weird looks, because when they turned seven they soaked up the attention like it could be worth anything at all.
He wishes no one had remembered, like they did last year. It would be so much easier then, to swallow down the grief that always filled him, the anger that snuck in, and hide it beneath layers of arrogance. He knows he’s unlikable, knows that his classmates hate him and he thinks, good. People are saved by rules, not stupid things like feelings and birthdays, and he’s not going to end up dead like his father. He’s not. He’s not going to be left alone again.
Kakashi wakes up to paws pressing his stomach urgently, Pakkun’s rough little snuffles sounding urgent and almost panicked. Dimly, Kakashi realizes that he’s gasping, breath catching in his throat. When he glances at his hands, they’re shaking, and he clenches them into the blankets to stifle it.
“Hey,” Pakkun noses his cheek. “You okay, kid?”
“Fine,” Kakashi snaps. He immediately regrets it when Pakkun’s expression falters, and his tail droops slightly, but not enough to take it back. “You woke me up, I have a mission tomorrow.”
He doesn’t mention that it’s just painting a stupid fence. He flips the blankets over his head and turns away, curling in on himself so he takes up as little space as possible. The air soon gets stale, but it’s safer than facing the yawning nothingness of the room, or the wrinkled concern in Pakkun’s face.
Kakashi counts the seconds and evens out his breaths, drawing them out as slowly as he possibly can, until he remembers the date and he takes a breath too fast.
He sits up, coughing, the blanket forgotten and pooling around his waist, as his lungs attempt to flip themselves inside out, like a wet sock. Pakkun thumps his back a few times, which doesn’t help, and leaves Kakashi wondering how on earth the tiny pug even managed to get his tiny paws that high up.
“What happened?” Pakkun asks, not even a trace of resentment or irritation at his earlier treatment.
Kakashi doesn’t deserve Pakkun, he really doesn’t. His first and only ninken, loyal to a fault and forever ready to do whatever Kakashi asks. He never holds grudges and never makes things difficult for Kakashi and all of a sudden he can’t bear the thought of being mean to him, even the slightest bit.
“Sorry,” he whispers, reaching out a hand to stroke his head. “For snapping at you.”
“No worries,” Pakkun smiles a doggy smile at him, that makes his eyes look like upside down crescent moons. “For real though, you okay, kid?”
“It’s my birthday,” Kakashi says, like that explains everything.
“Ah,” Pakkun answers, like it does for him. He crawls into Kakashi's lap and balances on his hind legs so he can lick his face. “You’re a good pup. You’re doin’ okay.”
“I’m not,” Kakashi whispers, feeling the needle-sharp sting of every failure he’s ever made, no matter how small.
“’Course you are,” Pakkun argues, settling down by his side, a comforting ball of warmth. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
Kakashi can’t think of an answer, but it’s okay, because when he looks down again, Pakkun is fast asleep. He’s eight years old and he’s doing okay. Kakashi can live with that, even if it means that he might still be doomed like his father, to die alone and hated.
He doesn’t mind, as long as he’s got Pakkun. He really doesn’t deserve his ninken, but as long as Pakkun is willing to stick around, he won’t be alone.
The stars are bright overhead, and Kakashi can almost pretend there’s no one around, and he’s running an intelligence mission or perhaps a solo scout, with nothing but wild animals and natural chakra in the air. But then Obito shifts in his bedroll, and Rin stirs from where she’s keeping watch, and Minato-sensei’s pencil scratches lightly across his notebook.
Kakashi curses his sensitive hearing and tries to block it all out, trying desperately to latch onto the feeling of calm that utter loneliness brings. He needs that stillness tonight, when he can’t summon Pakkun to keep him company—a waste of chakra on a mission like this—and he can almost see the time ticking away. It’s pushing him into another year of life that he doesn’t want, and the nightmares have always been stronger on this particular night.
“Hey,” Obito says suddenly. “If you weren’t a shinobi, what would you be?”
Rin turns to face them, the starlight catching on her cheekbones and highlighting the strands of her hair. She has her lips pursed in thought, and her expression is hard to read in the dark, even with Kakashi’s sharp eyesight. Obito watches her with fascination, like her answer could somehow do anything to stop the endless wars.
“I would be a librarian,” Minato-sensei says suddenly, glancing up at them. “I could read as many books as I wanted, you know? And I could also see you three, whenever you came to find a book,” his voice turns teasing, “and I could kiss Kushina behind the bookshelves.”
“That would be nice,” Rin agrees over the sounds of Obito sputtering, tilting her face away from them again to look up at the sky. “And Obito?”
“I want to run a candy store!” Obito answers, exuberant and exhaustingly pointless as always. “I could bribe Minato-sensei to let me read all the cool forbidden books.”
“Unfair and unjust,” Minato-sensei points his pen at the boy, pout visible even in the dark. “I would never.”
“You would too!” Obito protests.
Rin laughs, effectively cutting off any further arguments, and says, “I’d like to be a vet. I’d get to see so many cute animals, and I could still heal so many people!”
For a moment, like a sliver of a glimpse into an alternate reality, Kakashi allows himself to imagine it. He could wake up and take his pack for a walk, and nod at Rin through the window, and glare at Obito through the other window, and maybe read a book while he ignored Minato-sensei and Kushina-san for the sake of his eyeballs. It would be nice. Peaceful.
It would never, ever happen.
“What about you, Kakashi-kun?” Rin asks.
“I,” Kakashi starts, all the words he never said and never wants to say spilling over his tongue, and swallows them back down, “It doesn’t matter. It’s not possible, anyway.”
I would be happy, he thinks, and he presses his face into his bedroll so his tears can’t escape.
It’s far past midnight. Nine years old and Kakashi already feels like his life has dragged on for an eternity. He pretends not to see the looks his team is giving him, and tries to sleep.
The stupid green genin is back. Kakashi knows his name, but it’s better to keep everyone under the label of ‘Konoha shinobi’, instead of attaching messy names and messier relationships.
“Rival!” he cheers, with the kind of blinding enthusiasm that makes Kakashi feel like he’s shriveling up. “Let us see who will be the first to traverse the forest of death!”
“No,” Kakashi says, like he always does.
“I’m glad you agree!” the green genin shouts, like he always does.
“Shut up,” Kakashi snaps. He gentles his voice but not his tone and adds, “Leave me alone.”
“But Rival! Today is a Glorious Day, full of Youthful energy!”
Part of Kakashi wonders whether it means there’s more wrong with him or the green genin that he can actually hear the capital letters. The rest of him, which is quite a bit, just wants to stay alone in the silence of the forest. The Hatake compound is quiet, but that silence echoes, suffocating him if he stays still too long. The forest is just perfect—there’s not a trace of a human scent, and the world is just as content to ignore him as he is to ignore it.
Or at least, normally that’s the case.
“Today is a normal day, and the only energy I have is to train,” Kakashi retorts, and almost immediately realizes his mistake.
“Training! Such an excellent idea, I knew my Rival could be counted upon!”
“Gai,” Kakashi says, holding back a sigh, and startling both of them by using his actual name, “Just leave me alone.”
Gai’s smile dims a little bit. “Is my Rival feeling unyouthful today?”
“I feel like I should be dead,” Kakashi says lightly, with a kind of sarcasm he didn’t know he possessed. He doesn’t tell him that it’s his birthday, and it feels more like an omen of death than life, and he’s just wondering when it’ll be his turn.
“Rival!” Gai protests, looking appalled. “Do not discredit yourself like that! You are a wonderful and loved addition to Konoha!”
Kakashi scoffs. “Says who? My dead father?”
Immediately he regrets saying that, but it’s too late to take it back now. Gai does that, sometimes. He’s too bright and too loud and too full of life and it’s easy to distract himself from the empty nothing inside of him. It’s also easy to forget that not everyone else is empty inside, and so he forgets that you don’t just say things like that.
“Oh,” Gai says, startled. “My apologies, Rival. It was not my intention to be insensitive.”
Kakashi scoffs again and looks away, crossing his arms like he can stop himself from falling apart.
It’s been a long time since someone has reacted like that at the mention of Sakumo. They hear Kakashi’s father and think of Konoha’s disgraced White Fang, and they either look at him in disdain or with pity. Gai’s expression is a strange look on his face, that looks something like commiseration.
Gai sits down next to him, carefully, telegraphing his movements in a way that makes Kakashi feel like an easily startled wolf pup. He doesn’t particularly like the comparison, and scowls at the ground, even if no one can see behind his mask.
“I remember your father,” Gai says quietly. “He was very Youthful. I think he would be proud of you.”
“You don’t know anything,” Kakashi retorts, though he keeps his voice quiet as well. “He would be ashamed, and for good reason. And he’s dead anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Well then, I am proud of you,” Gai says stubbornly.
“That’s stupid,” Kakashi scoffs, ignoring the stinging in his eyes. “You don’t even know me.”
“You’re my Rival,” Gai tells him. He’s smiling, Kakashi can tell, even with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground. “Happy birthday.”
Kakashi closes his eyes, unwilling to face the bright world outside. He ignores the way his chest feels too tight, and the odd mixture of grief, cold fury and a weird sort of peaceful nothing. He doesn’t say anything to Gai, but he supposes today hasn’t been too horrible.
“Thanks,” he says instead.
He gets the feeling Gai understands anyway.
Eleven years old, and one of the shopkeepers asks him if he feels older, cheering something silly about how big he’s getting. And Kakashi does feel different, but it’s not a good feeling, like spiderwebs spun across his hair or dust clinging to his skin. Like blood in his clothes, or any unsettling nightmare his mind could conjure up.
It feels like a warning, like something bad is going to happen, and Kakashi hates it. He’s supposed to above this, he’s supposed to follow rules that are there for a reason, not stupid gut feelings like Obito.
But the crawling sensation doesn’t go away, not until he’s deep in an unknown forest and down one teammate, and a single sentence sends lightning fizzling through his veins, chasing away all the morals and stories and warnings that keep tangling him up. Barely two hours later, one of Kakashi’s eyes is not his own, Obito is dead, and Kakashi wishes he could die with him.
On the fourteenth of September, Kakashi is deep in Kusagakure on a mission, running a five-man surveillance patrol with only himself and his ninken. The original patrol had vanished halfway through the route, and he managed to find all five—two defected, now dead by his hand, and the other three were killed by their ex-comrades before Kakashi found them. He’s taking over their job now, and it’s draining, much as he hates to admit it.
He wishes Rin were here, because she’d know what to do. It’s almost funny how it took Obito dying for him to realize her worth, her immense strength and brilliance and how kind she is.
Too late, and by now it’s just a recurring theme.
Kakashi is alone, and perhaps this is repentance for all the times he abandoned someone else, leaving them alone and hurting until eventually they were ripped away from him, snapping connections that were already frayed and worn. He’s got his pack, now grown to seven, but they’re not humans, even if sometimes they might be better.
He’s so lost in his thoughts and regrets and silent, fervent wishes, that he doesn’t notice his surroundings getting familiar, nightmares etched into his mind springing to life under his feet. At least, not until he bursts out of the tree cover to find a river, with a destroyed bridge crumbling away, the water below littered with massive chunks of stone.
There’s something stabbing between his ribs, sliding unerringly into his heart as he freezes. He wants to scream.
Kannabi Bridge.
He’s so, so angry, furious at the world, at Minato-sensei for sending him here. It should have been obvious that he might have run into this place, but it wasn’t, and he can’t breathe through the anger and the pain and the shock of suddenly having to face this.
Before he even realizes what he’s doing, there’s lightning chakra crackling in his hands as he shoves it away from him, sending blinding energy hurtling towards the remains. They splinter apart, showering him in stone and metal shrapnel.
He spends the night there, and by the time September fifteenth rolls around, Kakashi is twelve and the only sign that Kannabi Bridge ever existed are the massive chunks of the bank that are missing, like giant claws had raked them away.
Only the rushing river will ever know that he broke down crying sometime in the early hours of the morning, and it carries his tears and his blood and his secrets away to the sea.
When Kakashi turns thirteen years old, he visits Rin’s mother. He doesn’t tell her it’s his birthday, because this day isn’t for him. It’s about the little box of expensive tea in his hands, bought from the coast of Kumo, her husband’s death yesterday, and her kindness that he doesn’t deserve.
Kakashi had been prepared to avoid the Nohara family like a plague, scared that they would blame him for Rin’s death. And it was his fault, but he didn’t want to face them, the trace of Rin’s smile on her father’s face or her purple-streaked cheeks on her mother. He didn’t need more nightmares.
But instead, at the funeral, Rin’s mother had caught his eye, where he had lingered at the very back of the crowd. And she got up, and put a hand on his head and smiled through her tears, and told him that she was sorry for his loss.
Kakashi had fled before he could cry, but the next day he bought a bouquet of flowers and left it at their doorstep, signed with a tiny henohenomoheji.
He’s never shown himself, but Kakashi thinks that today, of all days, he should appear in person, despite wanting nothing but to run. She deserves that much, and so much more. She deserves to have a happy family, with her daughter and her husband alive, and both of those are Kakashi’s fault.
“Kakashi-kun?”
Kakashi flinches, violently, at that familiar intonation of the words. But when he looks up it’s not the almond-shaped brown eyes of his dead teammate, but a slimmer shape and darker shade, set in a face wrinkled with laugh lines.
She must have been so happy, before Rin died.
“Here,” he mumbles, holding out the box of tea. He bows as deep as he can. “I’m—I’m sorry, that I couldn’t save him.”
Civilians, both of them, but Rin’s father had been caught in the crossfire between a missing-nin and a traveling merchant group, and Kakashi hadn’t been able to get there in time. When he can bring himself to meet her eyes again, he wonders if she’ll be the next casualty of a mission gone wrong.
“Thank you,” she says softly, and pats his cheek. “It’s not your fault. Won’t you come in?”
Awkwardly, unable to say no, Kakashi follows her into the house, filled with plants and little drawings and embroidery projects. It’s welcoming, warm, in a way Kakashi hasn’t seen in a very long time. She directs him to the kitchen table, and he sits.
“You can call me Yukako,” Rin’s mother tells him. “We’re practically family after all, with all that we’ve been through.”
“I can’t,” Kakashi whispers, mostly to himself, trying to breathe through the sudden spike of guilt and pain. He needs to leave, right now, before his very presence brings death knocking at the door of this lovely, empty little house. But Yukako’s shoulders are more relaxed than they were when she found him, and she’s smiling a tiny bit, and in the end he doesn’t move an inch.
“Rin spoke very highly of you, you know,” she says gently, setting water to boil and opening the tea box. “Always talking about how kind you and Obito-kun were, but how you got into such silly little fights. She used to laugh about them for hours.”
“I didn’t know,” Kakashi says, barely a whisper of a sound, but her face brightens, and then dims into wistful sadness.
“She was gone too fast, wasn’t she? Always like a butterfly, here and gone again, too fast for her mother to catch up.”
Kakashi doesn’t mention the tears in her eyes, and she doesn’t point out the little droplets on the table in front him, shining against the dark, worn wood.
A mug of steaming tea is set in front of him, and Kakashi blinks at it in surprise. It’s matcha, his favorite comfort tea, and the only way she could have known is if Rin first observed it and then told her. He can’t stop the tears from falling now, but he whispers his thanks in a hoarse voice and takes a sip. It’s warm, and comforting like Rin’s hands, smoothing away a scrape he got while training. Unnecessary, but somehow, inexplicably nice.
“Did she ever mention me to you?” Yukako wonders aloud, seemingly content to talk without much of a response back, letting Kakashi sit in near-silence. “She got annoyed sometimes—I couldn’t help but worry, even though she was strong, and could take care of herself. It was stifling I suppose, and she probably complained about her mother all the time. Too naive, too overprotective, and I never took the time to love her as she was before she—well, before she died.”
“No,” Kakashi says quietly, setting down his empty mug. It doesn’t matter if invisible talons are clawing at his throat and making it hard to speak. This woman who’s too kind for this world, just like her daughter, Kakashi would do anything for. “She loved you. Rin—she always talked about how wonderful you were, and kind, and how you were the best thing in her life. She said—”
His breath hitches and he stumbles over the words, and he reaches up to scrub violently at his eyes, both dripping salty water that tastes a little too close to iron and blood.
“Before she died—” Kakashi chokes out. “She told me she loved you, more than—more than anything in the world. And that—and she wanted someone else to know, because she didn’t say it enough.”
Yukako stares at him for a long, long second, and then her eyes fill with tears and she reaches for him, wrapping him in a tight hug. Her arms are warm and she smells a little like lavender, and it’s the first hug Kakashi has had in years.
“Thank you,” she sobs, cheek pressed against his hair. “Thank you so much for telling me.”
He should move away. He doesn’t deserve this kindness or this comfort, he doesn’t deserve to be alive while Rin died in enemy territory, her body never recovered, and her father lies cold in the ground. But Yukako is holding him like he’s the last part of the world that hasn’t broken yet, her shoulders shaking like leaves in a lightning storm, and he can’t quite bring himself to tell her that he’s been broken from the very beginning.
So Kakashi sits in a chair in a warm kitchen, Rin’s mother hugging him close, and he stays perfectly still, and he tries very, very hard not to cry. He doesn’t quite succeed.
Kakashi turns fourteen in Minato-sensei’s living room, curled up on the floor and watching the clock ticking towards midnight and then past it without any feeling. He was born at precisely 00:36, before the sun had even thought of rising again and far after it had set, in the darkest part of the night.
It feels fitting somehow, and Kakashi watches the clock counting up and up and passing his exact birthday like a whisper in the darkness. Like death, flitting in to check on him and smiling when he asks what it came for. Like disaster, ever present and ever looming and always ready to strike again.
Kakashi turns fourteen and doesn’t feel a thing, unmoving as the corpse-white porcelain of his mask, and he wonders if this is what his father felt like in his final hours.
Fifteen years old is an interesting number, stuck in between ten and twenty, a child and an adult. Kakashi is stuck in this village, soaked in blood and grief, and he’s not the only one anymore who hates and hates and hates. It’s good, in a way, because he doesn’t have to hide it anymore, and no one will question him. It’s bad, because there’s nowhere he can go to escape.
Rin’s mother died in the Kyuubi attack, and no one noticed. He was the one to find her body in the rubble, the one to register for a spot in one of the civilian cemeteries. He was the one to leave a bouquet of flowers and a cup of tea, the only one alive who remembered a kind, lonely woman.
“Goodnight,” Kakashi tells her gravestone. “Thank you for everything.”
Despite his words, he doesn’t go home. No, he goes to the Memorial Stone, which may well be his home with all of the names engraved on it and the time he spends there.
The moon climbs steadily higher in the sky, having made a full cycle since the Kyuubi attack, now a blinding disk of silver. Kakashi kneels before the looming stone, every inch covered in names hand-chiseled by grieving hands. He presses his fingers to the ground like they’ll hold him there, even though he feels like the slightest breeze could yank him away and into the beyond.
“Hello,” he says, because despite always coming to talk to the dead, he never knows what to say to them. “How have you been? I checked in with Naruto today, but the Anbu chased me out. He looked okay, so I thought I wouldn’t argue with Sandaime-sama. You wouldn’t want me to, Minato-sensei, so I guess I won’t.”
The wind is bitingly cold now, raking over his skin like needles or ice jutsu. He shivers and pulls his arms around himself, but doesn’t move. He has more to say, so many things he never said when he had the chance.
“Sorry, Kushina-san,” if Kakashi keeps his head down, he can almost imagine her familiar outrage, the incredulous, ‘Really, Kakashi-kun?’ that always seemed to echo through the house. “I know you wish I’d be better about this. I’ll sneak in tomorrow before my next mission. Another S-rank, but not Anbu clearance. Don’t you think that’s weird? I’m sure there are more jounin than me that are capable of it.”
If he closes his eyes tightly enough, the colored shadows blur together into Obito’s face, and he can pretend there’s that stupid smile on his face, the one he always wished would be directed at him, even though it never was.
“Y’know, Obito, I think you’d be better at this one,” Kakashi can imagine his surprised spluttering, and it almost makes him smile. “It’s to burn down a missing-nin hideout, and it’s okay if there are survivors. I think you’d like that. You get to burn things, and you don’t really have to kill anyone, but it’s still important.”
If only you were alive and not me, he thinks. He can’t bring himself to say it out loud, but it’s there, nestled deep in his ribcage, buried along with his heart.
“Sorry, Rin,” Kakashi opens his eyes to trace the neat characters of her name. “There’s not much to tell you. I visited your mother earlier, but I suppose you already know that. I gave Pakkun a strawberry today. He likes them almost as much as you do.”
A bell rings very faintly, from the civilian district, but his sharp ears can pick it up anyway. Midnight, and Kakashi counts the seconds under his breath as he slowly stands up and bows.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Bye Rin, bye Obito. Goodnight, Minato-sensei, Kushina-san.”
The empty space without their reply hurts. He’d gotten used to the pain of living without his teammates, and he thought that at least he had Minato-sensei and Kushina-san and he'd be fine, until they were gone and he wasn’t.
Kakashi doesn’t leave the cemetery until the sun begins to rise.
Kakashi meets a child, and he doesn’t know what he should feel about it. Tenzō is naive, and precocious, and he’s so full of life despite his grief that Kakashi doesn’t know how to react. Still, when he learns of Tenzō’s chosen birthday, he stops by a civilian bakery and buys a slice of chocolate cake, and he drops it off for the kid.
When Kakashi’s birthday rolls around, he finds a slice of the same cake sitting on his desk, and he smiles faintly. He eats the cake, even though it’s too sweet, and when he falls asleep he doesn’t have nightmares of his father or Minato-sensei or Kushina-san or Rin or Obito even once.
The stone is cold beneath Kakashi’s back, and he lies there and gasps and circulates his chakra and tries his best not to die. He’s stuffed himself into a tiny cave, barely a crack in the side of a mountain, and it’s damp and if Kakashi’s chakra control were even the tiniest bit weaker, he would be dead from hypothermia already.
The bleeding has probably stopped, but there’s poison in his veins and it’s dangerously close to his heart. There’s a moment where he contemplates letting it run its course, letting the purple-black seep into the muscle and seize it. He could die here, having served his village and finished his mission and he would be added to the Memorial Stone with his family and he would be sixteen and—no, that’s not quite right.
Kakashi squints through the dried blood on his face to see the opening of the cave, and he finds the sun out. The night has passed and he’s seventeen, and against all odds he’s lived this long, and really, Kakashi wants to end it here.
I never got to visit them, a tiny voice in the back of Kakashi’s mind whispers, and he thinks of smooth stone under his hand and wet grass beneath his knees and utterly still air in his lungs and he thinks that maybe, maybe it’s worth it to survive.
Three days later, Kakashi drags himself into Konoha victorious, one hand rendered useless and a halfway healed gash in his head, a stolen scroll of forbidden jutsu on his back, and a perfectly memorized chemical formula for T&I to have a field day with. He has to drop off the scroll, write down the poison compounds, report to the Hokage and get treated by a med-nin, but the first thing he does is shunshin straight to the Memorial Stone.
“I’m a year older now,” he says, “I wish you were here with me.”
Tenzō is a bit of a mess, Kakashi thinks, watching his kohai slowly and methodically strangle someone with a tree. The rest of their squad has split off—two injured and en route to Konoha, the others setting up an alibi for their hapless civilian covers—leaving the most impressionable of the group with the worst role model. Then again, there’s not much Kakashi can do to make Tenzō worse. He’s still every bit a kid to Kakashi, but once someone kills it lingers with them, ages them in ways incomprehensible until you’ve experienced it yourself.
“Kakashi-taichō,” Tenzō says. “Is that all?”
Kakashi nods. “Follow me.”
In silence, they leave the scene, don civilian-appropriate outerwear and light genjutsu, and head towards their squad to regroup. Tenzō delivers a quick report in shorthand. Kakashi watches and can’t help but think he blends a little too well into their team.
Team Rō is not only one of the oldest teams in the Konoha Anbu force, it also has the longest serving members, the most scarred and cynical. Some have had careers that span five consecutive years. It’s not uncommon for a new recruit to be ill at ease among them, no matter how professional they are, how well trained. Tenzō fits into their squad like he’d been there all along, and it… worries Kakashi.
Just a bit. Just as much as he has space for in his cold, dead heart.
Children run by them, laughing and shouting, feet pattering loudly against the streets, wasting energy with every clumsy movement. Their hands are sticky with sugar, their eyes distracted and minds in the clouds. Tenzō doesn’t even glance their way, unaware of the potential of everything he missed.
Their mission is quick, simple. For a group as ruthlessly efficient as Team Rō, they’re out by the time the sun sets and on their way home to report, speeding through the forest with barely a rustle of leaves.
For the first time that Kakashi can remember, he spends his birthday grieving over someone alive. No cold stones this year, no stained floorboards or scraped and bloody hands. Just the aching knowledge that Tenzō has never been and will never be a child, and Kakashi will never be able to do anything to fix it.
When he’s eighteen, Kakashi goes through a brief phase of babying his Anbu team, something that none of them appreciate in the slightest. One of them is older than him, which is just funny, and the others are all huffy about being strong enough to defend themselves.
Perfectly timed is the arrival of one Uchiha Itachi into Team Rō.
Itachi is eleven, almost strong enough to match Tenzō in a fight, and definitely strong enough to beat half of the Anbu force. He’s also a baby, as far as Kakashi is concerned, albeit a baby with the ability to kill.
When Kakashi was eleven, the most important person in his life died, and his life took a sharp turn off a cliff, impaled itself on a sharp rock on the way down, and has been bleeding out steadily since then. When Kakashi was eleven, grown shinobi began to fear even a passing mention of his name. At least, Kakashi tells himself, he can’t make Itachi’s year worse than that.
The baby of their team adjusts scarily well to the rhythm of war veterans and assassins, and soon they’re running back-to-back missions across the country, rotating the heavy workload between them in a practiced pattern. Itachi takes every mission with a nod and only asks the most necessary, perfunctory questions. He nods at his superiors and elders and bows respectfully. He never smiles.
So in the little gaps between the action—when they camp out, when they’re in the locker rooms, when they have a rare day off, Kakashi tries to make Itachi smile.
It never works, in the end. But he tries, and he thinks that maybe, deep down, Itachi might have appreciated it.
He starts simple, just leaving his ninken out a little longer than usual, rather than un-summoning them as soon as the mission ends. Tenzō gets along particularly well with them, even if Kakashi suspects they gossip about him behind his back. The rest of his team gives him weird looks, but none of them complain about cute fluffy things to distract from the horrors of their work, so they keep silent. Itachi seems to take it in stride, sometimes even obligingly scratching them behind their ears.
“Do you like dogs, Itachi-kun?” one of their teammates asks, bored and on paperwork duty.
Itachi is silent for long enough that they almost think he won’t answer, before he says simply, “I prefer cats. But Taichō’s ninken are very cute.”
Close enough, Kakashi thinks. He keeps leaving his ninken out, when he has the chakra to afford it, because the rest of his team seems to like them—and frankly, it’s nice to have his last living family around a little more. But he switches tactics for Itachi.
Next, food.
“Anything you need to tell us, Kakashi?” the oldest member of Team Rō asks him, after the third time he brings his team a meal. “Any long-hidden desires to become a civilian househusband?”
“Ha-ha,” Kakashi says dryly. “Can I not have hobbies?”
“You?” a different member snorts. “As if.”
It would be insulting from anyone else, but his Anbu team are the people that know him best, for better or worse. They’re all brutally honest with each other, even more so with him. It’s good, keeps his mind in check even as more and more rumors about him arise with time.
When he glances at Itachi, the boy has his head ducked down, with what might be a smile in the corners of his eyes—but then an explosion rings in the background of their current hideout, and the entire team is quickly distracted. After everything, Kakashi forgets the whole incident, and never quite finds out.
His next approach is introducing Itachi to Naruto. He leaves his littlest team member watching the kid with a bemused expression, and hightails it out before the Hokage catches wind of his little meddling and comes after him again.
“How was it?” Kakashi asks him afterwards, grinning behind his mask.
“Strange,” Itachi answers promptly. Less formal than usual, which either means the kid is relaxing a little or he’s just lost respect for Kakashi. Either option feels like a win. “He needs a friend. Perhaps… nevermind.”
Kakashi very carefully doesn’t look at Itachi, and even more carefully doesn’t think ‘take that, Sarutobi-sama’ when he says, “He’ll meet Sasuke-kun eventually. If they happen to meet a little early because my dear kohai happened to make a little detour, I hardly think it’ll be unprofessional.”
Itachi makes a little sound, vaguely disapproving but a little amused. “I’ll consider it, Taichō.”
“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kakashi says blithely. “Let’s go, we have a briefing at noon.”
Itachi nods back, and that’s that.
That year is oddly nice, if one ignores the bloody missions and nightmares and borderline war crimes the team commits. It undergoes a bit of a shift, where their oldest member retires out of the force and is replaced by a transfer from another Anbu team, who quickly gets too unsettled by their team to continue. He gets transferred out and is replaced by Yūgao. Kakashi likes her, both because she’s used to his style of leading and her fuuinjutsu fills a skill gap on their team, and because she’s willing to help with his self-assigned mission to make Itachi smile.
The two of them split their free time to stalk Itachi around the village a few weeks before his birthday, and bully the rest of their team into helping them set up a surprise. Itachi makes a reflexive attempt to take Kakashi’s head off when they ambush him the morning of his birthday and gets concerningly close to succeeding, before he’s placated with onigiri and dango.
He makes sure the rest of the team doesn’t feel left out, of course. He takes to following them on random missions to see who catches him first, and still turns up now and then with random offerings of food. On their birthdays, he normally annoys them a little and buys them cake. On Tenzō’s, he hides his cake at the end of an elaborate scavenger hunt masquerading as a team building exercise.
When Kakashi turns nineteen, they take an unsanctioned break in the Kirigakure swamps to loudly sing to him and make dramatic declarations of giving him severed enemy heads. Itachi refrains from participating, but he does gift Kakashi a shockingly nice tantō. He waves it off when Kakashi thanks him, but he looks a little pleased.
That year, no one on his team has a bad enough mental breakdown that they’re forced to see the Anbu psychiatrist. An unprecedented win, in Kakashi’s opinion. It doesn’t last—Itachi is promoted to Captain by the end of the year, and transfers out of Team Rō. But it was nice while it did.
There’s someone at the Memorial Stone, when he drops by late at night. His senses, too sharp to be fully human, pick up the rotten scent of crushed flower petals, the scrape of bare knees on the ground, the sound of quiet and muffled sobs. The silhouette is too small to be anything but a child.
It’s a bitter reminder that Kakashi is not the only one who’s family is nothing more than neat names engraved in stone. He waits, a silent shadow until the sobs die out and the child falls silent, and then he shunshins just close enough to drop his vest over their tiny figure. It’s not winter yet, but the nights are still bitingly cold—he can steal it back tomorrow, and no one will be any the wiser.
The night of Kakashi’s birthday, he’s walking through puddles of blood in his Anbu mask, his squad following behind him. All around them, uchiwa are slashed through, blood spatter litters the walls and ceiling, and the corpses of shinobi and civilians alike are discarded everywhere. Some died without knowing what had happened, and some had fought for their lives. None of them lasted long.
Kakashi’s heart feels like ice. He treats every one of his teammates like his pack, and to have one of them—the youngest, the puppy, still growing and still too young—turn away from the rest like this hurts. He watches, detached, as his hands write notes and his voice barks orders and more and more Anbu flock to the scene.
At some point, someone pulls him away and tells him he’s no longer a part of the investigation, on the basis of possible bias. Kakashi laughs in their face, because they think that they’re doing the village a great favor, and they’re going to pick at little Itachi until every fact is twisted irreparably, and they’re still so, so naive. Kakashi laughs and bows mockingly and shunshins away.
He lies awake that night, sharingan replaying scenes of blood and bodies and the utter, overwhelming feeling of betrayal. He closes his eyes, and thinks bitterly that it’s just another folder in an entire library of memories.
“Hey, Dad.”
The words stick in his throat, but Kakashi hasn’t come all this way for nothing, so he keeps speaking.
“I forgive you,” he says, releasing a slow breath. “For leaving me alone, and for choosing a few teammates over Konoha. Over me. They’re dead, just so you know, but I guess you gave their miserable lives a few extra months in the end.”
There’s no one around at this hour, not even in a shinobi village, so Kakashi can say whatever he wants without fear of it getting back to the Hokage.
“And I’m sorry,” he continues, and this is much easier, because he’s spent the past decade or so apologizing to many, many people, even if most of them are dead. “I’m sorry for leaving you alone, and I’m sorry for not believing in you. I’m sorry for forgetting everything you taught me. I’m sorry that I couldn’t make you proud.”
Obito’s eye burns. Not the familiar feel of the sharingan draining his chakra, or the nearly-as-familiar sting of tears. It’s just grief given physical form, and familiarity doesn’t even begin to describe how well he knows it. It was like he was born with this feeling, and it dragged everyone down with him.
“I hope you’re not too disappointed,” he says quietly. “But hey, I’m already twenty-two. I’ll be dead soon, and you can scold me then.”
It’s not even an exaggeration. Shinobi die fast and early, especially the brightest and best. And Kakashi is lightning in the epicenter of a storm, blinding and brilliant and all consuming for all of a second, burning everything he touches and setting flames to leap even further.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he says cheerfully, and even means it somewhat. “Bye, Tousan. See you soon.”
He will. He’ll see him again. He didn’t say it when he left the house on that fateful day, but he’s saying it now. Too late, but then again, maybe they’re even now. Kakashi’s father is sixteen years too late to say happy birthday to him.
By some miracle, a year later Kakashi is alive and he’s out of Anbu. He’s so busy readjusting to regular jounin life, too busy pretending to be human again, and he forgets that it’s his birthday at all.
“Kakashi!”
The loud cry comes from none other than Gai, waving too-enthusiastically from a booth crowded with other jounin. Kakashi raises a hand lazily in response.
“My Rival, you have arrived at a most perfect time!” Gai declares once he gets closer, and when Kakashi squints he thinks Gai is drunk. “We are just getting started!”
“You’re two hours late,” Genma drawls. “Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Maa, thank you,” Kakashi says. He gives his usual pleasant smile, and receives a withering look from Genma and a beaming grin from Gai. “You know how it is, I simply got lost—”
“I am not drunk enough for this,” Genma interrupts him. “Kurenai! Handle these idiots for me, would you?”
“Oh my, look who finally showed up,” Kurenai says. She waves Genma off and slides into his vacated seat. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come at all.”
Kakashi simply shrugs, and she offers him an understanding smile in return. Her career as a shinobi has been relatively forgiving, but she too understands the struggle of keeping in touch with human conventions. She told him once, having forcefully gifted him a stack of prepackaged meals from a civilian grocery store, that she has to make a conscious effort to keep herself open and sociable, and then invited him to get dessert with a few of the jounin that night. He refused that invite, and the one after that, but they never stopped. He’s grateful, even if he doesn’t tell her so.
“Cheers,” she says. “Would you grab me a glass of water? Gai is about to give himself alcohol poisoning.”
Kakashi snorts. “Sure.”
The stone is only slightly colder than the air, but it feels like ice under Kakashi touch. He has a bouquet of white chrysanthemums in his free hand, and as he watches as a petal drifts loose and falls to the ground.
“I’m older than you now, Minato-sensei,” he says, and his voice is hoarse and barely a whisper, shaking on the exhale and stopping entirely when he tries to drag in air again. “I’m twenty-five, can you believe it?”
There’s no answer, but if Kakashi closes his eyes tight enough he can almost feel a phantom touch ruffling his hair, warm and larger than life until he wasn’t. He turned twenty-five in the early hours of the silver-painted dawn, standing on the cliff’s edge of his teacher’s head and tempted to let himself fall so he didn’t have to see the sun rise on a nearly-empty world again.
“I still feel like a kid though,” Kakashi laughs, a bitter sound, salty with tears. “I thought everything was bad then, you know? And then—”
His breath catches again, and tears spill down his cheeks, both of his eyes betraying the emotions that he’s locked up since his last visit to the stone.
“Anyway,” Kakashi continues, smiling through the haze of pain for a circle of ghosts that watches him with sad eyes. “Hi Obito. Hi, Rin. Hi Kushina-san. Happy birthday to me, I guess.”