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“It’s over, Obito,” Kakashi rasped.
As he spoke, he ground his fingers into the smooth floor to steady himself. The mixture of Obito’s and his own blood on his hands was starting to congeal, sticking whatever he touched.
Across him, Obito coughed. He clutched at his midsection, where blood oozed from the hole Kakashi had punched through his chest. He coughed again, a wet hacking sound, before he slowly raised his head.
“You might have won the battle, Kakashi, but I’ll win the war,” he gritted out.
Obito’s eyes were empty, crazed. It was a sick shadow of the bright determination Kakashi remembered from their youth.
A hollow, dizzy sensation bloomed in Kakashi’s stomach. The edges of a dark abyss loomed beyond the battle adrenaline, but for now he kept his eyes locked forward. He breathed in and out. In. Out. A salty sharp smell, dust and sweat mixed with ozone from lightning, filled his nostrils and roiled in his gut.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” Obito smiled. In the cold brightness of their Kamui dimension, he looked like a ghost, one that had haunted Kakashi for almost his entire adult life. “I’ll let you skip all that. To see the perfect world we’ll create.”
In. Out. Obito was preparing something, gathering his chakra. Kakashi shifted his weight in anticipation. And then the world cracked apart.
The edges of his vision warped first, like paper crumpling around a single point, and then – a sharp snap, the ground giving under his feet. Kakashi fell, shattered fragments of the Kamui dimension crumbling around him. An endless void of black stretched out behind him and he dropped, faster and faster into the abyss.
The last thing he saw before he blacked out was the burning red of Obito’s eye.
–
Pain.
Kakashi fought his body’s instinctual reaction to tense up, though it was a near thing, because everything hurt. Beyond the various gashes and injuries from before, his entire body throbbed like a bruise. An overpowering metallic tang filled his nostrils when he breathed in. Blood. Of a quantity that he usually associated with slaughterhouses and massacres.
Strange. He hadn’t bled that much after – Obito. They had been fighting. What happened? Pain again — he shuddered, spinning away into the darkness of his mind. Right. He had fallen. His stomach lurched, remembering the vertigo of the drop.
Kakashi laid sprawled on his back. His clothes stuck heavy and tacky to his skin. The soft sensation of dirt and grass tickled his fingers, which were bound behind him with rope. So: not in Kamui anymore. His ankles were also tied up. He tensed at his bounds and stilled. These were shockingly loose knots.
Civilians? He counted about a dozen undeveloped chakra systems ringed in a circle around him. Was that chanting he heard? One of the presences rose and started walking towards him.
What the hell? This wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He breathed through the instinctual panic response, loosening his muscles. What had Obito done?
Time to act alive. If he had been captured by civilians, there wasn’t much point in playing dead, and he needed to get back to —- he needed to get back. He opened his eye.
A circle of people in white robes sat ringed around Kakashi in some kind of dirt clearing. Beyond them was the familiar lush green of old forest growth – were they in Konoha? Some of the figures had their eyes closed, hands pressed to the ground as they murmured a low chant. Others were slumped over on the ground, blood spreading in thick pools around them and staining their robes. That explained the smell. Their blood seeped into a giant circular design painted in rust tones on the ground, one that Kakashi laid smack dab in the middle of. A blood seal?
That was not good. Kakashi blinked slowly, trying to clear away the spinning sensation in his head. The symbol on the ground tugged at his mind. He’d seen it before.
Behind him, out of his line of sight, someone shuffled closer.
“Jashin-sama,” the person croaked, “We give this body to you, to become a vessel for your most-favored one. May he rise again to spread the gospel of your suffering once more.” The chanting grew louder.
Jashin – where had he heard that name before? His thoughts whirled and swirled, refusing to get in order. A shadow fell across Kakashi's face.
The person kneeling behind him – a mousy woman with curly black hair – raised a sharpened stake of wood above her head, the point suspended in midair directly above Kakashi. There was a large round object attached to the end she was holding. She peered at him with violent devotion in her eyes.
Crunch.
Kakashi stared at the stake, now embedded several inches into his chest. The round white end of it was a skull . It stared back at him, jaw open in a ghoulish grin.
Then the pain hit. He gasped, spasming in his bonds as his mind whited out. The woman had stabbed him with surprising force . Crushed sternum, punctured lung, internal bleeding , his mind supplied blankly as he twitched and wheezed in the dirt. A warm sensation bloomed underneath him, a sharp contrast to his cold extremities: his blood pooling out of the wound.
Shit. He had to calm down, to get out of here – he had to get back – to the war, his students, Obito – his fingers scrabbled against the knots, slippery with blood. The rope loosened.
And then the skull opened its mouth and laughed. An awful high-pitched sound, like a creaky hinge.
Kakashi froze, before redoubling his efforts. Whatever the fuck was going on, he was leaving. But the rope wasn’t moving, and his fingers were starting to numb, and the skull laughed and laughed and laughed –
A weight slumped over him, crushing him back into the dirt. It was the woman. She gurgled wetly, twitching a couple times before stilling. Kakashi grunted, twisting away from her dead weight.
And then he choked, overwhelmed with the sudden taste of iron. The woman’s blood was pouring over his face and clogging his mask. He couldn’t breathe . She had killed herself somehow and trapped Kakashi in the process. The foul thickness of her blood filled his throat. He bucked frantically, but couldn’t get free, pinned under her. His limbs weren’t responding; there was only a burning fire in his chest and a mounting, desperate panic.
The chanting rose louder and louder, reaching a fever pitch. Time slowed down. Kakashi couldn’t hear the chants anymore, only the echoing thump of his own heartbeat as he struggled.
His heart thudded — first frantically, then stuttering, and then in the space between one pulse and the next, Kakashi gave one final choking gasp and died.
–
Death was quiet and dark. He drifted, mind blank in the void. Slowly, a vast shape coalesced out of the inky black.
White flesh, the color of bone. A perfect symmetrical circle of black above an endlessly gaping, slitted mouth. Kakashi stared at the emptiness beyond the gates of those teeth. There was an awful, ceaseless hunger in its shape, one that terrified him beyond belief. But he was pulled inexorably towards its gravity.
Between the teeth and the circle laid two gashes of nostrils, and above those, two vast black pits. Something moved inside those pits. Something fleshy and red and slick, and Kakashi shivered, reminded of the wet gore of fresh death. He tasted iron on his tongue.
Kakashi was not blank anymore. He was fourteen, staring the Kyuubi in the face as it destroyed everything he loved. He was but a bug pinned before a terrible ancient force.
The enormous skull face – because that was what it was – shifted to look at him. Kakashi met its eyes, and the weight of its gaze shot through his body, electric like the moments when he held chirping death in his hand.
It spoke with a voice like a death rattle.
You, who has lost every beautiful thing you loved.
You, who has spilled oceans of blood across my lands. Friend-killer, ghost of a man haunted by one who yet lives.
What magnificent agony, it croaked.
It was as if a hand had slit him open and tenderly caressed his insides. In life, Kakashi had been a man who operated under several layers of masks, both literal and not. Obfustication that had started as a coping mechanism for loss had grown to a way of living. Whenever he lifted his books in front of his face, whenever he feinted during a fight instead of attacking head-on, he was safe.
Safe from the truth: that he was a failure of a teacher, of a shinobi, of a comrade. Obito’s snarling face flashed in his mind’s eye.
But now in death, this being saw the bloody mess of hurt that laid behind his masks — and it adored that. Laid bare, he squirmed beneath its covetous gaze.
Beautiful bloody thing, it crooned.
Kakashi shivered, his body a live wire dipped in molten liquid. His limbs shook, hot with fear and wonder. Horribly, tears stung in his eyes. He wanted — he wanted to dig his fingers into the space between his ribs and pull. He wanted to curl away, to crush himself so tiny that nothing could ever touch him.
He had failed. That was the plain truth of it. The agony of that feeling shuddered through him, and he lost himself in it, cradled in the palm of an eldritch love. He remembered everything now: Obito, his betrayal, their fight, his own death. Was this it? Was this what his life had amounted to?
Show me all of it. Show me.
He had failed Obito, his first friend. And then Obito’s pain had built and built until it threatened their entire world. He was Kakashi’s responsibility, but now Kakashi was dead. A silly, stupid death, to a civilian of all things. A scream built behind his throat and left his mouth as a choking laugh. Of course. It all stemmed from his failures. And it would end in them too.
What is life, without suffering? It is the glorious spill of red that binds the two of you.
The crushed ruin of Obito’s body under the boulder. Rin’s blood, black in the light of chidori. The swaths of death they cut through the world, after. And before that, spiraling backwards — two kids, left alone in the aftermath of loss.
Every wound calls to be filled by a blade.
The voice curled around his body, hooking into deep and delicate places. The sound of dripping echoed in the black.
Kakashi opened his eyes – when had he closed them? – and she was there. Pale, windswept, calm. Blood dripping from the gaping hole in her chest. Dark eyes, forever frozen at thirteen, skewered him to the spot.
“Rin,” Kakashi gasped. He stared as she walked closer and knelt in front of him. She reached out, fingers ghosting over the spot on his chest where his heart beat a thudding tempo – a cruel mirror to her own, which never would.
“You have given me your wound,” she whispered. “I can make you the blade.”
Kakashi understood. He had a thousand things he wanted to say to her, most a variation of the “ I’m sorry,” that had been howling in his chest ever since he laid eyes on her. But he didn’t say any of them.
He reached his hands up to his chest, fingers hovering over the divot where his ribs curved and met. He dug in. Skin stretched and then gave. He wheezed at the bright pain, the sensation of violation as his fingers curled under his ribs and pulled. Muscles and bones and organs sang in an agonizing chorus of rending and rearranging as one hand held his ribs and the other wormed under, pushing aside layers of flesh to seek the beating thing in his chest.
Rin’s eyes were pools of blackness, her pupils huge and wet. The longer Kakashi looked, the more he glimpsed something writhing in the darkness. In life, she’d had brown eyes the color of warm chestnuts.
Kakashi gasped as he forced his hand deeper in his chest. He didn’t look down. He kept his eyes locked on Rin’s as his hand closed tight. It felt — he panted, body bowed over. Every twitch of his fingers against pulsing muscle jolted through his body, like he was his own jerky puppet. His heart thundered in his grasp. Twitchy thing. He moaned.
Rin’s eyes were dark. He wondered what she saw.
She looked hungry.
In the space between one staccato heartbeat and the next, Kakashi wrenched his heart out from his chest.
“It’s yours,” he rasped, holding it out. It still beat sluggishly, as if not yet aware of its changed circumstances.
“It should’ve been yours.”
Rin smiled. Her cheek tattoos dimpled. She clasped Kakashi’s shaking, outstretched hand and took the heart, cradling it to her chest.
Behind her, the giant skull face loomed out of the darkness. Its mouth cracked open, spreading wider and wider and wider until they were surrounded between its jaws.
Rin mirrored the skull, her mouth stretching wide — too wide.
As her teeth closed over Kakashi’s heart, the jaws around them snapped shut, swallowing them whole.
Then, for the second time that day, he woke up.
–
Everything hurt. Again. He blinked, stretching happily into the ache. His forehead hurt like a spike had been driven through it. Waves of bright pain throbbed out, aching all the way into his ears. A body slumped over him. Drying blood soaked everything, in a quantity that he knew, from experience, meant a disgusting shower later. His hands were encircled in loose rope.
Lush green branches swayed overhead. Sunlight dappled through in diagonal strokes of late afternoon haze. He was being watched. Best to see what they wanted.
A flicker of chakra from across the clearing, and all his muscles were blanketed and seized with a foreign intrusion. He could not move.
“You’re trespassing on private Nara lands,” came a soft voice, shaky with the slight edge of strain. “How did you find this place? State your intentions.”
Ah. Shadow possession jutsu. An old friend. An old fucking pain in the ass. What?
Either way, the chakra possessing him was weak. He probed at it with his own chakra, measuring its strength.
“I repeat, you’re trespassing. Who are you? State your intentions at once, or –”
This was getting tiring. He sat up, shrugging off the jutsu and the ropes around him. He peeled the dead body off of him with a nasty squelch.
Ten feet away, a woman with dark hair pulled into a spiky tail gaped at him. Her hands gentled from where they’d been clasped in a rat sign. She wore a weird flattened version of a flak jacket.
He took in all of this information in an instant, body already hurtling towards her. She tried to fight him off, but it was useless. In less than five seconds she was pinned under him.
“Who are you?” he asked. He could see her pulse rabbiting in the jump of her neck. It would be so easy to slice it open and paint the earth with her suffering. She hadn’t known much pain in her life, he could tell. He could show her.
He’d gotten distracted. She was saying something.
“– off me. They’ll all be here soon,” she spat. “You’re an idiot for thinking you could get away with this on our land.”
“It only takes a second to kill you. But we have more time than that,” he rumbled. “Much more time. I could show you so many ways to hurt.” He wished he had his scythe. But there was a satisfying intimacy to using your hands, sometimes.
She froze, before gathering herself again. “F-fucking freak,” she grit out. “I’m Nara Shizuko, and I don’t go down easy. Try your best, asshole.”
Her body surged up, but he slammed her back down with half a mind. Nara Shizuko? He’d never heard that name before. Strange. He knew the names of all of the battle-ready Nara clan members, knew their abilities and how to best deploy them on the battlefield. It was the purview of a commander, after all.
Distantly, he sensed a large number of formidable chakra signatures heading fast in his direction. He didn’t recognize any of them. Alarm was starting to thread through the haze of adrenaline in his mind.
It probably wasn’t genjutsu. Everything was too specific and unfamiliar at the same time. Who’d come up with a scenario like this, and why?
“All talk and no walk, huh?” Shizuko grinned. “Realizing the situation you’re in?”
“Shut it,” he growled. In a flash, he gathered chakra to his hand and struck out. She dropped to the ground, out cold. He stared at her limp body. It was tempting, to show her a taste of the suffering she’d so lacked in life. To make things equal between them. But he had seconds before he was surrounded. And … she was a Konoha nin. So he shouldn’t do that. Right.
Most importantly, there was something he needed to do. It itched in the back of his mind, jumping away when he tried to grasp hold of it. His head still hurt, an agonizing spike lancing through his mind.
Growling, he shook his head like a dog and stood up. He flickered away in a shunshin right as the cavalry crashed into the clearing.
–
This wasn’t the Konoha he knew.
That fact was clear to him, after his mad dash to freedom out of the village. Oh, there were landmarks he recognized, but they were different. The Hokage monument had Naruto’s face on it, for example. And a face he didn’t recognize after that.
That was strange, though, because he’d never been to Konoha proper. Freaky forests didn’t count.
He sat against a tree, breathing hard. He’d lost his pursuers a couple miles out from the village, after using clones to lay several fake trails. If this was a different Konoha, he didn’t know who he could trust on the inside, especially after what he’d done when he’d woken up.
And everyone else was dead, probably. He remembered feeling Kakuzu’s chakra gutter out to less than nothing through the packed earth.
He clutched his head, still throbbing with sharp pain. “Fuck’s happening to me,” he groaned.
Well. There was someone he could trust. He bit his thumb and slammed his hand down to the ground, ignoring the strange twang in his chakra.
Poof! White smoke cleared and something in him settled, glad for this piece of normalcy. But then –
“Boss?” Pakkun looked stricken, like he’d seen a ghost. His tiny body hunched in on itself, but there was something hopeful in his eyes. “But you’re – wait. You’re not Boss.”
“Pakkun,” he tried.
Pakkun came closer, sniffing and pawing at him. “You smell like him. But also not him.” He sat back on his haunches. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
Who are you?
The question echoed in his mind. “Who are you?” the Nara had asked.
He had grown up surrounded by belching, bubbling springs. The ability to traverse over turbulent waters was one of the first abilities he’d learned as a shinobi.
No, that wasn’t right. Everyone in the village learned how to walk up trees at a young age. He’d run missions through swampy marshland, ice cold mountains and arid grasses, but he still felt most at home in the forest.
He’d been a shinobi his entire life.
He’d had a father, and then teammates, smiling faces and white bone masks, and they’d all died. Everyone died. Shinobi were meant to kill, and that was why he’d slaughtered them all when they’d dare turn away from the truth. He’d sliced their redemption over and over until the springs gurgled red with blood.
He killed his friends. He was known for it. He killed and killed until he became famous for it. He spread bloody suffering across the lands. And that was – okay. Fine. Boring. His duty. A faith.
But then he’d –
– found a partner.
– taught a team.
Failed them. Died bloody and red and snarling and alone in the forest earth.
Something cold and wet was nuzzling his hands. “Hey, cub,” Pakkun nipped at his fingers. “You back with us?”
He was curled up on the forest floor, hands threaded through his hair. His head still hurt like a bitch. He sighed, curling into the sting. With deliberate effort, he unclenched his shoulders and slumped upwards to an approximation of a sitting position.
“I don’t know,” he shuddered out. “I’m not your cub.”
Pakkun bristled and shot him a look that could have stripped paint. “That line didn’t work on me when you were ten, and it won’t work on me now. No matter whatever you’ve done to yourself.”
“Now,” Pakkun said with great authority. “Tell me what you remember.”
He told him. About the fight with Obito. Waking up to a strange bloody scene. Dying to the hands of a civilian (embarrassing). The skull face. Rin. Waking up again and fleeing. His different memories.
Pakkun was up now, pacing back and forth. He licked his nose again and again before stopping.
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “Time works differently in our world. But best I can tell, you last summoned me a little over one hundred human years ago.”
“ What. ”
“We felt you pass away shortly after. It was the Fourth Shinobi World War – we guessed you’d fallen in battle,” he grunted and looked away. “We mourned you. There’s been no one since.”
He laid a hand on Pakkun’s head to rub over the short fur in a silent apology. Pakkun nosed into his fingers and snuffled slightly.
I’ll make it easy for you, Obito had said. To see the perfect world we create. “I don’t like the conclusion I’m drawing here,” he muttered.
“What, time travel?” Pakkun snorted. “Figures something like this would happen to you. Did you know it was possible?”
He shook his head. “Obito has a better grasp on the possibilities of our Mangekyou than I do. I knew we could jump dimensions. Does that mean time is another dimension?”
“Beats me,” Pakkun muttered. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t think time travel is our biggest problem here. It’s whatever that freaky ritual did to you after you crash landed in the future.”
“Why?” he asked. “I just need to figure out how to reverse engineer whatever Obito did. And then I can go back and–” he shuddered, imagining it. He could see it so vividly: Obito had suffered so magnificently in his lifetime. His pain had swelled and swelled until he wanted to reject their entire world to block it out. He could drag that suffering out into the light. Mirror that divine root of hurt plain for him to see. And then things would be – not fair, exactly, but visible. Understandable.
“To go back and make him understand,” he finished.
“See, that’s what I’m worried about,” Pakkun said.
“Hm?”
“The Kakashi I know wouldn’t fantasize about killing a man. He’d be worried about getting back to his cute little students,” Pakkun stared up at him.
“I’m not –” he didn’t know what he meant to say. He wasn’t Kakashi, but that also wasn’t right. He remembered Rin’s hungry gaze as she devoured his heart.
“I don’t think I’m the Kakashi you know anymore,” he said slowly. He lifted his head and caught a glimpse of red in the shiny metal of Pakkun’s headband.
Pakkun looked back at him, solemn understanding in his eyes. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”