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Chapter Text
thy soul
shall find itself alone.Edgar Allan Poe
He’s small. That’s the first thing he notices- tiny, breakable fingers, thin, short legs, a weak, thrumming heart in his little chest.
The next thing he notices is the heavy feeling in his lungs, the way the air feels just a bit wrong, just enough to make him gasp and shake. The wind doesn’t whisper to him, doesn’t carry murmurs of gods and ayakashi, doesn’t try and deafen him with the screams and wishes for death.
There is no divinity in his veins, not anymore.
Yato stares at his too-fragile hands, at this too-human body, and screams.
The thing is, he knows he is a god. Or at the very least, he was. He still remembers echoes of before, before he is imprisoned in this mortal body and mortal soul. He remembers the feel of a shinki, the warmth of blood splattering on his pale cheeks as he cut down mortal after mortal. He remembers days bleeding into night, the scent of rust and metal and human waste thick in the air as he stood on battlefields. He remembers war, he remembers death.
God of Calamity, they called him. Magatsukami, they pleaded, begging for him to strike down their enemies and let the rivers run red. Evil demon, they whispered, staring up at him in horror as he bathed in their blood.
Idiot God, Yukine called him, huffing and yet never straying far. Yato-san, Hiyori named him, seeing a god, but calling him a friend. Family, Kofuku and Daikoku told him, inviting him into their home time and time again.
Yaboku, his Father called him, fashioning him from wishes and turning him into a weapon.
He has been called many names, has been remade into many images.
He doesn’t know what he is now.
His name as a mortal is Kakashi. His father is Sakumo, and they are the last of the Hatake clan. War has torn apart their family, dead in ditches and souls severed.
Sakumo tells him that he is a ninja, a shinobi of the leaf. He fashions a lullaby of strife and teeth, handing him a blade that glitters like silver. When he cuts himself and bleeds, Sakumo merely watches and tells him that it’s better that he familiarizes himself with the feel of steel breaking his skin. Better now, Sakumo says quietly, in the relative safety of their home, where he can wash out the cut and bandage it properly, than in the field where adrenaline and fear can overtake him and leave him as dead as the rest of their clan.
He doesn’t protest- neither the assumption of becoming a shinobi like Sakumo, nor the training of letting his clumsy fingers slip and slide against the sharp edge of the kunai for the sake of progress.
After all, for centuries and centuries and centuries, Yaboku has only had his Father, the man who wished him into being, and he has always been an obedient son-god-pet-weapon. Here, in this world that feels different, and in this body that feels wrong, he has no one aside from Sakumo.
At least that is familiar.
Even if Sakumo isn’t as loving as human parents are, he is used to fathers being distant. And if a part of him aches in longing whenever Sakumo touches him, to correct his grip on weapons, to hand him his meal, but never to comfort, Kakashi doesn’t say anything. He’s not a child, he tells himself. He doesn’t need love and care and affection like a human child does, no matter that he is in the body of one.
Kakashi was a god, had lived for centuries alone with his shinki abandoning him time and time again. Loneliness and longing have no hold on him.
He’s not a god anymore though, so he cannot hear the wishes and desires of mortals pleading for a deity to save them. But he needs not the ichor that had flown in his veins before to smell the scent of dread and anger and bitterness.
Even if Sakumo does not outright tell him during the days that he is around, it is obvious to him that there is a war brewing. It explains why Sakumo pushes him, even if his limbs look short and his height even shorter. He estimates that he’s a toddler, a mere babe in the grand scheme of things, but Sakumo places kunai and shuriken in his pudgy fingers all the same. The man watches critically as he obliges and throws the weapons against the still targets at the back of their compound, as he extends his arms and falls into the basic katas and spars against clones.
But when Sakumo isn’t there, when the ninja heeds the call of his Hokage and goes to slaughter the village’s enemies, he reads the books gathering dust in their library. Before he met Yukine and Hiyori and Koufuku and Daikoku, he had only himself and the calamity that he brought. In this world, of shinobi and assassinations and death, he wants to be more.
Kakashi will follow his father, will follow what Sakumo wishes, but he wants to be more than a weapon.
He’s had years of killing under his belt, and he knows he will have years more. Still, he doesn’t want to be a mindless murderer; now that he’s mortal and not beholden to listen to the prayers of humans, he feels a burning desire to be better, to be more.
He will kill, but he won’t be solely a weapon.
He devours whatever he can find, his eyes taking in legends of the tailed beasts and Senju Hashirama, reads stories of princesses and their chains, falls asleep to tales of the fae and spirits. He immerses himself in fairytales, warming his heart with happy endings and morals written in ink.
And when Sakumo comes home, dripping and trailing blood on their tatami mats with that hard edge in his grey eyes, Kakashi puts away the books and willingly picks up his kunai. Mind and body, spirit and soul, yin and yang.
He reads when his father is not around, and he fights when he is. For years, this continues, until Sakumo sits him down one night and tells him that it is time to become a ninja himself.
Sakumo enters him into the Academy, where all the shinobi and kunoichi hopefuls go to learn how to hold a weapon, how to attack and parry, how to infiltrate- how to be useful to the village.
He finds it hard to speak, hard to introduce himself as Kakashi instead of Yaboku or Yato, and the noise of the children around him makes his skin crawl. He’s lived centuries unseen, unheard, unwanted, and having all these children asking about him, about his father makes him want to search for exits.
Still, the children clamoring to talk to him about the dwindled yet prestigious Hatake clan are far more tolerable than the ones who look at his size, at his age, and at his easy handling of his body and weapons and take it as a personal affront. He cannot help that his hands feel more settled with a blade in them, cannot help that his stance is polished from centuries of fighting and the measly three years of practicing in this mortal body.
Yaboku had been the God of Calamity, the God of War.
It makes sense that he is skilled, even now that he is divine no longer.
He doesn’t confide in Sakumo that the Academy feels like a prison, like a room that is too small filled with bumbling prey, but Sakumo is formidable and smart in his own right. He takes a look at the dark circles under his eyes, at the mask he had started wearing to try and deter his classmates from talking to him, and hums.
Within half a year, Kakashi graduates. Within half a year, he wears a hitai-ate across his forehead and the weight of the village on his shoulders, and gains a jounin-sensei, an apprenticeship, even if he doesn’t gain a team.
And within another half year, Sakumo dies.