Chapter Text
It happens the night Rin dies.
Kakashi collapses, unnamed Kiri-nin felled around him, strung over rocks and dirt like a collection of broken toys. His eye spins wildly, hungry and wanting for every thread of chakra that sparks along his coils. There is nothing to do but let the world slip away, tearstains long dried on his cheeks and Rin’s blood embedded beneath his nails, and he sleeps.
He dreams of the face he misses most at this moment, a broken promise to a friend long passed. Obito lies on the cold hard ground in a sea of carnage, a perfect mirror of the last fading images from Kakashi’s conscious mind. His face pressed into the mud, rain weighing his short crop of hair to his skull, he is not unlike a corpse. It’s that scene again, the one newly burned into his Sharingan’s perfect clarity, a core memory in the making. He doesn’t see Rin. Her body, cut through by Chidori’s sharp edge, is missing.
Kakashi feels the rain soaking into his clothes, pulling him down with the rest of the fallen shinobi, and he sways forward, his eyes locked on an Obito that will not move, this person who was the first stone in the chasm of his regret. Everything feels different, from the flow of his chakra pathways to the rocks beneath his shoes and the way Obito’s eye bleeds his reserves from its socket.
Everything is a haze as he drops to his knees before the ghost of his teammate, blotchy black dots disrupting his focus as he reaches forward with a shaking hand.
It’s over just as soon. Kakashi wakes to the morning sun, Rin’s body left to fester in the heat, and he carries their broken selves with the last of his chakra-depleted strength to the home that, right now, feels like a fairytale.
Kakashi’s life revolves around a series of failures carefully compiled by his endless shortcomings. His only counter to this invariable truth is to push himself and break his body until it no longer puts up with the abuse. When his team is ripped away from him once more, when Sasuke leaves and Naruto goes to follow, and when Sakura is taken under the wing of the Hokage, he does just that. It’s easy to do with the constant flow of S-ranked missions that occupy most of his waking hours. The longer that he does, the more he falls back to the ANBU mentality that he has just begun to shake. His body is not his; he belongs to the village. His life is expendable so long as his loss is for the betterment of his Kage.
It next happens on the battlefield. No shinobi is exempt from careless mistakes, least of all one as critically aware of his worth as Kakashi is. When the earth above bends and breaks over him, his mind decides to play a little trick. It pulls one of his worst traumas up from the grave, falling rocks and crushing weight and an eye not his own hastily shoved into his skull. Before he knows it, he’s cut off from his reserves and someplace else entirely.
Kakashi finds himself in his village, his head propped up on his hand as he stares down at the academy rooftop. There stands his team, a bunch of budding young genin just the same as the day that he took them under his tutelage. He knows this memory well. It’s a day that felt completely inconsequential at the time, another team to cross off his list. More genin to fail.
The man standing over them is not him, though. From his vantage point, Kakashi can only see the back of the stranger’s head, some flak-jacketed jōnin with his hands folded over, leaning back against the railing. He doesn’t recognize this one.
It’s over as soon as it begins. Kakashi is somewhere in the heights of Earth Country, his chakra completely bled dry and a trio of hunter-nin dead at his feet.
Though it’s rare, there are times when Kakashi blacks out. His mind draws blank, his eye will spin, and he dreams of a life somewhere else that isn’t his own but feels so much like it could have been.
What nobody told him about taking up the mantle of Kage was that it would bleed every hour of sunlight dry. Kakashi knows he’s spent far too many hours in the Hokage office when the last trail of evening light peters out over Konoha’s wall and he’s still sat prone in his chair, hunched over his desk reading documents sent in for approval. He was also not told how much paperwork there would be, though he might have guessed from the piles of it always surrounding the Fifth whenever he was summoned.
For once, he’s been left alone. He usually has at least one attendant at his side standing off against the wall or helping to sort through the endless desk work that no one person could reasonably work through, but he’s found a rare moment of solitary peace and tries to enjoy it. His duties won’t let him. He thinks that maybe he can take a break to stare at the wall for some undiscerned length of time but if he doesn’t finish everything now, he won’t be able to go home.
It’s as his eyes glaze over that the knock at the door finally registers for him. All this time sitting in that chair is dulling his senses. Shame on him. He straightens his back, the brim of his hat blocking his face in shadow.
“Come in,” he calls.
He expects Shikamaru on the other side with lazy, unsympathetic eyes and a second round of files to hand over. Instead, the door opens to a face that he so rarely gets to see these days, and he smiles behind his mask. Any formality that may have crept into his stance is gone.
“Tenzō,” he greets, discarding the Hokage hat onto the desk. He hates that thing. “It’s rare for you to visit. To what do I owe the honour?”
Tenzō rubs his neck as he steps inside. His other hand holds a paper bag. At first, Kakashi thinks his old teammate may have brought food to share, but there’s no distinct smell from the bag to indicate that. “Sorry about that—I’ve been away for a bit. And it’s Yamato, Lord Sixth.”
“It’s Kakashi, Tenzō,” he sends back.
“I—” Tenzō sighs, his whole body wilting with the effort, and he doesn’t argue the point. It doesn’t matter; Tenzō will always be Tenzō, and getting him to break formality is like pulling teeth. Instead, he raises the paper bag up and wiggles his fingers. “I brought you a little something.”
“Hm?”
Tenzō sets the offering down on the desk, cushioned by a pile of mission reports. “I don’t know if you heard since you’re always stuck in here, but Master Jiraiya’s final manuscript was found.”
Ah. Yes, he has heard. It was a little over a year ago that it was located. Rumours started spreading about someone using Jiraiya’s unfinished notes to close off the story. He’d been looking forward to it but the village didn’t run itself and with his job taking over his life, he never followed up on it. For all he knew, the book was still in production hell. As he stares at the bag, its contents dawning on him, he realizes that must not be the case.
This is it, isn’t it? Master Jiraiya’s final work.
This exciting turn of events is enough to erase every ache and pain in his body. He plucks the bag up off his desk, feeling the unmistakable weight of the pocket novel within. It feels strangely new to him, having spent so many years with the series over and done with, its author long passed and everything it would ever be history in his mind. He’s read each book in the series more times than he can count; he has Icha Icha Paradise fully memorized from start to finish, and most of Violence and Innocence are right up there along with it. But reading the same treasured novels over and over again means he isn’t getting anything new out of them. All they bring to him is a nostalgic rush of years gone by that, now and then, he likes to relive.
Kakashi only notices his fixation on the book when Tenzō clears his throat. He lowers the bag to his lap and his eyes crest into a smile.
“Thank you,” he says. “I’ll enjoy every word.”
“I know you will.” Tenzō looks out the blackened windows, the last threads of sunlight only a memory, and heaves a sigh. No doubt he’s reminded of his current job as babysitter to one of the sannin. “I should head back. Give it a read for me, would you? Enjoy yourself a bit, Senpai. You deserve it.”
Kakashi’s left alone with nothing but the book and his job, and he matches Tenzō’s sigh with one of his own. With his brief reprieve now over and gone, reality rears its ugly head and he stares at all of the reports yet to be read. To keep his hands from wandering as he works, he places the book on the top shelf of the bookcase on the far wall, out of reach.
The night is quiet. When he stamps the last page, a budget request from Structures and Planning, he’s allowed freedom for the first time in two days. All that time spent hunched over at his desk leaves his shoulders aching and his eyes sore and strained. Maybe age is catching up to him. When he was a jōnin instructor, his job was a lot more taxing on the body and he had three genin-aged brats to contend with. Before that, in ANBU, his every day was a brush with death. He’d wake up in the night with blood on his hands and horrors in his mind, scrubbing away tears like he was scrubbing away his sins and begging for morning to come.
Nowadays, Kakashi has documents to sign and a village to run, and it’s somehow just as stressful as dealing with his trauma. Who would have thought?
With everything looked over and signed, and the fear of being dragged back to his duties if someone else walks through his office door looming over him, Kakashi pulls Icha Icha Reversal from its place on the shelf and flips it open to the first page. He shrugs off his Hokage cloak. It doesn’t come home with him; he’s too worried that its presence in his house will lead him to have nightmares about office work. At the start of the book, there’s a little biography about Master Jiraiya that he reads fondly. It details the grand adventure that the editor went on to locate the lost piece of literature and the struggles of taking the notes left behind with it and translating those into the final product.
Then, beyond that, a title card: Icha Icha Reversal.
Being this enthralled by a new installment of erotica is probably unbefitting of a Kage, but there are few pleasures that Kakashi allows himself and this series means more to him than it probably should. Its abrupt ending left an unfillable hole in his life. It’s silly, he knows, but Icha Icha found him at a time when he was closed off from everything around him, when intimacy was a foreign concept and he craved so desperately for something that he was terrified of losing.
Kakashi was an emotionally compromised young man once. Maybe he still is; maybe all that’s changed is his body, aged with the years put behind him and lined with the stress of his title as head of the village.
Either way, he’s looking forward to his book.
The Land of Snow cast the earth into perfect stillness. Arata, world-weary from long nights of blizzards and ash, felt the first givings of spring in a world far too cold to welcome it. The ice that crunched beneath his boots reflected the moonlight overhead, partly melted in the rising temperatures of the changing seasons.
This was to be his final journey. Beyond the Land of Snow’s vast expanse of sterile white lay a future that he could never grasp in a world not his own. She, too, awaited him there. His fire and flame.
Nose pressed between the pages, Kakashi reads through the introduction curiously. It doesn’t quite feel like Master Jiraiya’s usual writing. It’s exceedingly rare for the sannin to start his books with heavy, dread-filled imagery. Icha Icha had its fair share of heavy moments, but never at the start. The prose doesn’t feel quite right, either, and he wonders if that has to do with the editor who filled in the unfinished gaps.
He dips out into the hall and greets the two guards stationed there before starting the short walk home. He moved from his tiny one-bedroom apartment to a small house a little closer to the office for convenience. If he’s perfectly honest, he wouldn’t have even done that much had it not been for the prodding of everyone around him to raise his standards of living. He represents the village now. He needs to look the part. The new house has a small garden out back for his ninken to lounge around, at least, and he has more storage space for weapons, tools, and other miscellaneous supplies.
Kakashi reads as he walks, never looking up from the pages of his book. He’s so used to this route that after five years of taking it, he manages not to walk into anything, lampposts included. The story as a whole has a lot more setup than the other novels, as well. It’s a continuation using the cast of Violence so he assumed it would skip introductions in favour of getting to the meat of the story, but there he is on chapter two and still reading about the world and the protagonist’s situation. Things are looking grave, far darker than the situation left at the end of Violence, and something about that turns Kakashi’s stomach.
Icha Icha has always been a series that gives him a sense of peace. At the end of the day, no matter how many wars he fought in or how many people he lost, Kakashi could count on these books to be there for him, offering respite through the madness of reality. It was easy reading. Even when the characters suffered, there was always the promise of something better yet to come. Things would improve. No suffering is without reason.
This doesn’t feel like that, though; this feels like a world that is already lost and a man trying to put back together the pieces of a life that will not fit. It doesn’t sit well with Kakashi, but he keeps reading as he steps onto his front porch and releases the several wards placed on his home. He keeps his eyes on the text even as he shrugs off his boots and climbs the stairs to his bedroom.
There’s a moment when his thoughts stop and he rereads what he just read, sure that he must have interpreted something incorrectly.
The Land of Snow was a relic lost to history, but he stood there in the wreckage of his memories just the same. Fragmented stone jutted out from beneath the powdery snowbanks that the wind whipped into flurries, the remains of a village destroyed and a people abandoned. It was only when he stood at the precipice overlooking a decade’s worth of carnage that the implications of what he saw unravelled behind his eyes.
Kakashi shuffles up the steps, turns the page—
This world was not his.
His foot hits the stair and he lurches forward. He lets go of the book to brace his arms in front of himself, but he never hits the ground.