Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Consciousness did not return to him slowly. It was a quick and panicked thing, slipping into his system and shocking his nerves alive, firing shots across his synapses, and flaring his chakra. Breath funnelled through his throat and lungs like the impact a waterfall made on the pool below it, crashing against the surface and striking underneath, the rapid intake of oxygen squeezing his lungs and hurting him more than it helped.

“He’s hyperventilating,” a voice said and he tried to lock onto the sound to no avail, he couldn’t see anything and his hearing was muffled. His body tried to thrash reflexively at whatever was suffocating him, the knowledge that it was his own inability to regulate his breath meaning nothing to his nervous system. Panic thrummed through him as he failed to identify the threat and then failed to understand why he was having such a severe overreaction to waking up in an unfamiliar place. He was a shinobi, he’d been in situations like this before.

He had training but none of it was kicking in.

Flaring his chakra intentionally to manually override his malfunctioning reflexes, he gasped as his control vanished in the face of an all-encompassing block. Without a means to wrestle his control back over his rationale, his heart sped up threefold, and his tenuous grip on reality slipped away.





Time passed, he was certain of it, although he was not aware of the specifics of its passing, only that it had. For what good it did when his first impression upon his captors was already ruined and dripping with weakness, his second waking adhered to his interrogative training. Something must have happened for him to react so rashly but the memories before he was put under escaped him.

He knew it was wartime. But in a war between the moon and the combined might of the entire continent, there were generally no prisoners. So he was not a POW, which left a limited number of possibilities in its exclusion. ‘Hospital’ was the first scenario to come to mind but he didn’t feel heavily injured and a stay in a medic’s tent wouldn’t require chakra suppressing seals. Unless that was the reason why he was being treated, which aligned with his lack of notable injuries.

Although, his body did hurt. The aches were what woke him up, a mixture of repercussions from chakra exhaustion and something else as of yet unidentified.

He was sat up, oddly enough, his proprioception returning to him. Not sat up in the sense he was propped up on the small incline hospital beds allowed but rather he was sat on a chair and held ram-rod straight against the backrest. The strappings holding down his limbs, body, neck and forehead against whatever he was sat on were probably partially responsible for the majority of his aches accounting for however long he had been restrained for.

The set up did not bode well for his hospital theory and gave credence to his previously dismissed ‘prisoner of war’ assumption.

“He’s awake,” someone ahead of him said and he mentally cursed at the futility of his efforts to maintain the illusion that he wasn’t. Whoever had captured him had to have been monitoring his vitals, one point to the hospital theory.

He redacted all points from the hospital theory and sent it down in a blazing trail to the negatives when his captor removed his blindfold and his eyes adjusted to the clinical lighting.

Although it occasionally went by different names, Torture and Interrogation was not an institute unique to Konoha. Fortunately, the only T&I Kakashi was familiar with was Konoha’s but it didn’t take much to connect his predicament to the severe Kiri-nin in front of him and come to a daunting conclusion.

“It’s okay, buddy,” the man said and leaned forwards, hands planted on his thighs. His tone threw off Kakashi, it didn’t match with his scarred face and gruff expression. He spoke as though he were addressing a child which was not an interrogation tactic that Konoha shinobi were taught. Perhaps they should implement it since it certainly worked to offset his rhythm. “If you do as you're told and answer our questions, we won’t have to hurt you too badly.”

Or maybe not. It wasn’t instilling fear within him, if anything it was mildly irritating and mostly bizarre. It didn’t help his mounting confusion as he tried desperately to understand how he could possibly be in a situation like this in the middle of the fourth great shinobi war. The man wasn’t wearing a shinobi alliance headband and it didn’t make sense for Kakashi, a well known front liner, to be locked up in a foreign village’s T&I chamber miles away from the action. Hell, Kakashi didn’t know who this man was but they needed all the help they could get on the battlefield, he should be there too.

“Why are-” Kakashi stopped before his next words had a chance to leave his mouth. That wasn’t his voice. It was too high and young. “Ah,” he tested it, hoping against hope that he hadn’t heard himself correctly. He had. “What.”

“All brawn and no brain, huh?” The kiri-nin chuckled and withdrew to his full height. Either he was unnaturally tall or Kakashi’s chair was very short because the man’s eye-level was far too high above Kakashi’s head. Neither, he noted numbly as he looked down and saw that his feet didn’t touch the ground.

“What happened?” He asked, sounding meek and vulnerable and everything he shouldn’t be in a position of weakness like this. His tiny fingers cinched the wooden armrests his palms were strapped flush against, armrests that extended a good length passed the tips of his fingers. No explanations came to him, his mind distressingly blank as his earlier panic reared its head at the implausibility of his current reality. “Is this a genjutsu?”

“Aww, poor thing, is that what they tell you about T&I in Konoha? That they’ll give you nightmares with those red eyes? I’m sure those stories gave you nightmares, anyway,” the shinobi chuckled again and patted Kakashi’s head, heavy enough that his neck would have bowed under the weight if it weren’t being held up by the chair. “No, you’re not in a genjutsu, we just had to take precautions after what you did to our recon team. It wasn’t very nice of you, you know, to kill almost all of them like that. Is that how they raise their kids in Konoha? We may be the Bloody Mist but I’ve never seen a six-year-old so vicious before.”

What? This body - it was six years old. He was in the body of a six-year-old, in the depths of Kiri T&I because whoever had inhabited this body before him had been a bloodthirsty killer of nin. Six. A six-year-old killer of adult nin.

“I suppose the rumours are true after all, they always did say the Hatake were a feral clan, like wolves, right?” the kiri-nin didn’t wait for an answer and carried on, “although, you’re more of a puppy, really, and I’ve heard puppies are quick to learn to do as they’re told when given a spray.”

This was more in line with interrogation tactics that Kakashi was familiar with. Reach into the captive’s history, family, techniques, missions, anything and turn what you find around so the sharp edge of the sword points towards them instead of the handle. Kakashi was the last of the Hatake line and most of the folklore surrounding his clan had faded into the memories of elders by the time he was making a name for himself.

… Kakashi was the last of the Hatake line. This body couldn’t belong to a Hatake.

Was… was Orochimaru involved in this somehow?

“First question, then, just something basic that we already know to confirm a few things, can you give me your name, age, village and rank?” The shinobi dragged a chair from somewhere outside of Kakashi’s view and settled down in front of him. “Easy, right? Go ahead, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

He had everything to fear. He didn’t have the right answers to give the man, they wouldn’t match up with whatever they had in their files. Whatever details described this body didn’t apply to him and the contents of its previous character were unknown.

“... Kakashi Hatake,” he said slowly. The shinobi nodded. “... Six,” he continued and the shinobi nodded again. “Konoha and…” he’d been promoted at six, it was anyone’s guess if he was a genin or a chuunin. “Genin.”

He flinched as something cold and unpleasant slapped his face and saturated his mask. Blinking moisture out of his eyes, he identified the source of the attack, a spray bottle in the shinobi’s hand. “Ah-ah,” the man tutted and set the bottle aside, “wrong answer.”

“... Chuunin,” he corrected and the man clapped in approval. Like he was a six-year-old chuunin. Like he wasn’t a twenty-nine-year-old front line fighter. Like he wasn’t at war.

“Good boy, now let’s move onto the less fun stuff, okay?” The shinobi’s smile took on a shark-like quality and his posture tensed with barely restrained aggression, yet his voice remained sickly sweet, “why did you murder three members of a Kirigakure recon team and severely injure a further four? Tensions are high right now, if I weren’t mistaken, this very well could be an act of war,” he flicked Kakashi’s forehead protector and the resounding clink echoed in the barren room.

Flashes of a fight, his last waking moments, converged over his vision of the present. His hand through a heart. Lightning crackling in his veins. Blood sluicing down his arms. “It wasn’t on orders,” he blurted out in a rush, “I did that for myself.”

He woke up in bed, cosy. Fell out of it. Crashed into the kitchen. Saw the date on the calendar. Rushed outside of Konoha’s walls. Intercepted a mission the only way he knew how on a time limit. Killed the instigators.

“No one asked me to do it!” He proclaimed, desperate. If Hatake Kakashi was labelled the cause of the third shinobi war, his maddened rush of a plan would have been all for nothing. The blame would still lie with Sakumo, the one who had raised him. “I did it for me.”

He flinched at another flash of cold and the shinobi chuckled. “Oh, I’m sorry dear, your reactions are just,” he ruffled Kakashi’s hair, “nevermind, let’s try that again shall we?”

Kakashi had slipped out of many tight situations in his life, sometimes only by the skin of his teeth.

He wasn't sure how to get out of this one.

Chapter Text

Kekkei genkai were simultaneously feared and coveted in the Land of Water. Kakashi had known this in a disconnected peripheral sense which came into focus briefly during his encounter with Zabuza and then fell out of focus again. It was a point of culture that was converse to Konoha where kekkei genkai were infused within the very foundations of the village. Clans were proud, sure, but that reverence didn’t tend to extend too far outside of clan borders.

Strapped down to a gurney while a pair of researchers poked and prodded and took samples of him for analysis, it couldn’t have been clearer that their respective villages held kekkei genkai in very different regards.

Kakashi didn’t have a kekkei genkai presently. He had a natural affinity for lightning and a backlog of copied jutsu catalogued by an eye he no longer possessed. What he did have were biological quirks, but in no way did they give him access to any special chakra capabilities or nature affinities other than his ability to tell what a person had for breakfast by their breath from a metre away, hear the whisperings of gossip while seemingly engrossed in a book, and leave his hypothetical one night stands looking as though they were mauled by dogs rather than ridden with love bites.

Uncomfortable didn’t begin to describe his current situation. Examining every inch of him, producing scan after scan with unrecognisable medical jutsu, taking his blood, skin, hair, and his body in general, in small doses, these researchers were almost rabid in their pursuit of a fictionalised kekkei genkai. Behind their medical masks, he could imagine them salivating at the prospect of confirming their biases. Or perhaps they were tearing up in desperation behind their goggles, their superiors demanding that they discover the Hatake secrets and despairing at the thought of having to report that the six-year-old they apprehended just had weird teeth and that was about all there was to it.

Weird teeth which almost crushed the fingers of the first hand to investigate his mouth, only the chemicals slogging through his system prevented him from snapping onto his target in time. They’d sent for something to ‘deal with that’ since, Kakashi hadn’t caught the finer details, but they hadn’t returned yet-

The door opened and a shinobi swiftly deposited something onto the medical trolley on Kakashi’s right and left within the span of a few seconds. Curse the world, curse the Gods, curse Yaguya, Madara and a whole litany of rotten names, what can go wrong will go wrong and everything always went wrong for Kakashi. It was bad enough that they’d taken his mask, he didn’t need whatever the fuck that thing was.

Rubber props were set into his mouth by one pair of gloved hands while another forced his jaw into submission as he did his damned best to snap and growl. Echos of a righteous ache yet to come pulled at his mouth as the props stretched his lips apart and ensured that he wouldn’t be severing any limbs in the immediate future.

Dentist appointments were already on the list of things he never showed up to, never made in the first place, and whatever wicked form of the practice this was was far worse than the distant memories of his dad dragging him to the dentistry office for his six-month check-ups.

It would have been nice if the researchers deigned to subdue him with more than mild anaesthesia, would have been lovely if they just knocked him out. Whatever ideas of torture and specialised schemes the T&I department were cooking up couldn’t compare to what they had already put him through, something which he had no doubt they were unaware of.

Six-year-old Kakashi had yet to establish the hospital-self-defenestration facet of his reputation.

Six-year-old Kakashi hadn’t established much of a reputation at all outside of his quick ascension to the rank of chuunin and preference for his own company.

Except, no, that wasn’t true for this version of Kakashi. This version of Kakashi had murdered a cell of foreign nin and potentially incited the beginning of the third shinobi war. There were many things Kakashi would have traded for the horrible names that had haunted his childhood the first time around, but very few could compare to this.

“Increase the dosage.”

Wait, no, he changed his mind - better the enemy you know, his only asset right now was his intelligence… gathering, he couldn’t… he couldn’t… he...

Damn it.

Minutes, hours, any stretch of time later, he woke up alone and cold. Points of pressure flicked at his pain receptors almost playfully and he let himself take a moment to do nothing and think on nothing. Swiping his tongue along his gums, he tasted the twang of iron.

He rolled his wrist once, twice, and then in the other direction. A doctor had told him he had loose joints, once. Double-jointed, evidenced by the way he could dislocate his shoulder and shove the bone back into its socket with unnatural ease. Joint hypermobility syndrome, that was the medical term. Building muscle and maintaining fitness was the only advice the doctor could give him and he’d scoffed, all of four years old, and said he was going to be a ninja, that was already the plan.

Do not perform high impact exercise. Hah. He’d scoffed at that too.

More than once he had slipped his hands from a pair of cuffs. Young with tiny little spindly hands, it was all the more easier to crunch and pop and slip and pop again. One thumb, two thumbs. Back in they went.

The pain was not negligible. But he did not care for it.

The adult cuffs, hastily welded to a small but still ineffective size, didn’t clatter on the concrete ground in a series of dull thuds because he caught them before the noise could alert anyone. Carefully, he set them aside and moved onto the next phase of the plan.

It wasn’t so much of a plan as it was a vague idea of a series of events that may or may not occur, the majority of it hinging on his reflexes and adaptability. Choices he would have to make given a split second for deliberation, and a prayer he made the right decision.

Hospital gowns didn’t make for good shinobi attire, the creasing of the fabric was obnoxiously loud and counterintuitive for stealth. Fortunately, Kakashi’s history was littered with self-appointed stealth missions paved by vinyl and stinking of peroxide disinfectant. His current mission wasn’t quite the same, still clean to a clinical standard and echoing with loss of life and injury, but the setting was familiar in all the ways it should and shouldn’t be while maintaining that this was not a place of healing, this was a place of harm.

The door was sealed, of course. But Kakashi had spent years under the tutelage of a seal master, the man who was the second-best thing in the passing of Uzushio and trained under the only other seal master of note before him. Kakashi was not naive enough to think that Minato and Jiraiya were the absolute pinnacles of accomplished shinobi in the art given the vast libraries of medical ninjutsu packed to the brim with thick heavy tomes with characters so small they were hard to discern yet had the power to bring a ninja back from the brink of death. They were damn good at what they did, but he knew their fame wouldn't have reached the same levels had they not utilised their knowledge for combat.

Medic nin were often set aside in history, weren’t they? The Gods knew how many times Kakashi had brushed off Rin’s attempts to heal him. Perhaps they had marked these slights along with all the monumental fucks ups Kakashi had committed and were exacting their righteous due upon him now. The spirit world was said to be neither paradise nor hell. Sometimes Kakashi wondered about that.

Overloading seals led to results that had a margin of unpredictability, but one could reasonably expect for them to explode. Loud booming signals indicating his location and activities were precisely what Kakashi didn’t want during an escape operation. Removing a seal from its anchor would lead to similar results. Fortunately, he knew a workaround.

There were several seals at play all anchored to the door, which was telling. Whoever had applied them must have learnt from study, not application, and certainly without a tutor worth any merit in the practical field. Seals with single anchors were infinitely easier to remove than seals with multiple anchors, especially in the case of multiple seals conjoined to the same point. It was a convenient placement and required less hassle in setting up. But a master like his sensei would always advise against the practise, just as Kushina had advised - she was, after all, the one versed in the trade’s roots.

However, it did also mean that he would have to disable all of them since ripping up the anchor point would be very, very loud. Otherwise, he would have left, say, the unidirectional sound barrier and what he would like to aptly name the ‘temperature leech’ and the ‘heat vomit’ - a matrix of two cleverly combined seals that sealed and unsealed heat from the room in correspondence to a negative feedback loop in which the assigned equilibrium was criminally low. If hot, leech the hot; if cold, vomit the hot back out.

Altering seals in a way that would maintain their integrity (and consequently avoid the big bad boom bang) while also cancelling out their functions so they were inert was simple enough if one knew what they were looking at. He just had to find a command in the seal that he could loop back to itself so the seal went no further. He also had to make sure not to create an infinite loop on certain functions such as the symbols that diverted chakra or, for a specific example, the part of the ‘heat vomit’ that stored heat so capacities weren’t flooded meaning everything still exploded an indeterminate amount of time later. Not good.

There was an exception but he had practice with this scenario. The chakra suppression seals would have to be overloaded and it would hurt but he knew how to mitigate the damages.

Blood made an alright ink substitute on a budget, his budget being in the negatives given all the damage repairs to the delicate fabric of the relations between shinobi villages he’d necessitated within hours of waking in his six-year-old body… so blood was the perfect choice for the few flicks and alterations he proceeded to draw with his thumb. Simple stuff. He couldn’t invent seals like sensei and it would take him a long time to make anything more complex than a single element storage scroll without a blueprint, but he could profit off of other people’s hard work if he wanted to.

With a couple of bloody flicks, he gave a concise demonstration of the extent of his knowledge on fuinjutsu.

Digging his pinky into the anchor point, he broke his nail in tandem with the anchor but, hey, his nail would grow back. Those tampered seals would require a good thorough look through to identify why they didn’t work anymore despite not appearing outwardly broken.

Now, for the chakra suppression. Another set of bloody flicks, creating an infinite loop that gathered his chakra instead of barricading it and- shit, fuck, shit, shit, motherfucking Icha Icha Violence with a side of kunai for knife-play, that hurt.

Thin trails of smoke dissipated from his chakra points and he decided to push on forwards instead of lingering on the fading pain.

Outside of his cell, the air was a degree or two colder from the scarcely improved corridor airflow. Without foreknowledge of the building’s layout, having been unconscious during his transfer from medical to his cell, he was at a severe disadvantage. Depending on the complexity of the layout, he could spend anywhere between minutes and hours traversing the twists and turns and T&I buildings were not often designed to the benefit of their captives.

However, the object of his captors’ obsession had the potential to even the odds. Kakashi’s olfactory nerve was sensitive, along with every other trait he shared with his canine counterparts - upon leaving his cell, he was able to register the difference in airflow.

The solution wasn’t so simple as to follow the signs of the outside world, he could assuredly guess that he was in a multi-floored building and he was below ground level judging by the lack of windows and lack of signs of the outside world. However, if he could locate a ventilation system, he could meander through the building without drawing attention to himself.

Slinking along the walls, tamping down on his chakra signature and doing his best to minimise his presence despite the lack of shadow cover and cover in general, he mentally acknowledged each door his fingers trailed over and the distances between each of them.

More than once he paused and slipped behind a corner when footsteps bounced across the walls. In the eerie silence of the basement, all oncoming threats were loud as they made no effort to conceal themselves within their own territory. If it came down to it, Kakashi would incapacitate anyone who discovered him, irrespective of whether they were runners carting medical trolleys or shinobi on guard rotation. But they weren’t expecting an escapee and he would like to keep it that way.

Security was oddly lax on the personnel, although Kakashi suspected that they hadn’t anticipated anyone bypassing their barrier seals without at least making some noise. In general, the seals he had encountered were unusually advanced for a village not known for the art… except, Uzushio had been known for it. Kirigakure had been the village to destroy Uzushio.

Two puzzle pieces clicked into place on a jigsaw Kakashi had unknowingly unboxed. That was… something to think on later when his thoughts inevitably became more maudlin and he lingered on the past. Perhaps something red would catch his eye and he’d be reminded of hair, chillies, and compassion. Or maybe the sun would be high in the sky outside, the warm yellow was enough of a reminder on it’s...

Target acquired, a ventilation grid was embedded into the ceiling directly above his head. Lending itself to claustrophobia in a way that was likely both cost-effective and intimidating to prisoners, the corridor was not nearly as tall as it was long. Although, it didn’t feel that way. His estimations were telling him that the ceiling was just shy of one point nine metres yet it looked so much further away. Reaching above with his arms should have put him in contact with the sliced metal.

But his arms were spindly and his optimistically grabby hands were tiny. Six-year-old Kakashi hadn’t breached four foot yet.

No matter, Kakashi had mastered tree walking at five and a touch of chakra to his toes and fingertips ensured that he could jump from wall to wall until he latched onto the slats, body swinging like a pendulum as he used miniature chakra shockwaves to bypass the screws bolting the grid in place.

Hefting his insignificant body weight took more effort than it ought to, but he allowed himself the concession that more strength meant more muscle which in turn meant more weight and this body had barely graduated from its toddler years. When did children even stop being toddlers, anyway? Was it when they passed the academy entrance exam?

Kakashi’s ideas of age milestones were a little skewed.

One thing no one ever said about travelling via ventilation shaft was that it wasn’t as quiet and stealthy as ninja heist novels liked to depict it. For the most part, the structure was made of concrete, simple tunnels carved into the spaces between floors and walls. However, when he entered the metal sections, the dynamics of the situation were flipped entirely.

Each press against the surface, whether that be his butt and head touching the ceiling despite his small stature or the shuffling of his elbows and knees, was magnified by the warping of weak flexible metal. Progress was excruciatingly slow and he paid keen attention to nearby chakra signatures, always pausing in advance when someone entered the boundaries of his senses.

The novels also missed out key details, like how there would be the occasional straight drop into the abyss or suddenly the ceiling would disappear above his head and he’d look up to see a vertical path. His suspension of disbelief would be challenged on new levels if he ever read Akio Bushido and the Princess Behind Bars again.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure if the novel had been written yet. Which was a shame if it hadn’t been, Kakashi liked his uncomplicated action romance books. Not nearly as much as he liked his Icha Icha - oh no. Oh no no no no. He knew the first Icha Icha hadn’t been published yet. He had the serial number and publishing year of his first copy imprinted onto the back of his eyes alongside every single word in the novel.

Oh Gods, why? Why should he be forced to live in a world such as this, six-years-old, trapped in the past, running from enemy territory, life unbelievably fucked in every way, knowledge of a doomed future resting on his shoulders, and no goddamned Icha Icha.

He took a moment to despair, making use of his newly found headspace to look to the heavens, hands limp by his side. The effect was dulled somewhat by the clear view of the confines of the ventilation shaft and lack of a starry sky but he made a point to allow himself this nevertheless.

Moment taken, he carried on, shimmying up the vertical pathway with the aid of chakra.

Once he reached the top and heaved himself onto the ledge of the next network of ventilation tunnels, he had to stop and catch his breath. Overloading the seals had taken a not so trivial amount of chakra although it wasn’t something he usually considered noting and he’d been using chakra liberally to secure himself to the walls, something which he didn’t even think about normally. But his body was a lot smaller than usual and so were his chakra reserves. And the researchers had been focused on his chakra at one point. And it had been restricted earlier. And he’d collapsed after taking out that recon group. It seemed very unlikely that he’d been allowed much of an opportunity to recuperate his stores between then and now.

Fuck. Bad news, he was running low.

Good news, airflow was markedly better. If he wasn’t above ground, he was close.

Correct, he was in fact above ground. Following his nose, he was able to traverse the windings of the vent system until he found a grid that led directly out of the building. It was also half-submerged by dirt and grass, soil having tumbled through the slats and a single worm was wriggling two centimetres from his nose.

The smell of earth, something he usually took for granted, was a blessing to his senses after the saturated assault of cleaning solution he’d been subjected to ever since he woke up in foreign territory just two days (by his estimation, it was hard to keep track of the time when he was unable to account for how long his bouts of unconsciousness were) ago.

Manually unscrewing the rusted screws with his sharp nails, avoiding his decommissioned pinky, and then with his teeth when he got frustrated with the rate of progress, he removed the grate and shook his head when soil tumbled onto the lower half of his face in response to the removal of its support. Begrudgingly, he was thankful for his stature as he squeezed through the gap, he would have had to find another route if he had his adult body.

Coast clear, he took to the nearest bush and set about figuring out the logistics of the hard part of the mission. Kirigakure was dense with foliage, dark verdant hues submerging his surroundings and breaking only for the cream-and-brown buildings, also topped with more greenery, of which he could only see the tall and proud T&I building and what he assumed was the Hokage Tower in the distance.

Konoha was not devoid of greenery, it was known for it. But the atmosphere in Kirigakure was cloying and humid, and more than one tree sported fruit that were uncommon and expensive finds at home yet they were just hanging there, unprotected. He didn’t like sweet things but the impulse to snap the stem of one of those colourful fruits and take a raw bite pinged in the back of his brain when his eyes laid sight on them.

Distant chattering, the clings of kunai against kunai, the rush of water jutsu, and general hidden village life brought him back to the forefront of his predicament. Cover wasn’t something he had to worry about as much as he had inside T&I, foliage was thick as he had already established, and the mist the village was renowned for was just as good for hiding as the name implied. But vision obscurity was a two-way street and he didn’t have Obito’s sharingan anymore.

Cataloguing what advantages he did have (small body, chakra dampening, stealth, sensory abilities, surprise) alongside his disadvantages (limited vision, unfamiliar terrain, enemy territory, out-numbered, low chakra levels, unknown enemy abilities and numbers, unknown escape route…) he set a course north and crawled along the ground, avoiding the cobbled main streets.

If he were at his full capacity and knew the extent of his abilities, he would have run. He was quick and no one was expecting him. A straight dash would eventually take him outside of the village’s perimeter and he knew which direction not to go since he could see the Hokage tower.

The perimeter was made up of craggy mountains, very different from the man-made walls that housed Konoha on three out of four sides. Any shinobi whose intelligence outweighed their ego wouldn’t think to try and infiltrate Kirigakue by trekking through the mountain-scape and hoping for the best. There were routes in and out of the village, just like how easy it was for people to become lost in the living forest that surrounded Konoha, imbued with the will of the Shodai Hokage, yet those who belonged always found their way to and from home.

Kakashi’s intelligence outweighed his ego, unless that was his ego flattering his intelligence? Either way, he understood that, under normal circumstances, it would not be wise to test the benevolence of the rocky Kiri borders.

These were not normal circumstances and he’d rather put his life on the line than squander his opportunity to escape. Within two days he had been strapped down, interrogated, and scientifically examined. He didn’t know what would happen when the researchers did not find what they were looking for, when his interrogators continued to gather nothing useful from him, and their methods escalated. He didn’t plan on finding out.

Children darted through the undergrowth two metres from him, playing a vicious game of tag with kunai. One chestnut-haired child was sporting a dribbling cut that split his right eyebrow and another in proto-shinobi mesh armour had a bloody nose. Neither seemed to be in distress, enjoying themselves as they threw semi-blunted kunai (not sharp enough to do any real damage in unskilled hands, but sharp enough to hurt and leave light scars) at each other. Giggling, they ran straight past his hiding spot and deeper into the trees.

Exhale, inhale, he carried on.

As shocking as a child killing apparently was to his interrogator, the children of Kiri were of a different breed from those in Konoha. Kakashi didn’t have the best point of reference as he’d been sent out into the field at a very young age but he’d never played with weapons and never threw them at another child unless they were sparring and they were competent enough to dodge.

He didn’t crawl across the ground when grass transitioned into cream cobbled slabs, he paused at the edge of the tree line and gauged the distance between himself and the foliage at the opposite edge of the road. Small streams ran perpendicular to each other, like moats, following a locus around the road. Rivulets of water ran in between the cobbles themselves, languid in their pace. Around the bend some ways away, two teenagers chatted amiably, kicking up water with their sandals in a way that spoke of thoughtless chakra use, the water running along their soles, contrary to gravity, and spritzing the ground when it ran out of surface to cover.

He waited until they were out of sight and leapt across the width of the damp cobbled path, throwing his hands ahead of him as he neared his landing. Using the tiniest spark of chakra, he skimmed over the blades of grass and near silently rolled into a crouched position, bypassing the great splattering squelch he would have made otherwise.

His feet had long since been covered with mud, the soggy dirt slipping uncomfortably between his toes with each step he took. The ends of his white hospital gown were sodden as well, brown splattering up in lengths that nearly reached his collarbones in places. His hands, elbows, forearms, lower legs and knees had all suffered the same fate.

Water country was nothing like Fire Country. On the surface, perhaps they seemed similar, what with the bountiful greenery and trees, but Fire Country was distinctly dry for the most part and he couldn’t bear to think on how much worse his circumstances would get when it rained.

Repeating his road crossing stunt four more times as he travelled further and the roads became more infrequent, he was confident he was going to make it to the mountains at the very least.

Until a fizz of foreign chakra spiked on the back of his gown.

Pulling the fabric harsh enough to tear, his eyes lay sight on a simple beacon seal, released remotely, presumably by someone who realised he was missing. Beacon seals couldn’t be overridden, they were far too simple. All they did was release the chakra that had been stored inside, he could either empty the reserves in one giant flash-bang of energy or ditch it.

Pulling further, he continued his accidental tear until it reached the borders of the seal. With a kunai, he could swipe a circle around the edges, fold the axed fabric into a projectile and fling it far away from himself. Tearing fabric by hand lead to results that were difficult to control, he had to take it slowly, if he took one misstep-

Blinding blue light enveloped his vision, a physical admonishment of his spindly child fingers’ lack of motor control.

Cold, damp squealchiness drew one giant line along the back of his body and he sank a centimetre in the ground before he had the presence of mind to scramble backwards, blind and needing to be anywhere but here.

His mud slicked head and shoulders abruptly slammed into a pair of knees, and two hands gripped his flailing limbs with an all-encompassing strength. Impressions of silhouettes filtered into his vision, several tall figures encircling the spot where he had fallen, heads angled towards him.

“-t me see that.” Voices came next and he was suddenly aware of the ringing in his ears and the distanced radio-like quality of everything else. He was passed to another pair of arms who tugged back the yoke of his gown. “Well, what would you know, he’s a foreign prisoner.”

“Oh, piss off, let me see.” He was pulled away by someone else, a brief tug of war playing out until the original speaker gave up with a huff. His kicking legs went unacknowledged as the woman dragged back the yoke and Kakashi got the impression there was something to see there. “How can you even tell? It’s just a bunch of numbers, I reckon this is just his second attempt to run from the hospital, my Yuko has been tagged with a tracking seal more than once for that.”

“No, he’s right,” said a third voice accompanied by a third yanking hand. Kakashi, somewhat nonsensically as his mind reeled from the shock, feared for the integrity of his gown’s neckline. Yep - there it was, the sound of a small rip. “You can tell by the last three digits, six for foreign and sixteen for prisoner. My sister works in T&I, you know, Katsuki?”

“‘Works,’ yeah, sure, if you can call running errands and grabbing tea for Suzuki real work,” the woman scoffed and tucked Kakashi closer, arms securing his upper body in place while she ignored his uncoordinated kicks. “Whoever’s on guard duty over there shouldn’t be too far now, but I say we take him back ourselves and bully a promotion out of Suzuki, or at least some kind of recommendation.”

“Hah, bully Suzuki? Funny. She’ll make you cry for even trying,” the one with the sister laughed without humour. “Let me do the talking and we’ll see about that recommendation, maybe.”

Bickering ensued as the three made their way in the opposite direction of the mountains. Slowly but surely, his vision was returning, and he was thankful for the misty low light and heavy shadows. The occasional blinks of moody sunlight flickering through the leaves hurt his eyes.

With the return of his eyesight, his rational thinking came back too. He forced his body limp and one of the men, the man who identified him by the tag on his gown, mocked his apparent lack of resolve. All the better for Kakashi, he worked best when underestimated to the point that his in-village persona hinged upon it.

He gathered himself. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

In a single fluid motion, he kicked back between the woman’s legs, smacking his heel precisely where he knew it would hurt most, and threw his hands down in tandem with her body as she buckled forwards. Yanking with both the force of his entire body and their combined momentum, his hands clasped the underside of her knees and she fell backwards. Kicking off her thighs, he launched himself away from them before her companions had the chance to react.

Pressing circumstances overruling his need to conserve chakra, he leapt from tree to tree, mentally plotting a new route while wind whipped his hair back and crinkled his distressed gown. Pursuers would be upon him soon, both those who knew who he was and why he was running as well as opportunity hunters who would see a runaway and pounce just like those three who had been drawn by the burst beacon.

Throwing his senses out wide, he counted a number of tracking signatures in most directions, slowly hounding him in whether they intended to or not. There was a recognisable lack of coordination that differentiated the chasers from a synchronized squad but it didn’t particularly matter that they weren’t communicating if they were achieving the same goal by happenstance.

He took a sharp turn as a water whip struck just ahead of him, the slight glint of tempered steel revealing the chakra wire encased inside.

Rolling onto the ground, he launched himself back up to the branches not a moment too soon as the puddles he splashed through rose in a great wave to follow him, crashing down just half a metre from his landing branch. Shuriken flew by his cheek as he dipped to the side and then ducked as they flung back towards him, a thin line of water yo-yo'ing the sharp metal.

Six chakra signatures were surging upon his location and the ambience of woodland creatures transformed into a cacophony of squawking birds as they flew away from the jets and waves of water crashing down onto each branch Kakashi jumped from, washing the mud from his toes and fingertips.

Stuck on the defensive, he needed to flip the bets in his favour. A spectator sports for bored and spiteful Gods, he imagined disjointedly as he curled his spine around the flight path of three kunai.

But if there was one thing Kakashi knew about water, it was that it was an excellent conductor.

Landing on a conjunction between five cobbled roads, his feet and bracing hands dashing water up high with the impact, he let all six shinobi burst from the trees and attack. As if in slow motion, he watched as the first two threw shuriken and kunai within milliseconds of each other. There wasn’t much he could do about them, but the rest acted exactly as he had been counting on them to.

Thank you, Sasuke, he thought, bitter sweet, for bastardising my signature technique.

Two water waves on his left and right, the spray already tickling his skin.

Monkey.

A jet stream at eight o’clock, a whip forty-seven degrees to the left of it.

Ox.

Less than a second until impact.

Lightning Release: Chidori Current.

Brilliant white light lanced from his hands where they struck the ground, the rest of his body lifting with the force of the strike. Grinning, he ignored the slice of shuriken across his back and the point of a kunai embedding itself in his calf. Lightning took to the chakra infused water milliseconds from submerging him like fire to a straw house.

Screams alighted around him as the shinobi lost control of the jutsu and water struck the kunai and shuriken throwers in the backlash, flinging all six backwards as their muscles contracted in a desperate bid to release them from the electricity’s hold.

Thud, thud. Thud, thud, thud.

Thud.

Rain fell as the jutsu dispersed and Kakashi’s airborne body followed suit, only the barest tips of his fingers had kept him tethered to the ground. Silence, except for the pitter-patter of water and trickling streams, reigned in the aftermath.

Jarring his bones, his knees made contact with the cobble first and he slumped onto the ground, spent.

Shit.

He’d forgotten. Or perhaps he had known the whole time, backed into a corner and forced to resort to desperate measures. Had he not taken out the six of them, he would have been captured, not to mention heavily injured by the techniques they were using.

Not that it mattered. Tendrils of darkness slinked at the edges of his vision and all he could do was reach a single arm forwards in a feeble attempt to drag himself along the cobble, only to lose consciousness.

A pair of sandals and trailing ninja wire were the last things he saw before he went under.

Chapter Text

“... you implying that this pre-academy child incapacitated six adult shinobi, three of which specifically assigned to detain escapees, without the use of a kekkei genkai?”

“Ah, post-academy, um, he’s six years old.”

“Six? That’s not post-academy age.”

“Well, um, I’m not sure how the, ah, Leaf, do things, but he is a chuunin according to both our intel and the, um, prisoner’s confession.”

Silence.

“Tell me again that he has no kekkei genkai.”

“... he has no kekkei genkai.”

WHACK.

Kakashi’s eyes snapped open briefly, long enough to account for the bare basics of his surroundings before he returned to pseudo-sleep. Two figures, one cowering in front of the other. Four walls, close, nigh claustrophobic, probably would have been unsettling if he was both his full size and had a proximity derived fear.

His sense of touch told him he wasn’t quite bound but layered with strong yet papery restraints. Heavier bindings encased his ankles and wrists. Subtle flexing of his limbs alerted him to a set of chains attached to each, almost taut judging by the restriction and lack of jangling. His gown had been replaced, a new one set over the bindings that wound across his body.

He couldn’t feel his chakra. At all.

Logically, he knew it must be there since he was alive, but his lungs didn’t care much for the intricacies of facts and logic and urged him to breath sharper, faster. He didn’t. He maintained his even breaths by sheer force of will.

“I should take you directly to Suzuki myself, those were my shinobi he fried, I will not have anyone telling me some six-year-old nobody of unremarkable lineage took out shinobi that I trained,” the strong figure said, a man with a mid-timbre voice growing darker with each word. “Go get Tooru, this was his problem from the very beginning.”

“R-right, yes sir!” The cowering girl scrambled, her hospital slips audibly scuffing the ground in her hurry to leave.

Purposefully loud, the man’s sandals slapped against the ground thrice as he covered the short distance between himself and Kakashi’s prone form. Intimidation of the likes the man used against the girl wouldn’t work on Kakashi, ANBU were trained to resist interrogation (and, most importantly, kill themselves if the training failed them).

Nothing useful had come from his single session with the man he had first woken up to, potentially named Tooru considering the context of the overheard conversation, partly due to his experience and partly because he had no information they would believe. Kirigakure was not known for their mind techniques like Konoha and their Yamanaka were, for that he was thankful.

He was not thankful for much else.

“Time to wake up.” A solid kick to his ribs had him spluttering on reflex, unable to stop himself from ejecting the contents of his lungs. Helpless in his bindings, he watched as the man lifted him by his gown’s neckline to the extent the chains would allow. Dark spikey hair framed a cruel face unmarked by scars yet Kakashi instinctively knew he wasn’t bare from lack of exposure to combat. The man was dangerous, and he knew it.

Kakashi had never liked those types, shinobi who were far from mediocre but had little to their name other than their rank and strutted the fact and threw it around just to feel the satisfaction of holding power over others. That, and the allure of their stories that drew in fanciful civilian ladies. Nevermind there were a whole slew of highly specialised and trained ninja who could take them out in the blink of an eye, they didn’t care. They convinced themselves of a reality in which those better than them didn’t exist.

Right now, Kakashi’s personal distaste didn’t matter. Right now, a genin with only a basic grasp of a single set of academy kata and three kunai to hand could hold the same power over him. The theatrics only served to rub salt in the wound.

“I don’t care what the researchers say,” the man leant in close, “there’s not a chance in hell,” breath fanning across his face, salt, fish, and mango, “you managed to take out my shinobi,” noses centimetres apart, “without some kind of bloodline- FUCK!”

Iron slathered his tongue, thick and beginning to gag him but Kakashi sank his teeth in further, crunching through cartilage and bone. Vice-like, his jaw locked while the shinobi screamed, hands desperately pushing against his shoulder and exacerbating the damage.

Amidst the rush of blood and yelling, he almost missed the following thud and connected the abstract sound to the opening of a door after the fact when a second pair of hands got involved in the restraining. Slipping behind his neck, fingers calm but deliberate in their search, a direct contrast to the jostling hands on his chest and shoulders, until they found what they were searching for and sparked a little chakra.

Like a flipped switch, Kakashi went limp. His mind sent signals to his limbs but they were deaf to the messages. His jaw, locked as it was, had to be pried from the man’s face, baby fangs slipping out of flesh and bone with sick squelching pops. He caught a glimpse of a bloodied face, say bye, bye to the ladies, before his head hung with no support.

“He- he- what the fuck kind of- he bit me like a fucking, a fucking, dog,” disjointed footsteps took the man’s voice further away from Kakashi.

“Jiro, take Hikaru to medical,” the familiar voice of Tooru belonged to the pair of hands that had paralysed Kakashi.

“Yessir,” Jiro said. Kakashi hadn’t noticed the fourth member in the room, disorientated by the chaos. Although it was of little consequence, Jiro left and took the whimpering Hikaru with him and, once again, Kakashi was left with a single interrogator. A semi-competent one, this time.

Tooru did not engage with him. He chose to potter about the small room, arranging the only chair according to some inane personal preference, from what Kakashi could hear. His view of a very specific patch of ground below wasn’t lucrative in the intel department.

Blood splattered the concrete now, a puddle slowly growing with each rhythmic droplet from Kakashi’s face, dribbling from his slack mouth. Angled oddly by his restraints, he couldn’t see his gown but he could feel how the front of it was soaked.

The last time Kakashi had seen this man, he had been barely concealing anger. What had happened since then?

Tooru huffed, apparently done with his arrangements, and his feet came into view. If he held any qualms about the blood he was standing in, Kakashi wouldn’t be able to tell from his feet, nor his hands as they released the paralysis seal with the same calm temperament he expressed when detaching Kakashi’s teeth from another man’s face.

A small spike of chakra and Kakashi had control of his limbs again. Just to be contrary, he snapped at Tooru’s retreating hands, missing, as he had expected, but the sentiment was clear.

Generally, Kakashi didn’t bite people. The principle stemmed from two main ideas; one, it wasn’t an effective combat strategy, he didn’t want his throat and face anywhere within an opponent’s range of attack, and, two, he usually wore a mask.

However, Kakashi was a ninja of adaptability and opportunity. When the normal methods of combat were taken away, the abnormal stepped into place.

Tooru tutted, “bad boy.”

Mobility regained, Kakashi looked up to match his eyes and found Tooru’s expression to be mildly chastising as if he hadn’t just sent one of his colleagues to medical. Bad boy, Kakashi, good boys don’t permanently disfigure people. Hah. What the hell.

He winced as Tooru sat down on the chair and it screeched slightly against the floor. Crossing his arms, he looked at Kakashi with the air of an authority figure more akin to a disapproving teacher than a hard-boiled interrogator.

“My neighbour has three dogs and a puppy,” Tooru said conversationally, “I’ll have to ask her what she does when her puppy tantrums.”

Pointedly, Kakashi did not say I’m not a dog because he was an ANBU trained shinobi who knew how to conduct himself professionally during an interrogation. Weak attempts at dehumanisation and whatever other bizarre tactics this man employed wouldn’t get through to him.

Last time, he had the advantage of Kakashi’s tumultuous mental state. Now, Kakashi had adjusted to his situation. He may not have all of the facts, he may still be holding out on confirming anything until he got a hold of evidence, but he knew the layout of his circumstances and the information pertinent to his current reality. Anything that came after escape, came after.

“I did a little research of my own, although we don’t have much intelligence on the Hatake clan. Information on the White Fang? Sure, what village doesn’t? But the clan itself? Fire Country folk tales, mostly. Hearsay. A wild clan with ties to the Inuzuka. Not necessarily friendly ties, but ties. A common ancestor, maybe. I’d have to ask around country inns if I wanted to know more, which I’m not going to do,” Tooru shrugged as if to say ‘what can you do?’

There was a pause inviting Kakashi to speak, an invitation he declined. It grated on him to admit it but he probably knew as much as Tooru did about his own clan. Dad died when Kakashi was eight and he’d avoided the empty clan manor since. Another tick on the list of things he’d lost along with his dad on that terrible night.

A terrible night he may or may not have prevented.

“What I do know is what the researchers have come up with. You haven’t got a kekkei genkai.” He leant forward, elbow on his knee, chin in his palm. “And that’s a problem.

“I’m going to have a very hard time justifying an overruling of your execution order to my boss and the Mizukage. You’ve killed our shinobi, gravely injured more, mauled the face of your interim supervisor, and proven yourself to be a security risk - nevermind that I’ve ensured you won't escape again, it hasn’t been proven that you can’t, even if I know it’s impossible. If you had a kekkei genkai, the plan I have devised and will propose would be approved much more easily. So we’re going to have to work with what we do have.”

Easily avoiding the range of Kakashi’s mouth, Tooru ruffled his hair so it fell across his eyes. Without the means to use his hands, Kakashi was forced to shake his head in hopes of getting the silver strands to fall back into place. Multiple times. His hair never cooperated with him.

“I’ll be back soon,” Tooru waved and opened the door, “somebody will come by with food in good time and a couple of somebodys will show you the bathroom.”

The door closed and Tooru left.

Testing the strength of his restraints, Kakashi had to admit he didn’t know how to free himself. He was covered in seals, barrier seals, for the most part, he guessed as well as the one that restricted his movement and the complete chakra suppression. Without his chakra, he couldn’t identify the seals, let alone override them.

He was stuck unless he came up with more options.

They were too prepared.

No less than four shinobi arrived when they took him out of the cell to relieve himself. The seals stayed on, as did the shackles, they just disconnected them from where they were attached to the wall. His short carry-walk had allowed him to see the seals on the outside as well, more complicated than before. Not that he wouldn’t be able to get around them, but he couldn’t without his chakra and he couldn’t access his chakra if he couldn’t investigate the seals on his body with his hands. From there he could substitute blood for ink and make rudimentary alterations and hope for the best, but it was something at the very least.

Tooru knew what he was doing. He was also a liar.

He wasn’t back soon. By the count of his internal clock, a whole day had passed before he returned. ‘Soon’ varied in definition, but the implication had been ‘same day’ in Kakashi’s mind in that particular context. If he wasn’t mistaken, Tooru was on a time limit, Kakashi’s continued life balanced on Tooru’s ability to sway the opinions of both Suzuki, who he presumed was the head of T&I, and the Mizukage. The Bloody Mist’s Mizukage, not Terumi Mei. The one under the influence of Madara and subsequently Tobi in the future.

Although, would Tobi ever come into fruition? Without Kakashi, team Minato’s roster will change, or it would if Kakashi didn’t get the hell out of Kirigakure before he turned nine years old. Which he would.

“You’ll be glad to know I talked to my neighbour,” Tooru said as he closed the door behind him, clicking shut with a decisive thud. “I told her I got a new puppy,” in one hand he had a spray bottle and the other he couldn't see as he was holding it faux casually behind his back. “I said it was misbehaving, nearly bit my friend’s nose clean off,” he sat down on the lone chair, dragging it forwards a few inches with his feet. “She didn’t believe me, of course, but the only lie was that the man had been my friend.”

Kakashi continued to play mute, face blank, and he thought longingly of his mask. He had adjusted to the disappearance of its physical presence but there was a comfort to be had in the knowledge that even if his mouth twitched or his jaw tightened, it would have been hidden.

“You see, we have a small problem. If you’re going to be an asset to the village, I can’t keep you tied up like this. I bet it hurts, doesn’t it? I bet your muscles are really aching. You’re a skilled ninja despite your age and the longer you are out of action, the more useless you will become. Your muscles will atrophy and you’ll continue to drain our resources. But if I just let you loose, you’ll escape, or at least try to, anyway, and I’ll have no hope in rescinding that execution order. Do you see what I’m getting at here, buddy?”

Yes, it was to Kakashi’s benefit if he cooperated. That didn’t mean he had to lie down and roll over, though. He didn’t respond.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I am using a lot of big words and you’re only small,” he chuckled and for a dreadful moment, Kakashi thought he was going to ruffle his hair again. Thankfully, he didn’t, he looked down at him with a condescending smile that somehow communicated the same message as a hair ruffle would have. “Let’s see, if you don’t be a good boy and do as you’re told, you will die. That better?”

Reluctantly, he nodded.

Underestimation was not something Kakashi was able to utilise outside of the village unless in disguise. He was too well known. He lacked that notoriety now but he’d already displayed his ability to kill shinobi twice his size. Tooru should not be underestimating him.

Kakashi wasn’t completely convinced he was, but he would play into the role of a child if it was something he could convince him of. Children were vulnerable in more ways than one. Even if an actual child was as deadly as Kakashi, their minds and world views were far from developed. Tooru probably imagined he could take advantage of that. He was wrong. But he didn’t have to know he was wrong.

“Good boy,” and there was the hair ruffle. Utilising his new strategy, he allowed himself to irritatedly shake his head and snapped at out of reach hands when Tooru brushed it aside for him. “Bad boy,” he admonished, wagging a finger in the general direction of his face.

Cold forced his eyes shut and he reared his head back, Tooru had sprayed him.

What did he expect to achieve with that? It was just water to the face, harsh water, certainly unpleasant, but it was easily endured.

“My neighbour gave me this nice little doggy collar for you, wasn’t that nice of her?” He revealed his hidden hand which did, dishearteningly, hold a dog collar. Unnecessarily clunky, but unmistakably something that wouldn’t be too remiss around a canine’s throat.

Personally, Kakashi didn’t use dog collars for his ninken, there wasn’t any real point to it. They were loyal, knew how to govern themselves and had cognizance on par with humans. He didn’t need something to attach a lead nor did he need further identification when his capes and forehead protectors did the job just as well, if not better.

Kakashi almost got his teeth around Tooru’s thumb for a well-deserved crunch when he fixed the collar around his neck, almost. What he got in return was another spritz. Hardly a deterrent.

The collar was heavy and nearly clung to his skin with how tight it was, he struggled to tame the urge to swallow around it.

“Okay, I’m going to untie you now, be a good boy and do as I say, okay?” Tooru said and Kakashi nearly short-circuited. Was the man insane? Certifiably, he gathered that much already, but this was something else.

Yet the chains went slack and the form-fitting shackles on his wrists and ankles uncurled. This wasn’t right. Captors were not supposed to do this. Not without any leverage. Sure, if Kakashi cooperated, he’d avoid state-sanctioned murder, but he’d avoid that all the same if he escaped and he’d be out of their clutches.

He didn’t like this. Unknowns were bad, ANBU had taught him that lesson, thoroughly. Faulty information and unexpected changes in high-pressure situations often meant unnecessary deaths and, when the circumstances were particularly dire, failed missions. That wasn’t to say everything went according to plan on a good day. There was such a thing as a plan going too well, too good to be true. Assuming that Tooru thought Kakashi would cooperate easy as anything reeked of false promise.

“This way,” Tooru turned his back on him and headed for the door, beckoning with his hand, “we’re going for a walk.”

Cautiously, Kakashi stood and took his first wobbly step forwards. Muscles protesting a day of almost complete inaction, but he powered forward, doing his best to effect that he was in his physical prime. Now he was behind Tooru, the disparity in height was all the more obvious. He reached Tooru’s hip.

Pausing at the threshold of the room, he analysed Tooru for anything outside of what he mentally catalogued as ordinary. He couldn’t find anything. It appeared as though Tooru genuinely was going to allow Kakashi to follow him unaided.

“Come along now, I don’t want to have to repeat myself,” he waved his spray bottle menacingly, as though it held any power of him.

Dubious, Kakashi followed, walking slower than he had to under the pretence of disused muscles. It wasn’t an entirely false pretence, his limbs were screaming at him but Kakashi had long since learned to ignore the cries of his body, almost to the point of detriment at times. Tooru did not comment if he noticed, adjusting his pace so that he didn’t lose Kakashi around any corners.

He didn’t like this at all.

Trailing a limp hand along the all, he counted the doors they walked past. Tooru didn’t turn to look at him but Kakashi maintained a weak facade all the while, just in case, and pretended it really was deception. Pretended his jaw didn’t ache from the attack, pretended his body didn’t creak like a rusted machine, pretended his numbness to chakra wasn’t a gaping vulnerability.

… Four… Five… Left turn… One… Two…

He knew this place. One more turn and he’d see the vent, hopefully still busted- yes, there it was! Seven more paces and he could jump. Without chakra, but he could do it given the momentum.

Pausing, he tested his boundaries. Tooru continued walking onwards, unawares. Shifting his weight and bending one leg behind, he drew back and ran.

Bare feet pounding with each leaping step, he bound forward until he was a metre from the open vent, both feet left the ground, his arms reached heavenward, he-

“Ngh-“ His body seized, hands frozen mere centimetres from grasping the slats. His bones vibrated, muscles locked tight. There was a loss between jumping and finding himself on the floor, his coccyx a beacon of impact. The lights were out, his vision tunnelling. Confused, he lay on the ground unmoving.

A face blotted out the spotlight of his focus, a sick grin and unknowns eyes staring down at him. “Up,” he understood the word a couple of seconds after it left the grinning mouth and lost his sight again as he was tugged upright by the collar.

Sucking air through his teeth, his scrabbled at the collar as it lit up his neck in a band of pain, sensitive skin set on fire. His toes barely brush the ground and he stilled to avoid aggravating the pain further.

His efforts were for nought, Tooru shook him and moisture sprang into Kakashi’s eyes and static took hold of him.

“... boy, you will be shocked, be a good boy, and you won’t get shocked, understood?” Tooru’s voice faded in, from inaudible to incredibly loud by his ear despite having the timbre of a whisper.

When he didn’t immediately respond, he was shaken again until he jerkily nodded over and over again. Placed back onto shaky legs, Tooru allowed him to gather his bearings and shake out the aftershock. The pain of it was gone soon enough, but the sudden invasive feeling of it coursing through his body didn’t leave and his muscles ached.

At least now he knew Tooru’s angle.

As someone who had a lightning affinity, he’d assumed he’d had some kind of resistance, or maybe a way of channelling it even as foreign energy. But the electricity was so quick in its arrival, short-circuiting him in less than a second. There was nothing he could do but perhaps grow used to it. He almost shivered at the thought.

“Come along now, we don’t want to keep the medic-nin waiting.”

Chapter Text

There were four walls. A ceiling. A floor.

Itches. Itches. Itches. It won’t stop itching. Scratch it don’t scratch it. Bad. The itch will be nothing if scratch. But. Itches. Itches so bad.

His breath stuttered in and out, but he was breathing and he could count each inhale and exhale.

“He seems… on edge.”

Look. Throne. Waves. Not real waves, decorative waves. Artisan. Flows like real water. Real water in the, in the moat surrounding the room. Fish swimming. Think of the fish. Not the itch itch itch.

“Oh,” chuckle, chuckle, “well, we haven’t completely broken him in yet.”

Understatement. Hah. Haha… ha. Itches. Still itches.

There was a civilian method of falling to sleep by conjuring the mental image of sheep jumping over fences and counting each of them until the boredom sent you under. Kakashi had always found it to be a silly thought, bone-deep exhaustion was the only true cure for insomnia. That and medication.

“It’s the result of an experimental project from the poisons department that was not intended for him, but we found the effects were intriguing and could easily be adapted, given time and resources, to break down unique shinobi to their baser instincts.”

Look. Look. Stop wandering eyes and thoughts. Look at him. Speak. Come on. It’s important. It’s the mission. The now mission. New mission.

“And what prompted you to test this on him?”

He, the leader. It’s important, bigger than the itch. But this itch is so big, so consuming, so distracting.

“It’s a little amusing actually - we ran out of regular sedative and his body is too small to handle the strong stuff.”

Kakashi didn’t want any medication, right now. Konoha’s blend always inhibited his ability in the hours post-wake-up which was detrimental to his lifestyle. He needed to always be ready, always available. Not that it mattered, he didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to count, to distract, to numb himself with the minutiae and mundanity of things like counting imaginary sheep.

“You didn’t request this audience to showcase a poison, get on with it already, show me his bloodline!”

Fingers. On his face. In his- on his lips, opening jaw. Snap snap- NO. You don’t want, you don’t want that.

“... Sharp teeth? Sharp Teeth! Is that all?! You’re wasting my precious resources on SHARP TEETH?! WE HAVE SHARP TEETH BY THE DOZEN HERE!”

If he slept, then his thoughts would run unchecked and morph in the blender of his subconscious, spitting out nightmarish imagery too close to reality for comfort. But his waking mind worked hard to achieve a similar result and he had to keep it strictly in line. Or off the line, rather, by focusing all of his energy on something simple and far removed from everything else.

“Apologies for misleading you, that was not my intention. This is simply the only current physical evidence of his bloodline.”

Hands gone. Good. Itch itch.

“Oh? Do continue.”

Talk about a mood swing. Hah. Oh no- why is there hand in hair? Don’t like that. Pat pat. Ugh.

“This boy is the youngest of the last two living Hatake, the fearsome clan of wolves who share their biology with deadly predators. The blood has since diluted and the clan has grown tame, but our researchers are on the cusp of reviving those dormant genes.”

Tenzou made a game of it, once. A rebrand of the already boring game of “eye-spy” in which the objective was to pick out the least interesting detail in the area and describe it intensively. It was funny, at first, but soon lost its novelty and, in turn, achieved its goal.

“This already deadly child will become the most efficient fatal tool in our arsenal, if only you will give my project the go-ahead, Mizukage-sama.”

But no matter how he tried to bore himself, reality snook into the cracks in his psyche and slowly reeled him back in. He didn’t want the cold stone four walls, floor and ceiling. The damp ends of his hair. His maskless face. The dull ache in his bones. But it was not often that he got what he wanted.

He was certain the after-effects of the poison Tooru’s researchers had administered on him were still clouding his mind somewhat. He never fell prey to such vivid recollections when awake, not without a genjustu in the mix at the very least.

Looking at the few pros in a situation swamped by cons, he could acknowledge that he was alive thanks to Tooru’s manipulations and his apparent charisma in the eyes of the unhinged Mizukage, but he could not appreciate it in the moment. Kakashi did not have the capacity to become the most deadly of the Mizukage’s ranks, but Tooru’s viciously silver tongue had convinced the puppet Kage of something to that effect.

There were other shinobi, such as the puppeteer, who would unfailingly outplay him every single time.

As for the genetic tinkering, it was from the same grain - it was, to put it simply, complete bullshit. Another tale weaved by Tooru’s lying tongue. Granted, Kakashi didn’t know everything about his clan's history, but he would know if he had some kind of latent potential to become even more useful to the Leaf and perhaps tip the war in their favour. He would have made use of it by now.

He was good at that, making use of himself. His current use was to prevent the war by utilising his unique advantage of foresight. Still, he held out for the possibility that this was all a very convincing jutsu - perhaps a more twisted application of the infinite Tsukuyomi than advertised - but he was never so remiss to wilfully ignore all other angles.

This could well be time travel.

And, even outside of his time, he would serve the leaf to his very last second.

His eyelids drooped, his every other second spent plying them open, the seconds left in between dropping them. Open or closed, he couldn’t see either way, but he needed to remain awake.

Cold seeped through the points of contact his body made with the floor of his cell. If he twitched, he could rattle the chains where they lay unused behind him. His position was incredibly uncomfortable, one arm bent underneath his stomach, the other above his head and losing feeling.

At some point, he had acquired a muzzle, hazy memories of snapping teeth flickered to mind, and the metal bit into his cheek. The collar was at an angle too, the buckle and battery digging into stinging wounds that they wouldn’t leave alone long enough to heal. A reminder of what happened when he was awake or even half asleep.

He kept… getting things wrong. Misunderstanding what was demanded of him. Outright attacking them, too, but only when he was at his most delirious. It was against his prerogative to deny at least some semblance of cooperation at this point, but he just - not all of it made sense, not through the haze. And, sometimes, it was hard to differentiate the shock of cold water from the lower levels of electricity.

But he couldn’t will his body to move with the dreaded promise of sleep holding him down.

Groaning, he twitched some more. There were few ways he could fight the siren song of sleep, and he was taking advantage of all of them like a good shinobi. Voice, eyes, twitching. He refused to lose.

Losing this fight meant more time lost not knowing where he had been or what had happened to him. It meant waking up confused strapped to a gurney, or finding bites of consciousness as he was dragged down halls, or the pain of a bad neck and strained limbs sinking into his dreams alongside the dull pang of everything else.

It meant a complete information blackout. Intel was important to any shinobi on a mission, any shinobi who wanted to survive. Better to live through vivid horrors rather than experience them unwittingly and have them bite you on the ass later.

But he just… couldn’t… keep his damn… eyes… o...

Something had shifted. Multiple somethings had shifted. There was a tangible difference in the quality of his perception, but he couldn’t pin it down.

Restrained once more, he couldn’t test his limbs but they didn’t carry the weight he’d grown accustomed to in the past however long. During the period in which he hadn’t been entirely lucid or around in general, the pervasive feeling of sap for blood and lead for muscles had been a constant he could rely on. An indicator of his vulnerability.

An absent indicator.

Several seals fizzled into inactivity and the thick iron door trudged open, announcing the arrival of Tooru. Clasped behind his back, his hands were hiding something. Kakashi knew what to look for. It wouldn’t be the spray, a half-full bottle was ready for the taking a few centimetres outside of Kakashi’s reach. Then, what could it be? An even more malicious collar? Some other disciplinary device?

He didn’t let himself extrapolate any further, he was only going to work himself up. He’d know the answer eventually. From his contrasting manners in the few times Kakashi could remember their encounters in full, he profiled Tooru as a man of moderate temperance until his personal pleasures and grievances took the forefront, and his eyes were sparkling.

True to expectation, he crouched next to the spray bottle and revealed his hands. Two… rubber balls? Kakashi thought they were rubber balls, but he couldn’t gauge the finer details of the texture like he usually could. The form was clear, the colour blue as plain as a midwinter sky, but his vision was a little fuzzy. The lines on Tooru’s palms seemed less defined as well. If he squinted, it got moderately better, yet his vision was still lacking.

Perhaps he wasn’t as far out of the woods as he suspected if his senses were still muddled.

“What colour is this one?” Tooru asked, raising one palm close enough so Kakashi would have been able to snap at him if it weren’t for the muzzle. His head snapped up to his face at the sound of his voice, before he snapped back to the ball and reared back until his neck ached at the restraints. If his hands were free, he could swipe away whatever dust or moisture or sleep was turning the hand and ball into bland forms of amalgamated colour.

“Blue.” At least he could get that right, it was dull and murky but definitely blue. Knowing there was nothing he could do to compensate for his bleary eyes, he let his neck relax.

“Good boy,” Tooru said and Kakashi suppressed a flinch at the hair ruffle. “And this one?” Tooru raised the other palm and Kakashi raised a brow. What was Tooru’s angle? There wasn’t a point to the question as far as Kakashi could see, unless it was a trick? Was he missing something?

“Blue,” Kakashi said, matter-of-factly, and the cold spray was an honest surprise. Phantom pains ghosted along his neck.

“Wrong,” Tooru set down the bottle with a muted glass clink and leant back, palms caging the rubber balls against the floor. “It’s purple.”

What.

There was no discernible difference between the two. Slowly, he peeled his gaze from the two balls and gave Tooru a once over. With the sameness of the cell and general desaturation of everything he saw within T&I, he hadn’t immediately noticed how Tooru looked more washed out than usual.

Blinking furiously, water dripped from his brow into his eyes but it wouldn’t shift the grey film over his view. Surely, the already bland interior of T&I made the problem look much worse than it seemed, the dense greenery outside would penetrate the veneer. After he escaped, he could lay his eyes on the vibrancy of the wild. He would have to suck it up in the meantime.

“I’ll admit, this is more of a drawback than an enhancement, which was not the goal of our research,” Tooru’s voice broke through his resolutions, “although, it’s not all bad. Dogs evolved to compensate for their less than stellar eyesight by relying on their other senses and, besides, your peripheral vision should have improved and watch-”

He blinked as the room became dimmer and eyed Tooru’s neutral face warily.

“I can hardly see right now, especially since I haven’t allowed myself the time to adjust to the darkness, but I’m betting that isn’t the case for you.”

Ah.

Nearsightedness. Night vision. Limited colours. Increased peripheral. Those sounded like traits Pakkun modestly boasted about during tracking missions. Fucking hell.

This, this shouldn’t have been possible. Hatake weren’t- okay, there were a lot of folk tales but they were just that, tales. With nothing substantial behind them. Maybe his Dad, his dad would have told him. Should have. If he even knew himself.

Looking back… did Dad tell him anything about the clan? He did, didn’t he? Kakashi just couldn’t remember because it had been so long and he’d buried all memories of his childhood both unintentionally and intentionally.

Did he use the old ‘I’ll tell you when you’re older’ trick? Did Kakashi ever ask anything to warrant that? Was his own lack of curiosity, if he had or hadn’t had any at the time, the reason behind the absence of his clan knowledge?

There had to be something, but nothing was coming to him.

“We’ll do some proper tests tomorrow, for both your eyes and the other recent additions. Some of your features won’t be apparent yet, you’ll grow into them given time. But clearly some changes have set in already,” Tooru announced, ruffling his hair while Kakashi remained despondent, and left the room, followed by a dull thud from the door.

Kakashi’s fingers ached, raring to ply muscle from Tooru’s neck. A bone-deep sensation, a conduit for his repressed rage. Except, it wasn’t caustic anger running through his veins but fear, cold and chilling and icing his blood.

The ache wasn’t brought about by emotion.

Trapped by several clunky metal rings, his arms lay prone stretched out on the examination table while the rest of him lay slumped on the floor. Blood wept from his fingertips, pooling onto the glossy surface.

Overnight, the ache had transformed into an intense agony centralised at ten small points that raked against his nerve endings and shot down his arms.

“You can’t stop now, if you stop, you will only prolong the pain,” the researcher examining his wretched hands said faux soothingly. Briefly, he imagined a mockingly kind face upon the man although he could not see him, eyes scrunched up as he panted against the table leg. “Keep pushing.”

“AAGH!” A scream tore from his throat, echoing in the sterile lab and ringing in his ears. Static enveloped all senses, numbed every nerve except for those in his fingers as something finally broke through skin. Pressure built behind his nails and he was sure they were about to pop off but they clung to his cuticles for dear life.

Somewhere between when his cries became ragged breaths and his eyes flipped sightlessly open, he hit a plateau and the worst of it was over. Hearing returned to him, although without his comprehension, and he listened to the jumbled noise of the researcher for some time before he understood he was being spoken to.

“-iant, this is spectacular! I’ve never seen anything like it before, although my colleagues tell me it is somewhat similar to the Kaguya clan’s bloodline if you choose to look through such a lens. The worst of it is over now, but those nails…”

Finally, Kakashi was allowed his respite when the researcher plucked the crooked remains of his fingernails from their beds and he passed out.

Tooth… Toothache.

Roused from his sleep, hands still throbbing, world still grey, he couldn’t stop the whine that escaped him when he identified the source of his rude awakening. Toothache.

No, no, no, no, no…

“Please let it be over,” he whispered to no one, for the Gods clearly did not hold him in their favour. “I don’t think there’s much else I can take,” his tongue caught against his teeth, brand new and aching and too big, too clumsy.

He had a lisp now, he noted distantly.

Running along groves of his own making, his claws dug deeper into the tile of the floor. They hadn’t bothered to hang him up this time, his regular chains lay limp next to him. But his arms were cuffed, as were his legs.

There had to be a point where there could be no more. The breaking point, perhaps.

Chapter Text

Quaking, the woman behind the counter held a drink tray in place of a shield in front of her, eyes just barely peeking over the rim. Her knuckles were white as bone, skin pulled taught, tight like the lines around her terrified eyes.

When he stepped into the warm light of the humble candle-lit inn, she reluctantly lowered the tray with a shaky sigh. No longer did the full moon cast his silhouette and shadow into a monstrous figure, instead warm orange softened his tired features and highlighted his worn form. Mindful of the muck on sandals, he scrubbed his soles against the doormat before trudging inside, closing the creaky door behind him.

“Did you find her?” The woman asked as she pushed a generous cup of sake across the counter to him while he heaved himself onto the barstool he righted from the ground. No one else was in the messy establishment, although those who had thrashed the furniture and marked up the walls had only left last night.

He gripped the sake with one hand and traced a kunai strike in the wooden counter with another, steeling himself before he looked in her timidly hopeful eyes. That morning she had reassured him that she knew the odds of finding her daughter alive amongst the carnage were slim, but it seemed the anticipation for his return had fueled her sparks of denial. A weak flame, all too easy to blow into ash.

“I’m sorry Homura-san,” he began and she gasped, choking on an abrupt sob, “I found her body, I wrapped her up and left her nearby, she deserves a proper burial and send-off.” He took a sip of the cold sake and passed it back to Homura, who took it gladly between hiccuping tears.

“I knew, I knew, but, I just,” she blubbered between small gasps and he took his cue to place a strong comforting hand on her shoulder. She shuddered once, twice, and then deflated beneath his grip, and he retreated his hand. “I don’t understand… all of this for one boy?”

“One boy with a kekkei genkai,” he confirmed with a solemn nod and took the sake back when offered, although he did not take a drink.

“But his father had the same ability and they slaughtered him right there and then - why?” She wiped at her eyes but fresh tears sprung forwards, tracking down her cheeks like a well-trodden path. Glints of orange caught in the droplets and flashed as they fell onto the counter.

“His father wouldn’t have cooperated as easily, children are easily led astray,” he looked away as she searched his face, too much knowing had dripped into his words. His fingers twitched for the blood-soaked book drying in his pouch.

“And what of your mission?” Homura asked, her voice muffled slightly as she turned to clean glasses that nearly shone in the low light. If anything, her stained rag was dulling them as she wiped needlessly.

His mind’s eye returned to the bloodbath he’d dug through, sifting through the bodies of farmers armed with pitchforks and scythes as well as unaffiliated shinobi alongside a few low ranked missing-nin he’d accidentally memorised from scouring so many bingo books. It was a fairly typical sample of a village like this, a little alcove between the bigger military forces where outcasts and retirees found a living in the way of odd jobs. Except they were all cold and lifeless and many of the homes he’d passed on his way back to the inn were dark with their doors swaying to the breeze.

Two Kiri-nin bodies had been among them, little genin who probably hadn’t known any better. Fodder, or so the Bloody Mist treated them as. Survival of the fittest.

“It was strange, I won’t go into detail but it looked as though they had an attack animal with them but I couldn’t find any prints.” Throats gouged out by vicious fangs, like that of a wolf cub. Cubs were small and quite adorable yet disarmingly dangerous. But they didn’t cover their tracks. “I couldn’t have missed them, either. I’m a tracker, you see, and I’m very good at my job.”

“I’ve heard of wolf people, but they’re just tales the grandmothers used to spout. Men and women from a long time ago with great white manes and sharp teeth. A little bit like you,” Homura chuckled, sharp and sudden, and wiped the glass with vigour.

“You can go to bed Homura-san, the shinobi got what they came for and, if they do come back, I’ll protect you,” he eyed her tense posture, her hunched shoulders, her shaking hands. “We can sort out everything tomorrow, I can afford to stay another day before I worry anybody. It’ll be easier for you after having slept.”

“And after tomorrow, what will I do then? You’ve seen the houses, all ransacked and bloody. My home is a ghost town, there’s hardly a soul left,” she shook, still turned away from him but the angry tears rolling down her face weren’t hard to imagine from the cracking in her voice.

“Find those souls who are left, live for them,” he said with fragile strength. If this conversation continued much longer, he might just shake apart with her. All of his hastily held together pieces, his stuttering heart, his ragged lungs, his too-dry eyes. He was a man who strode forward by the guide of a weak and puttering light, it would not take much for him to get lost in the darkness like he once did before.

Homura didn’t say anything to that, she took three steadying breaths and brushed past him. Soon after it was just him, a cold cup of sake, and an array of destroyed furniture for company.

This wasn’t his mission but he’d gathered valuable intel regardless, so his Hokage would allow him this disobedience. Sarutobi held an increasingly loose leash on him as time went on, mission after mission taking side trips and alternate routes home after completing his initial objective. They were difficult missions assigned specifically to him because he had little left to lose. He was not ANBU but he was a special case, living through desperation alone. Not for his own life, but another’s.

He’d arrived in the village on one such detour and found it startlingly empty, despite his nose telling him many lived there. When he entered the inn and almost found himself skewered by a thrown chopstick, he learnt of the slaughter from Homura, the innkeeper and half-decent chopstick-thrower.

Somebody blabbed and the life of a four-year-old with a minor regenerative kekkei genkai was in jeopardy.

It didn’t take long for Kiri to swoop in and leave behind a bloody trail. Perhaps if the little village weren’t so close to the Bloody Mist, they could have had the time to employ some outside help or run and hide. But they hadn’t, and now most of them were dead.

He dragged a hand down his tired face and retrieved the little red-stained book from his pouch, pilfered from a c-rank missing nin’s body. The book was Kumo in make, he recognised the colour of the cover and the styling of the writing. A lot of the imagery and details were lost to the blood, a deep gash in the stomach with charred edges had been the cause of that. Had less of the wound been cauterised, the book would have been completely illegible.

He shuffled through the pages, plying them apart and ignoring the sticky texture, recognising many of the visible faces from having done this a hundred times before. Never had he been so obsessive over bingo books before he began his search. Of course, every ninja perused their given bingo books, taking note of the more obvious threats and filing away easy bounties should they encounter any of the faces in the flesh. Little square photos were stolen by intel gatherers and sometimes less savoury shinobi would sell ID photos and such from their own village to the enemy for a small but notable sum.

He turned the page, nearing the end now, and his own grey eyes stared back at him.

Sakumo Hatake, S-Rank Konoha-nin. Dog summons. Lightning Style. Kenjutsu. A neat little summary dappled with red. He looked a lot brighter than he did now, eyes brimming with the joy of parenthood. He remembered when the photo had been taken, Kakashi had just learnt to walk that very morning and the genin assisting the photographer had to hold an unruly Kakashi while the photographer took his photo. It was just a routine update of in-village files. Nothing special. But Kakashi had made it so.

Now his hair was unkempt, approaching that of the mane from Homura’s tale. Bags hung from his eyes, his grey irises devoid of emotion. A frown hid his pointed teeth and there was a permanent trench between his brows. He was twenty-nine but felt it doubly, his bones aching and his heart yearning for rest.

With a sad smile ghosting his lips, he pried apart the next page, and stopped.

A little photo, blurry in detail due to the movement of the subject. A thick chunky collar dwarfed a skinny pale neck, a much larger hand clasped around the back of it. Spiky white hair grew wildly, looking as though it had never felt the touch of a comb. A snarl stretched out across thin lips, blurry fangs glinting in the flash of a camera, crimson staining the tips. More red splattered up from the chin towards two fiery eyes, black like smouldering coals, furious at a glance but it was clear to anyone who took a closer look that the little boy was terrified. And he was little, so small, swallowed by a clunky collar and hung by a single hand.

Yuki. Kiri. The description read. There was no other information.

Sakumo was still. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t move. He didn’t think. He stared blankly at those two little words and the horrifying picture above them.

He left under the cover of night with no thought to the promise he made to Homura.

“I will be blunt with you Sakumo-san. Of all the outcomes we could have expected, this is the worst one.”

Sakumo’s nose twitched, as it had been doing since he barged into the Hokage’s office in the early hours of the morning, bingo book in one hand with his fingers bookmarking the second to last page. The little book lay on the Hokage’s desk now, closed.

Smoke permeated the office thickly, even without the Hokage presently smoking. It appeared he’d had a long night last night and it was clear from his weary figure that he hadn’t slept much before returning to his post. Sakumo greatly appreciated his sensitive senses when out on the field and tracking but it was to his detriment whenever he reported to his Hokage.

“The worst outcome would have been his death. With Kakashi alive, I can bring him home,” Sakumo said resolutely. A fire had burst to life in his stomach that night and he’d raced home blindly, his guiding flame a great roaring furnace. He couldn’t recall his last meal and the manic energy pushing him onwards was halfway derived from sleep deprivation.

His mission had been long and gruelling, his detour harrowing. But his son was alive, and that was more than he could ask for.

“If that is indeed Kakashi Hatake, he has undergone a terrible transformation. Kiri is not known for its kindness. Each village is building its army, as we are on the precipice of war, and Kiri’s methods of doing so are uniquely terrible,” Sarutobi said sternly, looking Sakumo directly in the eyes.

“Kakashi is Konoha shinobi, they’ve stolen my boy- they kidnapped Konoha nin,” Sakumo stressed. His boy, stolen while he was on mission. So close, the tracks had led to the site of the trade, to the bodies of downed Kiri-nin.

“Kakashi Hatake left the village of his own accord. There is no evidence that suggests otherwise. He was sighted headed in the direction of the village gates unaccompanied and while he was not seen leaving, you yourself tracked his scent past the front gates and beyond. His trail led to several dead bodies. While I do not personally believe your son capable of such a feat, no matter how prodigious he may be, all of the intel we have available does not paint him in a positive light. And Kiri, if they do have him, will know this too, because he will have told them.”

Sarutobi finished his grave retelling of events with a deep sigh and fished through his drawers for his pipe. Sakumo tracked his movement as he refilled the tobacco and tapped the excess, lighting a small fire jutsu and pulling a long drag.

“He’s my son,” he said, for there was nothing else to say.

“I know.” Sarutobi closed his eyes and looked aged beyond his years. His own son, Asuma if Sakumo could recall, wasn’t too much older than Kakashi. “I permit you, if you make contact with him, to take him by any means you deem necessary. If you are successful and you return to Konoha, he will be sent to T&I and treated as any other prisoner of war. Because it will be war, soon enough, and the only way you could ever return him to Konoha without consequence would be under wartime rule.”

“... and if I do not return?”

“Konoha will not be the village to place a bounty on your head.”

But he would be declared missing-nin, he heard in the silence.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t there.

Bandages, antiseptic, solider pills, food pills, kunai, shuriken… no red vial. He upended the contents of his pouch on the ground and knocked each item aside with his knuckles as he took stock for the fourth time. Solider pills, kunai, antiseptic, food pills, bandages, shuriken… no red vial. Rain dyed the khaki insides of the pouch brown. The downpour was heavy, there was no use in drawing the water out. It’d only dry out the mud on his emptied gear anyhow.

The rain stopped.

“What’s wrong, Zabuza?”

He looked away from his emptied pouch to see Isshiki standing over his crouched form, blocking the sky. His mouth was a thin line but the mirth in his eyes was as clear as the river of passing.

Maintaining eye contact, Zabuza repacked his pouch and drew to his full height, reaching Isshiki’s chest and reentering the downpour.

“Nothing,” Zabuza said and brushed past Isshiki hard enough to make him stumble. Several squelches sounded as he regained his footing, but no wet thud of a fall. Shame.

Isshiki was one of those types: older chuunin who got their scales all ruffled when met with younger betters. Because Zabuza was better than Isshiki, all of twelve years old and already a chuunin, the same rank as seventeen-year-old Isshiki who’d attended the same exam.

Back then, he’d trembled under Zabuza’s gaze, the tales of his slaughter in the academy following him like a stink. But after making it out under the cautious gaze of the Sunagakure judges without dirtying Zabuza’s already bloody hands, he’d gotten cocky.

Zabuza half expected him to dangle the vial above him, utilising his height advantage only to be socked in the stomach. Perhaps he would have if Zabuza spared him a glance.

Isshiki wasn’t worth his time. He had more important things he needed to pay attention to, like the hushed conversations happening on the floor above his barracks whenever Terumi Mei made an appearance. Like the developments brewing beneath his feet under murky water. The urge to dive headfirst into whatever rumblings were shaking along the foundations of kirigakure was overwhelming at times, but he knew better than to jump into shadowed waters.

If he stuck with the group, Zabuza wouldn’t need the red vial and Isshiki’s efforts would be for nought. Nothing could get in his way with Kubikiribōchō strapped to his back.

He paused when he reached the outskirts of the squad he’d be leaving the village with today. A simple mission, track and kill. A couple of genin had gone rogue under their sensei’s guidance and the Mizukage deemed the lot of them a lost cause. A group of eight shinobi seemed a reaction born of paranoia, only the sensei was of any threat. A rank at best and encumbered by genin with less than seven kills between them. At a push, Zabuza could have completed the mission alone.

However, the headcount wasn’t what gave him pause. He knew the parameters of the mission, he was a good shinobi. It was the identity of the only shinobi he hadn’t recognised on the list that startled him - Yuki.

A ninth shinobi stood at the centre of the gathered squad, T&I-supervisor-turned-deputy Tooru stood with his hands clasped in front of him, his signature serene demeanour as eerily tranquil as rumoured.

Gossip wasn’t Zabuza’s trade, but he kept an ear out, and Tooru was the talk of the village. Under the harsh hand of Suzuki, T&I wasn’t a place known for its flourishing career advancements. But Tooru’s project curried even the Mizukage’s favour, and here it was in the flesh.

A creature sat on hunched legs beside Tooru, its bowed head barely reaching Tooru’s knees. Drenched unkempt hair fell over its face and down its neck, obscuring its face. But as Zabuza edged into the group, its eyes flashed in the darkness and locked onto him. The black eyes were impossible to read, but whatever it held behind those irises looked complicated.

“...the hand sign to activate the collar, but don’t use it unnecessarily. I will change the combination if I find out you’ve been abusing him,” Tooru said gravely and held two fingers skyward in the standard one-handed ram before bending the middle finger. “A light spritz with a gentle jet jutsu will work just as well without frying his nerves.”

“Understood,” the captain said and bowed when Tooru left, leaving the squad to awkwardly gawk at Yuki. Like a half-drowned rat surrounded by sharks.

“That’s like, just a really weird-looking kid, right? Like I’m not seeing things?” One chuunin whispered theatrically to Isshiki who’d caught up just in time to catch Tooru leaving.

“Nah, Hana went on a mission with it last week. The thing may look like a little kid, but don’t let it fool you. It’s a monster,” Isshiki replied with the same ridiculous hushed tone. With the rain pounding as it was, they were almost shouting to be heard despite the pretence.

The duo nearly jumped when Yuki grumbled and, if Zabuza wasn’t mistaken, it sounded like something along the lines of “a monster with ears.” Huh. Yuki could speak. Zabuza wasn’t sure why he’d assumed it couldn’t. Or he. Hell, Yuki did look like a kid. Younger than Zabuza was when he washed the academy red.

“Shinobi, this is a unique opportunity for you all,” the squad captain announced, gathering everyone’s attention as he turned to stand beside Yuki. “You’re looking at T&I’s latest breakthrough, Yuki. It appears Tooru has a sense of humour, naming his infamous pet project after something as pleasant as snow. Never mind its unassuming name, Yuki is proving to be one of the best tools in Kirigakure’s arsenal yet, and today’s mission is a demonstration. Keep your wits about you and observe.”

An hour later, they were on the cusp of the grasslands Kiri’s rocky borders gave way to. Slowed down by genin, the sensei hadn’t managed to trek too far out from Kiri’s domain and from the anxiety rolling off him in waves, he knew he’d made a mistake. They watched him simmer in paranoia as he darted his eyes across the trees, jumping between his sleeping genin and the foliage.

A Hunter-Nin could probably spit a senbon from deep within the forest and put the man down with his genin none the wiser. But this mission wasn’t about quick and dirty mercy, it was a show.

The captain strolled out of the bushes with a casual gait and the sensei jumped to his feet in an instant, standing over his genin and their meagre shelter. Ninja wire glinted in the low light, strung between his hands. Zabuza groaned internally, the water whip users were by far the most annoying, they preferred to fight at a distance and wear their opponents down with petty slaps and scratches.

But the sensei couldn’t make use of his regular tactics, as his retreat would offer up his genin on a garnished platter.

What the sensei witnessed next must have made for quite the picture. The captain whistled and the mouthy shinobi from earlier lit a small fire behind him while another redirected the rain. Zabuza wanted to roll his eyes but stopped when Yuki prowled forwards, his silhouette marking his entrance before his unnatural form parted the leaves.

He didn’t look angry, hungry, or anything intimidating. His gait was awkward, like a fawn a mere week into walking, and each four-legged step was reluctant. Yet the wrongness of his nature drew a deep unease from all who laid their eyes on him.

“What- what is that?” The sensei asked and one of his genin stirred.

The captain shrugged. “One of the reasons you left, if I read the report right. You don’t quite agree with the way we run things around here these days, especially with the advancements we made in T&I.”

“The R&D I was a proud member of before Suzuki got her cold hands on it would never have created whatever that thing is!” The sensei abandoned all pretences of the hushed atmosphere and all three of his genin began to show signs of waking.

Slipping a hand into his pouch, the captain retrieved an item that glinted in the firelight behind him. Humidity grew thick in the air as Zabuza and the squad began to infuse the rain with chakra and the fire grew weak.

“It’s a shame you didn’t stick around and lend us a hand,” the captain said and revealed what he’d taken, a syringe filled with blue liquid poised at Yuki’s collared nape. “But at least now you get front-row tickets to witness the fruits of our investigations.”

Yuki bowed away from the first strike of the needle and the captain scowled while horror mounted on the sensei’s face. Yeah, it was easy enough to read that Yuki wasn’t enjoying any part of this showmanship either, and perhaps it was dawning on the sensei that the thing looked remarkably like a little kid.

A yowl struck the air as the captain dove the needle into Yuki’s bent neck with far greater force than his first strike. A synthetic hiss followed as the liquid glugged down the shaft and Yuki writhed.

One genin rose up, rubbing her eyes before gazing blearily at the convulsing lump a metre before her. “What’s goi-”

Violent red struck the sensei’s figure, blood splatters running up his form. Burning meat stench struck Zabuza’s nose. Aftershocks of lightning crackled in the atmosphere, pinging along suspended raindrops.

With a dull thump, the genin’s decapitated head rolled into the lap of her sleep-addled comrade. His rapidly lucidifying eyes locked onto the perpetrator.

Yuki stood on all fours, stance powerful, panting heavily around the crushed disks of the female genin’s spine.

The third genin screamed and made a run for it as Yuki’s clawed arm swiped at the second, lightning flashing along the strike and nearly cleaving the boy’s chest in half. His broken ribcage collapsed on itself and the boy slumped, lifeless.

The sensei shouted something anguished but Zabuza didn’t pay attention, it didn’t take a seasoned analyst to predict the next chain of events. Instead, he jumped down from his perch as the final boy ran in his direction, landing just behind him.

Hearing the soft splash of the subtle landing, the boy tripped and flipped over to face Zabuza while he crawled backwards frantically. No pleas left his lips, he was too busy hyperventilating to form words.

Weird, how genin older than Zabuza seemed so childish. It always took him aback when he learned the ages of the genin he was forced to work with. If you stayed a genin in the bloody mist for longer than a year, then you would stay a genin for life, Zabuza reckoned. You would maintain the academy mindset too.

The genin’s back collided with a tree and still he scrambled, making no headway, mindless. Zabuza cocked his head as he watched the helpless display. Escape was impossible, but the kid could have tried harder than that. Zabuza couldn’t understand the behaviour.

“You never would have made for a good tool, anyway,” Zabuza said and put the sorry thing out of its misery.

Returning Kubikiribōchō to his back, he retreated to the clearing.

A lesser man might have puked upon setting eyes on the bloody mess Yuki rolled around in. Like a rabid hound, he panted and growled with a bloody femur locked in his jaw, eyes blown wide. Whatever the blue substance was, it hadn’t left his bloodstream. Although it looked more like he was playing in the guts and gore whereas before he’d been delivering fatal blows.

Zabuza joined the rest of the squad in their awkward audience, none too sure what to do with a finished mission and a hopped-up T&I experiment. Until the experiment stopped.

Nose sniffing the air, Yuki’s hair fell away to show one glazed-over eye as it locked onto Zabuza. Nobody moved as the panting grew streamlined and Yuki dropped into a predatory stance, focused on Zabuza.

Red flashed into his mind’s eye. Not blood, but the hypnotic shade of the red vial he’d ‘misplaced’. ‘Scent marker,’ the little label read.

Taking a step back, Zabuza wanted to laugh. Would Isshiki’s plan work?

Yes, he concluded as lightning crackled and Yuki drew back to pounce.

Lightning lanced across Kubikiribōchō, Zabuza slashing her down in a sloppy block just in time for Yuki’s entire body weight to slam into him, throwing them both to the ground. Stunned momentarily, Yuki slumped over the blade.

There was a moment, their panting breaths intermingled, wide eyes staring into one another. Clouds parted across Yuki’s eyes, a temporary clarity, and his lips moved over something familiar.

It was gone. Intelligence fled his eyes. The animal took over.

Claws swiped millimetres from Zabuza’s eyelids. He thrust his sword up to block and threw Yuki to the side. Yuki u-turned immediately, scrabbling for a moment before pouncing again. Mud splashed. Zabuza blocked, prepared now, and parried. Blood spewed from Yuki’s chest. Shallow wound.

Yuki drew back again. Alarm bells rang in Zabuza’s hindbrain and he instinctively knew he couldn’t block the next hit.

Blinding light pulsed around Yuki’s hind legs and he flew forward. Slow enough to track with trained eyes, too fast to counter. All Zabuza could do was watch as Yuki dipped under his defences, dug claws into his chest for hand holds, and drew his fanged jaws to his neck.

Zabuza didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t flinch. If someone was going to kill him one day, he’d face them head-on, stare into their eyes and stand his ground. He would know without a doubt exactly how he died, and exactly what his killer looked like as they delivered the final blow.

Because of this unwavering will, he saw every second and every detail of what followed Yuki’s attack. Yet comprehension took a minute to dawn on him.

Yuki convulsed on the ground. He looked pathetic again, the drowned rat from before returning in the mess of his wet hair and gangly limbs. Muscles pulled taut, he tried his best to curl into the fetal position, but the bodily spasms tore him apart.

Slowly, Zabuza lowered his blade and watched dully at the sad display below him. No longer animated by the squad’s chakra, the rain pelted his form and haloed Yuki, as though he were the writhing creature’s shelter.

Some time passed, and Yuki stopped shaking so violently, gently hiccuping in the mud.

Both of them were a mess, brown intermixed with red. The rain began to melt away the muck from Zabuza’s back, but Yuki remained a small puddle of hurt.

“Zabuza!” Barked the Captain and he lifted his gaze to his slowly approaching squad. His captain ran ahead of the rest, bloody murder written on his face. “You were instructed to take the scent blocker!”

True. Although they never stated why he should have followed the order without question. He would have, had Isshiki not intervened. He cast his dull gaze over to Isshiki, who made his way forward cautiously. There was no guilt when they met eyes. If anything, he looked disappointed, but altogether too fascinated with Yuki.

“I misplaced it,” Zabuza said numbly without breaking eye contact with Isshiki. “It won’t happen again.”

“Won’t happen again? Oh, I’ll make sure it won’t happen again, when Tooru finds out about this-”

A weight settled on Zabuza’s feet and he would have stumbled at the surprise if he was able. Yuki’s shivering arms curled around his right leg, his light body resting against him, knees drawn up close. Like this, Yuki reached up to Zabuza’s thighs and his tremors nearly shook him in tandem.

“Well,” the captain coughed. “This… changes things.”

Huh. Did the kid who very nearly killed him just turn around and save him from the wrath of Tooru and perhaps even the Mizukage?

A useful tool indeed.

Chapter Text

“- One of the Seven Swordsmen, you can’t just-”

The door slammed shut and Mei’s shoulder slumped. However, it was a momentary thing and she soon flicked her long hair over her shoulder and faced Zabuza with righteous indignation.

Her sandals clacked on the T&I concrete floor. With purpose, as she was perfectly capable of moving silently. Zabuza had to wonder if the rage she decided the world must witness was born from the injustice of his situation, or brought about by Mei’s inability to force her will onto the staff.

“One of these days, paper-pushing cowards like Tooru will have no choice but to listen to me,” she hissed and sat beside Zabuza with a thud, arms crossed. “Surely the Mizukage isn’t that enchanted by him that he can get away with throwing about the lives of valued, strong shinobi.”

Uncharacteristically, Mei swooped in to ‘save’ Zabuza when news of his development with Yuki caught up with her at her most recent… meeting. Aware of their existence due to happenstance by simply living a floor below where they took place, he wasn’t privy to the exact delivery of the news, but now Mei knew him beyond ‘one of the seven’ and decided to get involved.

No doubt it had more to do with Yuki than it did with him.

“Not to be insensitive, but I need to get this from you while I can. Tell me what you know about this ‘Yuki’,” she said and looked into his eyes. The detached sympathy in her icy irises confirmed she hadn’t tagged along for altruistic reasons. Or, well, perhaps her cause was altruistic but it was larger than him - the unfortunate but unavoidable casualty.

Zabuza shrugged and looked away. Mei was largely unknown to him. A unique Kekkei Genkai. Up to something in the barracks. But Zabuza was a give-and-take kind of guy, and all Mei wanted so far was to take. “Ask me when I get back.”

“You think you’ll make it out alive?” She asked and Zabuza heard the shuffling of cloth but chose to pick at his nails instead of look at her. “You made a severe error on your last mission and now you’re being thrown to the wolves. Or wolf, in this case: Tooru’s prized beast known to rip through shinobi like rice paper.”

Hm. Unsurprisingly, Mei possessed intel outside of her jurisdiction.

The door opened and somebody called Zabuza inside.

“Watch me.”

Yuki was- familiar, sort of. Half feral, drooling haplessly and grinding his teeth. But his eyes were defiant and he could speak. As evidenced by his sniping remarks on the field.

The first thing Zabuza did when Tooru left was break the first rule: Don't remove Yuki's muzzle.

And, contrary to Tooru’s warnings, he didn't get bitten for it.

Breathing deeply, Yuki's eyes went skyward as if thanking for a blessing, and then turned their frosty grey attention onto Zabuza.

Attached to the wall by a crudely welded chain, a chunky collar hung heavy around his neck. Given the restraints and Zabuza's healthy dose of mist-nin aversion-to-risk-aversion, he wasn't afraid to get closer and study Yuki outside the battlefield.

For months he'd heard about the electric beast, fashioning a grand silhouette in his mind of gnashing teeth and hulking muscle. In reality… Yuki was small and looked younger than himself. Until he had your life flashing before your eyes in the sopping rain.

"I thought you'd be a wolf or somethin'," Zabuza sat back and ducked his neck to be level with Yuki, who'd been watching him back this entire time.

"Hah," Yuki barked without humour. "No, I'm shinobi."

Yuki had a lisp. Huh. There’d been a hint of it before, but it couldn’t be denied upon hearing him loud and clear, magnified by the echo of the small cell.

Close quarters. Zabuza’s disadvantage. He stared Yuki in the eyes. Stood - or sat, rather - his ground. "You've got dog teeth, dog claws and wear a collar, I don't know any shinobi like that."

"And you've got sharp teeth and a propensity for water-based jutsu. Does that make you a piranha?" Yuki replied, less defensive in tone than Zabuza expected. More snarky, a hint of mirth. Zabuza might be pushing his luck, but it appeared Yuki didn’t dislike him despite their recent history.

"Not a dog, alright. What are you, then? Not shinobi, that's a job."

Yuki didn't answer for a long moment but maintained eye contact. "A land shark."

"That's not a thing."

"What's Kisame then?

Touché.

Tooru returned none too shortly after and that was the extent of Zabuza’s interaction with Yuki post-mission, the so-called killer hound. It wasn’t that he completely doubted the integrity of Yuki’s claim to infamy - being a child himself, Zabuza knew the capacity for violence held between young nimble fingers intimately and had been held in Yuki’s less than metaphorical jaws of death - but he looked like more of a mutt. A little helpless, vulnerable, in need of someone to look after it.

A clever disguise? Maybe. Without chemical involvement, it didn't seem to ring true.

He huffed at the notion with a morbid smile as he left the cell at Tooru’s prompt. Even within the streets of their village, it was a dog-eat-dog world.

“What do you think of your new housemate?” Tooru asked as they reached the entry hall of T&I and a semblance of something approaching fresh air blessed his sweaty skin. With the impending doom of his failure's consequences dogging his steps, he hadn’t the chance to wash up before being summoned.

“I think it’s already pretty cramped in the barracks,” Zabuza replied neutrally. After his recent display on the field, he didn’t have much room to buck authority.

“Your building was initially considered because of the larger yard space. Oh, and because I’ve been told it often proves to be quite difficult to entice shinobi to share with you, even when ordered.” Tooru’s smile grew. Not in the sense that it became bigger, but it become something more. Something crueller. “Besides, after confirming eyewitness reports on Yuki’s temperament towards you - well, I couldn’t think of a more obvious location.”

Zabuza paused outside the threshold of T&I. Brilliant white sunlight temporarily blinded him until it faded against the backdrop of the thick trees. Squinting at Tooru, he spoke, “is he not taking a, I don’t know, closet or something? The basement? We only use that for storage and it’s not that full-“

“Do not doubt my judgement, Chunin,” Tooru smiled blandly and the midday light cast his features in shadow. “I’ve been consulting with experts across the country, from the master of the guard dogs at the Daimyo’s palace to an estranged Inuzuka. Yuki is already a formidable beast, and I intend to transform him into something far beastlier.”

“Right.” Zabuza nodded and made himself scarce.

“Did they really have to take the muzzle off him?”

Through the grubby kitchen window, Zabuza’s two housemates had a blurry view into the backyard and their new… yardmate who, last time Zabuza checked, was reading a book acquired from Kami knows where while perched on the lowest branch of their lone pear tree.

Lowest, as any higher and the spindly branches wouldn’t support his weight, no matter how scrawny he was, and also because his chain wouldn’t allow him any further leeway.

“Do you think he can actually read or is he just pretending? You know, like little kids do,” Shinji continued despite not having received an answer to his first question.

Before he could ask a third, Zabuza looked up from the dinner he was preparing and interrupted, “ask him yourself, he can talk.”

The both of them jumped and Zabuza rolled his eyes at the cracked ceiling. “It’s not like he’ll bite.”

“Um, yes, he absolutely will,” Shinji stressed and jumped down from the counter. He was all of thirteen years old yet the extra year didn’t grant him any extra height on Zabuza. He knew Shinji secretly fumed about it, but he was too cowardly to say anything. Shinji ran a tight balancing act between fear and dumb courage when it came to Zabuza, which resulted in this weird contradiction where he maintained his caution while also advancing full tilt with his irritating bullshit.

He was a dumbass, to be succinct.

But he had his purpose, that being rent money. He also made an effort to communicate with Baku, their silent third piece. A tool with two barely serviceable uses.

“He didn’t bite me,” and, like the fool he was, Zabuza indulged him.

“He’s a hound, right? Like a bloodhound? Probably smelt the blood on your hands,” Shinji rolled on and only seemed to realise the gravity of what he’d said as the words began to sink in. “Oh, shit, I mean- uh-“

Smarter than his counterpart, Baku discretely left the room.

“Save your breath for someone who cares and clear off,” Zabuza said and sprinkled pepper on his meal with an aggressive flare. Shinji flinched and did as he was told.

Basking in the blessed quiet of Shinji’s departure, Zabuza propped himself against the window-facing counter to eat his meal. Between bites he contemplated his altered circumstances and the life he thought would end twice over in the short stretch of the last twenty-four hours.

His would-be killer cut an interesting silhouette as the sun dipped behind the mountain peaks defending the village borders. Reds and oranges rim lit his shadowed figure in ombre, and a parakeet swooped down onto one of the taller branches to complete the ensemble.

The clunky chain disrupted the peaceful tableaux.

Yuki wasn’t a dog. It remained to be seen how whatever grand transformation Tooru planned could alter Zabuza’s perception, but right now the facts were the facts and his eyes didn’t readily deceive him.

Zabuza idly smoothed a hand over the tapestry of bruises Yuki punched onto his abdomen. Under the influence of drugs, perhaps he was more canine than human. Feral, certainly.

Fuck. Zabuza dragged a hand through his short choppy hair and grimaced at flaking dried mud. This was complicated. He didn’t do complicated.

The question: was Yuki useful? Answer: yes, when in combination with a shock collar, restraints, and a unique drug cocktail specified for his use.

Could Zabuza make him useful?

Tooru seemed to think so. Or at least he thought something adjacent. Tooru thought Zabuza was useful for his project. Zabuza didn’t know the scope of his involvement yet, but there was something to it.

Ugh. Everything was complicated since he finished the academy. Why couldn’t he go back to completing kata when directed and not having to worry about the machinations of older shinobi.

An idea occurred to him as he stared miserably at the remainder of his meal. As per usual, he cooked several portions to save effort and money over the rest of the week. Looking at Yuki's skinny stature, he decided to expend one future prep day and took a portion outside.

“Who’s feeding you?” He asked when Yuki’s ear twitched at his habitually quiet approach. Keen sense of hearing.

Yuki didn’t turn away from his book - 'The senbon between our lips’, gross, probably full of kissing and stuff - but he blinked slowly as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. “Hm, who is feeding me?” He murmured and turned the page.

Zabuza squinted at him. One of the first tasks on the itinerary when he received his pay was to budget for his meals, closely followed by his rent, and then shinobi gear. Clothes and dented weaponry could be repaired, a full stomach had to be bought. Unless he wanted to sustain himself on fruit alone and live without nearly enough nutrition a shinobi needed to perform well. He had no patience for trapping itty bitty colourful birds.

Yuki should care about food security. If his cupboard was empty and pockets matching, it was all Zabuza could think about.

“You want to go hungry?” He asked, mildly disgusted.

Yuki shrugged and turned another page. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I died the moment they looked the other way?”

That wasn’t… a useful mindset. “Mizukage would probably kill Tooru.”

“All the better,” Yuki said and his eyes curved into a smile while his mouth remained an emotionless line. The dissonance was jarring.

“Trades are dumb. A life for a life - that’s bullshit. Good shinobi keep racking up the missions and stay alive. I get taking the enemy down with you if you’re gonna die anyway, but dying before you even see the target die leaves too many loose ends. If you’re gonna do a job, you gotta see it through. Sensei always said there’s no guarantees.” Zabuza said while he walked over to the half-cleaned-out shed Yuki’s chain led to.

Half the contents had been upended onto the grass outside. Unimportant storage like gardening tools he and the boys didn’t care for, damp with earlier rain. The half-arsed job had Shinji written all over it, but Zabuza wasn’t going to contest it. Waste of energy. Shinji wasn’t the type who readily changed under criticism, he took everything as a personal offence and either cried about it or puffed up with ill-advised indignation without the gusto to back it up.

“Dinner in your den,” he announced when he placed the plate on a low shelf, swiping away dust. “Eat it. Or don’t. I’m not your master.”

He spied the increasingly familiar red of Terumi Mei’s hair several yards away. Another meeting, huh.

“You might wanna head in any way,” he added, holding the front door wide enough to poke his head out as he retreated inside his quarters. “There’s a nosy lady on her way and she’d love to interrogate you.”

Give and take. He hoped Yuki picked up on the arrangement Zabuza set in place.

Later, there were more complications. Complications he did his best to ignore. A difficult task, given the number of people travelling in and out of the building with no care for the sleep of those excluded from the meeting.

He rolled over in bed as someone decided to transform the pacing above his bedroom into a double act and he implored the midnight rain to stop. A sudden change in rain at midnight was an omen almost all mist-nin addressed seriously and would abruptly end the gathering, allowing Zabuza some much-needed shut-eye.

Voices drifted from the backyard through the window that didn’t close all the way and the temptation to expend all his chakra suspending the rain grew. Wooden taps on the engawa transitioned to grass-softened thuds and Zabuza could confidently divine their destination.

With a gratuitous sigh, he made up his mind and shuffled into his sandals. In the kitchen, he found Baku silently watching the three nin approach the shed from the counter window. A citrus candle maintained a steady flame between his hands, providing enough light to parse his features.

They made eye contact. Then Baku looked up at the commotion upstairs and slid his gaze pointedly to the trio and shed. Yeah, Zabuza had gathered as much.

“If Shinji wakes up, keep him inside,” Zabuza said and received no confirmation. Still, he fancied his chances with Baku keeping Shinji at bay. No need to bring the whole circus to deal with a couple of clowns.

“He bites,” he said once he snook up behind the trio. Frankly, it was embarrassing how three shinobi twice the size of him all jumped at his appearance. So engrossed in the anticipation of meeting Yuki, they’d forgotten their surroundings. Granted, the night leant to stealth, but the yard was in view of the full moon, giving them sufficient lighting to spot him.

“Mei wants to see you,” the shortest one said when he gathered himself.

Zabuza situated himself between the shinobi and the shed.“I don’t think she can fit me in, what with half the village being in our building tonight.”

“There’s no need to be covert, most the shinobi here are just curious about the beast. It’s expected. They don’t know about-” The youngest yelped at an unseen hurt. Zabuza deduced the blank-faced shinobi next to him zapped him lightly with a chakra surge to shut him up, or something to that effect.

He stepped forwards, blocking out the moon as he towered over Zabuza. “You gonna let us pass, little man?”

“I don’t think it will go well for you. I only came out because sleeping's hard enough without your screaming on top of everything.” Zabuza stepped aside and cleared off a metre away. Still in full view of the scene about to play out while outside mauling range.

The shinobi went to turn the handle and jumped back with a hiss.

“What’s wrong?” Asked the shortest.

He presented his mildly burnt hand. “Arata, does it look like… seal work?”

The youngest took to the doorknob with dubious scrutiny before leaning back in disbelief. “It does, actually.”

“Get rid of it then.”

“It’s not that simple - I work with medic seals, like, I know what those seals look like and how to activate the ones I know but this isn’t - it’s like looking at a kanji character you’ve never seen before. I know it’s kanji, I know it has meaning, and maybe parts of it look similar to another kanji I know, but I still don’t know what it means.” He raised his hands in surrender at the mutinous look on the shortest one’s face. “We should leave it alone, who knows what else is going on here? I didn’t expect the thing to know sealing.”

Bickering with each other, the three begrudgingly accepted defeat and returned to the building.

Zabuza was about to turn back in himself, having accomplished what he set out to do, when the shed door creaked open.

A spindly clawed hand emerged from the black interior and presented a spotless plate. Yuki turned it over and revealed a paper seal clasped between fingers and porcelain before flipping it back over.

“Basic soundproofing,” Yuki said, unseen, when Zabuza took the plate and seal in hand. As soon as his hand left the door’s range, the shed shut with a rusted click.

Give and take.

Chapter Text

Iron tongue, shock claw, bone crunch. Mud fur. Dead prey. Dead prey.

More. Downwind, fresh scent. Salt, earth, feather scent. Ear cocked. Fast heart, small, fragile, brittle boned.

Grass between toes, mud squelch. Five paces. Slow, don't startle. Hunchbacked, nose low, eyes high. Watching. One paw forward, slow. Second, slow. Prey oblivious. Third paw.

Draw back. Like a spring. Ready.

Leap.

Snap.

"Yuki."

Rip head. Bye beak. Beautiful, delicious red. Ugly feathers. Ugh. Shake.

"Yuki."

Horrible, horrible feathers. Tear apart. Confetti.

"Yuki."

"What!" He barked. Or tried to. Hard, mouth full of feathers. Gross. Yellow, blue, green. He shook the body in his jaws in frustration and more fell away. "Stupid," he growled around the fragile carcass.

"That's progress."

Yuki spun around with a snarl, only for it to die a quick death on his feathered tongue. A dead parrot fell from his slack jaw with a wet thud.

Child Zabuza crouched in front of him, heedless of the mud, and fixed him with a vaguely impressed but mostly drained look. "You spoke," he clarified.

Kakashi frantically spat the feathers from his mouth and resorted to a haphazard water jet jutsu to rid himself of the riotous texture. Halfway to drowning and he still couldn't relieve himself of all the little threads and spines of paradise bird coat.

"I tried to warn you." Zabuza shrugged and signalled to the rest of the squad. They emerged from the foliage with open morbid curiosity, eyeing the carnage Kakashi did his level best to ignore.

Preserving his sanity was becoming an increasingly difficult task.

"Yuki doesn't take well to verbal warnings," Kakashi countered and spat yet another emulsified feather onto the ground. A tapestry of dead bird surrounded them, oddly artful with its vibrant colouring.

"You're not helping yourself by talking like that. Just speak like the rest of us normal shinobi. Anyway, you know Tooru wants you to train verbal response," Zabuza said and began marching toward the nearest outpost.

Kakashi padded along; it was too close to his stint as Yuki to transition to his deer-footed two-legged walk. "That drug-induced beast isn't me. I can't even make sense of the memories post-mission, it's just flashes of sensations."

"If that helps you sleep at night," Zabuza sighed. It did. "You're being loud."

Kakashi didn't bother suppressing his flinch, despite it going against every biological directive he'd drilled within himself from the moment he learned the meaning of 'shinobi'. Before that even, when he only knew the word as a second name.

Now his body spasmed often, little twitches of nervous system misfires and phantom jolts. No one could read the flinch when it was impossible to differentiate from the litany of involuntary jerks he frequently exhibited. He could flinch all he wanted.

Responses fled him. He ran through predictions, and no words yielded any positive results. 'I thought you wanted me loud' - Tooru wanted him loud, and he didn't want to play into Tooru's hand. 'I'm just shaken' - too brazenly honest. Silence - allow me to fix my misstep.

Zabuza sighed again. He sighed a lot for a child. "We'll take a detour and pass by Nagai River, you can have a roll about in there. If you jump in the River of Passing again, I won't help you when you get mobbed."

Kakashi didn't deign that with a response. The River of Passing looked like any other river, but trust Water Country denizens to view waterways as paths to the afterlife. Fortunately, no one had borne witness to his sacrilege the first time he'd dived into the Passing's waters to shuck off the viscera of yet another blacked-out mission - both on file and within his mind.

It was easy to forget Zabuza was a child when his shadow drew long across Kakashi's whole body and he squared his shoulders like a man braced for the inevitable burdens of his unfortunate lot in life. But he did occasionally break from his ill-fitted mould.

Other Kiri shinobi treated Kakashi for what he was - an unstable freak deserving a wide berth and dissecting stares. The fool-hardy breached his personal space but never got far with Zabuza as his constant shield, while the more discerning majority observed and analysed from a healthy distance.

Zabuza was unique in that he talked to him like, well, another kid, he supposed.

"Eggplant sucks," Zabuza said as rote when they approached the dingy little miso stand at the end of the market district. Tucked between modest piles of over-ripe bin bags and the overhanging of the scrap metal collector next door, it didn't look like the kind of place to maintain a steady clientele.

Yet, unfailingly, there were always civilians and shinobi coming and going when they arrived and it was the time of day when both haggard demographics were too tired to cut too deeply into Kakashi with their eyes.

"All that salt has shaved off your tastebuds," Kakashi responded. It was a repeated exercise in sibilance, one in which he consistently failed to improve his lisp.

"Fire country folk wouldn't know flavour if it smacked them in the face." Zabuza ducked under the dull stall privacy hangings. "One plain, one eggplant."

The cook did not respond, but he always served. Kakashi hadn't so much as seen his apron; Zabuza always held a hand behind him as though Kakashi was dumb enough to insult one of the few merchants who'd serve them with his face. It rankled, deferring to a child. A child with a skewed but mostly dependable perception of life, but a child nonetheless.

"You need to visit tea country," Kakashi decided as they trotted through the back streets of Kiri, the ever-present rain buffeted by a subtle chakra manipulation Zabuza used to avoid spoiling the soup. Chakra trickery was everywhere in Kiri when one looked; it was no wonder so many kirinin were fond of finicky techniques like water whips and dragons when their culture nurtured their proficiency.

"And when would we visit tea country?" Zabuza asked and Kakashi had a moment to marvel at Zabuza's constant inclusivity before he soured it, as always. "The food will go cold after we slaughter the cooks."

The candidness Zabuza said such things with was unnerving, and the simplicity of it was one of the most poignant reminders of his youth. Zabuza was not cynical nor jaded, he just spoke his truth.

A shadow flickered in the corner of Kakashi's eye. He stopped, hackles raised. The hairs from his neck to the base of his spine rose one by one to a wave of static electricity. The puddled water by his feet sparked.

"Yuki?" Zabuza sounded distant at first, then caution bled into his tone as he presumably moved in closer. "Yuki." Kakashi wouldn't know. Existence was tunnelling into the darkness of the side street.

The cracked cream walls of two civilian housing units faded into thick shadow as the sun descended. The grand mountains surrounding Kiri lent a particularly viscous darkness to this side of the village in the evening. It was one of the leading reasons the rent was so cheap. Nothing could be differentiated from the shadows, not even with his enhanced night vision. The flickering lamp light behind them stopped short of it.

But something was there. He knew it in his bones.

Pain zapped his face and neck and he jumped like a frightened cat. He whipped around to shoot Zabuza a look dripping with betrayal as his face dripped with cold water.

"You weren't responding. I called your name six times," Zabuza said, as if that excused triggering Kakashi's learned pain reflex. A spritz of water might as well be a shock from the collar with how twisted and fried his nerves had become.

"And? Do you need attention so badly you can't bear the idea of me looking away from you for a minute?" Kakashi spat and knew he'd regret his behaviour later.

Pain had never made him mean before Tooru. Pain had never made him do a lot of things before Tooru. Before Tooru, he'd been a hardened shinobi who regularly pushed past the limits of the human body. Before Tooru, he-

"You were electrifying the water, look," Zabuza raised his freshly scorched sandals. "You know lightning runs too quick for me to divert the water."

Oh. But there'd been... something. He looked at the darkened street again, but that earlier hunted feeling failed to return. It looked like any of the streets in their neighbourhood. Disconcertingly full in its darkness, but empty.

Fuck. Was he losing his grasp on Yuki? Surely there would be a point where the two pieces of himself melded into one - people weren't designed to be split. He desperately hoped that whatever may come — whether he be more Kakashi than Yuki or more Yuki than Kakashi — whatever creature inhabited his body remembered his mission.

"Whatever. Come on, let's just get back to the house," Zabuza said and slipped on his sandals. "At least I get paid better on missions with you, I can afford the replacement."

At least he got paid.

Kakashi didn't have good luck. This was a well-established fact. The saying would go: the sky was blue, grass was green, and Kakashi's luck was bad. Except grass wasn't green. He wasn't so sure what green looked like anymore.

Sometimes, he dreamed in colours he struggled to imagine, of people with blurry faces and fading features. Muted smells he knew he'd experience differently if encountered again, and laughter like tinkling bells slowly losing momentum. Each forgotten piece of his history tore from his heart, dragging flesh and blood with it.

Zetsu, though. Zetsu he would have happily forgotten.

"Yuki. Down."

An aborted whine escaped Kakashi's throat as he snapped around at Zabuza's stern voice. He'd yet to attain the menacing grit his adult vocal cords ground against, but the associations Kakashi made between collars and orders aided his authority.

A growl rared to replace his bitten-off whine, but that too Kakashi staved. Yes, he was incredibly frustrated at both his instincts' and Zabuza's ignorance of the matter at hand, but that was no reason to act like an animal.

"We're being stalked." Kakashi decided to try his luck. Two weeks had passed since the first incident at the side street, and the near-constant raised hairs and slips of shadow had him convinced.

Zabuza crouched and peered into the darkness of Kakashi's shed and frowned. "There's nobody there."

"There was. They're gone now," Kakashi insisted.

Zabuza hovered his hands over Kakashi, visibly catalogued Kakashi's tense muscles and warning glare, and patted his shaggy hair awkwardly.

Kakashi huffed but allowed it. The kid was only trying to comfort him, which was sweet. He also thought Kakashi was deranged, which was less sweet, but he also hadn't reacted negatively which meant... something.

"We would have seen them leave," Zabuza said and tugged Kakashi's hair lightly, indicating for him to follow him into the house.

Kakashi threw one last glare at the shadows of his shed and did as he was told. When Kakashi was 'home', he was supposed to be chained to the shed. However, Zabuza took glee in terrifying his housemates with Kakashi's unleashed presence, and thus he was allowed some leniency before night fell.

"I need a bath," Kakashi declared and shook a blood-caked paw — no, hand — at Zabuza.

Zabuza batted his hand away. "Yeah, you do. Shout if you start drowning, land shark."

Kakashi huffed and padded up the stairs to the bath. Even at its most destitute, Kiri provided all its residents with running water. Kakashi had observed the genin in rotation manning the chakra systems in the underbelly of Kiri. A community service sanction-stroke-institutional-training-regime. There was value in learning to fine-tune and stream chakra through the mind-numbing task of managing the flow of water, although it seemed of little benefit beyond Chunin premotion.

They'd thrown Kakashi in there whenever they were short-manned and couldn't be bothered pulling someone above chunin rank in the name of civic duty.

Kakashi clambered into the tin bathtub while the water ran but didn't insert the plug. Summer water restrictions in Konoha would have forced him to find a river or bathe in his own muck, but he had no such reservations here. He allowed the tepid stream to wash away his mess and tried not to pay too much attention to how the tub swallowed him from the tips of his matted hair to the crust embedded beneath his toenails.

When the water ran clear, he plugged the drain and sank into his thoughts.

The Mizukage was not in his right mind. This he knew both from an outsider's perspective, a citizen's perspective, an experiment's perspective, a war criminal's perspective, a time traveller's perspective... The evidence was conclusive. Zetsu was administering its master's will before Obito was even on the board. Now Zetsu was interested in Kakashi.

He tugged at a particularly stubborn knot in his hair, and his claws came away with a tuft of grey.

What he needed to determine was the threat to his life and his plans. Nebulous plans with no means of action, yet, but plans he was going to enact given the opportunity were better than active plans foiled by Zetsu.

What had he done to draw its attention?

He stretched out his fingers beneath the surface, water gently rippling under his ministrations. Five clawed tips spasming as he worked through their stiffness. He pressed into a large callous on one palm and noted the eerie symmetry between his hands despite his right-handedness, and the odd uniformity.

"You dead?" Zabuza called from the kitchen, voice echoing against the tile. 'Called' was generous, he didn't raise his voice because he knew Kakashi could hear him. To an outside observer, he would appear to be talking to no one.

Zabuza did not have the same sensory advantage, so Kakashi shouted. "Not yet, give me another five!"

"Okay," Zabuza replied.

He felt rather like a paperclip as he uncurled from the tub, his painstakingly rehabilitated human form recalling its shape memory when submerged in hot water. It was as if his body had forgotten the past few hours in which he'd forced it into bipedal motion.

He braced himself on the rim as he straightened his spine, bringing him to eye level with the bottom of the tarp-covered window. Where a pin came loose in the top corner, only a triangle of black was visible of the outside world.

Zabuza knew five minutes in Kakashi terms was fifteen at its kindest, and likely attributed it to his trouble post-baths instead of his culpable trademark tardiness.

For all Kakashi liked to pretend Zabuza wasn't complicit when his wistful memory overlaid his face with an older visage, he completed his job of minimising Kakashi's freedoms effectively, even if he did allow him a small amount of lenience. They were conjoined at the hip. Or shoulder to hip, given Kakashi's struggles to maintain the appearance of a typical two-legged shinobi.

He sloughed the water from his skin with an appropriated fire jutstu and slid his clothes over his too-dry flesh with a mild sandpaper burn. The neck of his ill-fitting standard-issue shinobi thermal caught on his collar.

His hair stood on end, static in the breeze as he leveraged the tarp in his descent down the side of the building, kicking it back into place as an afterthought. No destination materialised in his mind as he slinked between bins in the half-light of the moon. He need only seek out the blackest dark, and it would find him.

Poor planning led to the sharp slice of a thin alley between two apartment buildings and Kakashi tucked himself between the rough concrete walls. The friction hiked up his shirt and sediment crumbled into his hair, but he crouched unmoving.

There. The faint shiver of moonlight became muted, that same unnatural dark filling the small space in front of his nose. Much closer, this time. He spared a thought for how bad of an idea this was, before remembering the value he ascribed to his life and how little that quantity was.

"Found me." A jagged crescent moon smiled into existence, followed by a single yellow eye.

Kakashi's hot breath fanned around the curvature of a flat face mere centimetres from his own, and he leant into the fear reaction stilling his body. "Yes," he agreed.

"What does the puppy-dog want?" Zetsu asked. "Do its masters not give it enough love?"

There was no lilting laughter, no white zetsu to temper its cold detachment with nonsensical humour. This thing was cruel, and it answered to none.

"You let yourself be found," Kakashi said.

"The puppy-dog is humble," Zetsu said. Its voice was unchanging, its face fixed. "Credit where credit is due, I didn't expect you to sense me. Perhaps T&I's little diversion is worth something after all."

The hairs on his nape stood tall enough that they may as well ply themselves from his pores. He needed to eliminate unknowns. Perhaps unreliable months upon immeasurable months had shot his patience, perhaps it was Yuki's temperament bleeding into his shinobi's resolve. Whatever it was, he saw a window of opportunity, and he'd jumped head first without care for who had opened it.

"You want to use me," Kakashi put forward. Don't ask questions; lack of knowledge is a weakness. Force the enemy to battle against you with their corrections.

"I have no use for a rabid dog. Nor a foolish little boy. Pick one and get better at it."

The smile curled in on itself and the eye winked out, allowing the faintest passage of moonlight into the ally once more.

Kakashi breathed.

Well. At least Zetsu wasn't actively antagonistic. Yet.