Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Kakashi likes to think he’s a calm and rational person.

Years and years of repression and blood and nights of trembling in the corner of a bed have taught him that a logic-only path would be his own downfall, but it didn’t hurt to utilize both the mind and heart.

So when he wipes the sleep from his eyes and finds he’s in the old Hatake compound in his child-sized bed, he checks himself over.

A sound check of his heart rate and breathing tells him he isn’t having a flashback or a panic attack.

A quick but quiet kai tells him it isn’t genjutsu.

A pinch to his arm (maybe he pinched too hard) told him that he wasn’t dreaming.

He didn't really know how to find out if something was a hallucination or not, so he gave up on that.

Ah, shit. His hand dragged over his face in a gentle facepalm. He was too old for this.

Assess the situation. Are you safe? Who’s in the building? What’s your status?

Kakashi finds his limbs to be gangly and thin, short and a body that isn’t his (was it his?).  His back and shoulders don’t ache for the first time in ages, and his face feels clear of gross oils and the general coating of what he liked to believe was depression in physical form.

…His eyesight is completely normal.

Typically, this wouldn’t be a reason to panic, but when one has had a vision-enhancing eyeball of a dead friend’s implanted into their left eye-socket, you tend to notice when your eyesight has suddenly downgraded.

He’s been lying in bed too long, for this situation at least.

The sun is up, not fully.

Rising from his bed (there are little paw-print patterns on the sheets that he never thought he’d see again), only pure muscle memory guided him through the household. Kakashi’s pretty sure he’d repressed most of his childhood before his father’s suicide, but then again, he’d been ridiculously young; it was natural not to remember everything about his childhood home (right?).

He recognized something was wrong the moment he woke up to an unfamiliar ceiling, but he wasn’t expecting this.

Kakashi’s forced to pull a stool and stand on his tiptoes to see his face, and it’s… baby-ish. Round.

Both of his eyes are there and they’re both his, a dark brown-black. The lines under his eyes, the shadowed imprints, they’ve completely vanished, no trace of years of sleep deprivation anywhere.

Catching himself before he starts spiraling downward, the boy stepped off the child’s stool and went to look around the house when a familiar voice sounded.

“Kashi? Are you awake? ”

Something in his chest twists violently.

It was like his head was dunked into water. Kakashi forced himself to swallow despite the lump in his throat, despite his widening eyes. He really, really wanted to go back to sleep.

“I was thirsty.” Oh god. His voice was ridiculously high - reasonably so for a kid under four, but it was jarring nonetheless.

His father, who was supposed to be dead, not that he was complaining, poked his head out from the doorway across the hall and gave a sleepy grin. There were no signs of weariness, no signs that he would drive his tanto into his stomach only months from now; only love.

That in itself made Kakashi want to tear up and start sobbing into his warm arms, but he suppressed the childish urge for both his own sake and his father’s.

Sakumo (his dad, his father, who’s alive and happy ) comes over and pours him a glass of water, ruffling his hair, and Kakashi finds himself leaning into his hand. It really was him; his chakra was just as it was all those years ago.

Giving him a hug that he passes off as a sleepy, clingy child’s embrace, Kakashi sips from the glass that’s too big for just one hand, and he lets himself be tucked right back into bed.

His father gives him a smile he’s missed for so long, and he falls right back into a deep sleep fueled by a decade or two of exhaustion.

It’s only when Kakashi wakes up again with a clearer mind that he recognizes something is truly, terribly wrong.

He’s in his child-body. He’s in the past? These are all things he can somewhat-kind of handle, he tells himself.

What’s wrong is he knows something is missing from his memories. They’re all fuzzy, blurry, dissipating quickly, slipping through his fingers like water.

He grew up in the Hatake compound, graduated from the Academy at the mere age of five, his father committed suicide before he began personally training with Minato-sensei until the age of 9 when he joined Team 7 (he balks when he thinks of their ragtag group), became a chuunin at eleven, and a jounin at twelve.

Directly after he became a jounin, Obito died, crushed under a rock, except he wasn’t really dead. He made a promise and broke it, Rin ending up impaled on his arm like a kebab (she deserved better, she deserved so much fucking better).

He threw himself into ANBU work after Minato-sensei (oh god, Minato-sensei) became Yondaime and invited him into the position, earning himself the monikers Cold-Blooded Kakashi, Kakashi the Friend-Killer (he didn’t dispute the latter, couldn’t dispute it, only noted that it was convoluted as hell).

He… became a jounin leader? What was the Sandaime thinking?

Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke, senbon and chakra that lapped up the environment like flames and put images of red hair in his head, spinning tomoe, god he’d made so many stupid mistakes, but at the same time it suddenly felt like these are memories he’s never actually experienced, just impersonal images floating through his head.

But that didn’t make any sense.

Maybe timeline-hopping into a state of adolescence affected one’s mental state more than fiction told you. Especially when the jump is from the brain of a traumatized thirty year old (Was he in his late twenties before the jump? Shit.) to the brain of an arguably not very traumatized child. Did trauma write itself back into the brain with dimension jumping? Was this more of a "he's-really-just-Young-Kakashi-but-Future-Kakashi's-memories-are-flooding-his-head-and-he's-getting-confused" situation? Was it not actually time travel?

Kakashi's brain starts unravelling like yarn and he decides that he isn't fit to try and compartmentalize right now. Or meditate. Or think. Or anything, really. Maybe he was never fit to do any of those things.

Maybe he was hallucinating.

It’s not like he was considered mentally stable outside of lying to pass psyche examinations. Images of Rin with a gorey hole in her chest flickered in the inky sea of his mind.

(“I forgive you,” she whispered, life dripping from her chin. “But I’m not sure Obito will.”

The stench of rotting flesh filled his nose, permeating his mask, making him gag.

“Kakashi-sensei?” He looked through his student, wavering smile brighter than even his jumpsuit not managing to wash away the thick oil he was drowning in.)

His eye burns like it's the molten core of a volcano and he wants it out.

Kakashi knew only a couple of things for sure right now, at least for his situation:

• His father was alive and happy, so he was currently five at the oldest. Sakumo had taken on that mission a little after his sixth birthday, and died (killed himself, he’d killed himself) only about half a year later. It was likely only a matter of weeks, maybe days, until the fated mission, if he was five and his father was still happy.
• He had no on to rely on with this information just yet; his ninken were just puppies (he’d been able to summon them from a young age, but that didn’t mean they were fully fledged yet), and everyone else would recognize him for the head-case he was.
• He wasn’t training with Minato-sensei today, considering his father had been surprised he was awake. It was likely the young man was busy with his own missions; he was only fifteen when Kakashi was five, if he recalled correctly (was he seriously forgetting his sensei’s age? The man who stuck close to him even as blood soaked his hands?).

Kakashi had time to gather information, thank fuck. He couldn't imagine how disastrous it would be to meet his dead father, his dead sensei, and possibly his dead teammates who would be at the academy right now, all in the same day.

...How did he even act at this age? Little Kakashi was a brat, right? Proud and arrogant to a fault (but not as bad as Sasuke was, not yet. He got much, much worse after his father's death).

Should he act differently? Would it be too obvious? He's had undercover missions in ANBU before, he's played many roles. Just not that of a five year old with the set personality of an asshole.

Waking up one day and having your child or student do a flip in personality would be worrying at the very least, he knew that much. But seeing them obviously fake it would be more alarming. Kakashi felt like banging his head on his end table; he was overthinking this, just go with it! He wasn't a stupid genin anymore.

Getting up was again a pleasant surprise; though he still felt somewhat sluggish, for the first time in ages it was as if he'd actually had a restful sleep. Not even his left shoulder ached in pain.

Blankets of sunlight warmed his face through the window. It was tempting to sit there by the window for the rest of however long this was going to last, wrapped up in his paw print blanket.

In the back of his head, Kakashi recognized that this might not all be real. Maybe his body was back in reality and this was some kind of fucked up coma situation, or just an extremely vivid and morbid chakra exhaustion induced dream he couldn't yet wake up from due to said chakra exhaustion. Out like a light for a week. Or he was less sane than he’d originally examined himself to be, as he thought earlier.

A headache tore his thoughts in half when he realized, horrifyingly enough, he wanted this to be real. Selfish as always. What happened to his future, to Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, if this was real? Did his team, the people he knew, cease to exist as they were?

Was this a do over? Another chance? It'd be hell looking at the faces of his dead comrades who he'd watched fall, but fuck it if he didn't jump at the idea of just seeing them again despite that.

At the same time, it’d mean the people he’d grown to know and love, the people whose love he’d accepted into his life, were gone.

Forcefully, he lit those thoughts on fire and stuffed them in a box before throwing the box into a mental river.

Kakashi could change things, if this past was permanent. The man spent too much time reminiscing the past for his own good, but...

He needed to know if Minato-sensei was alive. He needed to know if Rin and Obito were alive.

Making the bed for the first time for years (he was living with someone else again, after all), the boy hopped off and dressed up, wrapping his scarf around his neck. It was too big, and it was comfortable. He let himself indulge for a little bit and shrunk into his scarf.

It smelled of Pakkun and his dad.

Scampering out of his room, he felt himself about to call Sakumo “Otou-san” until he remembered he’d only begun calling him that to stress his independence, that he wasn’t a kid anymore, before it warped into disdain, the original innocent purpose distorting into the wish to distance himself from the poor man.

Kakashi had to do better this time around. If he failed again, maybe he’d really just lose it.

If he remained the stone-faced child prodigy he grew up as, nothing would change.

“I’m going out, papa.”

Sakumo’s face froze before it melted into a bright smile.

“Take some money with you, ‘Kashi,” the man laughed, putting his hand in the boy's hair again. Kakashi didn’t move away. It was pleasant. “Come back before sundown, get something to eat if you stay out past lunch, okay?”

He nodded, giving Sakumo a shaky smile. Hopefully his smiles translated better to his father past the mask.

He left the Hatake compound with absolutely no plan whatsoever.