Chapter Text
Kakashi is to become Hokage one week after Sakura’s 18th birthday. He’d asked for the ceremony to be put off a month, but no dice. Tsunade wants to retire as soon as possible. He knows just how goddamn often Sakura feels upstaged, and when the date of his swearing-in ceremony was announced, he had looked apologetically at his former student. Sakura has never been good at hiding her feelings, and pain flickered in her wide eyes before she smiled and congratulated him.
He requested to go on a mission, his last S-rank ever, a month before the ceremony. He is mourning the loss of action like he’d mourn the death of a good friend. He doesn’t want to sit behind a desk, doesn’t want to send people to their deaths, and he doesn’t want to sift through mountains of paperwork. He just stopped exhausting all his chakra on the sharingan and now they’re throwing him into a new responsibility the moment he thought he’d get a few days to relax.
And what a way to relax he chose. He wonders what sort of fucked up neural pathways have formed in his brain to make him crave combat this way. He feels normal only in the throes of battle. He is most comfortable when blood mists on him after he strikes an artery. He is freest when he is bounding through the trees away from Konoha and towards conflict.
He is thirty-two, and that’s far too old to be acting the way he is. Like he has a death wish. Like a petulant child who doesn’t want to receive the highest honor a shinobi can attain. And he’s nowhere near as young as Minato was when he took the position. He’s never been as good as Minato, though. For one thing, Minato never asked to go on one last S-rank. For another, Minato was married and stable. Kakashi doubted he’d ever marry. Shinobi paired off early, had kids early. Died early, too.
After five days of traveling by land, Kakashi and the three other jōnin assigned under him arrive on the east coast of Lightning country. There’s a storm brewing, and despite it being midday, the sky is dark and threatening. He beckons his subordinates to slow.
“Do you feel that?” Kakashi asks. The three shinobi look at him questioningly before realization flickers over the face of one of them. He’s a sensory-type just a little older than Naruto. He certainly fought in the war. Suddenly his subordinate vomits.
“I thought it was over,” the man says weakly.
“We thought it was possible that Kaguya had implanted chakra somewhere in this area,” he says to the two others. There was no mistaking this inhuman energy, faint as it was. “Now I’m sure.”
The only kunoichi of the team nods. “And you think that has something to do with the civilians going missing in the nearby villages?”
“It’d be quite the coincidence if they weren’t connected,” he says, focusing on the chakra in the distance. “Let’s investigate.”
They arrive at the mouth of a cave just as it starts to rain. The energy is strong enough to send a chill up Kakashi’s spine and raise gooseflesh on his arms. The cave seems to twist into two seperate caverns, and he decides to break his team into groups of two in order to search most efficiently.
He is silent as they move through the darkness. The kunoichi he is teamed with, a woman he’d met once or twice before this mission, slinks behind him. She’s attractive, and if he weren’t her captain at the moment, he might try to flirt with her.
She trips over something and crashes into his back. Shinobi at her level aren’t clumsy, and Kakashi is immediately suspicious. When she rights herself, he shines a light on the floor. It’s a wooden arm.
“That wasn’t there before,” he says carefully, and the reality sets in that both he and Tsunade had underestimated this mission.
He hears a shuffling, so quiet it would be imperceptible to an average person, so subtle that even a ninja might mistake it for the rain that has become a violent downpour outside. With horror, he realizes that they are surrounded by mangled wooden body parts, moving inhumanely and writhing towards them.
He feels the genjutsu trying to infiltrate his brain before anything around him visually changes. He didn’t spend half his life with the sharingan for no reason. He breaks it with little effort and looks back only in time to see his partner willingly impale her chest on a wooden stake. The smell of blood is overwhelming, and Kakashi tries not to gag. She doesn’t look like she suffered, he notes with some relief. The genjutsu must have kept her from feeling any pain.
These horrible half-mannequins lerch toward him, and he swears that he hears his name being whispered:
ka
ka
shi
ka
ka
shi
His mind goes to the two young men in the other cavern. Why had he split them up? He’s furious at himself for miscalculating the danger so severely. He had thought that there would be, at the worst, a weak Zetsu clone that was luring civilians into the cave to eat. He resolves to fight his way to the other men and report to Tsunade. Whatever this is, it’s bad.
He turns to look at the mouth of the cave and instead comes face-to-face with a sharingan.