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Published:
2022-07-21
Updated:
2023-02-27
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6/?
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Game Changer

Summary:

Hatake Kakashi used to be the zanpakto spirit of Shunsui Kyoraku.

Notes:

I wrote this years ago, and never got around to posting it. Happy reading, I own neither Bleach nor Naruto.

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

They say it’s a spell gone wrong-jutsu- they call it.
“Were looking for a way to reverse the effect so that your current incarnation can come back,” They tell her, and Katen looks out at the children before her with her lone eye, saying nothing, she can’t bring herself to tell them that souls don’t work like that. Had their friend simply been displaced in time it would’ve been possible, but since she-his soul- is in the right time, he’s never coming back. They show her a picture of a man with a shock of gravity defying silver hair.
Her most recent personification-Hatake Kakashi.  
In it he’s smiling, a pleasant eye smile, with over half his face covered. His shoulders set in a lazy almost shrug, completely at ease, charming even. Just like Shunsui, and just like her shinigami, Katen can see the danger lurking just beneath the surface in the young man.
A playful killer.
***
She gives them a name…Katen Kyouraku. 
They tell her they’re shinobi-protectors- and she nods, pretending she can’t smell the scent of death clinging to all of them. The people who have her do test after test, and in the end a bandaged man sneers at her.
“Civilian-the sharingan is lost,” He spits, and she bows her head as though ashamed, her carefully controlled reiatsu blanketing the entire village. The man before her doesn’t even realize he’s staring death in the face.
They release her to the same group she’d seen when she’d first awakened. The pink haired girl, stands next to the boy with the arrancar in his belly. Katen’d nearly called her blade the first time she’d seen it, then she’d got a glimpse of the boy’s soul, uncorrupted, and she’d decided to just observe. The pair are joined by a blond woman, as well as a white haired man with markings on his face.
The blond woman feels like Unohana before she started masking her killing intent-wild and ready to throw down at any moment-she also smells like sake, Katen approves. The man with the markings hasn’t stopped looking at her breasts, and Katen inhales deeply, just for the satisfaction of watching his nosebleed,idiot. His straying eyes are interrupted by a blow to the head.
“Stop it , Jiraiya!”
“Tsunade! I wasn’t doing anything,”
As it turns out, Tsunade, is the shinobi world’s Kage-their equivalent of Captain Commader. And Katen learns that there are more out there, each heading their own village.
Interesting, Yama-jiji would’ve thrown a fit, with Ryujin Jakka crackling madly the whole time. The thought of it makes her lips twitch, and she quickly suppresses the motion, sighing instead.
***
“This is Kakashi-sensei’s place, we hope it’s to your liking,” The apartment, obviously on the high end, lacks personality. As she moves around she can feel the presence of people who’d been in and out of the apartment-probably cleaning out any sensitive information.
There’s a pile of bright orange books by the nightstand, ignoring the four behind her, she picks one up, reads a few lines and gasps in outrage.
A pervert! She’s been reborn as a pervert, Shunsui had been more than enough, how could she have suffered such a fate twice!
“Oh! So sorry,” Sakura breathes, her face heating up.
“We must have forgotten to remo-”The blond’s side is elbowed before he can finish, and Katen pretends not to notice.
“We’ll just take those,” The blond moves forward, but before he can even touch the books, Katen catches his wrist in a light grip.
“Now, now, let’s not be hasty, perhaps I can find deeper meaning, by engaging in a more romantically adventurous form of literature,” Stuffing the tiny book into her bra, she clears her throat before gliding out of the bedroom. Ignoring the white haired pervert’s stiffled giggles, and the remaining trio’s incredulous stares. They leave soon after, and Katen stares out at the sprawling village below her.
When she squints, she can almost convince herself she’s staring at the rooftops of the Seireitei.
***
They watch her, of course they do.
 Fake hollows cling to the trees where she sits to read the little orange books. They follow when she goes to watch children play, white masks blending into the shadows. No sound, barely breathing, but she still feels them- hide and go seek- what a game,what a game. She wonders if they’d still play if she made it hide and go kill.
The two teenagers come to visit, at the end of the month as has become their norm, but this time they’re more subdued, their eyes dim. The truth written plainly across their smiling faces. They’re just now realizing what she’s known all along…their friend is never coming back. They don’t say it outright, and she doesn’t ask. Centuries in the royal court, and even more as a captain’s zanpakto have taught her the importance of silence.
***
The more she learns about the village, the more she keeps her silence.
Konoha, it turns out, is a place of many secrets. At first she thinks the biggest one is the village beneath the village. Buried so deep the roots of the oldest trees have grown around it. It’s full of blank faced children with flat chakra, no will, and definitely no free thoughts.
They should stick out like a shinigami in Hueco mundo, when they come topside, but they don’t. They fit right in, how would anyone notice anything amiss? Everyone in the surface village walks right by the pale eyed, blank faced men and women. Unlike the kids in the secret village, their chakra isn’t flat. It strains, weeps and bleeds, clawing constantly against the seal on their foreheads. But no one notices...no...they do, they just don’t care.
***
But the village within the village isn’t Konoha’s biggest secret. That one reveales itself to her one night as she’s walking down a lonely street.
She crosses paths with the bandaged man who’d all but called her worthless, and without the barrier of other people around, Katen sees him. He barely spares her a glance as he walks past, but that single moment, is enough to have her legs shaking, cold sweat running down her back. She manages to make it to the next street before throwing up on someone’s lawn.
She sits next to her own vomit for a long while, struggling to process.
She wrecks her brain until she finally has a name, Shimura Danzo, and just thinking it has a shiver running down her spine.
***
Spirits-in all their gory glory- are all over Konoha, every single one attached to someone. The phantoms of this world don’t have soul chains, so either they crossover or they just...linger. It’s not uncommon to have a spirit or two clinging to someone, but Danzo has throngs of people all around him.
Children...so many children.
Most alarming of all, is that some of them aren’t strangers. Katen had seen them before, while they were still living. The majority were part of the blank faced children. But why would...
He’s the kage of the root village! The realization has her wrecked with more tremors, and she struggles to control them. By the time she pulls herself together, there are four pairs of eyes watching her from the shadows.
In move that’s more real than she cares to admit, she wobbles as she gets to her feet, letting the bottle of sake in her sleeves hit the ground.
Nothing to see here, just a lady who hit her limit without realizing.
“I am never drinking again,” She whispers softly, knowing her voice will carry. A second later she has the bottle open and is chugging it down.
“Never again,” She says, and takes another swig. Her gait when she resumes walking is slow and measured, the steps of someone trying to hide how drunk they are. Her shadows must buy it because by the time she reaches her apartment, the numbers have dwindled to just one.
She waits until she’s under her bed covers to let her tears fall, hand clamped over her mouth to keep her sobs from escaping.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

The next time she sees Danzo on his own, she’s ready. She watches with impassive eyes, looking for all the world like she’s reading her book( Icha Icha leaves much to be desired, but she’s sure no one would read it if she stopped, so she keeps buying more of it to prevent that).
The man, having deemed her useless, doesn’t even acknowledge her presence as he passes by the tree she’s under. Once she gets her eyes away from endless number of children, Katen finds herself staring at something even worse.
Eyeless shades, dead but not all the way there. Pieces of them are still stuck in the land of the living. Did this man really...is he actually wearing the eyes of his victims?
No, nobody would be that cold blooded. But even as she thinks it, Katen knows it’s true. Clawed pale hands grip Danzo, the dark haired, pale skinned people(most probably a family) touching the areas where he’s implanted their eyes. The youngest of them, a boy in his teens, sticking to the side of Danzo’s bandaged face.
Taking a deep breath, she looks at Danzo with more than her physical eye and has to swallow down bile. Tattered pieces of souls cling to him, his arm full of eyes. They watch the world from beneath the bandages, always spinning, never blinking. Anchoring the souls of those who should’ve passed long ago to the mortal plane.
It’s quite possibly one of the most horrifying things Katen has ever seen, and she’s seen a lot.
Some creatues are worse that hollows, they at least are driven by hunger, the likes of Danzo are driven by greed and the lust for power.When there’s no longer so much attention on her…Katen is going to kill him.  Turning a page she stops watching the man and starts reading for real.
When she finally has her blade in him, she won’t just make it hurt...she’ll make a game of it.

Chapter 3

Chapter Text

The people of Konoha, for all their warmth and kindness, might as well be perfect strangers to one another. They don’t really know each other. It’s like the whole village is made up of the Central 46’s wet dream come to life, all dissent has been forced out of the people.
They exist as a single entity, all of them convinced all that they do is for the greater good.
They call it the Will  of Fire, often times with  stars in their  eyes and in the case of Naruto-at very loud volume. The belief that everyone is family. Everyone should love and respect others as they would family.
It sounds wonderful, and it also trips every single alarm in Katen’s head.
You can’t get along with everyone, no matter how friendly you are. What of those people who aren’t seen as family? Are they afforded the same rights and freedoms? What about the ones with different spiritual beliefs? Were their lives as worthy as those deemed to possess the Will of fire?
Even as she asks herself those questions, Katen already knows the answer. She’d been a zanpakto afterall. She’s cut many soul chains. The spirits staring with blank eyes at the burning remains of their homes and bodies. Innocent men, women and children cut down all because the name of their deity did not match that of their killer.
Peace, harmony, and love for all, the killers would chant, no matter the religion it was always the same thing. Their melodic songs reaching the heavens, below them the bones of the people they’d built their ‘paradise’ upon long forgotten. Sometimes even the bodies of their own people, those who’d still had enough sense to question, were among corpses.
She looks over at the people of Konoha, and she’s overcome with sorrow.
Some genuinely believe the ideology (Naruto-as far as she can see, a lot of brainwashing, probably from childhood was involved), but for others she can tell they don’t. Either through loss or suppression, their trust in the ideal is broken. But still they stay, because just as with the Soul Society, Katen can tell this is a world of extremes.
Either you’re with them or you’re dead…simple, but very effective.

Chapter 4

Chapter Text

Konoha, affords her luxury, and she’s treated well. Even with all the spies and the subtle steering that makes sure she only roams  the civilian parts of town(they have no idea she’s seen more of the village than they ever will ) she has  a bit of freedom. But she has as much loyalty to the village, as she does to a used paper towel. There’s nothing tying her to the place, and the longer she stays, the more restless she becomes.
In the Seireitei, she’d stayed because Shunsui was there. And there’d been Nanao, and for the longest time there’d been Juushiro-always-until suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. 
Sitting under her usual tree, Katen brings a hand to her chest, her heart hurting. It’s been so long since she’s heard Sogyo-no-kotowari’s laugh that she’s worried she’ll forget what they sound like.
Centuries together and she’s  having trouble remembering the little hellions’ giggles…pathetic. Above her the world’s fakest cricket chirps and Katen shakes herself out of her slump. Her shadows have noticed her sudden mood slump, and rather than give them any more juicy details in her boring life, she stands with an exaggerated sigh.
But it seems, eventhough she’s done feeling sorry for herself, the day is not done with her. As soon as she stands, she’s overcome by a whirlwind of pink.
Cherry blossoms.
The petals ghost over her skin, obscuring her view, and Katen instantly looks to the side, her gaze sliding downwards. The spot next to her is empty, of course it is, the flower storm passes but Katen doesn’t move.
Of all her losses, her silent companion’s absence hurts the most. She’d torn herself apart to create the little brat, and eventhough she’d never said a word, Katen misses their silent conversations.
She trudges home with a heavy heart. Once there she throws herself onto the bed without a care and stares up at the ceiling.
“Were you ever lonely?” She asks turning her head slowly to look at the lone picture of Hatake Kakashi on her bedside. He doesn’t answer, just keeps on smiling his blank killer smile. Eventually she looks back up at the ceiling, her view of the wall of white above her obscured by the stream of tears running down her face.
Reaching up with a trembling hand, she wipes a tear. The droplet collecting on her fingernail before sliding off and splattering. The next morning, she makes sure to bump into Naruto and Sakura, a few smooth words here and there and they end up spending the day with her.
She watches them laugh and play wrestle, only growing somber when their teammate, a deserter- a traitor known as Uchiha Sasuke is mentioned. But all in all it’s a good day, and Katen finally gets a good read on them. They’re good kids, good people. Most likely, if things stay the way they are, their kindness won’t survive.
One day they’ll see the horror of what their village is, and they’ll get swallowed up by it. Either becoming monsters themselves or covering up for the beasts. Looking at them as they are, the sun in their hair, fighting over a cup of ramen, it’s hard to believe. But Katen’s been around for centuries, she knows how politics work.
In exposing the likes of Danzo, she’ll upend their lives. But they’re still far enough from the seat of power that they’ll actually do something to stomp out the evil instead of covering it up.
In a move uncharacteristic of her, she ruffles their hair as they stand to leave, and they stare at her wide eyed.
Oh, a holdover then, from when Kakashi still ran the show. She gives them a two fingered salute and she sees it the moment something in them settles. She’s pulled into a group hug, and when the kids leave, she knows it’s probably the last time she’ll ever see them. Some wounds are just too raw to keep reopening.

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

The village has been inflitrated.
Katen, civilian that she is, isn’t told directly. But she notes the increase in patrols, the random checkpoints, and the way every single ninja she comes across is on edge. 
Uchiha Sasuke, the fake hollows whisper, and Katen is intrigued.
She finds him amongst the cherry blossoms. Flowers fall around him, his head shifting to take her in, his chokuto instantly on hand. 
He’s a child, is her first thought.
He’s familiar, is her second. 
She wants to chalk it down to it being a carry over from Hatake, but she knows that’s not right. He doesn’t say anything, he simply glares and his eyes turn red. Not the hungering decayed things hanging off of Danzo, but wild and free. Startling against his pale skin.
Like red roses over pure snow.
When he moves, blade cutting the air where she’d been seconds earlier, Katen takes in a surprised breath. He’s not just familiar, he’s family.
Dozens of millenia with the little one, and Katen would recognize Kyokotsu’s fighting style anywhere.
Summoning her spiritual blade for the first time, Katen laughs as she brings it up to block a strike that would’ve decapitated her. 
They don’t fight...they play.
Hide and seek among the falling flowers. Knock-knock behind the tree trunks, bark shattering when blades miss flesh, and tag with the blunt ends of their swords. The boy, she can tell, does not understand. Centuries of shared experiences easily overwhelming the little time he’s been alive. Making it impossible for either of them to go at each other with intent to kill. They’ve only just met, and he trusts her. His instincts rebel, she sees it in the way his hand shakes, but he still lowers his blade, and in return, Katen lowers hers too.
Perhaps it’s a cruel punishment for her. Allowed to find the missing piece of her soul, only to watch him wither and die. Killed by this hellhole of a village. Kyokotsu, despite her love for fighting, was a gentle spirit, kind at heart.
And in the boy, Katen sees the same qualities. Buried by years of heartache, but still there, for those who know how to look. Did this world not know how precious he was? Did he know?
“Do you remember your name?” She asks, and he raises a single unamused brow, no recognition on his face. It’s her cue to step aside, to let him be, but there’s a chance, however small that she doesn’t have to be alone anymore.
Dance no matter what. Shunsui, used to say. So Katen takes a leap of faith. 
“Flower wind rage,”She whispers, and the cherry blossoms fall around them like a raging storm.
The boy startles, trying to move away, but Katen’s reiatsu, gentle only because it’s him, holds him in place“Flower god roar,” The petals sing as they fall.
“Heavenly wind rage,” Up above, the skies darken.
“... and heavenly demon sneer,” The lightning strike that follows, renders the world silent. And when the blinding light fades, where the once stood a boy, there is a spirit. Lone eye blinking in and out, blood red one moment, and blue the next.
When Katen cries, the sky weeps with her.

Chapter 6

Chapter Text

Shimura Danzo dies with an old bridge for a stage, and the silent trees as an audience.
Wherever Kyokotsu cuts, he bleeds freely. Blood splattering like rose petals over the old wooden bridge. He screams, he swears, feet light at the beginning, but becoming slow and sluggissh the longer the fight progresses.
As far as stories go, it’s predictable, the man was literally fighting death, there was only one way the story would end. But the build up, the build up, is everything.
Kyokotsu plays with him, eye flashing between blue and red, like a stage light focused on the main lead. She catches him in the leg. Skin, muscles, bone and marrow come apart. He gets a punch in with his eyeless arm, and Kyokotsu takes the fingers as payment. When there’s no more skin on his ribs for her to take off, she guts him.
His whole body tenses, waiting for her to remove her blade...she turns it...90, 180, 270, and then 360 degrees, A full circle, just for him, every organ the blade touches turns to mush. When she pulls it out, the man falls to his knees, the soup that used to be his internal organs spilling everywhere.
Shimura Danzo dies crying, his lone eye (the one that actually belongs to him), staring right into Kyokotsu’s dry one. 
Disbelieving.
The moment he breathes his last, the ghosts swarm like sharks tasting blood in the water. For a split second, the bridge is overcrowded.
The spirits a hive of activity, chattering amongst themselves, salivating. There’s a moment where Danzo, newly dead takes all of them in, and his face is instantly a darker shade of pale. They fall on him with the fury of a thousand vengeful spirits, and Katen goes to stand beside a stone faced Kyokotsu,watching the new show.
Her companion is the first to turn away, her eye tracking the flowers drifting in the breeze.The simple beauty of them contrasting sharply with carnage that is the remains of Shimura Danzo. When it comes time for them to leave, the presence of shinobi headed their way becoming stronger. Katen pauses briefly, a whisper of reiatsu flies from her and blankets the ravenous crowd. It settles over them, as delicate as lady’s silk handkerchief, barely noticed.
A blessing from death itself.
Unending vengeance for as long as they wanted it.
On their way out, the two of them turn back only once. Long enough to watch the Anbu descend on the brigde. Pitch black robes covering the blood red scene, the curtain falling after the final bow.
The Anbu fall upon the scene like a final curtain call. The red disappearing in a sea of black