Work Text:
This is what his father would say: “One thing at a time, Kakashi.”
Sakumo had been an observant man, it was what had made him such an efficient fighter. He would first assess a situation, then take care, one thing at a time, of all the details of the situation at hand.
It was, in Kakashi’s eyes, what also had made him a good father. He’d hold on, day after day after day, even when the pain was unbearable. Even when his father had seemed crushed under the burden of his failures, he had held on for as long as he could, giving as much of his person as he could to Kakashi.
Kakashi knows he resents his father for leaving him alone so soon, for letting him bear the burden of grief, but that resentment doesn’t fester like he would have expected it to. He doesn’t hold his father responsible for his own death as much as the village who harassed him to it and pushed him over the edge for so many years. Sakumo might have held the blade that ended his life, but Konoha had been the one to give him the weapon and told him how to use it.
The legend was that the Hatake clan had come from wolves.
Even when he was very young and his father would tell him stories, he knew legends tended to be greatly exaggerated, even this one. Though as he grew up, he started to think that maybe those legends had a layer of truth at the bottom of them. He had seen his father ignore the stares and vitriol thrown his way, but bare his teeth at anyone who dared direct those same words at Kakashi.
The pack had only ever been the two of them, father and son protecting each other in a village that did not want them. When Obito and Rin managed to snake their way into his life, Kakashi had also come to consider them to be pack. Minato-sensei was something like a brother; he and Kushina were also part of his pack.
When he found Sakumo on that grey November day, he realized that it would now be his responsibility to protect all of them, his precious people.
Kakashi is a friend and a son first, then a Hatake second. He doesn’t know much about the clan, save for the few stories his father shared with him; still, he feels a strange sense of belonging to them, a family he has never even met. He has Obito and Rin, Minato and Kushina, and Gai too, who successfully entered his life after pestering him for years about their so-called rivalry. They are his precious people, his pack, and somewhere up in the north lives the rest of it, blood ties he has never seen or felt, but that he knows are there. He knows if he ever found them, he’d belong.
At the very bottom of the list of the things Kakashi believes himself to be, he is of Konoha. The idea of leaving the village makes its way into his head when he wakes up in the hospital with Obito staring at him from the doorway after the Sanbi was sealed inside of Rin by Kiri.
Obito, who had died for him months prior and had seemingly now come back from the dead for him and Rin, was now even worse than a black sheep in his clan’s eyes; he was a traitor.
Rin, who had offered to give up her life to keep her home safe from the tailed beast, wasn’t sure she could ever come back inside the village safely.
And Kakashi, left alone without a father or a purpose, heavy with the weight of his guilt over failing his precious people not once, not twice, but three times now.
All three of them were orphans now; maybe all three of them had never belonged to Konoha in the first place.