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Kakashi’s life exists in fragments.
Scattered memories, a puzzle with missing pieces long lost to time, snippets of emotion linked to things he can't quite picture anymore. People in his periphery, their presence hovering like ghosts that disappear when he gets too close. It’s for the best, maybe, because what little he does cling to is enough to make him believe he doesn't actually want to see the full picture, the full scope of tragedy that's scorched into every atom of his being.
It's a familiar, throbbing ache in his chest, a comforting death knell that echoes across a soul made of smoke and ashes barely held together by pale flesh and brittle bone, bearing the heart of a soldier. A tool, a weapon, a harbinger that hovers in the torn fabric of reality between life and death. A shadow that clings to dark corners with bared teeth and bloody hands that promise destruction, ruin, encapsulated in fingers sparking with electricity.
He bears the marks of that buzzing energy, lightning burned into taut skin. A livewire, always humming, always charged. Electric. Dangerous. The kind of danger that makes people turn their heads and double check the locks on their doors, as if that would stop him if they somehow found their names in his Bingo Book.
Innocents, Kakashi's raging mind tries to soothe him, sharp claws disguised as soft feathers, the whisper of his better angels. Not prey.
Tonight the prey he seeks sleeps soundly in a mansion, surrounded by the softest linens and guards that will never see him coming. The daimyō of the Land of Fire - a pathetic, simpering man from what he remembers of the one time they'd met, quick to bore and full of the pompous, lazy arrogance of someone in his position. Secure in the knowledge that he will not be challenged, that his word is law.
He's wrong, of course. This world was not made for men like him, men who cower behind others while they kill in his name.
Kakashi creeps through the shadows, a ghost in the night behind white porcelain swirled in crimson, fingers itching to cross off another name.
He will. He does. The screams of the daimyō's wife, an innocent, follow him, but he's long gone, back to a sketchy inn in a neighboring village where no one questions the blood on his hands or the fresh streaks of lightning burned into his flesh.
It's only there that he allows himself to settle, to scrub his hands before gathering a dinner from the kitchens that he eats alone in his room. Mask yanked down around his neck, canines tearing into tough, chewy meat, overcooked and tasteless. Habit, a lonely routine he finds comfort in.
He's always been good at being alone. It's even easier when people can't look at him without shrinking away in fear.
Wiping his fingers absently against the rough material of his dark pants, he gets to his feet and pulls his mask back up over his mouth, covers his unnatural eye with the silvery hair that falls over his forehead. That eye is open more than it's not these days, capturing every detail of the broken, rotted world around him.
In a way, it's a twisted, final fuck you to Obito's relentless optimism, unwavering even in the face of death. A revenge of sorts for this curse the Uchiha had shoved on him- he had died hopeful for a better world, now all his eye would see is the despair that claws at the underbelly, digging deep, bloody furrows into a cracked veneer.
The same despair that had been clawing at Kakashi himself since that night on a rocky outcropping, surrounded by enemies and singing birds with his hand soaked in blood that will never come off, one of the only memories he holds onto in perfect, agonizing clarity.
Rin's death will always be the memory that haunts his nightmares, wakes him from shallow, restless sleep and makes him scrub his hands until they're raw and red, keeps him up long past sunrise until he hits the road again with heavy, gritty eyes and tired limbs. He's so exhausted he can barely muster a transformation to disguise himself as he leaves, passing an increased patrol of shinobis sent from the Leaf, faces he'd recognize if he cared enough to look closer. He's stopped at the gate, his pack and identification checked, then sent on his way with a warning of caution.
"There's a killer out there," the guard tells him, unaware of the way Kakashi wants to rip the hitai-ate off of his forehead and gouge through the symbol of the Hidden Leaf until there's nothing left, ignorant of the thunderous rage coiling like a snake in the spaces between his ribs. "Murdered the daimyō last night. Watch yourself."
Kakashi only grunts in response, the sound hoarse and abrasive from disuse. It's been so long since he's spoken that he's not sure he even knows what his own voice sounds like anymore. He quells his rage with a quick huff of air and trudges down the road, away from a sleepy village unaware that the very killer the shinobis were there to find had slipped so easily between their fingers, like smoke disappearing into the wind.
He gathers his weapons from where he'd hidden them in the forest, buried in a small copse of tall, broad trees, pausing just long enough to look at the next name on his list.
Hiruzen Sarutobi. The Third Hokage, who had retired from his seat but was a little too quick, a little too eager, to take it right back before the Fourth Hokage's body was even cold. An overseer in the manufacture of child soldiers, groomed practically from birth to know nothing but blind loyalty to their village and its leader, carving them with brutal precision into weapons before their brains had even fully formed. A man who had once looked at Kakashi, broken and drowning in the depths of loss and despair, a killer soaked head to toe in blood in the name of his village, and told him that he was better suited to aid in their corruption. To strip away their innocence, their illusion of free will, before they were even old enough to realize what was being asked of them.
He had told the Hokage he would think about it. Instead, he had sat in the dark of his father's house and repainted his mask, erasing Hound until something new was born, a creature of bloodshed and righteous fury, a harbinger of death and thunderous ruin. He wore a mask painted in the memory of blood swirling across the floor, the symbol of the Hidden Leaf carved on the inside and scratched through, a permanent reminder. Never forget. Never forgive.
From weapon to nightmare in the blink of an eye. A list of names in a book dripping with blood. A ghost that stalks his prey with lethal intent, that shadow in the periphery of their vision that disappears when they look too close. Until they reek of fear - putrid, rotten - and realize that death is knocking on their door. A demon of their own making, trained by their own hands.
It's a heady feeling, knowing that he strikes such fear in their hearts. That they toss and turn after hearing of the death of a high ranking government official, wondering if they're next. It feels like poetic justice.
That feeling sticks with him when he lands on top of the Hokage Rock, crouched down with his elbows on his knees. He surveys the place he'd once called home, shrouded in twilight shadows and bustling with life and joy. Children laugh, too young yet to be forced into the Academy, their parents telling them it's time to go home and blissfully unaware that one day they won't. Were he in his right mind, it would be a comforting familiarity. Instead it sickens him, nausea roiling in his gut.
They don't see the cracks that he does, the facade crumbling as he slowly rips it apart with every life he takes.
They'll know soon enough, he thinks, eyes drawn to the red tower below. He'll drag every ugly secret and dirty truth to the surface, burn this village to the ground if he has to. He'll expose its rotten underbelly, the labyrinth of greed and corruption that the elders would kill children to protect. Power at all costs, right?
Once Kakashi had been proud to be a shinobi of the Leaf. To bear their symbol, to shed his blood to keep it safe. It was his duty, his honor.
Now, it's his disgrace.
Now, he knows that his sacrifices, the people he lost, were never to protect the village, but to protect power-hungry elders who would stop at nothing to keep their foothold in the world. They were, in ways, worse than the Hidden Mist, because while they didn't force tailed beasts into unwilling children, their machinations were subtle, buried in lies and secrets and backs stabbed clean through in their desperate bid to maintain the status quo. Gaslighting mothers into believing their children had died for a worthy cause. It disgusts him.
Minato-sensei had been the better of them, and sometimes when he hears his mind urging restraint, patience, he hears it in his sensei's voice. Maybe the Fourth Hokage could have changed things, but like Obito, like Rin, he'd been taken too soon. Another pillar of unrelenting hope, ripped from the world. Another unnecessary sacrifice.
Kakashi wonders if Sarutobi feels guilt for what he's done, what he's doing. If he lies awake at night and thinks about Minato like he does, if he asks himself if he did the right thing in taking back - and keeping - the mantle of Hokage.
Morbidly, he wonders if Minato had even stopped breathing before Sarutobi decided he wanted to be Hokage again after all. Maybe he'll ask him before he kills him.
Leaping off of one of the spikes topping Minato's carved head, he lands cat-like on the roof of the Hokage's Tower, dispatching the lone guard before he has a chance to react. His body disappears into the sealing scroll, no trace left of him. The thought of it being someone he knew, someone he'd worked with, twists a little uncomfortably in his gut, but he presses on.
He hopes Tenzou isn't on duty tonight. The kid had always been a little too naive, a little too innocent for this life, with a tentative flicker of hope Kakashi would hate to snuff out. Of course, Tenzou did his duty anyway, had never known anything else, but he didn't do it with the same cold detachment as the others. Like some primal part of his soul still cared. If the broken system Kakashi is razing to the ground deserves to be rebuilt, maybe Tenzou would be one of the pillars. Strong, unwavering, but still gentle. Someone who had seen the depths of the darkness just as Kakashi had, but instead of succumbing to the madness, continued to see the good.
Two Anbu stand outside the Hokage's office, neither with masks he recognizes. They don't see the shadow slinking along the wall until it's too late, their bodies sealed away to be dealt with later, too.
The Hokage sees it though. Hiruzen Sarutobi waits for him behind his desk, relaxed, like an agent of death itself hasn't come to claim his soul.
"It's been a long time, Kakashi."
The past few years haven't changed the Third Hokage much. He looks a little more tired, the circles under his eyes a little darker, the wrinkles on his skin a little more pronounced, but otherwise he was the same man that had stood over him on the rooftop three years ago, ordering him to put down the mask that had kept the fury that boiled in his lightning-charred bones down at a low simmer, the one thing that had allowed him to channel that rage into something a little less destructive to the system he'd lost faith in.
Kakashi takes that mask off now, clearing his throat to test a voice that hasn't been used since that day. It comes out cracked, hoarse, like the creak of a weather-warped wooden door that hasn't been opened in decades. "Not long enough."
Sarutobi hums thoughtfully in response, leaning forward and steepling his fingers. For someone staring his own end in the face, he looks decidedly unbothered.
Kakashi's rage snaps its jowls like a starved dog fighting for a piece of meat.
"It was me." The words slip out, a rough timbre thick with bitter fury. His wrath is a tempest, a storm battering against his ribs desperate to be let loose, to do what it does best and destroy. "The council, the daimyō. I saved you for last."
"Why is that?" the Hokage asks, low and gravelly, still calm. Still infuriating. Pissing him off without even trying. Kakashi stalks forward, slamming the kunai clutched in his bloody fingers down into the desk, so close it cuts the side of the Hokage's palm. He wonders what he looks like to the old man, leaning over him like this. If he sees the storm Kakashi would have him break beneath.
He leans closer, eyes dark as they stare into the old man's, steel and fire burning into fabricated warmth. He sees beneath, sees the cold, calculating man that leads children like lambs to slaughter. Who tells their mourning families that their death was some honorable thing, a sacrifice for the greater good. He never tells them what that 'greater good' really is.
"So you would know what was coming for you." He rips the blade from the wood, leaving a deep score in the dark spruce. The demon you crafted with your own blood-stained hands, your own weapon turned against you.
Hiruzen Sarutobi doesn't need to ask why. Kakashi can see it in his eyes when he registers that Kakashi had wanted him to be afraid, to sate the raging beast with the acrid scent of his fear. The old man chuckles, low and deep in his throat.
"Not what you were hoping for, is it Kakashi?" His steady voice, his unwavering calm, only fuels the fire burning in Kakashi's chest, soot building up along the pleura of his lungs and making it hard to breathe. His vision is shaded in the all consuming color of blood.
Kakashi's hand is quick to force the Hokage's yell of pain back into his mouth when two kunai drive through his hands into the desk, keeping him from forming hand signs. Keeping him from escape.
The Hokage, once a renowned shinobi who put his own kind of fear into the hearts of his enemies, has gotten slow in his old age, complacent. He's underestimated the lightning storm that lives in Kakashi's skin, the song of birds that is his thunderclap.
He moves quicker than a blink, speed trained into him just as sharply as force and precision, and strikes.
And like all the others, arrogant enough to believe they're invulnerable, Hiruzen Sarutobi too collapses forward, a hole plunged through his chest just like Rin's.
Kakashi has lost count of how many people's chest cavities he's known so intimately under the Hokage's orders, but this one is certainly one of the most significant.
With the Hokage Tower burning behind him, he finally puts a finger on what makes this one different.
It doesn't feel like tragedy or duty.
It feels like victory.