Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Grass blades fold beneath his feet, soil molding to the shape of his soles. Minato stands in a field of dancing sage and falling leaves. There is one set of footprints in the mud, one trail of disturbed dust, one tapping foot, and one pair of searching eyes. Minato is well and thoroughly alone.

Which wouldn't be odd in any other case, most shinobi are rather isolated creatures by nature. The only problem is, well— Minato is alone. On a Tuesday, meaning training day, a scheduled training day.

He is alone in a training ground and not a single student of his in sight. Granted, it is much too early for him to have arrived,  it's barely even time for the meet up—but that's just it, isn't it? Minato is alone in a training field, on a scheduled training day, with no sign of Kakashi. . 

When he'd first arrived, he had fully expected to spot a tuft of silver hair either hidden in the trees or already scorching the newly grown grass of the field. Minato had expected to see the trailing end of that spiky silver hair, to be faced with a glare that really shouldn't have made him wilt as much as it did.

Nothing. 

He shrugged it off at first, even a punctual beast like Kakashi could have some cheat days, besides, his student was barely two digits old and about yeah high, children needed adequate sleep—and who was Minato to fuss over Kakashi possibly prioritizing his health over training for once?

It is only when he saw Rin enthusiastically waving at him, did he start to feel panic slowly claw its way into him.

“Good morning, Minato-sensei,” Rin greets him, polite as ever even as her eyes dart around, hands moving to clasp behind her back, “did Kakashi start on his own already?”

“No…he hasn’t arrived yet.” 

Rin blinks at him once, twice, head tilting, before slowly turning to face towards the entrance of the training ground, still utterly devoid of the silver haired chunin.

“Huh.”

They glance at one another, silent, and move to stand side by side. The sun had risen hours ago and Konoha was beginning to stir, the bustling sounds of the market and idle morning chatter ringing in their ears. Rin sucks in her cheeks, eyes darting to the foliage. Minato can only bring himself to smile, its corners tight even as his cheeks ache, his hand burrowing its way into Rin’s hair.

“ I’m sure he’s just peachy.” He answers her unspoken question, determined to chase away the worry in her eyes and smoothen the furrow in her brows. Rin smiles back in response, just as tight as his, and ducks her carefully combed hair away from his offending hand. 

They spend the rest of the time in silence, both intently staring at the entrance as they waited for the rest of their team. The longer the minutes dragged on, the more Minato's gut twisted, curling in itself as Rin continued to fidget in her spot.

When a gaggle of limbs and a blur of orange dashes forward with a screech halfway out his mouth, Minato has to violently bite his tongue to avoid slipping a distressed little sound at the sight of Obito. Glancing at the sun's position, Minato reckons that Obito isn’t even horribly late this time. That thought doesn’t stop his stomach from twisting into elaborate little bows, threatening to send bile rushing up his throat.

“I'm not late– am I? I’m not, hah! See? See?! I'm on time, hahah!” a deep breath,”Take that, Kaka—” Obito sputters off, finger freezing mid air from where it rose to point at where the chunin would normally be. 

“Eh?” Obito, eyes rapidly blinking, crouches down and starts, rather aggressively, patting the grass—the grass Kakashi should've been standing on— and blinking harder with each grain of soil sticking onto his palm. “Is he hiding? Again?! I swear once I see his smug little face—”

“Obito, Rin,” a voice cuts Obito off, stern and uncharacteristically acrid, his soiled hands pausing midair as both his and Rins backs straighten on instinct. Minato looks off into the distance, eyes narrowed with his heart lurching up his throat. “You two wait here and start on your warm ups. I'll go check on Kakashi, Alright?”

“Yes, sensei!” They yell in unison, but they make no move to start even as Minato disappears with a shunshin, two pairs of eyes tracing the path of the drifting leaves to the ground. Rin and Obito share a glance, concerned and disgruntled respectively. 

“Do you think he's okay?” Rin gnaws on her lip. 

Obito continues to smack the ground. 

⋆⁺₊⋆ ━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━ ⋆⁺₊⋆

Kushina had once bashed Minato's case of being a mother hen. Normally, he argues back and defends himself because they're shinobis at war — he's just being vigilant ! On another, unrelated note, that was the day Minato found out that it was a rather difficult task to refute the claim of being a mother hen when you're actively adding a seal that allows for instant transportation onto the surfaces of your students' door frames. 

Kakashi had loathed the sentiment, he claimed he didn't need his sensei to be at his every beck and call.

Still, Minato could pat his own back for his past vigilance because it allowed him to cross half of Konoha in a mere few seconds. In front of Kakashi's apartment door.

Kakashi's torn and bloodied door. 

It is only the years of experience and his own sheer pure will that Minato manages to shove the unbridled panic rising up his throat back to the depths of his training and take a deep breath before promptly freaking out, calmly.

He digs his fingers into the grainy texture of wood, assaulted with the lingering stench of rot and decay after he wrenches the door open. Lingering wouldn't even be the right word, actually, not when it was reaching near overwhelming heights with how forcefully it clung to the room.

“Kakashi?”

Crimson streaks the flooring, sinking deep into the wood. The walls are charred black, clumps of ash cracking away and falling away into tiny chunks. Furniture had toppled over and ripped, stuffing pitifully piling on top one another as gravity forced them out of their home. Water drips from the ceiling, a groaning pipe precariously tiling out of a busted ceiling.

Minato bites his tongue, an amateur move, when he spots a long trail of blood, the width of the line enough to resemble a mockingly red river. It is the denial that cuts through him, through his instincts, that stops him from taking off and immediately following the trail. Instead, he crouches down and only manages to lightly dip a finger in before he's bolting off to where it leads. 

The blood was still warm.

Minato hasn't felt a lick of chakra since he's stepped foot in here, but he also knows that dread has clouded his judgement enough to the point he can't fully rely on his senses at the moment. Still, the lack of chakra either meant Kakashi was not at home, or he is currently in a state of such severe chakra exhaustion that he can barely be sensed.

Minato doesn't know which one he'd prefer.

But the blood had been warm, so much so that it must've just recently spilled. Recently in the sense that it must've only hit the ground between the time Minato appeared at the door and him tearing it open.

Which means Kakashi had been here by the time he arrived, or at least someone was. But he wasn't able to fully feel for a signature and so whoever they were most likely did not have enough chakra for even a simple shunshin, or at least they wouldn't be able to pull it off without alerting him.

All points lead to Kakashi, an a lone Kakashi. Because despite all the wear and tear of the apartment, it did not look like there was any actual resistance. The blood, the charred walls, the torn furniture, the busted ceiling, none of them had any sort of rhyme or reason to it, nothing like the usual collateral of a fight.

This was not a fight.

A fight would have shown that the furniture was either used as a weapon, a shield, or a landing from a hit. It did not. The charred walls would've shown hints of a fire jutsu and its destructive nature. It didn't. The ceiling gives the impression of a rusted metal pipe simply having been encouraged to collapse earlier by an extraneous element rather than it having been a result of aggression. 

The ground shows only one set of unsteady, small , footsteps.

So, unless the other party was particularly good at hiding their tracks and Minato was just making stuff up in his bouts of denial, then this was not a fight involving two or more people.

this was just Kakashi. And the blood had been warm .

He walks alongside the trail, steady and appropriately weary. His footsteps are silent, he knows they are, yet they seem to echo in his ear with every slight thump of the ground. The pungent stench of death wafting through the air and the line of red guides him towards another door. Behind it, the sound of shattering porcelain echoes.

Without further fanfare, he lifts his leg and readies to strike.

The wood crumbles with a groan beneath the added force, leaving Minato staring into the wide eye of his student.

Eye, singular. Abounding gore obscures the other eye, layers upon layers blanketing the left side of his face. In Kakashi's grasp is a small, rounded object, almost squirming within the blood pooling between the crevices and folds of his skin. 

Sages above, is that his fucking eye?!

Chapter Text

Someone was screaming.

Yoshioka Kayo had been having a wonderful start to the day, having risen up before the sun and already starting to take stock of his wares before the rooster even got its first call of the day.

Konoha was just beginning to stir, bleary greetings and soft chatting filtering through his open blinds as the soft hum of his oven nulled him to serenity, when the dreadful screaming began.

The screaming scattered the birds out of their perch and scared away their pleasant chirping, and with them went his peace. 

The sound was less of a scream and more of an agony blown screech, if Kayo were to be asked. It sounded downright awful, like a pig aware of its impending demise under the butcher's blade.

That is to say, terrifying .

For all intents and purposes , the scream sounded like a child, a very tiny child. It sounded like the one emitting those horrible noises barely even had their vocal box developed and yet was already wearing it down to the point of disuse.

Kayo prided himself to be a non-meddling man, he's only survived this long because he had chosen to keep to himself and not go around sticking his nose into things that don't concern him, especially during this time of war.

But, before he is a wary man, he is, first and foremost, a father.

And that screaming sounds much too similar to his young Haruto for him to feel any resemblance of comfort just standing by.

Perhaps, for his own peace of mind, he'll walk by his neighbor's door and peek a glance to check if they're alright. 

⋆⁺₊⋆ ━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━ ⋆⁺₊⋆

Kakashi is screaming.

Kakashi himself doesn't know why, but it just felt right to gape his mouth open and scream his throat raw. 

The moment he blinked awake, spotted the ceiling of the apartment he lost during the Kyuubi attack, and processed what he was seeing. Screaming seemed like the only viable option.

Blinding white chakra fizzes into the air, erratic in its movement as its owner trashes in his bed. Sparks of lightning bounces across the four walls, narrowly avoiding light switches and bulbs in its path yet scorching its delicate surfaces. Kakashi tries to grab onto his chakra, reaching deep within himself to bully it back into submission, only to watch his control slip out of his fingers like water in a drain.

Was his chakra acting up post-mortem?

Kakashi knows he died, knows he's long past the point of no return when his heart ceases to beat and his lungs stop working. He remembers in full clarity the look on Naruto's face as his world faded to nothing, the crack in his voice as he pleaded— begged for him to wake up. Clenching and unclenching his hand, he wonders if his chakra was protesting his death by being an uncontrollable little shit.

The tendons in his wrist flex and with it highlights an anomaly on his skin. With the cautionary benefit of a war honed shinobi, he rips the blanket off his wrist and pauses.

He stares for a while. It's all he can ever seem to do.

There, right above his pulse, stark against the pale of his wrist, is a series of numbers slowly ticking away. 

186: 23: 34

It moves across the span of his skin, animated in its movement as the third number decreases the longer he attempts to rack his brain around it.

When the number had lowered by twenty, Kakashi long became tempted to gnaw his own tongue off and hope the bleeding would be severe enough to put him down. 

It's a timer. There's a timer on his wrist.

186 days, 23 hours, and 14 minutes.

A quick glance at the calendar tells him the date: 4th of January, 66 years since the founding of Konoha. The same year team 7 was assigned to the mission that damned them all. 

Another glance to his wrist allows him to come to the rather devastating conclusion that approximately 187 days from now will land on the day of that said mission. Giving him a little over 6 months before the timer reaches its end. 

What does it mean for him when it reaches its end?  Kakashi knows as much as the nearest rock. Though, he doubts it's any good. The whole thing reeks of trouble, it's practically inviting it in with open arms!

He needs to get rid of it. Whatever tragic end this timer may befall him, it needs to be gone. But, how, exactly, does one go about removing a moving timer from the skin of their wrist? 

The realization sucker punches him when a tuft of unruly gray hair drapes over his left eye as he tilts his head for better inspection.

“The sharingan,” Kakashi mutters, eyes wide with hysteria, "the fucking sharingan.”

The seal that sent him stumbling into this hell hole needed the mangekyou sharingan, didn't it? Obito's mangekyou sharingan. The seal needed kamui— an ability that, for all intents and purposes, is a space-time jutsu . However, kamui has always had its drawbacks, and has always been notorious for being a double edged sword.

Could this timer just be one of the many teeth on its blade? 

The dog blanket smothering him flies into the air as he kicks up a leg, stumbling out of bed and damning the floor for all that it wronged him when he smashes his face against it.

Landing onto his hands and knees, he trips over a leg trying to rise up, hand knocking into a frame when he flails around.  It is only when the frame shatters into a thousand tiny glass pieces across the wooden ground does he notice the red staining his flooring. 

“Well, that's just wonderful.”

If his injuries prior to his untimely death followed him to the past, if the fizzling chakra within his body had come with him as he ran from the future, then what are the chances the sharingan tagged along with him as well?

Eyes darting around, he makes the painstaking journey of crawling over to the bathroom. With adrenaline no longer fueling his body, he's intimately aware of the way his body hurts with every crawl he takes, muscles aching in protest and wounds screaming in agony. Clamping a hand to his stomach, Kakashi can only grimace when his palm comes back coated in slippery red. 

The more he moves, the more his chakra acts up. A particular bolt of lightning strikes the corner of his ceiling, starting a chain reaction of spindly cracks forming on the surface.

With detached resignation, Kakashi watches the cracks spread for a moment before continuing his self imposed torture of dragging his mortally wounded body—wounds he's yet to address— towards the bathroom door. 

From behind him, he swears he hears the sound of dripping water.

Finally, he reaches the door with only a few other casualties added from the journey, namely a couple of pieces of furniture and perhaps his walls. A problem for another time. 

With as much triumph as his bloody, shaking fingers can manage, the doorknob twists. Only, instead of being faced with cold tiles and a reflection of his mistakes, he's greeted with open air and a startled civilian— his old neighbor, he recalls— staring at his crawling form in abject horror.

He slams the door shut, and if the door tears with the force he closes it with, then that's only between him and the screaming civilian outside. 

He glances at the long trail of red he's ruined his wooden floors with, glances at the path that he now knows leads to the bathroom, and tilts his head upwards.

Whatever is up there, they better gain some form of amusement from this. 

After another extraneous journey of cursing and another dose of subtle screaming, he finally places a hand on the damp tiles of the bathroom. Hand, because he's still very much crawling, before hoisting himself up on wobbling legs.

A pale, childish face meets him in the mirror. Cheeks that fill out and mouth with too long fangs. Two black orbs meet his gaze—

Well, hmm…not exactly.

A singular black eye twitches, squinting in low horror.

A black wheel amidst a sea of red mocks him, lazily spinning as the abrupt feeling of chakra exhaustion washes over him. He blinks and his reflection blinks back. He bares his teeth, fangs and all, and watches the person in the mirror do the same.

He had speculated that perhaps the cursed eye tagged along, yes, but that hardly means he actually wanted it to.

Though, watching his reflection tilts its head, if the timer is a by-product of kamui and kamui is in Obito's eye— that is, Obito's eye which is currently residing in his skull. Then…

Wouldn't nipping the bud from the start rid himself of the problem before it ever even grew to take its roots? 

Choices, choices…

Choices that, ultimately, aren't that difficult to make.

A clawed hand, dripping with the remnants of his once infamous chidori, reaches to gouge out the eye. Thumb pulling down the skin of his bottom lid while the other fingers lazily rest on top.

Crust on the beds of his nail flake off and scatter across the porcelain sink, blood of the injuries from a time long gone already caking the surface of his cheek. 

Kakashi takes a breath, holds it, then exhales as he begins to press a finger to the surface of the eye. With the organ bared open by his thumb, the nail feels little resistance wedging its way between the eye itself and the skin holding it in— his bottom lid.

The only resistance he encounters is a barrier that quickly loses the battle against the intruder and soon tears in defeat. The knuckle resting on his eyelid presses down while the nail cupping the eye simultaneously hooks the finger behind it to push the eye up and outwards. 

Kakashi doesn't know whether he's gathered an incredibly high pain tolerance throughout the years or if he's simply once again running on full adrenaline and will only then feel the consequences of his actions at a later date.

Either way, nothing more than a hiss escapes his chapped lips. The eye pushes through the barrier of his skin and out of its confines. It escapes his body with such a loud squelch that Kakashi can not help wincing.

It plops into his hand and he scrambles to catch it, slipping in his hold due to the blood between his fingers and pooling underneath his nails. 

Please. Please, do not make him live with the fact he dropped Obito's eye.

In his mad scramble, a foot skids across a tile, jaw crashing onto the edge with a crack. His hand, still in its clawed form, digs into the surface.

The sound of shattering porcelain grounds into his ears just as the door crumbles apart. 

Kakashi gazes into Minato's eyes, watching the horror intensify in them the more the man takes in the sight of his student. Kakashi's hand unfurls, mouth gaping open at the sight of sunshine blonde hair and sky blue eyes. 

His heart pounds against the cage of his ribs, eyes stinging with renewed vigor and tongue all too heavy to lift. Kakashi clutches at his stomach where blood continues to drip, at his chest that feels too small to host his lungs. He stares at the mirage overlapping the visage of the living.

With one last, stuttered gasp, the eye in his grasp drops .