Chapter Text
A massive explosion rocks the street.
Kakashi rushes toward it, dropping his grocery bag and forgetting all about his day off — he hasn’t even taken off his ANBU uniform; the Hound mask is already on his face, and he channels more chakra into his legs to move faster. He lands on the roof; black smoke rises into the sky; Uchiha police officers are evacuating people; a child is crying; several familiar ANBU signatures are spreading out in different directions.
They’re looking for someone, Kakashi realizes, and sharpens all his senses; he smells blood, fading farther and farther away; he doesn’t think when he starts chasing. A mistake a rookie might make; usually, he’s smarter than that.
He finds himself outside the village’s defensive wall, having passed through a hole someone had cut there long ago, when he realizes he must warn the Hokage; he sends a shadow clone back while he carries out his mission — they didn’t give him the Hound’s mask for nothing.
The balance of power shifts in an instant when a stranger’s hand grips his throat, pinning him against a tree.
“Seems today is a ghost festival”, says Orochimaru, his hands caked in dried blood, his own blood pouring from his stomach; this man doesn’t look as though he’s feeling any pain.
Kakashi forms hand seals with one hand; lightning crackles between them, searing the opponent’s skin. The Sannin releases him, and he leaps backward, leaving enough room between them to maneuver, drawing his tanto and activating his Sharingan. He just needs to buy time until Minato-sensei arrives. His vision sharpens, he expends more chakra, and the Sharingan memorizes every micro-expression on his face; if Kakashi didn’t know better, he would have thought he saw a fleeting glimpse of sorrow (he is well acquainted with that feeling; he sees it every day in the mirror, even if the years have made that feeling weaker, and Naruto brightens his days).
“I suggest you surrender”, Kakashi finally says, his throat scratchy, and bruises will surely remain on his neck if he doesn’t let Rin heal him.
The Sannin smirks, mockingly and grotesquely.
“Your father threatened to kill me if I betrayed the village. Would you like to make good on his promise?” it sounds like a calm observation, and Kakashi frowns; in recent years, few have mentioned his father; even fewer times was it without an insulting undertone.
The wind passes between them like a serpent’s whisper, and all of Kakashi’s senses scream.
“I am not my father”, Kakashi replies, just as he has for the past eleven years.
The Sannin smirks again, his snake-like eyes scanning him from head to toe, and Kakashi grips the hilt of his tanto tighter.
“No, you’re not him”, the words ring out in the silence, and the Sannin moves so fast that Kakashi can only see him with the Sharingan; metal sparks fly — Orochimaru’s weapon is also a tanto, and he has more experience with it than Kakashi has had in his entire life.
Lightning flies across his blade: wild, uncontrollable, even more ferocious than in the Chidori — his attacks are parried as if he were a child; the shadow clone dissipates, memories catch up with him, Minato-sensei races through the Thunder God’s seals left on the trees, and Kakashi nearly gets hit in the eye by a stranger’s blade (again). The Sannin is wounded, the man is still bleeding, but this affects neither his speed nor his skills; snakes are summoned, they are venomous, and Kakashi cuts them down faster than they can bite him — it’s not a given that the village has an antidote for everything the chief researcher could have come up with.
The Earth element suppresses his lightning (which is practically unnatural), and the Fire element neutralizes his Water element skills; Kakashi can handle all the elements, but so can the Sannin — and they’re far better at it than he is.
He thinks about the promise he made to Naruto to bring him ramen next time; he thinks about the promise he made to support Rin during her exam at the hospital in two weeks; he thinks about the promise he made to Kushina-san to keep an eye on Sensei so he wouldn’t work at night.
He promised Obito he would see this world for him.
'I'm sorry', Kakashi thinks as the Hound's white mask shatters into pieces and he is thrown backward onto the ground; he doesn’t have time to get up before a stranger’s tanto pierces his left shoulder through his protective vest, and a stranger’s knee slams into his right wrist, breaking the bones and forcing his own weapon from his fingers.
For a moment, everything fell silent; the world slowed down in the Sharingan and spun again as a stranger’s hand approached his face; they say the Snake Sannin is possessed by the clan eyes of the Uchiha.
Before he had time to think about it, his mask was torn off — instead of his red eye being gouged out; his mask, which he had worn for as long as he could remember to hide from the thousand scents that fill the world; a mask without which he could not imagine himself, hating the feeling of bare skin.
Kakashi, for lack of a better word, feels stunned.
“That’s right”, says the Sannin above him, leaning in unseemly close; his bloodied fingers brush against his cheek and lips. “Nothing in common”, he says with pity — unless Kakashi’s mind is playing a twisted, cruel joke on him; he feels a nervous chuckle that never quite leaves his chest (long ago, he was told he had his mother’s face).
He senses the approach of the chakra that appears and disappears — sensei. The Sannin raises his head in the same direction, pulls the tanto from his shoulder, and Kakashi winces involuntarily. Orochimaru looks at him grimly — at his bare face — one last time before forming the reverse summoning seal and vanishing into another world.
Minato-sensei appears a moment later, just in time to catch a glimpse of the final hand seal and the smoke into which the legendary Sannin — now a renegade — vanishes. Kakashi sits down, still not quite believing what has happened, unsure of how to react to the whole situation; perhaps there was something wrong with his expression, because Minato-sensei flew into a rage unlike anything Kakashi had ever seen.
His sensei exhaled sharply, beginning to examine Kakashi from all angles, aggressively wiping his bloodied cheek with his sleeve and putting his mask back in place, for Kakashi was still too stunned to do it himself.
The number of medical tests that followed was excessive, but Sensei and Rin insisted so much that he had no choice but to agree.
(It took him two days to piece together what the scene must have looked like to his sensei.
The following weeks were wasted because his sensei was adamant that Orochimaru, in addition to his long list of crimes, was also a child molester.
Kakashi tried to point out that he was already sixteen, almost seventeen, and that removing the mask from his face, though unpleasant, was clearly not the same as molestation — but it had no effect.)