Chapter Text
“No, you can’t have Naruto,” Kakashi said, wondering what the world had come to that he had to say this out loud. Twenty years ago, he’d stood in this office behind Minato’s shoulder, proud to be his Anbu, no matter that Kakashi was only ten and shouldn’t have been there at all. Now, he was standing at impatient attention as Danzou lounged behind the desk, and Kakashi still shouldn’t have been there, having to say out loud that Danzou couldn’t brand Naruto with a seal and imprison him underground for the rest of his life.
Danzou waved a hand dismissively. “I’m not cruel, Kakashi. He can have visitors, and I think I’ll recruit Sakura, too, so he’ll have everything he needs.” Absolutely wild statement, there. “Or we can do it your way, and he can die a bloody death like his father, and mother, and clan, and on and on.”
“By that argument we should all stop being shinobi. And it’s still a no,” Kakashi said firmly. “You cannot have either of my students, and I might as well say I’m keeping Sai, too. Being Hokage hasn’t made you a deity, Danzou. Your face isn’t even on the cliff, yet.”
“Does it take a deity to command obedience from shinobi these days?” Danzou asked, his voice deceptively mild. Kakashi had suffered the man enough to know he enjoyed shit like this.
Whatever. Kakashi hadn’t wanted to defect, but it looked like the world had gone to shit beyond anyone’s expectations. Sakura and Naruto weren’t even in the village, the former closeted away in sage training and the latter visiting one of Minato’s hideaways. Kakashi could grab Naruto, figure out a way to get into contact with Sakura, and go from there. There were plenty of places they could go, and between all of them, they didn’t really need Konoha. Not if it would be like this.
Danzou sighed. “You won’t even answer me, Kakashi? This is a dull way to make a point.”
“I just don’t have anything more to say. Are we finished?”
Danzou fiddled absently with his glass of whiskey, watching him with one flat black eye. It reminded Kakashi of a river stone, buried too deep for light to find it. “No, we aren’t,” Danzou said. “I need your agreement, Kakashi.”
Ah, so that was how it would be. Kakashi started his shunshin just a moment too late, catching himself before he slammed into the warding that went down along the walls. It didn’t stop anyone from jumping in, though. His kunai was in his hand one instant and then buried in the skull of a Root agents the next, and by then Kakashi had already finished the jutsu for a water dragon.
It filled the room, roaring Kakashi’s anger and lashing out at the Root agents that had crowded in. It was a poor way to fight him, if Kakashi was being honest. He couldn’t be crushed to death with human bodies.
Chidori sprang up around his hand, and he ducked under the water dragon to spear a kunoichi through the chest, flooding the jutsu with enough chakra to keep it going as he turned and dodged a kunai to the throat, punching his fist through the man’s head.
It was a mess, the whole room crowded and loud and stinking of alcohol and blood. The Root agents were silent, but the clash of kunai and the roaring of the water dragon made up for it. Kakashi made a clone, substituted with it, and kicked a hole through the wall where he remembered the first of the ward seals being placed. Damn Mito and her redundancies. Five seals. Five fucking seals he had to get to.
Kakashi got the second and the third easily enough, cutting through more agents than he was willing to think of. Later, he could remember they were people like Tenzou and Sai, but right now they were just obstacles. He took a couple of cuts, minor injuries, and he hurt himself more by accidentally slamming his hip into a bookshelf. It was fine; he got the fourth seal, stepping over bodies, hunting for Danzou as he did. Maybe he could do the world a favor and finally kill the bastard.
Danzou seemed to have disappeared, though, or maybe he was wearing a mask, hidden among the agents pouring into the crowded room. Blood filled his nose. Chidori screamed in his ear. Kakashi grabbed a man and cut through his throat, throwing his body at the next, dodging to just get the fifth—
His body locked up. Kakashi crashed heavily to the ground, his arms and legs moving at an excruciating crawl. The seal was a meter away, just below Danzou’s vacant chair, but Kakashi felt a foot press into his back. His chakra fell out of his grasp, sliding away from him. Fuck.
Well, there were worse ways to go out. He’d go down as a traitor, but a part of Kakashi had been ready to leave for a long time, now. His ninken would find Naruto once the bond was broken; they’d know something was wrong, they’d figure it out. Kakashi’s death would keep his students safe, or at least give them a chance.
The foot kicked at his shoulder, rolling Kakashi into his back. Danzou looked down at him. “Kakashi, you shouldn’t have reacted so strongly to this poison. Someone’s been neglecting maintaining their immunity.”
Yeah, and even if he hadn’t (Sakura was just so reliable) Danzou would have used something Anbu weren’t immune to. Or maybe Danzou was just lying. Kicking him while he was down. In as many ways as he could.
“You killed a lot of my agents. Again,” Danzou said, sounding extremely broken up about it. Danzou practically picked the fuckers off of trees for all the worth he attached to them. At least, to the ones who weren’t specially made. Or stolen for their bloodline limit. “I just wanted to have a civil conversation with you.”
“Just kill me already. This is boring,” Kakashi said, happy to find that he could still speak.
Danzou arched his eyes. “No last words?”
“Shinobi don’t have last words.” They had shitty, sad, half-assed letters, kept hidden in their drawers at home. Kakashi had read more than a few of them. He’d written his own. It’d do just as much good as all the others.
Danzou sighed. “I’m going to give you two options, Kakashi. I can kill you, and then I can immediately send everyone I have to go apprehend Naruto. I’ll tell the whole village that Naruto killed you and is evading capture. Sure, it’ll be a hard sell, but I think I can do it. I think people will believe that the effort of killing Pein weakened him so much that the Kyuubi broke through, tragically killing you. I can even produce some witnesses. And Naruto’s weak to genjutsu, right? Maybe I can even convince him that he did kill you. I’ll have a lot of time to try, won’t I?”
Kakashi stared at him, “Why? Why go to those lengths?”
Danzou just looked back at him. “I genuinely don’t see why I shouldn’t. But I will give you a second option, Kakashi, since you love your students so much.”
Kakashi groped for his kamui, his chakra still as useful as a pile of wet sand inside him. If he could just fucking do it… no, his eye refused to cooperate with him.
“Ultimately, I just need some way to control Naruto. How about this? I keep you, as insurance, and he stays free. I’ll even let Sai go, and forget about Sakura. You get everything you want.”
Kakashi didn’t trust it. Who would possibly trust a deal like that? Danzou must be used to luring in idiot children. “Go fuck yourself.”
Danzou made a clicking noise in his throat that was so insulting Kakashi nearly managed to kick him. Or, well, he got his leg to twitch.
“Think about it, Kakashi. You wouldn’t be rotting in a cell, necessary. I could give you lots of things to do, lots of ways to be useful, and you’d know your students are free because of you. Or you can die knowing they’ll all suffer.”
“It’s the same no matter what I pick,” Kakashi pointed out. “No deal.”
Danzou leaned over him, his single black eye utterly endless. “Can you really take that chance, Kakashi? I imagine it’s easy to die. Attractive. But can you really take the easy way out, knowing that I might not be lying? I promise I’m not. I really, genuinely, am telling you that I’ll uphold my part of the deal. You for your students, and Sai.”
No, Kakashi wasn’t an idiot. Only an idiot would believe him.
“You are a lot like your father. How do you think your students will react, when I tell him you had the chance to save them and didn’t?”
Kakashi tuned him out. He wasn’t falling for this shit. It was so obviously a trap. So obviously lies. Kakashi’s father had made his own choice. He’d been trying the best he could. Some people just… couldn’t keep going. Kakashi had figured that out eventually. But, a voice said in his mind, Kakashi had spent years hating his father. Could he deal with Naruto and Sakura feeling the same way towards him?
“They may not believe me the first few times,” Danzou continued. “But I’ll have them forever. If I just tell them over and over that you left them, how long do you think it’ll take before they believe me? And, honestly, won’t I be right? So by all means, die right now and ensure what I’m saying happens. Or take a chance on me being truthful.”
Kakashi looked away. No. No, Danzou was… It was too easy to imagine Danzou doing what he said. It was too easy to believe him. To easy imagining Naruto and Sakura believing that he’d…
“You really don’t want to at least try and trust me? Death is so final,” Danzou continued. “I don’t know how many times you want me to promise. My word as a shinobi, I will leave them alone if you act as leverage.”
Kakashi felt his resolve break, all at once. The peace of death, the world where he died because he’d tried his best and failed, vanished. Instead, he cursed himself for an idiot as he said, “Okay.”
-
Kakashi woke up in darkness. He took stock and found that he was naked, wearing chakra cuffs, and otherwise left lying on the ground. It was slightly warm, and he wasn’t thirsty, or hungry, or injured. Overall, it was the most pleasant imprisonment Kakashi had ever had in his life. So far.
He sat up, looked around, and it was still dark. When he stood up and wandered around a bit, and his hands hit stone walls pretty quickly. He gathered that he was in a featureless stone room, and he felt a rectangular seam that ran around a featureless stone door. There wasn’t anything in the room, and the walls and floor were smooth. Nothing really to do.
Kakashi eventually lay back down and went inside his sharingan, replaying his memories to himself. He didn’t have an excessive amount of them. It was a lot of fighting, with a couple hours or so of fragmented time with his students and other people he liked mixed in. And then, of course, Rin.
Rin dominated in his sharingan more than anyone else, and no matter how he avoided her, it was the way of sharingan that her memories pushed to the surface. Rin wanted to be seen. His memories of her demanded to be felt and lived.
Kakashi understood, thought the basic instruction he’d been given, and Itachi’s general musings, that this was normal. All sharingan memories were preserved perfectly, and when Kakashi watched them it was like he lived them again. They were permanently pinned inside his mind, and the important ones, the traumatic ones, defined him more than others.
So most Uchiha were picky about the memories they stored. No one could avoid having many memories of training and combat— they were all shinobi, so of course those memories were important. It was the other ones that had to be carefully chosen. Sharingan should be full of time spent with loved ones, of memories of sitting outside and relished a pleasant day, or moments where one could look in the mirror and be proud of who looked back at them.
Kakashi didn’t have many of those. His sharingan didn’t turn on and off instinctively; it was always on when he opened his eye and uncovered it, and doing so was very obvious. It was a threat, to most people. So he didn’t. So he didn’t have many memories.
It was fine, though, because Kakashi was only bored. There were worse things to do than replay his own battles, reliving the high of fighting at full capacity. He saw Rin as infrequently as he could, visiting her and saying goodbye, and then burying himself in battle again.
Uchiha were famously difficult to torture. Unless someone dug their eyes out, which tended to kill them, the Uchiha just sat in their sharingan, ignoring their body until their torturers gave up, one way or another. So there was an argument to be made, kind of, that Kakashi was better suited to imprisonment than his students.
Ridiculous. He was better suited because he’d done it before, because he deserved to suffer more, and because he was the adult put in charge of his cute little menaces— even if they were all adults now. Nineteen, already. Sage. But nineteen was still young. Too young to get thrown into the dark and left there. Thirty one was… not old, but he’d lived longer than most. Much, much longer than most.
Ha. If Danzou wasn’t lying. But what did it matter? Kakashi had agreed, sure, but he’d have ended up here regardless of the answer he gave. That was certain.
At some point, Kakashi drifted off to sleep.
-
Kakashi woke up for the fourth time to Yamanaka Ageha (if the name he’d been given was real) turning on the lights to feed him, give him water, and everything else. Kakashi was allowed to relieve himself in a way that didn’t involve pissing and shitting in the corner, which he supposed he was grateful for, though they could have made it more humane.
At the end of it, Ageha always looked at him, doing something to his mind that Kakashi couldn’t identify. He hoped it was only Ageha watching all his memories, that Ageha was doing it at his own leisurely pace, looking for specific things and then leaving to write them down. Kakashi really, really hoped that was it. Normally, when Yamanaka looked through his memories, Kakashi was aware of what they were doing.
With this, Ageha just looked into his eyes and then the world twitched, time jumping forward. If Kakashi tried close his eyes, or claim he wasn’t hungry or thirsty, or throw up a meager chakra-less defense, then Ageha would just hold him down and make him, barrelling through his defense like it was nothing.
Kakashi would have liked to say that, even without chakra, he was a good enough fighter to take on one person without it. Unfortunately, Ageha had to be some kind of monster. Yamanaka were scary, their bloodline limits were awful to fight, but Ageha didn’t bother with any of that. He just broke Kakashi down with basic taijutsu, and the moment they made eye contact it was over.
The fourth time went the same as the third, and the seventh was still the same, and Kakashi lost track after that. He shouldn’t have lost track. He had nine specific memories in his sharingan (just brief flickers because he didn’t want tons of memories of Ageha) but part of him insisted that there was more. Or he would be fairly certain there had only been thirteen times, and then there were fifteen memories.
Kakashi chalked it up to general imprisonment insanity. People weren’t made to stay in the dark for so long. People weren’t made to know that their entire life was going to be this, forever and ever and ever. So Kakashi decided to stop counting, stop caring, and just stayed in his sharingan. Or slept. He slept an awful lot. That was also normal. Better than being tortured.
Ageha refused to talk to him much, ignoring Kakashi’s questions. Again, normal. If Kakashi was torturing a prisoner, he’d never tell them how long it had been, or what would happen. Except… well, it was useless to claim that Danzou wasn’t supposed to torture him. Obviously the bastard got off on it.
Kakashi woke up at some point—who could— to new people in his room. He made the mistake of looking in Ageha’s direction before he could close his eyes, and his body went limp and collapsed. The two masked agents had a very easy time chaining Kakashi to the ground.
He’d gotten used to being naked around Ageha, but Kakashi couldn’t say he liked this. He’d been spared that aspect of imprisonment so far, but there were only so many ways being chained down naked could go.
So Kakashi was surprised when the masked agents took out fuinjutsu materials. Was this the part where they branded his tongue, then? No, apparently not. They were focused lower, and no matter how Kakashi tried to move, the two agents took advantage of his paralysis to slowly, painstakingly, paint some kind of seal across his pelvis. Whatever it was, it was complex, and Kakashi was really started to get truly uneasy. He’d understood most of what had been done to him so far, but this was completely beyond the realm of what he’d expected.
There was no chance that it would be good, fuinjutsu was best kept far away from bodies, and Kakashi’s anxiety mounted as the seal was finished, and the agents moved on to painting more on him.
Fuinjutsu was a varied art-form, as old as it was dangerous, and seals could do any number of things. Usually those things were bad. Often they weren’t exactly what anyone intended— especially with all the actual seal-masters dead now— and Kakashi couldn’t think of any kind of fuinjutsu that went on a person’s body and was this complex. Or went on the parts of his body they were paying attention to.
His pelvis was bad enough. No human being would ever need, or want, seals drawn on their cock. And balls. And around their chest and around their throat. Kakashi tried to work his jaw enough to demand to know what they were doing, and nothing came out. His glares at Ageha were ignored. Every attempt he made to move was useless.
When he was sure that they had to be finished because there wasn’t any part of him left, they unchained him and flipped him over. Kakashi felt hands on his ass, he decided it was time to go in his sharingan. He was aware that they were drawing seals around his ass, and he felt them reaching fingers in to stretch him, but it was distant. Kakashi could forget it and pretend that the only thing that was actually real was his Anbu team all around him and the kunai in his hand.
His capacity for thinking unrelated thoughts while in his sharingan memories was not large. The memory overwrote the present with the past too strongly. But when Kakashi let himself drift out to check, every now and again, he decided that at least he’d be dying soon. Whatever this ridiculous experiment was, Kakashi wasn’t surviving it. Whatever seal when inside a person’s asshole, the chances of the Root agents actually doing it right were zero. He tried his best not to pay attention. The sensation of the tiny brushes inside him was something he could absolutely do without.
Sage, what a stupid way to go. At least Kakashi could commiserate with all Orochimaru’s victims on the other side.
The two agents left eventually without actually activating the seal, and Ageha flipped him over again. “I bet you’re curious,” he said.
Kakashi found he could speak again, even though his body still couldn’t move. “No.” He could die without knowing.
“Alright then,” Ageha said, sounding amused. Kakashi felt him tap the seal on his pelvis and there was a warm feeling as chakra spread along the seal and all the others it was connected to. While it was an inherently pleasant feeling, Kakashi could have absolutely done without it being in the places it was. The warm pooled and collected along his cock and balls, tingling on his nipples.
His body gave in immediately, the traitorous thing. It didn’t matter, though, because any minute now the seals would start working and he’d be ripped apart into pieces by shitty, experimental fuinjutsu. If Kakashi died slightly aroused, well, it could have been worse.
Except, he wasn’t dying. And something was absolutely wrong with him, because he felt too sweaty, and too hot, and he wasn’t the least bit horny but his entire body really was. Much, much too horny. The disconnect was jarring. Sickening. Kakashi wanted to hide himself back inside his sharingan.
“What is this?” he demanded. “What’s wrong with you all? This is sick.”
Ageha hummed noncommittally. “I suppose you’ll find out, won’t you?” he said, grabbing Kakashi’s hands and taking off the handcuffs. Kakashi’s chakra should have immediately picked up, but it didn’t.
That meant that not only had the fuinjutsu not killed him, but it had permanently sealed his chakra. On top of making him much too uncomfortably aroused, which Kakashi really hoped was only a side effect.
Kakashi found he could move, and when he looked down at himself he found that the activated arrays had faded to a pale grey color, barely visible against his skin. He wouldn’t have found them if he wasn’t looking.
He looked back at Ageha, who had stood up, and was staring at him dispassionately.
“Danzou planned to do this from the start,” Kakashi demanded, needing to have it confirmed. “This is just him living out some bizarre fantasy, isn’t it? Naruto and Sakura were never going to be imprisoned.”
Ageha arched his eyebrows. “No, he wasn’t lying to you,” he said flatly, and when he closed the door, Kakashi was plunged back into darkness.