AN: Hi, please, bear with my writing from earlier. It gets better as I move from pre-written/ semi pre-written content to newer work. That transition happens shortly.

I tend to update weekly.

Also: Warnings for- Childhood trauma, violence, gore and mentions of the darker aspects of shinobi life.

"A ship is always safe at shore but that is not what it's built for"

Chapter 1: Enter, Hatake Sakumo

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, what my lousy childhood was like, how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

In my first life, I had one little sister.

Here, I have a grand total of nine brothers. We have not been named yet, but I know what we are going to be called: Pakkun, Bull, Urushi, Shiba, Bisuke, Akino, Ūhei, Guruko and, well, me, and another pup.

The fact that I had an extra to the pack, well, discounting me, was as surprising as it was depressing. After all, since he didn't show up later on probably meant that in this cutthroat world of ours, he probably died.

Ouch

Weirdly enough, I could feel cold, unwelcoming air outside of my mother's womb as soon as I could pay attention to it. My sense of taste was nearly as good as it had been in my last life, right after birth too.

I couldn't say the same for my other senses, though.

It seemed like a dog-thing or at least a ninken-thing, 'cause I wasn't exactly the only one who seemed to have taste and touch right out of the womb.

I felt like I was napping most of the time, to be honest. By that, I mean, while I did nap a lot, almost all of my interactions at this age were not actually controlled by me. It was controlled by my brain.

Normally, the maturity of your brain and soul is roughly equal; both your body and soul have the same number of memories after all. However, my young mind, couldn't keep up with my much more mature soul, and the corresponding memories, worldview, etcetera etcetera.

So, I spent much of my waking moments a little bit like if I was in my old world's most sophisticated cinema.

I watched over a long, too long time as my vision slowly cleared, over the course of many, many sleeps (Technical measurement, right here. I didn't really have any other method for measuring time) and the soft, comfortable pillow I was on turned to an equally comfortable pale, straw coloured rug, and then to a (to my eyes) massive dog.

Eventually, our motor movements were good enough to play-flight, usually with Pakkun (who was small, even for a puppy,) riding Bull as they charge at our little groups of two's and three's as we mock-battle our way to get the 'honour' of feeling more important.

Usually, Bull (Who is large for a puppy) either bowls us over like little puppy-shaped footballs, or we all decide to conspire against Fort Bull And Pakkun and puppy-pile them.

Except, with little toothless, gummy-jaws.

And, like, no cohesion.

At one point, we had a bizarre politics forming where anyone who joined in with Bull and Pakkun was promptly ignored and evaded by everyone not called Bull and Pakkun, but eventually, it just collapsed as we were more interested in food than puppy-fights.

Even me. Maturity or no, I was really just a spectator at this point.

After about a month, we started to be left to rest on genuine rugs as mum left and came back for her food, as opposed to having it all brought to her.

And the milk. I mustn't forget the milk. Though I really want to forget the milk.

Hey! You can blame infantile amnesia for the inability to remember your own suckling phase! As little as my soul could affect my thoughts, it still acted like the world's biggest hard drive, and fucking remembered that part of my life.

Damnit, Shinigami! You could've let my soul, I dunno, float into my head after a few months!

At least it only lasted two months, as opposed to, like, the decade it seemed to take in my last remembered life.

Though two months of… that is always two months way too many.

I swear, I will never be able to look at breasts without shivering and curling into foetal position at this point.

Good thing I'm a dog.

Well, I'm a dog -I'm not a ninken yet- so perhaps not foetal position, but the point stands!

Grrr! Me angry!

Bitching (Ahaha!) about my new life or no, after three months of having our mother, we pups were separated from her.

While I wasn't anything more than a backup-drive at the moment, to be out of her 'aura' was scary, and it hurt.

Let it never be said that puppies didn't notice their mother going away.

Granted, I didn't remember much. Granted, I was literally the most detached of the pack, memory-bank and all that.

But here's the thing:

Memories are links in the brain. The hand links with the ball and links with catching. Stuff like that.

But memories also link to emotion.

Remember when I said it was a 'little' bit like being in the world's greatest cinema? Well, that's because one of the primary objectives of a cinema is to impart feelings to the viewers

Better graphics? More lifelike? Relatable? All these things are of great importance to film-makers.

I didn't have to go through all that middle-man bull. I was not just looking there, I was there.

And that made all the difference in the world.

When I was near my mother, the smell of home and milk and safety, I felt safe. In my old life, as a human, I knew that in the familiar, calming presence of a mother (in an ideal home life), the child's brain will link her to happier times, and safety. It's why familiar toys are shown to children in panic attacks if they had a perfectly healthy, happy home life that does not prompt negative feelings.

We had a happy, healthy home life.

Then she left.

She was our rock, quite literally. We spent time lying on her, sleeping with her limbs around us, her feeding us, protecting us, and her leaving seemed to be the equivalent of ripping fishing hooks out of flesh.

And in that day, that hour, that second, where I was surrounded by eight puppies howling to the skies, I swore that I would protect them.

I swore that they would feel just as safe around me.

(And I never mentioned if I was howling too)

And it was that day that Sakumo Hatake entered our life holding his little three-year old charge in his arms, and his (pale, sickly-looking) wife trailing behind him, with what looked like a solid clone of a kind letting her arms cling to him, exhaustion in her slump and the thin sheen, and smell, of sweat on her forehead.

Sakumo Hatake.

Stronger than almost all of Konoha's Jonin.

Stronger than the Sannin.

Probably a Hokage candidate.

Saved Konoha at least once.

Could kill me with his pinky.

But he isn't one of the pack

So then I growled, the deep sound causing my flesh to ripple slightly, my hairs on end, and all four legs spread.

On one hand, I was something a three months old German Shepherd.

On the other hand, I was three months old.

Even when resting my weight on my hind legs, I probably wouldn't make it past his waist.

Is he why the pack was a member short later on?

Then he handed Kakashi to a seal-less, seamlessly formed Kage Bushin (I could tell from the smoke) and he chuckled.

"He's a feisty one, eh?" Behind him, his wife smiled.

"Good thing Kakashi-kun's going to have such a tight-knit pack."

Kakashi's mother was a tall, thin woman with faded, freshly-combed brown hair and an angular face. She had a pair of bags under each eye, with the shadows extending them to a large extent.

But, without a shadow of a doubt, the most defining characteristic was the two (Faded) red, base-up triangles on her cheeks.

Isosceles Triangles, to be exact.

I collapsed into a more comfortable, non-threatening position, resting on my hind legs.

Fuck, I just threatened one of the most powerful people I will ever meet

I would have been a little more openly worried in my old body to Sakumo.

Unfortunately, Sakumo probably works with Ninken, and therefore noticed my anxiety anyway. And if he didn't, his wife would've.

And the pack most definitely did, based on the way that we gravitated together.

Then The Words slipped from my mouth, and she froze.

"You are an Inuzuka" I muttered, forgetting that she can understand ninken's speech.

Big mistake.

She frowned and stroked her chin reflexively (she's probably off-guard in presence of her ridiculously OP husband and the non-threats we were. Still, I mused, she couldn't have been on duty for a while for some of her shinobi edge to blunt).

Then she spoke.

If we had been ninken, I have no doubt that she would have replied in her mother tongue, It'll undoubtedly be much more natural for her.

But, to the initial confusion of Kakashi (Damn, Sakumo's got some damn strong poker-face game) and probably Sakumo, she replied in a rapid series of short barks.

It was a bit like saying 'I come now' instead of 'I will come now', it was heavily abbreviated and accented.

Description aside, all in all, she said (Translated to proper… I don't know. Our language wasn't exactly named, at least to my knowledge): How come you know about the Inuzuka Clan?

Well, it was more like "How uh 'ave knows 'bout Clan Inuzuka", with even worse word-order, but it still stands.

The weariness in her tone was startlingly evident.

As an Inuzuka, shouldn't her dog-speech be as good, if not better than ours?

As Ninken-In-Training, the first thing we were taught was to understand human speech.

Since in my last life, I was in Japan, and they spoke a Japanese shoot-off-language-thingie (A bit like American-English and British-English), I took to the lessons like a duck to water, but it was probably the only thing I would have an upper hand on with Ninken Training.

I mean, it bought me a few months in the training program, but that would just give the rest of the pack proper incentive to improve. Eventually, they would catch up.

Still, by 'crunch time', we would be just a better fighters, so no harm was done.

Anyway, back to the whole 'I just revealed advanced knowledge exactly fifty seconds into the first meeting like an absolute Munk'.

Yes. Munk.

I am a doggy Munk.

Not even a monk. A munk.

Behold, ye puny mortal.

"Mother, how did you learn how to speak with ninken?" Because of course, Kakashi would speak first.

Then I noticed something about Kakashi. It was kinda sad though.

Even when three, Kakashi was a shinobi at heart.

It was in the way that he traced each of the pack and tried to find out who the 'alpha' dog was. It was in the way that he was looking at the area and determining entry and exit points, places where the ground was flat and areas where the ground was too uneven to fight with good footing.

As said, it was kinda sad that he was thinking about that when he was three. He's meant to be enjoying himself playing with friends or getting excited about his future summons, not evaluating us and the surroundings.

I don't even know how he dealt with the piece-of-shite hand that life dealt him with probably nothing good to fall back on.

No wonder he spent hours at the memorial stone, stuck in times long past. He only had a genuinely enjoyable experience never. Even when he had dropped his veil of 'indifference' and was in a state to see life as more than a list of rules and regulations, even when he had everyone (apart from Sakumo) in his life alive, Rin was in danger.

Then Obito 'died'.

Then Rin impaled herself on his Chidori.

Then Minato and Kushina died.

Then he watched the village ostracise their son, too broken to help him as he broke himself like an egg in ANBU.

Then Sasuke Left The village, 'left' being a short term. 'Abandoned due to a combination of intense psychological scarring and a magical Hickey' was closer, though less...well, how do I say it?

Appealing? Accepting? Harder to place blame on Sasuke?

I honestly believe that there isn't a person alive who would've done anything differently in the same position with the same experiences.

Then he watched the village that he worked so hard for, burn in Nagato's invasion.

Then, he could finally say his goodbyes to his father.

Then he faced down his almost equally broken teammate with the burn of seeing his betrayal of Konoha.

And Obito's accusals.

And watching his best friends life break.

And watching him die, again.

How the fuck did he do it?

How the fuck did he make it?

I wouldn't have made it.

No-one I know would have.

By the time I had made it through the impact of understanding what Kakashi would go through would become real, at a more-than-intellectual level, Sakumo and his un-named wife had talked through the anomaly that was me.

Luckily, Pakkun told me that they had more or less chalked it down to overhearing from other dogs. Apparently, we were going to go to the Inuzuka compound to finish our training now that Mum wasn't going to help us with it anymore.

The Inuzuka

It turns out that there is actually an examination done for whether or not we are ninken-grade in the Inuzuka compound, that will need a passing grade or better to get our hands on a headband.

Wait. There are 'other dogs?'.

"Come" Say's Kakashi's mum "We will take you to a place to finish your learning and grow strong. You will be able to protect the pack better. Come"

So we, following Pakkun on Bull's head, trailed after her.

"Do you have names?"

Sometimes, a ninken mother names their pups. If ours had, then I wasn't awake for it.

"We have a few names picked out. We have exactly eight, unfortunately. I can make two more on the spot though."

Well, I mused. I'm kinda used to 'Satoru', sooo-

I opened my maw "Satoru. I want to be called Satoru, please" because why not. Show advanced abilities, why don't yah! It doesn't make you show up! I mean, a name and a language base of a six-year-old are worth potentially killing yourself over.

She paused mid stride, causing Kakashi's head to snap towards her. Sakumo didn't even hesitate, but I had the feeling he was paying close attention to her…

And me.

Without even moving his eyeball.

What the hell was I thinking, trying to tangle with him? I'm insanely out of my depth, and that's just in paying attention.

This time, Sakumo spoke.

Unlike his wife, who had a sweet, but tired voice, Sakumo's voice was deeper (expected), relatively normal-low in volume (unexpected) and perfectly smooth, with undertones of playfulness.

Playfulness.

And here was I, expecting a cloak-and-dagger badass with, like, an Iwa shinobi's head on his shoulder, and a fragment of a skull with a Suna symbol hanging off the edge of a bloody tanto.

And black clothes. All black clothes.

"So, Satoru, can you understand human tongue yet?"

What?

His wife hadn't told him ye-

He can understand ninken.

Well…

The thing about speech is, the positions your mouth and tongue and stuff make is muscle memory.

That means that it is involuntary.

This body's voice box made vowels damn hard. Chakra helped, but only so much.

And the fact that the further the general facial structure deviated from humans, the harder human tongue didn't help in the slightest. Hello? German Shepherd here!

As a German Shepherd, if I hadn't my innate understanding of human speech, learned through being a human, and speech, I wouldn't be able to talk in anything other than Bark-lish.

Yeah, Bark-ish. Because, why not?

"Ha"- I forced chakra to help me with this syllable, "ai" Luckily, 'ai' was much, much easier.

"Well done, kid" Kakashi's mum gave a feral grin that helped prove her Inuzuka heritage further "Most of our more linguistically talented ninken started around now with two syllables. Well done."

Then, Pakkun happened.

"How does this measure?" I stopped.

What the fuck?

"Pakkun, what, how?"

He wagged his stubby tail the best he could. It was yet to lengthen a little.

"We have other dogs around us, perfectly willing to help out. Not my fault you are always sleeping when you are not drinking or playing. You seem to be on autopilot half the time."

What the fuck is he? Some sort of doggie Kakashi?

Then again, he was the only one of Kakashi's ninken I saw that could use anything like a clone technique.

"And I learnt the basics of Ninken art: Hound Clone" Sakumo, his wife, us, me, and everyone not called Kakashi stopped walking (talking about Kakashi, it seems that he was let down as soon as he questioned his mum).

Pakkun is officially an Attention Whore. CAP'S included.

So of course, I had to voice my displeasure.

"Attention Whore" I mutter- barked lowly. I hoped no-one picked it up.

This time, Sakumo allowed himself to turn his head and eyes.

Well, I smiled with a pained expression (It looks like constipation on a German Shepard, Don't Try This At Home Kids)

Shit.

Well.

"Well, luckily Kakashi doesn't understand ninken."

His mum turned to face me.

"Yes. 'Luckily'".

Under my fur, I paled and shivered.

AAAnd cut!

:P

Tell me what you think. Good? Okay? Horrible? Superb? Any and everything is accepted, flames included.

Well, apart from the flames that go "Fuck you -insert highly insensitive term of abuse-", but anything even vaguely ranty with a point, like "Scene XXX was a pile of warm, stinking manure", but greatly extended will be taken into consideration.

Jae Nae