AN: I do not own Naruto or any of the Narutoverse characters. Enjoy.
Kakashi felt funny. It wasn't that he felt off because there were no longer any living people in the area, it was a premonition of sorts; a hunch. His hunches never brought good things into his life. All of his hunches led to bad situations.
Despite this, the Rokudaime Hokage of the recently destroyed Leaf Village walked out of the outcropping of rock he used as a shelter and began wandering the area. He would search for survivors inside the wreckage of the villages he passed like he had come to do. He hoped to find someone, anyone, who had miraculously outlived the battle.
Someone who was a survivor.
Kakashi didn't want to wake up that morning. The emptiness of his mind beckoned his thoughts towards darker subjects. His limbs fiercely protested against any movement he attempted to make. But most of all, Kakashi had a bad feeling about today. His intuition was always eerily accurate and he had learned to trust it with his life.
Even knowing that, the thirteen year old sat up in his bed to begin his day. He would go and meet up with his team for the day's mission. With the war going on, everyone had little time to rest. He needed to prove himself so he could bear to move on to the next day, but to do that he would have to outlive the war.
He had to become a survivor.
Kakashi dug through the pile of rock repetitively. He had found a few bodies in this pile. Dog tags were fished out of bloody material and the names were carved into separate stones as markers. Some were from Suna, others were from Iwa, and he found two Kumo headbands in boneless piles of flesh.
He had long since become unaffected by the disturbing post-battle gore, and he was now able to still his mind when concerning the horribly disfigured dead.
The only thing he was unable to escape from was the stench.
Three days after the fighting had subsided, the corpses were beginning to rot in the late August sun. Countless bodies had been dug up and buried already, but the ones with nothing left to bury, like the two Kumo nins, he would just have to leave. The tags he found on those, he kept; they were grim reminders of how even the honored dead could have their existence, their memory reduced to nothing.
Before he could react, dizziness overcame his senses and he was falling, surrounded by a blinding light.
Kakashi ran through his katas slowly. The monotonous motions kept the feeling of terror that was scratching at the back of his mind diluted. Bad luck had assaulted him on his way to the training field and for the first time in his life, Kakashi was late. Not only that, but Obito had been early. He had been kicked out of the Uchiha compound.
Even so, Obito wouldn't and shouldn't have been early. Obito was never early. Kakashi knew this and he made sure to tell the dobe to be on time more often (more like every day) but only recently had he realized realized that Obito wasn't late just because of his own timekeeping problems.
The Uchiha's parents had been beating him.
The long sleeves and headgear, the pants and collar, they were all for hiding his bruises. At first he didn't want to believe it, but that was before Kakashi had smelled it on him. The scent of blood on him was almost overpowering. Depression must have been breaking him too, more than it was to Kakashi. Even if he was a dobe, and he was depressed, it didn't give him the right to indulge in self-harm.
A flash of light bloomed at the other end of the training field and a gut wrenching scream of pain shattered his train of thought. He heard panicked voices in the distance even before he began running. He knew something bad would happen soon.
Kakashi awoke from the strangest of dreams. He blinked blearily a few times as his vision refocused.
'Of course it was strange,' he thought as he gazed at his surroundings. 'I'm in Konoha hospital.' Overhead lights, whitewashed walls, , and the eerie smell of blood mixed with antiseptic all flooded his awakening senses.
Familiar voices pierced presently his hypersensitive ears as an argument outside his room made itself known. A small groan of pain escaped his lips and, when he heard it, his hand froze just before meeting his bandaged forehead. Kakashi knew that his voice didn't sound like that; soft and yielding, and the Konoha hospital was destroyed during the war. He blinked.
He shot up into sitting position with a gasp, ignoring the pain in his ribs and skull for the moment and he started to piece together the situation. He needed to find out what he was doing in a child's body seventeen years in the past. He shook with the effort and his head swam, but he managed to slide off of the bed and...
... fall flat on the floor.
As he struggled to stand, the reflective surface of the floor allowed him to gaze upon his physique in shock. The mask-less face sported a pair of bicolored eyes. Ash black and crimson red stared back as he regained his balance. He blinked again. His left eye was never NATURALLY red.
Now he was really confused.
His crash had notified his visitors of his conscious presence and a knock on the door broke Kakashi out of his stupor. He scrambled weakly back onto the white sheets, shut his left eye as a precaution, and covered his lower face with the fabric mask conveniently lying on the side table before answering with a whisper.
"Who's there?" The soft rasp came from his throat. The door to his room opened and three hauntingly familiar faces came into view. He couldn't stop himself from staring. It couldn't be.
"Feeling any better kid? You look just as pale as you did when we found you; like you've seen a ghost or something." The tall blonde joked. A sarcastic remark fought its way to his tongue but Kakashi ruthlessly bit it down as he thought. Hundreds of scenarios flashed though Kakashi's mind in an instant, each of which was more improbable than the last.
The chocolate haired girl came up to him and Kakashi tried to shrink away from her gaze and back under the hospital sheets. The memory of her death flashed in his mind and he cringed harshly. Kakashi's distress went dismissed by the three visitors as childish wariness as he fought his conflicting emotions. Instinct said that what he was seeing was real, but his mind screamed otherwise.
"It's okay," she said. "I'm just going to check your wounds. I won't hurt you. I promise." A hand of help was offered out to him and he glared at it suspiciously. He then tentatively reached out with a bare hand, flinching back lightning quick each time he saw her so much as twitch.
"I told you he wouldn't trust you." A third voice came from the right side of the room. Kakashi choked down a gasp and he retracted his limbs as close as he could to his center. A figure stood just three meters away at the room's entrance. Guilt, relief, and suspicion all fought for a grip on his heart.
The teen with jet black hair walked towards him with a frown, so much like the one he used to know and said, "The kid's definitely a Hatake.
Kakashi stood just outside the kid's room, thinking about how ridiculously coincidental just the child's existence was.
Soft silver locks and the shape of his eyes were so uncannily similar to his own and he knew from the bloodstained mask present on the child's face to the small stature of his body that they were related.
He didn't want to believe it, that his father had had an affair with an unknown woman, but blood never lies. And the chart was clenched in his left hand.
Kakashi grabbed the handle of the door and opened it. Everyone seemed to freeze in place when they saw him, including the kid. He then walked forward and unceremoniously dropped the stack of papers on the kid's bed.
Warily the boy eyed him, but when Kakashi reached out to grab the papers a small hand darted out of the white sheets and snatched up the graphs. The boy's single coal black eye darted along the page while his left remained shut, something Kakashi found interesting.
Finally the boy looked up from the papers and spoke.
"Hatake Kakashi?" He asked with a soft and innocent voice. Kakashi nodded slightly. The boy narrowed his eye and scanned the shinobi's body. The boy gave a sigh, like he was giving in to doing chores for a nagging mother.
"My name is... Hatake Kazu." His left eye was suddenly assaulted with a thousand images and a searing pain. A huge wave of guilt crashed into him and Kakashi stumbled backwards clutching his eye in pain.
Minato was instantly at his side and Rin and Obito fell into a battle stance. Kakashi crumpled to the floor shaking as the scenes played out in his head, things worse than his nightmares.
When the pain subsided, he opened his eyes, but the boy was gone.
AN: It begins.