content stuff: doesn't come up too much in this chapter, but later on there are sections dealing pretty clearly with depression and whatnot. inevitable side effect of Kakashi and a Mist-nin as main characters.
When the light fades, Kakashi is sitting at a table across from Hoshigaki Kisame. Kisame is setting down a cup of tea. "It's the bookstore after this, isn't it?" the missing-nin asks easily as he reaches for a dango skewer.
Kakashi spends a few seconds silent to get his bearings. Kisame raises an eyebrow, and Kakashi, wondering if he might be dreaming, says, "Yeah."
"Something the matter?"
"No," he says entirely on autopilot. He stands up too quickly – the chair scrapes across the ground, though thankfully it's on gravel and the sound isn't ear-piercing. Hand on the table, the solidity of the cheap aluminum a tether. He's wearing robes that cling strangely around his legs and a straw hat to shade his face. He's not sure what the bell hanging from the hat's rim is meant for. Does he expect to encounter an auditory genjutsu specialist in the near future?
Hoshigaki watches him with an expression ominously close to concern. "Bathroom," Kakashi manages, and flees into the teahouse.
The scratched mirror doesn't show him too much he didn't expect to see. He takes off the hat, and his own masked face, younger than it should be, peers back at him from beneath a bird's nest of silver hair. He takes in his Akatsuki robes, his glove-less hands (now with nail polish), his finger bearing Itachi's vermilion ring.
His forehead protector with a damning slash through the center.
"Kai," he murmurs.
Nothing changes.
It takes him a moment to decide that this is better than being dead. He straightens up from where he was leaning in with his hands on the sink. He still can't tear his gaze away from the forehead protector in the mirror, the tainted leaf emblem, though truth be told he doesn't try all that hard.
What's he looking at here? Not genjutsu, he's ruled that out as well as he can. Part of the afterlife? Keep that option on the table. Thirty feet away from him Hoshigaki Kisame sits eating sweets and waiting for Kakashi to return. He can count on both hands the number of people who have spoken with as much familiarity to him as the Akatsuki member did a minute ago. Four minutes ago Kakashi was dead in a pile of rubble, and now his heart is beating too fast and he's trying to pull himself together in a dingy teahouse bathroom somewhere near Earth Country, judging by the accents he heard on the way in.
Could be amnesia. Could be he came back to life, signed on with the Akatsuki, de-aged several years, and promptly forgot it all. Stranger things must have happened, somewhere, to someone.
He shouldn't stay much longer. Hoshigaki might come looking. He locates each of his weapons – he's carrying his tanto, why is he carrying his tanto – and then, as prepared as he can possibly be for this situation, he stalks back out.
Hoshigaki takes one look at him and frowns. "Kakashi-san – " he begins. A pause, then, before he continues. "What happened?"
"Nothing," says Kakashi. He sinks slowly into the seat and watches Hoshigaki refill what must be Kakashi's teacup.
He doesn't know what he should be doing. If he wants to keep Hoshigaki off his back, one-word answers don't seem to be cutting it, but is that what he wants? Should he be trying to kill the man instead? He's an Akatsuki member, part of the same organization as Pein and part of the team that came to Konoha in search of Naruto years ago. His continued existence doesn't serve Konoha's interests.
Kakashi stares for a long moment into the tea poured for him by an S-rank missing-nin from Mist who Gai once stopped from kidnapping him. From this angle he can't see his reflection, but he can catch a little of Hoshigaki, a blue sliver at the edge of the cup.
He pushes himself to his feet. "I'll be back." Will he?
"Wait," says Hoshigaki, and Kakashi stills and drags his gaze up to him. Hoshigaki sets a few coins on the table and stands as well.
When Kakashi turns and starts off down the road, Hoshigaki falls into step beside him. Kakashi forces himself not to tense. "Leader said to stick together."
"I'm only going for a walk," he says quietly.
"Hm."
They do, as a matter of fact, end up at the bookstore next. There's a poster outside advertising the latest Icha Icha volume, one that came out a little over three years ago, well before the death of its author.
Hoshigaki gives him an odd look when he wanders over to the adult section, and while Kakashi's leafing through a volume to verify that it's word-for-word what he remembers Hoshigaki picks up the copy next to his and opens it to the middle, unwittingly to the climax of the most enthusiastically terrible sex scene in the book. Jiraiya's typically an excellent storyteller, but the instant he dips into full-on porn it's like he gleefully throws away everything he knows about writing and begins churning out naked wish fulfillment couched in the most grandiose and ill-conceived metaphors known to man. Somewhere on the page Hoshigaki is looking at sits the sentence "She shredded him like a toasted cheese sandwich."
"Somebody wrote this," Hoshigaki says.
Kakashi feels judged. Most people take offense at his reading porn in public, not at the quality of the porn. "It's entertaining."
Hoshigaki makes a face and sets the book back, then waits off to the side while Kakashi pays.
(He'll rib Kakashi about it later that evening in their room at the inn. They'll get into an exceedingly stupid argument over what exactly one line is supposed to involve, made more awkward by Hoshigaki's unwillingness to explicitly indicate body parts and Kakashi's lack of any actual knowledge on the subject, and it'll evolve into a game where Hoshigaki will read a particularly flowery passage aloud and Kakashi will attempt to draw what it's supposed to be describing. He's no Sai, but he'll do what he can. By the second passage he will have given up and started drawing the metaphors literally.)
They don't appear to have any particular destination after leaving the bookshop. Kakashi trails along next to Hoshigaki, who leads them on a meandering adventure through the town that takes them past every restaurant and street food cart in the area. Hoshigaki stops at several to buy desserts or small snacks. "What do you think I should get?" he asks Kakashi at a spot selling savory pancakes.
It's a test. Kakashi, resigned to Hoshigaki's inevitable suspicion, answers, "Whatever you want," and the missing-nin breathes the ghost of a sigh and orders the option with shrimp mixed in.
He gets for Kakashi a paper tray of gyoza without consulting the recipient first. It's a food Kakashi likes, though Earth makes theirs larger and crispier than the vendors in Fire do, and unlike skewers or buns they're small enough for him to slip past his mask without having to waste time in biting off pieces. He accepts the tray and prods the dumplings around until they go cold. He's relatively sure they're not poisoned, but he's not especially hungry either, and he ends up feeding them to a stray.
A little under two hours after leaving the teahouse, Hoshigaki heads into a dead-end alley. Kakashi pauses on the street, considering his options, then switches with a shadow clone while Hoshigaki's back is turned and finds a roof a fair ways away to hide on top of.
Out of arm's reach of Hoshigaki, he can breathe a little more easily. He's been constantly aware of the swordsman's presence these past hours, a prickling sense of looming threat at his periphery. It's exhausting.
He estimates he has at least a minute or so to spend before Hoshigaki murders him in the alleyway. He catalogs his non-martial possessions, locating the pockets where he keeps the scrolls storing food, camping supplies, clothes, books, keepsakes – his dogs' summoning contract is in that one, along with his genin team photo with Minato-sensei and Obito and Rin, which he reseals before he can get distracted. He recognizes his own penmanship in the linework on the scrolls, but the seals themselves are what he imagines he might draw if he spent the past ten years without access to Jiraiya or to Konoha's library.
He seals his recent purchase into the book storage scroll and then, because his clone's not dead yet, investigates the other books on his person. Kakashi discovers that he apparently has a taste for classics and melodramatic romantic tragedies where the protagonists die at the end and no one else particularly cares. A little on the nose. He also, more relevantly, carries a collection of bingo books from assorted countries, two of which look newly printed even though they're dated to three years back. He fishes out the one from Konoha and scans the index.
Finding his own name in a Konoha bingo book gives him the same lurching, disconnected feeling as seeing the scratched forehead protector. He turns to his page, trying not to think too much, and makes himself read it from top to bottom without skimming.
"Oh," he breathes when he reaches the list of charges.
The Uchiha Massacre.
The charge after it of bloodline theft almost seems negligible in comparison.
There's something more at the bottom of the page, a footnote that informs him he's not known to attack Konoha-affiliated shinobi unprovoked unless they're Uchiha. According to the text, he killed the Uchiha under the deranged belief that they unleashed the Kyuubi and puppeted it into murdering the Fourth Hokage, and therefore he carries no hostility against Konoha as a whole.
What the fuck.
Updated hypothesis: he's moved three years into the past, and something, potentially whatever event returned him to life, rewrote history to turn him into the perpetrator of the massacre. It does sound egotistical put that way, to imagine something rewrote reality in order to give a random Konoha jounin Itachi's crime, and if he had the option he'd prefer it to not be his most likely guess.
He has the mad thought of running back to Konoha and explaining himself, telling them that he's from the future, that he didn't kill the Uchiha, that none of this is what he remembers and that none of this is what happened – and then, unprompted and unwelcome, he imagines how he'd react if Uchiha Itachi pulled that stunt.
He gets a rush of memory when his clone pops: Hoshigaki asking him to Kamui a trash bag, his clone prevaricating on principle before agreeing, Hoshigaki raising and dropping the half-hearted possibility of his being Orochimaru, his clone dispelling itself with the thought that the real Kakashi has thirty seconds to come up with a convincing story. Hoshigaki arrives on the roof on cue, and Kakashi, on his feet and with all of his things stowed neatly back, says, "The one time you met me we tried to kill each other. You were giving it more effort than I was."
"I'm sorry?"
Kakashi's usual response to unfortunate developments is to shut down and compartmentalize. He has no experience with the manic recklessness he's currently suffering from instead, and he's sure it shows. "A few hours ago I was dead." A few hours ago he was talking to his father. The memory of that conversation feels more real than the one he's living through. He pauses, then switches tacks: "Where are we? What's our goal in this town?"
Hoshigaki's expression has gone fixed, his teeth bared in a grimace. Not an imposter, he visibly thinks, just cracked.
If a ninja falls apart this completely in Konoha, they're grounded from duty until someone figures out what's happening and the extent to which it can be accommodated. It's a safe bet that Akatsuki does not follow the same policy or half of their organization would never be allowed outdoors. Hoshigaki's just going to have to deal with him.
Slowly, Hoshigaki enunciates the name of the town. "Tomorrow we're meeting with a client." Then he offers the date, year included, and as an afterthought introduces himself.
"You and I work together," says Kakashi. "For Akatsuki."
"...That's right."
Kakashi hesitates a moment longer. Then, very deliberately, he relaxes his posture into a slouch and half-closes his eye. Hoshigaki's expression does not change. "I'll be in your care."
"...Aa," Hoshigaki agrees.
Two months since his resurrection, they meet another Akatsuki team on Wind's border with River. Kakashi convinces Hoshigaki to show up three hours late with him, so when they finally arrive at the ramshackle abandoned hut it's to Kakuzu counting money at the table and Hidan nowhere to be seen.
Kakuzu looks up just long enough to see who it is when the door creaks open. "Put it here."
Hoshigaki drops the scroll with their earnings on the table. "Where did Hidan get off to?"
"He'll be back. You kept us waiting."
Kakuzu doesn't look to care all that much, so Kakashi doesn't volunteer an excuse from his post by the open doorway. The last memory he has of the Akatsuki member is of slicing the man's fifth heart with Raikiri. That's been undone now, and the rest as well – Naruto's triumph, Asuma's death, Kakuzu and Hidan's defeat. Kakashi's the only person left who remembers all of the murderous back-and-forth about immortality and heart theft.
Kakuzu moves on to recording the contents of the scroll. Kakashi digs out his book to pretend to read and sees Kakuzu go still in his periphery.
"That's new," Kakuzu murmurs.
"Hm? Did you say something?"
That's also new, judging by the vaguely puzzled glance Kakuzu directs at Hoshigaki. The swordsman pretends not to notice, and Kakuzu, with another look at the luridly bright cover, turns back to his work.
He parcels out an incredibly small portion of the money to reseal and packs the rest into his own bags. The only reason Kakashi doesn't say something is because Hoshigaki warned him earlier. Akatsuki members get paid a barely livable stipend, except once a year when they get all of the money they should have earned up to that point dumped on them at once. Ostensibly they arranged it this way to prevent another Hidden Sound, but in reality it's to keep Kakuzu happy. Kakashi and Hoshigaki each have enough funds saved up and spend so little that it hardly affects them.
They're also functionally homeless, have no regular access to medical care, and have to wear nail polish because an inexplicable side property of the rings is that they turn the wearers' nails brittle without that protection. Akatsuki is not an organization to join for the benefits.
Though, like bandit groups, it's still easier than life as an unaffiliated missing-nin. Even powerful missing-nin have abysmal mortality rates, free game as they are to Villages and each other both, but Akatsuki's buddy system has made it so that the leading cause of death for members is to be assigned as Kakuzu's partner. Besides that, the fact that they're paid a vaguely regular wage at all makes it a leap above having to constantly search for contracts that (in order of priority) won't land you in the line of fire of a faction specifically looking to kill you, don't pay horribly, won't give you nightmares for years afterwards, and you're qualified to take on.
"You might as well pick a contract while you're here," Kakuzu says once he's done, shoving a thin stack of papers across the table.
Hoshigaki scans them. Kakashi sidles up near him to look around his arm. He doesn't intend to interject. Hoshigaki usually handles finding them missions when they're not on an assignment handed down directly from Pein. He apparently knows what kinds of work Kakashi favors or at least won't object to, which Kakashi still finds unsettling when he stops to think about it.
Hoshigaki reaches a page and Kakashi, with a start, says, "This one."
"Enforcers? Against civilians." Hoshigaki sounds dubious. Most of the jobs he accepts either explicitly or have the potential to involve heavy combat.
"Yeah," says Kakashi briskly, snatching it up.
"The client might not pay you," says Kakuzu. "He has a history. Not that he's offering much anyway."
"Let me worry about that."
Kakuzu grunts. "Don't come out empty-handed."
Hoshigaki reluctantly sets aside a listing with no other information aside from a request to be contacted by a missing-nin experienced at open battle. "Ah, well." As he follows Kakashi out the door he calls back, "See you around."
"It can be a vacation," Kakashi says airily to him, rolling up the paper and slipping it into a pocket on his vest. "I hear Wave's interesting this time of year."
"Interesting, is it," Hoshigaki repeats, side-eyeing him.
Kakashi smiles. "Thank you for going along with me." The meeting point's far enough behind them that Kakuzu would either need a bloodline limit or an active technique to still be able to hear him. He says, "Gato likely won't pay. Kakuzu was right."
"Are we killing him?"
Kakashi tips his head back. "Leader won't like that." Not that Kakashi cares overmuch about Pein's opinion.
"The organization can do without a reputation for killing... what's the client?"
"Businessman."
"Random mob bosses," Hoshigaki finishes. "Quite a few missions from that sector."
"But there's a difference between going out of your way to kill a mob boss in another country and killing a client who murders his hires."
"Is that what we're doing?" he says, amused.
"You never know."
Hoshigaki huffs. "So, a vacation," he muses. Another few steps, and then, not quite grinning: "You know, I've known you for a long time and this is the first I've seen you follow up on a grudge." Kakashi's jarred out of keeping an eye on the surroundings to listen. Though he doesn't give visible indication, whenever Hoshigaki says or does something to remind him that the man has worked closely with him for more than half a decade his attention catches on it. The feeling's not dissimilar to how he imagines it would be to wake up on an island with amnesia and Gai for company, though he would have vastly preferred that over what he has right now. "I'm curious what this person's crime is."
"You'll see when we get there. He's kind of not subtle," says Kakashi without an ounce of irony.
"Oh, that type."
Kakashi hums.
Hoshigaki says, "We'll be going close to Fire. Any place you're interested in visiting when we're done?"
"Ah," says Kakashi blankly. "No." He adds, belatedly, "You?"
"There's a spot on the coast with crayfish mooncakes."
Hoshigaki would suggest they enter the country with the largest bounty on Kakashi to try a regional dish. Everyone has their vices. Hoshigaki's always the one to push them into booking rooms with two beds at inns (as opposed to letting Kakashi sleep on the floor, which he's frankly fine and doesn't see the issue with) and steering them away from subsisting solely on rice with raw eggs and dragging Kakashi to shoe shops instead of letting him mix glue to stick the soles back on.
Well, why not? Kakashi knows the city he's talking about, as well as where the shinobi outpost and ANBU patrol routes in it are, and it's not far into the country's borders. Not close to Leaf. It's a risk, but no more than anything else they do, and if he's to keep on Hoshigaki's good side it's not a bad idea to reciprocate when the swordsman says he wants to take a detour as well.
Wave is expectedly dreary and Gato expectedly stingy. Tazuna's gone, so Kakashi and Hoshigaki's job in the meantime is to sit on the bridge to stop anyone from working on it and to keep an eye out for the headman's return. Kakashi doesn't expect he'll be as popular with the people of Wave anymore, but he and Hoshigaki won't disrupt them for long.
Zabuza doesn't show. Gato might think a small crowd of armed civilians can take down two shinobi, but adding in a third and fourth ninja should stretch even his suspension of disbelief.
Hoshigaki's sharks report back to him on Tazuna's return. There are seven people in a boat coming from the mainland, four of them smaller in size. A tension settles in Kakashi at the news. It might not be Team Seven – probably isn't, truth be told, considering how many factors had to line up for that team to push through to the end on the Wave mission he remembers – but the chance of running into any Konoha shinobi he's familiar with doesn't sit right with him. It's one thing for Hoshigaki and the Akatsuki and teams of hunter-nin and every bingo book and his own headband in the mirror to call Kakashi a missing-nin. Hearing it from the mouth of someone he actually knows would cement it.
There's still a part of him that considers this whole situation surreal and doesn't believe that he can't go home again and that the short list of people who he cares about and aren't dead will try to kill him on the spot.
Hoshigaki glances over at him lounging on a steel girder with a book held overhead and stands to go intercept the target on his own.
"Kisame, let's not," Kakashi suggests.
Hoshigaki pauses. "Yeah?"
Kakashi lets the book fall onto his chest. "Did your summon see what they looked like?"
"Sharks can't distinguish people that well."
"That's fine," he says. The sky above is grey and heavy and half-hidden by fog. "It sounds like the target might have hired a team."
"Konoha. A mission to deal with Gato would be A-rank at the very least, although it wouldn't be for difficulty unless they heard he's hired shinobi. I'm surprised the bridge builder could afford it," says Hoshigaki, tone implying he full well knows that Tazuna likely lied to make the mission affordable. The Leaf-nin have no idea what they're in for. "Do they usually send teams of children for A-ranks in Leaf?"
No Village sends children on anything. Shinobi are legal adults. Kakashi sighs gustily. "Hey, Kisame. Can you throw a fight?"
"It's alright, Kakashi-san, I won't kill them."
"No, I mean..." Kakashi levers himself onto his elbows. "Can you throw it? Lose to them? For a good cause?"
Hoshigaki squints at him like he's not sure if those sounds were supposed to be actual words with actual meanings.
Yeah, Kakashi doesn't think that would have flown with him even if he wasn't one of the Seven Swordsmen. "No, never mind, I should do it." He swings his legs over the side of his perch.
"Why do you want to lose a fight to Konoha?" Hoshigaki asks.
"It could be fun."
"Should I come in if you're about to die?"
Kakashi stares up at him, taken aback slightly. "...I'd appreciate that."
Kisame looks back at him for a bit longer, and then his brow furrows. "As long as you know what you're doing."
That's a level of competency Kakashi shouldn't be accused of, and at no point is this made more clear than when he freezes in his tracks as soon as he catches the Konoha team's scents blowing ahead of them on their way to Tazuna's. Sasuke's there. That's Team 7, Sakura and Naruto and Sasuke, whole and together and small – they're tiny, he forgot, Bull weighs more than any two of them. They can't protect themselves, never mind a civilian target. They barely know how to tie on their headbands. Who let genin this green out of the Village? Whose bright idea was it to bring these bumbling disasters to Wave after Naruto revealed he thought the best way to deal with poison was to stab himself?
Apparently it was Gai's.
Kakashi needs a moment to wrap his head around that.
That Gai is their sensei is – good. It's good. Gai cares, and he can teach. Gai's own team is... they must have been assigned to another teacher. Kakashi's sure they've done well for themselves even with a different jounin. They're skilled genin. Though he thinks that's Lee's scent mixed in with the others, so there's a chance he's with Gai as an apprentice.
Does Gai remember the other two? Has he met them in this new timeline? Kakashi thinks he might have loved them.
Now he has Team 7. Kakashi can't imagine him being any less devoted to them than he was to his other team. They're in good hands. He's not prejudiced against Naruto, he understands the Sharingan as well as any non-user can and has to be better at giving pep talks about the evils of desertion than Kakashi, and his active teaching style will resonate with Sakura.
In the first place, Kakashi should not have been their teacher, no matter how adequate for the role he seemed on paper. He taught them battle formations before self defense and Chidori before water walking. He could have worked with them as chuunin with a few years under their belts (which he did end up doing anyway), but not as fresh graduates. He felt as out of his depth instructing them in tree walking as he would have if they needed him to tell them step-by-step how to breathe.
They're better off with Gai.
Though it's true that Gai doesn't understand limits. He remembers Gai egging Lee on against Gaara, and... he does find himself worrying.
He stays crouched in the trees until Team 7 comes into view in the clearing. He dismisses the urge to go down and greet the familiar faces. Before he can think too much about any of this he applies a henge of a Kiri kunoichi in standard greys with a slashed headband and condenses a water clone out of the scattered mist.
The clone brushes its sandal audibly against tree bark, then shunshins right into the center of the formation with a kunai aimed for Tazuna.
Lee kicks the clone off course with a yell. Kakashi's three – Team 7 take up positions around their client, and when the clone staggers Lee and makes another pass at Tazuna it's Sakura who parries its blade with a kunai held in both hands. Her pupils are wide, she's plainly scared, but she holds the line without flinching until the clone just bodily tosses her aside.
"Sakura-chan!" Naruto yells, breaking formation to rush at the clone. His taijutsu form is still relatively sloppy, but it's more controlled than Kakashi remembers it being, his weight spread more evenly and his center of balance lower down. Still, it won't mean much in a fight after he broadcasted his intention that clearly.
Gai steps in before he reaches the clone, dispersing it with a single downwards kick. It should have moved to dodge, but the flare of killing intent directed at it from Gai made it hesitate. Kakashi files the error away so he'll remember not to make the same mistake.
An interesting aspect of elemental clones is that they can be made of more than simply their raw element. It's possible to imbue them with full-fledged techniques that trigger on the clone's destruction. Before Pein, Kakashi was still working out how to apply it to his primary element, but the Kakashi of this rewritten history has mastered it with lightning, earth, and water. He's a ninjutsu specialist the same way Itachi was a genjutsu specialist, which is to say that his level of skill is somewhat ridiculous. He's even infamous for the absurd ability to mold complex jutsu without a single hand seal. None of that skill, muscle memory, or chakra control has left his body simply because he's not the same Kakashi.
As his clone dies, it explodes into a water prison. Gai leaps back, but it's already latched onto his foot where he struck it and from there wastes no time in surging to cover him.
Kakashi shunshins and appears crouched on top of the globe, sticking his hand in before the jutsu can fall apart without maintenance. "That's one," he says in a mimic of Hoshigaki's Kiri accent, resolutely not looking at Gai. Though looking at their kids' stunned and horrified faces is not much better. He's really in the past, isn't he.
Lee charges him. Kakashi raises an eyebrow and pretends at a one-handed seal. A tiny flash of lightning sparks around his fingers in the water prison. Gai doesn't make a sound, but Kakashi expects he must have flinched because Lee breaks off the attempt immediately. Kakashi grins viciously, playing into the Kiri missing-nin stereotype with his body language for all he's worth. Hoshigaki's probably getting a kick out of it.
Damn it, he was supposed to throw this fight. Gai, come on, you're better than this. Should he have postured first like Zabuza?
"Lee!" Gai barks. The genin snaps to attention. "Take the team and Tazuna-san and go! The water prison jutsu requires the caster to stay within arm's reach. As long as our assailant holds it she cannot give chase."
"Gai-sensei – " Lee protests, just as Sakura shakes her head, Sasuke palms a kunai, and Naruto yells "No!"
Oh. Kakashi can't do this. He closes his eye under the henge and takes a second to pull himself together. Breathe in, out. "Calm down," he drawls, opening his eye again. "I don't want to kill your jounin." To state it mildly. "I'm only here for the old man."
"You were hired by Gato?" Gai stalls.
"I mean, I wouldn't give up my client, but realistically how many people even are there who care about this garbage dump? Yeah, it's Gato." He glances down and leans in faux-confidentially. "Cute genin you've got there. They qualified for an A-rank?"
From the peanut gallery: "We're qualified for anything, 'ttebayo!"
...Does Naruto know what a mission rank is?
"Let Gai-sensei go, you jerk!"
"Sure," says Kakashi. "Hand Tazuna over."
Naruto fairly wobbles with rage.
"Kunoichi-san!" Gai says. Kakashi decides he can be the most easily distracted jounin in the history of Kiri, and Sasuke takes quick advantage to grab the other shinobi and start a whispered conference with much wide gesturing from every party except Lee. This team is a treasure and he never appreciated it enough. "You have the advantage of me. Your skill at ninjutsu is truly impressive, but I don't believe you're known to the ninja of my Village. May I have your name?"
Kakashi blinks. He couldn't sell it. He forgot some part of the act, and Gai's figured out just how much he wants to avoid a real fight. "Isn't it polite to introduce yourself first?"
"So it is. I've been remiss! I am the Green Beast of Konoha, Maito Gai!" He doesn't flash a smile, considering the circumstances. The introduction seems incomplete without it.
"A pleasure, Gai-san." Kakashi cocks his head. "Actually, this is a henge and I didn't feel like coming together with a backstory. You can call me... eh..." Kakashi trails off. A bit of soil drifts across the surface of the water prison, and he finishes lamely, "Dirt?"
"Dirt-san – "
Wow, no. "Wait! Wait. Call me – " the water's bluish, but Hoshigaki practically has the color trademarked " – Red. I can be Red."
"Red-san," says Gai, deathly serious, "you do not appear to wish to make an enemy of Konoha."
Kakashi says nothing to that.
"Tazuna-san is our important client. On my honor as a shinobi of the Leaf, I cannot allow him to fall victim to an opposing shinobi."
Kakashi lets his expression go blank. "So we're at an impasse." He leans down and murmurs, "I can treat your genin with kid gloves, but to be honest I'm not a skilled fighter. My hand might slip." He gives a one-shoulder shrug. "I've told you what I'm after. Your team just needs to get out of the way."
"If you hurt them – " Gai begins, voice tight.
Kakashi interrupts him, back at normal volume. "I think you got the impression somehow that I'm not taking this seriously, Gai-san. Can't say I'm alright with being misread that badly. I have my professional pride."
A mob of shadow clones ends the conversation. Kakashi races through a series of unnecessary one-handed seals, and two water clones rise around him to fend off the siege. None of the genin seem surprised by the technique, and Kakashi feels a little misplaced spark of pride at their observational ability. They extrapolated from what they've seen of his skills and planned for it.
Lee single-handedly occupies one while Team 7 takes on the other. Or, well, Naruto and Sakura take on the other. Sasuke remains standing guard at Tazuna's side. Gai must be training Naruto and Sakura as front-liners and Sasuke, the ninjutsu type with additional talents in thrown weaponry and (once his Sharingan activates) genjutsu, as long-ranged support. Sensible, though he's surprised Sasuke would accept it.
Oh, that's right. Of course Sasuke's personality wouldn't be exactly what Kakashi remembers. He want to kill Kakashi, doesn't he? Since Itachi's... dead? He's not sure on the status of the Uchiha clan; there's little information to be found on the specifics of the massacre, which has been frustrating but expected. It's hardly Konoha's proudest memory.
...He doesn't want to look too hard into this, but come to think of it, why is Sasuke alive? Itachi had some sort of fixation on his younger brother. Kakashi, however, had no emotional attachment to him before Team 7 beyond his being Kakashi's kouhai's brother. Was that enough?
The clones have until now been fending off Lee and bullying Naruto and Sakura, but just then Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke pull off a complicated but inspired plot with Naruto's clones and henge, Sasuke's ninja wire and fire techniques, and Sakura's speed and –
Wait a second. Kakashi's clone concedes to them the victory and lets Sakura's devastating punch land unguarded, but the original, who likes to imagine he's somewhat smarter than his water clones, frowns. He lifts his headband under the guise of brushing hair out of his eyes and peers at Sakura with the Sharingan.
"The second gate," he says, shocked, as he drags the headband down again. His remaining clone twists away from Lee and with a water wall jutsu stops the other three from charging the real Kakashi. "Gai – her body can't handle it, she has no muscle mass. If she uses it in every fight she's even slightly outmatched in she'll be bedridden before she makes chuunin."
Gai'd better not have taught her further than two. Four gates will straight-up kill her.
"What would you know about her?" Gai snaps, and Kakashi rocks back on his heels with a sharp intake of breath. "A ninja threatens her and her comrades' lives and you would expect her to hold back? Of course she would never use it in any but the most dire circumstances, she understands her limits as well as she does her potential."
Kakashi bites his tongue. He won't watch this. "Switch!" he shouts to his clone. It disengages from the genin to take over the water prison, and the instant he's free to Kakashi shunshins behind Sakura, sets his palm on the back of her neck, and drops her into the grass with a contact genjutsu.
The gates close when she loses consciousness. She still needs immediate treatment if there's to be any hope of reversing the strain on her body, but Kakashi isn't skilled enough at medical techniques to repair internal damage and he knows damn well that Gai isn't either.
Gai's killing intent brushes against him. Gai's terrible at projecting the stuff – the same level from anyone else would barely register to Kakashi – but the simple fact that it's from Gai lends it unfathomable weight.
If he wasn't half-expecting the reaction he would have to it since witnessing his first clone's blunder, it would have given him pause long enough for Lee to land the punch to his sternum. He jumps away in time, elbows aside Naruto's screaming clone, and calls up a water wall directly under Lee and the real Naruto's feet. The force sends them both flying, and finally Kakashi turns to Sasuke, who stands white-faced but resolute.
"I won't ask again."
"I am done running from monsters," Sasuke hisses, right before he starts through the hand seals for the fireball jutsu.
This is the first time in years Kakashi's seen Sasuke from this close. He's –
" – Uchiha Sasuke, son of Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto. You're Itachi's brother."
He didn't mean for Sasuke to see this. Itachi's going to kill him. Kakashi drops to a crouch on the balls of his feet so he's eye level with the boy. "I don't have business with you. Run along, Sasuke-chan. You don't want to be here – "
– for the fireball bearing down on him. On reflex alone Kakashi substitutes with the first thing in range, which he realizes a fraction of a second too late is Naruto.
"No – " he says, half-strangled, and hits all fours with an earth wall ready at his fingertips, but Gai's already there spiriting Naruto away. Kakashi has a moment of breathless, terrified relief. Lee and Naruto must have forced the clone to drop the water prison just in time.
Gai, dark fury painted across every line of his body, turns to face Kakashi. There's little time to worry about anyone else after that.
Gai opens five gates and decimates a tract of forest a kilometer long. Kakashi has to abandon one of his self-imposed handicaps and use Obito's eye, and even then when the fight ends two minutes later he's barely conscious enough to hold the transformation. His arms are fractured from trying to guard Gai's attacks, and they're the least of it. He grabs blindly for the splintered stump of a tree behind him and hauls himself to a sitting position with a massive effort.
Gai's swaying on his feet, but he's also on his feet. He takes one rigid step forward, his expression set. He says nothing. For as loud as he is around allies, he rarely speaks to enemies during combat.
Kakashi watches cautiously. He hasn't actually used many chakra-intensive ninjutsu – Gai pressured him to the point that there was no time for hand seals, and managing to cast high-rank jutsu regardless would have raised ugly questions – so if Gai comes much closer Kakashi can and will call up a water dragon bullet.
It might not stop him. Gai's nearing his last legs, but if he opens the sixth gate he can earn himself another forty seconds at peak physical condition at the cost of extending his recovery period by at least an extra week. If he considers the trade-off worth it, Kakashi's unlikely to survive unless he uses tactics he's not willing to against Gai. Kamui is not for opponents he doesn't want dead or maimed.
Another step. Kakashi, resigned, gathers his chakra.
And then there's someone standing between them, a Mist missing-nin who could be Kakashi's henge's brother. Kakashi blinks fuzzily up at him. "That's enough," says Hoshigaki. Kakashi can't tell if the wariness in his voice is real or part of the disguise. Either way it's not an inflection he's heard from Hoshigaki before.
"Backup?" Gai says to himself.
Hoshigaki responds anyway. "Aa. I suppose I'm Blue," he replies, one side of his mouth pulled out in a grin. He snorts. "A couple more and we can make a rainbow." He's carrying a plain sword, one of those he keeps around for when Samehada is too distinctive. He unsheathes it and holds it loose at his side. It's hard for Kakashi to ignore that this is a perfect reversal of their first meeting, those years ago in Konoha. "You going to let us pass, Green?"
Gai glares at him, visibly calculating the odds. A kenjutsu user of unknown capability, fresh to the fight, who witnessed Gai at five gates and still likes his chances well enough to openly face him but who apparently is only interested in getting his partner out of the line of fire. Gai's exhausted and has a team of genin counting on him. Not even Tsunade would take this wager.
Gai's expression does something complicated. "My students – "
"Fine," Kakashi manages. "They're fine." A break to catch his breath. "No one attacked them while you were occupied." Gai probably expected Kakashi to have a chuunin for backup if he had anyone at all, and any chuunin Lee can't outright beat he can certainly occupy until his teacher returns. To be fair to Gai, missing-nin of Red's apparent capability don't typically work in teams, or at least not with allies equal or greater to them in skill. He had no real way of knowing the danger he left the genin in.
He lets out a breath. "Go."
Hoshigaki helps Kakashi up. "Thanks," he mumbles. His vision goes dark and hearing goes static as soon as he stands. He loses a few seconds, and the next he's aware he's draped over Hoshigaki's shoulder. He checks: his henge's still active.
He waves a flimsy upside-down good-bye at Gai before Hoshigaki shunshins away. Hoshigaki keeps running for a little longer, jarring Kakashi with each footfall, before he stops and lays Kakashi on the ground. "Henge," he says shortly, dropping his own and bringing out a medical kit. Kakashi finally remembers to cancel the technique. "Where does it hurt?"
"Ah... everywhere."
"I hope you got what you wanted out of that."
Well... Gato will be disappointed, which technically was the entire point. "Close enough," he sighs. He catches a glimpse of Hoshigaki's open med-kit from the corner of his eye, its contents standard except for the markedly non-standard quantity of soldier pills. "At least it's not chakra exhaustion."
The words catch up to him a second later. Hoshigaki doesn't react like he said anything odd, but Kakashi – Kakashi hasn't gotten chakra exhaustion since Pein. For all he knows, his counterpart might not have made a habit of it. He should have needed to reason it out first to realize Hoshigaki carries those pills because of him.
...He still doesn't truly remember the past six years of this world, but when he tries he manages to dredge up more memories involving Hoshigaki than he should rightfully have. How long has that been the case for?
"I remember you," Kakashi rasps. (And why is he telling Kisame?)
Hoshigaki half grimaces as he turns a roll of bandages over in his hand and determines it to be not nearly enough. "I know." A pause. "Did you think you forgot everything?"
"I might have," he says carefully. "Help me up?"
"If you try to sit up I'm using Samehada. Then you'll have chakra exhaustion."
Never mind.
Hoshigaki's right. In retrospect, Kakashi's acted more than once on information he shouldn't have had. For instance: today, when Hoshigaki offered to show up if Kakashi needed him and Kakashi trusted him without question to follow through. A hundred small moments piled up over the past two months – asking for a paper napkin before he should have known Hoshigaki always keeps plastic pockets of them handy, buying two buns for Samehada when the swordsman asked him to handle dinner, mentioning a local birdwatching hub he spotted in passing on a magazine cover through a window.
"Was the jounin an acquaintance of yours?" Hoshigaki asks, but before Kakashi can respond he shakes his head and backtracks. "I can ask later."
Then, with some menace: "I will ask later."
Kakashi probably does owe him some explanation.