Beta: Well, several people asked for Kakashi's POV of that scene in chapter 96. Uh 3.5k of the misery caboose for the feels train? Careful what you wish for? Because I'm not really sure this makes anything better.
Lang: The best way possible to ruin a reader's day. (Beta wrote most of this.)
Raidō leaves me at the gate, angling left towards the Aburame clan and Genma's apartment. It's not too hard to imagine why, not when it's his and Genma's place. I stop long enough for the guard on duty to not-so-casually tell me Kei's back with a small laugh. It's good news, but at the same time doesn't mean much, so I leave without a word.
I'm not expecting her to be back for long, and I'm not expecting to even see her. She comes back and sleeps, then leaves. Even if I've told myself I'll finally work up the nerve to tell Kei how I feel or ask her out, and make sure she knows that's what I'm trying to do, I don't plan on doing it tonight. She's probably sleeping, and I'm tired too.
I've not been out of the village like Kei has, but ANBU's kept me busy. Long enough that as I hop across the rooftops, I can feel my low chakra reserves tell me I should have just walked along the streets. The mental tally of what food I have in my place is low too. Nothing there that's still good or easy to make.
I pass by my place, and head instead for Sensei's. He won't mind if I swipe a few packages of noodles, and I've got more than a few spare sets of clothes there. If it weren't for the fact Tatsumaki liked crying at two in the morning, I'd contemplate crashing there for the night. As it is, I land lightly on the roof and climb in through one of the hall windows.
"Kakashi's home," Sensei says softly to someone in the main room, and I brace myself for the loudness that is Naruto. It doesn't come, and I think of turning to get my clothes and changing out of the ANBU gear that is badly in need of cleaning.
After a few seconds, Sensei raises his voice to address me specifically, "Kakashi." And I turn back to see what he wants. "Kei's here."
My heart jumping because I haven't seen Kei in a year, I immediately slip into Body Flicker speed as Sensei continues speaking. As a result, I reach him and Kei before he has a chance to finish his request.
My heart then sinks as I get a good look at Kei, for what feels like the first time in a couple of years. Even before the last string of missions, she was gone for the year before that, and only a few of those missions had included both of us. Looking at her, I can see that she's been gone for too long.
Her hair's never been the tamest thing, but it's clear she hasn't cut it in a while. Even though the bangs have fallen in front of her face, and the top of her knees hide her jaw and mouth from view, it's obvious she's been crying.
This isn't the happy reunion I wanted, but I push that aside and put my hand on her knee. She doesn't look up, and I know my face is covered by the black mask so she couldn't see the frown even if she did. My first words to her in over a year are to ask her what's wrong.
She mumbles something that at that moment I don't hear. Not the words themselves, not when she shoves my hand aside. I can't hear them past the slight hitch in them and the dull monotone she uses as she forces herself to sit up.
Whatever it is she wants to say, I reach out for her hand. She still doesn't look up, even when I say her name.
Something is wrong.
I'm not a dog, but if I were, my hackles would be raised. I can't shake the anger at whatever's hurt Kei from my chest. I can't take it out on her though, never her. Instead, I turn to sensei, who is worried, but there is guilt there too, and I nearly growl out, "Sensei, what happened to her?"
The guilt on Sensei's face amps up again, and he opens his mouth to speak, but Kei interrupts him before he can say anything.
"I lied to you."
She lied to us? About what? Even as her hands dig into the thick fabric of the couch, I wrack my brain for what she could be talking about. I haven't even spoken to her in a year.
Could it be a mission report?
Or does it have to do with her visions?
She says weird things frequently, and sometimes she leaves things out. Maybe she doesn't think we notice, but none of it seems like it's anything important. And nothing that would put us in danger. Kei wouldn't do that to us.
She wants to keep us safe.
Like we want to keep her safe.
Like I want to keep her safe.
Gently, I squeeze her hand, hoping she'll look up or something, but she doesn't even seem to notice.
"Seventeen years ago, I started lying to everyone around me."
Seventeen years ago she was an infant. How could she have started lying then?
"And it just," she keeps saying, even though her voice is breaking through her tears. "It was easier to keep going. Like you said Sensei, why stop?"
What did Sensei tell her?
I look up to him for an explanation, but those blue eyes are focused on Kei, and he won't say anything to me. Not when Kei's talking. Squeezing Kei's hand, trying to work my fingers between hers to loosen her grip on the cloth, I turn my attention back to her.
"What are you talking about?" I ask, and try to keep her nails from tearing anymore. She doesn't release the edge of the cushion, or loosen anything in her posture.
Slowly, I reach out for her other hand. Even if she won't look at me, I'm going to let her know I'm here.
She starts speaking though before I can, telling us the truth about her lie. "I haven't always been Keisuke Gekkō."
My hand stops. I stop. She's always been Kei. She's been Kei since we met, even if we didn't get along at first, and then we did. She's Kei.
But there was The Dreamer, and Id. But they'd only been there once, and then they'd disappeared.
Were there more?
Is that what this was about?
Was the Kei I knew like them?
Worried about Kei and wanting an answer, but far too hesitant to say anything myself, I look up at Sensei. He meets my stare, and I wonder if he's wondering the same thing. "What do you mean?"
With the question asked, I turn back to Kei.
She rocks slightly like a gentle breeze has caught her hanging from a clothesline. She still doesn't look up, and it's almost more than I can bear seeing her like this. It's definitely more than I can stand without trying something.
With my attempt to reach out to her cut short and that hand pinned in place, I try to lift her chin with the other.
She jerks away from that, so I squeeze her left hand tighter as she explains what her world, what our world was or is to her. Her hand is bleeding. The nails have torn against the light fabric and I can see the spotting there, and know my gloves would be showing it too if they weren't too dark for it.
"I don't—" understand? Since when have I ever understood what Kei's thinking or how she sees the world? I've caught glimpses of it, and it alternatively amazes and frustrates me. "Kei, are you saying you saw the world as some kind of storybook?" That she sees us this way?
If I wasn't already fighting back tears as seeing Kei like this, I'd be doing it now. Kei's always acted like her visions followed a specific series of events that didn't bend to reflect the future in front of us—
Or her.
"That's why your visions never accounted for you. You weren't supposed to be here." She wasn't in the story.
She doesn't look up though, even if being able to look her in the eye would help me figure out what she's thinking. We don't always needs words to communicate; our missions before her absence proved that.
And yet when she speaks it's too quiet to make out, aside from scattered words and a soft, "Change the plot."
Because she thinks we are all products of someone's imagination. Like the characters in Jiraiya's books?
"So that's why you said you'd seen it before, and why you were so dead certain that certain events were going to happen," Sensei says, thinking aloud and coming to the realization a few seconds after me. Or maybe he's just filling the silence to give something for Kei to latch onto.
She does, nodding and saying something about being detached enough to see how events line up. She probably watched our entire lives play out.
The more I think on that, the less I like the implications. Are we just something Kei wants to play with? Does she even think we were real?
Then after a deep sigh, Kei says, "And then I got attached."
"Attached?" I ask quickly, so quickly, and feel guilty over the flare of hope I felt at her comment. Even before Kei can explain, or give me more hope, I pull back and bury it. I've failed to tell her for years. What reason do I have to hope Kei will like me like that?
None. Not when we're not even on the same page.
"Hayate first," Kei answers with far more pain in the two words than I want to ever hear from her. It's not a surprise though. She loves her brother. She's spent the last year making sure Sensei, Genma, Obito, everyone was there for him even when she was gone. Even when she was hurting.
"I didn't—"
And I can't help but wonder how long she's been hurting. How long this has been going on and we either didn't know, or just didn't see how deep this all went and just didn't do enough.
"He was just a minor character. His death didn't matter."
I flinch back at that, and even though my eyes are locked on Kei, I can see Sensei do the same in the edge of my vision.
Hayate's death didn't matter?
What?
This is not Kei.
"And then he was born. And he—and I couldn't not love him," Kei says, changing her words as her thoughts slid back into place. "I met Obito and Rin later." She keeps talking about them, and I draw back.
Even though I already know what happened to them in the world of her visions, I can feel my body go cold at the way she talks about it.
And then she shifts to herself. Except it's not to explain how much she's attached, it's more like some twisted progression of the expectations she had set for herself without any of us knowing, and how much she failed.
"Kei," I say, squeezing her hand with mine even if it's so cold and feels like ice because I am scared and this is not something I know how to deal with. "Stop." Sensei is quiet, so I go on. "Please, you're hurting yourself."
"And you." I expect her to look up at me when she says it, but she doesn't. "Kakashi, you were—"
I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear what I was in her visions, not the way they happened.
"You were different, in the story. It just kept hurting you over and over because it made things dramatic."
She's still looking at the floor and her feet, but I refuse to flinch back at that. This isn't about me. I'm fine. A little tired, and beating myself over not telling her how I feel, not calling her out on all the suspicions about the inconsistencies in the way she talks about her visions, but I'm not the one in pain right now.
And as she laughs, it only reminds me how much this world has hurt her. Her mother. Her father. Obito. The tailed beast. The years away on missions. This.
"If Obito and Rin made it, I thought, you'd be okay. What did it matter if some twenty-year-old phony died in their place, as long as it filled the quota?"
A quota? Is that how she sees this? She's saved them from some death in a reality that doesn't exist, except maybe in her head, and now someone else needs to fill their place?
"I'm sorry I didn't say this before, or I've hurt you by saying it. Maybe I just didn't want to believe I could lie so much."
My hand's still on Kei's, and I start to squeeze it lightly so she'll know I've heard her apology and accepted it. Even if there's no reason for it and I have so much more I want to say to her.
But she starts crying again, and pulls her hand away to wipe her face.
Sensei's eyes remain narrowed as he thinks. Quietly this time. And he doesn't say a word, even once Kei starts shaking.
She pulls back from me.
My knees are sore and I'm tired from the ANBU mission, and know I have more I have to do in a few hours, but I need to do something for Kei now. As I stand up though, and move, I can feel the tears I held back leak out my eye and slide down my mask, leaving the edges along my cheek wet.
I need to step away, into the hallway and away from Kei.
Dragging my dirt-and-probably-bloodstained glove over my eyes and snotty nose, I pull a kunai out of my holster with the other hand.
Kei needs time on her own to think. But that doesn't mean I can't give her something to help. Pakkun helped after we lost Obito, and her mother.
I summon him, and then after a second thought, the rest of the pack as well. If one dog helps, eight must help even more.
They don't even need me to tell them what to do before they turn toward Kei, and then run to her. Pakkun takes the lead, climbing onto her lap while the others flank her until she's thoroughly surrounded.
She pays attention to them, stroking Pakkun.
After looking up at me to let me know I did the right thing there, Sensei says something to Kei, and then he approaches me.
"Kakashi?"
"Yes, Sensei?" I ask, pulling the fabric back up over my mouth. It's wet and clings oddly because of the spotty way the tears had hit it. It doesn't do much, not here. Sensei, like Kei, has known me long enough to read my face even with everything covered.
How long has Kei known me? Or a version of Kei known a version of me?
Gently, he steers me towards what had once been the spare bedroom. It's Tatsumaki's and Naruto's now. But I can still remember throwing kunai at the ceiling where a mobile now hangs, after my father died.
"This came up while we were throwing a party for Kei at Tsunade's," Sensei tells me. Then, like I didn't know that this information was going to be more than an S-class secret, he added, "I don't think either of us should say a word of this to anyone."
Crossing my arms, and inhaling through my nose with a loud sniff, I ask, "What do I tell Obito and Rin?" If she stormed out, everyone would have noticed something was off with her. "Or anyone else who asks?"
Sensei grimaces at that. "She thought I sent her away from the village as punishment."
I can feel my metaphorical hackles raise again at that.
Part of it was true. The Shimura and Hyūga clans wanted Kei out of the village in retaliation for her behavior at the meeting. But the Hokage had kept her out for her safety. Or, if not her safety, the safety of the idiots who would view it as their sworn duty to harass a kunoichi who badmouthed them once or twice.
"You should have let me do something," I mutter. Even though I don't mean it fully, I do enough for the sake of the village to make it worth saying. ANBU agents act on behalf of the Hokage. If the clans posed a threat to Kei, to Konoha's jinchūriki, the Hokage could easily order ANBU to remove the problem.
That was the kind of slippery slope Danzō had worked on, though. Sensei isn't Danzō, but anger had a way of setting precedents that no one would be able to back out of later on.
Even though I know that wouldn't have worked, it doesn't stop me from wanting to do something about it, to have done something about it. To have stopped it before Kei got this hurt.
"Kakashi," Sensei says.
"I'll stay here with Kei. Hayate and the others will be worried if you're both gone for too long."
Sensei nods at that, but the pained smile is back on his face. "I need you to do something tonight, Kakashi."
I don't want to do anything else tonight but make sure Kei's all right. My chakra is low, and the last mission has left me tired enough I could easily sleep until noon tomorrow.
"One last mission to act on the information from Kei's visions," the Hokage says, and I immediately turn back from the direction Kei's in to stare at him.
If Kei's confession has done anything, it's convinced us both that we need to listen to her visions.
"What do you need me to do, Hokage-sama?"
"I need you to watch the Hyūga compound." The Hokage says, "Kei's convinced that a Kumo-nin is going to try kidnapping Hiashi's daughter."
I can feel my eye narrow as I think. The Byakugan is something people have tried to steal multiple times, and if the transplant of Obito's eye into me has taught anyone anything, it's that stealing the Byakugan might be just as easy as taking the eye. Particularly from a child too young for the Caged Bird Seal. Doubly so for the clan's heiress.
"Understood," I say.
Fwish.
Just like that, Sensei's gone and I have a mission.
I can't leave Kei just yet though. Not like this.
There's still something I have to say to her.
She's been gone for over a year, and during that time our most concrete interactions had been secondhand, through the security checkpoints. Every time I passed through the gates though, I'd asked someone if she was back.
I hadn't been as obvious or consistent about it as Hayate had been, but I wanted her back.
The feelings behind wanting to know when she'd be back, behind all the failed attempts at asking her out or trying to impress her, had grown over time. Somewhere along the year, I'd told myself I'd tell her how I feel. How I really feel because I'm not doubting or unsure about any of it. Absence made the heart grow fonder, didn't it?
And yet now, I know it's not the right time to tell her. As I walk back towards Kei, and see her surrounded by the dogs, rocking gently, I know I have to tell her something.
I just don't know what.
But Kei's words rattled around in my head. What did it matter if some twenty-year-old phony died in their place, as long as it filled the quota?
When we'd lost Obito, and when Kei became the host of the three-tails, she'd been thirteen, not twenty. But if she had been mentally there, does that make her Tsunade's age? Or something else entirely? While she's always acted odd—mature—she doesn't act as much like she's too old for her age like she used to.
But the little nagging thought, wondering if Kei will ever think of me as something other than a kid compared to her, is pushed aside by the rest of her words.
Does she really think there's some death quota to be filled, and that someone will have to die for it to be met? Or that she doesn't belong in this world? That her death wouldn't matter?
She doesn't even look up as I reach her, although Pakkun does. The rest of the pack does as well. "Do something," their lowered ears and large eyes say.
Gently, I lower myself onto the seat beside Kei and scratch at Akino's ears.
I can't tell Kei that I love her, not now. Maybe not for a while. She needs to deal with what's on her plate before I give her more to chew on. It's not fair to her to expect her to deal with this now.
She thinks we just value her for her prophecies, or her status as an S-ranked shinobi, but she's so much more than that. She's so much more than whatever changes she's made from a reality that doesn't exist, or a reality where she doesn't exist.
I can tell her that.
Forming the thought into words, I lean over and press my forehead to Kei's head so that she knows I'm here and that I need her to hear me.
"No matter what you think, I'm glad you exist," I whisper, and don't dare speak any louder because I can feel the urge to tell her more building in the back of my head. She doesn't need to hear it. She needs this. "Not your prophecies. Not your power. Just you."