A/N: Content Warning: Talking about suicide.

.

Orochimaru took care of everything. That night was a night of rest. Nothing awoke Kakashi in the morning. He opened his eyes to find a glass of water by his side. Oh, that was nice of him. Then he remembered the meeting. He shivered. In some ways, the reactions he'd gotten had been better than he'd expected. In some ways, they'd been worse. What does it mean?

He crept through the base as quietly as he could. He wasn't sure why he felt the need to be secretive. Perhaps it was a wolf instinct: when injured, hide. Kakashi kept all senses on high alert. He crept up right behind Tomoda without the young snake noticing.

Tomoda was outside, sitting by the garden plants and stroking their leaves. There was nothing to be done for them. They were perfectly healthy and needed no watering. Yet Tomoda spent most of his time out here. It was as if he hated being in the base.

"Tomoda?"

The boy looked up. He smiled. He got to his feet and hugged Kakashi.

Kakashi did not hug him back. He closed his eyes. "Uhy?"

"Uhy?"

"Daman fear make thu. Ma daman da. How…how can you hug me? How can you smile?"

Tomoda blinked back at him. "Thu katta."

"Daman. Monster."

Tomoda clasped his hands together and swayed back and forth. His eyes filled with tears. "Daman," he whispered. "Snake. Th - those, I know. Ninja? Uman di dark, as daman, cold, make fear? No know." He turned around to face the garden again. "No know."

I was wrong. He doesn't hate being in the base. He stays outside just because caring for plants is the only familiar thing he has. Kakashi's inner emptiness eased. Tomoda, too, had lost most of his connections. His community, his lifestyle, his whole world was gone. He was lonely too.

Kakashi stood beside his little brother and held his hand. "Tell me about your world."

Tomoda squeezed his hand back. They sat down together. In halting, sometimes choked language, Tomoda spoke of his world. He described the house he lived in. He spent a lot of time on its gardens, the plants that grew there and the way they danced in the breeze. He told Kakashi little anecdotes - stories that had nothing to do with each other except that he happened to remember them in the course of describing the garden. Kakashi had asked for his world, but by the time Tomoda grew too choked with emotion to speak he had yet to go beyond his house.

"Let me tell you of the world I grew up in," Kakashi said. "The world of ninja." He followed Tomoda's example and started in his own home, with his father. He described how his father first enrolled him in ninja school, after giving him a crash course on how to speak, understand speech and read. He described the school: its classes, recess, the social dynamics that developed among the students. He spent a lot of time on their social dynamics. The idea of rivalry, of having to be the most powerful and never expecting help, was drummed into us from every angle. Tests, contests. Even at recess, there was no escape. Our childhood games were competitions, and no sympathy or kindness was shown to those who got left behind. He told Tomoda all about Obito, because he had tried to offer Obito kindness after defeating him, way back in the beginning. "I told him, 'You were the only one who kept trying.'" But it didn't work. Then my father… And then, after that, I embraced being the best. I leaned in to that culture. I was horrible to him. Kakashi, too, grew too choked to speak before he even left the village.

Tomoda squeezed his hand. "Obito."

"He's dead now. He… I didn't save him. A bad man took him away, and it was all my fault." Kakashi let go of Tomoda's hand. He looked at his hands. "I could have saved him, but I didn't." He could almost feel his soul shriveling from the guilt.

"Ninja."

"Yeah. Ninja. I wish I never lived in that world."

"Thu na ninja da."

Kakashi smiled a little. That was a compliment.

"How?"

"Hmm. That's a hard one." Kakashi scratched his chin as he thought. Where to even begin? "Well, we left the village and moved into a hidden base just like this one. It might have been this one. Your big brother has lots of hidden bases, did you know? And then… We practiced being wolf and snake. I practiced my demon powers; we flew together. We practiced being anything other than humans. Then we ran into you, or what was left of you, and we went around to all the bases to find out what was going on. Then…"

He let his sentence trail off unfinished. It didn't matter what happened after Tomoda was unsealed and restored to himself. "Tomoda, do you remember what it was like to be a disembodied soul?"

Tomoda shrank back. "Na can travel back to the seal-spell. Na can travel back…many places."

Kakashi wanted to facepalm. How had he not realized it was strange that Tomoda only recalled incidents from his early childhood? He had never mentioned anything that happened in his later teenage years or young adulthood, and certainly nothing related to his sealing. Now it made sense. He couldn't remember anything except his childhood. No wonder he acted like a child still.

"No need," Kakashi rushed to tell him. "No need."

Tomoda clutched his own chest. "Na can travel back home… Was will it go…"

"No. You can't control what you do or don't remember. You didn't abandon anything."

"Was will it go," Tomoda repeated. He sobbed. "Was go, at same time ninja was make fear, make die. Ma was will it go…"

Kakashi shook his head frantically. "No, you don't have to feel guilty. You shouldn't feel guilty about any of it. You couldn't have known what was going to happen. If you hadn't been sealed, you couldn't have saved the world. You would have died too. It's better for you to be alive now. Now, you can make a difference."

Tomoda looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. "Now, no know. Ca - can make a difference… For thu. Na ma."

He doesn't recognize this as being the same world he once lived in. Why should he take comfort from being able to help strangers fix their own world? If anything, it must make it hurt more. If he can help a strange world, why couldn't he do anything for his own? Kakashi said nothing. He couldn't find anything to say.

"Katta." Tomoda sniffled. "Go back?"

Kakashi's blood froze. "No."

"Daman da."

"No. I can't interfere with time. Even if I could, I shouldn't. It would ruin me. You must never, ever ask me to do that."

"Go to umans? Real umans?"

"No! You would have to die!" Tomoda's words scared Kakashi like nothing else. He looked so happy, so boyish. How could he harbor such dark thoughts? It wasn't right!

Tomoda started to look scared. "Kagzi?"

"Don't leave me," Kakashi begged. "Please don't leave me. I need you here, now. Please make me part of your world." I will say anything I have to, just so you don't say those words again.

"Daman da," Tomoda whispered. "Be fear make thu?"

"Constantly. Always. All time."

Tomoda held his hand again. "No fear."

"Don't go. Your people might have needed you once, but I need you more." Kakashi found his whole body shaking. When had that started?

"No fear. No be will thu go."

As if I can ever believe that!

.

He initially kept Tomoda's words secret. He didn't want to scare Orochimaru. But then he realized that was the same logic and the same strategy he had used regarding his own problems, and look how well that worked. Orochimaru went shopping in the middle of the day, so they had an ordinary human-style dinner. Kakashi entered the kitchen as he was cooking. "I learned something about Tomoda this morning."

"Of course you did. He's an inexhaustible wealth of information." Kakashi could hear the smile in his voice.

"It's not… Ah… What I learned…"

"Spit it out, Puppy."

"He's like me," Kakashi blurted. "He's lost in a world he doesn't recognize as his own, and all he wants is to go back home. He asked me to take him back. He even asked me to take him to see his people. I don't know if he understood what he was really saying, and I'm too scared to ask."

Orochimaru slowly turned around. Kakashi avoided looking anywhere near his face. "He feels so guilty because he left his people when they needed him most. He blames himself for not remembering anything around the time when he was sealed, as if he abandoned his world by not committing it to memory. He said this after I told him it's my fault Obito died."

"You still live with that?"

"Of course I do."

"It's been two decades. Are you planning to keep your martyr complex permanently?"

Now Kakashi looked up at him. He couldn't understand what Orochimaru was saying. "Obito's dead, and he's never coming back. His death will last forever. That's how death works. I know you like to pretend that isn't true, but it is."

"Just because he's dead, you should be too?"

"I can't," Kakashi squeaked.

"If you could kill yourself, you would? Is that what you're saying?"

"No. I don't know."

"Tomoda's like you? You mean he's suicidal? My little brother wants to die?"

"He just wants to go back home."

Orochimaru hissed. He lunged forward and grabbed Kakashi's arm. "What the fuck do you think you're doing? Do you think I'll let you? You're both idiots!"

"I asked him not to leave me. He said he wouldn't."

"That doesn't do him much good when you're like this." Orochimaru swept his gaze up and down Kakashi's whole body, his face twisted in revulsion. "If you fucking infected him with this guilt you insist on feeding…"

Kakashi shrank back. He hates me. I shouldn't have told him.

Orochimaru let go. He was flushed and his breathing was heavy. He turned away from Kakashi. "I - I should pay attention to dinner. Before it burns."

Kakashi slunk out of the kitchen and straight to some unused room he could sleep in. He had no appetite. I'm a walking disaster. He's right to hate me. Once again, all he wanted was oblivion in sleep. It took a while to find, but eventually he found it.

.

The next morning, Orochimaru found him and shook him awake. "Pack meeting. Now." He dragged Kakashi off to the blank-walled room where experiments were performed. Tomoda was already there. He squeezed the toy snake, looking confused. Kakashi was not confused. Is he going to yell at the both of us like he did last night?

Orochimaru's yellow eyes glinted. "Kakashi." His voice was cool and level. "You can manipulate the structure of reality in order to teleport small pieces of your soul. Do that now, but on a larger scale. Large enough to teleport a whole person."

"Who?"

"Who else?"

Kakashi's whole body untensed. Thank the gods! He's not going to yell at me! "Of course," he said, nodding. "Give me two minutes."

He sent a small frame containing this request to his dog clone, who was a little hard to locate among the sea of soul lights that surrounded him. Sure enough, two minutes later when a frame came back, Kakashi learned that his dog clone was now in the angels' homeland. He and Purple had been playing fetch. The dog clone wasted no time in telling Purple that an angel was needed, and what the plan was. Purple agreed to try it. Now all Kakashi had to do was stay in place and coordinate wordlessly with a clone of his to anchor both ends of a person-sized tunnel through reality, which wasn't even close to anything he had done before.

"Starting now," he told his pack. "I've never done anything like this before, so it could take a while." Orochimaru nodded.

First, Kakashi threw a string of darkness in his clone's direction. A tug on the string indicated it had been received. He shaped a wormhole large enough to accommodate a soul light, and extended it along the length of the string. Fortunately, the liquidy currents of reality easily conformed to whatever movement an incoming wave was performing. But just as easily as they bent into a barrel wave, the wave could collapse. Kakashi attempted to push outwards from his string of darkness, holding the wave open by force. It lasted several seconds. Based on the results he got with his frames, that should be enough time.

He and his clone did it again. They opened wormholes and sent them along the length of the string to create a tunnel. Kakashi held the tunnel open as long as he could. When it collapsed, he nearly panicked. It would have been so much more reassuring if he could have seen Purple's soul!

When he dropped down to the concrete level of reality and saw Purple standing there, he nearly collapsed with relief. "Thank the gods! I've never done that before."

"No fear!" Purple said cheerfully. "It was kind to me."

A gasp drew everyone's attention to Tomoda. The young snake stared at Purple with wide eyes. "Uman di light?" he asked.

"Yep," Kakashi answered.

Purple gasped too. "Hello! What name is yours?"

Tomoda blinked. "Name… Tomoda?"

Purple crossed his hands over his chest. "Purple Sorrows."

"Burba," Tomoda repeated. He crossed his hands over his chest too. "Snake."

Purple gigged in delight. He turned to Orochimaru. "Hearing the young snake speak brings joy! Now to do… Was need?"

"Yes," Orochimaru told him. "There is a lot of need." He indicated that Kakashi should stand next to Tomoda. Kakashi did so. This allowed Orochimaru to gesture at the both of them while he spoke. "These two have problems understanding why they should continue to live. You're an angel. You must be able to make them understand."

"Why they should…" Purple's delighted look disappeared. "What?" He sounded like he already knew, but didn't want to be right.

"Let me explain," Kakashi requested. Orochimaru nodded. Kakashi told Purple, "As you know, I suffer from recurrent bouts of depression. Sometimes, during a particularly bad bout, it's true that I wish for the ability to just stop existing." He cleared his throat. "Tomoda here misses his people and the world he knew. He asked me to take him back home or to see his people. I'm not sure if he meant that the same way other people would mean it."

"And apparently, he's afflicted with crushing guilt just the same as Kakashi is," Orochimaru said with a hiss.

Purple went up to Tomoda and examined him. The young snake smiled just as innocently as ever. "Young one, are you sad?" Purple asked.

"Na."

"Are you sad in the past?"

Tomoda's brow furrowed. His smile faded. "Ya."

"How sad?"

Tomoda struggled to remember. "N…na can travel back."

Kakashi sighed. "I have no idea why I felt so bad either. It's as if I can remember the event itself just fine. I can even remember my thoughts. I just can't remember my feelings."

Orochimaru held up a hand. "That might be your situation. But let's make sure our little brother remembers the event before we jump to conclusions."

Oh. Kakashi blushed. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to. "I asked you if you could remember what it was like to be a disembodied spirit," he told Tomoda.

Tomoda looked distant. He did not respond.

"You said, 'Na can travel back. Was will it go'?"

Tomoda still didn't respond.

"You asked me if we could go back, if I could take you to see real humans," Kakashi pressed. Does he have total amnesia of our discussion?

"Real umans," Tomoda repeated. "Na ninja. Ninja cold, dark, as daman." He shivered. "Na…" He started to whimper.

"We went to a ninja village a few days ago," Kakashi told Purple.

"Was will it go…" Tomoda looked up at Purple, a pleading look in his eyes. "Ninja make fear, make die. An ma, ma sit in seal-spell. Snake. Strong. An ni go to umans, ni saeve non." He gasped. "Na saeve non."

"That's what the demon told him," Kakashi realized. "Na saeve non. Your snake powers won't save anybody. When war came, he was sealed and couldn't do anything. It's as if the demon's words came true!"

Tomoda was crying now. "Shma. As fruit."

"He thinks the demon was right about him." Kakashi's heart sank. No. No.

Purple hugged Tomoda. "All is kind," he murmured. "All is kind to you, little one."

Kakashi and Orochimaru looked at each other. Was blatant lying really the answer? But Tomoda seemed to draw comfort from it. He relaxed in the angel's arms. "Mm."

Purple held on to him and patted his back for a while longer. When he finally released Tomoda, the young snake looked like himself again. "Can I try logic now?" Kakashi asked. Purple nodded. Kakashi put a hand on Tomoda's shoulder. "You are not small. You are not as fruit. Remember when we were in the meeting, surrounded by ninjas? You told them what they were. You and your katta showed them how demonlike they were, and they were ashamed. Remember that? You are not weak."

"Fear…"

"Being afraid doesn't make you weak." Kakashi patted his shoulder.

"No know."

"Not yet. But you will."

Tomoda hugged his stuffed toy snake and rocked back and forth. He sniffled.

Purple turned to Kakashi. "Why do you want death?"

"Not death itself. Just the option. When I am in the middle of one of those episodes, I feel powerless and trapped. I long for any way to escape. The fact that I can't even die makes me feel more trapped. It doesn't matter so much whether I would or not."

"What trap?"

It took Kakashi a few seconds to figure out what he was asking. "Trapped with my feelings. I want a way to escape from feeling so bad."

Purple brightened. "Other ways are every place!"

"It doesn't seem like it…"

"What bad feeling?"

"Guilt, mainly."

"Hmm… How banish guilt…" Purple thought hard. "Why guilt?"

"It has so many sources, I don't know where to begin."

"Obito," Tomoda and Orochimaru said at the same time.

Kakashi raised his hands. "Okay, fine, I'll talk about Obito. No need to leap on me." His casual and lightly annoyed tone masked a deep unease. His heart beat fast. "Obito was a teammate of mine. He was like a little brother to me. But I was cruel to him. I always put him down. I embraced the values of ninjas, where ninjas are tools and all that matters is that you complete missions. I looked down on him for being slow and uncertain of himself, when really he was just being human. And then, just when he finally got through to me, just when he taught me what it means to be human, how to love… Just when I could have dropped the pretense and embraced him as my friend and brother… Something horrible happened. He was badly injured, and taken away by an evil man who did horrible things to him. And I didn't stop it. I could have stopped it with my demon powers, but I didn't want to use them. I was too busy pretending to be human." Kakashi was openly crying now. "He taught me how to be human and being human is why I didn't save him. I - I never could thank him, I never got the chance to tell him what he did for me…"

Kakashi sank down to his knees and covered his face with his hands. Purple sat with him. "Sad is. But is it your guilt?"

"I'm a demon. I'm supposed to be all powerful. What good is being a demon when I couldn't save him? I'm too powerful when I don't want to be, and powerless when I need to be. I don't know what to do with my power. I can't control it. I'm scared of it. If I wasn't a demon, then at least I could tell myself there was nothing I could have done. But I am a demon. A useless no-good one."

Purple gave him a hug. This time, Kakashi's need was so bottomless that an angel's embrace did not comfort him. Guilt and fear and shame, plus a lot of their hangers-on, swarmed around his head. His soul ached. "Ow," he whined.

"You take too much weight," Purple told him.

"It's not like I can control it."

"All words are true."

Kakashi opened his eyes. He had encountered that philosophy before. When his seafaring clone lived aboard the ship, it learned that many of the things considered important among ninjas were not considered important in the angels' homeland. Because of that, they were not important. Thoughts created reality. Words created reality.

"That's why I feel so trapped," he said. "I'm locked in a loop of thoughts and words and things that happen."

"Change the mind."

"How?"

"As you change clothes," Purple said. "Put on a new mind."

Kakashi pulled back and stared at him. "What are you talking about? I only have one mind."

Purple shook his head. "Mind is not one. Guilt-mind is not as happy-mind."

Logically, he's right. I could just change my mind. But in practice I can't. Maybe that's just because I tell myself I can't, but it doesn't matter why. All that matters is that I can't. Kakashi shook his head.

"Excuse me," Orochimaru cut in. "What are you talking about, Puppy? You can put on a new mind as easily as a hat."

"No I can't."

"Yes you can." Orochimaru smirked. "I have a day's worth of notes to prove it."

A day's worth of notes? Kakashi looked up at him, unable to understand.

"You have two lives at the same time, Puppy. You don't need to end this one in order to escape the disaster it's become. Just switch to your other life for a while."

"Two lives at same time?" Purple asked. "Dog?"

"No," Kakashi said. I remember! "Yukidama. I have a clone on the inside of that tangle I told you about. That clone has been separate from me for my whole life, but we're still linked. I have some of its memories. I can assume its personality." Why did I not think of this? Another personality is the perfect escape! I can escape from myself!

Orochimaru nodded. "That clone has never been taken by the false world or accepted an overly large share of guilt in its life. It's a perfect antidote."

Kakashi closed his eyes. "Let me try something. Don't interrupt." He took a deep breath. On the exhale, he said, "Obito," and remembered that horrible day when Obito was crushed under a rock. Then, without opening his eyes, he lifted up his hands and pressed them together. My other self. Yukidama. He pressed his hands tighter and tighter against each other as he struggled to keep Obito in mind while simultaneously adopting that guilt-free persona. What would he think about Obito?

"Obito," he whispered. "He… He was…" Kakashi felt some muscles around his throat tense. "He was a nice puppy," he said in a high-pitched child's voice. "When he got crushed, it was…" Kakashi opened his eyes. "Grr! It was terrible! And the worst timing, too!" He crossed his arms and pouted. "And if I'd known about it, Madara's bed would totally have been turned into spiders."

"You're mad," Orochimaru said with a grin.

"Yeah!"

"Do you feel guilty?"

"No," Kakashi answered. Success! "Because…" He rubbed his chin. "Because I don't make the rules. Those big ideas did. I just stopped by to play their game."

Orochimaru frowned. "Big ideas?"

"The gods!" Purple exclaimed. "Not the ones that live in shrines, that help us. The ones that some souls make part of when they are free. The gods that are every place and every time and every thing."

"It's a nice game they got here," Kakashi said. What? My clone lives guilt-free because he thinks of the whole entire world as nothing of importance, as just a game? It may feel good, but I don't think I want to view the world that way.

Purple nodded. "Yes, is so!"

…If angels see the world that way, it can't be bad. Kakashi resolved to cultivate a more gamelike view of the world in the future.

"Thank you," Orochimaru said to Purple. "You've helped immensely."

Kakashi fought to restore his normal personality. He massaged his throat. He coughed. "Now let's see if I can send you back," he said in his normal voice. "What did my clone do to send you through the wormhole?"

"Dog revealed the way through just next to him. I saw. I went through."

"Okay." Kakashi sent his dog clone a frame to alert it. Then they repeated the same procedure as before. He made sure to place his end of the wormhole so close that it must have manifested in the same room. As before, when the barrel wave collapsed, he briefly panicked. A frame arrived seconds later to tell him Purple was safe and sound.

When Kakashi returned to the normal level of reality, Orochimaru was standing in front of him with one hand on his shoulder and one hand on Tomoda's shoulder. "In case a visit from an angel wasn't permanent enough for you two, let me make myself absolutely clear." He leaned in. "Under no circumstances are either of you allowed to kill yourselves. I won't have it in my family. Is that understood?" Kakashi and Tomoda nodded. "Good. I don't want to hear another word of it, unless those words sound something like 'I am being besieged by those horrible feelings again, please remind me how to get rid of them.'"

Kakashi nearly melted. "You care for us so much."

Orochimaru smirked. "You're surprised?"

.

A/N: Some notes about psychology:

Emotional amnesia (where you can remember everything else just fine, but not your feelings) is a thing. I read an article on it.

Kakashi's solution to his traumatic thought patterns is also a thing. It's called plurality. At least, that's what it's called by the people who have it. The plural comunity includes anyone whose identity structure contains multiple parts. People with Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) are considered plural. So are people with other dissociative disorders that cause them to have distinct 'states' with different patterns of thinking and feeling that don't fully qualify for DID. So are people who've never been diagnosed with anything at all but probably could be. So are people that get along well enough in the world that they probably couldn't be, because the first criteria for any psychological diagnosis is that it must negatively impact your life. If your identity is anything other than "I am an individual person," it probably qualifies.

Anyone who wants to know more about this community or any of the conditions listed above can check out Pluralpedia dot org. It's like Wikipedia, but for the plural community. It's got all kinds of articles about common vocabulary and phenomena within the community. I cannot recommend it enough. This is only the first plug I'm doing - my other stories will also have Author Notes that mention Pluralpedia within one or two chapters. Finding that site changed my life.