Kakashi
Between a surrealinner landscape conversation with his dead father and opening his eyes to find Sakura hovering over him and insisting that Naruto actually needed him, with Sasuke lurking over her shoulder and nodding in agreement, Kakashi felt entirely justified in his reaction of sighing and saying, "So, I'm dead, then."
Sakura's brow wrinkled. "Sensei, what?"
"I've died. This is some strange mixture of heaven and hell, because my kids are here, but you're all still super obnoxious, somehow?"
Something tiny and rebellious and offended sparked in Sasuke's eyes—eyes that were free of the blinding seal, eyes that Kakashi could look into again without wanting to vomit, thank the afterlife for that, at least—and was quickly banked, like he wanted to protest that he had never been obnoxious in his life, but even his famed allergy to the goddamn truth couldn't force that lie past his lips.
Kakashi choked on a giggle that absolutely murdered his heavily abused ribcage.
"Sakura," Sai said politely, from somewhere in this ramshackle room that was slowly coming into focus. Burn-blasted brick. Hospital beds bearing scorch marks. The heavy stink of smoke. "Is there brain damage on Kakashi-Sensei's person that you forgot to heal?"
Sakura offered Sai a look that suggested she'd put his head through the nearest wall should he question her medical prowess ever again. "His brain isn't damaged."
Any more than usual—Sasuke didn't say it out loud, but Kakashi could read that in his eyes, too, because he and Sasuke knew how to have entire conversations without saying a word, sentences folded into looks and facial tics. Which was why Kakashi knew that his message back to Sasuke—you are still technically classified as a missing-nin capable of deadly force, I could kill you right here and get a goddamn commendation for it—was received, loud and clear.
Sure you could, old man, Sasuke said, smug smug smug in the fractional curling of his mouth, and okay. Kakashi was going to end this uppity little shit.
Except that Sakura broke in with a forceful, "Kakashi-Sensei. Naruto."
"Right." He rolled to his knees, and then his feet, with Sakura's supporting hands on his back. He would find time to hate himself for that later, that his student was the one holding him steady, that he'd made it her responsibility to drag him back from the almost-afterlife with blood and sweat and her own chakra, instead of Kakashi protecting her like he'd always promised to do.
"You're alright, Kakashi-Sensei?" Sai inquired.
Every bone in his body ached like a deeply set bruise. He was pretty sure his ribs hadn't set all the way, because breathing deeply made little spots of silver dance before his eyes. Discretely, he tried to gather chakra in his right hand, and felt an immediate recoil of pain up his arms, burned-out chakra pathways screaming in protest. None of it Sakura's fault, of course—no doubt she was chakra-drained as well, and even more so after pulling Kakashi from the brink of death. But still, she could never know about the hurts that lingered. "I'm fine, Sai."
Liar, Sasuke accused in the infinitesimal tipping of his head.
Shut the fuck up, kid, Kakashi sent back with a smile.
"Where is Naruto now?" he asked the room at large, shifting his weight to his left foot in the hopes that it would hide the hairline fractures that were still rocking his right leg.
"With Pein," Sasuke answered. "And Madara. Madara plans to pull him back into the genjutsu—the one he caught all of us in before—and use it to keep Naruto calm and compliant until they can extract his fox."
"It's a good plan," Kakashi agreed lightly, even as terror screamed down his spine like a lightning strike. Naruto, for all the he'd grown and overcome in recent years, was still susceptible to genjutsu. It would work. Madara had made sure that it would work. "And what's your part in it, Sasuke? Were you sent to gather us together? Trap us in a genjutsu of your own?"
"I'm here to help," Sasuke said.
Kakashi smiled at him again, perfectly pleasant, in a way that communicated, You have to understand why I can't believe that.
"I am," Sasuke insisted. "But we don't have time for me to prove it to you. Every second we waste is a second that Madara could be pulling Naruto away. I can sense his chakra right now because he isn't hiding it from me, doesn't see me as a threat. But Madara is a master of concealment; if we mess this up, stall out and let him see that I'm helping you, and he gets away? Then we'll only see Naruto again when Madara throws his empty corpse out for the birds to feed on."
"Of course," Kakashi demurred. With a subtle angle of his chin, he added, I told you once that you were my legacy and I still believe that. But make a single threatening move toward Naruto, toward any of us, and you won't have the chance to betray us again. I'll slit your throat first. It will destroy me to do it, but I will Sasuke, understand?
Face blank, Sasuke nodded.
"Do we report first?" Sai wondered, fingers curled loose and ready around his ink brushes.
Sasuke slid him a cutting look. "Report to who? The rubble of the Hokage Tower? Three-fourths of the Village is burned to the ground."
Sakura threw an elbow at Sasuke's gut without a backward glance. "We don't have time for mission reports or subtle bitchery, you idiots. We have ground to cover and a Village to rebuild."
"Can't rebuild the Village without your boy?" Sasuke asked, rubbing at his stomach and sneering, because Kakashi's legacy was an idiot who hadn't learned a single goddamn thing across the years.
But Kakashi had, because he hadn't been frolicking away from Sakura's fists during their formative, fierce-growing years. And so he knew to keep his mouth shut and let Sakura step forward herself, green eyes flashing and breath heaving, as she said, "I don't need any boy to build my home. I can stack those stones myself. But Naruto loves this Village. Even when it didn't make space for him, he loved it. And if the Leaf has to be rebuilt, then Naruto is our best chance at making sure that there are gaps enough for everyone to fit on this go-round."
Sasuke didn't nod or apologize or say anything at all because he was, as Kakashi maintained: an idiot. But he did take a step backward. A single step and it shouldn't have felt so important. But it did, and it was, because Sasuke had never ceded even that much ground to Sakura before.
Still an idiot, but maybe he hadn't learned nothing.
They looked to him then, the three of them, instinctive, and wasn't that the biggest tragedy in all of this? That his kids could see the bodies and buildings that Kakashi had failed to protect and still believe that he was the one to lead them. It made Kakashi ache. Humbled him down into the dirt. Made something in his stomach feel warm and impossibly small, and also made him feel like he was the master illusionist here, never mind Madara and his matching pair of fancy Uchiha eyes.
Because, really, Kakashi had been successfully spinning a pretty lie for years, if his kids still thought that he was someone to have faith in.
But still, he said, "Let's go," because someone had to and at the end of the day, Kakashi would try to be anything that these kids needed, even if it was the leader he didn't believe himself to be or keeper of secrets he didn't feel entitled to or the comfort of a clean death at familiar hands.
Anything, anything for his kids. The weight of it bowed him sometimes, but it was still a lighter load than failure, and he was glad to carry it.
They followed him out of the ruined building and across the ocean of rubble. Kakashi hit the trees on the village border, having to work extra hard to find stable branches that weren't blackened or bent, his kids still on his heels, and bizarrely, felt the urge to cry beneath his mask.
##
They found Madara in a cave, because of course they did.
Someday, if Kakashi's kids continued to be unreasonably stubborn about his inevitable early death, Kakashi was going to hit old age because Sakura wouldn't stand for otherwise, and then write a lengthy dissertation on villains and their apparent erection for dark, dank, jagged caverns that were covered in moss and stinking of dirt and damp.
After Kakashi whispered this aloud, a little bit high on adrenaline and the giddy endorphins of pushing back pain and the sound of falling rocks that he was never quite able to banish from his head, Sai fixed him with a solemn look and whispered back, "I believe that, were Naruto present instead of unconscious somewhere inside this cave, he would say 'What the fuck, Kakashi-Sensei, why are you so weird?'"
"You are not actually allowed to die young," Sakura agreed from Kakashi's right flank. "Just saying. I will drag you back every time, Sensei, and the lectures will only get longer."
Sasuke snorted, very softly, from Kakashi's left. The four of them were crouched in the tree branches above the cave entrance, muffling their chakra, which took depressingly little effort with how drained they all were.
"But we won't stay hidden for long," Sasuke said grimly. "Madara is…he's something else."
"Kakashi-Sensei," Sakura whispered. "Plan?"
"We need to get inside," Kakashi said. "Madara won't release his hold on Naruto, so somehow, we need to get inside the genjutsu as well."
"I can get us into the illusion," Sasuke countered. "I've touched it before. I know what it feels like. But we can't defend against Madara if we're all incapacitated."
There was a long beat of silence, because that was the crux of it. They could break into the genjutsu. They could snap Naruto out of it, they knew that for sure. They might even be able to get him out of the cave, if they could work up a suitable distraction. But keeping Madara at bay was a suicide mission, and they all knew it.
Finally, softly, Sai said, "I'll do it. I'll remain outside of the illusion and hold our defenses."
"Okay," Sasuke agreed immediately, and Sakura punched him in the skull.
"Sai," she said, while Sasuke tried manfully to pretend that there weren't cartoon birdies wheeling around his head. "You don't—you have just as much right as any of us. Just as much ability, to be the one who drags Naruto out of the illusion. You don't have to volunteer for this."
"Naruto needs your talent for seeing through genjutsu, Sakura. He needs Kakashi's stabilizing influence."
"Stabilizing," Kakashi repeated, doubtfully.
"But-," Sakura started to argue back, and Sai cut her off with a look. On anyone else, Kakashi might have called it 'gentle' or 'amused'.
"I am not offering out of some misguided belief that I do not belong on this team, Sakura. You and Naruto have done more than enough to assure me of my place. I'm merely extrapolating the odds that the three of you have a better chance of retrieving Naruto, given that you've already done it once before."
Sasuke had .25 seconds to look smug in the tilt of his eyebrows, before Sai added, "Besides. Surely there's no force more likely to awaken Naruto than the sheer power of his homoerotically charged bond with the Uchiha."
Sakura hit Sasuke again, before he could follow through with his obvious intention to shove Sai out of the tree. Kakashi was just so proud of the three of them, really.
"That leaves a way in, and a way to get Naruto out," Sakura said, once Sai had settled on a branch safely out of Sasuke's reach and Sasuke had put on the 'I'm too dignified for such childish behavior' face that he wore whenever he was actually afraid of Sakura's further retribution.
"I have an idea," Sasuke said, because Naruto wasn't there to make stupid decisions, and so Sasuke was the natural successor to the role.
Kakashi said, "I want it documented that this was the exact moment when this mission went from 'high likelihood of death' to 'there will be rivers of fire and blood and a curse upon this land for years to come'. Put that on one of your scrolls for whatever wandering ninja finds our rotting corpses in the aftermath, Sai."
"Kakashi-Sensei," Sakura said, disapproving.
Fuck you very much, Sasuke suggested with the tiniest tip of his head.
But Sai just nodded, solemn and serene, and actually pulled a scroll from his bag, inking 'To Whom it May Concern: Please blame this catastrophe on the corpse with the katana and questionable haircut' on the parchment until Sakura snorted once, reluctantly amused, and even Sasuke's glare wasn't as ugly as it could have been and Kakashi could burn that picture into his head to take with him, instead of the exhausted tight-lipped worry they were all wearing outside of it.
##
The stupid idea, in true Sasuke fashion, had been one that smacked of distrust and potential betrayal.
"Madara told me to join him once I'd gathered myself," Sasuke had explained. "He'll be expecting me. I can walk right in and create a distraction, while Sakura and Kakashi snatch Naruto and run to the safe place Sai will have set up."
"I love this plan," Kakashi had said. "Especially how it's 92% likely that this is all a ruse that you worked up with your crusty, immortal family member to take out the people who could possibly rescue Naruto in one fell swoop. That's just my favorite part of all of this, Sasuke, really."
"Do you have a better idea?"
"Oh, absolutely not. I'm just doing my part to create an atmosphere of positivity. It's very important to have an atmosphere of positivity. Tsunade-Sama made the Jounin attend an extremely relevant and absolutely necessary seminar on effective leadership. 'A good leader works to maintain morale', et cetera."
"I've read about this," Sai had announced from his tree branch. "About expressing humor in the face of certain death. Does it help, Kakashi-Sensei? Should I tell my joke about the chicken and the ninja trap? I worked very hard on it."
"I swear to god," Sakura had finally threatened. "Sai. I will create a distraction by knocking down a wall and then launching you directly at Madara's face. Shut up now, okay?"
Sasuke had looked at Sakura like he'd never respected her more.
Now, Kakashi crouched at Sakura's side, wedged inside a tiny rock shelf, ignoring the dirt and damp and centipedes disturbing the earth beneath their feet, watching as Sasuke strolled into the cave's rocky interior with a cool look and a quiet, "Madara."
Madara, whose hair was ridiculously grandiose even for an Uchiha, pivoted slightly to acknowledge Sasuke's entrance. There was a frail, sunken man at his side who didn't look like Pein, but his chakra felt identical and so he must have been, somehow.
Naruto was at their feet, limp and unmoving. Resting in the dirt like forgotten garbage. Kakashi breathed carefully through his mask and clenched his fists together hard enough that his nails cut grooves into his palms.
Still, he had appearances to maintain. He couldn't risk speaking out loud, because Madara wasn't stupid no matter what his hairdo implied, and so Kakashi uses two fingers and Morse Code to tap out a message against Sakura's ankle.
Ten bucks on Sasuke betraying us with a choreographed flip of his hair and some dramatic saying like 'you really should have seen this coming, Kakashi-Sensei'.
No deal, Sakura tapped back. Even when he was morally gray instead of death and vengenance-flavored, Sasuke never could resist the dramatic hair flip.
Kakashi grinned, so grateful for Sakura, grateful down to his aching, shattered bones.
"Welcome, Sasuke," Madara was saying back inside the cave. "I knew you'd come to your senses and choose family over the faint and fragile bonds of Leaf Village shinobi."
"Hn," Sasuke said—a truly heroic effort at conveying family loyalty. Kakashi wanted to throw a shuriken at his head.
"Would you like to say goodbye to your former comrade?" Madara asked, all polite sweetness, even as he nudged at Naruto's body with his foot and set Kakashi's blood pressure from angry simmer to boil.
Sakura was tensing next to him as well, carefully regulating her inhales, and Kakashi thought that Madara might have actually feared for his stupid, endless life if he could have seen the murder in her eyes.
Sasuke blinked down at Naruto impassively, head tipped to the side like Naruto was nothing more than an unfamiliar face, a stranger lying in the dirt at his feet instead of the boy who had bled and burned and spent every waking second trying to save Sasuke from himself, someone unworthy of Sasuke's worry or concern, and Kakashi thought this is it, this is the moment and steeled himself against the quicksilver cut of betrayal and the fact that it could still cut so deep, when he was expecting it.
Except that Sasuke said, "Tch. Unnecessary," instead of shouting something like, "I've brought my former team to you as promised!" And then shifted his weight onto his back feet and delivered the signal that he and Sakura had agreed upon.
Sort of, anyway. Kakashi and Sakura had interpreted the pre-arranged signal of 'get Madara's attention' as 'draw him into conversation or maybe get him monologuing since that always seems to work'.
Sasuke had, apparently, interpreted the signal as 'slide my katana out of its holster and stab Madara in the fucking chest'. Because he was, at the end of all things, a perfect storm of unnecessary, excessive violence.
"What the hell," Sakura yelped, even as she responded to the signal accordingly, bursting free of their hiding place and knocking down the wall behind it in a crack of splintered rock and broken earth. The cave shuddered ominously around them. "What are you—just—I have done nothing in my life to deserve such idiots on my team."
"Sasuke," Madara said, sounding completely unconcerned by the katana in his upper lung. If anything, he sounded blandly disappointed, like Sasuke had just trod dirt onto the hallway carpet, or something.
In response, Sasuke flipped his bangs and said, "You really should have seen this coming, Madara."
Kakashi howled with laughter, wheezing and choking even as he set off the series of flash-tags that he'd set up around the cave, filling the space with a distracting cacophony of light and sound on top of Sakura's decimated wall and the uneasy groaning of the cave.
"Called it," he gasped, dizzy with laughter and relief and a raw kind of wonderment, eyes streaming in a way that he really wanted to blame on the smoke choking the cave but knew he couldn't. "You owe me ten bucks, my dearest, darling student!"
"I said 'no deal'!" Sakura hollered back, darting in between rubble and rocks falling from the collapsing ceiling as she headed for Naruto.
Madara turned in her direction, still entirely too unbothered by the sword in his chest for Kakashi's comfort level. Sasuke attempted to stop him, but Madara flicked him back with two fingers, like Sasuke was an annoying gnat on a hot summer's day. Sasuke went flying into the still-erect wall of the cave, hitting it with enough force that the sounds of collapsing rock became much more urgent, to the point where Kakashi had to swallow around the slick, slimy, physical weight of post-traumatic flashbacks.
Madara's eyes fixed on Sakura, Sharingan whirling, and Sakura tipped his chin up in response, defiant and fearless and perfect as she reached for Naruto in spite of Madara's attention.
Madara's hands flashed and Kakashi felt his stomach drop, felt himself move, chest tightening as he realized that he'd be too late, that he couldn't get to Sakura in time, and that Sasuke was still unmoving against the wall.
Except that Madara was suddenly being impaled by more than Sasuke's katana, iron rods pushing through his arms and legs and torso with the crack of shattered bone and the soft, wet rip of rending flesh, pinning him to the dirt.
"Go," Pein-But-Not wheezed around lungs that sounded like they were filled with wet sand. "Take the boy. He is…better than dying here, for Madara's purposes."
Kakashi stumbled to a stop at Pein's side, the hairline fracture in his leg sending shocks of white-red pain up his spine.
Quietly, as Sakura collected Naruto and headed for the entrance, he said, "We're blowing the cave. We've got explosives lining the entrance."
A favor for a favor. But Pein just nodded. "That is…good. I am very tired."
"I don't want to thank you," Kakashi informed him. "You killed me once today."
"Well, clearly, it didn't take," Pein said, with a glimmer of something like humor. "Don't thank me. Just go. The collapse of the cave might be enough for me, but it won't slow Madara down for long."
Kakashi nodded once. He left Pein behind, wheezing and rattling deep in his chest, and headed for the opposite wall. Sasuke was climbing unsteadily to his feet, ignoring the blood matted in his hairline like a champion.
"Were you going to go on without me?" he asked when Kakashi reached his side. Without blame. Honest curiosity.
"If you had betrayed us," Kakashi returned, easy and truthful in spite of the cave falling down around them. "I would have."
I thought that I was going to have to leave you here. Another Uchiha buried beneath rock and rubble on my conscience. I wouldn't have survived it for long.
"You could have let Sakura pull the trigger, old man," Sasuke muttered, even though his face suggested that he knew why Kakashi would never ask that of her. "Let's go."
They went, fleeing deep into the trees, coughing up blood and dust. Kakashi didn't think about Pein, or the cave, or the shuddery, unshakeable, faintly silver feeling that Sasuke might have been in there, he might have had to leave him.
He detonated the explosives without a backward glance.
##
Sai had set up camp in a pretty little copse of trees, with patches of clear blue sky overhead and a fresh water source nearby, because he at least took Kakashi's ramblings as words rife with meaning, even when they included the phrase 'cave-erections'. He'd established a perimeter of ink-infused chakra that he closed behind them as soon as Sasuke and Kakashi crossed the border.
"A first defense," he'd explained. "Any touch outside my own will burn and sting, ink infecting the bloodstream like poison. I'm afraid it won't last very long against an enemy of this magnitude."
"But everything helps," Sakura assured him, as she wadded up Naruto's jacket and stuffed it beneath his own head. The boy's face was completely slack, unnervingly still, empty of anything recognizable, the spark that spelled out Naruto. It made a scream claw at Kakashi's throat like sharpened talons. "Every minute. Every second."
"Time moves differently in genjutsu," Sasuke cautioned. "We could be under for minutes, or hours, or days. It all depends on how quickly we're able to convince Naruto that the illusion isn't real."
"Oh good," Kakashi said, settling comfortably at Naruto's side in the dirt. "The success of our mission relies upon our ability to out-stubborn Naruto. That's just super promising, really."
"Shut up, Kakashi-Sensei," Sakura said, and sat cross-legged on Naruto's other side. "Sasuke?"
Sasuke closed his eyes. When he opened them again, his eyes were red, redder than the blood he'd spilled to buy this ability.
"Don't blink," he said, probably at Kakashi, who'd gone rigid instinctively.
Merrily, he said, "Sorry. Old habits. Every time you've Sharingan-ed at me in recent years, there's been murderous intentions behind it."
Sasuke gave him a look that said fair and maybe also stop turning my hallowed family legacy into a verb.
Sasuke reached for Naruto, creating a link physical link to the illusion they'd be invading, and Sakura reached out as well. But her hand caught on Sai's sleeve instead of Naruto's, and the boy blinked down at her in placid surprise.
"Be here when we get back," she said. "Be here, Sai, and be alright. Or I'll be pissed. Okay?"
Sai blinked again and then smiled, a tiny, painful, awkward curve of his lips that meant so much more because it was real. "Of course, Sakura."
"Hold on," Sasuke said, and reached for Sakura's hand. Sakura released Sai and reached for Kakashi, and Kakashi groped for Naruto's cold, slackened fingers.
And then, Sasuke's eyes were spinning and Kakashi was falling without moving a muscle, losing physical shape and mass, losing the feel of Naruto's hand and the shape of Sakura's jaw, so set and determined, stretching like a rubber band and then snapping forward, into a whirling mass of white and gray as the forest disappeared around him.
##
He came back to himself alone. Upright at someone's kitchen table, but immediately crumpling over as his gut cramped and his breath caught.
There was a difference between being caught inside a genjutsu and invading one by force. Like the difference between sinking through water and sinking through mud. Before, the genjutsu had been insubstantial, seamless and transparent, a pretty, unnoticeable trap.
This time, the genjutsu clung to his skin, coated it, a tangible weight, heavy and suffocating like being wrapped in a wet blanket. Kakashi rested his sweat-slickened forehead on a wooden table that didn't feel quite real or right and breathed through the adjustment, slow and measured.
"Hey, cut the shit," someone said from above him. "You've eaten my cooking before and survived, Kakashi—stop being so dramatic."
He glanced upward and saw Hiro. Hiro, science teacher and genjutsu-Kakashi's best friend, who was actually Obito, and he wondered why Madara had bothered to change the name before. Maybe to avoid giving Kakashi a trigger, an inroad back to his old life.
"I have to go," Kakashi said.
Hiro—Obito, God—gave a shifty, hunted look that was so familiar it made Kakashi's throat close. "Alright, listen. I don't know what you saw in the kitchen, but I swear that those unlabeled liquids are safe for human consumption and whatever."
Kakashi said, "You're not real," because it was important, so important, that he remember it.
"Wow, rude. Did you start on the liquor without me?"
Kakashi got to his feet. The world tipped unsteadily around him, the wooden panels of Obito's dining room fading in and out of focus, the floor spinning gently beneath his feet. It was like being inescapably motion sick and Kakashi swallowed and swallowed around the wet sting of vomit. "I have to go."
"Hey. Bailing on your best friend is rude, Hatake. You're supposed to stay for dinner."
"No. I can't."
"Okay, but the price of abandonment is getting your car saran-wrapped. Just FYI. I don't make the rules."
"Jesus."
"Because we were going to plot the principal's inevitable break with sanity tonight. That is sacred time, Kakashi. I did, like, goddamn pre-work. I have flowcharts and everything."
Kakashi choked on a watery laugh. "That's more preparation than you've ever put into teaching, you little shit," he said, and then stopped. Obito had never been a teacher. Obito had died under a fall of unforgiving rocks before he was even old enough to define himself outside of 'killer for law and country'.
But it was easy, too easy, to fall back in the gentle rhythms of the genjutsu, to let the illusion turn from mud to water, a slow, silent, sweet embrace slipping over his head and dragging him under.
Across the room, Obito's smile had softened from 'manic' to 'melancholy', like he could read the change in Kakashi's face.
"You're a failsafe," Kakashi realized. "Madara's MO: give a man what he wants and he won't try to escape."
Obito half-shrugged, a rueful move that he'd used to make after messing up a flanking pattern or accidentally kicking Minato-Sensei in the face during taijutsu practice. "Maybe. But you could, though. You could stay. I'm not out there, am I, Kakashi? But I'm here. Minato-Sensei is here, all of your kids are here, and time moves differently in a genjutsu, right? You could live an entire life in the seconds passing outside. A happy life. Which, let's be real—you've never had and probably earned by now."
Kakashi was shaking, quick and vicious shudders from head to foot. "God. God. Fuck you and your stupid, shitty Uchiha self, Madara, honestly."
"I should be offended, maybe," Obito said, nose wrinkled. "Since I am an Uchiha and also Madara made me or whatever. But mostly I want to laugh?"
"Yeah." Kakashi's lungs were heaving. His eyes were stinging, staining the fabric of his face cloth with wet. "He gets points for authenticity, I guess. He's got your crazy down pat, Obito."
"I am a unique and delicate flower, and don't you forget it, Hatake."
"Never." Kakashi drew in a breath that left him light-headed. "I can't stay. Obito. I can't."
"Yeah." Obito's smile was still so small and sad. He stuffed his hands inside his pockets across the table and his shoulders rounded. Greif bore down on Kakashi's spine, bending him in half. "Yeah, I know."
"You're not going to try and stop me?"
"Nah. Points for authenticity, right? I only got in your way when you were being stupid, Kakashi. But for saving your precious people? I never would."
Obito was flickering now, fading in and out along with the room around him.
"You were a precious person," Kakashi said, words spilling over. He'd only had a memorial stone to share them with up until now, and even though this wasn't real, it was Madara's creation, it was still more than he'd had and Kakashi could afford an instant of weakness. A single second of it. "You…Obito, you were—"
"You're such a fucking moron sometimes, for being such a genius. I know, alright? God. You're such an asshole to other people, and somehow an ever bigger asshole to yourself. It's amazing, really." Obito jerked a shoulder at him. "Go, Kakashi. Your kids need you more than you think."
Kakashi nodded. Took one stumbling step backward, and then another. Kept his eyes on Obito the entire time, and the way that his smile remained the same, even as he faded in and out of focus.
"It's different this time," Obito whispered. "Not every ghost in this graveyard will be so willing to let you go. Find your kids, Kakashi, but watch the lights. Get them out before sundown. Okay?"
"Okay. I—thank you. Obito. Thank you."
"Yeah, yeah." The light inside Obito's house were fading, dimming like sunset, and Kakashi remembered his warning. Watch the lights. Get them out before sundown. "Go, you bastard."
Kakashi went.
Every step away felt like shedding layers of his skin and bone, like he was leaving blood and bits of himself behind.