The God of Anbu

Note: No Yamanakas were harmed in the making of this fic.

Ask the Hokage what Kakashi Hatake is like, and he'll sigh about how this village just won't leave prodigies be. You will be dismissed quickly.

Ask his three genin, and they'll yell about lateness and pornography. You will leave confused, but thoroughly charmed by the cuteness of the three.

Ask his fellow jonin-sensei what Kakashi Hatake is like, and Gai will immediately dominate the conversation. Leave Konoha while you have the chance.

Ask his former Anbu subordinates, and you'll be taken in for questioning. Ibiki will shine a light into your face, demanding to know how you got in, why you want to know about the Copy-nin, and why you took such an idiotic way of gathering information.

I told you you should have left Konoha while you had the chance.

But if you could get an answer out of his Anbu subordinates—say you're some rookie that wants to know more about the legend that is the Hound—you might get this hushed, reverent reply.

The God.

Shinobi have their gods. Anbu, cynical and broken as they are, need a darker god than most.

They may say, in dark tones, that he hadn't cried once during his own birth, when he tore out of his mother's womb to claim his first kill. This, of course, has never been said in front of him.

Others may say with a healthy dose of sarcasm—because they were joking, of course they were joking—that Sakumo Hatake had climbed a mountain one day and found the babe, an incarnation of the thunder god. That they'd hidden his face because his divinity would be too apparent otherwise.

They may say he'd developed his killing intent at the age of four, when he'd found the White Fang on the floor.

That the Academy-sensei had rushed him through graduation, thrust him on the frontline, knowing his rage could not be contained within the village.

That he'd almost singlehandedly ended the war, but that his bloodlust had left his teammate dead. Whispers that he'd torn his eye from the teammate when he'd realized the benefits of the Sharingan.

That the Yellow Flash had thrust him into Anbu after the war was over, knowing the ninja could never assimilate to peace.

The oldest of the Anbu may even tell you, if they're in the mood to scare a rookie that day, that in the early years after the war, he'd witnessed the Hound tear through a camp of Iwa nin they'd just happened across, not targets. That it hadn't mattered, and that the last one had gurgled his last even before the first dead hit the floor. That the Hound had started howling at the moon, a hoarse, full-throated bellow that had made even the veterans among them flee back towards home.

That the one time he'd been given a psyche test, the Yamanaka assigned had started screaming, screaming like his brain was melting.

They may even tell you that the Yamanaka was yet to stop screaming. That Inoichi had been too afraid to go in there to wipe the memory, in case he was affected the same way.

But then again, these same Anbu members would tell you that Itachi Uchiha never turned off his Sharingan eyes. That he'd licked his weapons clean after every battle, relishing the taste of blood. That the entire time he'd been in Anbu, he'd never spoken a word. Just taken orders until he became an Anbu captain, taken orders until he broke.

So you'll take these with a grain of salt.

But.

Itachi Uchiha had become a phantom bogeyman, a story that shinobi told their children to scare them. The memory, the shock of a clan numbering more than a hundred being wiped from the village in a single night had elevated the story of Itachi Uchiha to a fairytale, one that left people wondering if he was even human.

Kakashi Hatake was a living legend.

It was fact, and legend, that Dog had never failed a mission.

It was fact, and legend, that he'd run more than 700 Anbu missions in just ten years.

It was fact that his mask hung in the locker room, on the way out so that operatives could tap it on the way to the more dangerous missions. A custom that no one would explain.

Now you may scoff at the tales the older Anbu tell you, thinking to yourself, what ninja loses control like that? A berserker is not a ninja. An unreliable tool is a broken tool.

You—young, powerful, confident—may not tap the mask.

Then you, the rookie Anbu, will be called on a mission, on one of those missions so dark and dangerous and important that praying to vague deities in the ether is not enough. You will want to tap the mask.

You'll look and see that the mask is missing.

And you will see the tension in your compatriots ease, the shadow of death lifting from their faces to be replaced with a fierce light. They will hide that light with their own masks, as they file out to see the mask live again, filled with the man behind the legend.

You'll see Dog move, bone-white armor shining, and the formation will shift to let him take the lead, in body and in spirit.

You will feel your adrenaline rise, feeling a part of an invincible pack.

You will not understand why this shift happens.

But the sense of power emanating from the living legend is infectious, and the mission is no longer to be feared, and you understand why that mask is hung up in the locker room.

With the God of Anbu lighting the way with the Raikiri, how could you lose?

A/N: Of course, Kakashi's nowhere near as strong as Hashirama and co., but I feel like Anbu need a tangible thing to believe in. Who better than Kakashi Hatake, who they know have been through everything they have to go through and far, far more?

Checked the stats, according to ranker: "Kakashi has completed a grand total of 1,141 missions since the beginning of his career. 197 of those were simple D-Rank missions, 190 were slightly more complex C-Rank missions, 414 were B-Rank, 298 were difficult A-Rank, and 42 were S-rank")

Do the math assuming being at war was likely more of an assignment than a mission , say D's and C's don't count, you still come out with 754, and we know this could only have happened during the time he was in Anbu. He joins at 14, leaves at 26, to have the most conservative estimate we assume he served a full 12 years: that's an average of 62.8 B+ missions a year. There are 52 weeks in a year.

Like.

What.

Sounds like god status to me.

This legend wouldn't be flavored the way we know and love our kooky Copy Nin either, since this is from his fucked up days.

I imagine Kakashi himself would want to preserve the legend, this legendary version of the cold, merciless Friend-Killer Kakashi since this image of him helps ANBU function better on these suicidal missions. The emotional effect of having someone like that on your team can make more of a difference than the actual skills of the person involved.