re: Guest - sorry, forgot to reply! Minato and Kushina are both just as dead as they are in canon
They leave roads behind in favor of a straight shot to Rice through forests and swamps and lakes and fields. They do still skirt a wide berth around Konoha in the center of the country, which adds on a day of travel time.
Kakashi doesn't consider visiting even with Konoha so close that he recognizes each tree they pass. If he only turns his feet west, he could be coming home after a mission. But for what? There's no good to be done there.
Home for Kakashi means people. He holds little attachment to material items, and that's what a place is, a collection of objects and a point on a map. Konoha is familiar, which carries value – he knows where to go in it to find what he needs, and he can generally count on no one attacking him if they recognize him – but if it ever happened that he returned from a mission to find his apartment burned down he'd have simply mooched off of Gai until he could find somewhere else to sleep.
(Though that's not an option anymore. Thinking about that is... necessary.
Gai's not the only person he'd feel comfortable inconveniencing. But he's the only one Kakashi could stand accidentally learning what his face looks like. He doesn't even allow that much for himself: he avoids mirrors when he needs his mask down. Some of the staff at the hospital know how he looks, which makes for part of the reason he tries to stay out of the place.)
Konoha is a system he knows his role in. It's the first Hidden Village, Senju Hashirama's legacy, the ideal that brought an end to the warring states.
It's the cause his father and clan lost their lives for, his team, his comrades, his two kage, himself. No one remembers what Kakashi did, but meaning lies in the act itself, not the recognition of it. Naruto and Sakura will one day fall in Konoha's defense as well, although Sasuke... but that might go differently this time around. It's better than the alternative, isn't it?
Konoha is more than the sum of its parts, and it is not the land it rests upon. The familiar landmarks carry no draw for him though he recognizes them down to his bones. Only the Memorial Stone, but the monument itself doesn't matter.
That he spends the evening before they draw near the place recreating Naruto's rasenshuriken for raiton has nothing to do with distracting himself. It's common sense to keep a technique so destructive handy if he means to fight a Sannin, particularly that Sannin. That the project to complete the rasengan is one of his last connections to Minato's team is completely tangential.
Mostly tangential.
The raiton rasengan takes him nearly fifty seconds to put together, long enough that he starts to wonder if he can't manage it. Remembering in absolute detail how Naruto's chakra took form doesn't actually help him much. Lightning, after all, doesn't flow the same way as wind, and can't combine with base chakra in the same manner.
Most have forgotten how the Sharingan operates; all they know of it anymore is how Kakashi uses Obito's. It doesn't hand its user the ability to copy techniques. It eases the process, but it cannot build upon a foundation that doesn't exist.
Shinobi's memories fade quickly. They die young, and the next generation comes of age in a stranger world. In some ways Obito's legacy has outlasted his clan's. Kakashi acquired the name of Copy-nin while the Uchiha yet lived – it was a skill unusual enough to become remarkable even then, but with the Uchiha murdered and their bloodline limit's sample size reduced to a handful, Kakashi's ability has instead become commonplace and Obito's eye infamous.
Sasuke doesn't know how to copy chakra-based techniques, and neither Itachi nor the masked Akatsuki member demonstrated apparent proficiency, but for several years Kakashi comprised fifty percent of active Sharingan wielders. Ergo, copying techniques is a signature Sharingan ability.
Ninja skip hand seals, mold chakra from different base elements than lightning, make a plethora of individualized modifications for every ninjutsu they use. Hoshigaki's chakra is so heavily, improbably water-natured that he skips elemental manipulation for suiton techniques. Anyone who tries to imitate him step for step will end up with too much wasted chakra and not a drop of liquid to show for it.
The Sharingan shows Kakashi when those shortcuts occur. Everything between and around that is his own doing.
Without Obito's help, Kakashi can still reverse-engineer within a day or so nearly any basic elemental technique he's seen demonstrated. For that reason alone Kisame doesn't mind overmuch having his techniques stolen: he can't stop Kakashi short of murdering him.
Which he won't even need to do if Kakashi tries to use half of his repertoire. Some of the ninjutsu Hoshigaki tosses about willy-nilly make Kamui seem on par with the Academy three for chakra cost.
All that aside, however, witnessing Naruto's use of the technique was still the last lead Kakashi needed to engineer a lightning form of the rasengan.
Namely, seeing Naruto use more than one hand.
...He's never telling anyone.
It didn't occur to him. Why would he convolute an already one-handed technique? It's bad practice, lazy, a crutch, a waste of chakra and time and attention and limbs – but who would have taught Naruto that? His jounin sensei? Ha.
It doesn't hurt, either, that Kakashi gave up on the elemental rasengan within a week of Minato introducing it to him. He has an unpleasant habit of deciding a ninjutsu isn't worth the effort if after a couple of days he can't nail it down. He'll put his nose to the grindstone for physical conditioning or intelligence work or book learning or what have you, but he frankly hasn't the patience for any skill chakra-related.
Most shinobi require weeks to learn a ninjutsu, then months to hone it for battle. So far as he's noticed, the average non-clan ninja can perform two elemental techniques by the time they die. Kakashi knows hundreds.
Obito really was spoiled for choice in finding issues to hate him for. He has no idea why Rin put up with him, particularly after Kannabi Bridge.
(That's another thing about ninja: the names that first come to mind belong to the dead. If people are Kakashi's home, and most of the people he's cared about are gone...
Well, it's why he carries the memories of them with him. As bluntly as necessary. Obito's ideals, Minato's teachings, Rin's values – even if the latter he copied inadequately. He grew up such an open wound of spite and grief and insecurity that it scarred grotesquely when he cauterized it shut. True consideration isn't something to be put aside when it overwhelms him or when he wakes to a grey morning that becomes a grey day. Rin would not have thought of a genin team, I can't let you closer. My heart is too small to hold all of you, ghosts and living both. I'd have to make room, and what would remain of us if I let them fade for you?
Though she might have looked back in a clearing enshrouded by mist, and she might have smiled, and she might have told them, Don't worry. I won't let you die.)
Sometimes, after all, he needs to remind himself of why he's going to such an effort to find someone who terrifies him. For Fire and its people. Always for that.
Orochimaru became the first high-ranking defector in his lifetime. It made an impression. He made an impression. Pein, who literally killed Kakashi, doesn't inspire near the same level of primal, stupid fear.
Kakashi made it onto the clean-up crew after Orochimaru abandoned his laboratories in Konoha. He still hasn't managed to forget what they found inside.
The thing is, he's seen and produced dead bodies marred by most kinds of elemental damage imaginable. He has – had – acquaintances in Torture and Interrogation. He's rescued captured comrades and hostages. He knows humans have a natural aversion to gore and corpses in the same removed, sterile way he knows most people have memories like rusty sieves. The laboratories shouldn't have fazed him.
Yet they did, and worse is that he can't say why. He remembers the physical response he had once his shift ended and he got back to his apartment, the trembling and shortness of breath and the vague sense that everything was falling apart, but as for what caused it? He hasn't the faintest.
Maybe it was the awareness that Orochimaru did all of that to his own people, the depravity of betraying so wholly those he was trusted to protect – except that Itachi did the same. A missing-nin turning on innocents and comrades before deserting is expected. And, besides, he doesn't imagine he would've reacted differently even if all of the remains they disposed of came from foreigners.
The current state of affairs, then: he's in the opponent's seat of power aiming to cripple the operations of a Sannin who he dreads facing, whose mere presence inspires him to idiocy, and he intends to do so with no backup, no intelligence, minimal planning, and one ally who would rather have gone elsewhere.
If they both make it out alive he'll find a god to make an offering to.
"This is probably far enough past the border," he guesses a few minutes after they've left Fire behind.
Hoshigaki stops as well and side-eyes him. "Oh, is it, now?"
"If this doesn't work, I have a secondary plan you'll hate more. Nezuki," he calls. A pair of small white paws appears at Hoshigaki's pocket before she pokes her head out. He flips her a coin, and she squeaks and catches it in both hands. "Hire us for a mission, please. You can pay using that."
She peers at him through the hole in the center of the coin. "What? Do you mean the request to find a contractor?"
"A new one," he clarifies. "It can be anything C- or D-rank, just keep it within reason."
She blinks. "What?"
Hoshigaki offers her his palm to climb onto. "Is this leading somewhere?"
"Ah, well. The last few jobs went off the rails. I'm wondering if there's a trend." The last two, specifically. The Wave mission did, too – he didn't expect Gai – but he won't count it because a mission office would've rated working for Gato as a B-rank.
Nezuki thrusts the coin at him. "I will pay you to explain what you just said."
He accepts it while Hoshigaki says, measured, "Kakashi-san. You think we're being sabotaged?" Across multiple jobs, he doesn't add, in multiple countries, with circumstances set up weeks or years in advance and no deducible end goal?
"No, obviously not, that'd be insane." Hoshigaki doesn't look mollified, still watching Kakashi like he's trying to piece together how their lives led to this point. Kakashi also wishes he knew. "It's probably bad luck. But it's consistent, so we might be able to take advantage of it."
"What?" Nezuki says again, quietly, and cranes her neck to peer back at Hoshigaki.
"Take advantage," Hoshigaki repeats, "of...?"
Team 7 under Kakashi never took on a C-rank that went as planned. Team 7 not under Kakashi never took on a C-rank that went as planned – any mission that hosted Naruto or Sakura alone inevitably went just as sideways as if it fielded the entire team. The same might have applied for Sasuke if he remained in Konoha, or Kakashi if he didn't exclusively take B-ranks and above.
The upper echelons of command noticed, of course. It wasn't subtle. Kakashi did his own digging and turned up little of worth. Yes, teams that hosted his students routinely ran afoul of faulty intelligence; no, none of it seemed intentional or connected. Naruto probably couldn't run a mission to find a pet ferret without unearthing some lost army from the desert, and it would be a coincidence every time it happened because no malicious actor can plan for that level of escalation. Sometimes circumstances just turn out that way.
But even if Kakashi's not reckless enough to ascribe motive or reasoning to the vagaries of fortune, he remains capable of basic pattern recognition. His last two missions in a row in this timeline have both exploded with varying degrees of flair.
Any D-rank that takes place far enough from a Village gets automatically upgraded. Therefore, explaining his reasoning (in highly modified terms) to Nezuki qualifies as a C-rank. If the trend holds with this mission, they can potentially make enough of a ruckus in a short enough time frame to force Orochimaru to investigate.
For a long few seconds after he finishes speaking, no one responds. Hoshigaki and Nezuki exchange a look that leaves him feeling a little attacked, but he doesn't worry about it because he's right.
Hoshigaki says thoughtfully, "We never did work out how the amnesia happened." Despite his tone, his expression's edging towards a grimace.
"There's precedent for this," says Kakashi. "It makes sense. You have to admit that the last – "
"You sound like the Mizukage."
Everything stalls. Kakashi falls silent, frowning, and Nezuki stares up at Hoshigaki, unmoving and wide-eyed. Hoshigaki doesn't look upset, but he never does. The closest he comes is vaguely judgmental distaste, a deflection that pushes the focus off of himself.
Eventually Kakashi says, "That's harsh."
Hoshigaki shrugs. From him, it's an expansive motion. "Maybe it is." But he doesn't retract it.
This is what Kakashi knows of Karatachi Yagura: he orchestrates genocides against his own countrymen, and he's taken each of his predecessors' worse policy decisions and perpetuated them. Hoshigaki, Zabuza, and most Kiri ninja he's met of their age or younger (so all but two of them) have been nigh on impossible to disturb because they shut down in uncannily similar ways if they begin to feel too much emotion. Water Country's younger citizens in recent years have tended to be shorter than mainlanders, not significantly but noticeably.
None of which goes any way to explaining the comparison with Kakashi.
Hoshigaki mulls it over. "The Yondaime," he begins eventually, "didn't start out the way he is now. He most likely would have always been... you know. A kage. Cutthroat. Dangerous to spend long in a room with. But he wasn't always guaranteed to be..."
"Incomprehensible?" Kakashi offers, because Hoshigaki's clearly struggling for a word that will get the point across without badmouthing Yagura.
Hoshigaki nods slowly.
Right. "Clearly I didn't explain it well at all," says Kakashi. "Which part of it was bad enough you're accusing me of having gone off the deep end?"
"...The entire thing."
Very helpful. He looks to Nezuki.
She raises a finger. "You do keep using that word. But..." She lifts her hands palms-up, ears twitching. "Luck... doesn't... happen in a vacuum." Like she's not sure the sounds coming out of her mouth are real, she continues, "Something has to cause it. ...Right?"
"Sure," says Kakashi. "Genetics."
"...I don't think that's true," says Nezuki.
"I don't know what that word means," says Hoshigaki. "I'm not sure I want to."
Kakashi wouldn't know either if he hadn't read a dictionary once. "Okay, so bloodline limits are passed down through family lines. So are other traits, like, as examples, appearance or personality or chakra natures. That's caused by genetics."
"Luck is not genetic," says Nezuki, squinting at him. "And even if it was, you can't make important decisions off of it."
"You can if it's consistent."
She squints harder. "No, you can't."
"Well, you can't call it a good idea, but you can do it. We're in a rush, and we're more equipped to deal with anomalies than, oh, a genin team, so it's worth the try."
"She's right," says Hoshigaki, "something has to cause luck. It's not real on its own. Even if it is passed down through families, that's not a good enough reason."
"It's not passed down through families," Nezuki says, pained.
Kakashi raises his eyebrow. "Yes, it is. This is common knowledge." Hoshigaki not knowing about it he can almost buy, but Nezuki has ever seemed oddly well-educated. "And fate doesn't always need to explain itself."
"Fate isn't usually what we use to predict mission outcomes," says Hoshigaki.
"Usually it's not as consistent as this, but rarely it can be."
"Is this consistent? Two missions?"
"It's part of a larger established pattern." This is like explaining chakra to Naruto again. What do they teach in Kiri? Kakashi learned all of this without even needing to go to the Academy. "If you didn't know about this, how did you explain geniuses?"
"Well, some people are luck... ier..." Hoshigaki's expression turns complicated.
"That's not related at all," Nezuki snaps.
Kakashi exhales. "Let's talk about the Senju clan."
Nezuki wraps her snout in her paws. "Let's not."
"They're the most obvious example to point to for hereditary luck and its measurable impact on the world." Kakashi's response when he first heard about them was to ask how they lasted long enough to establish Konoha, and Sakumo told him that everyone asks that the first time. The answer is that luck is important, but it's not everything. If you prepare well enough, you can spite fate. Case in point: Sakumo and Kakashi, who both contrived to die fairly easily despite the Hatake clan's nigh-inability to perish at others' hands.
"Every shinobi member of the Senju clan born since the founding of Konoha has died young, and of unrelated causes, except for Tsunade-sama. Nearly very civilian member has managed to avoid having children, also of unrelated causes." Some died before they could, some had trouble conceiving, some married partners who had difficulties conceiving, and at least one had some incident or another interrupt them each time they tried. (And some were born not straight, as some always are, but that's unrelated to an individual's ability to generate offspring. You can do whoever you like after you've procreated. Kakashi's had people breathing down his neck about it since he made sixteen, even after he started reading porn in public.) "The bloodline ended within two generations."
"That sounds like it came from a curse," says Hoshigaki.
"I guess you can put it that way. A curse of what?"
Nezuki keens softly into her paws.
"I'll grant that it's usually not this clear-cut, but it can be," he says yet again. As many times as he needs to, apparently. "I know one person who can walk near a casino and every game inside will turn in the player's favor." That's Naruto. It doesn't work on Tsunade (they've tested it), who has her own thing going on. Kakashi doesn't bring her up because he doesn't want to give the impression this only happens to Senju descendants. He has subtler, non-Senju examples to point at if he still needs more.
He frowns. "Although the C-rank pattern hasn't held for this one yet. Maybe cheating it like this doesn't work."
Nezuki says, muffled, "Aah, I think it did. Life will never be as it was."
"It's hard to believe that you didn't know luck is hereditary."
"It's not," she moans.
"You can ask Orochimaru if we find him, if you'll trust a med-nin more." Although Kakashi might rethink a few things if someone considers Orochimaru generally more trustworthy than him.
"I am not doing that."
"...We can try it again," says Hoshigaki. "One more time before you open up about your worse backup plan."
Nezuki agrees to cooperate after a minute to pull herself together. She holds out the coin with a sullen "Find Orochimaru."
"That'd be quite the C-rank," says Kakashi.
She switches it over to weeding the square foot of grass beneath him, which he accepts. He tugs up a particularly well-lodged weed, and the removal of its roots disturbs a poorly reinforced section of the man-made tunnel below, sending just enough earth falling through to form a hole they can glimpse the passage's floor through.
Kakashi blinks for a moment, then glances up.
Nezuki is hugging Hoshigaki's thumb and squeaking in rapid-fire distress. Hoshigaki is eyeing the opening with an expression best described as polite interest, if your only experience with polite interest was seeing a shark who'd just finished a large meal glide through a school of minnows. He'll have questions later, but for now he's gotten what he asked for.
