CHAPTER 13
The night terrors were here.
The dim, unintrusive light coming from the observation window of Kakashi's room flickered, humming with static noises.
The shadows in his room twisted and jostled, clamouring at the foot of his bed and climbing higher against the walls.
Kakashi's jaw was wrenched shut, bared and heaving haggardly. He was on his side and he was almost curled into himself. His nose flared with his huffing breaths and his chest vibrated as he hyperventilated, flicking his bloodshot eyes around the meandering shadows of his room.
Sweat soaked his clothes, adding to the heat and discomfort of his situation, and his noisy breathing sounded like a continuous rushing wind, sucking and blowing wildly and without rhythm.
Panic crept up his ankles, paralysed and helpless as a tall shadow elongated from under his bed. It loomed over the boy and stared down at him with its green eyes. A pearly white grin tugged at its black face and a pearly white grin stretched across its face—
An orderly came up to Kakashi's observation window and peered inside, and the demon was gone, disappearing in a wisp of sulfuric smoke.
Kakashi's bugged wide eyes glistened with tears, voiceless as he whimpered for the orderly.
But, from the man's position, he didn't notice the boy's horrified stare as his shadow cast over the child completely. He stayed there for a long moment, checking on the boy and taking a second to check the corners of the room.
Meanwhile, Kakashi felt the demon roil impatiently under his bed.
The orderly hummed and walked off, and the demon returned as if it had always been there.
Kakashi's breaths were hot as he forced his eyes closed.
Slowly and carefully, the demon sat down on the edge of Kakashi's bed. The quiet creak of his bed springs punctuated the darkness and silence of his room, with the noise stabbing the shadows and piercing them to death.
It was as if the pressure inside Kakashi's head was reduced, and he could finally breathe.
Still, he dared not open his eyes, now afraid that his relief would vanish with the demon.
"Find the truth," the demon muttered in a dark, scratchy voice. "Locate the ROOT archives."
Kakashi's grit teeth ground together and he grunted, trying to speak.
"Look under 'Hatake'," it said slowly. Kakashi's eyes flew open and the pressure in his head flared back to life, but he didn't care. His eyes blinked down to see the creature sitting on his bed, but it was gone, only its echoing instructions remained as it said, "Don't take my word. Look for the truth yourself…"
Kakashi's eyes fluttered and closed, exhaustion carrying him back to sleep, unaware of the single kunai hiding underneath his pillow.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Moments later, Kakashi's eyes fluttered open and his right hand instinctively reached under his pillow.
He stealthily grasped the blade but paused and refrained from flicking his eyes at the cameras in his room. He slowly pulled his hand out from under the pillow and sat up, inhaling deeply and raising his hands over his head, stretching as high as he could.
The numbness in his fingers was going, and his sluggish mind was thawing out.
The lightbulbs in his room gradually increased in brightness, simulating the rising sun, and a soft knock sounded from the door.
"Hello~," the nurse sang as he nudged the door open. Kakashi spied a silver trolley of medication outside of the room, alongside another nurse, while the one that entered his room was accompanied by a sleepy chunin that was just about wearing her shinobi vest, tying up her ponytail. The ninja shut the door after herself and leaned against the wall close to it, yawning into her hand and then crossing her arms. She couldn't have been older than twenty. Twenty-five, maybe.
Kakashi almost felt sorry for her.
The boy's chakra, blocked from his reach behind a tough barrier of seals, spilt against the barrier; it wasn't Kakashi's first time being disconnected from his chakra. It was standard training in ROOT to adapt and thrive without chakra.
What he didn't like was how heavy his body still was.
Kakashi blinked slowly, catching sughy of the belt of the shuriken pouch wrapped around the ninja's hips, with the pouch at her lower back and a different pouch on her left thigh. She didn't carry any more weapons that the boy could see.
"Morning," he said in a slurry tone, shifting on his bed closer to his pillow. His bleary stare focused on the girl and a whisper of a smile tingled at the corner of his lips. The girl nodded in response, crossing her right ankle over her left and getting better situated at her station. Kakashi rolled his tongue in his mouth and brought his eyes to the nurse, waiting for him to notice his presence and meet the boy's look with a broad and friendly smile. "Morning, Yoko."
"Morning, Kakashi!" the nurse exclaimed. He was about three feet from the boy, holding a small cup of medication, cough syrup with a spoon, and a cup of water on a tray.
Kakashi's keen nose could smell the nurse's prickly aftershave.
He wrinkled his nose.
"Did you sleep well?" the man prodded, standing back and not prompting Kakashi to collect his medication. He stayed in a somewhat stooped posture, looking at the droopy boy in his sunken eyes.
Kakashi hummed and looked up to the featureless brown ceiling, tearing his eyes away from the nurse.
Yamanaka techniques didn't work on Hatake clan members, but Kakashi still wasn't sure if his drugged-up state would loosen his natural defences against mental prodding; Inoichi couldn't peer into his head, even while subdued, but Kakashi could not drop his guard.
The nurse hummed with a smile, his teal eyes twinkling and looking with fervent intensity at the boy.
"I…" Kakashi began, rolling his tongue in his mouth. He brought his eyes down and a corner of his lips quivered. "I dreamt that someone…was here."
Yoko Yamanaka hummed and straightened up a little, titling his head curiously. "A nightmare?"
"Not a nightmare," Kakashi said, shaking his head once. "The person was…nice. They gave me a kunai…" this broke the chunin out of her sleepy stupor and she pushed off the wall, standing and watching the slurring child attentively. He spilled the truth and he didn't taper his words. "Now…I want to leave this room. Kill anyone between me and freedom. Look for answers outside these…walls…"
Yoko subtly flagged for the chunin to draw nearer, and she quietly did, padding closer and standing a bit between Yoko and Kakashi. "What answers, Kakashi?"
The boy looked between the nurse and the chunin. "I'll ask this." He inhaled steadily, inflating and allowing his shoulders to rise, and exhaling, letting them sag. A wry frown crossed his bland expression, and he turned pointedly to the nurse. "Will you stop me if I tried, Yoko?"
Yoko took a step away, and Kakashi sighed.
"Oh, well."
He reached under his pillow and the chunin grabbed his elbow. She said in a hot snarl, "Don't—"
Kakashi pulled her down using her hand on his elbow and snagged the blade with his other hand, plunging it under her chin and spearing through her upper jaw as she fell on him.
The alarms blared as soon as he did that, and Yoko turned around and fled, discarding his tray and scrambling for the door, only for him to slump against it as a jarringly strong force slammed into the back of his head and bashed his temple against the door.
He clattered to the ground and darkness took him.
Kakashi breathed in and out, shaking his head with disappointment.
His left hand grabbed the chunin's, steadily prying her fingers from his elbow, while the girl gurgled deathly, coughing out blood and her severed tongue from her bleeding mouth. She toppled to the side and crashed onto the ground. He looked over with dull eyes and exhaled with a slight frown, more disappointed at her not putting up more of a fight than anything.
Kakashi got up and strolled to the dead nurse, bending down and yanking out the kunai lodged in the back of Yoko's head.
He tried the door handle and exhaled gruffly when it didn't open.
He rolled his eyes and grabbed Yoko's right arm, heaving as hard as he could and slapping it against the handle of the door. The seals on the door and the door handle flickered, humming and clicking open, as Kakashi predicted. He set his foot on Yoko's chest and shoved the dead man back, allowing him to ease out of the room, leaving the chunin alone to hysterically choke on her blood.
Outside of the room, the building was alight with alarm.
The lights were red and all of the doors were locked shut.
Kakashi looked back at his room, wondering if he should have taken Yoko's hand, just in case he needed it again down the road.
A small, warm tingle at the back of his neck broke him from his blankness, reminding him of the restraint seals embedded on his body the second he landed in Inoichi's care. Long before now, the moment he was grabbed by the chunin, the seal should have activated and blasted his mind into unconsciousness.
"Maybe the demon weakened the restraint seal…somehow…" he murmured lethargically to himself. He idly jogged down the corridor, willing his heavy body to move and forcing the gears of his sluggish mind to think. "Very interesting…"
His lethargic mind wondered if he should have cut off Yoko's hand or taken the chunin's weapons, but he didn't dwell on that for long; there would be many more hands and weapons he could take, all storming to his location at that very moment.
He did, though, look at the drug trolley and search his memory for the name of the medicine that slowed down his mind, not the one that made his body feel like it weighed ten times as normal. Yoko was careful to always have his pills together in a small, plastic cup, and did not explicitly say which meds were which.
For a civilian, Yoko was very meticulous with how he treated Kakashi.
Kakashi shrugged unhurriedly and picked out four thin medicine boxes from the cart, hoping that his mood stabilisers were among them. He tucked them into the waistband of his underwear.
The wail of the institution's sirens served as the backdrop for Kakashi's single-minded massacre on his way out of the institute, painting the walls and walkways red with blood and viscera.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The large double doors of the facility's entrance groaned, easing open painstakingly slowly with the hinges grating, putting up futile efforts to stay shut.
When the doors were barely open a crack, it stopped for a second, before the door on the left groaned heavily and was pushed open, widening the opening. Kakashi slipped through the opening, just in time for it to slam shut with a deafening bang.
He wiped his brow with the back of his hand, then realised that he was holding onto two severed hands. He threw them aside thoughtlessly and exhaled, pursing his lips and looking around with squinting eyes.
He was starting to feel his brain.
The pressure in his head was building.
He didn't consider his blood-stained clothes, or the throbbing sprain in his right ankle, fumbling for the drug packs he stole from inside and looking at them—
An explosion stopped him, and he groaned petulantly.
He looked up to see what all of the fuss was about, and he comprehended with a pleasant jolt why all of Konoha hadn't fallen on him the moment he left his room.
Above him, hundreds of miles in the sky was Iwa's final roar.
Shinobi from Iwa's Explosion Corps madly collided against Konoha's seal defences, detonating themselves in blinding blasts of fire and hot wind, sending hard tremours through the seal barriers that rippled down and shook the entire village.
The suicide bombers flew on clay birds, encased head-to-toe in wet clumps of whitish-grey clay and splattered hopelessly onto the barrier, detonating a split second before they could make contact; large shards of the barrier fell from the sky, dispersing and repairing themselves soon after, but the suicide bombers kept coming.
Relentless in their mad desperation.
Kakashi's jaw dropped, standing there in his sweaty, bloodied clothes, and he beheld the gory scenes.
The sun rose from the east, and roughly fifty suicide bombers had landed on the barrier. The cry of the village's siren couldn't drown out the deafening blasts crashing into the village's protections, setting the sky on fire.
It was like beholding several dozens of supernovas at once, popping and thudding with terrifying ferocity and in quick succession.
Kakashi's eyes glistened with tears, but his lips cracked into a mystified grin.
"Beautiful…" A hard shudder brought Kakashi down to a knee and he released a shaky sigh from his lungs. "To love so much, you throw your lives away."
Iwa refused to give up on Konoha, especially after losing the Kannabi Bridge and being forced to retreat behind their defences.
A rain of soft ash and carbon trickled from the heavens, and Kakashi closed his eyes, inhaling deeply and breathing out from his mouth.
True to the sight and sounds, history books across the continent would call this event Iwa's Final Roar.
Falling from the skies couldn't have been Iwa's only plan of attack, as that would not have been enough for Konoha's home defences to be drawn away from Kakashi escaping, so he assumed that Iwa's last forces were stampeding from the forests and baring down on the Leaf village.
The flash of light and the sharp yells of fighting from the western gates of the village informed the boy that he guessed right.
No doubt, Iwa could have wiped Konoha off the map if they had prioritised quality over quantity during their training. There were reports in ROOT of certain past Explosion Corps members that could make atomic explosions, but as time passed, Iwa decided to mass produce their shinobi to disastrous effect.
Their ninjas were generic, their weapons were passable, and their tactics were mainly centred on outnumbering their opponents.
The suicide bombers from Iwa's Explosion Corps could only manage explosions similar to two hundred-ton boulders being dropped from the sky, and that was unquestionably the best they could do.
The little quality Iwa had during the First Tsuchikage's time was gone.
A sharp spotlight fell on Kakashi, and he groaned with mild frustration.
He got up to his feet, shaking off the thin coat of ash covering his hair and shoulders, and he turned to the light with a squinting stare, holding out his arms and shrugging incredulously at them. The howl of the facility's siren mingled with the drone of the village's alarms, mixing into a strange tune that sounded eerily like the deviated, whining snoring of a giant.
Kakashi just about laughed. "Why bother, at this point?"
He stood there for a minute, daring the facility guards to shine the spotlight on him to come down and take him back.
He'd handle them the same way he handled everyone else that stood in his way.
He did only what was necessary; only those who were stubbornly trying to keep him in the facility died.
Predictably, the spotlight flicked off and Kakashi scoffed, shaking his head. "That's good."
He turned back around and began a steady limp into the forest, unhurriedly leaving the facility behind him.
"Someone really wanted me to escape," he muttered solemnly to himself, glancing down at his ankle and frowning visibly. "The demon, probably." He looked to the sky when the last Iwa bomber collided against the seal reinforcements of the village, and mused aloud. "The kunai…my restraint seal…and the Iwa diversion…. The demon must be pulling a lot of strings to bust me out."
He stood and slumped into a tree, using it to keep himself upright.
His adrenaline finally trickled from his system, and he wheezed, smiling with a faint chuckle. "Good exercise," he said in a raspy tone, nearly patting himself on the back for his accomplishment. "Good exercise."
The pressure in his head built up and he gently set the side of his head against the tree, cooling his breathing and letting his cracked fingernails dig into the bark of the tree. The excitement from before leached from his pores and was replaced by an eerie stillness, oozing from his body-like colour and leaving him hollow.
His sluggish mind began turning, heating up and churning faster and harder. A jumble of words and noises clamoured in his skull, battering his brain and making him wince.
He remembered.
More than ever, he remembered.
He remembered what One did to Obito.
He remembered the mayhem that was Team Minato's mission.
He remembered hearing his heartbreak when Naruto didn't have his back.
Tears trickled from his eyes and his body trembled, sobbing. The person he held with so much regard, and the one that promised to support him no matter what, had let him down when it mattered most; One was at fault for the disaster, but Naruto stood in his way.
Kakashi blinked his eyes, weeping at the pressure in his skull and gripping his head.
In his delirium, he coughed up bile and threw up on the tree.
He wound around with manic eyes and grabbed someone's wrist, preventing them from stabbing his neck with a syringe filled with a clear liquid. Kakashi's large, bloodshot eyes travelled up the arm and met Orochimaru's concerned, frowning expression.
The boy panted like a cornered animal, throwing Orochimaru's arm and backing away.
"It's alright, Kakashi—"
"Don't," Kakashi said with a sneer, bumping into the tree. He made to dip around but stopped when another Orochimaru came out from behind the tree. The boy became hysterical, his eyes darting between the two Sannins, standing with a wide stance and snagging a stick from the ground. "Don't come closer."
Kakashi knew exactly how bloodthirsty Orochimaru could be; anything the boy did back in the facility was nothing compared to the inhumane, and often pointless, experiments the man conducted on ROOT operatives.
The man's placating hands and soothing voice only alarmed Kakashi further.
"You're in safe hands, Kakashi," Orochimaru said softly, giving the boy a lipless, reptilian smile.
Kakashi, though, sprinted to his right and skidded underneath a swipe from a third Orochimaru that came out from the earth. The boy didn't make it ten steps before two different pairs of arms came out from the ground and wrapped around him. The boy kicked and spat with the ferocity of a possessed creature, frothing at the mouth and snarling, thrashing his neck in an attempt at biting the earth clone's arms or their necks.
The needle the first Orochimaru had was promptly stabbed into Kakashi's neck.
Meanwhile, Kakashi gradually became droopy and he heaved, gasping noisily as he thrashed harder against his restraints. His breathing became gurgled and watery, and his eyes flickered, fighting to stay open as his tongue lolled from his mouth, too heavy for his jaw.
"You're making this harder than it's supposed to be, Kakashi." Orochimaru tutted, sealing the syringe and dispelling all of his clones aside from one to keep the boy restrained.
"Lemme…go…" Kakashi puffed, swinging his legs and twisting as hard as he could.
Orochimaru rolled his eyes and watched, patiently, as the boy succumbed to unconsciousness.
Somewhere nearby, Zetsu also watched, satisfied that his plan was finally back in motion.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Orochimaru would have loved to claim he saw this coming, but he couldn't.
He threw a short look to Kakashi, lying on the forest floor and blissfully unconscious, a long distance away from the facility, and then he returned his eyes to the notebook and the message written in bold words inside.
The Sannin hummed, a teeming smile growing on his face. Intrigue twisted in his golden eyes and he quietly said, "Someone's playing games…"
He licked his bottom lip and looked again at Kakashi, chortling a bit at the spike of pain shooting up his heels to his upper back. He rolled the book and tucked his hands at his back, walking a few steps and pursing his lips. His glimmering eyes flickered to the right and left, breathing out slowly from his nose and stopping his walk.
"I don't need sage mode to smell you, whoever you are," Orochimaru smirked with interested eyes as his stare darted to the back of a tree. "Let's talk."
The quiet thumps of smaller explosions at the western gates punctuated the quiet of the forest. The animal life in the forest remained low, wandering away from the sounds of conflict and giving the Sannin a wide berth.
Orochimaru impatiently squinted at the rising sun, and at the opaque barrier covering Konoha, patching itself up from the previous onslaught of suicide bombers.
He brought his gaze down and met a pair of green eyes embedded in the bark of the tree.
The creature didn't blink, holding Orochimaru's stare without revealing more of its body.
Orochimaru's shoulders briefly trembled with a second jab of pain from his heels to the nape of his neck. He exhaled with a thin smile. "What do you hope to gain?"
The creature made a grinding noise as if it was gnawing on metal. "Straight to the point. I respect that." Orochimaru raised an exasperated eyebrow and tilted his head to the side, waiting. "What do you want, Sannin?"
"I want him to reach past his potential and kill his brother. That's what I want," Orochimaru answered sharply, clicking his tongue annoyedly. The creature seemed surprised at the quick and honest response, expecting Orochimaru to stall or at least have the decency to speak in code. "I could kill Naruto myself, but it would be sweetly ironic if Kakashi did it."
Well worth the wait, Orochimaru assured himself. He was prepared to wait as long as possible for Kakashi to prepare himself to murder his brother.
Orochimaru wanted so much to laugh at the irony of Kakashi killing Naruto as if it was one of Jiraiya's damned revenge stories, the ones Jiraiya could never finish writing.
Instead, Orochimaru brought the notebook from behind his back and carelessly tossed it to the tree, letting it hit the roots of the tree and messily open to the back. The creature didn't glance down at it, and Orochimaru gave it credit for not taking its eyes off him; the Sannin would have attacked.
"Speaking of ironies…"
The creature again made that grating sound. "I only want Kakashi to fulfil his destiny."
Orochimaru subtly grit his teeth. "Secrets, huh."
The creature hummed laughingly.
"Whatever your plan is, creature, it will not interfere with mine," Orochimaru said slowly and deliberately, ensuring that his message was sent.
"…It won't."
"Good." A sealless Orochimaru earth clone came out from the ground. It dusted the dirt and grass off itself, clicking its tongue at the original Orochimaru and receiving a scathing glare in return. "Get him to the lab."
The clone bowed dramatically, hissing under its breath at being commanded, even by its summoner. The clone messily picked up the boy and slung Kakashi on his shoulders. The clone took off into the treeline, hurtling east, towards Orochimaru's hidden laboratory.
Orochimaru shook his head, exasperated at the pride of the clone. He crossed his arms and addressed the amused creature, who had also been watching the Sannin's relationship with his clone, "Luckily for you, Kakashi could use some hard truths to motivate him."
The creature chuckled. It sounded irritatingly proud that it had the foresight to push Kakashi towards escaping the psychiatric facility. "Like I said, he has a destiny to fulfil."
"We'll see." Orochimaru shrugged, flying into the treeline without so much as a parting look.
When Orochimaru was out of earshot, the creature released a heavy sigh that it had been holding since the beginning of the meeting, relieved that it had survived the encounter with the ruthless Sannin.
Its eyes sagged on the bark of the tree, relieved beyond belief.
Zetsu's plan wasn't nearly as to the point as Orochimaru's. It had hoped an Uchiha, like Obito, would fall into its lap, but a renowned prodigy like Kakashi was a vast improvement to that initial plan.
Still, that didn't mean that a Hatake could easily take the place of an Uchiha.
Zetsu had a feeling that Orochimaru could sense that it didn't have any concrete plans for Kakashi, but the Sannin had chosen to not comment on that fact.
Thankfully, he didn't have sweat glands, or else he would have been sweating buckets.
He seeped down the tree and entered the ground, racing towards Hidden Rain.
Authors note
That's it for now.
See you when I see you.
Foy.