In Another Life

You shouldn’t have come back.

You know that now.

But knowing doesn’t loosen the hold wrapping around your lungs, doesn’t warm your hands where they’ve curled uselessly into the earth. It doesn’t stop the cold sweat clinging to your spine, or the way your legs have folded beneath you like they’ve given up before you did. You’re half-kneeling, half-collapsed, slumped forward in the dirt with one arm cradled against your ribs and the other buried in the underbrush, fingers digging desperately for something solid.

Your forehead presses into the ground. Hard. As if it might anchor you.

But it doesn’t.

Nothing does.

The weight on your back is unnatural. Like gravity’s shifted solely to crush you. The trees stand tall and uncaring above, but the air between them twists—dense, sluggish, warm one breath and freezing the next. Like the forest itself can’t decide what season it belongs to.

And it’s quiet.

Not ANBU-quiet. Not shinobi-in-hiding quiet.

Something deeper. A silence so unnatural it thrums in your ears.

You don’t know how long you’ve been here.

Minutes? Hours? Time is melting around the edges, and you feel it slipping through your fingers like chakra you can’t pull back.

The trees are watching you.

No.

Not the trees.

Something through the trees. Behind them. Beneath them. Beneath you.

And it wants.

You can feel it in the ground. In the way the soil vibrates beneath your palm, as if it has a heartbeat of its own — slow and deliberate, out of sync with yours. You can feel it winding up your spine, gentle and invasive, like the careful tug of thread being unraveled.

It doesn’t rush.

It doesn’t need to.

Your chakra is being pulled from you. Spiraled out in thin, invisible strands — slowly, like it’s savoring the taste.

You didn’t offer anything.

You didn’t trigger a seal. You didn’t walk into a trap.

But you’re paying something all the same.

You try to pull it back. Anchor it. Shape it into a defensive surge. A final jutsu. Anything.

But it slips through your hands like smoke. Like memory.

You gasp, and it feels like choking.

There’s blood on your tongue. You bit it. You don’t remember when.

The pressure behind your eyes builds until it feels like they’ll burst. Your limbs have gone numb — not dead, but useless. Pins and needles. Ice and fire. Your fingers twitch in the dirt, scrabbling for purchase on something, anything, and find only dead leaves.

Your name doesn’t feel like yours anymore.

Even your chakra signature is fading. You can feel it — not just the drain, but the disconnection. Like the thread that holds you to the world is fraying.

You try to speak.

You don’t know what comes out. Maybe you’re cursing. Maybe you’re pleading. Maybe you’re whispering apologies meant for the hospital room you left behind.

Or maybe you’re calling his name.

But the sound doesn’t go far.

Nothing does.

Kakashi was right. You really were a liability in the end, even to yourself. 

Your breath comes shallow and silent. Your pulse—a stuttering, distant thing. You strain to feel it. To hold onto the rhythm of life.

But it’s slipping.

You’re slipping.

Oh…

You’re dying.

And something in this place is watching you die with intent.

Then—

Something shifts.

A crack, sharp and unnatural. Not in the trees. Not in the earth.

In the air.

Like a rift in the sky.

And through the thickness of the world, you hear it:

“Hey!”

It cuts like a kunai through fog.

You try to lift your head. Try to see.

Your body doesn’t move.

But the forest reacts.

It doesn’t scream — not with sound. With resistance. Pressure. Like an ancient, unseen hand clenching its grip around you, unwilling to let you go.

But it has to let go.

Because a presence breaks through it. A chakra like steel—familiar and unmistakable—forces itself between you and the thing draining you.

There’s a crunch of boots. Urgent. Fast.

Then—contact.

A hand—rough, gloved, real—grasps your shoulder like a lifeline, dragging you back from whatever was swallowing you whole.

Everything snaps.

The air implodes.

Your spine arches.

Something tears.

The sky doesn’t just light up—it fractures. The color bleeds wrong. The ground heaves once beneath you. And just before the world gives out—

You feel him.

Just for a second. Holding you.

And then—

Cold.

Not the absence of heat, but of existence. A cold that strips sound and space and self.

You don’t feel the scream.

You don’t feel the fall.

You’re just—

Gone.

He sees you before he hears you.

Sprawled in the dirt like something the forest has claimed.

Limbs twisted beneath you, fingers half-dug into the soil, your shoulders trembling with every ragged, silent breath. You don’t look like a shinobi. You don’t look like anything but a shadow sinking into the earth.

Kakashi’s heart seizes.

Your chakra—always distinct, steady, vibrant even at your worst—is barely there. Flickering. Fading. Like a candle guttering out in a storm.

“Shit—”

He’s already sprinting before the curse finishes leaving his mouth. The ground blurs beneath his feet.

Then he’s on his knees beside you, skidding in the mud, reaching—

But he hesitates.

Where does he touch you? Your wrist, your shoulder, your back—what if you’re fractured? What if touching you breaks something?

He picks your name out of his throat and throws it into the stillness. “Hey—hey, look at me.”

His hand finds your shoulder. He presses. Firm. Reassuring. Anchoring.

You don’t respond. Not fully. Your eyes flutter, but they don’t focus. Your lips twitch, but no sound comes. The blood beneath your nose is already drying.

His fingers find your pulse. It’s there.

But it’s wrong.

Too thin. Too slow. Too faint.

And beneath the skin—your chakra is being torn from you.

Not leaking. Not injured.

Tethered.

Kakashi knows the feeling.

He’s felt the signature before. Back at the mission site, when Tenzo fell. The strange chakra, the anomaly that made his skin itch and his instincts scream. He told the Hokage. Reported everything. But no one understood what it meant.

Now he does.

This thing—it didn’t let you go.

It waited.

And now it’s feeding.

“No, no no—” he mutters, already unsealing his gloves, already sliding his bare hand against your skin. He doesn’t care about protocols. Doesn’t care about containment. There’s no time.

He channels his chakra straight into yours—a jolt, violent and invasive, pure will behind the surge.

It’s not healing. It’s not sealing. It’s interruption.

A shout into the void.

A blade between the ribs of whatever’s pulling at you.

And the forest responds.

Not with movement.

With rage.

The ground lurches. Chakra erupts from beneath the soil in a pulse so heavy it bends the branches above him. Invisible tendrils lash up around his shoulders and arms—he can’t see them, but he feels them, slipping into the edges of his chakra network, testing, tasting.

It’s not just draining you.

It wants him too.

But it can’t have him.

He won’t let it.

You jolt against him—your spine arches, your mouth opens in a breathless, soundless scream. Chakra twists through your veins like wire, flaring wildly under his touch.

Kakashi doesn’t flinch.

He hauls you up, one arm locked around your back, the other pressed to your chest like he can hold the rest of your soul inside you by force alone. He leans close, voice low and hard.

“You are not dying here. Not like this. Not now.”

Your body is cold.

So cold.

And the thing in the earth howls.

Not with sound—with force. Like gravity is folding in on itself. Like something ancient and buried has reached up through the world and found you.

The pressure builds—

—higher—

—tighter—

He shouts your name.

The sky doesn’t crack. It rips.

Light bursts around him—not golden, not divine, just white. Pure, empty white. The kind that swallows everything. That erases.

Kakashi throws every ounce of chakra he has into shielding you, into anchoring you against his chest.

And then—

The world ends.

Not with pain.

Not even with sound.

Just a flicker.

A second too long.

A breath too deep.

Like blinking during lightning and forgetting what came before it.