In Another Life

The sky blooms.

First gold, then red, then a shiver of white-blue that cracks open the dark like a second sun. The explosion rolls through the air and settles low in Kakashi’s chest, a phantom beat that rattles against the quiet space between his ribs. Smoke curls through the sky like spilled ink, tracing delicate lines over the stars.

And beneath it—framed in the fractured light—you stand, head tilted up, face bathed in color. The reflection of fire dances in your eyes. Your lips are parted, not in speech but in breathless awe, and your expression—

It’s unguarded.

Soft in a way he rarely sees. Open in a way he doesn’t deserve to.

For a moment, you don’t look like a shinobi.

You look like someone untouched by blood and secrets. Like someone who never had to wear a mask.

He knows that isn’t true. But gods, he wishes it could be.

The colors shift again—green, silver, gold. The fireworks bloom slower now, each one more dramatic than the last, meant to draw out the end of the show. He watches the way the light spills over your features. It doesn’t seem real. You don’t seem real.

You look like something from a dream he would never admit to having.

Something beautiful, in the way only things destined to vanish can be.

He turns his face toward you, drawn in without thought. One hand lifts slightly, as if it might reach for your sleeve, your shoulder—anything to make sure you’re really here. But the motion stalls halfway, caught in the air. There’s a word caught behind his tongue, too. A fragile thing. It wants to be spoken. It wants to change everything.

But he doesn’t say it.

Because beauty like this is borrowed. And borrowed things don’t last.

A breeze curls through the night, carrying the scent of ash and lantern smoke and the faintest trace of incense from the shrine stalls. The warmth of your shoulder brushes his—light, barely-there contact—but grounding. Solid.

He doesn’t want to move.

He wants to stay here. In this moment. With you.

But then—

He feels it.

Not through sound. Not through sight.

But chakra.

A tremor that moves through the space around them like the whisper of a detonating tag—a subtle hum, barely there, just enough to coil the muscles in his spine and twist something ancient in his instincts.

Faint.

Wrong.

And close.

He shifts, barely, adjusting his stance in a way that hides the alertness crawling through him. You don’t notice. Still looking upward, chin lifted to the light. Your face turned skyward like it’s the only place worth seeing.

And maybe it is.

Because what’s below is always darker.

He could ignore it. Should, maybe.

But Kakashi has never been good at ignoring things. Especially not the ones that pulse quiet warnings against his skin like this one. The kind that don’t announce themselves with explosions or shouts—but slide in like knives under the skin.

Still, he hesitates.

He wants to ignore it. Just this once.

Because this night—this memory—has been untouched by duty. Untouched by ANBU, or blood, or ghosts of the past clawing their way into the present.

And if he takes you with him—

If you see what he suspects is waiting in the dark—

Then this night, too, will rot.

Just like the others.

He glances at you one more time, something tight drawing in his chest. You’re smiling now. Genuinely. And your eyes shimmer with the echo of fireworks and joy you don’t get to feel often enough.

It hits him then—harder than expected.

He can’t ruin that.

Not this time.

I’ll be right back, he thinks, the words curling against the inside of his throat like smoke. But he doesn’t say them aloud. Doesn’t give you the chance to ask, or offer to follow, or demand an answer.

He just watches you for one second longer—

And then turns.

Slips into the crowd like a shadow melting between lanterns and laughter. The noise swallows him up. The scent of grilled food and sweet dumplings hangs thick in the air, and somewhere, a child shrieks in delight.

Another firework goes off behind him—louder, brighter.

And from the distance, carried on the wind—

You laugh.

The sound is light and startled and completely, devastatingly alive.

It follows him.

Down the alley. Into the dark.

And for the first time in a while, he feels like the ghost.

By the time Kakashi reaches the outskirts of the festival, the din of laughter and fireworks has dimmed to a distant echo—faint, like a memory already slipping between his fingers. The night thickens here, air turned damp with river mist and the scent of ash trailing from spent firecrackers. Shadows grow taller between alleyways, and the cobbled roads give way to dirt paths too forgotten for festival lanterns.

He moves like smoke, barely brushing the air. His mask is already in place—featureless, cracked near the chin from some mission months ago that he never bothered to fix. His headband is reversed, hair tucked in beneath a nondescript hood. A rogue. A nobody. That’s the idea.

His chakra is sheathed so deep it barely hums under his skin—tamped down to the pulse of a civilian, silent enough to pass unnoticed even by trained sensors. A lifetime of ANBU discipline honed into instinct.

The trail he’s following is faint, a thread of something oily and cloying that slips under his skin like wet silk. It’s not recent—but not old either. A few hours, maybe. Something that shouldn’t be here.

He tracks it through the narrowing alleys until the world turns hushed and strange.

Half-collapsed festival stalls line the passage like broken teeth. One leans against a wall, its canvas top shredded and sagging, still painted with laughing koi that now leer with faded grins. Crates are stacked too precisely against a shuttered doorway—too neat for storage, too irregular for a merchant’s cart.

Kakashi slows.

Something’s off.

He crouches low, fingers brushing the dirt. There’s residue here. Chakra-scorched. The edges of a seal burned into the stone beneath the crates, warped and splintered as though it had been ripped open instead of deactivated. The summoning circle is jagged—spiraling in on itself like a vortex that collapsed under its own weight.

Wrong.

Utterly, unmistakably wrong.

He leans closer.

The smell hits him hard—underneath the festival smoke, the lingering scent of grilled sweetfish and damp fireworks, there it is: serpent skin. Dry. Moulting. Old.

The stench of burned parchment and iron-rich blood—copper, clotted, controlled.

And beneath it all, something precise and surgical.

Not Orochimaru.

But close.

Inspired.

No signature, no village tag. No insignia carved into the crates or the alley stone. Just a seal twisted in ways it was never meant to bend. A mimicry. A crude imitation of genius.

Maybe a student.

Maybe something worse.

An evolution.

A sudden whisper of motion.

The rustle of fabric, soft and practiced.

Steel breathes cold behind him.

Kakashi doesn’t hesitate.

He shifts left, just enough to let the blade whistle past his shoulder, drawing sparks from the crate’s edge. His foot sweeps low, catching the attacker’s ankle, and before the man can recover, Kakashi’s kunai finds the hollow of his throat—tap, not slice.

He’s unconscious before he hits the ground.

A second presence moves. Smaller. Faster. Twitchy like a bird cornered in a net. Chakra fluttering erratically in bursts. Panic or overconfidence—Kakashi doesn’t wait to figure out which.

This one jabs forward with a poisoned senbon between fingers, twitching like a nerve misfiring. Kakashi ducks under the strike, catches his wrist, twists, and drives him into the wall hard enough to knock the air from his lungs.

The mask hides the confusion on their faces.

They think he’s just another rogue.

Perfect.

They speak to each other in clipped syllables. An unfamiliar dialect—borderland slang, maybe. Or a cipher. Not important.

One tries to bolt.

Kakashi lets him.

Better they run. Better they think this was a failed ambush or a deal gone sour.

He steps over the unconscious body of the first attacker and turns back to the crates.

Now that he’s closer, he can feel the chakra inside them—sealed scrolls, paper tags, something alive tucked away in one. A pulse. He can’t tell if it’s animal or something grown. It beats too slowly to be human.

He reaches for a fire tag.

He doesn’t want this getting back to anyone.

But then—

It hits him.

A sudden spike.

Your chakra.

Not panicked—but sharp. Charged. Like a blade being drawn.

And something else.

Something impossibly vast, colliding with it. Not violent, but vast in the way a mountain is vast. Grief-heavy. Old. Unsteady.

He freezes mid-motion.

Tag fluttering in his fingers.

Your chakra again. Flickering now.

Like you’re pulling it in tight.

A reflex born of years under pressure.

He moves.

No thought.

No plan.

Just motion.

And the fire tag slips from his hand, falling unlit to the dirt as he vanishes into the rooftops—gone like smoke on the wind.

Kakashi lands without a sound.

The edge of the old market district yawns before him like a skeleton of what it once was—wooden stalls shuttered and broken, old signs bleached white by sun and age, tarps whispering like breath against the evening wind. Lantern light bleeds only faintly here, diluted by distance, casting soft, warbled shadows that seem to breathe.

Somewhere, a bell chimes lazily in the wind. The kind hung on storefronts, long abandoned.

He doesn’t register the cold.

Doesn’t register the faint ache still in his knees from the chakra sprint across the village.

Because he sees you.

There.

Frozen.

Standing in the middle of the narrow lane like you’ve forgotten how to move. Like someone took a photograph of you and made it flesh. Your posture is rigid, arms slack at your sides, eyes hidden beneath the curtain of your lashes—but your chakra is raw. Bare. Crackling just beneath the surface like lightning trapped in skin.

And then—

Kakashi sees the man on the ground.

Jiraiya.

On his knees. Arms wrapped around your legs with a desperation that borders on madness. His fingers claw at the fabric of your kimono like he’s trying to anchor himself to the world. His face is wet—mouth moving too fast to form proper words, breath hiccuping between sobs.

“My flame. My—my inspiration. My—oh, I’m gonna need a whole new pen name—”

The words are broken.

Not slurred like sake-speak.

Clear.

Painfully clear.

Jiraiya looks like a man who woke up inside a nightmare, and the only exit is through you.

And still—you don’t move.

You don’t push him away.

But you don’t comfort him either.

You just stand there.

Staring down at him like he’s something very far away.

Something not entirely real.

Kakashi’s hands curl, fists in his pockets.

There’s a heat behind his mask that has nothing to do with chakra. Something knotted and ugly in the pit of his chest. Jealousy—undeniable now, surging to the surface like bile. Because he’s read this man’s words. He’s laughed at them. He’s carried those ridiculous novels through blood and silence and loneliness.

But now he watches the author of those fantasies—this legendary Sannin—reduced to a heap on the cobblestones, holding onto your legs like a lifeline.

And Kakashi? He’s standing above it all, just watching.

Not your hero.

Not anyone’s.

You tilt your head down slowly, just enough that your face catches in the low lamplight.

And what he sees guts him.

You’re empty.

Your eyes don’t glisten. Your mouth doesn’t twist with anger or sorrow. There’s no accusation. No forgiveness. Just—

Hollow.

As if some last thread inside you finally snapped and took everything with it.

Then—abruptly—you move.

Without a word. Without a glance.

You wrench yourself free in a single motion and break into a run.

Kakashi’s breath catches in his throat.

Jiraiya stumbles forward as your legs disappear from under his grip. His hands smack the ground, scraping raw on the stone, and he cries out after you—voice ragged, almost childlike.

“Come back! You always said feedback was essential to the artistic—hey, don’t run so fast, I’m wearing geta—!”

But you don’t stop.

You don’t even hesitate.

Your figure blurs into the darkness beyond the alley mouth—shoulders tight, fists clenched, hair whipping like ink against the lantern light—until you’re gone.

Gone like you were never there to begin with.

Jiraiya crumples into himself.

He whispers something, a cracked repetition of your name, over and over, as if it might call you back.

It doesn’t.

And Kakashi?

He doesn’t follow you either.

He stays hidden in the rooftops, shadowed beneath the broken slope of a tiled awning, wind tugging gently at his hair, his heartbeat loud in his throat.

High above the warm-glowing village, where lanterns bob like floating stars and laughter peals in bursts of unknowing joy, he lingers in stillness, a shadow perched in the quiet between two worlds. One foot rests on the ledge, the other folded beneath him, elbows braced on his knees. His mask feels tight. The festival sounds—flutes, drums, the clatter of sandals on stone—are distant echoes behind the thrum of blood in his ears.

The night threads through his hair, lifting pale strands like silver ghosts. Cool against the sweat at his temples. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t shift to follow. His eyes stay rooted below.

The cries below grow quieter.

But the weight in his chest only gets worse.

Jiraiya hasn’t moved either.

Still crumpled in the middle of the path like a dropped doll, his broad shoulders hunched forward, silver hair disheveled, hands limp where they’d failed to keep hold of you. The street around him glows in amber light—lanterns casting long shadows across the gravel, across the collapsed shape of a man who once stood like a giant.

A hero.

A Sannin.

Now just a man broken in a place too loud for grief.

Kakashi watches him.

Something sour stirs in his stomach. He’s not sure if it’s pity. Not sure if it’s contempt.

Or jealousy.

He shouldn’t be jealous. Shouldn’t. He knows that.

But there’s a part of him—ugly and small and fierce—that resents how easily the pervert had been allowed to fall apart at your feet. How freely he’d wrapped his arms around your legs, like he belonged there. Like he was entitled to your comfort.

As if he hadn’t hurt you.

As if he hadn’t said something to make you look like that—hollow-eyed, mouth pressed thin, gaze turned to winter. 

Hadn't hurt you by mourning you. No, not you. Her. 

You didn’t yell. You didn’t cry. You just left.

Ran like you’d suddenly remembered who you were and hated the skin you’d just stood in.

Kakashi’s gaze shifts.

To the empty corridor between buildings.

The place your silhouette had vanished into—shinobi-fast, festival kimono snapping behind you like a memory tearing loose. You didn’t look back. Not once.

He doesn’t know whether to follow you.

Doesn’t know if you would want him to.

And the longer he waits, the more the moment calcifies—like a shuriken caught in stone, impossible to dislodge without breaking something more.

The lanterns sway gently overhead, casting his long shadow down the rooftop tiles. Somewhere to his left, a child squeals at the sight of a paper dragon. A dog barks. The night exhales.

The village lives on. Unaware of the fracture blooming quietly at its edges.

Jiraiya lets out a soft, strangled noise—a sound no shinobi should ever make. Not even him. Especially not him. And Kakashi—Kakashi feels something twist beneath his ribs, sharp and hollow and exhausted.

This is what war leaves behind.

Not scars.

Not stories.

But men like this. Bent, kneeling, begging into the dirt.

And people like you, running from the ghosts that should’ve never found you tonight.

Kakashi shuts his eye.

Tries to breathe.

He doesn’t know which ache to answer first.

The one clawing in his chest for you.

Or the one mourning the fall of another legend.

He stays on the rooftop.

Watching.

Listening.

Letting the night burn around him like paper.