As a Thing and Its Shadow

Kakashi wakes up in the hospital, again, and wishes he hadn’t.

He slides his eye shut, before the nurse switching out his IV drip can notice, and waits until she leaves the room. Mentally, he tallies up his injuries, lingering aches, and the numb spots that must be anesthetic. One broken ankle, wrenched back into place and bandaged on the fly. Second degree burns up both arms, from the endless waves of fire jutsu the target’s guards had been fond of. One dislocated shoulder, presumably popped back into place by a medic and throbbing. Entire abdomen numb, where they must have given him anesthesia while they put his insides back inside of him. All told, he’ll live. Again.

They let him out the next day, everything mostly healed except his insides, which apparently will work themselves out. Kakashi has his doubts about this, but he doesn’t have the energy to find out more from a harried nurse, and he believes the medics probably want to keep him alive. He’s too good of a shinobi to waste.

He heads to the memorial first, on autopilot. The stone is as solid and unyielding as ever. He kneels before it, chilly wind lifting the edges of his hair, and finds he really doesn’t have anything to say. Doesn’t know how to express the weary numbness inside of him, doesn’t have it in him to find the words for the bone-deep exhaustion that permeates his every minute.

Rin and Obito wouldn’t understand, anyway. Rin, with her unwavering faith in both him and Obito, her sweetness untarnished by the war they grew up in. She was a medic-nin, straightforward on her path to being a healer. Kakashi doesn’t think that he could explain to her the pointlessness of his own work, the endless missions that are supposedly keeping Konoha safe by killing other people. And Obito would not understand why Kakashi keeps unquestioningly accepting these jobs. They never talked in life, not really. Kakashi can’t even begin to imagine how he would explain this to Obito, when his Obito is frozen as a brash thirteen-year-old to Kakashi’s twenty-one. No matter how close he holds Obito’s memory, it doesn’t change the fact that Obito’s dead, decaying somewhere in Iwa, and Kakashi hasn’t spoken to him in eight years. It’s a long time, to talk to your barely teenage friend, while you grow up without him.

—

Tenzo finds him the next day. He’s stuck in a semi-doze that refuses to become a nap, but that he knows he’ll be sleepy if he wakes up from.

“Kakashi-senpai,” says Tenzo carefully, and Kakashi slits his eye open, sleep-deprived and irritable. Tenzo holds up both hands. “I brought you food.”

He’s not sure if he’s allowed to eat regular food with his stomach still screwed up. They were giving him ice chips and IV nutrition in the hospital. But whatever. Tenzo would probably sulk if he didn’t eat.

It’s a katsu sandwich, meaty and still hot and filling enough that he demolishes the whole thing in a few seconds and ignores the way an ache blooms in his gut as he swallows it. Tenzo tosses him a bottled water and a bag of potato chips, the greasy salt and pepper kind he likes, and he nods his thanks.

“Kakashi-senpai,” Tenzo starts again. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” Like he’d ever give a different answer to that.

Tenzo frowns at him, but doesn’t press. “You coming to the meeting?”

The meeting. The godsdamned meeting that active ANBU have to go to once a month to be very vaguely briefed on The State of Things (generally: “it’s okay but we need you to kill more people that we can’t tell you about in more detail in case you are captured and tortured”), told that they are carrying out great deeds for Konohagakure (generally: a lot of reference to the Will of Fire, the legacy of the Senju, the ever-present threat of war, and invocation of the tender children and civilians that they are supposedly protecting), and have their mental states probed delicately to see if they are on the verge of psychotic breaks that could wind up with people dead. This last is a recent addition, begun only in the last six months after Itachi lost his shit and murdered his entire family. The Obito in Kakashi’s head remarks that this feels a bit like closing the barn door after the horse is gone, to which Kakashi’s mental self responds that they should have closed the proverbial barn door after his own father killed himself in a cesspool of shame and left his kid alone.

Kakashi forcibly shuts down that whole train of thought before he can think in more circles, and says to Tenzo, “isn’t it mandatory?”

Tenzo blinks at him. “You try as hard as you can to skip it every month. You told me last month that you do your damndest to be sick, dead, or out of the Village so you don’t have to go to this meeting.”

Kakashi does remember saying something like that, but he didn’t think Tenzo would commit his words to memory with quite this much accuracy. He opens his mouth to say so, but it doesn’t seem worth pursuing. Tenzo is too literal for the argument to go anywhere.

He sighs instead. “Well. Unfortunately, I am not sick, dead, or gone. Give me ten minutes.”

He takes a shower, washes the lingering sleep out of his eyes, scrubs absentmindedly at the blood leaking from his stitches, and puts on clean ANBU blacks. He blow-dries his hair because he doesn’t want it dripping down his back for the next three hours, okay, shut up, Obito. Tenzo tosses him his mask as he emerges—scrubbed clean of the blood and dirt on it, the kid is ridiculous—and they head out.

—

Gai is waiting for him when they’re released from ANBU HQ. Kakashi tries instantly to duck back into the ANBU locker room, where Gai can’t follow, but it’s useless against the tide of ANBU agents streaming out after the meeting.

“RIVAL KAKASHI!” Gai booms, and Kakashi winces. They’re not supposed to be quite so obvious about their identities, even if by virtue of chakra signature and a lifetime of familiarity everyone knows who everyone else is anyway.

He turns around, deliberately smoothing the stiffness from his shoulders. “Hey, Gai.”

Gai beams at him, throwing a green arm around his shoulders. “Take off your mask, my friend! You are off duty! We must go celebrate your safe return!”

Celebrate. His safe return. Kakashi has to hold back a snort. Getting his abdomen sliced open and nearing chakra exhaustion doesn’t seem like much of a reason to celebrate, even if he did finish the assassination. Another few days in the hospital, more lingering pain, and a short break before being sent back out again. Joy.

Kakashi scrambles for an excuse. “I would, Gai, but I am just…” He has nothing. He racks his brains for any activity that seems even vaguely appealing, and comes up short. He can’t think of a single thing he would rather be doing, and how sad is that?

It doesn’t matter, because Gai isn’t even paying attention to him. Apparently that was less of an invitation, and more of a statement, because he’s already being hauled down the street to the sports bar his classmates who’ve made jounin now frequent. Kurenai and Asuma are already at a table, bickering. Well, Kurenai is making fun of Asuma, who’s smoking silently, punctuated by an occasional grunt.

“My friends!” Gai hollers as they walk up. “Look who is hale and hearty again!”

“Yo,” says Kakashi. Asuma draws out a chair for him.

“What’ll it be, Kakashi?” Kurenai asks. “Asuma’s buying.”

“I am not,” says Asuma.

“Thank you, my friend!” Gai booms. “Asuma, I will have an ale! And an old fashioned for my honorable rival, here.”

“I don’t work here,” Asuma says. “Tell it to the waiter. And I’m not buying.”

“But surely you want to celebrate Kakashi’s safe return!”

Kurenai grins. “Yeah, Asuma. Do you not think Kakashi’s completing a mission is cause for celebration?”

“I complete missions all the time, and Kakashi’s never bought me a drink,” Asuma grumbles, but he digs out his wallet anyway.

Kakashi places a hand over his heart, wounded. “How can you forget that I bought you dinner when you made jounin?”

“That was literally years ago!” Asuma growls. “And you said you’d pay, and then said you forgot your wallet!”

“But I wanted to pay,” Kakashi assures him.

Gai nods in solemn agreement. “It is the intention of paying that matters, my dear Asuma.”

Kakashi sips his drink, losing himself in their easy byplay. There’s a basketball game on TV that’s at least mildly entertaining, and he chimes into the conversation when he has to, usually at Asuma’s expense. Sarcasm is easy, has always been easy, and seems to satisfy everyone. There’s a script here, one they’ve followed for half a decade. Asuma is the butt of the joke, on the receiving end of gentle ribbing from everyone else. Gai is earnest, the final word, serious even in his buoyant enthusiasm. Kurenai is sly, sweetly mischievous, the one who starts the verbal sparring.

It’s easy for Kakashi to slip into his established role. He’s sarcastic, dickish, quips after Kurenai’s lines. Surface-level, these nights might be, but it’s a touchstone of sorts, a semiregular return to the little world they create in this bar at this table between missions and fights and the endless churn of life as shinobi. They don’t talk about work beyond some ironic bravado, funny stories, gossip of who’s lost to who and who thinks they’re all that. Mostly they talk about basketball, a new movie Gai’s seen, make fun of Asuma’s newest punk band, debate whether or not Kurenai should get bangs.

It’s three drinks and a few hours later when Kurenai says to him, casual, “You were hospitalized again, Kakashi?”

Kakashi looks up at her, surprised. “Yeah. Sliced up my stomach.”

She nods, tracing a finger around the rim of her glass. “How long before the next one?”

He lifts one shoulder, unsure where she’s going with this. “I don’t know. Tomorrow, maybe the day after.”

Gai and Asuma have turned their chairs away from the table to shoot dice on the scuffed bar floor, but Gai looks up. “So soon! You need a longer break, rival Kakashi!”

Kakashi shrugs, noncommittal. He doesn’t have a lot of control over how much of a break he gets. And it’s not like he has anything to do in Konoha, so they tend to send him out more than the shinobi with duties at home. He doesn’t complain. Better out beyond the walls, even wading through blood and death the way he does, than staying in the suffocating emptiness of Konoha, where he used to have so much more than he does now. In town, Minato-sensei and Kushina’s absence still feels fresh, the memorial stone with his team’s names engraved on it all the more forbidding and lifeless. And the missions he takes at this point are so brutal that he doesn’t want any other shinobi, even other ANBU, to have to live with them. Since Itachi’s defection, he’s been sent only on solo jobs. Deliberately or not, he’s not sure, but it seems best to him. Even without knowing what exactly happened with his young teammate, Kakashi would bet that the cold-blooded viciousness of ANBU work didn’t help. It’s better now that he takes those missions, with no family or friends left to hurt at home, than anyone like Itachi.

There’s an irony in that, he knows—that because he got one genin teammate crushed, killed the other with his own hand, and failed to save Minato and Kushina from their early grave—because he’s gotten everyone in his life killed, he’s now the optimal black ops agent. Friend-killer Kakashi, shadow protector of the village. Funny.

But he doesn’t know how to put any of that into words, and it’s not something he’d say to his classmates anyway. They don’t talk about that kind of thing, ever. So he shrugs, and when they wait expectantly for something more, says, “I can’t break for too long, Gai, or I’ll have to start accepting your challenges.”

Gai doesn’t take the bait, doesn’t return them to equilibrium. He frowns at Kakashi, impressive eyebrows drawing together.

Next to Kakashi, Kurenai says in a low voice, “If I didn’t know better, Kakashi, I’d say you’re throwing your own life away.”

He doesn’t meet her red gaze. Gai’s flipping a die between the fingers of one hand, still frowning. Asuma stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray.

Kakashi makes himself look at Kurenai, and says evenly, careful not to sound angry, “It’s a good thing you know better, isn’t it?” He stands up, grabbing his jacket off the chair back. “It’s getting late. I’ll see you all around.”

Gai gives him an intense, unreadable look; Kakashi thinks he looks almost disappointed, but can’t fathom why.

“Good night, Hatake,” Asuma says steadily. “Be safe out there.” Kurenai just nods at him, red eyes glittering in the dim bar.

Kakashi salutes them lazily, and takes his leave.

He takes the long way home. This just means walking rather than a shunshin, but still. The scenic route, Minato-sensei would say when all three of them were too weary to follow him into yet another body flicker. We’ll just take the scenic route, then, winking at Obito, who had the greatest chakra stores out of the three of them and would wink back conspiratorially. Kakashi remembers resenting this, at the time, but it doesn’t rankle now like it did then. Mostly he just feels the same wave of loss he always feels, and ignores it.

He’s cutting across the rooftops, still a little tipsy, when something trips the edge of his consciousness and he pulls up short. It’s gone before he can really register it, and he can’t figure out what it was that made him stop, something just on the tip of his tongue. He’s full of adrenaline all of a sudden, heartbeat pounding in his ears.

But whatever it is is already gone. He shuts his eyes and inhales, reaching out mentally as far as he can. He’s not a good sensor, but there’s nothing there. A lot of sleeping chakra, drunk voices spilling out of the bars below, the tension of the shinobi on guard at the wall half a mile away. Nothing, and whatever he sensed is long gone. He already can’t remember what it felt like, only the memory of his nerves tingling.

—

His dreams are strange. The forest around Konoha, shifting, the sense of foreboding. He’s with his old ANBU team, but someone is missing. He counts, again and again, and can’t tally up everyone. There should be more of them, but they haven’t been attacked, and no one is lost, and they’re right by the village. He counts again. It’s off, but he doesn’t know what the right number should be. He counts again. It’s the right number, but someone is missing. Three black-cloaked figures crouch in the trees, the leaves swaying dark overhead. He counts again. There’s one less, someone is gone, but there’s still three ANBU masks looking blankly back at him. And there’s someone watching them, the forest itself shifting to hide them, and Kakashi stares into the bushes.

Two red eyes blink open back at him, tomoe lengthening into a bloodred pinwheel.

He jerks awake, heart pounding. Sunlight is flooding through his open windows. Obito.

But it wasn’t Obito. He knows Obito’s eyes because one of them is his own. Three tomoe, narrow, Mangekyou Sharingan with its scythe shape, somewhat lacking in the aristocratic delicacy of the other Uchiha, a fact Rin told him in an attempt to try and make him understand Obito’s well-developed sense of inferiority. It hadn’t worked, but he still remembers it now, crystallized like all his memories of his genin team.

And then he knows, all of a sudden, he’s absolutely certain who he sensed coming home, who was missing from his ANBU squad all night. His hands are shaking when he summons Pakkun. Or they would be, if he wasn’t an S-ranked ninja who can keep his damn hands still.

“What’s got you all shaken up?” Pakkun asks. Kakashi sighs. So much for hiding his emotions. His dog grunts, scrabbling up onto the bed beside him with what looks like extreme effort.

“Jesus,” says Kakashi. “Aren’t you supposed to be a ninja?”

“I don’t see you complaining about my skills in the field,” says Pakkun with dignity. “Then it’s just ‘Pakkun, run to Suna for me! Pakkun, take out these S-ranked missing nin for me! Pakkun, run back to the Hokage with this intel and four Kiri nin on your tail!’”

Kakashi’s laughing. Pakkun can always, always make him laugh. “I have never made you take out an S-ranked missing nin for me!”

“And after watching me climb on the bed, you never will,” says Pakkun, putting his chin on Kakashi’s thigh. “I’m moderating your expectations. It’s best for both of us.”

“You’re getting fat,” Kakashi tells him. “In your old age.”

“Kid,” Pakkun says. “You’re the one that’s aging me. Here you are, summoning me at sunrise. In my twilight years, I need all the rest I can get, but do you let me have it? No, you wake me up and—”

“It’s Itachi,” Kakashi interrupts. Pakkun goes still. “He was in Konoha last night.”

Pakkun blinks. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t realize who it was till I called you. I didn’t recognize his chakra.”

He can almost hear Pakkun thinking, working through possibilities. There are ANBU stationed around the Uchiha compound 24/7, to protect Sasuke if Itachi tries to come back for his little brother. And while Itachi is certainly capable of evading or taking out multiple ANBU, he wouldn’t be able to do it without alerting the village. He can’t have killed Sasuke or his guards, or ANBU HQ would have sent for Kakashi.

“Spying?” Pakkun wonders aloud. “Is he working for someone else yet?”

“Not to my knowledge,” says Kakashi. “But he’s Itachi. There’s been almost no intel on him since the massacre. If he didn’t want Konoha to know something, we wouldn’t.”

Pakkun hums thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine he’d bother to spy, though. He already knew everything as an ANBU Captain that he’d be likely to find out through one night of visiting home. Not much has changed since he left.”

“So what, then?” Kakashi says impatiently. “To see someone?” It is, of course, possible that there is someone in the village on Itachi’s side. But it doesn’t make sense, not really, not when the massacre had been so thoroughly an Uchiha affair. Sure, probably a number of the more suspicious shinobi, or maybe the Hyuuga, or really anyone who blamed the Uchiha clan for the Kyuubi attack might have sympathized with the massacre.

But Itachi had been poised to become the next clan head. Since Shisui’s death, he was the pride of the Uchiha. It would be hard to believe that he had conspired with the segment of the village that mistrusted his clan, when he was so thoroughly of the Uchiha. Plenty of shinobi had ostracized and outright hated the clan, but to approach the future clan head, the most powerful living Uchiha, a shinobi who had made ANBU Captain at thirteen, with that sentiment? It would have been an insane gamble.

“There’s no way,” Pakkun agrees. Kakashi can feel the shape of his thoughts along the mental link they share, reaching the same conclusion. “No one in Konoha would have dared. He was too dangerous.”

“Unless he recruited someone to help him,” Kakashi points out, but Pakkun is already shaking his head.

“Who? That kid was weird as hell. He had no friends. Who was he talking to right before the massacre? You, the rest of Team Ro, his family? You were with him almost constantly in the last couple months. Who would he have even gone to?”

“And he’s Itachi,” Kakashi says. “He wouldn’t have wanted a partner.”

“Exactly,” says Pakkun. “He took the damn Chuunin Exams alone, and he asks for help from someone to slaughter his family? It doesn’t make sense.”

“None of it makes sense!” Kakashi runs a hand through his hair. “The massacre doesn’t make sense either! I still don’t understand it, and I worked with him for almost a year. None of it makes sense.”

Itachi had been incredibly powerful, definitely weird as hell, but a good shinobi. He was only thirteen, but Kakashi had joined ANBU at thirteen too, and he knew he’d been strange and awkward too. He had still trusted Itachi almost instinctually to watch his back. Itachi was measured, clinical, externally almost always calm. Kakashi still, months later, finds it impossible to picture the unhinged slaughter of every single Uchiha from his quiet teammate.

The testimony Itachi’s little brother had given to the Hokage had clarified nothing. Kakashi had been there, in uniform. He remembers, with the painful clarity of the Sharingan, how Sasuke had been too small for his feet to touch the floor. How he had sat, completely expressionless, kicking his legs while the Hokage waited for him to answer. He had said, in a tightly controlled voice, that Itachi had killed his clan to test his own abilities. That Itachi had told his little brother to kill him, to avenge the Uchiha. To hate him.

Kakashi had followed him out of the Hokage tower after the interview, curious. As soon as he left the building, Sasuke had turned into an alley and cried, gasping, desperate sobs that left his small chest heaving. Kakashi had crouched on the rooftop above, aching for Sasuke’s loss and his own loss and with one corner of his brain, thinking that Obito would have felt this same grief and betrayal both after Rin’s death and now. And Sasuke had clenched his (seven-year-old) fists, squared his shoulders, and gone home. Kakashi had remained crouched on the rooftop, staring numbly at Minato-sensei’s stone face until the stiffness of his knees roused him.

Pakkun is following his train of thought. “Leaving Sasuke alive doesn’t make sense either. Sasuke said Itachi told him he wasn’t worth killing. But Itachi killed civilians, and Uchiha without Sharingan, and other children. All innocent, not even opponents for him.”

“Okay, so he lied to Sasuke,” Kakashi says. “I buy that, from a guy that just killed his parents. But why did he really spare him?”

Pakkun looks at him. “I know what you’re thinking. I can’t think of anything else either.”

“But if Itachi still loves Sasuke, or cares about him enough to not murder him, then why kill the kid’s entire family? How is that love?”

“And he tortured him, too,” Pakkun points out. “Sasuke said he put him in a genjutsu, and made him watch it over and over. That’s cruel.”

“That’s not Itachi,” Kakashi counters. “I never saw him be cruel, ever. Brutal, yes. Sadistic like that, no. He was too calculated.” He taps his finger on his thigh, trying to sort through his thoughts.

“Okay, say it was calculated. We still need a why.”

“Why, why why why,” Kakashi singsongs under his breath. “Why did he do it? Any of it?”

“Unless he really did just snap,” his dog suggests.

“I still can’t see that,” Kakashi muses. “But I don’t know. Kid saw a lot of shit. It’s not impossible.” He’s going to go further, argue that he’s seen more shit than Itachi and hasn’t murdered anyone. But on second thought, redirecting the conversation toward his own mental state is not what he wants. Kurenai’s already accused him of throwing his life away, whatever that means, and he doesn’t need a lecture from Pakkun too.

The pug sends him a flat look, sensing his thoughts. Kakashi wrenches Itachi to the forefront of his mind. Pakkun rolls his eyes.

“Fine. Say he didn’t snap. Say it was in character. Why torture the kid brother? Why tell him to get his revenge on you?”

“Because you weren’t sadistic enough to kill him in cold blood, but you still want to defeat him? Because you want to fuck with his mind? Because you want him to hate you?”

“Maybe,” says Pakkun slowly, “maybe he didn’t lie to Sasuke. Maybe he does want him to avenge the Uchiha. Maybe he wants Sasuke to hate him.”

“But if he wants him to avenge the Uchiha, if he thinks they’re worthy of avenging, then he could have just not massacred them in the first place.”

“Damn it, Itachi,” says Pakkun. “We’re at square one. There’s still something we’re missing.”

Kakashi flops back on his bed, staring at the ceiling. The shock of Itachi’s actions, immediately afterward, had stopped him from really thinking about it. The grief of losing yet another comrade, albeit to treachery rather than death, had sunk into him again. And he’d dealt with it, or been able to shove it aside, mostly because of the suddenly constant missions he’d been sent on. These few days of mandatory medical leave right now, he realizes suddenly, is the longest he’s been in Konoha since Itachi left.

In his head, he keeps coming back to how small Itachi was the last time he saw him. Still a child, a slight, slender, delicate framed child who had not yet hit his growth spurt. A head and a half shorter than everyone else in ANBU, seventy pounds lighter than Kakashi. Shoulders too narrow for the regular ANBU armor, slight enough that as his CO, Kakashi had had to put in a special request for custom armor. Thirteen years old. Smaller even than Tenzo.

“Kid,” Pakkun says softly. “He still did it. Even if we don’t know why. He still did what he did.”

“I know that.” Kakashi shuts his eye. “I know.”

He was there, on Team Ro, brought with the Sandaime Hokage to the Uchiha compound the night of the massacre. He is a Sharingan user. He remembers, will always remember, the stench of death and pain in the deserted streets. Bodies tossed to the side like so much trash, blood streaking the walls and the ground. He remembers comprehending, suddenly, the difference between a battle and a slaughter. The silence was an old one, not the absence of noise but the suffocation of it. He found Sasuke’s still body in the street, had checked for a pulse automatically, not expecting to find one. Had realized, with a dawning horror, that the kid’s heart was still beating determinedly. That in the middle of all this death, the slaughter of every single one of the kid’s relatives, Sasuke was alive, and completely alone.

Sasuke had looked so much like Itachi then. A younger version, without the lines of war carved into his face. And Kakashi had realized that he would have to live the rest of his life alone, knew that realization intimately, and hoped against hope that Itachi had survived the slaughter.

But the Sandaime knew by then. He had called Team Ro to his office and said, “Uchiha district. Now.” And they had gone, and the Sandaime had stood in the midst of all the carnage and said to Yugao, “Uchiha Itachi is to be reclassified as an S-rank missing nin.”

Yugao had shot a glance at Kakashi, brow furrowed. “Hokage-sama. We have yet to identify every body. Itachi may have been killed as well.”

But they hadn’t found Itachi among the dead. The Sandaime had not seemed surprised, only older and wearier than ever. Reeling with shock, Kakashi had gone to the files himself and reclassified operative: Uchiha Itachi, age 13. Rank: ANBU Captain. Specialties: Assassination, Stealth, Close to Mid-Range Battle, Genjutsu. Notes: Possesses Mangekyou Sharingan as Missing Nin: Uchiha Itachi. Rank: S. Affiliation: Unknown. Designated: Flee On Sight for all active Konohagakure operatives.

They had been forbidden from tracking Itachi, to bring him back or to kill him. With the loss of every Uchiha, their entire police force, the village was weakened enough that it was not worth the risk of sending shinobi out after him. Kakashi assumes that at some point, they’ll be sent to hunt him down. Konoha doesn’t have an official hunter nin division, because defection has never been so large-scale like in the height of Kirigakure’s Bloody Mist era, but the elite ANBU are still tasked with killing missing nin. That means Team Ro, and it especially means Hatake Kakashi.

He opens his eye again. “What do I do, Pakkun?”

Pakkun grunts. “About what?”

“All of it,” Kakashi says. “I don’t know what to do with any of it.” He grits his teeth, and shoves the next words out before he can think too hard. “Itachi—it was my fault. I should have watched him. I know what being thirteen in ANBU is like. I should have paid more attention.”

“Kakashi,” says Pakkun. “You can’t blame yourself for every tragedy that happens in this world. Itachi’s actions are not your burden to bear.”

“But they only happen to the people I love,” Kakashi says, and his voice breaks, just a little bit. He swallows hard. “My mother. My father. Obito. Rin. Minato. Kushina—” His mother died in childbirth, bringing him into this world. His father, so ashamed and alone that to him life was not worth living even for Kakashi. Obito, who had made him into a better man at the cost of his own life. Rin, whose blood he still can feel on his hand. Minato and Kushina, larger than life in their vibrancy, his charges to protect, and he has failed them all. And Itachi, losing his grip in the depths of ANBU, his own CO too blinded to see it. “What do I do, Pakkun?”

Pakkun climbs up onto his chest, curls up right beneath his chin. His heart is beating against Kakashi’s throat, a quick tattoo through his warm fur. Kakashi raises an absent hand to scritch behind his ears.

“I don’t know,” his dog says eventually. “But I think you should ask the Hokage how he knew.”

“Knew what?”

“To go to the Uchiha compound the night of the massacre. And to mark Itachi missing before you finished searching for him. How did he know?”