Cut flowers and burning trees
Life in Konoha was at once achingly familiar, and unfathomably alien. If Kakashi hadn’t already retreated into shock by the time he arrived he might have found that hard to deal with. As it was he experienced his first weeks in his new village through a kind of numb haze, that insulated him from the worst of the culture shock, for what it was worth.
The Yellow Flash had helped. It had surprised Kakashi a little to find that Konoha’s Yellow Flash, Namikaze Minato, mass murderer, and nightmare of Iwa, was kind. It wasn’t what he’d expected, but he was glad of it. Namikaze had spoken for him, had helped ease him through the messy process of changing his allegiance, had given him a place to stay while he found his feet. He’d even helped Kakashi fill out his paperwork, and never once had he pushed Kakashi on the questions he wasn’t sure he was ready to answer. It was… nice, in ways that Kakashi was not entirely used to.
Not that any of it was easy. Defection was always a messy process. It required loyalty checks, debriefings, skills assessments, citizenship exams, assimilating strange ninja into a village was hard. The Yamanaka were able to streamline this process somewhat for Konoha, but still it was not a quick or simple matter. Still no light choice to make. And Kakashi’s defection had been messier than most. Rin was dead by his hand for all that he’d tried to save her, and he’d brought nothing with him but trouble and his own skills, no secret techniques, or battle plans. Maybe if she’d lived it would have gone smoother, a new jinchuriki was a hell of a good faith gift. Probably not though, after all there was still the sharingan, which everyone assumed he’d stolen. Not that he’d tried all that hard to correct them, no need to taint Obito’s memory, by telling them he’d given village secrets to an enemy.
The sharingan. Now there was an issue. The Uchiha were of course furious, and had wanted the eye removed, ideally along with his head, but the rest of the village was hesitant to demand he hand it over. One more sharingan user was more useful to the village than the Uchiha’s pride, provided they could trust him. And there was the rub, they weren’t sure they could trust him. If he’d been a loyal Konoha nin he’d probably have got a slap on the wrist to placate the Uchiha, and then been left to his own devices, if he’d been a straight up enemy nin, they’d have killed him, burned the body and had done with it. As it was he was trapped in a liminal state, and it seemed like every faction in Konoha had an opinion on the subject and an agenda to push. He’d always hated politics.
He hated politics, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know how the game was played. Politics in Kiri were a matter of survival, and Kakashi had survived. It would take more than Konoha’s games to make him lose his footing. By the time it came to tribunal Kakashi was reasonably sure they’d let him keep the eye, if only because ninja villages couldn’t abide waste. Namikaze had spoken for him, which helped, and he’d passed a Yamanaka interrogation, which helped more. In the end the eye stayed where it was and the Uchiha went away unhappy. It was probably the best result he could have hoped for, although he suspected there might be trouble over it later.
…
In some ways though the legal process was the easiest thing, politics, and bureaucracy notwithstanding. The human side, that was the hard part. Being accepted by the law was one thing, being accepted by the people was another thing entirely. Being accepted by people who’d been his enemies right up until he’d done the unthinkable and betrayed his village. People he’d tried to kill, whose friends he’d succeeded in killing, people who’d tried to kill him in turn. There was a history there, written in blood as history so often is, and it would take more than orders from on high to make him a part of this village.
It was more than that though. Konoha was at once both alien and familiar, and the dissonance of it set Kakashi’s head spinning. Konoha was a ninja village, just as Kiri was, steeped in blood and shadows, and yet… Konoha was not Kiri, was different, in a thousand little ways that left Kakashi utterly disoriented. Kiri was cruel, cruel and merciless, and weakness was like blood in the water. You trained in secret, and trusted no-one, and you learned not to take betrayal personally, because if you took it personally it might just be the thing that ended up breaking you. Konoha though, Konoha confused him, because Konoha was cruel too. Konoha was a hidden village, the oldest hidden village, and cruelty was in the blood and bones of all ninja villages. But Konoha was more than that. Konoha was kind, they took something Kiri had always believed was a weakness and turned it into its own kind of strength, into a weapon in its own right. (Sometimes Kakashi wonders if the contrast doesn’t make Konoha’s cruelty all the sharper)
It was a weapon Kakashi did not know how to use, a game he didn’t know how to play, this game of trust, and loyalty, and camaraderie. Kakashi was born of Kiri and weakness was blood in the water to him, he dared not lower his barriers enough to let them in, he had to hold back words drawn like blades whenever they tried to lower their own. It caused tension.
There had been no outright trouble, his fellow jounin knew better than to let their personal feelings get in the way of the mission and lower ranked ninja knew better than to fuck with a jounin, but the konoha nin felt uncomfortable around him and it showed. They’d avoid him when they could, and they were cautious when they spoke to him. They’d work with him but they weren’t his friends. It was surprising how much that hurt. After all, objectively he was no more isolated than he had been in Kiri. But then, in Kiri everyone was alone, no-one trusted each other. Somehow it was different in Konoha, where comrades were people to be trusted and Kakashi’s isolation stood in sharp contrast to the bonds the real Konoha nin shared.
Not that he blamed them. It was as much his problem as theirs. He may have defected to Konoha, but he was of Kiri, for better or worse, and neither he nor his new comrades can forget that. Kindness is not in his nature, and if history written in blood weren’t enough to set him apart then his own killer instinct would be. It wasn’t something he felt able to fix.
With all of that it had been a bit of a shock when a loud, green clad, almost-jounin had invaded his new apartment to challenge him to a “friendly test of our most youthful prowess in the noble art of combat” which he mentally translated to a request for a friendly spar. It was surreal, but at the same time it awakened a half buried feeling that put him in mind of holding Obito’s hand in the dark, of sleeping back to back with Rin, of Konoha’s Yellow Flash ruffling his hair after he passed his citizenship test. He would like to say he’d agreed out of morbid curiosity, but if he could summon up the courage to be honest, with himself if no-one else, the truth was it was nothing so shallow. He’d agreed because Gai had reached out his hand, and somewhere along the line Kakashi had decided that was important. Maybe the most important thing there was.
The sparring match left them both collapsed exhausted in the training grounds. Gai was good at taijutsu, the kind of good that only came from long hours of training, and absolute dedication. Too good to be a chunin and Kakashi said as much when the both of them battered and bruised and aching, managed to prop themselves up against a tree in training ground seven. Gai’s reaction was… enthusiastic to say the least.
“Yosh, I am deeply honoured by your words of youthful encouragement, I am indeed in the process of taking the jounin exams. If all goes well I shall be a jounin by the end of next week, and if I fail I shall run around Konoha a hundred times on my hands.”
“Maa, there’s no need to get so excited. I was just making an observation.” Kakashi tried in vain to calm him down.
“So hip and cool my rival!” Gai beamed at him. It was hard to get really irritated with someone who was smiling at you like that.
“Of course if we hadn’t been restricted to taijutsu I could have defeated you easily.” Kakashi couldn’t resist pointing out.
“A Challenge. Very well I accept. Tomorrow at midday we shall spar again, and if I fail to defeat you I shall do five hundred press-ups.” Gai gave a thumbs up. Kakashi suspected he may have just made a terrible mistake.
The next day Kakashi flattened Gai in ninjutsu, leading to another challenge. Things escalated from there, and before long Gai had declared Kakashi his eternal rival. Kakashi refused to admit how much he liked it.
…
Kakashi had been somewhat surprised when Namikaze (now the Yondaime), asked him to join Anbu. You didn’t offer positions in black ops to people whose loyalties were uncertain. But then Kakashi thought about it some more, and realised that foreign deserter he might be, the Yondaime was surer of his loyalties than many native born nin. Because he was a foreigner he had no affiliation with any of the many internal political factions that the Hokage had to balance, because he was an outsider he had undergone a Yamanaka interrogation, and could be asked to undergo another at any time within the next five years, no questions asked. He had two close associations within Konoha, one of which was the Yondaime himself, and the other being Maito Gai, the most stubbornly politically oblivious ninja in the village. When viewed that way Kakashi realised, he was probably one of the most trustworthy ninja Namikaze had. There was something darkly amusing about that.
He said yes of course. After all he’d been thinking about trying out for Anbu in Kiri, before… everything. He was good at what he did. Even when the whole world seemed uncertain and he couldn’t trust his village, or his comrades, or even his own judgement, he’d always been able to trust his skills. The teenage boy in Kakashi liked the idea of being the best, and Anbu were the best. There was more to it than that of course. The anonymity was another big draw. With Gai’s odd friendship he was no longer as alone as he’d been when he first arrived in Konoha, but he still didn’t belong, was still held at arm’s length by most of the village and the idea of belonging to a group where no-one knew where he’d come from or what he’d done was appealing for obvious reasons. He suspected it might be easier to fit in with Anbu as well. Anbu were expected to have hard edges, behind the white mask his own killer instinct might not seem so out of place, it was a way of thinking that he understood.
He’d joined Anbu and been set to guarding the Hokage’s wife. He hadn’t known Namikaze was married. Apparently neither had the rest of Konoha. And now she was pregnant, and her husband was worried so he’d given her an Anbu detail for her own protection. The woman, Kushina, her name was, didn’t seem too pleased about this state of affairs. Kakashi didn’t blame her. She was clearly a competent ninja in her own right, an Uzumaki if her red hair was anything to go by, and Kiri remembered how fucking terrifying Uzumaki were in a fight, it was perfectly understandable that she resented having to be protected. Still Kakashi could see Namikaze (call me Minato)’s reasoning as well. Like it or not she was in a weakened position, and as the Hokage’s wife she was a high level target, and that was not even considering the suspicions Kakashi had been nursing since he’d caught that trace of copper and ozone in the air.
Kakashi’s posting made sense. Kushina was a target three times over as the wife of the Hokage, as Konoha’s jinchuriki, and as the mother of a child that would most likely become a monster in terms of sheer potential. The child of Konoha’s Yellow Flash and an Uzumaki, Kakashi held back a reflexive shudder at the thought. Kiri scared their children with stories of the Uzumaki, the way they never ran out of chakra, and never ran out of ideas, and never even learned the meaning of the word impossible. Combine that with the Yondaime’s genius and the world would tremble. Then of course there were any personal enemies Kushina might have made over the course of her career, and Kakashi had no doubt there were many. Kushina needed a guard detail, no matter how irritating she might find it. Logically he was sure she knew that too, but Uzumaki weren’t known for being even tempered at the best of times, let alone when pumped up on pregnancy hormones, and her mood had been getting steadily worse as the pregnancy progressed.
Things came to a head about seven months in when she threw an almighty temper tantrum over the absence of ramen in her cupboards, (Kakashi was tempted to put this down to pregnancy cravings, but according to his fellow guards, she was ramen obsessed even when she wasn’t pregnant). It ended with his fellow guards nobly deciding to throw the rookie to the wolves in order to save their own skins, and setting Kakashi to try and calm her down while they raided a 24 hour supermarket for supplies.
She was actually quite good company, aside from being utterly terrifying. Kakashi was from Kiri, he was a year older than Zabuza demon of the mists, he could deal with terrifying. Talking to her was oddly reassuring. She’d only been a few years younger than him when she’d left her home village for Konoha, and she understood in ways that ninja born here just couldn’t. Admittedly her transition had been a bit less… messy than his. It had been an official transfer between allied villages rather than an enemy defection, but she understood the culture shock, the values dissonance in ways that people who’d lived in the same place all their lives just couldn’t.
“When I first came here.” She said, “I didn’t understand why everyone just let me roll over them. They said I was too aggressive, and they didn’t like it, and I thought they were all wimps. I didn’t fit in, didn’t belong, it was difficult.”
“They don’t say anything, but I think they think I’m too vicious.” He replied, “I try to hold back but they aren’t comfortable with me. It’s better in Anbu, but whenever I talk to the regular ninja they look at me like I’m about to eat them.” Kushina snickered a bit at that.
“Like I said wimps. But they’re strong where it matters. My advice to you is to cultivate some quirks. If you can’t be nice be weird, weird is non-threatening, eases tension. That’s why I make such a big fuss about ramen.”
“I just assumed you really liked ramen.”
“Well that too. I mean ramen is the food of the gods no doubt about it, but think about it. That girl who has a ramen obsession is far less intimidating than that girl who punched Mikoto’s lights out in kunoichi class.” Kakashi considered this. It made a surprising amount of sense. The next day he started walking around town with the latest Icha Icha book.
After that Kushina guard duty became less of a chore. She was still a terrifying, hormonal, menace, but she liked Kakashi, so he dodged the brunt of her temper. Most of his shifts were spent talking to her, comparing experiences, commiserating over how weird Konoha nin were. After the fifth time he’d caught them whispering to each other Minato had started giving them worried looks. Kakashi was pretty sure he thought they were plotting against him. He knew his wife, and her love of pranks, and even Kakashi had to admit she was surprisingly good at drawing otherwise sensible people into helping her execute him. His lips were sealed on the subject of the pink dye that had somehow got into the wash with Minato’s Hokage coat, it wasn’t really his style, but Kushina was persuasive.
…
A few months later everything fell apart again. Honestly he should have been used to it. It was hardly the first time his world had been upended. But it seemed that tragedy wasn’t one of those things that gets easier with repetition. Every loss just seemed to cut him deeper, and any time he started to feel like he’d managed to salvage something good out of disaster, his life would fall apart again.
Everything fell apart again with the scent of fire, of trees burning. Ashes and smoke, and the kind of dry heat that could never take hold in the wetlands of Kiri, he might have mistaken it for a forest fire if it weren’t for the sickly sweet scent of ozone that followed in the wake of the flames.
The Konoha nin reacted quickly he’d give them that, and he was forcibly reminded of what Kushina had said to him. That they were strong where it counted. He’d known that already of course, Rin and Obito had been anything but weak, but still, it’s a reminder, that they weren’t exceptions, that Konoha’s kindness hid a core of steel. They reacted quickly, organising evacuations, knocking down houses for firebreaks, using water jutsu to douse the flames, a well-practiced machine. Fire country is aptly named and the village hidden in the leaves knows what to do when the forest burns, just as Kiri nin know what to do when the rivers flood. Konoha nin are prepared to deal with forest fires, but no-one can prepare for the unleashed rage of a bijuu.
And that’s what it was. Kakashi knows better than most that smell that’s more a taste on the air, a metallic sweetness not unlike the aftermath of a raiton jutsu. The scent that marks a bijuu. The nine tails had broken free, and Kakashi cannot allow himself to think of Kushina. Jinchuriki cannot survive the removal of their burden and Kakashi can’t afford to grieve now.
He had no training for fire control, so he left the Konoha nin to it. Instead he went to fight a monster, with no real hope of winning. Went to die for a village that was and wasn’t his own because he was a ninja, and fighting was all he knew how to do. He went to join the Anbu who were fighting the monster, distracting it, he realised later, so he had a front row seat to the Yondaime’s choice.
That night he saw the Fourth Hokage, the Yellow Flash of Konoha, summon the god of death, and he knew he’d seen a legend being made. That night he saw Namikaze Minato, one of only three friends he had in Konoha, sacrifice himself to save the village, and he knew his world had fallen apart again. He was the first to reach the bodies, he’d say they looked like they were sleeping, but Kakashi has too much experience in telling the quick from the dead for that., Minato and Kushina were deaddeaddead in each other’s arms, he couldn’t deceive himself, and he couldn’t allow himself to grieve, because there was still work to be done. Because there was a newly orphaned baby on the ground beside the bodies, and he owed it to both of them to see their son safe. So he’d buried his grief, and his tears, and picked up baby Naruto, and carried him to the hospital, and watched over him all through that night and into the next morning as the mood of the village turned against him.
He’d cared for Naruto all through that week. The hospital had seen to his physical needs, but Kakashi had been the one to sit with him, and hold him, and soothe him through the grief that he was too young to understand. Naruto was too young to understand what he’d lost but he knew in the way of babies that something important was missing, and he’d screamed and cried and wailed for it. Wailed in the way that Kakashi wished he could, but wouldn’t allow himself to. He’d been the one to take Naruto to the funeral, orders be damned. It was a risk but some things were more important than physical safety. He held the baby tightly as the scent of cut flowers filled the air, life cut short, beautiful and fading. Naruto might be too young to understand but he had a right to attend his own parents’ funeral. Kakashi would not allow them to take that from him, even if they took everything else.
He hadn’t been allowed to keep Naruto of course. He was after all a defector from a foreign village, he might have had the Yondaime’s trust, but the village as a whole was still uneasy with him and giving him care of the village’s jinchuriki was a bridge too far. In any case, even if he hadn’t been who he was, he was still an unstable fourteen year old Anbu with no support network, no social worker in their right mind would have approved him as a guardian for a newborn baby. Deep down, Kakashi could admit they were probably right. The orphanage might be a little impersonal, but the kids there were clean, and fed, and reasonably treated, and the anonymity of it would be an extra layer of protection for a baby that had a target painted on his back since birth.
A part of him was glad he hadn’t been allowed to keep Naruto. Glad that the choice had been taken out of his hands, because it hurt to look at him, to remember Minato, and Kushina, and how they had died. Glad because for all that Kakashi had been a legal adult for years, he didn’t think he was adult enough to be what a child needed, not when he was still so caught up in his own grief. Naruto was safe enough in the orphanage, so Kakashi could afford to bury himself in Anbu, in the comfort of missions, and orders, and work that he understood, could afford to let himself fall apart in ways that someone charged with a child’s care could not. And if he felt a pang of regret for what could have been, he had sense enough to bury it with all the thousand other regrets that lived in his heart.