Chapter Text
Kakashi wakes hungry, hungry, tired and uncomfortable in a bed that smells unfamiliar and with something warm pressed against his side.
He turns his head to see what it is and meets the eyes of an ugly lumpy flesh- thing that’s just about as big as he is - it takes a startling long moment to process what it is before -
It’s a baby .
Kakashi tries to get away from the too-large baby but his body just won’t work and his head’s too heavy and he’s so hungry. A swell of anger and frustration burns through his stomach and Kakashi opens his mouth and cries.
There’s silver hair and tired bags below sallow eyes and a comforting scent and for a second Kakashi thinks Tou-san, but instead his father is a woman and has red, red eyes and she’s untying her robes and she picks up Kakashi and puts his mouth to her teat.
It’s so, so humiliating, but Kakashi is hungry and it’s purely instinct that makes him suckle on her nipple, “shh, shh,” the woman, Mother, mumbles, blinking through half-asleep eyes, “you were hungry, weren’t you? Drink well and grow big, Itama-chan.”
Hatake Kakashi dies at age fifty-nine, he doesn’t even recall how he died, only that he’d been having a horrendous migraine behind his eyes for the past few days that none of the medics could resolve, went to bed, and then woke up as a baby Senju Itama.
The ugly lumpy baby next to him had apparently been Senju Tobirama, the Nidaime Hokage, who’d been born a mere twenty minutes before Kakashi.
Isn’t that crazy?
The Shodaime Hokage, Hashirama, is a child of three-bordering-four who peers down at Tobirama and Kakashi with something like awe in his eyes. Mother picks up Tobirama and puts him in Hashirama’s shaking hands and says, “this is your first little brother, Tobirama,” and then picks up Kakashi in her own hands to smooth a palm over the peach fuzz of his head, “and this is your littlest brother, Itama. You’ll protect them both, won’t you?”
Hashirama nods his head so hard Kakashi’s worried it’ll fall off, for a moment, before he tightens his grip on Tobirama and just looks at him and says, “with my life.”
Kakashi is three and trying to actively get through as many stages of growing, as quickly as possible. He’s sixty-two but his body has baby fat and weakness clinging to it.
Kakashi is sixty-two and Tobirama is three and yet Tobirama is still able to keep up with him with their toddler bodies - his red, red eyes have a sharp clarity to them and he’s already started playing with the shuriken that Hashirama had accidentally left in their room and Kakashi had squirreled away.
Kawarama is born that summer, but Mother dies from the childbirth and Father becomes strict and cold without her to temper him.
Father is pleased when he finds out that Kakashi can use chakra, finds them hidden away in their rooms with Kakashi smothering Tobirama in his chakra to stop him from crying from how much he could sense while pressing his face in Tobirama’s neck - he’d forgotten how overwhelming the scent of everything had been for a Hatake child’s nose.
Tobirama may have the colouring of a Hatake, but all of his sensory prowess had developed into his chakra sense. Kakashi is Hatake, through and through, no matter how only half of his hair is Hatake silver and only one of his eyes is his Mother’s red, and cuts heal so much quicker on his skin than they ought to.
Hashirama is too Senju to be Hatake - his colouring too dark, his senses too dull, healing far too fast.
Mother’s sister, the Hatake clan head, with her silver hair and coal-dark eyes that Kakashi misses - had taken one look at him when she’d come to pay her respects to her late sister and brushed past him to kneel in front of Tobirama and Kakashi and laid a silver pelt on each of their shoulders; this is a Hatake’s birthright, she’d said.
Kakashi sees how Hashirama tries not to cry, tears welling shiny in his eyes, and resolves to never wear his pelt in front of his brother - he hadn’t had one before, he wouldn’t need one now. Tou-san didn’t have one, either and he’d been too Hatake for his own good.
Tobirama asks him, a few days later, where he’d put the fur.
I’m keeping it in a secret place, because it’s precious, Kakashi lies, and Tobirama frowns, you should wear it, it’s only proper.
That’s so Tobirama - he just doesn’t understand how it makes Hashirama feel. Kawarama is too young to understand that he’d been excluded because his hair is more sand than silver and his eyes too dark, but Hashirama had felt the sting of rejection from Mother’s family.
Kakashi had folded up his pelt, wrapped it in an ill-fitting yukata from when he’d still been a newborn and tucked it beneath Hashirama’s bed. It wouldn’t be found there because Hashirama spends more time running about the Senju compound than hidden away in his room and no one else goes in there.
Father trains them all into shinobi - Hashirama already his pride; Mokuton emerging in his blood, while Tobirama has one of the sharpest minds Kakashi’s seen, even beyond those of modern Konoha - Tobirama looks at a problem and just thinks this is how to solve it, and Kawarama is just… so, so good.
He’s the youngest but has the strongest shinobi base - moulding chakra just clicks with him, his kunai and shuriken always fly true and Kawarama’s skill in taijutsu at seven rivals that of Rock Lee when he’d been twelve.
That doesn’t save him.
Kakashi had forgotten, he really did, he’d taken History of Konoha, in that one, singular year in the Academy and had never thought on it again.
Hashirama and Tobirama had been the only surviving siblings of four.
Tobirama had felt when Kawarama had died - Tobirama and Kakashi hadn’t been permitted to enter the Senju-Uchiha skirmish - Tobirama still just a bit too unskilled and his sensory abilities just a bit too precious and Kakashi had been pushing and pushing, pretending that he was unwilling to fight, no matter how much Father had scolded him.
So they’d been in the Senju Main Family House, crowded around the hearth to warm the house for their family’s return and to keep their toes toasty when suddenly, Tobirama who had been tense all night, had gone still, something wild in his eyes as he’d leant forward and gripped Kakashi’s arm in a death-grip.
“I can’t feel Kawarama,” he’d hissed, his fingers digging bruises into Kakashi’s arm and Kakashi’s heart had dropped.
He’d forgotten that he’d been living in history, forgotten that he knew how the story ended.
Kawarama’s body is buried just as all Senju are, Hashirama’s eyes are wide and his fist and teeth are clenched, and Tobirama just stares and stares and stares, his face too blank and Kakashi curses his stupid child body because he’s shaking and his eyes get hot and then he’s crying into his sleeve.
“Stop crying,” Butsuma says, his face cold, cold, “he died as a true shinobi.”
I’m going to kill him, Kakashi thinks to himself, and even as Butsuma gets stricter and harsher, Kakashi does not kill him.
Instead, he begins acting out - running off into the forests; not Konoha’s forests, because the trees are too small and too straight and too still - they’re nothing like the protective breath of the trees that Hashirama had- would grow - but they’re close enough that leaping from bough to bough feels like being home.
Kakashi finds himself often racing towards the no-man’s land where Konoha would eventually develop - the mountain that would hold the Hokage’s faces a familiar path, even if Kakashi has to be the one forging it.
Kakashi has three months of the Hokage Mountain to himself before one day, when just seeing Butsuma’s face almost resulted in him throwing a kunai into it, he’d run and run and found someone else pacing circles into the soil.
“I just need to keep Izuna-nii alive,” it’s a boy, black hair and pale skin and so very Uchiha, “then Madara-nii will stay sane and the world’s saved.”
“Who are you?” Kakashi asks and the Uchiha boy startles, his eyes darting to Kakashi’s and a kunai appears in his palm defensively but his stance, it’s - it’s Konoha standard, not Uchiha-style.
“ Who are you?” Kakashi demands, and the Uchiha boy’s grip tightens, “I should be asking that of you.”
“Itama,” Kakashi says impatiently, watching as something like recognition flits through the Uchiha’s eyes. Kakashi hasn’t been to the battlefield, not yet, Butsuma had tried, but Kakashi had refused and instead disappeared five minutes before, broken his leg, and limped back to Butsuma to prove he couldn’t fight. None of the Uchiha should be able to recognise Kakashi through name alone, nor through looks, but this Uchiha does, and that Konoha stance means- “but I was once called Hatake Kakashi.”
The kunai in the Uchiha’s hand clatters to the ground - a rookie mistake - and the Uchiha just says, “what are you doing here? You’re not - it’s supposed to be just me, did you die? You stupid- it’s not supposed to be you, too.”
“You’re the reason why this all happened, then?” Kakashi’s too old to be anything more than annoyed, his foot taps against the ground.
“ No! Yes! I was going to save the world, properly, this time,” and something about the way the Uchiha speaks it’s so - familiar. The migraine before Kakashi had died had felt like he was in the middle of the Fourth Shinobi War, his eye deteriorating with every Kamui.
“ Obito?”
Uchiha Obito’s face goes from frustrated to terrified.
