Chapter Text
If there was a button for killing the people I don't like, I wouldn't be able to press it. But if there was a button for killing the people who don't like me, I wouldn't hesitate.
Pathetic fallacy was a funny thing. Horror loved it. What was more romantic than a chase into the dark of night, rain slashing horizontally, the glare of a headlight catching in the downpour? Zero visibility. A cold numbness of the body to contrast the unrelenting fear of the mind, somehow icier adrenalin running through veins while skin frosted a blue bruised colour. The hot cut of a knife through frozen vertebrae, blood spilling a shocking warm red only to mix into a muddy brown on its path to the drain, to the sewers, to the muck and grime and filth of human excrement.
Living things were all the same in death.
Once, Junpei saw a counsellor. Back when his worldview was a malleable thing and hope was a virtue he still subscribed to. She labelled his depression seasonable. SAD, a fitting acronym. Junpei reckoned you could label any emotion as seasonable; it was hard not to feel like raw garbage in the unforgiving Japanese summer, for instance.
Junpei didn't believe in therapy, but he wasn't one to blindly believe. He gathered evidence for his claims and hypothesised and synthesised results. He was so sure of his view of the world because of his methodology. His life was a chronology of the meaninglessness of suffering, of the randomness of hierarchy. Power went in hand with abuse, but there was no altruistic criterion to determine when power was owed. You had it, or you didn't.
Junpei didn't have power, to no fault of his own. Not good-looking enough, not strong enough, not popular enough - not born well enough. From the moment he entered the world with his genetics and his circumstances, his power was determined. Or his lack thereof, rather.
But Junpei wasn't depressed, so it was a moot point. He was indifferent. The optimal state of mind, as perfect as the human experience could get. The weather didn't follow his whims, and when it snowed too hard or rained too thoroughly, it only extenuated his emotions like anyone else's.
The rain had been rough last week. He hadn't been any more depressed for it.
Now the weather couldn't make up its mind. Torrential rain or sweltering humidity? Or perhaps it was a feedback loop. In this present moment, it chose to burn his pale cheeks ruddy as he detachedly observed his bullies pick on a new powerless target.
Was there solidarity in victimhood?
He watched the trio poke at the white rabbit with whittled-ended sticks. They'd broken its legs at some point, so it lay there in a slump, breathing heavily and twitching pathetically.
Was that him? A maimed rodent hapless to the whims of the sadistic? Were they brethren, brothers in broken arms? Was there supposed to be a metaphor here laid down by some higher power to reality-check him into changing his life? If you carry on down the path of least resistance, you'll lose something far graver than your dignity.
No. Junpei felt nothing for the rabbit. His eyes were dull, cataloguing, tired. Numb. From one pathetic victim to another: I despise you for being weak. For being born.
Hideyoshi sat on the nearby garden wall, whittling a stick sharper by driving it between the cemented grooves. His swinging legs stilled as a dog jumped up on the other side.
It was a small thing, as far as dogs go, and the temptation to switch targets visibly rolled over Hideyoshi's face in the twitch of his grin and squint of his eyes. But then it looked at him with what could only be described as unbridled disgust, if a dog were to be capable of such an ugly, human emotion.
The rabbit's torment had arrested Junpei for a good ten minutes, and he was confident he'd be undetected with his bullies so invested in the suffering of something soft and sweet. But a new sight caught his eyes at the sound of rubber scraping on tarmac.
Oh. Life was a contrived, scripted tragedy.
The homeless blind man approached. 'The' because this was Kawasaki City, Japan. He'd been notable from the moment he arrived and proceeded to just... not sort himself out.
Was there power in choosing powerlessness?
No, but further evidence remained to be seen. Pacifism didn't work on an individual basis, he knew that much from first-hand experience.
The man's cane swung in wide arcs ahead of him while a pair of dogs dived between his legs and jumped over his cane in constant chase. Despite this, the man moved unhindered, his free hand sliding over his phone. A tinny screen reader dolled out a continuous drone, but it was too far away to discern the words just yet.
Hideyoshi picked a chip from the wall and threw it at Katsuo.
Katsuo turned with the beginnings of a righteous scowl, but his face cleared up as he followed Hideyoshi's indicating hand. Junpei would call their communication telepathic if it wasn't for the fact that he could so easily follow their logic from behind a street corner.
Katsuo tapped Shin's shoulder and they let the rabbit writhe unattended as they considered the homeless blind man. While he was an adult at an impressive but slumped height, he also wracked up visible weaknesses like a victim-themed bingo card. And the balls roll out... If you have blind, homeless, and old, you win the grand prize of: getting the shit kicked out of you.
Was there solidarity in victimhood?
No, Junpei-
The man collapsed his stick, and the dogs stood to attention. Two more appeared around a second street corner, and Junpei jumped as another padded past him.
A silence fell over the junction, quiet enough for the summer heat to be heard beneath the rabbit's pants. A heavy atmospheric sickness bore down on them as the bullies subconsciously raised their hackles to match the eerily still dogs.
There was intent in those taut limbs and watchful eyes. Junpei took a step back.
"That poor thing," the man simpered, saccharine sympathy viscous and syrupy, melting sticky and thick in the hot air, sweltering in the canine-footed circle around them. "Leave it alone, it's done nothing wrong."
Something was off. Regardless of whether they could pin down what exactly while Junpei failed, the bullies could also instinctually recognise there was something afoot. They collectively stepped back, as did Junpei.
"Completely innocent," the man intoned, and it tasted like a lie. He drew closer, and the bullies matched him step for step. "Let me look after you."
"You can have it, fucking weirdo," Katsuo spat and kicked the rabbit closer to the man. "Got places to be, anyway."
A lie. Nobody had said a single true thing in this entire exchange.
"Youth these days," the man murmured and his dogs converged on the rabbit while the bullies sauntered off, their swaggering demeanours an obvious effort to mask their uneasiness.
Junpei fought the instinct to turn tail and run. This hadn't played out as it should; the script was right there and left ignored. Everyone else knew their parts, yet this man and his dogs had bowled onto set and left everyone scrambling in disjointed improvisation.
It was Junpei's prerogative to collect evidence, hypothesise, and understand the world. Anomalies must be explained and accounted for.
The man appeared unbothered as the dogs fought amongst themselves over the rabbit. He stood above the rabble with his attention returned to his phone, swiping his finger across the screen.
"Haru: Meet me under the cherry blossom tree. I have something I want to ask you."
He giggled. It was the most unnerving act in the scene so far.
Attention still glued to his phone - was he playing an otome game? It sounded like an otome game. And the accessibility voice was so loud - he pivoted and walked in the opposite direction from Junpei, his dogs having nominated a courier.
The rabbit hung limply from the jaws of the shaggy-looking one. Junpei couldn't ascertain if it was breathing. But it did-
Oh. Swinging upside down, it was hard to see at first. But there was no mistaking it: a third glossy black eye pressed into its forehead.
Junpei followed at a distance, although he was certain those uncanny dogs had seen him. Several had dispersed, leaving the man with a trio in a guard rotation - it was too uniform to be anything else. But they were unbothered by Junpei and he couldn't rightly turn away without getting some answers.
The troop paused at the stark separation between the midday sun and the deep shadow of an underpass. The man didn't look at him, but Junpei felt seen.
The man continued into the dark and Junpei settled by the edge of the entrance, maintaining a facade of stealth if only for lack of any better alternatives.
The courier dog set the rabbit down and backed off.
Junpei crouched, transfixed as the man poised his hand above the still rabbit, fingers streamlined and pointed. His nails barely brushed against the soft white fur, turned grey in the lack of light, surveying the body. Until they settled, hovering above the third eye.
Something tugged the back of Junpei's shirt and he whipped around.
A tired-looking pug released his shirt from its mouth and the cloth stuck against Junpei's back wetly. The pug didn't speak and Junpei spared a moment of incredulity to think on why that had been a consideration at all. It stared at him, somehow knowingly, and Junpei missed whatever squelched and cracked sickeningly in the underpass.
He snapped back around.
The rabbit's forehead was an oozing crater, and its eye cut out a silhouetted sphere perched in the precise fingers of the man.
"I like the phrase: curiosity killed the cat," the man said in a dissonantly cheerful voice and Junpei stood to his full height. Now Junpei was taller than him, as the man remained crouched before his victim. Not to mention Junpei was in light while the man was in shadow. Yet Junpei didn't gain any power from the dynamic. "You shouldn't follow strange men into dark places, kid."
They were disjointed non-sequiturs, but Junpei could read between the lines. "It wasn't curiosity. Don't you know the rules of this world? Somebody like you shouldn't have come out of this like that." Junpei rattled off on autopilot, his psychology streaming directly from his brain, sluicing up his throat and drooling from his mouth. "This is fucked up."
"Quick lesson: Self-preservation. If you see a man rescue an animal only to mutilate it in a dark, secluded place, make like a bunny rabbit and clear out, okay?" The man said and pocketed the eye, dusting off his knees like this was a completely normal activity, and stood up.
"But why?" Junpei asked compulsively.
"Why run? Kid, I'm clearly some kind of deranged psychopath-"
"Why save it just to kill it? It wasn't a mercy kill - you're dissecting it. What's happening here?"
The man paused. Although little could be seen of his face beneath his battered inked medical mask even without the darkness, his confusion was clear.
"What's happening is you're writing a verbal sign-off on your own life. Scram, kid. Seriously - deranged bunny rabbit killing psycho here. Where's your will to live?"
"We're all the same in death."
"... Okay?"
Junpei didn't know what to do. Neither did the man. He made like he was looking about himself for some kind of direction, arms halfway shrugged in bafflement.
"Why'd you do it?" Junpei pressed.
"Because I'm clearly insane. Now, I'm going to leave because whatever half-baked survival instincts you have aren't kicking in when they should. So er- goodbye, and, um, don't do this again."
The man backed away, and solvent shadows slid over his figure, spiralling like a whirlpool. Between one moment and the next, he was gone. As were his dogs.
What. The fuck.
"To recap - the kid looked like an ANBU prodigy on a forced sabbatical. 'Where's your will to live?' What kind of idiotic question is that?" Urushi's voice bounced off the brick sewer walls, which was admonishment enough as each echo emphasised the height of his volume. "... Sorry, Boss."
"Damn right you should be sorry," Akino said, slow and measured and all the more punishing for it. "A: for mouthing off. B: for making a racket. Zip it."
"Also, Boss is blind," Bisuke added with an audible shit-eating grin. "He didn't know what the kid looked like."
Urushi huffed, building up to some defence if only he could locate the words for it beyond his indignation, but Pakkun knocked him down before he could get up.
"Enough squabbling," Pakkun said. "You're not pups fighting over a teat. We're on a mission."
Kakashi hummed. He rarely interjected in his ninken's conversations these days. His leadership gave way to a lot of slack, and it showed in their evolving attitudes. The future could be divined from the looseness of his hold, his metaphorical loose leash, yet he did nothing to reel them back in.
At least the mention of 'mission' had perked up their ears that morning. He could have said 'unlimited dog treats' for the same effect a year ago. A year ago, since a lifestyle supported by theft didn't lend well to the tolerance of indulgence.
A year ago, Urushi wouldn't have dared to speak to him like that.
To be fair, the prospect of progress had torn Kakashi away from his morning ritual of 'find power outlet' and 'play otome games for eight hours'. There hadn't been a slither of progress in months, only for them to find evidence in the very underground network they currently called home base.
Said otome games sat in his phone, burning a hole in his back pocket. Every five minutes, his fingers twitched towards it but, while his muscles didn't know any better beyond recent memory, his mind was on target and he resisted the draw.
His outfit helped frame his mind. While he didn't know what it looked like and all the elements were sourced by paws with little interest in fashion (beyond making a spectacle of him for their amusement and his indifference), he trusted his ninken when they said they'd hunted down something acclimated to stealth. At the very least, it felt stealthy.
Warm tight-knit fabric clung to his form, a thin layer of strong, stretchy under-suit between it and his skin. The top layer looped around his neck and cut two neat ovals on either side to grant extra mobility to his shoulders, consequently revealing his ANBU tattoo not unlike his past uniforms. On his bottom half, he wore his favoured fur-lined leggings topped with loose joggers. He was tempted to cut an opening for his toes in the trainers but acknowledged that he didn't fancy sewage water washing his insoles while his not-chakra refused to play at water walking.
The ensemble was complete with a pair of fingerless gloves, his original hitai-ate, and a black face mask that could be drawn to his hairline if he so wished.
It was no suit of armour, but Kakashi was working on circumventing his physical defence. Not as hard as he should have been, but he was just so - distractible. The guilt couldn't stick. Not until his electricity ran out and the reality outside of his magical electronic box flooded his senses.
Dolled up and thrumming with anticipation, he silently padded through the sewer network. A relay of ninken ran through interconnecting tunnels, spiking their not-chakra at each wrong turn, reconvening and fanning out again.
Bull was a distant flicker stationed at the manhole they'd entered from. Stealth didn't suit his bulk, although he wouldn't have made a hindrance of himself if he'd accompanied them.
Directly ahead, Guruko flared twice, and their entourage stilled. Destination found.
Report, Kakashi signed in rusted ANBU code when Guruko returned.
"The curious boy is there. He's talking to a strange man. There is a big immobile monster," Guruko said, clipped.
O.K, Kakashi signed. Caution. He pointed to himself. Lead. Go.
All seven dogs nodded and fell behind.
Kakashi raised his hitai-ate.
The world struck his vision, racing to squeeze itself into his retina all at once. He crouched, breathed in one rancid breath, two. Blinked, slowly, and adjusted.
His not-chakra lethargically ticked an invisible countdown and he moved quick and low. Sewage heat warmed his exposed skin, but he was accustomed to roving through the dregs of society; he'd first trodden on spilt intestines at age five and thought little of it then.
The tunnel dropped into a cavernous space and the water thinned enough for him to mould his body to the lip. He suppressed a shiver as buried memories of ROOT overlayed the brutalist pipes and raised walkways in pattern recognition.
'A strange man' did indeed lounge on a mesh hammock strung between maintenance pipes, idly swinging. The angle wasn't lucrative, but the man's not-chakra was as thick and oily as any other monster he'd encountered.
The curious boy, who Kakashi identified through a process of elimination, sat at ease on the edge of one raised platform, gazing into his murky reflection. They were chatting to each other, casual as anything, while the call for the process of elimination caught all stray attention.
A naked, undulating thing sat on the right, its laboured breaths heaving its triple-digit width and height body with each exhale. It struggled, fat lips bubbling with saliva, framed by a smattering of ugly black hairs.
Sewage rot didn't tug Kakashi's gag reflex, but that thing and its tragic humanity reached into his throat and nearly brought him to retch.
One of his ninken whimpered, but Kakashi was too busy containing his own reaction to care.
The monster shifted its attention to the tunnel. Not the mis-happen mountain of lard, no, that was twistedly human despite it all. The monster with the scum-grey hair and stitched-up face.
"We have a guest," the monster proclaimed and dropped from his hammock, landing beside the child who looked up - curiously. But also dull. A default curiosity, sparked by little other than some kind of doctrine or prerogative, if Kakashi had to guess.
Urushi wasn't off the mark.
Kakashi peeled himself off the tunnel floor and dried his clothes with a quick wash of hot air. He could accomplish that much with ninjutsu still. Now the grime cemented itself into the fabric and the stench became semi-permanent, but it was a sight better than waterlogged and dripping.
"Ah, apologies, I'm being so rude," Kakashi said lightly and sat down on the lip. "And I'm late to... whatever this is. I would have arrived sooner but this old man collapsed from heat stroke in front of me so I had to help him to the hospital. And then his wife arrived, and it turned out he was supposed to be at his brother's in Osaka - how suspicious! - so she slapped him, of course, but then he fainted and it was a whole thing. I'm here now, though."
The monster gave a quick, delighted clap. "How uninteresting. And here I thought you were spying for that pesky jujutsu sorcerer."
Kakashi grimaced. "There's a sorcerer in town? I'll be leaving soon then."
"Oh?" The monster paused and leaned forward as if the extra inches would provide any more insight with the several-metre distance between them. "Oh. You're... I don't know what you are. Why don't you come down here so I can get a closer look at your soul?"
"I know him," the boy interrupted before Kakashi could react. "I watched him dissect a rabbit a couple days before I met you... I thought he was blind."
Who the hell was this kid? He read as human as can be, but his behaviour was puzzling. He comfortably sat amongst filth conversing with a monster while said monster's victim suffered a tortured existence in the same room.
"A three-eyed white rabbit, by any chance?" the monster asked, and Kakashi jumped down.
The monster wasn't perturbed by Kakashi's quick descent and subsequent cautious approach, and certainly wasn't anywhere near as unsettled as Kakashi as he walked past the gigantic human while keeping his eyes trained ahead. He came to a stop on the platform opposite the monster and boy, a stinking pool of stagnant water dividing them.
The sharingan's focus was so fine he could see the scant space between stitches and skin on the monster's body, and the unnatural composition of his entire ensemble. Ignoring the arbitrary details, Kakashi retrieved a storage scroll and released the nine eyes he'd collected.
"Recognise these?" Kakashi held one eye up for examination, kept fresh by stasis steals, black and glossy with a soft give between his unprotected fingers.
The monster's face split with a grin. "I do. It's my work, although I can't claim full credit."
"And the identity of the other... artist?" Kakashi ventured, although he knew the answer from the sadistic gleam in the monster's eyes. The fox who got the cream.
"I'm starting to think if I brought them your body, I'd be rewarded generously. Still in identifiable condition, of course - but why don't we set that as the parameter for my next experiment? To test the limits of identification. How far can I morph a soul until it loses all recognition? I'll need some cannon fodder first, and a control, before I start on you. But at least you'll be able to observe the process that way before you lose your mind."
"I'm not fond of unsupervised human experimentation." Kakashi undercut the severity of his voice with a shrug. He glanced at the boy who at least seemed mildly... disturbed? No, disturbed was too strong of a descriptor.
"You speak from experience? Is that why you're... the way you are? On a side note: I will be running a side project on your composition before I wreck you completely," the monster grinned and loped to the edge of its platform.
"Yes, you remind me of someone. He and the local ethics board got into a disagreement. I was ordered to assassinate him."
"And were you successful?"
"No. But he was far more formidable than you." Orochimaru still popped into his dreams from time to time. "Also, I was fifteen."
The monster rolled back on his heels. "You count your age? How interesting."
A beat.
The monster lunged.
Kakashi flung himself backwards on instinct, twisting mid-arch to propel himself off the wall and avert a collision. His sharingan shifted and clicked into new patterns like a physical mechanism, echoing in his brain as nerves connected and his body realigned itself with unreality.
The monster crashed into the wall Kakashi just jumped from, and careened right back on track.
Kakashi's eyes widened as the monster moulded its technique onto itself, stretching and twisting something intrinsic to the fabric of its existence. Its arm thrust out threefold, many-fingered hands rapidly crowding Kakashi's vision.
They phased through him. Kakashi still shuddered.
"Oh," the monster pouted, and the climax of their fight petered out awkwardly. Kakashi stood, unsure of what to do with himself, as the monster stepped back and waved a probing hand through his intangible form. "You're like an inversion of Gojo Satoru."
"Buddy of yours?" Kakashi asked, for lack of anything else to do. He just sort of... stood there while the monster prodded and poked through his body.
"The opposite. He'd squish me like a bug, and I'm not afraid to admit that. My technique is transmogrification, and I activate it via contact. Gojo is untouchable. As are you, apparently. But I suspect there's a restriction - why feign blindness above ground?" The monster stopped his physical exam and canted his head. "Let's test a hypothesis." It grinned.
"Let's not." Kakashi glared a literal hole into the monster's abdomen.
Killing monsters was fairly straightforward. They all had different weaknesses, kill switches of sorts if instead of clicking a switch you smashed it beyond repair. But, in most cases, if he cut the centre mass from the body, they died.
This monster was in two pieces. It did not die.
Its decapitated head released an unhinged cackle as limbs poured from its neck in mimicry of blood and it reunited with its legs via a deluge of misbegotten flesh. Kakashi stared and catalogued the display, compartmentalising his horror as he crouched in a battle-ready stance.
"You're 'nothing', aren't you?" It said after retaining its previous form. "Gojo is everything, and you are nothing."
"That's not a very nice thing to say," Kakashi said on autopilot while he scanned the monster for some clue or trick. Head next, he reckoned. It mimicked humans in appearance; the logic might follow.
It dug into its trouser pocket - its grey torso was exposed as Kakashi had done away with its clothing from just below the shoulders to its waistband - and frowned at the two shrivelled dolls it retrieved.
"You destroyed most of my fodder," it explained and then shrugged. "For all you are the strongest's fun-house mirror, I don't believe you have the skill to kill me. Fortunately for you, I won't be aiming to kill either. Disfigure beyond repair? Yeah. But you'll be alive. Aware..." It tilted forward. "... Awake."
It threw the dolls.
Not-Chakra crackled, and the dolls transformed into fleshy amalgamations assuming bastardised human forms, limbs akimbo and extremities stretched. It was hard not to flinch away - long-honed battle instincts from a life without intangibility - and stand as they ineffectually swiped through him.
"The only thing you're hurting here is my mental health," Kakashi said, and let himself shudder under the guise of comedy.
"Experiment One: Stamina. How long can the subject maintain intangibility?" The monster said and Kakashi's train of thought stuttered, although he ensured it didn't manifest physically. "Once upon a time, Gojo couldn't keep up his infinity indefinitely. Or so I'm told - he's been around way longer than me."
He had a couple of options. Use kamui on the monster's head and risk missing its weak point and leaving himself low on not-chakra. Or dance between intangible and palpable in close combat.
That was assuming the aberrations fighting him would also die when the monster died.
He watched as they pawed at him. Some amount of relief washed through him as he realised they weren't alive. That energy was all the monster's and, when cross-referenced against the gigantic horror show on the right, he could confirm they were puppets. Corpse puppets. Ugh.
"I found a mobile port of Umineko yesterday. Do you know how long I've been trying to play Umineko without access to a computer?" Kakashi said and locked eyes with the monster's forehead.
"There's Umineko on mobile?" The curious boy piped up, a little breathless and more than a little disbelieving. The monster broke eye contact as if remembering he existed. To be fair, the boy caught Kakashi off guard as well.
"Exactly," Kakashi said, and the monster snapped back onto him with unerring swiftness. "So I'm going to just..."
Whenever he used kamui, there was always this breath in-between existence and not in which flesh whorled and drove an innate wrongness into his marrow. The monster's face contorted, Kakashi tamped down on a shudder, and then its body stood without direction.
Water dripped. Sewage flowed. The gigantic human heaved.
The body tilted, fell, and hit the ground with an anticlimactic thud.
Kakashi closed his eyes and followed suit. With the time he'd wasted, two kamui were definitely approaching his limit.
Canine bodies broke his fall - just barely. They jumped down and supported him to the point he didn't crack his skull open, but they didn't save his coccyx from smacking against stone.
He spared a glance at the curious boy before surrendering to blindness. The boy stood on the opposite platform with an uncomprehending look on his face, wringing his hands.
"... You've ruined everything," the boy said in a dull voice, much closer. The pack surrounded Kakashi in loose protection. "You've ruined everything."
"It's a skill." Kakashi waved a limp hand in dismissal.
"He was going to give me power," the boy said and emotion began to bleed into his tone. There was a fleshy thud and the drag of a dead weight. "For once in my goddamn life, I wasn't going to be a fucking victim."
Right. Kakashi was too tired to deal with... whatever this was. A psychotic break? A villain origin story? A final declaration? Post-ANBU mission personnel fallouts had been the worst, and this was unearthing long-buried teenage memories of witnessing shinobi fall apart without a clue of what to do other than stare.
The boy timed his words with his paces. Never a good sign. "My life is a chronology of the arbitrary meaninglessness of the pain and suffering those with power for no altruistic reason inflict on any and all who fall beneath their soles in the hierarchy of circumstance. There is no means for me to gain power without some kind of divine intervention. I am destined to cower beneath the boots of those bigger and meaner than me. Forced to eat bugs, give up my money, endure beat downs."
The steps picked up in pace. Kakashi's dogs tightened their defence. Cloying remembrance crawled in the folds of his brain. Sakura once parroted Lady Tsunade in the way enthusiastic students liked to share learned knowledge - a foreign phenomenon until Kakashi spent more time around Maito's students - on how the human brain didn't stop developing until age twenty-five and how experiences throughout childhood could irreversibly affect its development.
"It's a dog-eat-dog world and I am a three-eyed white rabbit. But I had a chance. I won't fool myself into thinking this is divine intervention - God didn't intend for that abomination," the pacing paused, fabric rustled, and Kakashi imagined the boy aggressively pointing to the tortured human.
When Kakashi was fifteen, a 'no-witnesses' clause led to the avertable collateral of a civilian family. His interim captain was robotic in his execution and took the deed, the blame, upon himself. His stoic shoulders shook apart with the removal of his mask and he'd laughed.
"God doesn't exist. But I was going to be strong, and I was going to eat them."
He hadn't thought about emu-san since, only fleetingly when his mask changed hands. But the crackle in the boy's voice, his echoing footfalls, the sound of his fists clenching and unclenching hair - echoic memory, Yamanaka-san once said.
"Your bullies?" Kakashi asked to reign in his mind from the dark winding paths of half-familiar memories.
"What?" The boy stopped. He'd gotten caught up in himself. Kakashi suspected he hadn't been looking for intervention.
"You want to eat your bullies?"
Pakkun huffed warningly.
"I... no, it's an expression. Well, no, it was a reference to the dog eat- it doesn't matter! Just, nobody would touch me anymore if I showed them what I could do."
"... Okay," Kakashi said and pretended he wasn't using feigned deep thought to scramble for any kind of answer. "I can understand that, they don't sound nice."
Kakashi had killed for less. Not on a personal motivation scale, but sometimes he wasn't even paid for missions during the chronic mismanagement of admin post-war. At least there was gratification in killing your enemies. Or there should be. Kakashi mostly experienced a hollow sort of scraped-out feeling after self-imposed hits and didn't prescribe them often.
While wrapped up in his head, a pointed silence had fallen over them. "You're insane." The boy said and Kakashi was honestly affronted because - seriously? "That's really not what you're supposed to say here."
The first day I had my students, one of them declared their greatest dream was to murder his brother. He was twelve. He then tried to kill me at fifteen, while cooing about how much he'd been looking forward to doing so. I learnt how to kill before I knew the definition for the word 'murder'. I indirectly started the great shinobi war by accidentally killing my childhood friend's crush - It's a family tradition. I have said friend's eyes in my skull. I am functionally blind due to said eyes. I was so good at killing people at fourteen, I was put in charge of the training of other child soldiers. The second I am without duty, I shamelessly and wholly sink myself into my indulgences. I have no reference for what is normal and what I'm supposed to say or do.
"You remind me of my student," Kakashi said, to summarise.
"Was your student relentlessly bullied and humiliated for existing?"
"No - but now that you mention it, that fits the bill for another student of mine."
"What the-" The boy stopped. "No. I'm focusing on the wrong details. You're a teacher. And you're... you're like Mahito. Mahito said otherwise, but it's all the same when you strip away the superfluous details. You have supernatural power, and you killed Mahito. There's no way you taught something as mundane as maths or biology."
Flashbacks to teaching Tenzo about mortgages came to a stuttering stop as the implications sunk in. Oh no. He knew where this was going. "Before you go any further-"
"Teach me."
"- I was paid."
"You owe me."
Oh, this kid. This kid was impossible. "I really don't."
How he wished he was tucked away and playing Umineko right now. He just needed to softly reject this kid in a way that didn't lead to poor decisions, find a power outlet- ah. Right. It was evening, which meant no food court power outlet to linger by.
One of these days he'd sacrifice his non-existent paper trail to stay in a twenty-four-hour internet cafe-
Instinct stalled all thoughts.
"Boss." Pakkun said at the same time the boy inhaled sharply.
Kakashi tensed. He flipped up his hitai-ate.
Tripedal, extending his neck like a snapping turtle, Mahito reached for the boy.