Chapter Text
Kakashi had had his team for nearly a year, and he felt confident that he could no longer be surprised by them. They were strange and a little creepy sometimes, they had a bad habit of picking up missing nin and they knew things they had no conceivable way of knowing. But they were his. And they were good kids and strong enough that he wasn’t constantly terrified they were going to drop dead the second he stopped watching over them.
His first mistake was thinking he could trust them to mind themselves for an hour or two. He should have known better—every time he’d left them to their own devices, they’d ended up doing something insane, like befriending Itachi and Kisame or fixing the Suna jinchuuriki’s faulty seal.
(Though he’d admittedly only found out about that after the fact when Naruto had explained why the top candidate for the Fourth Kazekage was writing him as if they were best friends.)
Who knew what other shit they had gotten up to that he didn’t know about?
The point was, he should have known better.
Because instead of peacefully sitting around the campsite as he’d left them when he went to go scope out the nearby town on the border of Rain Country, what he found upon returning was this:
There was a tall man in an Akatsuki robe and an orange mask lying on the ground with a hole punched clean through his chest, though Sakura was leaning over him, hands glowing green as she worked. He did appear to be breathing, somehow, and though Sakura had sweat beading at her forehead, she seemed well and unharmed.
Kakashi was more concerned about the boys.
“Kill it with fire!” Naruto shouted, ducking under an unnaturally white limb, and then having to shunshin out of the way as a burst of fucking mokuton shot up where he had been standing.
“Just. Die. Already,” Sasuke grit out, each word punctuated with flame so hot it burned nearly white.
The thing they were fighting—because it sure as shit wasn’t a person, as far as Kakashi could tell—was surprisingly resilient, always wriggling away at the last possible second. The worst part was that it was forcing Naruto and Sasuke to really work to even hit it. There had been times when Kakashi was sure his students had shown him their absolute limit, but he’d never before seen them fight like this.
(Kakashi felt useless—he didn’t know the situation, didn’t know what that thing was or how to fight it, didn’t know what his students needed. Clearly it had been a mistake to not push for answers. Maybe if he’d known more of what was going on with them, he could protect them now.)
“Fuck it. Can you seal it?” Sasuke called. “I’ve got an idea.”
Naruto nodded, and then, impossibly, a golden cloak of chakra fell over him, and he darted forward fast. Naruto had always had speed on his side, but this was on a whole other level. He was little more than a golden blur, just a flash of light—so much like Minato—and then he was behind that creature, his palm slapping against its unnatural skin. It screamed, and Naruto pulled out an empty scroll, slamming that onto where he had touched it, and the creature melted into the paper though its hands tried to claw out.
“Sasuke!”
Sasuke’s sharingan spun to life, red and vibrant, and a moment later the scroll was lit in black flames. Naruto dropped it onto the ground, and the two boys stood over it as it burned to ash.
“Think that did it?” Naruto asked.
Sasuke nodded. “I don’t see how it could come back after that.”
“What,” Kakashi said, voice strained, and his three students jerked towards him, as did the body on the ground, “the fuck is going on?”
“Ah. Sensei—” Naruto started, but he didn’t get to finish.
“Bakashi?”
His stomach dropped out from under him. There was no one left alive who would have called him that, few people that would have even known—
The man on the ground reached up and knocked his mask to the side, and suddenly Kakashi couldn’t breathe.
The scars had changed him a little, but Obito…Kakashi would have known him anywhere.
The world was swaying.
Oh, Kakashi thought. No, it’s me.
Everything had gone black before he even managed to finish the thought.
The last time Obito had been tended to by a healer that wasn’t a Zetsu, it had been Rin. Sakura-san was a lot meaner.
“Stupid fucking dumbass Uchihas. I told you—I fucking told you—not to talk until I was done with your chest. No, shut up and stay still. Stop moving your arms. Sage’s balls, it’s like you want your ribcage to collapse in on itself.” She huffed again, but the green healing chakra felt like cool relief. “Honestly. First Itachi with his lungs, then Sasuke—”
“I wasn’t sick!”
“You were literally poisoned! And acting all tough like you hadn’t lost feeling in your toes. Stupid.”
“Naruto was poisoned too.”
“Kurama-san processes poisons for Naruto as well as heals him in other ways. Naruto’s allowed to be stupid.”
“Hey!”
There was a stirring of movement to his left, and though he couldn’t turn his head for fear of Sakura-san’s wrath—terrifying, terrifying kunoichi—he could just make out the sight of Kakashi pushing himself upright.
“Sensei, you’re back with us,” Sakura-san said, her voice steady and cool, not at all like the raging terror she’d been five seconds ago. “How are you feeling?”
“Like hell.”
“That’ll be the adrenaline and the shock.”
“Obito—”
Sakura’s cool chakra made one more pass over his chest, and then stopped as she sat back on her heels. “He’ll make a full recovery, but he needs to be careful for a few days at least.” Her sharp eyes narrowed in on him. “No fighting. No strenuous activity. None of that Kamui nonsense—I’m not sure how much of a strain that puts on your body. I’m also not sure how much those grafts are impacting your need for food and rest, so I’d like to monitor you closely over the next few days if you don’t mind.”
Obito wasn’t sure he had much of a choice. Sakura didn’t seem like the sort of girl who took objections to her medical advice kindly.
And then Kakashi was leaning over him, hands clutching gently at Obito’s own. The hitai-ate was pulled back to reveal the sharingan as Kakashi looked at him for a long moment.
“You’re here,” he breathed. “You’re alive. You’re real.”
“Yeah.”
Something wet dropped onto Obito’s face, and he realized belatedly that Kakashi was crying.
“You have a lot of fucking explaining to do, Obito,” Kakashi said angrily, but he was still crying and his hands hadn’t let go of Obito’s.
(It was selfish of him, perhaps, to enjoy it while it lasted. Because once Kakashi found out what he’d done, what he’d been a part of, what he would have done, Kakashi was never going to want to look at Obito again, let alone be so close, holding on like he was afraid Obito would disappear if he let go.)
“More than you know.”
“And we have some explaining to do too, I think,” Naruto said, rubbing awkwardly at the back of his head.
Kakashi nodded sharply. “I think I’d like those answers now.”
Time travel. Time travel.
Kami, it made so much sense.
And that they had come from a hellscape of a future, where everyone else had died, where there wasn’t any choice. It was either go back and try to fix things or stay and die too.
(Obito had helped make the world that way. And even if this Obito hadn’t gone that far yet, he’d still been the one to release the kyuubi that night, had been the one to kill sensei and Kushina-nee, the one to help with the Uchiha massacre—
Kakashi was angry. But underneath that, there was guilt and sadness too. Because Obito had been left alone—and with a seal of hatred on his heart—and he’d been manipulated, used and lied to.
There was relief, too, and a selfish sort of joy. That after everything, Obito was alive.
It was…complicated.)
“We didn’t want to lie to you, sensei,” Sakura said. “But—”
Naruto finished for her. “But we wanted to fix things ourselves. We had to.”
“They were our mistakes to fix,” Sasuke said.
He wanted to tell them that they didn’t have to carry that burden alone, that if they had told him, he would have done anything to help. Then again, he was pretty sure they knew that already.
“What next?” he asked.
“We go back to Konoha—”
“No offense,” Obito cut in, “but just because you were able to get Itachi pardoned and cleared to be a shinobi of Konoha again doesn’t mean they’re just going to let me come back.”
“Why not?” Sasuke asked. “The only people who know the full truth are here. If we say you’ve been a prisoner of war for the past 14 years, that Madara held you and tortured you, used genjutsu to make you think you had done all the things that he did…who’s going to know?”
Obito stared at Sasuke, mouth open, and Kakashi felt tempted to do the same.
“But I did do those things—”
“And in another life, you died to atone for it,” Naruto said. “In this one, live and make amends your own way.”
“I can’t fix things,” Obito said, voice a whisper and pained. “I can’t—your parents—”
“I know you can’t bring them back.” Naruto smiled, soft and kind and too generous with his forgiveness. “But I could use another big brother.”
“Another?” Kakashi asked, and Naruto rolled his eyes.
“Don’t be stupid, Kashi-nii.”
Oh. This is…family.
(Insane, chaotic, absolutely deranged family, maybe, but then at least Kakashi would fit right in.)
*omake*
Naruto sat across the table from Shikamaru, eyes narrowed in focus on the shogi board. It was strange to see Naruto capable of sitting so still when he’d always been a fidgeter even in the academy. Iruka-sensei had wasted more breath yelling at Naruto to settle down than he had on anything else.
Then again, a lot of things had changed since then.
“So, how long did it take you to figure it out?” Naruto asked, seemingly out of the blue.
“Do you mean when I suspected, or when I knew?” Shikamaru threw back, moving his piece on the board. He’d win in three moves or less. For all that Naruto was…mature for his age, so to speak, he wasn’t a shogi prodigy.
Naruto grinned. “Isn’t that the same thing with you?”
“Well,” he said, smirking, “I suppose you know me better than I know you.” A pause. “I had the basic theory about a month after graduation. The chuunin exams cemented it for me, though.”
“Sakura and Sasuke owe me a lot of money, then.”
“How’d you know that I already knew?” Shikamaru wondered.
“You’re Shikamaru,” Naruto said, as if that answered everything. “Of course you already knew.”