Chapter Text
It’s really the uncomplicated goodness in the boy’s eyes that makes Kakashi not run the fuck away at the sight of him. Well—That and the giant wolf.
This new world, Kakashi decides all too quickly, is a miserable, wretched place. He died fair and square, fallen in the line of duty as was written in the stars. The fact that Sakumo was there to greet him on his way out was as good as a sign as any that finally, the wait was over. Hatake Kakashi, the last and least of the Hatake gets to not be.
That very reasonable supposition was, as it turns out, far too optimistic. Funny, that. Kakashi hadn’t thought of himself as an optimist, nor had he known anyone else who would call him such. He had been a gloomy, neurotic nightmare-child, and only got worse as pain, failure and despair had started piling on. His complexes had complexes. His lies lied. It was a whole thing. It still is, most probably.
Less, though. The thing about dying is that it severed all the connections he had with the world, the ones he was aware of and the ones he was not. No matter what he had tried to project before, Kakashi gave so many fucks about everything all the time, just breathing through it was an achievement. Now? Even if he understood them, he wouldn’t let himself be influenced by the social norms these strange, drab humans hold. He doesn’t care to match their fashion, manners or speech.
Okay, so they have cute babies, but that’s about it. All babies are cute, that’s part of the package. That’s their entire Godsdamn survival strategy. Other than the babies—Nothing. Not a hint of interest, not a twinge of curiosity.
Well. So maybe the language is kind of cool, in a distant, hissy way. It’s not his fault, is it? While it sounds nothing like Chikyūgo, it does sound like Orochimaru. Kakashi is but a weak mortal and Orochimaru is exceedingly pretty in that predatory I will fuck you so well you won’t even mind the gruesome way I will murder you afterwards sort of way. Hatake are wolves, but Kakashi is, very empirically, as domesticated as a hamster. There is a word for domesticated wolves.
Whatever. The point is that Kakashi is in something of a strange position. Several points trip him up. High up there, is the fact he is alive, in a body that is—It’s not his, but it is. It’s his body if he was created from scratch at age thirty-three. No Sharingan, no scars, no tattoos, no piercings, nothing. Just a perfectly healthy Hatake male.
Who did this? How did they even—It had to have been some God or another. Kakashi has been placed here like a piece on a board, which, fine, he’s old enough not to be upset about things like that anymore. If they had just told him what his mission was, everything would be fine and dandy. He can ignore everything else easily enough. Religion and spirituality, eternal search for purpose—all those worries never really touched Kakashi. He knows his purpose—he’s a Hatake. His purpose is to serve. Fine, great. A God wanted something, so he took a soul and placed it here to serve. So far so good. Serve what? Where? How? When?
Dogs don’t assign themselves missions. Dogs waste away until they stumble upon a kind soul who will trade their affection for obsessive loyalty and adoration. That’s, yeah. Kakashi is not proud that that is the only social contract he knows how to be a part of, but he’s fucked if he could think of a way out of it. Rationally, he knows he must not die, but that’s about as far as he can get. He walks and eats and keeps his body clean and healthy. Without any clear idea of what to do, there are worse things than wandering around—Riverlands, apparently—aimlessly, waiting for. Something.
It’s not bad, is the thing. It’s not bad at all. He’s left alone, which in itself is a novel experience. Humans here are much too busy eking out a miserable existence to bother with him. They’re even worse off than the civilians back in Elemental Nations, which is a damningly low bar to fall short of. Everything kills them, it seems. Bandits stand out as the most immediate source of death and ruin, but there are plenty of other calamities, should that one pass them by. If the bandits don’t get them, then the wildlife will. If they survive that, they will get sick, or conscripted. The lucky handful that survives all that will starve when, inevitably, all the food they grow is taken away from them.
Kakashi knows how that goes, more or less. The poorest civilians do most of the work to keep the country going. If the year is good, they get back just enough to survive. The lion’s share goes to the hierarchy of vultures. Their overseers get a cut, then the merchants, then the lords, then the Daimyo, a possible Emperor and, in the end, the worst of the worst, Shinobi.
He vaguely wonders—Who fulfils the role of the Shinobi in this world? Who are the biggest parasites? Most likely, it’s the civilian monarchs. Then again, the priestly class here is a whole lot more ambitious than what he’s used to. Who knows, really?
It takes about a year to come to terms with his new body. The downsides are apparent very early on. His Chakra is acting weirdly. After some creative expletives and a systematic run-down of his skills, he concludes that he can still do internal techniques—can strengthen his body and walk on trees, can meditate and organise his thoughts with Chakra—but Ninjutsu? Not a chance. A Ninjutsu specialist without a single Ninjutsu. What a fucking joke.
Even if he would like it to be otherwise, he isn’t much bothered with that, because the upsides? The upsides are so overwhelming, he literally wants to cry about it at all times. He feels upsettingly good. Insultingly good. Everybody and their mother knew the Sharingan took a lot of energy to maintain, and Kakashi’s wasn’t even his own. For the first time in twenty years, Kakashi isn’t ten minutes away from starving to death. He feels—warm, sometimes. It’s a possibility, it’s on the table if he tries hard enough. His teeth don’t itch and his body doesn’t hurt all the time.
He is, in all truth, pretty strong these days. He can stand up properly, his shoulders naturally pull back into a gentle, relaxed slump. His joints aren’t fucked, and his muscles regenerate at a normal rate for a Shinobi. Most comfortingly, he doesn’t feel himself desperately salivating at the sight of every edible thing. It’s disgustingly good, not to be starving, and Kakashi hates it a lot. Hates that he had to die to feel the humbling bliss of being warm and muzzy after a big meal. Hates that he is only now learning how easy it is to fall asleep without the instinctive fear of not waking up again. Of having finally starved to death, this time.
Another six months into his odd pilgrimage, he realizes that he is beginning to hate the Elemental Nations and the life he spent there. Not all of it; there was far more beauty and worth than there ever was evil. With that said—
There is no denying that Kakashi lived a miserable life. It was his fault, of course. Nobody forced him to keep another Clan’s bloodline limit inside his head like a madman. That genius decision and the subsequent cascade of shitshows were on him. He’s not disputing it. If that was the extent of it, maybe he wouldn’t be feeling this torn up.
Only three people ever suggested that taking the eye out was an option. Gai, Itachi and Shisui. Everybody else placed him somewhere along the spectrum of a useful idiot and watched him take a nosedive into terminal depression and two decades of starvation and pain. The Uchiha Clan was, when all is said and done, the most honest one of the lot. They made no secret of their view that the Hatake disgrace was performing a useless but impressive ritual suicide to honour their fallen Clansmember.
If Kakashi wasn’t who he was, he’d have made it a month tops, before his body would have given out under the strain. The energy expenditure alone would have done it. The Sharingan burned through about ten times the calories as the rest of his body combined. No amount of supplements would have cut it. No, it would have taken a bloodline. A Hatake would have made it. A Senju. Maybe an Uzumaki. That’s it. It was an open secret in Konoha—or, at least, in ANBU—that the village would have liked nothing more than to replace all their eyes with the Sharingan. Wouldn’t that have made for a perfect solution to all their problems? The worst thing about Uchiha is that they will always be more loyal to their loved ones than to the village. You circumvent that very elegantly by sticking the Sharingan into ANBU, the most slavishly devoted population you have. If Kakashi hadn’t been there to serve as an object lesson, they likely would have given it a go.
And now—now that he is as he should have been, he realises how sick it all was. How monumentally twisted. Oh, he is a worse Shinobi. He is not constantly on his guard, driven into somewhat functional insanity by hunger and paranoia and hallucinations. He is less lethal, objectively, without the Sharingan’s predictive abilities. He doesn’t remember everything with crystal clarity. He is a less valuable soldier.
But he’s warm, now, when he tries to be. He brings down a boar, roasts the whole thing and is full to the point of bursting for two glorious days. He sleeps and doesn’t fear—doesn’t hope—he will never wake.
It is strange.
Eight months in, Kakashi found a place for himself. Kind of, maybe. Learning Westeron—Common—was no challenge. What was challenging, was blending in. They were, quite simply, different species. Kakashi was bigger than them, healthier than them and prettier than them. Kakashi, like every Clan brat before him, is a result of extensive selective breeding and pre-natal Chakra work. His face is as symmetrical as it can be made to be. His skin is clear, his proportions are perfect. Now that death has wiped his sins he doesn’t feel the need to cover up three-fourths of his face, either. He is no Uchiha, but in comparison to the bedraggled civilians, he might as well be.
Point is, he stands out, and, while that doesn’t scare him—very few things scare him, these days—it does make him vaguely uncomfortable. He might not be scared of them, but they’re most certainly scared of him. As they should be, considering.
So he sells the loot he takes from all the bandits he murders, buys some rudimentary supplies he can’t be fucked to make, and sets up something of a home in a forest next to a village called Acorn Hall. The locals know of him, they speak of him in low, frightened voices, but they know that he is a bigger danger to the looters than he is to them. This is apparently a very good thing because quicker than he would like, war starts.
He has become a bit spoiled, he thinks as he’s jerked out of sleep by the stench of murder and arson. It’s been a while since he’s sensed this shit. More pressingly, he adds as he’s running towards the commotion for some fucking reason, it’s been a while since he thought to care.
The group of children that run his way is, admittedly, alarming. “They told us,” babbles the oldest girl child in this batch of ten, words barely audible through the laboured breathing. “They told us to find the witch in the forest. That you will protect us—”
Fuck.
“I will, pup.” Man, he hasn’t spoken in a while. The grating, animalistic sound works with his lone murderer aesthetic, amusingly. “You just run straight, and you will find a hut. There is food and water there. I will just run real quick to see about getting your parents to join you.”
He doesn’t wait to hear their response. Fuck that. It’s bad enough that these people are desperate enough to send their children to him of all people. He doesn’t need to know the details.
He meets several groups of children, each one more bedraggled than the last, and each time he increases the speed and length of his Chakra-jumps. He hadn’t been properly mad since he had arrived in this hideous world. Now, though—
The village is burning. That doesn’t interest him. The force that invaded is—
Not that strong, actually. It’s not a war, it’s a raiding party. They’re terrorists, growls the animal part of his mind. They’re nothing.
If he had seen him in a less terrible setting, Kakashi might have pencilled off some time to laugh at how neatly the big guy fits the villain stereotype. He doesn’t, now, because the animal is, in this very moment, raping a woman as some sort of a performance for the rest of her terrified village.
Sexual violence is far from the worst thing he’s seen done—that he’s had done to him—but Konoha thankfully carefully danced around that particular line. In a village that was created on the backs of Clans, rape meant line theft. Meant war. It happened, all the time, but rarely in the open and rarely to Clan-brats that lived to tell the tale. If it did, and the victim was in a position to report it, the local law enforcement would throw everything it had into executing the perpetrator before all the biggest Villages descend on them. All bets are off when you start fucking with line theft. Everything and anything goes until the air is choked with ash and seas run red.
He rips the beast’s head clean off his shoulders and sends a commiserating smile to his victim. She won’t make it, he knew that before he saw the knife in her belly, but she spares him a red-soaked grin.
He has gotten a lot stronger, he thinks idly, as he tears through the wailing unit of rapists and murderers. Calmer, too. Not that he needs help in killing a couple of hundred barely trained idiots. He could have killed thousands when he was twelve. But now, he could do so with barely more than a spoonful of Chakra. That’s edging into Gai levels of strength, honestly.
Weird.
The man was called Gregor Clegane, he’s informed a few hours later by an old man that passes for a leader of the poor village. Kakashi shrugs and tells him it doesn’t much matter.
Not much is left of their home. It doesn’t take a long time to destroy a village this poor. The only reason Kakashi was in time to save any was that the Mountain Who Rides, of all ridiculous names, was fond of pageantry.
“They say—They say war is starting. War of Stags and Lions and Wolves and our Lord can’t think his way around a piece of string.”
Right. If these poor bastards had anyone to care for them, they wouldn’t be on the verge of starvation already. “I suppose you have to come with me,” he says, sighing. “I don’t have much, but it’s a forest. Bring what you can carry. Your kiddies should be safe enough.”
Kakashi doesn’t have space for a hundred people. Kakashi lives in a small clearing. Kakashi hasn’t been around civilians—Ever, actually. He’s the very definition of a cultish Clan Brat. Itachi at least had civilian family members. Not Kakashi. His interaction with non-Shinobi was limited to mission work and shopping for groceries. Now there are young women timidly asking for his name and kids climbing every tall surface from which they can jump on his head. Brave grandmothers use careful words to ask about all the idle wolf motifs he’s carved into the walls and seem oddly knowing when he explains it was his Clan animal.
It’s a strange shift, but he adapts easily enough. He is big, always has been, and there are worse things he could use that strength for than chopping wood and building a few more huts. Hunting is easy enough and tracking down the escaped farm animals is easier than breathing. It feels nice, even. Ridiculous. Kakashi was an assassin, yes, but he was a tracker first. He could track his target over contents, and here he is chasing down Gari the Goat.
After a few weeks of traumatised chaos, the villagers settle into their new circumstances. Kakashi learns most of the names of his new flock and settles into the life of a sheepdog. It’s pretty soothing, even if the pups can be suicidally reckless at times.
Vera, a blue-eyed bunny of a girl informs him of who Gregor Clegane was and what he did to the Dornish Princess.
“All the smallfolk know, m’Lord,” she says, teeth worrying at her pouty lower lip. “The nobles pretend, but we know because he did it to us all the time.”
Kakashi nods, not really understanding why he should care about a woman killed almost twenty years ago. She thinks it important enough to overcome her wariness toward him, so he takes it seriously. “If I meet a Dornish, I will let them know.” Whoever the fuck Dornish are.
Princess Elia Targaryen, nee Martell, he learns a few weeks later from the older, wiser parts of his new flock, was raped and murdered over the corpses of her infant children. He understands why Vera thought the Dornish would want to know. He also understands why the villagers insisted his body be mounted at the smoking ruins of their homes.
Well, no, he doesn’t understand-understand, but he can accept that they do. They, against all odds, believe in Kings and Queens and Princesses. To Kakashi, the Elia Targaryen nee Martell isn’t more or less important than the women the beast had killed not even a month ago, but she is to them, somehow.
It’s no stranger an ideology than what he had believed in his past life, honestly. They had all killed and tortured and died for the sake of a vague concept they couldn’t define even to themselves. The divine right of Kings, or whatever, is as good as any.
An army sporting a lion motif his flock calls Lannister sweeps through the Riverlands. Kakashi doesn’t see a point in involving himself further—and endangering his flock in the process—but the woeful eyes get to him.
“My sister lives in the village not a mile over,” says Til, carefully not looking at Kakashi in any way. “She has six children.”
Where is he even going to put them? The clearing is almost grown to the size of a small village.
“Lord Piper won’t care,” says Grasson, commonly called Bret, for some reason. “He never cares about his smallfolk.”
Ugh.
“They may have some chickens,” hums Jaida. “I’ve not had a proper morning meal in a long time.”
And that is that. Three is his limit. He rolls his eyes, puts Alys in charge and warns them all to stay put.
“I should be back soon enough. If enemies come, run. You know this forest by now. Run away because nothing here is worth your pain.”
The village next to theirs is burning by the time Kakashi reaches them. All the men of fighting age—by civilian standards, at least—have been conscripted years ago, and the few that remain are too old or sick to fight. This might explain why, other than a few cuts and bruises, the inhabitants are undamaged. Not that it matters much to the empty-eyed people watching their lives burn away. If this army didn’t kill them, the next one will, or the one after that. Or, if all else fails, there is always the winter.
“Til told me his sister lives here,” is how he chooses to open the dialogue because that’s where he’s at, social-skills wise. He doesn’t mention the chickens, what with their village having become a smoking ruin. “You can all come with me if you want. There is not a lot, but we have a few goats.” Hm. “If you had livestock that survived the army, I can track them for you.”
His flock expands by two hundred and change, most of them children. He would panic, but the villagers have it well in hand. The army took the chickens, the goats and the grain, and only left the cows because they bolted. Kakashi has to knock the silly animals out and drag them to the forest, but they settle quick enough after they recognise their people.
It’s really more of the same. The fighting outside doesn’t meaningfully touch their little forest, mostly because it’s a pain to move through the uneven terrain. Whatever the strategic value would be for capturing a makeshift village with a couple of hundred children isn’t worth wading through the dense forest rich with unpredictable patches of swamp. Not to mention the Shinobi.
The army doesn’t bother, generally, but the bandits and looters do. Kakashi kills them and his flock melts down the shoddy steel for knitting needles, looms, pots and pans. The kids somehow manage to find and domesticate a couple of rabbits, which means they soon have a lot of rabbits. The best part is that the newcomers brought their dogs. Kakashi is so overcome with emotion that he spends at least three hours cuddling every dog that lets itself be pet. Which is all of them because they’re dogs and therefore his.
If things were different, Kakashi is certain there would be a lot of strife and discontent with so many people living so close together. So many injured, traumatised, grieving people. As it is, the metaphorical buy-in is too high to fuck around. They don’t let the superstitions spin out of control, they keep their mouths shut and resolve their disputes quietly and efficiently. Nobody bothers Kakashi, even when they really should.
“You are sick?”
Alys, much too young to be seven months pregnant, smiles tightly. Kakashi can smell the sickness on her. “I am fine, m’lord. Don’t worry yourself none.”
“Like Hell.”
He can’t heal. His Chakra fizzles out uselessly when he tries, but he’s a Shinobi with a Shinobi nose and a Clan upbringing. He forgot more about healing than these poor souls will ever learn.
“Right. What are your symptoms?”
Alys has the common flu, as far as he can tell. Alys also lacks calcium and iron to an alarming degree, and the overall lack of hygiene is—Something he should have already handled. They live in a forest.
“Bed rest for all expecting mothers,” he instructs his flock. “I will hunt us some more red meat. Give them double the amount of milk and cheese. Where is your nearest Lord?” Like fuck is any of his flock going to get scurvy or whatever else horrible vitamin deficiencies will do to them.
“Do we have any leftover steel? We need a bathtub and a set of cauldrons to warm water.” He also needs a midwife. “On my way back I will see about acquiring us another village that hopefully comes with a midwife. Be careful.”
He rampages through the far end of the forest and kills six pigs, a buck and two bears.
“Cook them very carefully,” he tells his, this time more agitated—flock. “The bear especially. They have—things living inside them that can kill you unless you kill them first. By kill them, I don’t mean eat them.” He’s not explaining this well. “Look, high temperature will kill the poison. Boil it for a while. Fry it for a while. Bake it for a while. You get the point, yes? I mean it. No fucking around.”
On his way out, he comes across a small unit of lions. They try to either attack him or conscript him, it’s unclear. Things don’t end so well for them, but he lets those who try to run go. After confiscating their weapons, of course. His flock can use the steel and the women are getting rather good at working the anvil.
The roaming soldiers do trigger an exciting idea. Kakashi was up for robbing the piece of shit Lord, but why would he go all the way there when there are supplies literally coming his way? The supply lines that would be necessary to feed all those thousands of soldiers must be robust. Why not go for a supply caravan where the things his flock needs come pre-packed for transport?
That seems to be the winning strategy. His flock grows by one almost as soon as he returns with three horse-drawn carriages full of miscellaneous supplies, some more useful than others. Alys tells him her son’s name is Eddard and follows up that random statement with a meaningful look. He pats her on the head and gives the baby a blanket and a puppy. What else does a boy need?
Another group joins his flock. Kakashi starts worrying about the survival odds of the forest, with how much of it they’re chopping down. Darrick, their oldest inhabitant at eighty-three, names it Starktown. Kakashi hums a vague noise and escapes to see if they need help with the furnaces.
Things start becoming tricky after a group of soldiers mount an attack on their peaceful little enclave—proper attack-attack, pre-planned and deliberate. Kakashi smells them coming before they step foot in his territory, but it’s the principle of the thing. Where there’s some dickbags, there’s more. Kakashi’s raiding—which has become somewhat spiteful, honestly—is noticed and un-appreciated by whoever is in charge. That’s not ideal. Kakashi can handle however many they throw at him, but he’s not always there.
It’s a problem.
He is rather beautiful, he thinks, mind stalling. Easily the most beautiful person he’s seen in this world. Fair-skinned and blue-eyed, with lovely flame curls. He could be an Uzumaki if they ever let themselves become that pale.
He is also riding a wolf. Big-ass wolf, easily the size of Sakumo’s Yuri-sama. Both of them, wolf and rider have frozen still at the sight of Kakashi. Rude. Kakashi is not the weird one, here. He’s just a guy. Alright, so he’s dragging a dead bull by the leg, but still.
The kid makes a slight noise, like a meep or a chirp, when Kakashi rolls his eyes, drops his prey and opens his arms. The wolf perks up and bounds forward, barreling into his body and licking a big, smelly stripe up his neck and over his face.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re a good cub, I see that,” he says, hugging the pup around the neck and rubbing his ears fondly. “Pretty cub, sweet cub, gentle little cubby-cub—”
“Pardon me,” says the human boy, still sitting on the cub’s back, “but who in Seven Hells are you?”