Chapter Text
Kakashi had heard rumours for years now, and had dismissed them. Rumours about samurai. He unconsciously pricked his ears, because the Hatake were of old a samurai clan; some of his fourth and fifth cousins of that relation still lived in Iron. He looked them up whenever he headed there on missions, and none had the white chakra; unsurprising, as they had married into the Hatake. Still, any mention of samurai caught his attention, and he had to deliberately dismiss it.
But, this merchant.
“…as my foolish apprentice ran after the rolling apples. I yelled at him to hide! It was chaos! He was almost too slow. If one of our samurai guards had not to leaped the carts, used his shoulder as a spring board and swing his sword to protect him from the bandits, he’d be dead!”
Kakashi had only slipped into the bar in northern Fire Country to shake what he feared was yet another tail. It was the end of an exhausting day, at the end of a long difficult mission into Rice Country. He hated trailing Orochimaru, and worse, hated the ANBU missions that the Leaf sent through his labs. Ostensibly, to steal research, but there were occasionally hiccups like this one. He had left the six-month-old boy in a small farming town orphanage. The hard life of a farm hand would be far more productive than whatever Orochimaru had planned for the child. He grimaced as best a smile as he could, as the table around him loudly laughed at the tale the merchant was telling.
“Then, I tried to drag my apprentice under the cart, and he tripped and skinned his knee and hands. And fainted at the sight of his own blood! Amid a bloody battle. His own blood!”
The low-grade exhaustion headache was becoming a stabbing migraine.
He just had to sit there, sip his sake, not yawn at inappropriate moments, and wait for his tail to reveal himself. The man was already suspect by waiting for him. If he were truly incompetent, would try to confront him when he wandered out, pretending inebriation. He had somehow picked up this tail an hour outside the village, five hours after he had lost them while faking his trail east into Lightning.
Konoha didn’t have to know about his side trip. The fate of the child, should he bring him back to the village, would be worse than whatever Orochimaru did. And Orochimaru’s underlings hadn’t been able to track him, even with a child tucked into his all-weather cloak. He looked nothing like he had five hours ago: brown hair, grey eyes, and to disguise the child, a truly voluptuous bosom. He slouched on the bar table with black hair, brown eyes, and putty to enhanced the scar to all the way down his jaw. He had left some of his hair silver in keeping with the idea of the scar extending into his hair. His moustache was a thing of beauty, none of the other local farmers and merchants at the table could match it. It not being a henge, ninja overlooked it. So how had he picked up the tail? The wait and see approach was tedious.
“The samurai waved his sword, then grabbed my fallen apprentice and tossed him under the cart with us. I tell you; they say ninja are scary! They haven’t seen a samurai close up! Blood all over his sword, red eyes blazing! Never been so scared in all my life! My own guards were more terrifying than the bandits. Which, of course, is why I hired them!”
Kakashi took another long pretend sip at his sake to hide how still he had gone. Red eyes? There were many clans with red eyes, but, samurai with red eyes? That was unusual. Chakra use changed people over time, enhancing various aspects of families, until they became something like clan characteristics. The Kurama had distinctive red eyes, as did, well, the Uchiha, but they were long dead, four years now. He checked his tail in the mirror behind the bar and grimaced as a second thug had joined him, a thug he recognised. How had they tracked him here? Then again, this town would be on one of the main routes back to Konoha from Rice. If he were fool enough to go straight home. Was it Orochimaru covering all possibilities, rather than guessing he had been from Konoha? Time to frame another great nation. He’d head to Iwa; they could deal with the pain that was Orochimaru.
“… they pressed in close! It was terrifying. The bandits dared to face the samurai, they must have heard of our cargo, because they didn’t flee. They fought harder. It was then,” the merchant lowered his voice and everyone leaned in closer, “the samurai waved their swords and they exploded with lightning!”
Kakashi had to jerk his eyes away as he stared straight at the merchant, stunned. Samurai wielding lightning chakra?
“Isn’t that a ninja trick?” to his relief, the farmer beside him asked the question on his own tongue.
“See,” the merchant gestured gleefully at him, “that’s what we all thought. Only, they say that very well-trained samurai can use chakra to enhance their swords.”
There was a beat of awed silence, then the sniggering broke out.
Kakashi took a sip of sake, so he would smell like the drink. He had heard enough, and his tail had grown to four. The merchant wasn’t wrong, samurai did use chakra, but it was not common, and the talented warriors were snatched up for the general’s elite guard. What were chakra wielding samurai doing wandering about Fire, with red eyes. This would be a good distraction to look into while he headed to Iwa.
The party broke up half an hour later, and he followed the story telling merchant out of the bar. His tail didn’t follow, but one tracked his passage. Now on alert, he slipped after the merchant. As people pulled their coats on at the door, he reversed his brown coat to show it’s dusty grey underside, pulled up a hood that had a black wig within. Hidden in the hood, he ducked into the shuffle of departing drunks, and slipped on glasses, peeled off the moustache and the worst of the scar. He swayed with the others and followed the main group back to the merchant’s warehouse and lodging. There were samurai stationed at the door, so he supressed his chakra and flowed into the place with the merchants. Once inside everyone split to their various rooms. Kakashi stumbled into the nearest room, and dossed down among the sleeping, and lay still. No one had noticed him. He waited an hour, until the rowdiest of the returning drinkers had quieted down, before slipping off the spot between two bedrolls and borrowed blankets, to inspect what sort of caravan this was. Mixed cargo, of semi-precious stone, spices, incense, and, the reason they were in fire country, via Wind, Earth and Grass, rare woods. He found the unfortunate apprentice of the merchant’s story, and stole his papers. A quick visit to the bathroom stall allowed him to rapidly forge his own. He took out a storage scroll and went to work. When he stepped out, amid those too busy being ill to notice him, his hair was black, his clothes those of Iron country, and tabi and straw sandals to replace his distinctive ninja sandals.
By the time the merchant caravan left in the morning, he was efficiently helping like the apprentice his papers said he was. A very light genjutsu suggestion that he had been with them since Grass kept the more alert of the merchants from questioning him. By the time they were on the road north to Iron, a week later, everyone knew of him, but no one knew him. A position he liked in an infiltration. The traders from Iron thought he was the small group from Grass, the Grass group thought he was with the spice traders from Wind, and Wind thought he was from Iron. A nice little subterfuge helped along by accents, and occasional alterations to his wardrobe.
He had lost his tail completely, boldly walking past them as they had exited the village, and they were clustered among the guards at the city gates, who inspected the caravan. His papers were scrutinized and returned to him. The same happened at the Iron border. He glided past the Rice Country ninja affiliated with Orochimaru, none of them looking too closely at a samurai guarded caravan.
They headed for a good-sized trading town three hours over the border, where he would be able to ditch the caravan, any lingering tail, and high tail it back to Konoha. He wasn’t late. Yet. He’d learned quite a bit about the sort of things the Iron nobility liked. Not interesting intel, but potentially useful to the Akimichi traders and Yamanaka profilers.
The samurai, were exactly as the merchant had said. Only, they didn’t have red eyes, just the dark brown common to Fire Country and their close neighbours. It was disappointing. He’d asked a few, about themselves, and they were taciturn. Yet he did learn that their liege lord was Ryuusen Fujio Sama, and they his vassals, retainers and distant relations to the Lord’s family. The Ryuusen were a samurai clan. He understood that. The Hatake had been, four generations back, before the formation of Konoha.
They caravan came to a halt in the town, and unloaded at the warehouse to sort merchandise to sell it at auction and on to other factors. He slipped out amid the chaos, and made it as far as the nearest alley before someone arrived right behind him in a shunshin. The samurai guard who had offered him the information about his liege lord stood there, amid a dissipating chakra cloud as dispelled by a shunshin. The next instant, there were three, then five, then eight. He hauled out his tanto and kunai, because the samurai katana had a longer reach and they caged him in, kicking him back down as he tried to run up the wall, or leap for the roofs. In sheer desperation, he activated his sharingan. What he did not expect were for sixteen sharingan to glitter back at him. That image was seared into his mind, along with the sudden blast of lightning to his system that knocked him unconscious.
He woke kneeling on tatamai mats, guarded to either side and the rear by samurai. Though the chakra supressing cuffs were doing a very good job, as was the chakra draining seal affixed across his sharingan eye.
He rapidly assessed the room, and was thankful for his mask, because his jaw would have dropped otherwise. Uchiha. Hundreds of them, sat in rows around the room, like an assembled court. He felt his heart sink as he realised that that was exactly what he was seeing. A court. A samurai lord’s court. A samurai lord who wasn’t going to be happy to hear why he had an implanted sharingan, not if they were all Uchiha, as he suspected.
The lord walked into the room and everyone bowed. Someone shoved him down so his face touched the tatamai. He squirmed out of the firm grasp, but by that time, everyone else had risen and the lord was seated before him on the raised dais with a grouping of his elders and advisors.
Kakashi rose, mostly to begin the biggest and most persuasive lie in existence, before he went still. He had to swallow to find his words.
“Fugaku?”
A sharp slap to the side of his head reminded him of his manners.
“Maa, Fugaku Sama, this will be news, Konoha cremated you.”
They must have hit him harder than he thought that he was seeing Uchiha here. Or the genjutsu was top notch.
“Konoha turned their backs on us.”
It was Fugaku! For some reason the sight of him was like a punch to the gut.
“But, the Massacre—”
He ducked the slap, only to catch it when he straightened.
“The Incident was regrettable,” Fugaku stated, “and freed us from our oath to Konoha.”
Kakashi couldn’t not ask, for all he felt sick to the stomach at the memories.
“But, I was there, I cleaned up bodies—”
“There were dead, we were caught unawares, but we are a ninja clan, and highly skilled at genjutsu.”
Oh.
Oh! Kakashi abruptly felt like a fool. He knew how to fake bodies, though obtaining five hundred corpses, how had they done that? He was intrigued, because that was a massive operation.
“Not to be rude, Fugaku-sama, but why have you captured me?”
“Did you not sneak into that caravan, deceive their people, and attempt to deceive us?”
There was no answer to that sort of question.
“What is the condition of my freedom?”
“Freedom, Hatake?” Fugaku drawled. “You possess a sharingan, this is a trial.”
Kakashi almost groaned in frustrated irritation. This again? He had argued it to Fugaku’s father, and then the man himself years ago.
“I am sure the tedious transcripts from my last trial exist in your extensive archives,” he drawled, then added a hasty, “Fugaku-sama,” as the samurai beside him twitched.
“They do, as the ninja Hatake Kakashi, pleading before the ninja clan of the Uchiha. We are the Ryuusen Samurai Clan, and you, thieving ninja have a sharingan.”
Kakashi thought fast, because there was no way he could take on a whole hall of ninja trained Uchiha turned Samurai.
“The last surviving member of the Hatake Samurai clan, begs to differ,” Kakashi said smoothly.