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Kakashi was barely old enough to remember it, the fall of Uzushio. That he remembered it at all said a lot about his upbringing- he had just turned two, but Sakumo always said Kakashi acted six times his age.
Kakashi’s home village had always been true to her name- the Village Hidden in the Whirlpool was quite literal. Some of Kakashi’s earliest memories were of looking up through the dome to the sky, of watching chuunin and jounin activate seals that would swirl the ocean above to welcome someone home.
In contrast to the blue-green ocean around her, Uzushio was painted with a palette of sunset colors. Ruby reds, fiery oranges, burning golds, and deep royal purples matched the coral around them and, should anyone look down from the surface, the entire village would blend in with the coral reef.
Kakashi would never forget the bright, happy smiles of the other children on his street, all of them older than him but they never turned him away. They taught him the tiny seals that made dolls dance and sent fish bones flying at the stray summons, they gave him sweets and showed him the skills they learned at the Academy. They gave him advice on his calligraphy and fuuinjutsu, corrected his hold on kunai and senbon, and adjusted his hand seals until he could fly through the signs for a clone faster than any of them.
There was the Uzukage, Izumi Uzumaki, whose bright red hair was offset by the ferocious green of her eyes and the burgundy clan marks she inherited from her Inuzuka father. She was vivacious and true but she was always careful to remember that a Kage was just a diplomat who could fight if the situation called for it, and not a fighter with a silver tongue.
Kakashi remembered the Sunset Festival, the annual celebration of the day when the Shodaime Uzukage Kamiya Uzumaki formed the village out of coral and painted it with the sky. He can still see the entire village emptying as they all went to spend the day on the shore. He remembered the Blood Ceremony, and every nin in the village cutting off a braided lock of hair- an overwhelming pile of Uzumaki red and the odd Uchiha black or Hatake silver- and dropping it into the Scroll of Ages so that they could protect the village for another year.
(Kakashi also remembered grabbing the Scroll when the Kirigakure nin started attacking, sealing the Scroll with fuuinjutsu that a two-year-old shouldn't even know existed. He remembered shielding it from the metallic spray of his mother’s blood and holding it close to his chest when Sakumo grabbed him and made a mad dash for the horizon. Rie Hatake might have been a native to Uzushio, but Sakumo’s home would always be the green forests of Konoha.)
Kakashi doesn’t like living in Konoha. The surroundings are too green and they’re too dry (how can a river compare to an entire ocean?) and the mountains are too short and the air is too sweet. The animals are too wild and the sky is too grey. The people are too hostile to strangers, especially to children with the same air they'd seen around grown men. Nothing about Konoha is right.
Sakumo, having grown up in Konoha, likes the place well enough. He talks to the people like he knows them because in most cases he does, and after they settle down it isn’t long until Sakumo is so at home it seems he had never left.
(Sakumo doesn’t have anything left of Uzushio, but tucked away deep in a chest at the foot of Kakashi’s bed is a scroll, hastily sealed and wrapped in a child-sized yukata that was only ever worn once.)
Sakumo never really gets over the loss of Rie, not quite, but he doesn’t let himself get dragged down by her death. He moves on. He remarries just as Kakashi turned three.
Orochimaru Nohebi is cunning and strong, strong enough to face Sakumo in a fight and draw or win in equal measure. They're tall and beautiful in a fluid and androgynous way Kakashi has seen neither before nor since his stepparent. Orochimaru is grudgingly fond of Kakashi, or at the very least doesn't hate him, although that might just be Orochimaru’s personality. They're less kind and more tolerant than anything else. Kakashi supposes he gets more affection out of the Snake Sannin than most people.
Alternatively, Orochimaru’s daughter Anko isn't much of anything. She's pretty much still a newborn- Orochimaru was pregnant when Sakumo met them- and can't do much more than babble at Kakashi. But she already bears the Nohebi clan marks, just as Kakashi was born with Hatake clan marks. Anko’s pudgy hands always tug at Kakashi’s hair, and it’s a testament to how much he likes her that he only stops her once in a while.
So Sakumo and Kakashi and Orochimaru and Anko become something of a family. Kakashi starts wearing a mask because he’s tired of getting called ‘cute’ all the time. Anko learns to walk. Kakashi enters the Academy. Orochimaru gets pregnant again, and soon a family of four became a family of five when Kabuto joined the party.
(Sakumo left the village as the very image of a perfect shinobi. He returned two weeks later as one of the largest failures Konoha has ever seen. Kakashi doesn't see his father at all in the week he’s home. Orochimaru brings Sakumo food and water three times every day, but Sakumo turns everyone else away. The first time Kakashi decides to enter Sakumo’s room without permission is the same day Kakashi gets his first good look at a dead body.)
Orochimaru starts taking more and more missions. They're gone for longer more frequently, and it isn’t very long before Kakashi is the one taking care of Anko and Kabuto.
Time passes. Kakashi graduates the Academy. He meets Minato Namikaze and Rin Nohara and Obito Uchiha, and some of them are more pleasant to be around than others. Kakashi becomes a chuunin the next year. He is six.
Anko turns three and shows an affinity for snakes. She smiles and she laughs and she asks when will Parent be coming home? and Kakashi doesn’t know what to tell her so he teaches her other things instead. He shows her how to hold a calligraphy brush and he doesn’t tell her that one day she’ll learn it’s the same way one holds a senbon.
Kabuto hits his first birthday and his thick eyelashes don’t hide his clan marks anymore. They show and they’re beautiful and get thicker every day, and they’re the shape of Nohebi marks but the same color as the darker purple marks Kakashi hides under his mask. But he still fusses at night and the only way Kabuto sleeps is if Kakashi hums a lullaby he remembers from Uzushio.
Orochimaru comes home and spends an entire week there so Kakashi takes a longer mission as a break. He comes back after three days and Orochimaru is called back to their expeditions and their experiments that only Orochimaru Nohebi, the Snake Sannin and the best mind Konoha has, can take on.
(For the first time in a while, Kakashi thinks of his father. He thinks of the smell of blood, the gleam of a sword, and the tears he only ever saw Orochimaru shed once, and he can’t help but hate his father.)
Kakashi turns nine. He makes Jounin and goes on a mission with his team, and none of them know that it’s the last mission they’ll ever undertake together. He leaves with his father’s tanto and returns with a Sharingan eye and a newfound respect for what his Sakumo did.
He rummaged through his father’s things and knows Orochimaru won’t notice. He takes the summoning scrolls his father used to use and makes eight contracts with eight dogs.
Kakashi is twelve. Anko is nine. Kabuto is seven.
Might Dai checks in on them once a day and Kabuto doesn’t know any other father than Gai’s. Anko is at the top of her class. Kakashi joins ANBU and starts training her in kenjutsu. He pretends his work of discreet eradication doesn’t affect him.
Kabuto doesn’t remember his parent’s face, but he doesn’t really know the difference between having one and not.
Anko wants to learn complex fuuinjutsu, and he doesn’t deny her. Of course, this means that Kabuto learns it just by being around them (it doesn’t even matter if he’s in the same room. He just absorbs the information.) Kabuto learns to hold a kunai and how to throw a senbon and maybe he uses a bit too much paralysis toxin, but he’s learning.
Orochimaru never comes home anymore, but their children hardly notice.
Kakashi does well in ANBU. He is a captain and he is feared and he is cold and ruthless and emotionless and he is ANBU Hound, reporting for duty .
It’s easy to separate Hound from Kakashi, as simple as walking through a door and closing it behind you. Kakashi is in one room, with his siblings and his dogs and Gai. In the other room is Hound, silver hair dyed red with blood and his masked face revealing nothing.
But Minato worries, and Kakashi can see it on his face. Obito is gone, Rin is gone, and they’re all that remains of Team 7.
Gai tries to convince Kakashi to fight out whatever’s bothering him, to Punch His Worries like they’re physical things. But he can’t punch the fights Anko keeps getting in, or the fear that drives Suna to consider war. He can’t stab the rumors about him, or the whispers about how one day Kabuto will turn out just like Orochimaru.
Kabuto and Anko try to take his mind off of things by asking him for help. Kakashi, I can’t get this one seal. What are the signs for that one jutsu? Come check my kenjutsu form. But for all that he wants to be distracted, everything they ask is so second-nature to him that all it does was make it worse.
But in the end, it’s Minato who came up with the thing that did it. He had Kakashi helping out Kushina. Even before the pregnancy Kushina had been a handful, but with the additional excitement of being a mother was more than most people could handle.
But Kakashi has raised Anko and Kabuto, and he puts up with Gai every day. He tolerated Obito for years.
So Kakashi keeps Kushina company. He listens to her babble about things and he helps her in the garden. He gently presses the wrong ingredients out of her hands when shopping because even if he’s not going to be eating it, he does have a certain fondness for his teacher who will be eating whatever Kushina makes. She asks him what kind of baby Kabuto was and how he dealt with a screaming baby at ass o’clock and he tells her Well, I just hummed a lullaby from when I was little and tries to make that the end of it.
But she wants to learn it, so he sings a little bit of it for her and she looks like she’s about to cry. After all, they both come from Uzumaki lines, and they only ever used one lullaby.
(Sometimes he would dream of Uzushio, and remember the vibrant Uzumaki children that ran rampant through the streets and often dragged him into their games. He once wondered if Kushina had been one of them, but then realized that he would’ve been able to remember if she had. Even among Uzumaki, Kushina is something else.)
Kakashi is seventeen. Anko is fourteen. Kabuto is twelve.
Minato and Kushina are gone. Half the village is gone. The old Hatake compound, which Sakumo had rebuilt by hand and that his children had lived their whole lives in, was half-collapsed from the Kyuubi attack and all Kakashi can think is that everything he once knew is now gone. Almost frantic, he searches through the rubble to find his room. He finds the shards of his bed under a ceiling beam and the chest at the foot of it blessedly untouched.
He puts aside training scrolls and rusty kunai and takes out the bundled-up child-size yukata that isn’t quite as white as it used to be. The Scroll he keeps there is still just as pristine as the day he first came to Konoha, and for that he is grateful. As long as he has the Scroll of Ages, he still has his village.
He’ll rebuild the house one day, Kakashi decides. But for now he re-wraps the scroll and walks back to his siblings at the edge of the property.
The origin of Kinoe and of the Mokuton are harder to trace than Kakashi would’ve thought, but it becomes obvious why when they finally catch up.
In the underground lab full of dead and mutilated bodies- disassembled and stitched back together with a practiced and steady hand- is Orochimaru. Their hair is longer, the clan marks on their face more pronounced, but it is most definitely Kakashi’s stepparent.
Orochimaru easily slaps down the ANBU squad sent to apprehend them, knocking off their masks as though it’s child’s play.
They get to Kakashi, who is paralyzed from his stepparent’s killing intent, and falters for a split second. They seem surprised to see Kakashi, who is now eighteen and looks more like his father every day.
(But Orochimaru moves on all the same, pushing Kakashi aside and escaping.)
A balm comes in the form of Izumi Umino. She's a coy sixteen-year-old, the same age as Anko, with a penchant for mischief and far too much accomplishment with Uzushio-specialty-level seals for Kakashi to feel safe when she and Anko are giggling and whispering at each other.
Izumi laughs at Kakashi, and she snarks with Anko, and she helps Kabuto train for his upcoming Chuunin exams (the same exams Izumi’s about to take). She jokes around at meals and she listens to Anko’s incessant ramblings about how much she wants to punch something. Izumi smiles despite the pain in her soul, pulls the silliest stunts for the sake of getting a smile out of someone.
There had been others that infatuated Kakashi before Izumi- some of them older, some of them younger, that one time Kakashi hooked up with Gai- but none of them quite felt the same. None of them could argue the living daylights out of anything Kakashi said. None of the others made him excited to see them, or could pull a smile to his face just by entering the room.
(Kakashi is twenty-one when he marries his little sister’s best friend, and Anko doesn't seem to mind nearly as much as Kakashi thought she would.)
Somewhere along the line, Izumi becomes Iruka. Kakashi loves him all the same, and not much changes.
Juuzou and Junko are the beautiful progeny of the Hatake clan. They have Kakashi’s silver hair and Iruka’s brown eyes and the pale origins of Hatake clan marks.
Junko is happy and bubbly and quite a lot like Kakashi was before he came to Konoha. She smiles and she laughs and she has an amazing grip for a newborn baby. She coos at the dogs and Bull has pretty much adopted her and when Gai comes over and yells about the Power of Youth, Junko screams right back.
Juuzou is quiet, and Iruka used to worry about how his son doesn't cry at night but Kabuto was the same way when he was a baby and he turned out fine. Juuzou doesn’t scream and clap like Junko does, but he gives off the perpetual air of an observer. Keeping watch from the sidelines and remembering everything.
Kakashi is twenty-two and Iruka is nineteen, and the people around them comment on their age and how Isn’t that just a bit young? . Iruka was already a schoolteacher when they married and just maybe the twins hadn’t been planned, but they don’t really mind. Kakashi starts staying home more. He teaches his daughter to write. He teaches his son to read. He teaches them the same way he had taught Anko and Kabuto, showing them how to hold a brush and how to fold their pudgy little fingers into letters as training for hand seals for jutsu they wouldn’t need for years.
Kakashi stops wearing his mask at home, because he doesn’t want his children to grow up knowing their father’s facade.
Kakashi’s genin team is a handful.
Sasuke Uchiha is simple to figure out. He’s a version of Kakashi who didn’t take his father’s death as well, a version of Kakashi who doesn't have people who rely on him, a version of Kakashi who could afford to throw himself wholeheartedly into vengeance. (He’s also a version of Kakashi who only had one person to blame for his situation, but Kakashi prefers to ignore that part).
Sakura Haruno is a slip of a girl with about as much spine as a piece of paper. She has enough smarts for ten of her peers and possesses endless potential, but nothing Kakashi can think up will be able to do anything to motivate her to fulfill that potential. Kakashi would almost use the word ‘delicate’ to describe her, but in a fight there's a certain fire in her eyes that painfully reminds Kakashi of Rin.
Naruto Uzumaki is Kushina dyed in Minato’s colors. He's vibrant and energetic and no matter what anyone says, he'll always be more like his mother than anyone. If not for his wind affinity, he would’ve been a nearly cookie-cutter Uzumaki child. He’s so bright and so familiar he almost hurts to look at, but Kakashi smiles and carries on.
Kakashi re-evaluates his original lesson plans, adding in fuuinjutsu for Naruto and advanced first-aid for Sakura and, though it takes a while to come up with something for Sasuke, decides kenjutsu is the way to go. He wants them to be a well-rounded team to the fullest extent that he can train them. He shows them practical things like how to walk up trees and amusing things like how to breathe life into a doll with just a few seals.
(Naruto doesn't see the point in making a puppet dance and neither does Sakura, but whatever mask Sasuke puts up Kakashi can see how much he enjoys watching a little figure made of sticks twirl and spin. Kakashi manipulates the twig man to braid Sakura’s hair and it does a good job considering.
Kakashi recalls watching his mother Rie do the same thing, having a special puppet she used to braid her hair and do her makeup in the mornings. He's not as good at controlling them as she was, not by a long shot, but Junko is scarily close to perfecting it and Sakura is quickly catching up.)
Wave Country is as close as Kakashi has been to Uzushio since the massacre, and it takes every ounce of his self-control to not ditch the mission and see his old home. There are ways into the city without nin on the inside to open the whirlpool, and Kakashi is reasonably sure he can remember one or two. The urge to show Naruto his ancestral home, to bring an Uzumaki back to their city, is almost overwhelming.
But Naruto is a bit young to see the place where his (extended) family was massacred for fear of their abilities, so Kakashi decides to veto that idea. Kakashi isn't even sure if he's ready to see it himself yet, much less show anyone else. He doesn't want to go to the shore, doesn't have the spirit to see his mother’s skeleton with the twenty-six-year-old tatters of her most beautiful kimono still clinging to her bones, or the age-dulled senbon she only ever wore in her hair on special occasions. Can’t bring himself to go looking through rubble only to find a pile of bones and two rusted metal prosthetic fingers.
Kakashi knows that no-one has given anyone from Uzushio their rites, that the skeletons are still lying where they fell two and a half decades ago. No-one went back to send the bodies into the sea, no-one kept the incense burning for three days and three nights while the spirits of the dead traveled to the Pure Land. Kakashi doesn't even know if anyone else is left to give the dead their rites. For all he knew, he was the only remaining survivor of the Uzushiogakure Massacre.
He doesn’t know how to feel about that, so he chose not to feel it at all.
The final round of the chuunin exams grows near, and Juuzou and Junko decide they want to watch it go down. The exams haven’t been held in Konoha since Kakashi was promoted, and Iruka won’t let his children leave the village just to go watch other children fight. The five-year-old Sakumo is utterly disenchanted with the idea, but he knows just as well as Kakashi does that wherever the twins go he’ll have to follow.
Iruka still doesn’t like the idea of two seven-year-olds and their little brother going to watch fighting between genin where people have been known to die, but Anko (their babysitter for the day) assures her best friend that if it gets to be too much she’ll remove his children from the premises.
If Sakura and Naruto are surprised to see three genin, two with silver hair and all three with purple clan marks they don’t recognize, show up and get excited when Kakashi and Sasuke shunshin into the arena, then that’s their problem.
(The chuunin exams fall to shit after Sasuke beats the jinchuuriki from Suna. Sakura is instructed to not let those three children out of your sight before Kakashi leaves to fight.)
Sasuke is gone.
Naruto is gone.
Sakura has a new teacher.
Kakashi is alone.
Junko and Juuzou are on the same genin team, and it should probably worry Kakashi how co-dependent they are, but with Junko starting to lean toward extended training with Gai and Juuzou showing an interest in a medical apprenticeship, he doesn’t think he’ll have to worry much longer.
Sakumo gets less enthusiastic about his training every day. Eventually, he says to Iruka Mom, I don’t think I want to be a shinobi.
Time passes.
Iruka and Kakashi have one more child before they decide they’re done, but little Obito Hatake’s gentle demeanor and bright smiles are nearly enough to convince them it’s a good idea to keep going.
Juuzou and Junko both make chuunin on their first try, the year after Team 7 technically disbanded. Junko promptly throws herself into taijutsu training like her life depends on it, and Juuzou wheedles Tsunade into taking him on as another apprentice.
Sakumo made genin and is well on his way to chuunin, having decided that because he’s actually kind of required to try his hand at the chuunin exam at least once, he might as well go the extra mile and just become a teacher like Iruka.
Sakura started to come over for dinner every few days, and so she has seen the results of Iruka’s strict No-Masks-Inside-The-House rule. She studies with Juuzou and trains with Junko and babysits Sakumo and Obito when Iruka and Kakashi are caught up with work.
Time passes, and the world spins on without Naruto.
The final battle against Madara comes with a terrifying swiftness.
Kakashi decides that on this day, to this fight that may very well be his last, he will not wear his mask. He will wear his clan marks proudly.
He cuts. He kills. He slaughters. A thousand enemies fall before his blade, a thousand men and women bleed under the White Light Chakra Sabre Kakashi has wielded since his father died with it on his back.
For the first time in his life, Kakashi fights back-to-back with his estranged stepparent, and he couldn’t ask for anyone else to cover him.
A lull in the fighting comes, and Kakashi looks over the field strewn with the dead and dying.
“Sai,” he says, pulling Orochimaru with him, “I need to borrow that new ink jutsu you’ve been trying.”
The ex-ROOT shinobi looks even more clueless than usual. “The ink spread one?”
Kakashi nods and turns back to Orochimaru. “How many people can you bring back with the Edo Tensei at once?”
Orochimaru frowns. “Theoretically, there’s no limit as long as there’s enough chakra for me to cast the initial jutsu. You don’t want me to control them, do you?”
Kakashi shakes his head. “No, just bring back as many as possible.”
The sannin crosses their arms, but nods. “Provide the DNA samples and I’m sure it could be possible.”
Kakashi pulls an old scroll wrapped in white cloth from the inside pocket of his flak jacket. “How does the entire shinobi population of Uzushio sound?”