Chapter Text
Consciousness did not return to him slowly. It was a quick and panicked thing, slipping into his system and shocking his nerves alive, firing shots across his synapses, and flaring his chakra. Breath funnelled through his throat and lungs like the impact a waterfall made on the pool below it, crashing against the surface and striking underneath, the rapid intake of oxygen squeezing his lungs and hurting him more than it helped.
“He’s hyperventilating,” a voice said and he tried to lock onto the sound to no avail, he couldn’t see anything and his hearing was muffled. His body tried to thrash reflexively at whatever was suffocating him, the knowledge that it was his own inability to regulate his breath meaning nothing to his nervous system. Panic thrummed through him as he failed to identify the threat and then failed to understand why he was having such a severe overreaction to waking up in an unfamiliar place. He was a shinobi, he’d been in situations like this before.
He had training but none of it was kicking in.
Flaring his chakra intentionally to manually override his malfunctioning reflexes, he gasped as his control vanished in the face of an all-encompassing block. Without a means to wrestle his control back over his rationale, his heart sped up threefold, and his tenuous grip on reality slipped away.
Time passed, he was certain of it, although he was not aware of the specifics of its passing, only that it had. For what good it did when his first impression upon his captors was already ruined and dripping with weakness, his second waking adhered to his interrogative training. Something must have happened for him to react so rashly but the memories before he was put under escaped him.
He knew it was wartime. But in a war between the moon and the combined might of the entire continent, there were generally no prisoners. So he was not a POW, which left a limited number of possibilities in its exclusion. ‘Hospital’ was the first scenario to come to mind but he didn’t feel heavily injured and a stay in a medic’s tent wouldn’t require chakra suppressing seals. Unless that was the reason why he was being treated, which aligned with his lack of notable injuries.
Although, his body did hurt. The aches were what woke him up, a mixture of repercussions from chakra exhaustion and something else as of yet unidentified.
He was sat up, oddly enough, his proprioception returning to him. Not sat up in the sense he was propped up on the small incline hospital beds allowed but rather he was sat on a chair and held ram-rod straight against the backrest. The strappings holding down his limbs, body, neck and forehead against whatever he was sat on were probably partially responsible for the majority of his aches accounting for however long he had been restrained for.
The set up did not bode well for his hospital theory and gave credence to his previously dismissed ‘prisoner of war’ assumption.
“He’s awake,” someone ahead of him said and he mentally cursed at the futility of his efforts to maintain the illusion that he wasn’t. Whoever had captured him had to have been monitoring his vitals, one point to the hospital theory.
He redacted all points from the hospital theory and sent it down in a blazing trail to the negatives when his captor removed his blindfold and his eyes adjusted to the clinical lighting.
Although it occasionally went by different names, Torture and Interrogation was not an institute unique to Konoha. Fortunately, the only T&I Kakashi was familiar with was Konoha’s but it didn’t take much to connect his predicament to the severe Kiri-nin in front of him and come to a daunting conclusion.
“It’s okay, buddy,” the man said and leaned forwards, hands planted on his thighs. His tone threw off Kakashi, it didn’t match with his scarred face and gruff expression. He spoke as though he were addressing a child which was not an interrogation tactic that Konoha shinobi were taught. Perhaps they should implement it since it certainly worked to offset his rhythm. “If you do as you're told and answer our questions, we won’t have to hurt you too badly.”
Or maybe not. It wasn’t instilling fear within him, if anything it was mildly irritating and mostly bizarre. It didn’t help his mounting confusion as he tried desperately to understand how he could possibly be in a situation like this in the middle of the fourth great shinobi war. The man wasn’t wearing a shinobi alliance headband and it didn’t make sense for Kakashi, a well known front liner, to be locked up in a foreign village’s T&I chamber miles away from the action. Hell, Kakashi didn’t know who this man was but they needed all the help they could get on the battlefield, he should be there too.
“Why are-” Kakashi stopped before his next words had a chance to leave his mouth. That wasn’t his voice. It was too high and young. “Ah,” he tested it, hoping against hope that he hadn’t heard himself correctly. He had. “What.”
“All brawn and no brain, huh?” The kiri-nin chuckled and withdrew to his full height. Either he was unnaturally tall or Kakashi’s chair was very short because the man’s eye-level was far too high above Kakashi’s head. Neither, he noted numbly as he looked down and saw that his feet didn’t touch the ground.
“What happened?” He asked, sounding meek and vulnerable and everything he shouldn’t be in a position of weakness like this. His tiny fingers cinched the wooden armrests his palms were strapped flush against, armrests that extended a good length passed the tips of his fingers. No explanations came to him, his mind distressingly blank as his earlier panic reared its head at the implausibility of his current reality. “Is this a genjutsu?”
“Aww, poor thing, is that what they tell you about T&I in Konoha? That they’ll give you nightmares with those red eyes? I’m sure those stories gave you nightmares, anyway,” the shinobi chuckled again and patted Kakashi’s head, heavy enough that his neck would have bowed under the weight if it weren’t being held up by the chair. “No, you’re not in a genjutsu, we just had to take precautions after what you did to our recon team. It wasn’t very nice of you, you know, to kill almost all of them like that. Is that how they raise their kids in Konoha? We may be the Bloody Mist but I’ve never seen a six-year-old so vicious before.”
What? This body - it was six years old. He was in the body of a six-year-old, in the depths of Kiri T&I because whoever had inhabited this body before him had been a bloodthirsty killer of nin. Six. A six-year-old killer of adult nin.
“I suppose the rumours are true after all, they always did say the Hatake were a feral clan, like wolves, right?” the kiri-nin didn’t wait for an answer and carried on, “although, you’re more of a puppy, really, and I’ve heard puppies are quick to learn to do as they’re told when given a spray.”
This was more in line with interrogation tactics that Kakashi was familiar with. Reach into the captive’s history, family, techniques, missions, anything and turn what you find around so the sharp edge of the sword points towards them instead of the handle. Kakashi was the last of the Hatake line and most of the folklore surrounding his clan had faded into the memories of elders by the time he was making a name for himself.
… Kakashi was the last of the Hatake line. This body couldn’t belong to a Hatake.
Was… was Orochimaru involved in this somehow?
“First question, then, just something basic that we already know to confirm a few things, can you give me your name, age, village and rank?” The shinobi dragged a chair from somewhere outside of Kakashi’s view and settled down in front of him. “Easy, right? Go ahead, you’ve got nothing to fear.”
He had everything to fear. He didn’t have the right answers to give the man, they wouldn’t match up with whatever they had in their files. Whatever details described this body didn’t apply to him and the contents of its previous character were unknown.
“... Kakashi Hatake,” he said slowly. The shinobi nodded. “... Six,” he continued and the shinobi nodded again. “Konoha and…” he’d been promoted at six, it was anyone’s guess if he was a genin or a chuunin. “Genin.”
He flinched as something cold and unpleasant slapped his face and saturated his mask. Blinking moisture out of his eyes, he identified the source of the attack, a spray bottle in the shinobi’s hand. “Ah-ah,” the man tutted and set the bottle aside, “wrong answer.”
“... Chuunin,” he corrected and the man clapped in approval. Like he was a six-year-old chuunin. Like he wasn’t a twenty-nine-year-old front line fighter. Like he wasn’t at war.
“Good boy, now let’s move onto the less fun stuff, okay?” The shinobi’s smile took on a shark-like quality and his posture tensed with barely restrained aggression, yet his voice remained sickly sweet, “why did you murder three members of a Kirigakure recon team and severely injure a further four? Tensions are high right now, if I weren’t mistaken, this very well could be an act of war,” he flicked Kakashi’s forehead protector and the resounding clink echoed in the barren room.
Flashes of a fight, his last waking moments, converged over his vision of the present. His hand through a heart. Lightning crackling in his veins. Blood sluicing down his arms. “It wasn’t on orders,” he blurted out in a rush, “I did that for myself.”
He woke up in bed, cosy. Fell out of it. Crashed into the kitchen. Saw the date on the calendar. Rushed outside of Konoha’s walls. Intercepted a mission the only way he knew how on a time limit. Killed the instigators.
“No one asked me to do it!” He proclaimed, desperate. If Hatake Kakashi was labelled the cause of the third shinobi war, his maddened rush of a plan would have been all for nothing. The blame would still lie with Sakumo, the one who had raised him. “I did it for me.”
He flinched at another flash of cold and the shinobi chuckled. “Oh, I’m sorry dear, your reactions are just,” he ruffled Kakashi’s hair, “nevermind, let’s try that again shall we?”
Kakashi had slipped out of many tight situations in his life, sometimes only by the skin of his teeth.
He wasn't sure how to get out of this one.