Chapter Text
The stench of blood reached him first.
Kakashi opened his eyes to the sight of his father's cooling body arranged before him as though it had been carefully placed there. For a moment he lay suspended between sleep and memory, caught in that fragile space where horror had not yet decided whether it belonged to the present. Then recognition settled over him like a familiar cloak.
Ah. A nightmare.
Kakashi took in the scene with the distant precision of a shinobi assessing a battlefield.
He had forgotten how accurate his dreams could be. Every detail was preserved with merciless clarity: the way the late afternoon light filtered through the paper screens in thin gold sheets, the angle of his father's shoulders, the faint slackness in a face that had once seemed carved from resolve.
He was kneeling in blood that had pooled wide and dark across the tatami, soaking into his clothes, drying in tacky layers against his skin. It spread around him in a grotesque echo of his father who was still with the tanto buried deep in his abdomen and out his back.
The air smelled of iron and old grief. Somewhere in the quiet, there was the soft, persistent drip of blood slipping from the blade's edge to the floor below.
It had been years since he dreamt of his father’s suicide—not since Rin’s suicide took up that spot in his subconscious. For some reason, tonight, the mind attached itself to its first fracture.
Sometimes, when Kakashi was younger and his father’s death was more fresh, hope twisted the knife deeper. Kakashi would arrive home just in time to witness his father's steady hand plunge the blade inward with terrible deliberation. Kakashi would scream for help into an empty house that answered with silence, his voice too thin to fill the space. He would fall to his knees and press shaking hands against a wound far too large, whispering reassurances he didn’t believe. Those dreams were frantic and breathless, saturated with panic but worse, with desperate hope.
This was not that dream.
Here, the blood had already begun to darken and thicken and cool. The violence was finished. There was nothing left to try to stop. No one left to save.
This nightmare was about regret.
Years of repetition had taught him the futility of resistance of this dream. Struggle only lengthened the suffering and acceptance, paradoxically, shortened it. He had to let the dream, which was closer to a memory, run its course and relive that fateful day.
Understanding that, Kakashi folded his legs neatly beneath him and settled into seiza, spine straight, hands resting lightly atop his knees.
——
Kakashi’s subconscious was a meticulous kind of cruel. It did not need to invent new horrors. Instead, Kakashi would feel again the way his knees grew numb against the tatami, the way his breath fractured in his throat. He would see his own too small hands curl into fists on his knees and remember the absurd clarity of his thoughts in that moment: how the world had narrowed to the simple fact of the blade lodged in his father’s abdomen, and everything else that had seemed so important mere hours ago—honor, disgrace, village politics, whispered condemnation—had fallen away until only steel and blood remained.
And when the weight of it became unbearable, when the guilt twisted inward and began to whisper that he should have been stronger, faster, better, the temptation surfaced as it always did: Kakashi would imagine sliding the tanto free, and turning it on himself.
The impulse was never wild or hysterical. The logic of it seemed almost serene. If this was the path his father had chosen, then perhaps it was a path meant to be shared.
And then, as inevitably as dusk, Minato-sensei would arrive. The door would slide open with abrupt force, and he would stand framed in light, blue eyes wide with horror and something deeper, something unbearably warm.
He would cross the room in an instant.
On that day, five year old Kakashi had refused to turn around but Minato's arms still wrapped around him anyways, firm and unyielding, pulling him away from the edge with a strength that felt absolute, until Kakashi was pressed against a familiar warmth, and the scent of sunshine, toad oil, burnt parchment, and safety.
In his dreams, before Minato could pull him into a crushing hug, Kakashi always woke up.
——
Kakashi knew what it meant that the only one who could end his nightmare was a man already dead.
——
Kakashi looked at the shadows drawn over the slumped form of his father. It is only late afternoon, meaning there were a few hours before Minato came looking. The knowledge settled over him with a weary familiarity. His dream was giving him time to sit with the body. Time to measure the depth of the silence. Time to watch the light catch on the edge of the tanto and glint like a beckoning star.
Kakashi eased more firmly into his seiza, spine straight, gaze fixed on that shard of reflected sun.
He had to sit with the unbearable fact that he had been late. He had been elsewhere. He had not been enough.
This was a nightmare of regrets after all.
——
Kakashi blinked when the house wards finally flickered.
The disturbance was subtle, a tremor along the edge of his awareness. Someone had crossed onto the grounds. The polite flare of chakra that announced itself was so achingly familiar that Kakashi’s breath caught.
Warm. Bright. Golden, like sunlight filtered through leaves.
Kakashi’s fingers loosened infinitesimally around the kunai hidden in his palm.
Minato was here. Now, Kakashi’s dream could finally end.
Minato would follow the silence deeper into the house, guided by instinct and dread, until he reached this room.
He would see Sakumo. He would see Kakashi kneeling in blood. He would rush forward.
And just before his hands could close around Kakashi’s shoulders—just before he could pull him back from the edge, save him as he always did—Kakashi would wake.
The door slammed open and the call came, “Kasshi!”
——
Kakashi’s eyes snapped open, a sudden thought striking him.
Dreams did not have chakra signatures. Nightmares, no matter how realistic, did not have chakra signatures either.
Did genjutsu?
Kakashi’s hand flew to his left eye as he twisted around, instinctive and startled. He blinked once, twice. Minato still stood before him, his expression collapsing inward as he took in the scene.
Kakashi still knelt in his father’s blood, the tatami dark and heavy beneath him.
"Kai," He tried but the world stayed in full color, soft-edged and natural. There were no chakra lines threading through the air or the unnatural clarity that the Sharingan imposed upon everything it touched.
This was sight Kakashi had not had since he was eleven.
His breath hitched.
He had both eyes. Both of his own eyes.
——
This was not Kakashi's nightmare, the copy-nin realized with growing horror. This was every shinobi's nightmare.
Kakashi was compromised.
——
The jounin jumped to his feet with a snarl. He did not know of a genjutsu that could fool the sharingan—would not have believed it to be possible. But here, in this illusion that was so elaborately built and powerfully enacted, not only did his borrowed sharingan fail to dispel the illusion but it made him believe that he was still five, that his father just died, that Kakashi did not possess the sharingan at all.
His memory drew a blank as he grappled to remember the last mission he was on or the last enemy he faced. Which village had taken him? Which enemy had invested such staggering resources into crafting a countermeasure against Konoha’s bloodline limit?
Kakashi gritted his teeth. Konoha had plenty of enemies and Kakashi had more. He wouldn’t be able to figure out the how or who or even why, not while he was still caught in the genjutsu.
——
The things Kakashi did know were: One, there was no counter to a genjutsu of this level. The sharingan was feared for a reason, and the only protection against getting caught in a genjutsu was to not get caught in one at all.
Two, Kakashi would not allow himself to be used against Konoha.
——
In one seamless motion, Kakashi dragged the edge of the kunai across his thumb. Pain bloomed, sharp and grounding. Blood welled instantly, vivid against pale skin, another point of proof that he wasn’t in a dream, that all of this was somehow real, another shocking evidence of the caliber of the genjutsu he was caught in.
He hurled the blade toward Minato’s head—no, the construct wearing Minato’s face. The throw was obvious but fast and it achieved its purpose: the jounin jumped sideways with a shout of surprise to avoid the projectile, giving the precious extra second Kakashi needed to smear out a single character onto his right palm with his blood. Before the blood could even drip, he flickered through the string of one-handed signs taught to every formally inducted anbu agent, a sequence that was muscle memory, and—to his faint surprise—fake-Minato's eyes widen in recognition.
“Kakashi, that’s-“
——
Three, Kakashi would never let Obito's eye fall into enemy hands.
——
Kakashi slammed the bloody palm against against his left eye and completed the last handsign of the ANBU suicide jutsu with his other.
“Kai,” He snarled.
——
"NO!"
Kakashi’s vision exploded into white.