Salvation (Kakashi x OC) (Standalone)

2.3

Kakashi hadn't taken to being a teacher at first. For two years in a row, he failed his students on the ultimate criterion of teamwork.

He'd been taken from a place of constant warfare and clandestine missions that wounded his already-fractured soul, but he didn't fit. Not right away.

It wasn't until Kakashi had met the three kids who he would follow back into the depths of war that he finally stopped reeling from his losses, found his footing, and took his first steps forward. Without those three kids, Kakashi never could have become the Sixth Hokage, nor could he have found closure with Obito and Rin during the Fourth Great Shinobi War.

This was the Kakashi Hatake before he'd been led into the light. This was the Kakashi Hatake before he'd even taken his first steps to being a sensei, feeling lost and unqualified.

The enigma peering beside my face at the iconic first meeting playing out on the screen was an unknowable beast. A beast that had been shown in glimpses but never explored for real.

Shonen doesn't really like to take the time to show the true, long-lasting effects of pain and grief, does it?

The episode ended with the ending song Wind, one of the best and saddest endings in all of the Naruto franchise. The familiar, patched-together English sung by a resonant, Japanese voice soothed my soul, calming the tension at the sudden change to this day.

I clicked out of the Netflix app, shutting the screen down. My silhouette, colorless and almost flawless in the gray tinge of the iPad, peered back at me. We sat in silence, looking at the darkened screen. Even the kittens had finally stopped their mewling and fell into a deep slumber.

Where do we go from here?

Did Kakashi believe me now, or would he sum it all up as a similar story that was the product of stalking and not his true home? Maybe there even were differences between the Hidden Leaf Village from the show and what Kakashi knew.

I'd read a book once about a person whose written works came as prophecies from another realm. The story she wrote was real in a different dimension, and she only glimpsed pieces of it to write down and sell in our world as fiction.

What if Masashi Kishimoto had done something similar, and he'd only drawn the pieces he could glean from his visions? What if he'd completely mistaken crucial details?

It was plausible. The Naruto world was an international cultural icon. Nothing could compare to its breadth, its heart, or its legacy. Not in my lifetime, at least.

If there was any story that was drawn from a real world, facing real wars, all drawn by a manga artist with the ability to receive visions from that world, then it would be Naruto.

But then, how did Kakashi get here?

In the book I'd read, there'd been dimensional gates that had accidentally spit out characters from this real-fictional realm into the wrong world. The author, trying to focus on her visions, had accidentally caused these gateways. To get the characters home, she'd had to write it happening that they got to go back home.

But that had only been possible when the author had lived in the same city as the one where the fictional characters had appeared. Unless Masashi Kishimoto frequented run-down, medium-sized cities with a terrible economy and high crime rate, he wasn't here.

And if he wasn't here, then Kakashi shouldn't have ended up in Mayhop, but in whatever Japanese city Kishimoto called home.

Why the hell was Kakashi speaking English, anyway?

Gah, there are too many unknowns in this situation! Where do we go from here? Where can we?

Struggling through the comparisons from the books I'd read over my life that was similar to this, I didn't notice the deep furrow appear between Kakashi's brows until he broke the silence.