Salvation (Kakashi x OC) (Standalone)

12

And the other boy was the smooth, suave heartbreaker with all the basketball skills, so I affectionately dubbed him Carl. Oh, how I would love the irony if that badass teen, with his impressive height and dimpled grin, had a name on the same level as Carl.

Beside me, Kakashi sat with his arms behind him, bracing himself against the pavement as he leaned back. It was too dark for the headband to make any difference. We were always getting lucky when it came to moments someone might recognize him. So far, the only people from my world he'd met hadn't known about anime. Well, except for Sam, but that's a different matter entirely.

Kakashi cleared his throat, speaking slowly. "So, about this Benimaru guy...the naked firefighter..."

I froze, dipping my chin up from being pressed against my legs. This would be a great time to have a camera off to the side, so I could have my moment from The Office.

Blinking rapidly, my confusion outweighed my desire to laugh as I turned to the muscle-man shinobi beside me. "What?"

"You know—" Kakashi shrugged, his voice a little higher, a little closer to the voice actors' I was familiar with, "the guy you'd choose to be with, if you could."

My first instinct was to say that Benimaru wasn't real. He was a fictional character.

But I didn't know anymore.

Part of me wondered if that book I'd read as a teen—Vampire Stalker—was right. Its theory, at the very least. Could an author from my world—which actually had more magic than I'd originally thought—tap into another dimension? Did that mean creativity didn't exist? It was all a vision from another world—and not from the creators themselves?

That couldn't be true. The thought that all the stories I loved hadn't come from some amazing human but were actually real...the idea of some of the horrible things that exist within those tales being real...

But then, where did one draw the line? Were all the popular stories from another world? So far, there have been Naruto, Demon Slayer, and My Hero Academia cast members who appeared in little Mayhop. Those are all really popular stories.

But a different hypothesis was slowly growing inside of me. And it was because the three shows were so popular.

What if...the stories became so loved, so supported by all their fans that...they'd just kind of popped into existence?

Of course, there are several problems with that theory as well. Beyond how such a thing could even be possible—it was, essentially, sacrilegious. To every religion.

My theory gave god-like powers to regular humans, en masse. How did the universe come into existence? Most origin stories start with a creator god, then branch out from there.

My theory puts humans on the same level as the god that many believe created them.

But there was yet another problem with it. Kakashi definitely acted differently from how he appeared in the show. I hadn't spent too much time with Kirishima, but he seemed to act accordingly with his character. And Rengoku, in those final moments before he'd turned into light and disappeared within that purple portal in the sky, had definitely been in character.

Kakashi's different-ness didn't align with my theory. If I was right, then Kakashi could only be like his character. No added depth.

On the flipside, very little is truly known about Anbu-era Kakashi. The differences in attitude could have been that universe's answer on how to fill in all the gaps.

But if the Naruto franchise had been created by the mass love of the humans on my Earth, then what were the odds that I'd stumbled across Anbu-era Kakashi at all? Just when did the world pop into existence? What year had it been? Could a world pop into existence, fully formed, and start playing out a fated story?