Chapter Text
Gojo Kakashi was born amidst a thunderstorm.
On that day, the winds battered against the windows, howling like a pack of wolves set loose. The rain fell so heavily it flooded the small town down the hill from the Gojo Clan Compound, the waters rising just above the knee. Thunder growled, lightning flashing through the sky in streaks of white, the smell of ozone lingering in the air. None of that mattered for the newborn baby, safely tucked away deep in one of the clan buildings, wailing like his life depended on it. His mother, weary from the strain of giving birth, pressed a kiss to his tiny head for the first and last time, before passing him to the nurse kneeling beside her.
“Kakashi,” she murmured, holding on the the last vestiges of life, but her voice never wavered. “Gojo Kakashi. That’s his name.”
And as she took her last shuddering breath, the newborn cried out even louder, as if lamenting a mother he would never get to know or meet again.
Outside, the winds howled.
/
When Gojo Kakashi was one and a half years old, he started to remember.
It came in bits and pieces. Fragments of buildings he’d never visited in his life (or was it just this one?), people he’d never met (But oh, how his heart warmed at the thought of them), the woodsy smell of trees (There weren’t any forests around here, strange). His tiny little mind couldn’t handle all that influx of information, of course, so for a while all of that information went nowhere while he focused on attempting to walk and exploring his surroundings.
He found the scent of trees calming. He loved being outside in the open air, always stumbling back with his clothes dirtied from where he’d laid down in the dirt, much to the chagrin of his caretakers. (They didn’t appreciate having to wash his clothes all that much.) But other than that, they had to admit, Kakashi was a rather calm baby. He rarely cried, was fascinated by everything, and often didn’t move much at all if it wasn’t needed, unless it was to run outside. Then he moved so fast for a one-and-a-half year old that the gardener swore the kid was a ninja.
After he was satisfied with being able to walk steadily on his little feet, he took to dozing off in the most inopportune places, sometimes right in the middle of a corridor. This worried his caretakers, who frantically consulted the clan doctor with worries of denutrition. The doctor took one look at Kakashi attempting to escape out the doors to the garden outside and old Chiyako-san hauling back a squirming, very unpleased baby in her hands and said that no, there was nothing wrong with him, he was a perfectly normal kid, if a little quiet. Kakashi, who had reluctantly accepted his fate, gave Chiyako-san huge, watery puppy eyes as if to prove his point.
He did, in fact, prove a point, if not one that his caretakers were expecting. Now Kakashi knew he could get away with anything now that he had discovered the ultimate weapon: Puppy eyes.
(Kakashi was a cute kid. His caretakers stood no chance.)
/
Kakashi was three, and sometimes, when he looked into the mirror, he’d feel like his appearance was just a tiny bit off. His eyes seemed a little too wide set, his nose too curved, he constantly expected to see a beauty mark at the corner of his mouth. Sometimes one of his eyes would glow a chilling red, but it was gone after a second glance. It was too confusing, all of it, and so he had taken to hiding his face at all times. (He ignored how comfortable that made him feel.)
Kakashi was three, and things started to make more sense. The fragments of memories and feelings and instincts came together to form a complete picture of another him. Another life.
He was… he had been Hatake Kakashi. He had been a shinobi, a ninja, in a village called Konohagakure. He had been hailed as a prodigy, a genius, and his father was dead, and his mother had died in childbirth (How ironic, he thinks, that the same thing would happen to him in two lifetimes.) and then his teammates had died and so had his sensei. (The ache had faded, smoothened away with time and age, but it was still there, still lurking) And then he’d become a sensei as well, and-
Oh. Naruto.
He had three cute little Genin (they would always be cute and his Genin, regardless of their age and the fact that they could topple mountains with ease), Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke. He had been fond of them. He was still fond of them. They had fought a war against a dead-but-not-quite Madara Uchiha and an alien goddess from the moon, and won.
He had then become Hokage, despite his many protests, before finally passing on the seat to Naruto and retiring. He’d travelled a bit with Gai, before returning to the village and settling down. Well, as much as a shinobi could settle, anyway.
And after that… Ah. He had died.
It was peaceful, he remembered. His cute little students were there, all so sad, even though Sasuke tried his best to hide it. Gai had passed only a year ago in his late seventies, still wearing his ridiculous green jumpsuit with his signature grin on his face. He had missed him, he realised. They had been old, positively ancient for shinobi. It was no surprise to him that his body started to fail, and he had accepted death with as much grace as he could muster.
…Except he wasn’t dead. Well, he had died, he was sure of that, but it seemed that he had been… reborn. Reincarnated.
He hadn’t been reborn in Konoha. In fact, he was pretty sure he wasn’t anywhere in the Elemental Nations.
He knew this because he had checked the maps. As many as he could find. Apparently, he was on an island called Japan, which had seemed huge to someone who was used to living his whole life in one village. And this wasn’t even the biggest continent in this world, there were other countries that spanned more than over twenty times the size of this one, not to mention the population.
Geography aside, what really made it sink in was that there was no chakra. At all. Even though he was in the body of a three year old, he should still be able to at least feel his own chakra, and yet…
He did feel something, though it was a little different. It sat in a pool in his gut, and felt… heavy. After straining his senses, he could sense the same pools in other people he came across, much akin to the way he would sense chakra, though varying in volume. He wondered if it was this world’s form of chakra.
He inwardly sighed. He had a whole lot of theories and no concrete answers. Time for more information gathering, it seemed.
/
Kakashi had only seen his father once in his lifetime, and even then, it had been an accident.
Kakashi had snuck off, as usual, in a bid to escape from Chiyako-san’s attempts to test his reading skills. After the disastrous first session where he inadvertently let slip that he could read the basics without guidance, he had been fleeing from her attempts to get him to read more complex sentences. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, he did, he just didn’t want to live through the ‘genius child’ life again. It had left him with more scars than he knew of, and really, he thought he could do a lot better if less people were focused on him and every move he made. He was a shinobi through and through, after all. Attention wasn’t something he desired.
His destination this time was the clan head’s house, which was fairly easy to spot, seeing as it was one of the grandest buildings in the compound. Of course it was also one of the places he was forbidden to enter, which was rather ironic, seeing as his father was the clan head. Nobody had told him this, he had figured it out by himself through common sense and eavesdropping on the servants. There were only so many people who’s bastard child (and yes, that he figured out by himself as well) would be kept so hush-hush and yet be able to live fairly well in the clan compound.
In fact, Gojo Hideyoshi, the head of the Gojo clan, might not have gotten away with all the secrecy if his other son hadn’t been born, six months before.
Gojo Satoru, the bearer of the Six Eyes. From the way the servants spoke of it, with equal amounts of awe and well hidden terror, it was pretty powerful. He likened it to a more powerful version of the Byakugan, even though it was clearly more than that. He had never seen the boy, either, however unsurprising that was. The clan heir, and with a powerful doujutsu that only surfaced once a generation thrown in the pot? No one would be letting him out of sight anytime soon.
Amidst all the commotion, no one paid much attention to one unremarkable child being born, more so the fact that he wasn’t even a legitimate one. Kakashi didn’t mind; he hadn’t grown up with much parental guidance in his previous life, as much as his father had tried. So what was one absent father? He was too old to complain about the hand he’d been dealt, young as he was in this life.
In fact, he would have been perfectly happy to put the thought of his father out of his mind until he heard footsteps around the corner of the corridor he was walking through.
“Completely out of their minds-“
“Gojo-sama, the Zenin clan wouldn’t go so far as to hire assassins, would they?”
He could have easily hidden himself, but the mention of ‘Gojo-sama’ made him pause. He didn’t care about his father. He didn’t. But he just wanted to know…
When the entourage turned the corner, Kakashi had already set his plan in motion. Picking up speed, he ran straight into them, right into where he estimated where Hideyoshi would be.
His estimations were correct. Kakashi collided with a man who was indeed
(judging by the fine apparel he was clothed in) Hideyoshi, while shouts and clangs of steel echoed around him. If I was an assassin,thought Kakashi, faintly, the clan head would be dead on the ground by now.
“Sorry,” he said, twisting his fingers together, trying to give off innocent child vibes. Admittedly, he wasn’t very good at it, but he hoped it would be enough to convince Hideyoshi that he’d wandered into the house by accident. “Are you okay, mister? I didn’t mean to run into you!”
Gojo Hideyoshi did not look like a man who liked kids. His face seemed fixed in a permanent scowl, and faced with a kid who had not only broken into his house, but was also running around like he owned the place probably did not make him feel any better.
“Why are you here,” snarled Hideyoshi, “In the clan head’s residence? It is not some playground you may fool around in, child.”
“Sorry,” said Kakashi again, keeping his voice low. “Sorry… I just wanted to see my dad. I heard that he lived here, and I’ve never seen him before… So I came here to find him!” He chanced a look at Hideyoshi’s face. “I think his name was… Hide- something. Do you know him, mister? Can you help me find him? Oh, right, my name’s Kakashi! What’s your name, mister?”
Gojo Hideyoshi looked like he’d swallowed a lemon whole. “Get him out of here. And someone better explain to me why security around the residence has gotten so abysmal that a child can sneak in without anyone even noticing!”
A blink, and Kakashi was standing outside his house, the man who’d brought him here complaining loudly to Chiyako-san about ‘minding that brat’, which was completely unjustified, in his humble opinion. He had apologised. And his curiosity was sated, for now. Hideyoshi really didn’t care for his bastard children, especially if they didn’t seem to have any special talents like his legitimate one.
He ignored the childish part of him that wanted to curl up in a ball and sulk. He was fine. He didn’t need parents, not if they didn’t want him.
Still, when Chiyako-san pulled him into a hug and ruffled his hair fondly after he sat through a long, long, lecture about trespassing, he couldn’t help but relax into her arms. And if he clung to her long after when he usually would’ve pulled away, no one needed to know.
/
After the Hideyoshi incident, as Kakashi liked to call it, Chiyako-san took it upon herself to give him a more in-depth explanation about curses.
Well, it was mainly a result of their negotiations about his studies. Kakashi would put more effort into studying (and none of that wishy-washy half-asleep nonsense, said Chiyako-san sternly), and in return she would tell him more about the world he had been born into. He kept to the deal, for the most part, he didn’t want to put in too much effort after all, and in return, he finally got to have some of his questions answered.
“So,” sighed Chiyako-san, failing to hide the fondness in her voice. “I know you have questions, Kakashi-kun.”
Did he ever.
She frowned, thinking. “How about I start with an overview, alright? Then you can tell me what you not understand from it.”
Kakashi nodded. That sounded acceptable. He’d read about curses from various books he’d managed to find, but he still wanted to know more, and hearing about it first-hand was way better than reading it from a book.
“Now, my knowledge about curses is rather general,” warned Chiyako-san, “So there will be some things I won’t be able to answer, but I’ll keep a look out for books about the topic for you. Yes,” she said as Kakashi opened his mouth to retort, “I know you’re very intelligent, even if you try to hide it, Kakashi-kun. I still don’t know why you’re hiding it, but at least let me help you with this, alright?”
Well. It looked like Kakashi’s attempts at dumbing himself down weren’t as effective as he thought.
He looked at Chiyako-san, who had taken care of him ever since he was born, who loved and cared for him just as he assumed a mother would, who knew he was hiding things but didn’t push him for answers, and felt a sudden overwhelming love for the old woman. In this new life, he may not have any of his precious people anymore, but it seemed like there would always be others that wormed into his heart.
“Maa, fine, I’ll read more books, Chiyako-san, just for you,” he finally said, crossing his arms and pouting at her. He was a kid now, he felt no shame at all at actually acting like one.
Chiyako-san just laughed, ruffled his hair affectionately, and said, “Well, shall we start now, Kakashi-kun?”
/
After Chiyako-san’s explanation of curses and cursed energy, he started to get a better understanding of the whole concept.
“So, can anyone use cursed energy, Chiyako-san?” If it was anything like chakra, then potentially, everyone could harness this energy, right?
“Not everyone. Only people with high amounts of cursed energy can sense cursed energy, and even then, sensing and actually controlling cursed energy are totally different things. For example, I can see curses, but I am unable to do anything about them. People like me are called windows, we aren’t considered jujutsu sorcerers, but we can still contribute to jujutsu society.”
Kakashi frowned. “So, for non-sorcerers, it’s impossible to increase their cursed energy reserves?”
“Well… I don’t know much about that. Jujutsu society, and the existence of curses, is hidden from the rest of the world, so research on this part is lacking. Usually, in extreme cases, non-sorcerers can only see curses if their life is in danger. For sorcerers, though, binding vows are usually the preferred method.”
He mulled this over. “So, what about the Six Eyes, then?”
Chiyako-san raised her eyebrows in surprise, then laughed. “Ah, I shouldn’t even be surprised by now, eh? The Six Eyes…
The Six Eyes is an inherited technique of the Gojo clan which grants the bearer extraordinary perception, and no two bearers can exist at the same time. Only the bearer can utilise the Limitless technique- another inherited technique of the Gojo clan- to its full potential. There hasn’t been a sorcerer who was born with both the Six Eyes and the Limitless in the last hundred years, though.”
“What about the current Six Eyes bearer, then, Gojo Satoru? Do they not have the Limitless technique?”
Chiyako-san hesitated for a minute. “Kakashi, the Six Eyes is one of the most powerful techniques of the Gojo clan, possibly the whole Jujutsu society, so I trust that you won’t go around recklessly spilling information, alright?”
Kakashi huffed. “Maa, Chiyako-san. Do you not trust me?” He could understand where she was coming from, he supposed, normal three-year old kids probably weren’t well versed in the art of keeping secrets, but when had he ever been a normal three-year old?
“Yes, yes, you can trust me, I won’t say a word,” he acquiesced when she mock-glared at him. She raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Really? and received his most innocent look for her troubles.
“Right,” she said, reluctantly accepting it for now. “Well, Kakashi-kun, Gojo Satoru is only six months older than you, you know, and cursed techniques usually only appear around five or six years old. So while we know that Satoru-sama has the Six Eyes, whether he has the Limitless technique has yet to be seen.”
Kakashi hummed, and said, “But the fact that he has the Six Eyes already makes him a valuable asset.” Unlike him. As far as he knew, he didn’t have any special cursed techniques to speak of, except for all the memories of jutsus he’d performed in his past life, which were useless here. Though that could change; he might turn up with the Limitless in the future, but he wouldn’t put his hopes in that.
(He also really didn’t want to get involved with clan politics, he’d had enough of that for a lifetime. Sometimes being an illegitimate child had its benefits; no one would want him to lead the clan.)
Chiyako-san didn’t look happy with his choice of words, but agreed nonetheless. “You could word it like that, I suppose…”
Kakashi, seeing that the conversation was nearing an end, jumped in with the first thing he could think of. “So, if Gojo Satoru is the clan head’s son, does that mean we’re brothers? Should I be calling him Nii-san?”
That opened up a whole new can of worms. Kakashi didn’t regret it one bit.