Chapter 1
The smell hit first.
Burned wood. Melted stone. Blood—old and new, layered into the earth like a memory the ground itself refused to forget.
Kakashi Hatake opened his eye.
For a long moment, he didn't move. The sky above was gray, not with clouds, but with dust still drifting down like tired ash. A broken roof beam lay half a meter from his face, split cleanly in two, as if something impossibly large had brushed past it and kept moving.
This isn't a dream.
The thought arrived fully formed, sharp and calm in a way that didn't belong to a grieving thirteen-year-old.
He sat up slowly. His body answered without protest—no pain, no stiffness beyond exhaustion. A jōnin's body. Trained. Maintained. Familiar.
Too familiar.
He raised his hands. Small. Scarred. Calloused.
Kakashi Hatake's hands.
Memory crashed in—not his, not all of them. Two streams colliding.
A masked man.
A giant fox of hatred and chakra.
A yellow flash standing against the impossible.
Minato-sensei… is dead.
The knowledge landed without emotion first, then with crushing weight a heartbeat later. Kakashi bowed his head, white hair falling forward as his breath stuttered once.
But he didn't break.
Instead, something turned inside him.
A slow, spiraling motion in his chakra coils—tight, controlled, unfamiliar.
Wind.
Lightning.
They didn't clash.
They aligned.
The air around him shifted. Loose pebbles rolled inward, tracing a lazy spiral around his knees. A torn strip of cloth lifted, hovering as if caught in an invisible current.
Kakashi's visible eye widened slightly.
"…So that's new."
His voice sounded wrong in his own ears—too steady, too aware.
He stood.
The ruins stretched in every direction. Entire streets flattened. Homes erased. The village he knew reduced to jagged outlines and silence punctuated only by distant voices—shinobi calling out, medics moving, survivors crying.
One day.
Only one day since the Kyūbi had been unleashed.
And already, the political storm was forming. Kakashi could feel it, the way one sensed pressure before a lightning strike.
The Uchiha would be blamed.
Danzo would move in the shadows.
Hiruzen would try to hold the village together with tired hands.
And somewhere—nearby—a newborn jinchūriki cried, alone and hated.
Naruto.
Kakashi's fingers curled slowly.
"No," he murmured. "Not this time."
A presence approached—three chakra signatures, cautious, alert.
ANBU.
They landed on broken stone behind him without a sound.
"Kakashi Hatake," one of them said, voice masked and neutral. "The Hokage requests your presence."
Of course he does.
Kakashi turned.
For a fraction of a second, the ANBU froze.
Not because of killing intent.
Because the air around him moved.
Not violently. Not aggressively.
Like the calm center of a storm that hadn't decided whether it would pass… or erase everything in its path.
"I'll come," Kakashi said calmly. "But first—"
He glanced toward the far edge of the village, where a faint, unfamiliar chakra flickered. Small. Chaotic. Hurting.
A baby's chakra.
"—there's something I need to confirm."
The ANBU hesitated.
Kakashi didn't wait.
He stepped forward—and the ground didn't crack.
Instead, the wind bent.
In a silent burst, he vanished, leaving behind a twisting spiral of dust and a single thought echoing in the air:
The storm remembers now.