Chapter Text
When Kakashi opens his eyes, he realizes he’s drowning.
The world around him is waterlogged and muted, spinning in all directions. His chest is on fire, and when he gapes his mouth wide to gasp in a breath, there’s nothing there to breathe. His head is pounding and eerily silent all at once, as if there’s a war going on inside of it but he’s gone deaf to all the noise. He can’t focus on any one thing, but rather all of it at once.
Eventually, he comes to figure out that there’s a pressure against him, at his left side. He shoves at it, and it falls away. Second later, it comes back a hundredfold, ramming into him with a force that, had he any breath in him, it would have been knocked out with prejudice.
He blinks moisture from his eyes, and finally realizes the pressure is a surface- two surfaces. A bed, and the floor. Currently, his body lay pressed against hardwood. It was cold and wet. Or, Kakashi was cold and wet.
He pushes up off the floor, uneasily putting feet beneath him and attempting to find a center. He wobbles upright painfully slowly, still uncertain which was was truly up. He thinks he’s home, because while there is blind panic and pain, there is a faint sense of familiarity. Not quite safe, but when was he really, anymore?
He carefully turns himself around and stumbles to where he thinks the bathroom door is. He grabs the knob and wrenches it open, body tilting forward precariously into the room, only to get an abrupt face full of dry, musty fabrics.
Kakashi tears himself back, feet falling over himself. He hits the floor again, hard, and stares up dumbly at the open bathroom. Except, it’s not the bathroom. It’s a closet.
Kakashi doesn’t have a closet.
Or, he ponders at the back of a sickenly pulsating mind, he hadn’t had a closet in a while- not in years, actually. He turns his head, eyes scanning the room he’s sitting on the floor of. His eyes go in and out of focus. They’re having trouble staying in place whenever he aims them at something. Things are close, and then further away and blurrier than they had been a second ago, and he doesn’t even blink. Eventually, Kakashi pieces together his location.
Yes, it’s his apartment. At the same time, it isn’t, because Kakashi hasn’t owned this apartment since he was ten years old.
Still, it wasn’t like he doesn’t remember the layout. Teetering on unsteady limbs, the ninja hauls himself back to his feet and maneuvers his body, which was being rather difficult with him at the moment, toward where he recalls the bathroom to actually be. This time, when he opens the door, it’s not a closet, and he practically collapses onto the tile. He almost doesn’t make it to the toilet.
When he finishes attempting to expel the nauseating pit of whatever it was from his stomach, and failing, he pulls the lever with a weak, shaking hand that his eyes are convinced is farther away than it should be, and rests his clammy, sweaty forehead against the porcelain seat. He closes his eyes, and just sits here for a moment, too tired and miserable to even think.
Kakashi isn’t quite certain how long he’s there, on the floor of the bathroom in the apartment he’d sold before he was even a teenager. He pukes three more times- he thinks, it might have been more, he wasn’t exactly counting here- and all that comes up is bile, burning through his esophagus and leaving a sick, acidic taste in his mouth. It could have been hours, or days, or minutes. Maybe he falls asleep, but he isn’t sure.
He blinks once, and finds himself on the floor, not sure how he got there and staring at his hand that lies on the tile next to his face. It’s still too small, too far away. Which is weird, once his eyes have finally stopped shaking all around in his skull, they are able to focus on everything else now except, it seems, himself. He blinks a few more times in the hopes to better adjust them, but his own body remains strangely distorted in comparison to his surroundings. Like the world is there, existing, but Kakashi is not. Or suppose to be, but having trouble doing it all the way.
Kakashi frowns, dizzy and sick and irritated that he is having so much trouble with something as simple as existing in the reality that he has, until now, had zero complications existing in.
The door thumps oddly. Kakashi stares at it with dull eyes, puzzled that it is making noise when, last he’d checked, doors were inanimate objects that generally remain silent when left on their own.
It thumps again, and says, “Kakashi?”
Kakashi blinks. He wonders what kind of reality he is trying to exist in here, where doors are able to speak to people, and sound like his old sensei.
He supposes that, in a weird, abstract way, it somewhat makes sense. Doors are dead trees, after all, and Minato-sensei is also dead. Is this what happens to people when they die? Kakashi pauses for a moment, and wonders if he himself is dead. Maybe that’s why he‘s having trouble existing here. He hasn’t possessed a door like his sensei had. Maybe he would become the toilet, instead, since he’s so close to it right now.
Kakashi can’t help but assume that to be a rather... undesirable existence. He doesn’t think he’d been that terrible when he’d been alive, had he? No puppies had been kicked, certainly, no babies eaten, no Icha Icha left unread.
Kakashi doesn’t think he really deserves to be a toilet.
“Kakashi?” The door asks once more, this time opening itself in its apparent worry for him. It was nice of it to be concerned like that, but Kakashi finds himself wondering when it was that it had closed in the first place. He doesn’t remember shutting it when he’d come in. Maybe it had closed itself, being sentient and all, to give him some privacy while he was upchucking his own stomach. How kind.
Kakashi’s eyes fall shut again, too heavy for him to keep open, and he turns his face against the tile. It‘s nice and cold. It feels soothing on his clammy skin. The world isn’t throwing itself in all directions anymore, and he definitely feels grateful that it has at last decided to settle down.
A pressure slips underneath his limp body, lifting him away from the floor. It feels like hands. Does the door have hands? Kakashi mourns the loss of the stable surface that the floor had provided. At least he isn’t drowning anymore.
“Oh, Kakashi…” the door sighs quietly.
The second time Kakashi wakes up, he thinks about the first, and has to pause for a moment, because holy fuck, what a fever dream!
Or not? He’d obviously been high on something last night. He’d been hallucinating pretty hard. Doors that could talk and sounded like Minato-sensei, honestly? What the hell?
He sits up, carefully, already anticipating the hangover before it even comes.
And it does come, crashing down upon him with a vengeful fury, angry that he’d made such terrible life choices. Kakashi doesn’t really blame it.
His head throbs so powerfully that he has to lie down again, but sits right back up and brings his hands around to his front, palms facing up toward the ceiling and fingers spread out wide. He stares down at them, absolutely befuddled.
They’re still too small.
Before he has a chance to contemplate whether or not he is still under the influence, as is so clearly the case, the door of the bedroom he’s in (again, his childhood apartment. Now that his heads a bit clearer, Kakashi realizes that this apartment isn’t even suppose to standing anymore. It had been destroyed in Pein’s attack on Konoha, and not been rebuilt. Which now begs the question; how is Kakashi here, when here doesn’t exist?).
“Kakashi,” someone says, and Kakashi thinks he’s sober enough now to know that it isn’t the door.
He still must be a little high, though, because that’s definitely Minato-sensei’s voice speaking.
Then someone steps into the room, and Kakashi looks at them, at him, and just blinks for a moment, hoping that‘ll clear up his vision a bit. He’s still hallucinating, clearly, because that’s Minato-sensei standing there, with Minato-sensei’s relieved smile and Minato-sensei’s blonde hair.
Kakashi pushes at the energy that exists inside of him, until it’s outside him and in the air, reaching outward, feeling, tasting, and- there. Minato-sensei’s chakra.
Just to make sure, Kakashi opens his mouth, and croaks out (in a voice that is not his, mind), “Minato-sensei?”
The Minato-sensei beams at him, and replies, “Kakashi! I’m glad you’re awake,” and, yup, that’s Minato-sensei’s voice.
Kakashi falls back down against the bed, closing his eyes. It’s too short of a way down, and he clenches hands that are too tiny and feeble and not his in dog-print sheets he hasn’t owned for decades.
Kakashi feels like crying. Why doesn’t it make sense?