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Kakashi walked between his ANBU guards. He didn’t recognize those, meaning that hopefully they were simply from another squad. He wouldn’t know what he’d feel if they were from his squad anyway. It’d be probably even worse for his reputation to be seen in cuffs.
Sarutobi of course tried to reassure him that the cuffs were no indicator of his guilt, but simply a precaution, just regular procedure. That of course did not nothing to quell his worry. Seeing his history, Kakashi knew that nothing good came out of him being in the spotlight like this. And though Kakashi understood the consequences of his betrayal of Danzou, of his confession, he really hoped things wouldn’t turn out like this.
They stopped in front of a door and one ANBU walked in. He waited by the door, staring at the wood until they were called in.
Kakashi was walked to the center of the room where all heads turned to him.
He stood silent.
“Hatake Kakashi.” The hokage greeted.
“Hokage-sama.” Kakashi greeted back.
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
His eyes drifted around the room, watching the clan heads who stared him down impassively. He saw Gai sitting between them, squirming in his seat anxiously. Kakashi didn’t know if he was glad he was there as a friendly face among them or feeling guilty over accidentally dragging his only friend into this mess.
Kakashi had a bad feeling about the fact that he stood handcuffed in front of all these people while Danzou stared him down, shadowed by his two ROOT guards.
“I am being questioned on my defection from ROOT and disappearance from the village for the past week. And possibly on my involvement in a possible attempt against sandaime’s life.”
Hiruzen smiled at him.
“So you understand. A thorough investigation was led while you were gone and after you returned. We now stand here to listen to your version of the story and make a judgement of it.”
He leaned back in his seat.
“Can you please tell us your account of the happenings of the past few days?” He asked.
“Sandaime,” He started “you are aware that I contacted you around 15 days ago. I asked to speak to you privately.”
“Yes, I recall.” He confirmed.
“What I wished to speak to you about were my thoughts of betrayal to Lord third and the village of Konoha.”
The air stiffed around him. Kakashi could see from the corner of his eyes Gai struggling not to get off his seat to protest.
“Explain yourself, young Kakashi.” The third at least seemed composed.
“Several days prior, a few weeks after the kyuubi’s attack,” Kakashi breathed in. “Danzou-sama had spoken to me. I was… unhappy with how things were handled during the incident. I expressed my discontent with Sandaime’s decision of keeping young shinobi out of the fight and Danzou-sama offered me a position inside ROOT. I accepted.”
“Were there any witnesses to this exchange?”
“No, Sandaime-sama.”
Hiruzen hummed.
“Please proceed.”
Kakashi let his eyes lock with Danzou’s for a second.
“Within the organization, Danzou tasked me with the a high priority mission right away. He tasked me with Sandaime’s assassination.”
“Did he say his motivation to do so? Explain his plan of action?”
“Yes, Sandaime-sama.” Kakashi continued. “He expressed his disagreement with your style of leadership. We were to attack you during your convoy outside the village.”
“Did you have any reasons to justify an attempt on my life, Kakashi.”
Kakashi stood still.
He breathed in and out slowly.
“Yes, Sandaime-sama.”
“Care to tell us?”
Kakashi’s eyes flickered to his feet.
“I… I believed that perhaps if I were allowed to fight… if my generation was allowed to fight… then the Yondaime would still be alive. That maybe you had allowed him to die on purpose. My judgement was clouded by misguided grief, Sandaime-sama.”
The Sandaime stood in silence for a moment. He hummed sadly.
“But you changed your mind.” Kakashi nodded. “Why?”
“I found out Danzou harbored a mokuton user under his organization. A shinobi he kept away from the fight.”
Hiruzen’s eyes widened slightly at that.
“After seeing this boy’s abilities, I searched for any records of a mokuton user and found nothing. I realized then that Danzou-sama must have acquired him by unlawful means.”
“Yes, I recall a mention of this boy by Maito-san. You contacted him about this child if I’m correct?” Hiruzen turned his head. “Would you please tell us about this message you got?”
Gai shot up from his seat looking as nervous as he was determined.
“Yes, Hokage-sama! It was about 10 days ago. I was in my bed when one of Kakashi’s ninken, Bisuke, woke me up! He informed me a message that Kakashi wanted delivered to me and the Hokage. The message was that he was being pursued by ROOT, Danzou planned on assassinating the Hokage in three days and that we had to look for a mokuton user inside ROOT, a child of no older than 10 possibly.”
“Had Kakashi ever mentioned his involvement with ROOT or Danzou’s plans to you before?” The hokage asked.
“No, sir.” Gai shook his head wildly.
“Had he ever mentioned this mokuton user before?”
“No, sir.” Gai said again, glancing briefly at Kakashi.
“And you believed him?”
“Of course!” Gai exclaimed, scandalized. “Kakashi wouldn’t lie to me like this. Specially when he needed my help.”
Kakashi could tell Gai’s faith in him was not shared between the clan heads present. Gai’s eyes slowly took the quiet stares in the room.
“I see, thank you Maito-san. You may sit down now.”
“U-um.” Gai sat down slowly. He was slowly realizing how different his vision of Kakashi was from anyone else’s. He looked upset by it.
Kakashi didn’t look at him.
“I’ve sent my ANBU to look into the matter while you were in hiding, after I received your message.” Hiruzen straightened up in his seat. He flipped through a few pages on his desk. “There is no such thing as a mokuton user in ROOT, Kakashi.”
“What?” His head snapped up, glancing at Danzou, whose expression didn’t even twitch. “That’s impossible, I saw him. I saw him using the woodstyle with my own eyes. He fought me, Hokage-sama.”
“But we all know not to trust what your eyes see, don’t we, Hatake-san?” Danzou said out loud. Kakashi felt the hairs on his body stand up.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve had many reports from different shinobi on your, well, hallucinations. Visions of your former teammates, I was told.”
Kakashi’s eye twitched, hands itching.
“Is it true, Kakashi?” The hokage asked.
“I know what I saw.” Kakashi replied firmly.
“The question was “is it true?”.” Danzou cut him off. Kakashi held back the anger that crawled up his throat.
“Yes. Hokage-sama. That is true.”
“Then we can conclude that your shaken emotional state combined with the guilt you felt have led you to hallucinating a boy, capable of using a power that would have saved your former sensei’s life.” Danzou continued.
“I did not hallucinate the boy.”
“I hear you, Kakashi.” Hiruzen said, I don’t believe you , was what Kakashi heard.”Unfortunately we found nothing. My men scanned the base, looked over files and interviewed several men. There was no proof of a mokuton user.”
A long beat of silence passed.
“Please continue your statement.”
Kakashi took a few breaths of air. He needed to calm down. It wasn’t a defeat yet.
“After my research, I felt distrustful of Danzou and started doubting my decision of serving him. I thought about it and decided to confess his plan and my actions to you.”
“You didn’t though. What happened?”
“As I made my way to talk to you, I was stopped by some of Danzou’s men.”
Kakashi remembered, being stopped by a masked man on his way to meet the Hokage. The mask close enough to ANBU to fool anyone else. Not him. He remembered the voice, the words “Danzou-sama requests your presence immediately” . He remembers his answer.
“I understood they intended to kill me before I could tell you of his plans, so I fled.”
How in a second a battle started, the other hidden root agents coming out to attack. How Kakashi deflected and ran.
“Did you engage in combat with any of those men?”
How the number of agents turned from 3 to 6 and Kakashi didn’t have any option but to push through with brute force.
“Yes, Hokage-sama.”
“Did you kill any of them?”
The kunai missing, his hands flashing through the familiar hand signs, despite the sickness that settled in his guts as the chirping came to life.
Kakashi stood in silence, feeling everyone’s eyes weightning on him. He felt cold.
“Yes, Hokage-sama.”
“Can you recall how many.”
“I am not sure, I was fleeing.”
“When did you come into contact with my guard?”
“Sir?”
“The ANBU you killed, when did you come into contact with them?”
Kakashi’s hand prickled.
“I did not kill any ANBU, sir.”
Hiruzen seemed to deflate slightly at that.
“Kakashi, there were witnesses of you clashing with my guard. If anything, the wounds of the ones killed by your jutsu would prove as much.”
Impossible. Kakashi never saw any ANBU that day, only ROOT. Were the ROOT members he killed ANBU as well? Who had seen him? What did Danzou do?!
Kakashi felt cold even as sweat started to collect on his skin.
“I didn’t kill any ANBU, Hokage-sama. I’ve only killed a few ROOT that attacked me.” He spoke slowly. It was self defence, right?
“There were visual witnesses, Hatake. You cannot lie about that.” Someone from the audience said, Kakashi didn’t quite catch who, he was scared that moving his head would make him sick. Kakashi never got close enough to the Hokage to meet his guard. Had someone transformed into him? How far had Danzou planned to incriminate him?
“It wasn’t me.”
There was a loud exhale. No one believed him. His eyes darted quickly to Gai, the boy eyed the room cautiously, his eyes landed on Kakashi when he felt him staring.
Kakashi looked away.
“Again, I believe this might be yet another one of Hatake’s delusions. It is not the first time he has done something of the sort.”
“Care to elaborate, Danzou-sama?”
“This event has mostly been suppressed by the Yondaime, but it concerns the occurrence during the rescue mission of the late shinobi Nohara Rin.”
Kakashi tried to breathe slowly. His skin was cold but his insides felt like they were on fire. The itch was becoming unbearable. He rubbed his hand against his pants.
“After failing to rescue his former teammate, Hatake Kakashi proceed to brutally kill at around thirty kirin hunter-nin-“
“It wasn’t me.” Kakashi blurted out, feeling how everyone’s eyes fell on him.
“-going as far as to dismember some enemy and even impale some in the trees nearby.”
Bodies, scattered, body parts, all around him. Bodies, bodies, bodies. Death.
“The scene was described as “horrific”. A “sea of blood” covering the ground of the battlefield.”
The smell was unbearable, steel, flesh, death, death. Kakashi felt sick. Kakashi felt really, really sick.
“Upon being questioned on it, Hatake Kakashi claimed to having not done so, saying he had no recollection of anything that happened after his teammate’s death by his own hands despite evidence pointing no one else had been there.”
“Kakashi,” Minato had sat down by his hospital bed. Reaching for him. Not really touching, Kakashi still felt blood clinging to his skin even after several showers.
“Did you do that?”
“It wasn’t me.” He pleaded.
“Kakashi, please calm down.”
He heard it, he didn’t quite understand.
Kakashi eyes swept over the people, catching every twitch of their expressions, their bodies. Apprehensive, disgusted, distrustful. Kakashi could smell it in the air. He didn’t know who did it! He didn’t know!
He was surprised when his wrists hurt when he tried to bring them apart, eyes registering the handcuffs on them.
“Kakashi, do not direct your sharingan at the people present here.”
The sharingan? He did have both eyes open, he wasn’t really managing to order his brain to close any of them, blood filled his vision with every blink.
He wasn’t feeling very well.
“It wasn’t me.”
Minato knew it, he believed him, he knew they just had to ask him, Minato could tell them but he was dead, impaled, very dead.
He saw the Hokage speaking but couldn’t hear it. He tugged at his arms to get his fringe away from his face. He raised his hands and everyone in the room twitched.
“Kakashi?”
Kakashi.
He felt someone hold onto his arm. He was twisted a bit and then he was facing Gai.
“Kakashi?”
Ka….ka..shi…
His head hurt so bad.
Gai’s face turned from concern to shock.
And then Kakashi was shoved to the ground.
Someone held his head to the ground, hand clamped over his eyes. The weight of a body pressed onto his chest and Kakashi couldn’t breathe. He coughed pulling air into his lungs too fast and feeling dizzy, his lack of visual reference making him feel worse and worse.
“I don’t know who did it! I don’t know!”
Kakashi shouted out between breaths, flailing a bit. And then he couldn’t even get enough in to speak.
“STOP! LET GO OF HIM! HE’S JUST SCARED!” Gai pleaded to the Hokage, eyes darting in a panic from Hiruzen to his hyperventilating friend, held down to the floor by Danzou’s guards. The ANBU behind him didn’t release the hold in his arm from when he tried to lunge for Kakashi’s rescue.
All Gai wanted at that moment was to knock him back to help his rival, but he feared what an outburst from him as well would mean to Kakashi’s fate.
“You saw that eye, Maito-san.” Danzou said from where he stood from his seat. And the honorific somehow felt like an insult.
“Hatake-san has done something to his sharingan, he attempted to use a weapon against the shinobi in here, we simply acted in defense to avoid escalating the situation.”
He was wrong. Kakashi didn’t try to attack anyone. Gai didn’t know what the strange shape in Kakashi’s sharingan eye meant, but he had seen the pain in Kakashi’s eyes. He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone!
Gai could hear Kakashi’s harsh, too fast breathing when Danzou stopped talking. Tears sprang to his eyes. A frown set on his face.
“As we can see, Hatake cannot be trusted on his own word. He obviously does not have total clarity over his thoughts, emotions, actions or memories. It isn’t far fetched to conclude that he invisioned a situation in which I have ordered him to murder the Hokage, or a fictional “mokuton user”. His mind simply broke, being only 14. He’s unfit to be a shinobi any longer.”
“Hokage-sama…” Gai pleaded.
Hiruzen sat silent.
“I recommend he be put into psychiatric care. Locked away from anyone he might cause harm and sedated, protected from himself. The uchiha doujutsu stripped away from him for safety.”
“Hokage-sama-!” Gai begged .
“I…” the Hokage paused. Perhaps sad at failing another child of konoha. “I must think about it. Please take Kakashi-san to the hospital. We will continue this at a later date.”
The Hokage got up. They lifted the heaving Kakashi off the floor, carrying him off the room. The people got up and left, and the ANBU let go of Gai. And then Gai was alone.
Gai stood there in shock.