Chapter Text
The sky was blue. Not the gentle blue of robin’s eggs or summer lakes — but a gaping, godless blue, the kind that swallowed prayers whole. Satoru lay sprawled in the grass, his shadow a pale stain beneath him, and wondered if the heavens ever grew tired of their own emptiness.
Pathetic, he thought, watching a cloud fray at the edges. Everything up there is just… waiting to dissolve.
Human lives were no different. Fragile as moth wings, snuffed out between one breath and the next. He’d seen it a hundred times: the way bodies crumpled, the way eyes glazed over mid-scream. They called him the strongest, as if strength could armor him against the boredom of it all.
The grass prickled against his neck. Somewhere beyond his Infinity, a bee thrummed.
Then—
A footstep. Deliberate. Heavy.
Satoru didn’t turn. His Six Eyes had already traced the figure looming at the edge of the training field — a silhouette cut from the static between life and death.
The man moved like a relic.Silver hair, wild as if combed by the wind and left to its whims, framed a face half-hidden by shadows and an eye patch. The visible eye — dark as a nailhead, sharp as a katana edge — didn’t blink. Didn’t waver. It pinned Satoru to the earth with the weight of a verdict.
He wore fatigue like a second skin. Not the kind that came from sleepless nights, but the kind that seeped from the marrow, the kind that whispered ‘I have outlived the world that made me’.
His posture was a study in contradictions: lazy, yet coiled; relaxed, yet tensed to kill. The school uniform hung loose on his frame.
And the smell — not sweat or steel, but something older. Wet earth. Ink. The ozone-tang of a storm that refused to break.
Interesting.
"Senpai," Satoru drawled, plucking a dandelion from the soil, "if you’re here to scold me for skipping class, bring a better argument than Yaga’s disappointed face."
Kakashi’s eye crinkled — not a smile, but the barest acknowledgment of a threat.
“Mm. If I cared about attendance, I wouldn't be here either" Kakashi said, his voice as dry as the dandelion dust clinging to Satoru’s fingers.
A beat. The wind carried the petals away.
Satoru opened his mouth—to tease, to demand, to force a reaction—but Kakashi was already walking off, hands in pockets, his shadow stretching unnaturally long behind him. It slithered over the grass like ink spilled from a well, and for a fraction of a second, Satoru swore it winked.
That was the first time Gojo Satoru spoke to Hatake Kakashi.
It wouldn’t be the last.
—
Mission Report:
Assignment: Curse Extermination
Location: Enkō-ji Ruins — an abandoned temple on the outskirts of Tokyo, once destroyed during the Heian era when monks failed to seal a curse that fed on grief. Now, its shattered torii gates weep black sap, and the air smells of burnt incense and iron.
Curse Grade: Grade 1
Anomalies: Repeated disappearances of sorcerers and civilians. The boundary between life and death is unstable. Reports indicate a residual echo of unknown origin.
Objective: Eliminate the curse. Identify the cause of residual disturbances.
Satoru stepped over the rubble, teleporting onto the broken altar in a careless flicker of space. A skull, brittle with age, crumbled beneath his foot and skittered forward, shattering against Kakashi’s boot.
The Enkō-ji ruins had long since been swallowed by the earth, its once-sacred foundation fractured, its sutras eroded to whispers. The torii gates still stood—barely—bowed and weeping black sap, their edges charred as if licked by an ancient fire.
It smelled of incense and iron. Of prayers abandoned mid-verse.
“Bet you ten yen this place has more curses than the Zen’in clan has daddy issues.”
Kakashi didn’t look up from his book. “Hm. Only ten?.”
The ground at his feet rippled. Shadows coiled in the periphery, shifting with a hunger too deep for words.
Satoru stomped once. The earth split open.
A curse dragged itself into the dim light—skeletal, sinewy, its flesh a patchwork of sutras that bled scripture. It shrieked, the sound warping as if it had been buried for centuries. The temple trembled in response, stone Buddhas shedding tears of red.
“Oops,” Satoru sing-songed. “Must’ve woken up Grandma.”
The curse reared back, bones grinding, eyes—if they could be called that—locking onto Kakashi.
Kakashi sighed, closing his book with a quiet snap. His visible eye remained unreadable, but his shadow shifted. Stretched. Split.
And then it swallowed the curse whole.
No struggle. No resistance. One moment, the thing was screaming, and the next—emptiness.
Satoru’s grin faded as he watched. The temple walls groaned, unsettled by something deeper than just a feeding.
Obito’s ghost was never fully seen. Never fully heard. But it was felt. The temple shook as the curse screamed.
Then—silence.
When the dust settled, there was no body left. No cursed energy lingering like an aftertaste. Just a void where something had once existed, now devoured by the thing that lived in Kakashi’s shadow.
Satoru’s Six Eyes burned, drinking in the impossible.
Obito had consumed it. Entirely. No residue, no remains. Just emptiness.
Satoru whistled, stepping forward. The air was thick, saturated with something wrong.
Satoru tipped his head. “…You feed him.”
Kakashi adjusted his eyepatch. “He takes what he wants”
Satoru crouched, fingers brushing the dirt where the curse had stood. A beat. Wind stirred the dust where the curse had died, revealing nothing beneath it. Not even a stain.
“That’s not a technique,” Satoru's Infinity flickers-his first real surprise. "That's a haunting."
Kakashi’s eye crinkled. “Does it matter?”
The wind stirred. In the hollow breath of the ruins, something—someone—laughed.
—
Satoru crunched down on his lollipop, glassy shards of sugar tinkling against his teeth. "Hey, Hatake." He tilted his head, watching the ground at Kakashi’s feet. "Your shadow’s looking a little extra today."
Kakashi turned a page in his book without looking up. "It’s rude to stare."
A beat. Then—
Satoru blurred, Infinity-enhanced fist cutting through the air toward Kakashi’s temple.
The hit never landed.
Kakashi’s book didn’t even close as he phased through the strike, Satoru’s knuckles passing through his skull like mist.
"Huh," Satoru muttered, flexing his fingers as if testing their solidity. "So that’s what a ghost feels like."
Kakashi’s shadow pulsed—not behind him, but around him, tendrils of darkness licking at Satoru’s ankles.
"You’re predictable." Kakashi barely spared him a glance. "Does Infinity make you lazy?"
Satoru’s grin sharpened. "Nah. Just pretty."
He snapped his fingers. Blue.
The compressed energy detonated, a pulse ripping through the training ground, uprooting trees, sending dust spiraling into the sky—
But Kakashi was already gone.
A whisper of displaced air.
Then—
A grip.
Five skeletal fingers, webbed in shadow, clamped down. The skin was translucent, veins pulsing with cursed energy instead of blood erupted from Kakashi’s shadow, fingers curling like steel around Satoru’s ankle.
"Oh, hell—"
A yank. A violent, undignified yank.
Satoru’s feet were torn from beneath him, body flipping midair as Obito’s spectral grip hurled him like a skipping stone. He twisted, trying to catch himself—
Too late.
With a graceless thud, he skidded to a stop, sprawled in a cloud of dust.
Satoru stared at nothing, then flicked his gaze toward the post behind him—where the stick of the lollipop had embedded itself, quivering, exactly where his skull had been a second ago.
Kakashi, still reading, turned a page.
Satoru grinned, pushing himself up. "Tomorrow," he called, brushing dust off his uniform, "I’ll make you really move."
Kakashi didn’t turn. "You’ll try."
The shadow at Satoru’s feet flickered—just once—with a Sharingan’s red glow.