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Hatake Kakashi closes his eyes for the last time in a triage tent at the edge of a battlefield. It’s as he always supposed it would be; conflict and violence have been the only constants in his longer-than-anticipated life, and while it’s been more than three decades now since he held a Sharingan, he looks up from where his head is resting in his husband’s lap and sees not Gai’s wethered and time-worn face, creased with lines from smiles at his eyes and cheeks and worry across his forehead, but the smooth, carefree face from their prime years. He doesn’t have the energy to reach up and touch, but he smiles in his last moments nonetheless. The battle will rage on, but it will not be his, and Gai will be there to get their kids — not quite grandparents themselves yet but they’ll always be their kids — through it. He breathes out and lets his eyelids fall shut on the image of Gai as the newly-minted Jounin sensei he was so long ago, and is at peace.
He opens them again in some kind of large tube and looks out through glass at a woman with dark hair and angular features, gazing at him through green eyes glinting with... satisfaction?
He barely has time to think Orochimaru’s name with no small level of alarm before he fades out again.
The next time he awakens, he finds himself in what appears to be a crib. His head is immensely heavy and his hands are pudgy and squat and his first instinct is still to blame Orochimaru until the shinobi who enters to check on him opens his mouth and says something in a language that is distinctly not Elemental Standard.
Well. That’s... inconvenient.
The next year or so is spent trying to grasp not one, not two, but no less than eighteen different languages. The expectation seems to be less that he’ll truly be able to speak all of them in that time and more that he’ll be able to code-switch between them depending on who is caring for him on a given day. He’s familiar enough with the concept from his time in ANBU that he actually unintentionally delays himself by trying to do so consciously rather than letting the process be automatic. It’s not until the fourth time he’s being switched for disobeying an order from one of his teachers that it seems to sink into his stupid baby-not-a-baby brain that he’s not supposed to think about what they're saying, only follow it. Fluency will arise after obedience. It smells a little too much like Root for his taste, but among the deeply unfortunate consequences of a fresh baby body is that his nerves are unaccustomed to the level of pain stimulus he’s being presented with, meaning that his self-control is more compromised than he would like to admit even to himself. It’s something most of his teachers are swiftly on their way to rectifying, and he’s more than aware of its uses as it pushes him to learn orders more quickly, but that doesn’t mean he’s any happier about it. Being aware of the conditioning can only do so much when his infant body still has pain-based survival instincts instead of experience-based ones.
The woman from the other side of the glass comes and observes his training at times, occasionally sweeping him away from his lessons for some kind of reprieve. Usually it involves her reading to him from books he can’t read the titles of yet, though occasionally she also gives him a toy or puzzle. He learns quickly not to get too attached to either because they're always gone within a week after he received them, but there's something soothing about these sessions that makes them precious anyway. The puzzles let him work on automating his hand-eye coordination, and the only time he feels anything approximating peace is when he’s held in the woman’s arms, ear pressed against her collarbone as her voice lilts and tips over words he doesn’t yet understand. Some part of him thinks that at this point, he wouldn’t even care if she did turn out to be Orochimaru’s newest body; there's so much comfort in not having to learn or train or fight for those few small hours that he would squash his fear and disgust and cling to her side anyway.
The one word that sticks with him from these sessions is a word he never hears from anyone else. There's something about the way all his other tutors address him that makes it clear to him that they're referring to him by some title or honorific.
Only the green eyed woman calls him “Damian.”
Another year or so passes, and Damian begins combat training.
He learns knives quickly according to his tutors, and the basic foundation he developed in his last life on various types of weaponry (ranging from nunchaku to meteor hammer and everywhere in-between) serve him well as they continue to introduce more and more complex weaponry to his still-too pudgy hands. Part of him feels that he ought to be embarrassed by his showing; certainly, he would be doing vastly better in his adult body, but he’s not dissatisfied with his efforts, given his current limitations, and feels that his tutors could probably stand to be less generous with both the switch and the paddle they’ve begun transitioning to, but he’ll take what he can get.
Around the time they start him in on kenjutsu he’s struck by the realization that his tutors are not delaying the introduction of chakra to his training; rather, it seems to have ceased to exist. This is alarming enough when it strikes him shortly after he’s been sent to bed that Damian’s stupid baby brain becomes overwhelmed with emotion and his body begins to wail without his consent. He tries to reign it in independently, but isn’t able to grasp his self-control well enough to do so before the sharp pain of the night’s caretaker striking his cheeks helps shock him out of it. At least the damned conditioning is doing its job, he thinks, and gives up on stopping the hot tears continuing to leak silently from his stupid baby eyes from pooling uncomfortably in his ears.It’s disturbing that he hadn’t realized the lack of chakra in his body and surroundings earlier, but there's nothing he can do about it now.
Perhaps he should have guessed it would be coming, given the way his first childhood had gone, but he finds himself startled nonetheless when the sense of helplessness and bafflement combines with the frustration of not being able to stop the tears still escaping his eyes and turns into a blinding, white-hot fury and makes him want to scream and tear at his bedclothes. Instead, he brings an arm to his mouth and turns his face into his pillow to pretend that he’d be able to muffle it if the sound escaped his tenuous hold on it.
He wakes in the morning with a deep indent of teeth on his arm, but the night caretaker hadn’t had to come and beat him to silence, so he’ll take his victories where he can get them.
Another year passes, and then another, and the part of Damian that remembers Kakashi as sense-memory specifically begins to hope that time will begin to accelerate as it had when Kakashi was in his twenties, where weeks and months felt shorter simply because he’d had so many of them.
Damian kills his first man in this life— a traitor reserved for the purpose by his knife instructor, who has only ever spoken Mandarin to him— climbs a mountain without equipment or chakra, and loses the same damn eye as in his last life while fighting a mountain lion only to have it surgically replaced within hours of his return. He intentionally does not allow himself to question where the replacement came from, just as he never has before and refuses to consider doing anytime in the future as other parts become needed. He learns that the green eyed woman does not go by Orochimaru’s name but is instead referred to as Lady Talia, and that the old man who reviews his progress once in a blue moon is his grandfather, and doesn’t learn until he hears Lady Talia refer to the man as “father” that she is most likely his mother and not merely his creator. It’s something he notes with passing interest, but like all the toys and games he’d only been allowed for a week or less after she gave them to him, he doesn’t allow himself to become attached to the idea. She clearly wants him loyal to her as a soldier rather than a son, so that’s the most connection he’ll allow himself to her.
He learns enough about history and geography in preparation for his upcoming Year of Blood— explained to him by his kenjutsu and Cantonese instructor as an opportunity to prove himself both loyal and capable in the Demon’s Head’s eyes— that he’s able to determine (with no small degree of reluctance) that he’s not merely in another time, place, or dimension, but rather that he seems to have been reborn in an entirely different world. It seems a step too far to him; seals that allow time travel and alternate worlds with different versions of all the people he knew and loved were difficult to grasp when he encountered them, but he was able to make his peace with the ideas as necessary. An entirely different planet with a different history and different continents? That’s nearly more than he’s willing to accept, until he remembers that the Otsutsuki had supposedly travelled from another world to his own. At that point he’s forced to concede the plausibility, and from there it’s merely a matter of conditioning himself into acceptance alongside all the other training he’s being subjected to.
In the last months before his Year of Blood is set to begin, he achieves acceptable levels of fluency in Farsi, Arabic, Cantonese, French, Greek, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, and, of course, the League dialect. Lady Talia says his English is largely passable, but that he tends toward a more artificial accent than will be acceptable when he returns. He has, relative to his height and weight, mastered the use of more than forty types of weapons, eighteen poisons, and every stealth technique anyone has deigned to introduce to him.
Lady Talia informs him that if he is successful in returning from his Year of Blood alive, he will be required to call her Mother. Only then, she says, will he have earned that right, and it would be unacceptable for him to decline it upon having achieved it.
Damian nods as solemnly as his round baby face and swollen lip, obtained in his final combat trial, will allow before leaving to pack for a year of violence and bloodshed.
Kakashi remembers enough from ANBU that it won’t take much time at all to be ready to leave.
Damian returns one year later with three of his first four adult teeth mostly grown in and the fourth still leaking blood into his mouth from where his fourth incisor had come out on the plane ride back. His head is more Hound than either Kakashi or Damian, but he’s careful to keep that thought tucked away where it won’t interfere with his ability to give his report. What he doesn't do wrong is probably less likely to get him killed, after all. He calls Lady Talia “Mother” as ordered, and is granted the similar privilege/command of referring to the Demon’s Head publicly as “Grandfather.” His training increases in intensity, but at the same time, his position of privilege becomes such that it’s almost difficult to recall that the same servants who now bow and scrape to him in the corridors as he passes by were the ones who dragged him from his bed for resistance training not two years before. He has elevated so quickly from a subject to a prince that he finds himself reeling at the change. Certainly, if he had only had his own memories and experiences from this life it might have gone to Damian’s head that he had earned the right to be treated as such by everyone he encountered. Fortunately, his time as Kakashi had taught him to be wary of such intense about-faces in attitude from members of highly militaristic organizations of dubious legality. He proceeds warily, not quite willing to accept any presumed security of his new position, but it’s hard to deny that there's something about being a child again that makes him rather susceptible to praise and compliments. He tells himself he doesn’t believe a word they say, but more often than not he finds himself fighting to control a pleased flush when someone mentions some accomplishment or other with glowing admiration in their voice.
His caution seems to have been warranted, however unsuccessfully he was able to cling to it. Tensions are beginning to rise among the members of the Demon’s Head’s court, and in response, Mother tells Damian to be prepared to move at a moment’s notice. One never knows when one’s enemies will deign to end their cowardice and strike, after all.
Perhaps it’s in response to the rising threat, or perhaps it’s part of a larger, more detailed plan; no one deigns to inform Damian and he can therefore do little more than speculate. Regardless, in the end it’s not quite a year after he’s returned from his Year of Blood that Damian is told he has a new task.
He’s being sent to meet his father.