These flashback scenes with tiny baby Itachi is such a trip, tbh. Like this is an eight year old. This is a baby. Him wearing the lil cat ears with his genin teammates at granny cat's, god.
The part where he tentatively goes "oh okay so this is what friendship is, these are my friends" is kind of hysterical. But then one of his teammates DIES on an escort mission, and while he is processing it at home later THAT'S when his sharingan first activates? He is still eight years old at this point in time?
His dad is congratulating him on his eyes and his promotion and little Itachi is quite literally thinking inside his head "my FRIEND is DEAD" but then puts on the normal (tm) face and says something like "ill do my best dad" oooh man ahahahahaaaa this is going to get BAD isn't it? Yeah sure, let's put this baby on the assassination squad. Hashirama somewhere rolling like a rotisserie chicken in his grave. My man said "I started this village in part so we could cool it with the whole child soldier thing" and we are literally FAILING step one
This line from Hiruzen is brief but it says so much about the way Konoha operates. In this panel, Naruto is 12, but because he graduated from the academy and earned his headband, by Konoha standards he is now an adult. Following this logic that means that Itachi, the Sannin, and Kakashi, who graduated at ages 7, 6, and 5 respectively, would have also been regarded as adults. I don't think I need to explain why that's fucked up.
But what makes it worse is that it reminds me of another scene:
Kawarama Senju was only 7 when he died, but being a Shinobi meant Butsuma and the other adult ninjas viewed him as an adult. Hashirama and Madara formed Konoha in part to stop this attitude because they'd seen how badly it impacted their own families...but it took relatively little time for this practice to return, enforced by one of Hashirama's followers no less.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Minato does not think of Kakashi as his heir until he becomes Hokage and discovers that everybody else already does.
The realization comes quietly, buried beneath the ordinary ugliness of administration.
Hatake Kakashi’s name appears too often. It surfaces in mission requests from merchants with long purses and short memories, in letters from minor lords who have heard of the boy with the borrowed eye, in recommendations from commanders who praise his judgment and then request him for assignments with projected casualty rates they would never accept for their own children.
Reconnaissance beyond the eastern border. Infiltration through Iwa territory. Assassination work dressed in the respectable language of political necessity. Missions requiring discretion, endurance and, according to one client, a shinobi unlikely to hesitate when circumstances become unfavorable.
Kakashi is fourteen, yet the file does not say this with sufficient force. It records his age in the upper corner beside his rank, blood type and registration number, as though fourteen and jōnin are facts capable of sitting comfortably beside one another. Beneath them stretches the neat arithmetic of a life spent being useful: Academy graduation, promotion, war service, field commendations, injuries, mission totals.
Sakumo’s death occupies two lines.
Obito’s occupies four.
Rin’s is folded into a report so heavily redacted that Minato can see his own grief only in the black bars crossing the page.
Kakashi’s survival is listed simply as an outcome. There is no space on the form to explain what survival has made of him.
Minato reads the entire file after midnight, alone beneath the low lamps of the Hokage’s office. Rain whispers against the windows, soft enough that he can hear the turn of each page and the distant footfall of the ANBU stationed outside.
He knows every event recorded there. He had lived through most of them.
Still, seeing them gathered in official ink gives them a different cruelty.
A boy loses his father and is promoted. He loses one teammate and completes the mission. He kills the other by accident and returns to active duty. The village takes each ruin, stamps it, files it, and calls the result experience.
Minato sits for a long time with one hand resting over Kakashi’s mission history.
The requests continue arriving. They praise Kakashi’s adaptability, his precision, his unusual calm under pressure, and his capacity to function alone.
Minato first notices it months before taking office: thin, worn at the corners, its title plain enough that even a passing glance leaves a coldness behind. He never asks directly. Kakashi is clever enough to answer questions without revealing anything, and proud enough to turn concern into a problem he must solve for the adult offering it.
Nobody writes that he has become so skilled at leaving quietly that people mistake absence for composure.
Nobody mentions the little book he carries.
Attempts to reach him tend to end the same way.
Kakashi accepts food if Minato pretends there is too much. He permits company at the memorial stone if Minato arrives without announcing that he has come for him. He submits to medical examinations, follows orders and appears at the house when summoned, provided nobody says the word home.
The moment Minato reaches too plainly, Kakashi’s face becomes courteous and empty.
The book remains.
Minato hates it with a helplessness he cannot admit. He cannot confiscate it without acknowledging why Kakashi keeps it. He cannot demand an explanation without forcing the boy to defend the very despair he is trying to conceal.
The elders interpret this silence as confidence. They see Kakashi differently. To them, he is the last surviving student of the Fourth Hokage, Sakumo’s son, a prodigy whose reputation has begun to move ahead of him. He has inherited technique, notoriety and the convenient mythology of being the one left standing.
They call him Minato’s natural successor before Minato has ever permitted himself to think the word.
“He has the instincts for command,” one elder says during a council meeting.
“He has no interest in command,” Minato replies.
“That may recommend him.”
“He is fourteen.”
“He will not remain fourteen.”
The answer is delivered with the patient condescension of someone discussing weather.
Minato looks across the table and understands, suddenly, that they do not see a child at all.
They see continuity. And the village...is always hungry for continuity. It takes the survivors of one generation and arranges them into the scaffolding of the next. Kakashi, with his father’s name, Obito’s eye and Minato’s training, has become an especially elegant construction.
An heir without being named one. A boy expected to inherit not merely authority, but enemies, unfinished wars and every duty left behind by the dead.
He shortens a border assignment, redirects an assassination contract to an older team and personally reviews every request bearing Kakashi’s name. Missions that once would have seemed difficult but ordinary now appear edged with a terror he does not recognize in himself.
Minato has never been frightened of missions. He has been frightened during them, certainly. Fear belongs to battle as naturally as blood and mud. But no assignment has ever acquired weight merely because a particular shinobi has been asked to undertake it.
Now distance disturbs him.
The possibility of Kakashi’s death has always existed but affection makes it immediate.
How long Kakashi will be beyond the walls.
How far he will travel.
Whether the route passes through old Iwa territory, where ruined bridges and abandoned outposts still hold the shape of things the boy cannot forget.
Whether the client values completion more than return.
Once Minato recognizes the feeling, he cannot force it back into abstraction. Every departure becomes a small act of violence. Every delay reaches beneath his ribs. He begins listening for Kakashi’s step in the corridor long before reports are due.
The elders notice.
“Kakashi’s services are in demand,” Homura says. “The village cannot afford to decline profitable contracts because you find them distasteful.”
“I find them wasteful.”
“You find them personal.”
Minato meets his gaze. Homura does not look away.
The accusation hurts because it is accurate enough to survive denial.
Koharu folds her hands over the table. “He is one of Konoha’s most capable jōnin.”
“He is also one of its youngest.”
“He has never required special treatment.”
“No,” Minato says quietly. “That may be part of the problem.”
The room stills in anticipation yet he does not explain. There is no vocabulary in the council chamber for what he means. No administrative category for a boy who has endured too much too competently. No budget line for mercy.
The village needs revenue. Kakashi brings it. Every successful mission increases his value and lowers everyone’s reluctance to send him on the next one. Survival becomes proof that further survival may be demanded.
On paper, the appointment is impeccable. Kakashi is disciplined, discreet and already accustomed to work that requires silence afterward. Placing him under the Hokage’s direct authority allows Minato to control his deployments, reserve his skills for missions of genuine necessity and deny clients who have begun treating Hatake Kakashi like an expensive weapon available for hire.
It also keeps him near (That reason does not appear in the recommendation).
The elders approve because ANBU remains useful, prestigious and lethal enough to satisfy their sense of proportion. Minato signs the assignment with a steady hand.
Only later does he consider the cruelty in it. He wants to protect Kakashi, so he places him inside an institution designed to make wounded shinobi more efficient. He gives the boy a porcelain mask because he has never managed to persuade him to remove the one he already wears.
Kakashi accepts immediately.
That should frighten Minato more than it does. He kneels before the Hokage’s desk in dark uniform, the new mask resting against one thigh. The painted face is smooth and expressionless. It looks too large in his hands.
“You’ll serve as my private guard,” Minato says.
Kakashi inclines his head.
“Yes, Hokage sama.”
The title sounds wrong from him - too clean, too distant. Minato has heard Kakashi call him sensei across battlefields, through fever, from beneath rubble. Hokage sama places an office between them and closes the door.
He almost corrects him. Instead he adds, “Your assignment includes Kushina.”
Kakashi looks up.
“She is not Hokage.”
“She is frequently near the Hokage.”
“That seems like a flaw in the security arrangement.”
“It is a flaw in my wife.”
From the adjoining room comes Kushina’s voice, bright with outrage.
“I can hear you, 'ttebane!”
Kakashi’s eye shifts toward the door. For the first time since entering, it curves faintly at the corner.
Minato feels something inside him loosen.
The order gives him a reason to keep Kakashi close without naming the fear beneath it. Kakashi shadows him through the tower, stands beyond council doors and keeps watch from the narrow ledges outside the office windows. When Minato returns home, Kakashi follows because Kushina is there and therefore remains, technically, part of his assignment.
The first evening, he stops at the threshold. The house is warm with the smell of broth and ginger. Kushina is setting bowls on the table, sleeves pushed to her elbows, red hair coiled loosely over one shoulder. Steam softens the edges of the room.
“You can stand outside after dinner,” she says.
“I’m on duty.”
“Yes. Your duty is to ensure nobody murders me before you finish your rice.”
Kakashi glances toward Minato, as if silently asking for clarification. Minato removes his cloak and sits.
“The threat assessment supports her conclusion.”
Kakashi remains in the doorway for another moment, caught between obedience and suspicion.
Then he takes off his sandals.
Kushina does not smile. That would make the victory visible. Instead, she sets down a third bowl.
Kakashi eats because refusing would now be more conspicuous than staying.
This becomes the method. Kushina never asks whether he is sleeping. She complains that Minato works too late and instructs Kakashi to drag him home if the office lamps remain lit after midnight.
She never asks whether he has visited the memorial stone. She sends him to the market with a list and scolds him for choosing vegetables according to qualities no civilian cook would recognize.
“These tomatoes are green 'ttebane,” she says.
“They are structurally sound.”
“They are tomatoes, Kakashi. They are not being deployed.”
“They would have ripened.”
“Under interrogation?”
He stands in the kitchen holding the shopping basket, his visible eye narrowed with the grave offense of a jōnin whose tactical judgment has been questioned over produce.
Kushina takes the tomatoes anyway.
She finds tasks for him without offering care in a shape he might reject. A shelf needs repairing. Groceries are too heavy. Minato has left classified documents beside the pickles again and clearly requires supervision.
Kakashi is not being comforted, he is being employed.
The distinction preserves his dignity.
Minato sees what she is doing and loves her for the precision of it.
Weeks pass. Kakashi begins arriving through the kitchen window instead of waiting on the roof. Kushina condemns this every time while automatically placing another cup beside the kettle. A spare pair of sandals appears beneath the veranda. Nobody asks who put them there.
Some evenings, Kakashi speaks. Most, he listens. He sits with his back to the wall, mask lowered while he eats, one eye tracking the room out of habit. Kushina tells him which merchants are cheats. Minato complains about the council. Kakashi offers dry assessments so accurate they border on insubordination.
One night, Minato finds him asleep beside the doorway after an assignment within the village. Kakashi sits upright even in sleep, head tilted against the wood, ANBU mask hanging loose from one hand. The suicide manual lies open across his knee.
He still leaves the moment conversation turns too tender.
He still visits the stone.
He still carries the book.
For several seconds, Minato stands over him. The house is quiet. Kushina has gone to bed. Rain breathes softly against the roof.
He could take the book. The urge rises with such force that his fingers curl. He imagines Kakashi waking to find it gone. The immediate stillness. The blank expression. The careful, unbearable politeness with which he would ask for it back.
Minato knows then that confiscation would not remove the thought. It would only teach Kakashi to hide it better.
He leaves the book where it is. Instead, he drapes a blanket over the boy’s shoulders and lowers the lamp.
In the morning, the blanket has been folded with military precision and placed at the end of the table.
There are mornings when Kakashi’s face is pale beneath the mask and his answers arrive half a second too late. There are missions inside the village walls that leave blood on his gloves and silence at the dinner table. Sometimes he sits before a full bowl without tasting anything, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the room.
But he sits.
For now, that becomes enough.
Minato had once resisted the idea of Kakashi as his heir because it seemed absurd. Kakashi is too young, too wounded and too indifferent to power. He obeys rules because rules hold the world together, not because he wants to inherit the person who writes them.
But the longer Minato watches him, the more he understands that heirship in Konoha has never been only about office. It is about burden - and Kakashi has inherited Sakumo’s shame, Obito’s eye, Rin’s death and Minato’s enemies. The village has already placed its expectations on his narrow shoulders and begun calling the weight destiny.
Minato begins to want something smaller for him.
Protecting Kushina remains Kakashi’s official duty. Being drawn into their lives happens so gradually that he never finds a clean moment to refuse.
Meals eaten while warm.
A place where his absence is noticed before a mission report is late.
Kushina arguing with him over tomatoes.
A cup placed beside the kettle without ceremony.
The right to enter through the window, leave without explanation and still be expected back.
Later, when they learn she is pregnant, Minato assigns Kakashi to her protection fully. He presents the decision as a security measure. Kushina nods with suspicious innocence.
Kakashi looks from one to the other.
“You planned this.”
“Planned what?” Kushina asks.
“This.”
She places a bowl of sliced fruit in front of him. “Eat.”
His eye narrows, but he eats anyways.
For now, he remains behind Minato’s chair in the Hokage’s office, close enough that Minato can hear the quiet rhythm of his breathing. The elders complain that such talent should not be wasted on domestic guard work. The village needs revenue. Clients continue asking for Hatake Kakashi by name.
Minato continues saying no.
He tells himself it is strategy, and sometimes...it is. In the evenings, Kakashi follows them home. He keeps watch from the roof until Kushina calls that dinner is getting cold, then appears at the window with feigned reluctance and rain silvering his hair.
Minato cannot make him speak about the dead. He cannot persuade him to surrender the book or convince him that surviving should not become another duty. He cannot protect him from everything the village has already taught him to accept.
But there are nights when three pairs of sandals rest beside the door.
There are mornings when Kakashi falls asleep at the table and wakes beneath a blanket he pretends not to recognize. There are meals where Kushina complains, Minato laughs, and Kakashi’s eye bends briefly into something young.
Minato has brought him close and knows proximity is not the same as safety.
Still, it is not nothing.
Sometimes, standing in the quiet house with Kakashi’s mask resting beside the rice bowls and his little book closed beneath one careless hand, Minato allows himself a sliver of faith.
Perhaps an heir does not have to be the person left standing after everyone else is gone. Perhaps he may inherit something gentler.
Given enough time, perhaps even Kakashi might learn that being kept close is not always another form of duty.
A place at the table.
A light left burning.
The certainty that someone will notice when he is late.
Kakashi knew the memorial stone better than he knew most living people.
He knew where rainwater lingered longest after a storm and which names disappeared first beneath winter snow. He knew the pale seam running through the granite near its base, the stubborn patch of moss that returned every summer, and the shallow groove Obito’s name had worn beneath his fingers - not from erosion, but from habit.
The stone changed with the weather. The dead did not.
That afternoon, rain had washed the clearing in grey. It whispered through the leaves overhead and gathered in the carved characters until the names gleamed darkly, as if written in fresh ink. Kakashi stood before them with his hands buried in his pockets, damp hair sagging over his forehead protector.
He had already found Obito.
He had already found Rin.
Technically, there was nothing else he had come to see. His gaze wandered anyway, passing over older casualties, unfamiliar clans and children who had died before he entered the Academy. He might have left without noticing anything had the name not belonged to someone he once knew.
Not well. Kakashi had known very few people well at that age. The boy had sat two rows behind him and chewed his pencils until the wood frayed between his teeth. He laughed too loudly whenever a teacher misspoke and always forgot to tie the left side of his hitai-ate properly during drills. Kakashi could no longer recall his voice.
He remembered his name.
But apparently, the memorial did not. One stroke in the surname angled the wrong way - it was a small error. The sort that survived because no one looking at hundreds of names had reason to pause over that particular one.
Kakashi did. He touched the character with two gloved fingers. Rainwater filled the shallow cut beneath them, cold and black.
By morning, the wrong name had followed him into the Hokage Tower. Minato found it waiting upon his desk, written twice on a narrow sheet of paper. Kakashi’s hand was neat enough to resemble print, and the difference between the two versions was so slight that Minato initially thought he was looking at a correction in spacing.
Then he saw the stroke and paused.
Kakashi stood near the office window, carrying the wet smell of the morning inside with him. Water had darkened his sandals and gathered along the shoulders of his uniform, but he appeared not to notice.
“You’re certain?” Minato asked.
“Yes.”
There was no impatience in the answer, only the rigid certainty Kakashi reserved for things he had already checked too many times.
Minato studied the two names again. “Did you know him?”
Kakashi’s gaze settled somewhere beyond the paper.
“No.”
Pause. A breath later, he added, “I remember him.”
For Kakashi, Minato knew, there was a difference. Knowing required closeness. Remembering merely required that someone had once occupied a space and then stopped.
Minato sent for the memorial records.
The first ledgers arrived before breakfast and brought half the old Archives with them: dust, brittle paper and the sour scent of ink that had aged in sealed cupboards. By midday, clerks had covered his meeting table with casualty rolls, Academy registers and stoneworker requisitions. The incorrect character appeared in every document produced after the boy’s death.
Before it, his name had always been written properly.
The senior clerk seemed relieved by the discovery, “the mason was not responsible, Hokage sama. He copied the approved casualty list exactly.”
He said it as though responsibility had been settled rather than displaced.
Minato turned back several pages. The boy’s Academy enrollment form bore the correct surname. So did his medical examination, his genin assignment and the single completed mission report attached to his file.
Then he died, and someone changed it.
“Who approved the casualty entry?”
The clerk bent closer. His finger moved over the bottom of the page, past the unit seal and the date.
“There should be a signature.”
There was only the broad red stamp of the Wartime Personnel Office, driven so hard into the paper that its edge had split the sheet.
Minato knew the office. Everyone who had served through the war knew it, though few remembered it fondly. It had been created when casualty reports began arriving faster than the village could process them and dissolved when Konoha no longer wished to examine too closely how many compromises it had made to survive.
Its former directors had retired with commendations. Its records now occupied the least orderly corner of the Archives.
“Bring me the original mission report,” Minato ordered.
No one moved at first. The clerk’s reluctance was slight, visible only in the way his shoulders drew inward before he bowed. He returned an hour later with dust on his cuffs and an apology prepared.
The file could not be located.
“Misfiled,” he suggested.
Kakashi had remained near the window throughout the search, silent enough that the clerks had begun behaving as if he were part of the furniture.
“Stolen,” he said.
The clerk looked sharply toward him.
Minato did not correct either of them. “Find it.”
The wrong name should have remained a single error. A careless stroke copied from one list to another until it reached the stone.
By evening, the table had filled with contradictions. A medic whose clan name changed after her death, two brothers listed as casualties in different provinces( although their former captain remembered losing them together), A kunoichi declared missing by one office and killed in action by another three months later.
Kakashi found the genin whose name started it all. The first ledger called him a deserter. The second placed his name on the memorial.
The boy had apparently abandoned his village and died defending it.
Kakashi read both entries beneath the yellow light of the desk lamp. The flame hissed whenever damp air found its way through the shutters.
“Which one is true?”
Minato drew the ledgers closer. The desertion classification had been entered first. The death record followed almost a year later, written in a different hand and sealed by a different department.
Perhaps someone had discovered the mistake and tried to correct it. Minato wanted that to be true.
Then he noticed that the later entry contained no restoration of rank, no compensation authorization and no amendment to the family register. The name had been placed on the stone, but the desertion remained everywhere that money or honor might be claimed.
“They didn’t correct it,” he said.
Kakashi’s fingers tightened against the edge of the table.
“No.”
Minato looked at the two versions of the boy’s death.
“They hid it.”
The missing mission file was eventually found inside a crate marked for disposal, buried beneath weather reports and obsolete supply inventories. Someone had replaced several pages with copies convincing enough to survive an ordinary review. The paper was of the correct year. The signatures had been imitated carefully. Even the ink had faded at roughly the same rate.
The lie had not been made carelessly. The official report described three young shinobi volunteering to hold the rear while their commander evacuated civilians from an advancing enemy force. It was a clean account of ugly heroism: frightened children choosing sacrifice, seasoned officers forced to accept it, the village preserved through courage.
The field notes told another story.
There had been no civilians. The unit had withdrawn to protect its senior operatives after the commander misjudged the enemy’s strength. Three newly promoted genin had been ordered to remain behind and delay pursuit.
None had volunteered. The boy whose name Kakashi remembered had cried.
That detail survived in the hurried notes of a field medic, wedged between estimates of blood loss and a request for additional bandages. It had not survived into the report. Fear made poor material for memorials.
The commander received a commendation for preserving valuable personnel under impossible conditions.
The children received three lines between them, while one received the wrong name.
Minato read the file twice, though the second reading offered nothing the first had not already made clear. The office around him seemed to recede, leaving only the parchment, the old ink and the white Hokage cloak hanging beside the door.
He had imagined the office would feel different once it belonged to him. As a child, he had looked toward the Hokage Monument and thought power must feel like standing above the village, high enough to see every roof and road. Instead, it felt like sitting at a desk built by other men, opening drawers they had chosen to leave locked.
Kakashi waited across from him. He was fourteen. Too young for the stillness he wore and old enough, by Konoha’s standards, to have already buried most of his family.
“Who signed it?” he asked.
Minato turned the final page. The report carried several approvals: the commander, the quartermaster, Wartime Personnel.
At the top sat the authorization seal of the Hokage’s office.
Rain returned after dusk and followed them to Hiruzen’s home.
The former Hokage received them in a room still arranged around habits of command. Scrolls crowded the low table. A map of Fire Country remained pinned beside the window. His armor had been packed into a wooden chest, but the lid was not fully closed.
Retirement had removed the hat. It had not yet persuaded the room that he no longer wore it.
Hiruzen read the altered mission report slowly. The steam from his tea faded before he reached the final page.
When he saw his seal, his expression barely changed. That frightened Minato more than surprise would have.
“Did you know?” he asked.
Hiruzen’s thumb rested over the red mark.
“Not about these children.”
It was an answer shaped to fit around the question. Minato felt Kakashi’s attention sharpen from the darkened edge of the room.
“You knew records were being altered.”
Outside, water ran steadily from the eaves. Hiruzen looked toward the sound, and for an instant the years of war seemed to settle upon him.
“Reports arrived by the hundreds,” he said. “Sometimes by the thousands. Units vanished before their losses could be verified. Commanders submitted contradictory accounts. Families demanded bodies we did not have and answers no one could provide.”
“So you allowed the Personnel Office to invent them?”
“I allowed classifications to be adjusted where disclosure threatened operations or stability.”
The language was careful. Administrative. Bloodless. Minato had used similar language himself in council meetings. It was easier to discuss sacrifice when verbs had no subjects.
“Children were ordered to die,” he said. “Their commander called it voluntary, and your office approved the report.”
“My office approved thousands of documents.”
“Your seal is on this one.”
For the first time, irritation entered Hiruzen’s face.
“You believe a Hokage reads every page placed before him?”
“No,” Minato said. “I believe everyone beneath him learns what he is willing not to read.”
Silence. Hiruzen’s gaze moved briefly toward Kakashi. Perhaps only then did he remember that the argument was not occurring solely between former and current Hokage. A child from the generation those reports had consumed stood in the room, listening to powerful men explain the practical difficulties of recording dead children accurately.
“There were decisions,” Hiruzen said at last, more quietly, “that kept this village from collapsing.”
“And lies?”
“Sometimes the distinction was less visible than it appears now.”
Minato looked down at the field medic’s notes.
The boy had cried.
Someone had found that detail inconvenient enough to erase, yet not inconvenient enough to refuse the order that caused it.
“If the distinction is gone,” Minato replied slowly, “we find it again.”
Hiruzen’s mouth tightened. “You will open old wounds.”
“They were not closed. They were covered.”
“Families will demand compensation the treasury cannot easily provide. Retired officers will accuse you of dishonoring their service. Clans will insist every correction is an attack upon their name.”
“Some of them may be right.”
That, more than defiance, seemed to unsettle Hiruzen. Minato did not intend to replace one convenient certainty with another. War produced confusion. Reports failed. Witnesses remembered poorly. Some truths would remain impossible to recover.
But uncertainty was not permission to preserve a lie merely because it had grown old enough to resemble history.
“You are Hokage now,” Hiruzen said. “Truth is not your only duty.”
Minato thought of the memorial stone in the rain, one wrong stroke holding because everyone had trusted the page before it.
The review began without announcement. A small group of archivists worked after ordinary hours, comparing casualty reports against Academy rolls, hospital records, clan registers and surviving field correspondence. Minato chose people too junior to have built careers upon the old system and too stubborn to be impressed by the names attached to it.
Kakashi was not among them, but he came anyway.
Some evenings Minato found him sitting between open archive boxes, knees drawn up beneath his arms, a lamp burning low beside him. Dust silvered his sleeves. He read with the fixed, tireless concentration of someone searching for a particular disaster while knowing there might be many.
His usefulness lay less in formal knowledge than memory. Kakashi remembered which desks had emptied abruptly at the Academy. He remembered children who stopped appearing at training grounds and jōnin who returned from missions unwilling to speak of certain places. He remembered the gaps left by people no clerk had considered important enough to recall.
The records slowly acquired shapes.
Missing bodies from failed operations became desertions, allowing the village to deny compensation.
Civilian-born shinobi were reassigned on paper after death so commanders could distribute losses more favorably across units.
Friendly fire became enemy action.
Foreign-born residents who served under Konoha’s command sometimes vanished from the final rolls altogether, their files ending with an unfinished medical form or a requisition for sandals never issued.
No single order had created the pattern. Some records were altered to save money, some to preserve reputations, some to conceal tactical failures.
Others because a clerk, exhausted and frightened, was told to make two contradictory reports agree and chose the version signed by the higher-ranking officer.
The village had not required everyone to be cruel. It had only required enough people to find obedience easier than objection.
Minato and Kakashi visited the dye shop on a cold morning near the end of the month.
The boy’s mother lived above it, in rooms steeped with the mineral smell of pigments and hot water. Blue stained her fingertips and settled permanently into the lines of her palms. She had grown smaller than Kakashi remembered, though perhaps all adults seemed smaller when seen from fourteen rather than five.
She listened while Minato explained that the name on the memorial was wrong.
Her face remained composed. Only her thumb moved, rubbing slowly against the side of her forefinger as if testing the texture of invisible cloth.
When he placed the corrected record before her, she did not look at the Hokage seal.
She looked at her son’s name - the proper one.
“Was he brave?” she asked.
Minato had prepared explanations regarding falsified reports, compensation and the formal inquiry. None survived the question.
The field notes said the boy had cried. The commander’s statement said he had begged not to be left. The village’s amended account called him fearless because the dead were easier to honor after being stripped of everything that made them children.
“He was afraid,” Minato finally replied. Kakashi stood behind him, quiet as rain against the shutters.
The woman’s hand stopped over the page.
“He obeyed an order,” Minato continued, “that no one should have given him.”
Her eyes closed. For one terrible moment, Minato wondered whether honesty had merely injured her again. Lies, once lived with long enough, did not leave cleanly. They took the shape of whatever grief had grown around them.
“Did the others escape?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Because he stayed?”
“Yes.”
She opened her eyes and looked down at the name, tears slipping from her gaze.
“Then he was brave.”
Minato bowed his head, partly in shame, partly in respect. The village had needed to make the boy unafraid before it could call him heroic.
The inquiry became public soon afterward because institutions leaked most efficiently when threatened. Retired commanders began visiting the Hokage Tower in formal robes, clan representatives requested private consultations, while Treasury officials arrived carrying estimates of what corrected classifications might cost and spoke of financial stability with the solemnity usually reserved for battlefield casualties.
One councilor suggested that the village could acknowledge “administrative irregularities” without assigning blame.
Another warned that young shinobi might lose faith in command if they learned how wartime decisions had been recorded.
Minato found that argument particularly revealing.
The council chamber smelled of incense, old wood and the summer dust drifting through its shutters. Hiruzen sat among the advisers, no longer at the head of the table but close enough that everyone still measured the room around his silence.
A former commander leaned forward.
“You intend to judge wartime necessity from a peaceful office.”
Minato thought of the office. The white cloak. The drawers full of other men’s decisions.
“No.”
“Then what exactly do you intend?”
“To distinguish necessity from fraud.”
“And when you cannot?”
“I will say that we cannot.”
The man’s mouth hardened. “You are very young, Hokage sama.”
Minato had been younger than Kakashi when commanders first learned how useful his speed could be. He had watched adults decide which shinobi were too valuable to risk and which were inexpensive enough to spend.
“I was young during the war too,” he said. “It did not prevent the village from giving me responsibility.”
73 names required correction.
11 shinobi recorded as deserters had died carrying out orders.
9 foreign-born casualties had never been added to the memorial.
32 families had been denied benefits through altered classifications.
Some of the responsible officers were dead, whereas some evidence had been destroyed.
Some decisions remained mired in the ugly territory between deliberate deceit and the brutal expedience Konoha had once encouraged.
Minato did not prosecute ghosts or manufacture certainty for the comfort of the living. He corrected what could be proven.
The memorial was rededicated beneath rain.
It seemed fitting. Rain stripped away ceremony. It flattened expensive robes, blurred prepared speeches and filled old names and new ones alike.
Fresh cuts showed pale against the dark stone. Corrected characters had sharper edges than the inscriptions surrounding them. The names added near the base looked almost raw.
Families crowded the clearing beneath umbrellas. Some wept. Some stared at the memorial without moving. Others watched Minato with expressions that made forgiveness seem not merely distant, but irrelevant.
He understood. The village could return compensation. It could restore names and strip commendations from retired officers.
But it could not return the years in which families believed their children cowards, deserters or forgotten things. An apology from the Hokage remained an apology from the same office whose seal had authenticated the lie.
Minato stood before them without the hat.
“The village failed these shinobi twice,” he said. “First when it spent their lives. Then when it changed the record of what those lives had cost.”
Rain moved softly through the trees.
He did not promise that Konoha would never ask its people to die. The village was still a shinobi village. Peace had not remade the foundation beneath it.
“We cannot undo every decision made during the war,” he continued. “Some truths were lost with the people who carried them. But uncertainty will not be used to protect what we know is false.”
At the edge of the gathering, an old officer turned and walked away.
Minato watched him go.
“No one will be erased because their death embarrasses the living. No family will be denied a name to mourn because a cleaner story was easier to preserve.”
Then he bowed - not as the Yondaime receiving the village’s gratitude. But as the head of the institution that had done the harm.
The clearing emptied slowly.
Kakashi remained. He stood before the corrected surname, rain dripping from his hair and the edge of his mask. The new stroke looked almost too bright, a thin pale wound cut through old granite.
Minato came to stand beside him.
Obito’s name lay farther along the stone. Rin’s beside it. Their characters had always been correct.
That was not the same as the truth beneath them being whole.
“It was one stroke,” Kakashi said eventually.
“Yes.”
“That was all.”
Minato looked over the memorial. Hundreds of names. Hundreds of chances for a clerk, a commander or a Hokage to decide that accuracy could be sacrificed because no one important would notice.
“You noticed.”
Kakashi lifted his hand and traced the repaired character. Rainwater followed his fingers through the groove, but the line remained sharp beneath them.
This time, the village had written the boy’s name correctly.
Consider: An anthro opossum, koala, capuchin monkey, or anteater, who is wearing a t-shirt with a text on the back that says "if you can read this, I have no idea where that little fucker is".
ppl are so annoying “you can’t paint ur bedroom pink you’re an adult” i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige
when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.
I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.
But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)
And the moral of the story is: Fuck ‘em, please yourself. Either they’ll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.
This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be “mature” about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that I’m 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, I’m just like “marriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.” If they don’t like it then they don’t have to come to my wedding.
I’m thirty and my first big furniture purchase was a custom coffin shaped coffee table that opens up and is lined with purple crushed velvet. I would have loved it at 13 and I love it now. Growing up doesn’t mean you have to abandon what makes you happy.
I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, because I am An Old now and repeating stories forever is our prerogative:
When I bought my house, the kitchen was multiple shades of dingy white. It was dismal, but it was now mine! So went to the hardware store for paint (well, several trips, painted swatches on panel, etc — I’m very picky. But this was the final, ‘real’ trip). It was a busy day in the paint section. There were at least five people behind me in line.
Now, remember, latex paint is slightly lighter and brighter when wet than it is when dry. And I’d decided to paint my kitchen candy-apple red. The hardware store employee took my gallon off the Paint Jiggler and cracked it open to put a dab on the top, revealing the most incredibly deep pink, and behind me I hear the entire line of people say,
“Oh my god.”
…in perfect chorus.
I did not realize up until that moment that shocking a crowd of strangers with my paint color choices was a life goal, but at that moment I felt an absolutely overwhelming sense of achievement.
When I first moved into my place, I painted the spare room, that eventually became my office, lime green, the kind of lime green that glows down the corridor when I open the door - The colour was only available as an “accent colour” in the section of paints intended for children’s playrooms, and in the shop I got a lot of “Oh your son will love this!” And from people I knew I got a lot of “Oh well, you’re 21 now, you’re basically a teenager, this is a terrible idea, you’ll hate it and need to pull out all the furniture to repaint it.” And I have to report that I am now in my forties and my office still looks like this, and it makes me smile every time I see it.
not decorating trends; those have always existed. but the idea that color and decoration is inherently childish
this is the dining room at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, from 1878 (where I used to work, briefly). the walls are TEXTURED MICA SHIMMER on a green background. Adult Space For Adults!
A jewelry shop in Paris c. 1901. kids can’t buy jewelry!
who can forget the classic 1950s colorful bathroom? I’m not a huge fan, but still! adult space! bright colors; decorative designs!
meanwhile “you’re immature if you like Art Nouveau” is a hot take I’ve really, seriously seen on this webbed site (only once, thank the gods). I don’t know who started this, but I’m going to kill them
I think a lot of it stems from the ubiquitous Waterhouse prints that were sold on college campuses for 20 years. like why would I get a free pass if it were Monet instead Western culture is stupid. The entire point of being an adult is breakfast for dinner and cake for breakfast and dying with the most toys.
The examples of decorated homes above are both either modern or upper class, which makes it easy to dismiss because “sure the rich people have beautiful homes” and “sure, modern middle-class people have lots of color in their homes.”
So here’s two examples of traditional Norwegian farmhouse interiors. You know. The kinds of places peasants live in.
This type of painting is called “rosemaling” and today you usually find it on, like, carved wooden bowls and such that are only used for decoration. But back two centuries ago, it was very common to find the interiors of homes covered in it, in projects that were painted little by little over the decades. Because it’s beautiful to look at, paint is the cheapest way of decorating your house, and what else are you going to do on the long winter nights when it’s too dark and cold to work outdoors?
But mostly, they did it because it made them happy, and it was beautiful.
If we ever more into my old childhood home, I want lilac-black-blood red kitchen-livingroom combo, I've seen that yellowish cream color for so LONG I'm hating that particular shade. We also agreed that the slanted ceiling of upstairs bedroom should ABSOLUTELY be a night sky with northern lights. Not white. Gramps saw what I had planned for the living room and he was fine with it. He still lives there tho, now alone, but he knows I love the house and know what to keep. I'll let my wife loose only on few spots. It's... a thought process in the works
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!
I don't want to go all 'some of you have incredibly biased opinions of Fëanor based on fanon and fail to acknowledge the canon complexities of such a character' but it really be hard to not do that sometimes
Thanks for picking up my tags! Since we're at the Discourse Store, let me add, Shib clarifies explicitly that a crucial factor to the burning of the ships was that Fingolfin declared himself "Finwe-Nolofinwe". Since in Noldorin culture Finwe=King, this was a declaration of intent of usurpation (and was indeed shortly followed by Fingolfin declaring kingship of the Noldor - before he arrived in Beleriand.)
Now I am also a Fingolfin stan. I believe he was ambitious but well-intentioned and genuinely believed wrestling the Noldor out of Feanor's influence was the best for his people. Which is... Correct.
Yet, if I was terrified of replacement/usurpation and had been stoked in that direction further by Satan and someone openly declared their intent to usurp me and had a larger army than mine, and was due to arrive at my flank, I too wouldn't want them there.
Things can be bad without being incomprehensibly unhinged and comically evil. They can have a rationale and reasons without it being enough moral justification. Permitting personhood is not apologia.
