Chapter Text
Chapter One: The Photo
March 5th,12:46 AM, Tuesday
Hatake Kakashi did not want a cellphone.
He had said this. Many times. Out loud. In meetings. In shops. To anyone who brought it up. He had held the line with the stubbornness of a man who still washed his clothes in a river sometimes. When Genma first raised the idea, Kakashi had laughed. A short, nasal sound. Dismissive. Absolute.
Then Genma got petty about it.
The harassment campaign was low-grade psychological warfare. At first it was jokes. “You know they let you call people now, right? Even outside the village?” Then came the increasingly dramatic gasps when Kakashi pulled out his notebook to jot something down. “What is that? Is that a pen? Is this pre-village?” And finally, when all else failed, he enlisted Yamato.
Yamato, who just so happened to casually invite him to lunch and then disappear mid-meal, only to send Kakashi a message from Genma’s phone: “imagine if u had a phone rn. crazy.”
So, eventually—wearily, bitterly, with the resignation of a man who has fought many wars and lost far too many battles—Kakashi got a phone.
He hated it.
He hated the stupid glossy thing. Hated how smug it looked charging on his counter. Hated how it chimed at him. Hated that it somehow already knew what time he usually woke up and had the audacity to offer him a morning briefing like it was his personal assistant. Hated that the screen smudged if he breathed near it. Hated that when he turned the brightness down, it decided he meant to adjust the entire user interface font. Hated that it had, in the span of three days, made him feel like an elderly man staring down the dawn of a new empire and deciding to just die in his hut instead.
And yet…
Tonight—well, technically morning—he found himself staring at it again. Reclined on his bed in just a pair of sweatpants, shirtless, his mask still on, hair askew from the pillow. The phone rested on his stomach, screen glowing upward like a cursed scroll. He watched the lock screen dim, brighten, dim again. A new message from Genma had come in an hour ago. Something about “do u know what memes are. have u tried memes.”
He hadn’t answered.
Not because he was offended. But because—gods help him—he had tried memes. For five minutes. His right eye still twitched if he saw a picture of a cat with a caption under it. One of them had said “no thoughts, head empty” and he’d seen something of himself in it that made him sit in the dark for thirty-seven minutes without moving.
Still, he stared.
And, inexplicably, started thinking.
About how everyone else seemed to be having fun with theirs. Not functional, efficient, mission-logging fun. But ridiculous, brainless, Genma fun. The kind of fun that made you wonder, a little deliriously, why the fuck did I do that, while smiling like an idiot.
He didn’t do that sort of thing.
He was thirty-four. A jonin. An elite shinobi. A war veteran. A former captain of the ANBU Black Ops. His idea of fun was buying discounted dango and reading erotic literature in peace. He did not indulge in whimsy. He did not take selfies, for the love of all that was sacred.
…Which, of course, is why two minutes later he was standing in front of the bathroom mirror with his mask off, his hair messily tousled, and every cell in his body screaming abort, abort.
“This is stupid,” he muttered aloud to no one. “This is catastrophically stupid.”
He did it anyway.
One tap. One shutter sound.
And then there it was: his own face, angled lazily in the mirror. Hair wild. Sweatpants slung low on his hips. Mask nowhere in sight. Shirtless. The lighting was terrible. The expression on his face even worse. He looked like a man trying to appear careless and failing miserably. His left eyebrow had made a break for the border. His mouth—normally hidden, mysterious—was doing something halfway between a pout and a frown, as if he was contemplating his own taxes.
It was objectively the worst photo ever taken of him.
Naturally, he saved it.
And then, in a moment of profound existential disassociation, he tapped “Share.”
The screen brought up a small list. Three names. Genma. Yamato. And… Sakura.
He meant to tap “Genma.”
He tapped “Sakura.”
There was no time to react. The message sent with the velocity of a thousand chakra-amped kunai. Delivered. Read receipt: active.
He stared.
And stared.
And then dropped the phone like it had bitten him.
“No,” he whispered. “No no no. No, absolutely not. That did not just happen. I did not just—oh my god.”
His entire soul left his body.
She was going to see it. She was going to know. The sweatpants. The tousled hair. The lack of a mask. The pout. That wasn’t even a real facial expression, that was a glitch. He didn’t even mean to look like that. He hadn’t posed, per se. He just hadn’t not posed.
His legs turned to water. His whole body was humming with something between shame and primal horror. He could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips, feel the back of his neck go hot, feel the absolute certainty that he had just committed digital seppuku.
He snatched the phone back up. Still nothing. No reply.
No reply.
That was a death sentence.
And then—purely on panic autopilot—he began to type.
kakashi: please ignore that
kakashi: I was trying to send that to genma
kakashi: for blackmail purposes
kakashi: not in a weird way
kakashi: okay in a slightly weird way
kakashi: not that weird
kakashi: oh my god
kakashi: just delete it
kakashi: pretend you never saw it
kakashi: I mean obviously you saw it
kakashi: but unsee it
kakashi: how do I unsend something
kakashi: do phones have genjutsu???
kakashi: is there an IT ninja for this???
kakashi: I will pay you
kakashi: I will pay you to pretend I never sent that
kakashi: I’m going to walk into the sea
kakashi: tell the Hokage I died honorably
kakashi: actually don’t tell her anything
kakashi: oh god you haven’t replied
kakashi: please respond
kakashi: or don’t
kakashi: actually I’m blocking you
kakashi: no I’m not
kakashi: oh no I just pinned the chat how do I unpin this
And then—just when he was about to throw the phone out the window and follow it—he saw it.
At the bottom, three dots.
Typing.
Then they stopped.
Then started again.
Then stopped.
Then started again.
He made a noise. A real noise. A whimper crossed with a death rattle.
He threw the phone under the bed like it was cursed and physically retreated from the mattress like it might explode.
He sat on the floor, barefoot, maskless, half-naked, panicking, vibrating with the energy of a man who had survived war but not a texting app. His hands were pressed flat to the floorboards, grounding himself like a summoned beast back from the brink. His heart pounded so hard it felt like it was trying to escape his ribcage and file a complaint.
He was Hatake Kakashi. Elite jōnin. Feared in ten nations. Trusted with S-rank secrets. A symbol of calm, control, and lethal grace.
And he had just accidentally thirst-trapped his own teammate.
And then followed it up with a breakdown in text form.