Name: Hatake Kakashi
Age: 18 at ANBU Trials
Birthday: 15th September, Sandaime Year 15
Rank: Jounin
Service: ANBU Field Ops, ANBU Team 6
Registration Number: 009720
Physical Appearance
Height: 5’11”
Weight: 150lbs
Blood Type: O
Hair: silver-white, perpetually upstanding and messy. It’s a follicle pattern thing. His eyebrows and eyelashes are darker.
Eyes: right: steel-grey, sleepy-looking, inscrutable. Left: Sharingan, one previous owner, slightly used.
Skin: pale, scarred. If you look closely there’s a very faint tan line around his right eye.
Facial Features: he has an angular jaw, sharp cheekbones and fine-bladed nose—his father’s mirror image laid over his mother’s delicate bone structure. A long white scar sliced across his mouth looks a little like he tried to kiss a kunai. He has another on the right side of his jaw, just dropping off the edge of bone. His canine teeth stretch to delicate points and give his smile a wicked edge.
Other Physical Traits: Kakashi looks lean, but there’s solid muscle beneath that uniform. If you could talk him out of his clothes, you could use him as an anatomical chart for a class of med-students. He’s got quick, talented hands and beneath the slouchy, lazy exteriour, there’s a subtle feeling of a wire under high pressure.
Handedness: favors his right, but ambidextrous in a pinch.
Voice: low, cool, slightly drawling.
Identifying Marks: the hair, the mask, the hand-me-down eye—what isn’t an identifying mark? Even the back of his head gets in him trouble sometimes, with the Sakumo-hating crowd.
Usual Clothing: out of his ANBU uniform, Kakashi wears his jounin uniform. On rare occasions he’ll dress in more casual civilian clothes, but even those tend to be plain or shading to black. He rarely takes his mask off.
ANBU Mask: a flat-muzzled lion-dog, outlined in red and black, with a curling mouth and slanted eyes. Two streaks make whisker-like marks at the cheeks, and sharp little ears lift into his hair. The eyes are cut a little wider to accommodate the Sharingan.
Living Situation: ANBU’s rookie dorms, which are as bad as he’s heard. His room includes a bed, a storage chest, and the scent of the former occupant’s faint despair. Bathrooms are separate and shared. As soon as he gets the chance, he’s going to install a desk and a bookshelf. Minato bought him a house-warming plant; he keeps it on the windowsill.
Skills
Fighting Style: lightning-fast with a touch of head-fuckery. Ninjutsu, genjutsu, and fuuinjutsu are his main strengths, but he’s no slouch at taijutsu. His edges are his collected jutsu, the ability to think on his feet, and his Sharingan eye. He doesn’t mind playing on his reputation, either.Chakra natures: Lightning, Water, and Earth. Sensory range: 5 km.
Preferred Weapons: kunai and ninjutsu, often shuriken. He tends to use his own hands before he draws a sword, but he’s fast with a blade.
Special Jutsu: two: the Chidori, and its nastier big brother, the Raikiri. The Raikiri gets its name from the time he cut a bolt of lightning in half. It’s that fast.
Weaknesses: Kakashi’s barely average chakra reserves are his major weakness and he knows it. He tries to end conflicts before that becomes an issue. When his Sharingan is covered, the blind spot it leaves and the lack of depth perception are occasionally a problem. He’s worked hard to compensate for both.
Service Record: graduated the Academy at seven, when the teachers had run out of good reasons to keep him. Promoted to chuunin at ten and jounin at thirteen. Joined ANBU at eighteen.
War Record: fought in the Third Ninja World War and against the Fox, lacks fond memories of both.
Personality
General Personality Traits: from the outside, Kakashi looks slouchy, lazy, grey-haired and useless. He reads porn, takes a sideways attitude to social graces, and is functionally terrible at talking to, well, everyone. He snarks like he breathes.
Underneath that, he’s also sharp as a razor, a dedicated leader (in training), a flawed workaholic, and ready to die for Konoha. He’s mostly amiable with other ninja, but he doesn’t make friends. There are castles of defences built to keep other people from getting in his head and under his skin. He very rarely touches anyone, and has a special trick of just not being there when other people try to broach his personal bubble — he doesn’t move, he’s just not standing where you thought he was.
He smiles when he’s lying, makes jokes when he’s frightened, and despite years of trying to get over it, still has a reflexive deathwish.
Quirks: keeps a mask on his face and a book in front of his mask. Likes his dogs more than he likes most people, and understands them a lot better. Can sleep anywhere, on anything. Never really appears to eat, but food vanishes around him. Perpetually late, but he’s (almost) always exactly where he needs to be.
Sexual Orientation: no one is quite sure. He reads Jiraiya’s terrible rainbow of porn, but as far as the rumor mill knows he’s never dated anyone. The general suggestion is that he’s so far in bed with Konoha, there’s no room for anyone else.
Gifts/Talents: genius, excellent memory, fabulous ninja, responsible plant owner. Not much else.
Flaws: many and varied.
Religion and Philosophy: culturally shinto/buddhist. His father believed in Gods, but his father gutted himself on the living room floor. Kakashi believes in surviving for the next mission.
Likes and Loves: his dogs, his porn, salt-fried saury and grilled eggplant cooked in miso. Competent teammates and successful missions. New jutsu. Time to himself. Naruto.
Dislikes and Hates: sweet food, collapsing after a fight, incompetent teammates. People who take an issue with his father, his eye, or his village. Loss, of any kind.
Fears: making a critical mistake, intimacy, letting the village down.
Dreams and Ambitions: To copy ten-thousand jutsu and create at least five new ones before he dies. To be at least as good a captain as Minato was.
Relationships
Family: His family is small and dying out. Kakashi and his mother are the only two living members of the Hatake clan, and Sadayo married into it. If Kakashi dies without children, the clan dies with him.
Friends: Obito died. Rin is a rising star in Konoha’s hospital, breaking records and slowly working her way towards being the youngest head of department ever. Kakashi sees her once a month, if he’s lucky. As confidants go, Naruto is a surprisingly good listener.
Lovers: Since Rin broke her heart over him, Kakashi tries hard not to lead people on. He’s not always good at it.
Hero: Kakashi idolized one man, and he died bloody. Kakashi doesn’t deify people anymore. (Working with Minato—who tends to inspire hero worship—has also given him a pretty good idea of what human idols are really like close up: i.e. flawed.)
Enemies: he doesn’t make a point of leaving people alive to nurse a grudge, but the occasional one pops up.
Personal History
Hatake Sadayo miscarried three times before she gave birth to a living son, then she almost bled to death. If she’d been in a civilian village, she would have. Medical jutsu saved her life.
Kakashi was healthy, but small, and his parents worried he wouldn’t be strong enough to weather a ninja’s hard life. But he was a bright boy, watchful and interested, mostly happy. He leaned to sit up before his peers, then to crawl and stand. When children his age were still scooting around on the kitchen floor, Kakashi was running.
He set a cherry tree on fire when he was three, with an angry outburst of chakra. Two weeks later, he melted the plastic knobs on the stove. His parents made sure all the cutlery was metal, drilled him with lessons about self-control, and stopped worrying.
Like all ninja children his age, Kakashi joined the academy when he was five.
He was still smaller than most of his peers, but he picked up the material four times faster. Reading, chakra theory, weapons training—it all came easily, and he was excited to learn. His teachers sent him home with advanced homework, and his parents—both excellent jounin—were happy to train him. After a year, he’d already advanced two classes. After eighteen months, he’d covered almost four years worth of material. There was talk of graduating him early, perhaps placing him with a jounin-sensei for individual coaching…
Sakumo was in favor. Sadayo was decidedly not. It was one of their few major arguments, and there was no good compromise.
Kakashi graduated six months later. He was seven.
The Third Great Ninja War was already in full swing and swallowing ninja by the handful. Kakashi’s assignment to Namikaze Minato, Konoha’s youngest jounin sensei, meant there was always someone to keep Kakashi’s mind active and focused, turned to training problems, rather than wondering when his parents would come home. Sakumo fought on the front lines, leading teams in high-risk missions. Sadayo worked in a loosely-knit group of espionage artists, gathering Intel and sewing chaos deep behind enemy lines.
When Kakashi was eight, Sakumo made a mistake.
He paid for it on the living room floor, with steel and blood. Sadayo was on a mission. Kakashi found him.
After that, in public, Sadayo’s only spoken regret was that she hadn’t been able to act as her husband’s kaishakunin—the person responsible for beheading the individual taking his own life, as a preventative against having to sit quietly for thirty minutes waiting to bleed to death.
In private, after the funeral, she sat at the foot of the stairs with Kakashi leaning against her side, and cried herself raw.
After that, Kakashi was a more serious child, by-the-book and humorless, with the One-Hundred Rules of Shinobi Conduct firmly memorized. Under Minato’s tutelage, he made chuunin at ten. His graduation present was two new teammates: Nohara Rin and Uchiha Obito.
They did not get along.
Despite early teething troubles, Kakashi began to make a name for himself on the battlefield, the silver shadow to Minato’s golden sun, and developed his first crush slightly ahead of schedule. At thirteen, he was promoted to jounin.
In his first attempt at leadership, he lost an eye, lost a friend, perfected a jutsu, and gained a whole new viewpoint, slightly red-tinged.
They did succeed at destroying Kannabi bridge.
His second mission went better (it couldn’t go worse), and so did the dozen after that until the war ended. There was peace for a fragile moment. Rin joined the hospital. Minato was made Hokage and got married; his wife became pregnant. Sadayo retired from espionage and joined the clan council, devoting all her war experience towards cracking hard-boiled council member skulls together. Kakashi trained, ran B-ranked missions, visited the Hero’s Stone, helped the war clean up.
A month after Kakashi’s fourteenth birthday, Minato’s wife, Uzumaki Kushina, went into labour.
It wouldn’t have been a problem—women went into labour all the time, to Kakashi’s understanding—except that she housed the Kyuubi, and giving birth weakened the seals. Even that might have been fine, if the birthing party’s secret location outside of Konoha hadn’t been attacked. Mysterious forces slaughtered the guards, overwhelmed Minato, and ripped the Kyuubi out of Kushina, unleashing it on the village.
It was one of the worst nights in Konoha’s history. Hundreds died.
Minato fought his way free, ordered Kakashi and Rin to guard and care for Kushina and the screaming newborn child, and organized the defense of his village. The fight was grueling and long, but for Kakashi it was mostly screams and flames in the distance, while Rin struggled to hold Kushina’s wavering lifeforce together. The baby grew quiet eventually; Kushina wouldn’t let anyone hold him.
When Minato brought the Fox back, struggling and screaming in chains, the Village was half levelled and Kushina was almost gone. Sealing the Kyuubi back inside her would kill her, and eventually release the Kyuubi when it clawed its way back from the afterlife. Minato argued: he wanted to seal the Kyuubi into the baby. A living jinchūriki could contain the Fox and prevent a resurrection, even if the sealing would kill Minato and Kushina both.
Understandably, Kushina said hell no.
He should have one parent, said Rin.
Minato sealed the Fox back into Kushina, and Kushina died.
It took a year to rebuild the village. Every anniversary, on the date of her death and Naruto’s birth, Konoha celebrates Kushina as a hero and mourns the dead, ninja and civilian both. Beyond Kushina, the Sandaime was the most prominent loss. Minato remained the Yondaime, despite Kakashi’s fears that he might reach for a tanto. As Yondaime, he made reforms instead: he worked to fix Konoha’s broken, over-full orphanages; he kept the peace with Iwa and Cloud; he ordered a minimum age limit for new ANBU, and restricted the recruitment period to twice a year. Generally, he tried to make things better.
Kakashi, then fifteen, found himself with three more years to wait until he could join ANBU, and wasn’t happy. But it did help him get over his crush.
He used the time to train, bettering his control over the Sharingan and the Chidori, until he sliced a lightning bolt in half and discovered the Raikiri. He ran missions around several corners of the world. He got introduced to Jiraiya’s Icha Icha and disappointed his mother. When he was sixteen, Sadayo gave him Sakumo’s dog contract scroll, and he discovered people outside of the Inuzuka who could smell as well as he could.
Slowly, he was groomed for leadership.
The April after his eighteenth birthday, he put his name in for the first stage of ANBU’s recruitment trials, and didn’t look back.