First Aid Kit – Wolf “Wolf-father, at the door / You don’t smile anymore / You’re a drifter, shape-shifter / Let me see you run, hey-ya hey-ya”

wafflelate:

lyrics || song

Maybe you were expecting Kakashi and I could see that – Minato as the Fourth and the Kyuubi doesn’t happen or whatever but Gai dies so Kakashi is allowed to Pull A Tsunade because that’s better than letting him kill himself in ANBU? But…the chorus….

When I run through the deep dark forest long after this begun
Where the sun would set, trees were dead and the rivers were none
And I hope for a trace to lead me back home from this place
But there was no sound, there was only me and my disgrace

but there was no sound would have the wolf-father lyrics you gave as the quote and it would be about Hatake Sakumo. It would be about… missing nin Hatake Sakumo.

At the start of the Third War, Sakumo makes his big mistake and it was, ofc, a set up by Danzou to delegitimize Sakumo’s possible bid for the hat. But Danzou pushes a little harder, gets impatient, and sends an agent to stage Sakumo’s suicide instead of just letting Sakumo end up there.

Suddenly Sakumo wants to live if only out of spite for whoever thought he wasn’t getting to offing himself fast enough. 

Kakashi still doesn’t need him, though, and is ashamed of him, and would only be a target if Sakumo tried to stay for his sake. So the White Fang flees the village and Konoha is on the verge of war and has no resources to spare to pursue this powerful missing nin who didn’t commit any crimes (presumably, since in canon we don’t hear him failing the mission led to anything like a court martial or anything. It made him unpopular but not criminal.)

So… Kakashi is spared the trauma of coming home to his dad dead but instead his dad is a traitor and a coward and now that he’s a missing nin AND he’s not dead by his own hand no one is going to even be shy about saying it. Kakashi has a lot to prove. Obito probably doesn’t think the White Fang was a hero, or at least he can’t say that because the White Fang is still out there and is still an enemy of Konoha.

Minato burns a lot of favors just getting Kakashi the chance to succeed. 

Maybe things go better on Team Minato, though? Or maybe they go worse. Or maybe just the same. Either way, Shikako enters this verse and finds Sakumo is a grim-faced but honorable missing nin, living in the old nomadic Hatake way. It’s bare weeks before the Kyuubi attack and Sakumo has been a missing nin for six or seven years and Shikako knows that the village probably needs the White Fang more than ever… especially Kakashi, if things have gone to script.

I think Sakumo is still loyal to the village, he doesn’t hate it, but he’s got… complicated feeling. He’s still all ashamed of failing that mission, of being too loyal to his teammates, but also not willing to go back on that philosophy, really. Lots of ideological debates with Shikako. Also odds are good that Sakumo has at least one fellow missing nin or something that he’s bonding with because I bet he’s a disaster insta-pack bonder like his son. Not Orochimaru though. Slightly More Aggressive Impatient Danzou probably drove someone else off or it’s a foreign nin. Maybe Konan, who’s trying to get him to join Akatsuki, which would make things trickier for Shikako.

Tsunade is probably well into her fuck-the-village lifestyle and I think she and Sakumo sometimes meet up for drinks and she’s lowkey annoyed her sensei never made her a missing nin so she and Sakumo could match. Sakumo probably has to avoid the hell out of Jiraiya. Or maybe he doesn’t but he thinks he does.

Kakash has been told that his father never summons his dog pack anymore but it’s a lie, ofc. Either Pakkun and the rest don’t know or the dogs are lying to Kakashi to protect him from having to chose between his father and his village.

Ideally before Shikako leaves she and Sakumo bust in on that whole Kyuubi thing and really help out and Minato pardons Sakumo and all is well.