fml, if this showed up as a SakuSasu for you in your inbox, I'm so sorry. It hit post without double-checking. Turn back now. It's a KakaSaku lmao.

A/N:

1. Cross-posted from ao3.

2. It's gonna get weird, but trust me, it'll get weirder.

Collision Course

[xxx]

Hatake Kakashi figures getting hit by a train is like remembering your past life. He doesn't think he's ever been hit by a train before, at least not that he can remember (though, it's hard to be sure when your existence is just a collection of different lifetimes), but the point is, he can imagine. Not the dying part, nor the pain, but that exact moment of collision when you realize The Terrible Thing. The Terrible Thing being, of course, the stupid absoluteness of it, that everything from your flesh to the mortal soul within will be crushed beneath the machine's unstoppable spinning wheel and it will quite plainly be, for lack of a better term, terrible.

Yeah, Kakashi thinks as his gray eyes set upon her, like getting hit by a train.

[xxx]

Hatake Kakashi. 34. High school English teacher. He's been doing this gig for the past six years, carving out a reputation among the students as a brutal grader who didn't really care whether your mom was going to beat the shit out of you for failing his midterm. The most any tearstained pleading ever got from him was an uninterested, "Hmm, that so?" and a flip of the page if you caught him in the middle of reading.

However, always trailing dutifully behind the complaints like a line of ducklings were all the "buts": "...but, he's fair, even if he's hard"; "...but, I learned the most in his class"; "...but, he was still my favorite"; "...but he's still the hottest teacher at this school."

Hatake Kakashi also openly keeps a stack of hardcore erotica on his desk in his office. He smokes on the rooftops during lunch despite all the signs around campus that say don't do it, and all the videos in Health 101 that say "Smoking Kills!" There are even rumors that it isn't always cigarettes he's lighting up. There are other rumors too. A claim he had once saved his student from the mafia. Someone else heard he was an ex-mercenary who had done tours of a couple war-torn countries ("Who? Kakashi-sensei? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard...really?"). He might've gotten mixed up in some weird shit with the local drug lord. And so on.

Some hard facts though: he is punctual in his clockwork tardiness, always ten minutes late to every class, and has a tendency to let his students out early, particularly, seemingly randomly so, on Wednesdays. There is a suspicious correlation between his early Wednesday dismissals and the local theater's adult movie matinee specials, but either no one has noticed or is brave enough to point it out.

The principle has publicly upbraided him in the hallways on many occasions, but everyone knows Sarutobi has a gooey center despite all his hard edges, so Kakashi goes on breaking and bending all the rules he can while letting the rumors pile up so high around him, no one knows who the man really is.

In short, Hatake Kakashi is kind of a fucking legend.

He has also spent the last thirty-four years of his life blissfully unaware of all the other lifetimes he has lived.

Until this very moment.

"Kakashi-sensei, right? I'm Haruno Sakura, I'll be the new school nurse here. I look forward to working with you," she tells him with that smile he already knows.

Kakashi blinks once, twice, trying to piece himself together after just being crushed beneath The Wheel of Fate. He looks into her bottle-green eyes—unchanged and eternal, no matter how many times the gods Xerox her soul and place her before him to exact their cruel punishment—and all he can say is, "Well, shit."

[xxx]

There are rules. Nothing official like a manual lowered down on a golden rope, but while slogging through the eons, Kakshi picks upon on a thing or two.

The first rule: between the two of them, only he ever remembers.

[xxx]

Hatake Kakashi. 27. Enforcer at Tokyo's Ministry of Welfare Public Safety Bureau's Criminal Investigation Department. I.e., An Annoying Mouthful. For brevity' sake, he prefers "Hunting Dog."

He's one of those "fallen" ones—the guys that were demoted from their Inspector titles because, according to the all-knowing Sibyl System, they had become too dangerous, their Crime Coefficients too high. "Latent Criminals" was the official term.

Kakashi just calls it "Not Having a Stick Up My Ass."

But maybe Sibyl wasn't so omnipotent, because everyone else had seen Kakashi's demotion coming since day one, when he had stumbled in late to the CID without a tie, reeking of booze with a porn magazine tucked under his arm even though it was contraband; it had been his first day on the job. Even the most generous who had chalked it up to "a rough start" quickly ran out of excuses when Kakashi didn't let up on his rampage of devilments: wild benders at the nightclub, women and the occasional men, cigarettes, still no tie, and all that porn.

Usually when an Inspector is demoted, it's a deliciously dark scandal, and usually the entire department is besieged for weeks by a heavy fug of whispered voices in the bathroom, did-you-hear? texts, and sidelong glances. However, when notice of Kakashi's demotion hits everyone's emails, people read it with the same interest they reserved for the daily weather report before moving it into the trash.

For Kakashi, the rhythm of his life beats on without much change: wild benders at the nightclub, women and the occasional men, cigarettes, still no tie and, and even more porn.

All the Big Wigs upstairs keep talking about locking him up and putting him down ("...like the rabid hound he is!"), but that's all it ever is: talk. Even as he slides deeper and deeper into the pits of depravity, the Inspectors still line up to work with him, and therein lies the incontrovertible truth: who gives a fuck about Hatake Kakashi's moral compass? The man is a goddamn savant when it comes to catching criminals.

So, Enforcer Hatake ambles through this twisted Neo Tokyo with a Crime Coefficient so high it would make Satan weep and a gun to his head that no one's ever going to pull. In short, life's going great.

Until of course, you know, the whole getting Crushed by The Wheel of Fate thing.

This time, Haruno Sakura gets dumped before him as rookie Inspector, freshly graduated from the academy, top of her class, and her shirt buttoned up to the collar. She's newly minted in her CID uniform when they meet at the scene of the crime: an awfully gristly homicide right in the middle Shibuya's busiest shopping district. It's raining hard. CSI says it looks like the killer had used one of those vintage chainsaws. Everyone's still looking around for the head. Someone makes the sharp deduction the perp had likely taken it as a souvenir.

"Inspector Haruno, reporting for duty," she says with a silly little salute, and the flashing red and blue lights from the CID patrol cars strobe against her face. After Kaksashi gets over the initial shock of having just touched the void, he considers the pink-haired girl and her serious green eyes, which are bright with The Flames of Justice! Kakashi decides she'll last a week, at most.

Two weeks roll by. Kakashi spies Inspector Haruno and her perfectly parted hair in the peripheries of his awareness. Day by day she inches closer and closer to him, so that by the time he realizes what's happened, it's too late. Suddenly (to him, anyways) there's a pink bob at his elbow asking if he could look over some results from Forensics. He gamely tries to ignore it by pointedly bringing his adult novel closer to his face, but the pink bob succeeds in changing his mind after she persuasively plucks out three of his arm hairs.

They go back and forth like that for several weeks: Sakura always looking for him, and Kakashi trying for the love of god to ignore her and all the usual existential baggage that lies waiting in the penumbra of reincarnations and inescapable fates. This has the not all together unforeseeable effect of girding Sakura's determination even more. By the end of the month, Sakura's worn him thin enough to wrap around her finger twice over, and he's stuck trailing after her with one eye on his porn and the other on her so that she doesn't go off and do something idiotic again, like that one-woman drug bust.

Just to be very clear, Kakashi is the unwilling victim here.

Well, okay, so maybe while they were in the break room working on the Shibuya Chainsaw case—killer still at large, headless bodies turning up in the middle of the city in broad daylight, still no suspect—shoulders bump, hot hands become entangled somewhere along the way, and once again, before Kakashi can fully grasp what's happening, Sakura is beneath him on the black leather couch; that damnable top button of hers is finally undone, along with everything else; her slow thighs are moving against him as The Wheel spins mercilessly on; and Kakashi can only helplessly bite out a muffled curse into the crook of her shoulder as they collide with all the inevitability of two orbiting stars.

Oops.

Unsurprisingly, neither of them handles it very well.

Sakura is a brewing Molotov cocktail of confusion and excitement primed to Explode Any Second Now, while Kakashi just half-heartedly yanks against Fate's leash, knowing he's caught. Eventually, probably, Sakura would have burst and Kakashi would have succumbed to the ensuing tidal wave and let the current drag him out to sea. Eventually, probably, they would have figured everything out: his benders, the porn obsession, her buttoning the top button of her shirt, the fact that there was probably a room in Hell with his name on it— everything.

Eventually, probably never comes, however, because they find the Shibuya Chainsaw Killer, or rather, the Shibuya Chainsaw Killer finds them. More specifically, he finds Sakura returning home after a late night at the CID. She and Kakashi had been awkwardly avoiding each other, so of course she's walking alone, and of course she decides to take a shortcut through the park you stupid, stupid girl, and of course there's a blind spot in the security camera that won't go away no matter how many times Kakashi demands that the guy in the chair play the footage again, god-fucking-damnit.

When the cryptic message is sent to Kakashi along with her arm, it transforms him from the CID's well-heeled Hunting Dog into a maddened hellhound. Not even the Devil would want him anymore, and Neo-Tokyo is powerless as he tears the city apart in search of her, busting down doors and stomping into the pavement the skulls of any poor, third string miscreant who stands in his way.

Eventually, he gets the name of a place after kicking in the teeth of the guy who runs half the city's opium dens. He goes down into the labyrinth of sewers beneath the city, but it takes him so long and he gets turned around again and again in the maze of pipes and rats, and by the time Kakashi finds them, it's already almost too late. What's left of her is pulled apart in front of him, piece by piece—no, no, no you motherfucker!— until it capsizes all at once, and then, it is too late.

The Wheel grinds into his Soul, and he is left gutted.

[xxx]

The second rule: If she falls in love with him, he will bear witness to her horrific death.

[xxx]

Hatake Kakashi. 43. Exceptional office manager by day, but when he comes back to his empty apartment, he tugs off his tie and rolls up his sleeves and slips into his moonlight role as a writer. He has a knack for spinning stories about lonely men pursuing unattainable women, usually set against a shimmering backdrop of jazz music, whiskey, and sometimes cats. The off-kilter stories have attracted a cult following consisting of mostly restless souls who like to think of themselves as such, and the occasional English major who only aligns herself with the obscure and wayward, eschewing anything written for the masses. In other words, a lot of pretentious people like it.

Kakashi doesn't really have an opinion on any of this. He just writes.

And usually, Kakashi likes to write while he's very drunk, and usually Kakashi does the things he likes.

So tonight, as on countless other nights, he imbibes many glasses of scotch and writes while he's very drunk. Life's great when it's so simple.

As his long fingers type out a staccato against his keyboard and the text on the computer screen before him swims in all the alchohol, unbeknownst to him, two doors down from his own apartment, the young doctor with pink hair and bottle-green eyes has come home from a late shift at the hospital. She has many suitors, but officially, she lives alone. An uncommon beauty, though Hatake Kakashi has never set his eyes on her.

By the unusual dint of some rare defect in the celestial gears, the shapes of their respective schedules never quite end up aligning: an elevator opening just as the one across from it slides close; an apartment door shutting as soon as the other opens; a 7:10 a.m. bus taker and the other who rides at 7:20 a.m.; one leaves food out for the neighborhood cats on her way to work, the other on his way back; a flick of a dress disappearing around the corner; a blue umbrella—still wet from the evening rain— left out in the hallway.

And so, The Wheel groans to a pause, and the author Hatake Kakashi quietly lives and dies in solitude, leaving behind nothing more than collection of stories of lonely men and all the unattainable women—a brief moment of respite.

[xxx]

The third rule: he only remembers if their lives cross, which is, to his great misfortune, often enough.

[xxx]

Hatake Kakashi. 27. A...ninja? Sure, fine. Whatever.

Since he was a child, it had been clear to the adults around him that Hatake Kakashi would be special, and they were right. With his first steps as a baby—an easy, sure-footed gait—his father, Hatake Sakumoto, had been both proud and mildly disconcerted by the unnaturalness of it. When Sakumoto takes walks with young Kakashi, doting pedestrians lean in to croon over his gray eyes— my, just like his father's! But, Kakashi doesn't say anything. He rarely says much, ever. He just stares without a word.

Eventually, the pedestrians all bite their lower lips in discomfort and hastily go on their ways with a hurried, "Well, have a nice day," because Kakashi's gaze is odd and old, haunted and knowing as if he's touched the World's Truth. But that's just silly—the boy's not even three!

And young Kakashi picks things up quickly, a little too quickly. Walking, running, school, fighting, cooking, killing a man—all the firsts comes so easily to him, as if he's done it all many times before (Oh, if only they knew!). There are geniuses, and there is Kakashi, a cut above the rest. And if his parents are a mirror into the future, he will be a beautiful man.

However, Kakashi must be made mortal, so he is plagued by a fury of bad luck that begins the moment he is born and never slows: his mother passes away while giving birth to him; at four his father commits suicide; at twelve it's Obito, crushed beneath a boulder behind enemy lines; fourteen, it's Minato-sensei; fifteen through twenty-five is a hazy, decade-long stint in ANBU, filled with a monotony of one dead teammate after another and really only punctuated by his murder of Rin.

Fate comes for him with a vengeance this time.

At twenty-six, The Third looks into Kakashi's one remaining eye, yanks him from ANBU, and bullies him into being a teacher for the kids in hopes it'll bring the light back. As if determined to let him down, Kakashi fails all of them, mowing students down with the cold machinery of his infamous Bell Test, and the most any tearstained pleading ever got out of from him was an uninterested, "Hmm, that so?" and a flip of the page if you caught him in the middle of reading.

This time, the gears fit together flawlessly, rolling smoothly over one another so that at twenty-seven, Sakura and he are inevitably pulled into each other's orbit. However, a fifteen year expanse lays between them, and it seems this time he has room to breathe. So this time, he doesn't struggle too much beneath the yoke, plowing ahead with those three little munchkins in tow.

And okay, maybe he's just a little overprotective, and maybe he always has one eye in Icha Icha and the other on her to keep her, making certain she doesn't go off and do something idiotic again like taking a shortcut through the park you stupid, stupid girl—wait, no, that's not quite right, is it? And maybe at the first sign of trouble Sakura's the first—and really the only—one out of his three students he ever grabs out of harm's way, but his body just moves on its own, so what's he supposed to do?

He thinks Sasuke's kind of a twerp, and definitely not good enough, but anyone's got to be better than Kakashi, so he does his best to straighten out the kid's twisted heart and fails spectacularly. Fortunately, Naruto, Boy Wonder, manages to catch the dropped ball, and save all of them—but most importantly, Sakura— from a lifetime of heartbreak. On that achievement alone, Kakashi would have chosen the him to be his successor as the next Hokage.

Sakura grows lovelier and lovelier with each season, and at twenty-three she is at the height of bloom. Sasuke has become palatable, definitely still not good enough, but Kakashi figures he will do. With her attention elsewhere, Kakashi finds himself relaxing bit by bit into the harness because the fifteen years and a black-haired boy laying between them seem impossible to traverse.

But there are some days like today, when it's late summer and they're walking down side by side of one of the village's wider avenues. Before them, the sun is retiring behind the mountain, dyeing the sky red and the clouds purple, spilling liquid gold down along the road. Kakashi has his nose in Icha Icha, half-listening to Sakura who is twittering away about her day at the hospital. The Konoha Council has told him over and over again how unbecoming it is for the Hokage to be seen in public with such a vulgar book, and Kakashi has over and over again ignored them. Plus ça change. Same old, same old.

Sakura asks him whether he's gone in for his yearly check-up at the hospital or something like that, and he grunts noncommittally, and then there she is, grabbing the book out of his hand and pressing her bottle-green eyes way too close as she demands an answer. Her face glows in the light of the dying day, and suddenly, the thought of black leather couches and slow moving thighs sends a pang through his chest; The Wheel digs a bit against his soul.

"Kakashi-sensei?"

Her teacher just stares dumbly at her, and Sakura feels a pinch of concern. For a moment, she thinks she catches a glimpse of something frantic in his usually flat eyes. "You okay?"

"Hmm?" He blinks and it's gone.

"Your yearly check-up, have you had it?"

"Ah," is all he tells her and plucks his book from her grasp. He pulls his mask down to flash her a lopsided smile. "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't," he says and makes his escape, leaving his student stunned on the streets as the last bit of sunlight slips away.

She can't always be the only one catching him unawares.

[xxx]

The fourth rule: this is never ending.

A/N:

1. What this really is: a Psycho-Pass/Naruto crossover in disguise

*whispers* but you didn't hear it from me.

2. Haha, yes this is not a SasuSaku (the world really is ending). The good little girl in me is always happy writing a good SasuSaku, but the jaded old lady deeper within has a big old squishy spot for KakaSaku, although I'm usually not comfortable unless Sakura's at least old enough to drink or there's some conceit that makes them closer in age. This one really wrote itself.