#I think this is a cute conceit but got super distracted with worldbuilding

[butter--peanut]

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Hiya! I doubt this will ever be completed, but for a while there I was writing an Obito-has-amnesia-and-turns-into-a-cat!AU. :D Here's the first chapter.

(send me a 📕 and I’ll send you a snippet of or idea for wip!)

It was night and there was pain. Pain, and fear, and — and a place that felt wrong, familiar yet not, buildings that were too large and streets that he saw from the wrong angle, and a body that didn’t obey him, that felt like his head was too far forward, simultaneously more and less stable than he was used to.

He didn’t know how long he’d been here, wandering these streets in the night, ducking away from the occasional footsteps and people that were huge; how had they become so large?

At last he reached a building that looked more familiar than the rest. He looked up, and up higher, and eventually saw an apartment window that called to him, although he had no clue why.

He leapt and stumbled against the wall and fell back down to the ground. And then, narrowing his eye at the wall, ran again and leapt, and yes, now this he understood, shaping his energy on the wall, so that he could run up it vertically, although he stumbled as he ran, uncoordinated with this unfamiliar body.

He reached the balcony he was seeking and went to the window; looked through; saw a shuriken-patterned bedspread.

He needed to get inside, but he didn’t seem to have hands in the regular sense, and there was no way to try and raise the windowpane.

He needed to get inside.

He pressed his body against the wall and felt his body stumble through the wall, and then he was in the room, with no idea how he had achieved this bizarre feat.

This room was far too big for a person, just like the world he had wandered through was also unnaturally large. He jumped onto the bedspread and curled up, and put his head in his hands, and smelt something familiar and comforting, and stayed there, not sleeping, still afraid, still completely fucking unsure about what had happened to him and where he was and who he was.

When morning reached the room, a face appeared at the windowpane. A man with silver hair and a cloth mask covering his mouth pressed his face against the window, and closed his eyes, and looked weary.

Kakashi.

He remembered one thing, then. A name. This person was Kakashi.

***

It was just past dawn when Kakashi returned from his mission. He nodded tiredly to Kotetsu and Izumo at Konoha’s gates, who barely glanced at him, sitting with half-lidded eyes sipping their hot coffees that made swirls of mist in the brisk morning air. Then he took to the rooftops, because although he barely had enough energy to shape chakra to support his leaps across the tiles, he had even less energy to suffer through conversations with perky early morning risers (Gai, who made regular laps around the village at this time, was sure to draw him into a conversation and attempted contest, and although he normally enjoyed contests with Gai, he just couldn’t. Not today, after a week-long mission. After this week-long mission). 

He reached the balcony outside his apartment window and leant his head against the window for a few moments, closing his eyes, trying to summon the energy to undo his barrier seals.

From inside his apartment, he heard a dim yowl.

Kakashi flicked his eyes open. On the other side of the glass, standing on the shelf that ran alongside his window, was a cat.

Had he come to the wrong apartment by mistake?

Kakashi looked around; checked the number of floors up and across. No, it was definitely his apartment.

He looked back through the glass. Yes, it was definitely a cat.

Why was there a cat in his apartment?

Gaining some energy through his curiosity, Kakashi released his barrier seals and opened the window, “Hello,” he greeted the cat from outside. “How did you get in here?”

The cat looked balefully at him and yowled again.

Kakashi slipped through the window into his apartment and turned to eye the cat again. It was big for a cat; bigger than Pakkun, although smaller than all of Kakashi’s other ninken. Is fur was mostly black, but there were lines of white along the right side of its face and dirty white patches across the right side of its body. It also only had one eye: a plain black one that was also on the right side of its face. And—

Kakashi sniffed the air and frowned. Then he looked closer, eyes now seeing through the dark fur what he had been able to smell easily.

The cat had been bleeding. There was matted blood on its neck, on its side, and even on its tail. He couldn’t see any sign of open injuries, and couldn’t see it favouring one side, but it had clearly got into some trouble recently to be covered in blood that hadn’t properly dried yet.

“What happened to you?” Kakashi murmured. “You look worse than I do coming back from a mission.” He reached out a hand — and then pulled it back quickly when the cat hissed at him and swiped out with a paw, its tail spiking up and all its fur standing on end.

Kakashi didn’t speak cat, but even he could tell that this was the Panicked, Aggressive pose.

Kakashi started at the cat and the cat glared at Kakashi.

Slowly, when the cat could see he wasn’t going to try again, its aggression lessoned, with its tail twitching down.

“I don’t know how I should help you,” Kakashi said to it eventually. “I’m a dog person, not a cat person. And all the dogs around me tend to just tell me what they want, in human language. Can you speak human language?” It wasn’t a completely stupid question. If the cat could get through his barrier seals, then maybe it was a Summon.

The cat meowed, then started, seeming a little surprised. It meowed again, then growled.

“No human language, then,” Kakashi observed.

The cat yowled again, sounding greatly dissatisfied.

“Can I — can I please touch you?” Kakashi asked. “To check whether you have injuries?”

It was probably a bit much to assume that a cat could understand him, but the only animals he’d interacted with recently were his ninken, so he wasn’t used to speaking to animals in any other way.

The cat looked at him for few moments, then took a tentative step closer.

Kakashi took that as a “yes” and reached out a hand slowly. The cat looked at him warily, but didn’t attempt to move, and then Kakashi was gently touching the blood matting the fur around its head, and then the rest of its body, searching for open wounds.

“You’re not injured,” he told the cat eventually. “You should be, though. You shouldn’t have healed this fast if you have this much fresh blood on you.” He snorted. “Unless you managed to kill something without gaining an injury to yourself and rolled around in their blood. But there’s too much blood to be a small creature that I’d expect you to catch. And somehow, you don’t look the type to kill a human.”

The cat shivered.

“So, why are you covered in blood without a scratch on you?” Kakashi asked.

All the cat could do was meow again.

Kakashi scratched it between the ears as he thought through this second curious occurrence, and blinked in surprise as the cat’s head twisted up to press in the direction of his fingers.

Aggressive, but also affectionate?

He really didn’t understand cats.

“Can I get the blood off you?” Kakashi asked the cat. “I know that cats aren’t supposed to like baths, but you would like to be clean, right? And you can’t exactly lick all of this off yourself.”

The cat didn’t respond, so he picked it up with both hands under its belly, and then quickly dropped it when it yowled again and scratched his arm with its claws. The cat fell, its limbs flailing wildly, and although it was only a metre from the ground it wasn’t able to land properly; it flopped onto the ground on its belly with one paw crunched underneath.

“That was a fair bit less elegant than I would have expected,” Kakashi observed, rubbing the new scratch on his arm with a wince.

The cat meowed again, stumbled to its feet, and looked angrily at him.

“If you don’t want to be picked up, then follow me,” Kakashi said mildly, and turned toward his kitchen sink.

Two steps in, he felt the cat jump somewhat ungainly onto his shoulder.

“There you go,” he said.

He walked with the cat toward the sink and popped the plug in and ran a half-tub of lukewarm water through it.

“Go on,” Kakashi said, pointing.

The cat leaned forward to peer off Kakashi’s shoulder, then unbalanced and careened forward, falling head-first into the water. It splashed the water wildly and then stuck its head out and wailed, and coughed, and eventually settled, standing in the sink appearing skinny with its fur wet pressed against its body, looking utterly betrayed.

“You did this to yourself,” Kakashi said mildly, and the cat hissed at him.

Kakashi took some soap from the bathroom and then washed the blood off the cat, who just barely put up with this treatment, and then let the water out of the sink and ran the tap like a shower and rinsed the remaining blood off its coat. Then he gently dried it with a hand-towel. Finally, the cat was clean, with hair now fluffy and sticking out in all directions.

He smiled at the cat and petted its head again. “There,” he said. “Wasn’t that worth it, to be clean?” 

It felt nice, after returning from a long mission where he had killed people, bringing his mind back uncomfortably close to his ANBU days, to perform a kind act for this strange creature in his apartment.

Then Kakashi sighed, went to his front door, and opened it.

“Okay,” he told the cat. “You’re free to leave now. Go on back to your owner. Or, if you’re a Summon—” he still wasn’t sure, because even though the cat couldn’t speak, it seemed to know exactly what Kakashi was saying, and surely that wasn’t typical cat behaviour, no matter how smart they were supposed to be— “please unsummon yourself.”

The cat gave him a very unimpressed look from its position sitting on the kitchen countertop, and then looked meaningfully in the other direction.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here,” Kakashi said wearily. “I don’t know how to take care of you, and even if I did, I’m not around enough to feed you when you should be fed. You won’t be safe with me here.”

The cat jumped off the countertop, this time only wobbling a bit on its landing. It looked briefly at the door, and then it padded away from it, toward Kakashi’s bed, and leapt up onto it. It moved to the right of a suspicious dark patch and curled its body up on the bed. It watched him with wary eyes.

“You’ve left blood on my bed,” Kakashi commented, pointing at the dark patch.

The cat met his gaze, unapologetic.

And Kakashi couldn’t help but snort a little. Despite not caring a whit about cats in general, there was something about this one that was more interesting than most. It was familiar, in a way.

Familiar? What could he find familiar about an uncoordinated creature with short, fluffy black hair who seemed to always be angry with him and had one single eye, on his left side?

Well.

“Okay,” Kakashi told the cat. “You can stay for one night. Only if I get to name you.” He smiled a little. “Can I call you Obito?”

***

Obito.

Yes. For some reason, that felt right.

He looked up at Kakashi, so bizarrely large, but at least he knew the reason for that, and the reason was that Obito was a cat now, a fucking feline animal who couldn’t even talk to Kakashi to tell him that he should be human normally. Although he couldn’t remember much, he could at least remember that he was human, plus Kakashi’s name — and his own now, he supposed.

Kakashi somehow knew him from the past. Though not, from Kakashi’s sad and wistful tone, anymore. 

Well, when he finally figured out to get back into his body again, he could at least tell Kakashi that he was alive, and that would surely stop his annoying sadness.

First things first, though. He needed to and try everything that he could to regain his memory and find out what had happened to him.

Although Kakashi seemed eager to get rid of him — and for some reason, that dismissal also felt both painful and annoyingly familiar — he couldn’t allow that. He needed to stay close to the only point of familiarity in this world, this person who made him angry and comforted in equal measure.

#bp shortfic #kakaobi #kkob #obkk #I think this is a cute conceit but got super distracted with worldbuilding #cos I wanted this AU to have magic as well as chakra #and for Konan to be some epic wizard who cursed Obito when she found out he was lying to her and Nagato #and he can only break the curse when something something true love's kiss something something #anyway you asked for a snipped I sent a whole chapter lol