i am losing my MIND.
the laser-focused intensity in this scene - LOOK at this! naruto is throwing a fit in the background and neither kakashi nor sasuke so much as BLINKS in his direction.
neither of them acknowledge any of naruto’s outraged interjections. they never respond to any of his questions. it’s like they can’t even hear him. kakashi is talking to sasuke - only to sasuke - and he’s saying more than what naruto and sakura are able to hear.
what i mean by that:
the above exchange, along with the one before it (“sasuke, what is your current dream?”/“if you don’t want to tell us what you’re thinking right now, sasuke, that’s fine”), as well as the moment when sasuke and kakashi first encounter each other (“sasuke, i’m sorry for appearing so suddenly. i promise we’ll talk more later”), are all scenes where kakashi extends a shocking degree of grace without asking sasuke to explain himself or defend his actions or justify the apparent trust kakashi is placing in him, and the most crucial thing to recognize about these moments is that kakashi knows sasuke isn’t “on their side” right now. from the moment sakura mentions that sasuke wants to become hokage, kakashi recognizes what sasuke is planning to do. you can see it clicking for him - immediately after sakura asks “what’s the meaning behind saying you’ll be hokage,” kakashi realizes just how sasuke plans to achieve that dream:
but even given this - even suspecting that a post-battle sasuke is planning to drop their temporary alliance and go right for naruto’s throat - kakashi decides to keep telling sasuke the same thing he tells all the kids: i believe in you. “it’s okay if you don’t want to share what you’re thinking right now,” he says, even though he’s pretty sure that what sasuke is thinking about is killing naruto and taking the hokage’s seat by force. “i promise we’ll talk more later,” he says, as if there’s no doubt in his mind that sasuke’s future includes a “later” where they can sit down together and have a conversation. “you should be the one leading team 7′s four-man squad,” he says, even though he and sasuke both know that sasuke is planning to turn on at least one of them as soon as this battle is over.
kakashi gives sasuke team 7, even though he knows that sasuke no longer considers himself to be a member of the squad. he does it in front of everyone, over naruto’s vocal objections, his eyes never leaving sasuke’s for a second. he’s trying to tell sasuke something that the other two can’t hear, and while we won’t know for a while whether sasuke really absorbs the message or not, i respect kakashi SO MUCH for choosing to deliver it, especially since it’s done at his own risk and in defiance of any and all common sense.
no other adult in the hidden leaf would have recommended that kakashi take this route. everyone outside team 7 has already written sasuke off (”this guy has no future”), and even though kakashi knows perfectly well that sasuke has plans that aren’t necessarily “we all make up and become friends again,” kakashi still chooses to step into a trust fall that no one in their right mind would have advised as a safe or smart course of action. he doesn’t do it foolishly or naively or out of an abundance of rose-tinted optimism. he does it with his eyes wide open and his heart steeped in acceptance of the risk he knows he’s taking.
the following is just my own impression, but the sense i get from all of kakashi’s interactions with sasuke in this arc (and of course these are just my current thoughts from where i’m at right now; things may change as the story progresses) is that kakashi has reached some kind of settled internal decision about how to handle sasuke’s reappearance (and what sasuke might be planning to do now that he’s back). i don’t know if it’s because of everything else that’s happened in the last few hours, or because of all the other times today where kakashi has been painfully confronted with the hard-to-accept knowledge that he isn’t responsible for other people’s choices and can only honor his ideals and take care of the people around him as best he can, but whatever the contributing factors are, in the end, when it comes to sasuke, kakashi decides to take a leap of faith and believe in the student he helped raise. he’s not going to interrogate him about his intentions, and he’s not going to confront him about his plans. he’s not going to abandon him, certainly - the things he says to sasuke in this arc are still lessons, last reminders (there’s a “later” for you with us, if you want it - it’s okay if you don’t want to share with us, but “that we were all once members of team 7 is an incontrovertible fact, isn’t it?”) - but he’s not going to counsel sasuke to change his mind, and he’s not going to exhort sasuke to turn back. kakashi is choosing to trust sasuke to walk that last mile of broken road himself, to find his way home on his own.
kakashi has spent his whole life fighting to save the people around him from everything under the sun, but this time, for perhaps the first time, he decides that what he and his students have already done for sasuke is going to have to be enough for sasuke to save himself. it’s not a decision that comes out of nowhere - from the very beginning, kakashi has always been the one who’s known that sasuke would have to make the decision to come back on his own, and this is just an extension of that understanding. all of team 7′s members know, deep down, that sasuke is planning to turn on them. all of them understand, on some level, that sasuke isn’t really on their side yet. but kakashi still chooses to hand sasuke the reins to team 7 regardless, willingly ceding control of a group that sasuke doesn’t even consider himself to be a part of anymore, all to communicate the message “i trust you to lead us, even when you say you aren’t one of us. i have faith that you won’t hurt us, despite your explicitly expressed desire to kill us. i (still) believe in you.”
i’ll have to keep watching to find out whether his choice here is justified, but even though i’m pretty sure it (eventually) will be, i don’t think kakashi will regret making it even if it turns out to be wrong. he chooses this knowing full well that it’s a risk. he knows sasuke has already tried to kill him once, and there’s absolutely no reason for him to think sasuke won’t just leave him for dead somewhere on the battlefield that they’re about to enter. but if that’s where they’re headed...well, then, i think kakashi feels like that’s just where they’re headed. he’s accepted it. risks or not, this is the only choice he can make. he tried to make a different one the last time he and sasuke confronted each other, and even though he did it for all the right reasons and in the service of protecting innocent people, i suspect that somewhere in between then and now he’s come to the realization that treading that path again just isn’t something he’s willing or able to do. he’d rather take this unlikely gamble and put his life in sasuke’s hands and maybe end up killed for his misplaced trust than harden his heart and drive his hand into another young person’s chest.
accepting this risk is the only road kakashi can take that doesn’t feel like a betrayal of everything he stands for. it’s the only choice he can make right now. i don’t know how things will play out from here, or how the situation might change later, but in this particular moment, this is what kakashi thinks is right, and this is what he has to do. no matter how ill-advised his choice might sound to an outsider, kakashi has known for a long time that doing the right thing doesn’t come with guarantees, that the mark of true conviction isn’t just doing what’s right when you know your choices will be validated, but rather doing what’s right when you know they probably won’t be, when you know you might suffer for it, when you know you might die for it. true conviction means doing the right thing even when you can’t be sure that you won’t pay for it later, and for kakashi, in this moment, the right thing for him to do is believe. he has to believe that sasuke will be able to sort his own heart out in time. he has to trust that he has done everything he can for this kid, and that sasuke possesses everything he needs in order to break free from his chains and become who he’s meant to be. kakashi has to give his lost student one last chance.
whether this choice pans out or not, i don’t think it’s a decision that kakashi will regret. he may have spent the past thirty years unfairly second-guessing and blaming himself for every other decision he’s made in his life, but the choice to take a leap of faith on a child he cares about is a decision about which his conscience will always be clear.
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