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[panharmonium]

behind this mask...is another mask!  

sometimes i think about how true this “joke” of a statement is, and how welcome a change it must be for kakashi to start spending all his time with three kids who are too young to realize it.

for all that kakashi is obviously a person who’s been trying to scrape together some degree of anonymity (in whatever way he can - the mask, the headband, anbu), he has long since been stripped of most of his privacy.  he can put on as many masks as he wants, but he’s living an incredibly overexposed life - all of his most traumatic experiences were high-profile, high-publicity events, and some of them made him famous enough that every antagonist he encounters in every country he visits already knows far more about him than he would EVER choose to disclose to someone he’d just met, or even to a friend - if he ever even had that choice, which he never does, because everybody he meets already knows all of the things he might be reticent to reveal.  

for someone who is so clearly trying (in vain) to put some distance between himself and the total strangers who know far too much about him, this is profoundly uncomfortable.  it’s like walking around naked all the time.  nothing is private for him, no matter how hard he tries to cover up.  he has a mask to hide his face, but everybody already knows who he looks like.  he has a headband to hide his eye, but everybody already knows what’s under there.  his teacher’s death is probably the most well-known and widely-discussed event in recent hidden leaf history, and his student’s departure (and subsequent infamy) is now an international issue.  every single intensely personal and painfully intimate tragedy in kakashi’s life is very much out there in the public eye for people to scrutinize, and i think this situation probably just gets more uncomfortable after the uchiha massacre, because now not only is kakashi the first (and only, as far as people know) non-uchiha to ever possess the sharingan, he’s also suddenly the LAST person to possess it, at least until sasuke’s potential abilities awaken.  

kakashi can cover his face all he wants, but it doesn’t matter.  he might as well be wearing a flashing neon sign on his headband, for all the privacy it grants him.  

but with the kids, though -

the kids are too young to know.  they weren’t alive for the third great ninja war or for the battle that finally brought it to a close.  they’re too young to remember the nine-tails attack.  they don’t know anything about what happened to kakashi’s father or how kakashi got his eye or how he’s connected to the leaf village’s most famous martyr or any of the other horrible things that have happened to him.  they do eventually start to realize that he’s famous, in a sort of vague, undefined way, but it doesn’t mean anything concrete to them.  to them, kakashi is just their sensei.  he can shoot lightning out of his hand.  he can kick zabuza’s butt, twice!  he can use four different chakra types.  he has a pack of talking dogs.  he weaves hand signs faster than the eye can follow.  he’s the coolest mofo on the planet, but he's also very stupid, because he’s obsessed with the dumbest books the kids have ever seen and he’s ALWAYS late for EVERYTHING.  

and i’ll tell you right now - kakashi loves being perceived like this.  with the kids, he gets to just be, and he loves every second of it.  he loves that they think he’s a chronic oversleeper with no sense of punctuality; he loves that it drives them bonkers - they don’t need to know that he’s always late for them because he visits his friends’ memorial stone first thing every morning and gets stuck there thinking about “what an idiot [he] used to be” - they have no reason to suspect something like that about him; they just yell at him for being lackadaisical and he's perfectly happy to let them do it; he’s perfectly happy to entertain them by coming up with more and more outlandish excuses that they can scold him about.  he loves when they make fun of his reading material and take advantage of his fannish devotion to it so they can best him in a fight.  he loves when they fall out of a tree on top of him because they’re mistakenly convinced that he’s dating somebody and they’re desperate to discover all the dirty details.  he loves when they obsess over what’s under his mask and start spying on him; he plays along with all their schemes and lets them stalk him and sets up decoys and eventually agrees to “reveal” what’s underneath as part of a bigger joke, which he knows will drive them crazy (but which he also knows will be the most entertaining outcome) - he couldn’t be happier to be playing along with these games!  he doesn’t mind their occasionally curious and clumsy attempts to stick their noses into his business; he knows it just means they’re interested in him, like all kids are interested in the Very Secret and Mysterious Lives of their teachers.  they’re having fun, and kakashi loves seeing kids get to be kids, so he chooses to have fun right along with them.  nothing about it bothers him - no matter how much they try to stalk him, kakashi still gets to decide how much of his personal life they’re privy to (and that’s a relief, because it’s not a luxury he has with anyone else).  

but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t ever share things with them.  it just means that when he does, it’s because he chooses to do so, which makes it a far more authentic connection than whatever he experiences with random strangers who already know all his personal business without ever having put in the time to earn that kind of intimacy.  kakashi tells the kids things about himself not because he’s forced to, but because he wants to, and the fact that he sometimes makes these kinds of choices even when his natural inclination is to preserve what little privacy he has left is exactly what makes him such a good teacher.  that scene he has up in the tree with sasuke is important precisely because kakashi doesn’t have to tell sasuke what he does (“everyone you’re talking about has already been killed”) - he could have just given sasuke a lecture and been satisfied with that; he could have demanded that sasuke listen to him solely because one of them is the authority figure and one of them is the student - but instead, he chooses to disclose his own history, his own feelings, his own struggle, because he knows that sasuke deserves more than platitudes from people who can’t possibly understand how he feels; he needs to hear from somebody who legitimately knows what he’s going through (see: it’s easy for you to talk; you have no idea!  maybe if i were to kill the most important people in your life - everyone who’s ever meant anything - maybe then i’d listen to you, because maybe then you’d have some idea how i feel!)  kakashi knows he won’t have any credibility with sasuke until he opens that connection, vulnerable as it makes him, and so he doesn’t hesitate.

nor does he mind.  he’s comfortable making that choice.  he’s perfectly willing to open himself to somebody else when he feels it’s appropriate, but the trouble is that the only time he ever has a choice to do so is with the kids.  everybody else in the Leaf and beyond already knows too much about him - he’s been mistaken for his father in multiple countries, at multiple ages, and every single villain he encounters has some kind of comment to make about his eye even before the headband comes off.  despite the barriers kakashi has tried to put up between himself and other people, everyone he meets is privy to details of his history that are WAY too personal and painful for total strangers to know, and it’s only with the kids that he manages to escape that constant overexposure.  his students are too young to know anything about him, and too unsuspecting to realize that asking around might net them any information.  they don’t know that kakashi’s father was more legendary than the sannin, or that he killed himself when kakashi was many years younger than they are now.  they don’t know that kakashi lost his own eye protecting a friend, or that he got his new eye when that same friend was crushed to death saving kakashi’s life.  they don’t know that the rest of kakashi’s history has just been one long parade of loss.  

to them, kakashi sprang into existence the day he became their teacher, and ever since then, he’s just been ‘Our Cool Sensei, Who’s Also Stupid.’  that is such a gentler, happier, more hopeful image of himself than the one everybody else sees when they look at him.  and when he’s with the kids, i think it’s all kakashi wants to be.