Kakashi and Katsuko’s files were both papery bricks. After a moment of debate, he chose Kakashi’s first on the theory that the Copy-Ninja’s story was a familiar one, and might make faster reading.

He was wrong.

He’d known the bones: youngest jounin in Konoha’s history, son of a disgraced genius, student to the Hokage, the only living person to wield a bloodline that he hadn’t been born with. He hadn’t known the details. Like the vehement letter from Hatake Sadayo demanding her son remain in the academy for one more year, written when Kakashi was seven. Kakashi had graduated a month later.

The incident report for Hatake Sakumo’s suicide was dated the next year; he’d killed himself in the family room, next to the kotatsu, while his wife ran a two-day mission. There was no mention of who’d found the body, but Raidou thought he could make an educated guess.

Five years after that, Kakashi had broken in his shiny new jounin vest by losing an eye, a friend, and whatever anonymity he’d had left. There were three incident reports for that mission. Nohara Rin’s, detailing her capture, rescue, and the frankly insane field-surgery she’d performed at thirteen, in small, neat script; Namikaze Minato’s, recounting the last minute rescue of his two surviving students; and Kakashi’s, which started messy and got worse, devolving into unreadable chicken scratch.

They must have had him on heavy painkillers.

Raidou flipped ahead through other reports and realized, no, Kakashi just wrote like that. Maybe they had graduated him too early.

The injury list was even longer than Ryouma’s, with whole pages of notes in Rin’s hand devoted to the strange machinations of the transplanted Sharingan. He pulled them aside to hand over to Genma. The psychological assessments were surprisingly brief. One agent had made a few sketchy observations about introversion, perfectionism, and possible PTSD—the last based on a half-dozen accounts of Kakashi having issues in the hospital, which Raidou translated to ‘had nightmares’ and ‘jumpy around medics’. Which, yeah, Kakashi and the rest of the shinobi world. The remainder was basically note after note of ‘Hatake Kakashi does not talk’, ‘Hatake Kakashi deflects’, ‘Hatake Kakashi took a three-week A-rank mission to Suna and missed all his appointments’.

Hatake Kakashi was a diagnosed slitherer-outer, basically.

Raidou flipped through the rest of the file, reading increasingly extraordinary missions in an increasingly solo career, and wondered why Kakashi had decided to one-eighty himself back onto a team. Perhaps, on some level, he was lonely too.

Or trying to source a new well of uncopied jutsu.