#ljrp

Kakashi. Sometimes it was all you ever heard, in the silence after missions when the mud filled up your shoes (but it wasn't that mud, no, not the mud made up of blood that belonged to him, which you never could wash off because that blood was his, and it was all you had left of him) and the feeling reminded you of the rock you couldn't move. And maybe it was his voice saying your name the way he always did in your head that kept you alive, that gave you a reason to keep on living even when you sometimes forgot why you did in a world where boys are never really boys.  His voice, and your name, and a hundred pinwheel eyes, and the memory of his ghost sitting by your side when you laid feverish at the edge of death after the war, telling you that it was time to stop living for them and to start living for yourself. What kind of a man does not know that he is a man and what it means to be one? To own himself, his body, his heart, and the life that beats from it? This life is not a life and will never be, if you never start living, or remember what it was like when you did live. What it means to love and to take chances, god dammit, Kakashi.  Kakashi started living for the first time in seventeen years, slowly figuring out what it means to live for himself. Sometimes he forgets but Iruka reminds him again, what it means to be alive, and the feeling of it. Life. How good it can be. Filled with happiness Kakashi never thought possible when it's the stuff made up of fairy tales -- a love worth living for. A love that belongs to him, like this life and this body that he shares, this body that belongs to Obito too, because Obito's a part of him, and he's a part of Obito.  Kakashi? He should've known that it was only a matter of time, should've thought that this was possible. The dead coming back alive happens all the time in this world, they come back alive without any memory that they had died because they are taken from the brink of death, the brink of the past sliding into the present and Obito is alive. Obito is alive and breathing and walking about and those are his ankles, his eyes, and his voice, his voice. That is Kakashi's name in Obito's mouth, and Obito's voice in Kakashi's ears. Obito is alive, alive, alive and all Kakashi can do is stare at the tiny screen of his Hitomi in his hand, this shaking little thing that holds Obito's face and his voice and Kakashi's name.  For a moment, he forgets to breathe.  Kakashi?  He should respond.  He should say something.  He should. He should.

(Obito's no longer a part of you.) There is sand in Kakashi's mouth, which has gone dry, and the world is (coming down and you can't say goodbye, and there's too much blood and dirt and smoke in the air and you're seeing out of your best friend's eye, and he's dying there under the rocks all alone and it's your fault because that rock should've been for you, stupid obito always breaking all the rules, should've let you die there instead of taking your place, what was he thinking, he didn't even tell rin he loved her and you don't deserve this, to be standing here and breathing in this air when he's breathing in dirt and how can he breathe if it's filling up his lungs and choking his throat--) shaking so hard he almost drops the Hitomi. Almost drops Obito who might not even recognize him because he went on growing when Obito never could.  Growing, getting older.  Living, which is the most difficult part.  Almost as difficult as trying to find the right words and know what to say and what to do, because Obito's out there, and not here anymore, inside of Kakashi, so he can't tell Kakashi what to say or do.  Minutes go by. Or maybe hours. Kakashi loses track of time like Obito always did because he doesn't know what to say, doesn't know how to say it even if he did know what to say, if there should also be an apology or maybe just his name. If he should tell Obito everything is okay, lie to him and give him some fairy tale of a world where Minato is still alive and he is married with Rin, and their children are crybabies just like their dad. A world where Kakashi doesn't have to wonder what to do about this eye in his head, which isn't his own, but Obito's. Obito, whose blood never made the dirt under Kakashi's feet turn to mud that ran between his toes and filled up his shoes that he never threw away. Obito, who was never left behind under a rock too large for Kakashi to move. No, that was someone else. In another world, another life. This Obito that says Kakashi's name, whose chapped ankles fill up the Hitomi's screen can have the life he always wanted. The life he saw in his dreams. And oh, how he dared to do that. To dream in a way Kakashi never knew how to do. But Obito, Obito always knew the best way to dream, how to fill up his head with them and let them reflect in his eyes so everyone else could see it too.  He can do it. He can lie to him. Look him in the eye and say--  He's not sure what he'll say. Maybe he'll find the words eventually, beyond the sand in his mouth that's making his tongue stick to the roof, that makes his throat so dry he's not sure if any sound will travel past his lips. Or what will happen if he opens his mouth. If his tongue will betray him and start wagging and slip up between the syllables and tell Obito what he (should know, deserves to know) doesn't want to know.  Kakashi's not sure he wants to find out. But he should say something, before someone else does. Before Madara does. Madara and his slick, poisonous voice and the claws that spill out through his teeth. 

Kakashi takes a breath, and steels his face into something maybe Obito might recognize. He swallows down the tide rising up in his throat, swallows down the sand and the salt and smooths his features down, eroding away the edges until they become polished and unaffected because the Kakashi Obito remembers was always too good for that -- to give a shit enough to let his face take on the expression of something human. Something real. Something strong enough to not be afraid of showing what was underneath the underneath.  He tells himself he can do this. He tells himself he can make his voice as flat as the rest of his expression, drain the emotion from his eyes. Because Kakashi wouldn't be emotional. At least, not the Kakashi Obito knows.  "Obito." The last syllable threatens to waver, threatens to break open with a violent feeling stabbing through him that Kakashi has to fight to hold down.

----

..Kakashi? Isn't that funny. It was like Obito paused and Kakashi just kept living all along. It was like Obito still couldn't catch up. A cruel prank, the worst prank; he tastes salt and bile, he wants to chew rocks rather than speak to him after this, after even when he'd been brave and powerful, even when he'd let the adrenaline rush his head, push him forward. A stupid, careless joke. His features fall, his brows knit in annoyance, and he begins to lecture even as he focuses on the screen. He becomes two pinwheel eyes in a slot of darkness, and his world is a seem-less blend of chakra and reality, and this strange place is not around him and is, but all he sees is the uneven image of this fake Kakashi on the other end. "Funny. You're hilarious, you know tha -" The unfortunate results of the test: here he is, Kakashi, standing there without the flow of chakra to indicate focus, standing there as someone who is real and old and real and old -- where did the time go? Why is there fear in his throat? Sure, that same fear, it chokes the edges of his eyes, once hid behind orange goggles that tinted the world pleasantly, pretended he was okay when he wasn't because he was afraid all the time.

Hand around the handle.                 Hope you don't have to kill someone today. And he remembers the rock. It was falling. He wasis?was? dead? Why would his form of death have someone like this? Someone to mock him, to always be one step ahead, to always be better, now complete and adult and with all the experiences to look down on him with, to judge him back? Of course he only has his eyes, these two things that thought in blood-red and interiors, skeletons and musculature. His face, cut by the camera, a childish cinematography, twists into a rigid frown, into a blanched mask. He wasis not alive. This is his first conclusion. Maybe his only conclusion. When he saw the rocks coming down he had thought to himself, if they live, I live. This idea of being a hero, of being worth something had over-ridden the knee-knock tremble breath-stall halt to heart and mind, and he'd done it. He'd sacrificed himself, so he thought. Or maybe he hadn't believed it. Maybe he'd believedbelieves all along that Rin-chan would come by and -- is Rin here too? Standing there with Kakashi? Speak. Had life become this: "How long have you been living?" He remembers living by his memory or for it, the memory of being the worst of the Uchiha, of being the slowest to graduate, of Kakashi's foot-steps before him, stepping up into a life that Obito had hoped for himself, that he had sacrificed pieces of himself throughout childhood that he had sold pieces of himself for, and now he feels crushed by the rock he'd seen fall, feels like he'd been taken away, anyway, taken out and above and away, and there was Kakashi, walking ahead, always walking ahead, always having more and walking ahead... Kakashi... is walking ahead. Where has he gone? How has he gotten here? How had it happened? How had Obito frozen so badly? The camera adjusts, and he pierces back into the frame, in full, both black-on-red pinwheels focused on the man, the man, and Obito had never felt as one of those, and he'd thought Kakashi had never felt as one either, and he wanted to eventually say that, to say he had been a man, to say that he no longer needed to protect these things on his face, these fucking things on his face, these things that dictated he was a failure all along! He'd failed! He's failing! Even at growing up! "Kakashi... god dammit, Kakashi! How long have you been living?" What else can he say but ask some stupid question that won't provide anything but a rock of an answer? Sticking his tongue to the back of his teeth, glue-salt, sand-salt, sand-glue-salt, all against his mouth and gum and roof of mouth, glue-salt-sand and he can't breathe, he realizes, he's panicking, and the pinwheels spin away to reveal an empty black, that he'd had passion once fill, or at least he'd assumed such, but sometimes, but sometimes. Living is just the most difficult part.

----

Kakashi had almost forgotten that fact. Or maybe he just wanted to so desperately, he told himself he could. Convinced himself that it would be alright to make it so life could be good one day, and living didn't have to be difficult. No, living could be damn fine indeed, in this world of dreams where days stretch into weeks and months faster than any time he ever spent back home, when the missions went on forever. Especially the kill at the end. That always took longest, every second yawning so wide he felt it pass like hours instead -- the feeling of his hand passing lightning through a man's chest and the life that left the heart a moment later.  Nights like that stretched on for an eternity, and sometimes he thought morning would never come.  Daylight was for the living, for the people who looked in the mirror and saw their own reflection, which Kakashi never saw back then. He'd look in the mirror and see the reflection of someone else. Someone with a red and white face and holes cut out for his eyes, which were not completely his own, because one of them belonged to Obito. He would look in the mirror and there would be someone else standing there, someone who was not really alive and not quite dead, but was trying to be alive or figure out what alive meant, and in the middle of all this being and not being alive, he was busy ending lives. Putting them out with his hands. He never asked why he did it or what they did to deserve it because the answers belonged to the rich man who lived in his castle far away, and the elders who wafted above the ground in fine silk robes that smelled of camphor and jasmine and not at all like the blood and dirt and the stink of death that was the smell of men who were boys and boys who were men like himself with no faces. Only hands. Hands to kill, hands to put out the lives they were commanded to take without knowing why they should, and hands to bury the dead or the empty boxes that signified them.  Those hands, the feeling of a man dying by them, they remembered the moment because they could not forget the flesh and blood feel of life disappearing because they were told it must. And he was not really sure if it was because it was his own hands that were doing it that dragged out the moments as long as they did or if it was because he was living for someone else. For Obito who wanted to see the future, for Rin who made him promise to live on, and for a teacher who gave up his life to save his and the rest of the people in the village. Living for three people who were not himself made life slower and longer and made death even more so. The memories of him and him and her and everyone else who he lost along the way, every breath he took without them or for them crawled so slowly, he must have lived a thousand lifetimes by the time he died the first time.  But death was not ready for him then, and it wasn't ready for him the second time, either.  It spat him back out to continue being what he was the moment the rocks fell: a living memorial.

He had forgotten the truth. Had let himself believe the words Obito said when he told him that he needed to start living for himself. He was so caught up by the living, by being alive and feeling life for the very first time in seventeen years, by every day he woke up and saw Iruka smiling back at him, he forgot there was a world outside of the one they created. They had no need for things like the entertainment that everyone else in the world seemed to miss because they had each other, and they were always losing time, losing themselves, by giving more and more of themselves to the other. Kakashi thought he could be alive this way, if he could finally put his hands around someone and feel like this person belonged to him as he belonged to them. That there was something beautiful and wondrous about life that he could call his own. Something that was far away from the blood and the long nights and the feeling of flesh and blood dying in his hands. The flesh and blood under his hands now was more alive than life itself, and when he reached out to touch it, when he put his hands on it and felt it warm and supple under his fingers and saw the smile that touch elicited, he knew. He knew then that life could be good, and he could have this good life for himself.  He had forgotten. He had forgotten that this life is not his to choose. That he does not deserve this goodness or that smile, because all the while when he was basking in the sun, feeling skin and looking at a smile that stretches wider than the sky above, Obito was crumbling to dust under the rocks he was buried by all those years ago. Rocks and dirt and bones and Kakashi is living a life that he should have never had the gall, the purearrogance to live, when Obito had been dead all along and Kakashi's very existence should never have been more than just what he had promised to be -- a memorial of seventeen years.  Seventeen long years is how long Kakashi has lived, not for himself, but for him and him and her and the rest of them that he lost.

How long have you been living? It is an accusation. Kakashi had stolentaken the living part from Obito. There is anger in his voice, and Kakashi knows he deserves this anger, this panic-lined rage because Obito, he thinks, must look at Kakashi and see his murderer. See the man that had taken the rest of his life and then thought he had the right to actually live his own life when his life hasn't belonged to him all this time.  It is not at all slow, the way Kakashi's walls come apart and crumble with the bite of Obito's words reverberating in his ears. He knows then that he could never lie to Obito, could not look him in the eye and tell him things that are untrue because that would be a disgrace to Obito's memory and to Obito who can always tell the truth. Who knows Kakashi better than Kakashi even knows himself. It must be because he's been living on all this time as Kakashi's left eye that he sees out as easily as he sees back in, deep inside of Kakashi where no one else can ever reach.  A shudder goes all through him then, and Kakashi tries to swallow again past all the sand collecting in his throat, feeling the words pass like gravel.  "Seven--" He starts, and suddenly, that feeling inside of him, the sharp stabbing one in his lungs, goes lurching up through his throat and makes this terrible sound that almost sounds like a sob, or maybe a choke of breath, that Kakashi has to swallow down. Has to press back into himself, to return from wherever it had come from. His eye screws shut then, the Hitomi slightly shaking in his hand.  "Seventeen years,"  He finishes, in a dry whisper. His eyes are burning and he thinks the sand must have gotten into them. Rising up within him like that sharp stabbing feeling that wrenches around his insides and rearranges him until he's not sure where his heart had gone or where his lungs went. Filling up his chest with sand and salt and the taste of bitter blood and a profound sense of loss that he had not realized was within him because he had been too busy living this life that wasn't really his.  

--- 

Obito's brain shut off. It is one of those simple things - click click and the brain-waves hit a negative number zero-per-cent, all put apart, torn apart, split apart, the distance between reality and dreams, between the foot-step and the door-step and the door-way to something else - and he thinks he sees black, but he isn't sure. Does he pass out? No he is still standing and that is just a little too much work for each and every muscle in his legs to do. He sits, but only with the need to resign himself to splitting. There it was, the rock, and coming down on his head it crushed him. Killed him. Laid him flat. But it hadn't ever hit. He never crushed, never bled, never died, never split, maybe he's splitting now, dying now, and Kakashi's memory is forming now, and seventeen years later Kakashi is here too, and whatever has happened wait where is he he is not there or here he is some-where and he is a-part and he is not sure anymore if anything makes sense. Killed him. Laid flat. His hands are around the Hitomi. They have skin. They have bone. And in an instance he bites one, unaware that it is being taped, just to see that it will bleed and it does the skin parts open to let the blood trickle out, like water sliding down a rockface, like a rain-storm sliding down a rock-face, and he knows that he will bleed. Huh. Seventeen years. Seven-teen. He replays the sounds of the words in his head, Kakashi speaking through a mouth of moths and dust and sand, and there it is, the fear. Kakashi was sad, tormented in his voice, and now he is sad and tormented on the screen, and that fear, that emotionless jounin, is there and Obito has gone from a cocky asshole to a defeated adult in three seconds and at least he bleeds oh yes, at least he bleeds "Isn't there a rule against this?" He finds his voice somewhere, watching the blood start to dry in the toosooncallouses along his inner fingers and he remembers when Minato-sensei and Kakashi seemed to gang up and make a wall. He fought his personality against them, fought hard, but Kakashi knew every rule in every book and recited them by heart, a rule for everything he might ever show of a real fuck-ing personality and instead he was just a rule, one big white-haired rule that came down with every mis-step and human thought, and brought with it another rule and another. Obito remembers hating him, fighting him, making notes to try to trick him, always failing because even if Kakashi built himself on rules they were clever rules, sound rules, rules with documentation. It didn't matter how much Obito tried. He was still the cry-baby anyway. Crying on the field. Crying in the mission. Goggles. Eye-drops. All fakes and frauds and diversions from the fact that he was scared taking kunai to flesh and killingwithhands that he hadn't yet done anything else with and he was scared when Kakashi's hands did it and he was scared when Rin took fingers to wounds to make them better and he is scared now and he wonders if Kakashi's rules will save him this time... "Sounds like you're crying, cry-baby." Obito is crying. He always cries though. He pulls his goggles down over his eyes and cries, tucking his knees to his chest. He's dead! He's dead! He's dead! He's dead! He is stapled to the earth in a rock casket, and he is bone, and he is compound bone, and he is a-part bone, and he is all sand and worms. He's dead. Click, click, whrr whrr -- one hun-dred per-cent back to-gether before he can sob for too long he starts to push his legs out, heels catching dirt digging ditches behind his scratching ankles --  "That's my job, right? You gotta be the rules so I can break 'em."

----

 Rules. It was all Kakashi ever used to care about. The rules and the regulations, perfectly structured systems, the rigidity of an ascetic life that was not a life but a purpose; shinobis did not belong to themselves, because they belonged to their village. Their lives were not lives, as they were only weapons to be used in war. Weapons whose only purpose was in their unsheathing. They only lived during those moments of blood, during the moments when the blade pushed past the flesh; the rest of the time they were not alive, but waiting, waiting, waiting for the chance to live. They waited to become useful to their village. Waited for the rush of the kill and for the mission. Waited to find meaning in those brief moments of life, when they had to remind themselves to breathe. It's easy to forget that you have to take breath when you are rarely ever breathing. You are slowly suffocating, and what's killing you isn't the sheath you put around yourself, but the moments when you think you are alive. It's a contradiction, this shinobi life, but Kakashi believed it was all that he had. Believed in nothing else, when he remembered too well how slowly his father had died. Death did not begin with the bloody blade left by his father's body, but in the moment he chose to save life instead of let it be taken. He had broken the law, broken the rules, broken everything that was true for shinobi and look at where he ended up: guts in the hands of his eight year old son, small hands trying to put them back in. Trying to save the life that had been taken by the saving of lives that should have never been saved. Kakashi stopped seeing life after that, when all he saw was himself and his father lying there on the living room floor. He memorized the rules and regulations verbatim, even the fine print no one ever read, and started living by it. Living for it. Because he did not want to end up like his father, whose name was no longer a legend but a curse, spat on by all the angry people shouting insults with eyes he could not forget, eyes filled with killing intent, directed at his father whenever they went out. Eventually they stopped going out at all, and a legend killed himself with his own sword, leaving behind a son he couldn't bother staying alive for. They say the sins of the father are inherited by the son, and Kakashi couldn't bear to live with that mantle on his small shoulders. So he cast it off entirely, refused to bear its weight, and the rules were all he had to give his life purpose. The rules were all he had, but they were also what cursed him, what took Obito's life because Kakashi hadn't listened to reason, too caught up by the fine print and by the fear that made him see nothing but that eight year old boy in an empty room filled with death that he exchanged for an eye and a rock he couldn't move no matter how hard he tried. And after seventeen years of trying to repent, seventeen years of breaking rules instead of keeping them, this is what Obito reminds him of. That he is supposed to be the rules that Obito breaks. The rules that he abandoned the way he abandoned any idea that he knew anything about life or about what it meant to be a true shinobi. Obito had done that. Had smashed through that ideal, that perfect, shining, glorious ideal of rules and regulations and shinobi who live for missions, just like he smashes through everything Kakashi ever thought he knew about living all over again.