#minakashi

“—oi, Sensei. Just got back from Grass this time.”

It was the voice that stirred his consciousness. Familiar as breathing had been when he was alive. It took effort to bring himself to full wakefulness every time, but for her…

Kakashi rambled on about her journey back, a familiar call and response that no longer had a response.

Over the years Minato had resigned himself to the fact that she could neither see nor hear him. Every time Kakashi came to the Memorial Stone in self-punishment. Every time she bared to a dead man what little of her heart she allowed. He felt it was repayment for all the times he’d sat vigil by her own hospital bed. But Minato wasn’t sick or injured. He was dead.

There she was, kneeling in the grass, like always. She looked older, more weathered. Tired.

With a muffled pang, Minato realized she was now older than he had been at his own death.

He should have sensed the intruder, but she had always been better at hide-and-seek, and all the more deadly for it.

A hand pushed the book down and he looked up to meet Kakashi’s uncovered eye.

“You’re back early,” he murmured with a happy smile. He had expected her mission to take a few more days, but here she was—tired and filthy but obviously glad to be home.

“The mission went more smoothly than expected.” Kakashi prowled around the living room like a cat reorienting itself, before returning to his side. Minato pulled her into his lap, book forgotten.

“I see you were reading your way through my Icha Icha collection,” she said dryly.

I missed you. “It made me think of you.”

Kakashi hummed softly, pleased. “Any part in particular?”

Winter Wonderland AU

Kakashi’s the broke college kid with deep abandonment issues and nine dogs who just got kicked out of her apartment.

Minato’s the single dad who never intended on getting involved with anyone after his wife’s death. Especially someone like Kakashi.

.*.

Her menagerie looks down at her from her walls, birds and tigers and weasels peering between thickly painted leaves. With the wide window cracked open to let in a breeze carrying the smell of diesel and the sounds of the city, Kakashi forces herself to relax. She’s been on edge for too long and she tries to immerse herself in her work.

She has a house elsewhere in the city, filled with only the barest of necessities. She doesn’t linger when there is no need to. It is a place for sleeping and eating, nothing more. But more often than not, she sleeps here in her studio.

It’s safer here.

Her drafting table is sanded to a soft golden shade and spattered with blobs and streaks of paint, none of them fresh.

She hasn’t had inspiration for a while, not since…

She steadfastly refuses to look at the bulletin board directly opposite her drafting board. It’s filled with scraps cut from magazines and printed from the internet, things she’d seen and wanted to create herself. Little things for little hands.

But now there’s no possibility for either of those things now.

Her eyes fall on a scrap of paper clipped next to the window, an idle doodle for a children’s book she had published over a year ago now. It’s a loose collection of pencil strokes, a dog and an owl looking at each other from their respective spots on the ground and in a tree. It had never made its way into the book, but Kakashi hasn’t been able to force herself to throw it away.

There’s just something so wistful about it, a gap that the animals are unable to bridge.

She reaches for her tubes of paint, begins pouring and mixing. She loses herself in the motions for a little while, intent on getting the shades just right as the sun slowly shifts over the drafting table and the afternoon pours more fully into her studio.

But the time comes and blank canvas stares at her. Her brush hovers over it, hesitating for the first time. It’s the spaces between the dog and the owl, the bleak sight of the bulletin board at her back. She’d known what she wanted to paint as she was mixing, but now all she sees is that blank whiteness, barren.

Her chest clenches painfully.

The sound of knuckles against wood is jarring to her senses and paint streaks across the canvas and her hand. Her head whips up to find someone standing awkwardly in the doorway. A very familiar someone. Kakashi stops herself from shrinking into herself. “What are you doing here?” she says flatly.

Minato doesn’t answer for the longest time, merely watching her with a worried look that Kakashi knows well. Why she doesn’t linger in the house that used to be a home. The sun streaks through the tall windows, setting his messy blonde hair alight.

He is intruding into her world, the only safe place she has left.

“I have … a book. My favorite. A gift from the author.” He hesitates before coming closer. “Some pages have been lost. I was hoping you would be able to replace them.” He hands it to her and Kakashi feels herself freeze up again.

She knows this book. Adventures of the gruff old hunting dog and the cheerful owl, a friendship for the ages. This was the proof copy, the original drawings she had created, willed into being. But there are gaps in the paper, negative space she is unable to fill.

She smoothes a hand over the cover, eyes taking in the illustrations on the front. Her illustrations. She’d poured her heart and soul into it and the ones that followed, stories created by a desire to put to words how much love she wanted to share.

She doesn’t know that woman anymore.

Kakashi doesn’t raise her head from the book. She can’t bear to look at him. “Why did you come here? You could have just bought a replacement.”

“True,” he concedes in that reasonable voice Kakashi hates. “But I have a particular fondness for this one. It was given to me by someone I love.”

She lets the book clatter onto the drafting table and she turns her back to him fully, eyes closed against the brightness of the sunshine. It does little to thaw the chill creeping through her. “I guess you’ll just have to content yourself with memories. I no longer make those books.”

Minato’s voice is low and soothing. She misses that. Hates herself for it. “Why did you stop?”

Kakashi doesn’t look up from her drafting table, resting shaking fingers against the age-smoothed wood. Pencils clatter out of her way and onto the floor. “You know why.”

Minato takes a step closer to her and she tenses, a feral animal bristling and ready to snap. She knows why he’s here, and it’s not because of the book.

Kakashi wonders how long she’s willing to let this estrangement between her and her husband go on. How long until that thread snaps and Minato finally gives up on the broken girl he claimed to love.

“Do you know how quiet it is at home?” he asks softly. She can easily envision his blue eyes, too deep and too caring. He always cared too much. “How much you’re missed? How many times Rin and Obito ask after you? You’re never there anymore and it’s sad to live in a place as empty as that—”

She spins around, throwing the jar of brushes at him with deadly accuracy. Minato ducks and they clatter against the wall. “Get out,” she snarls.

She can’t stand this back-and-forth, this dance around the pain that shoved them apart in the first place. She wants none of his pity.

But Minato isn’t going anywhere, not this time. He’s gentle, not weak. “I know you need time. But you can’t keep carrying all of it by yourself. I want to help, Kakashi. Let me help.” Those blue eyes nail her in place and she’s stunned to see the suspicious glitter of tears. “You’re not the only one grieving. And I can’t keep watching you hurt yourself.”

Kakashi sucks in a breath. “This whole thing—I was hurting myself? Are you hearing the words coming out of your mouth? I didn’t cause this. It happened to me. You talk about empty houses—is that supposed to make me feel sympathetic?“

The look in his eyes is bitterly sad and says more than his words.

“You’ll drown yourself in darkness,” he murmurs, inching forward with a hand held out like he’s approaching a wild animal. And she feels like it. She feels trapped, with nowhere to run and death staring into her eyes.

Kakashi abruptly slides to the floor, Minato beside her with his arms curling around her.

“Hating me won’t bring them back,” he whispers, resting his forehead against her shoulder. “I keep asking myself if there was anything I could do. But I know there wasn’t. It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t mine. It just happened. And we fight through the best we can.” Kakashi shakes silently. She knows what he‘s asking and she can’t let go. Not now.

She can feel a spark at her fingertips, there—but unwilling to be spilled on a blank canvas. To let it spill out would be to hollow out herself completely. And so her grief has nowhere else to go. It burrows ever deeper inside her.

Minato’s arms tighten around her, unwilling to give her up. She can feel warm wetness against her cheek, realizes they’re not her tears. And Minato’s voice in her ear, pleading and wrecked and so painfully human. ”Let it out, Kakashi. Let it out.”