word count: 4534
warning: occasional expletives
“Sorry for being late!” you yell out as you jog up to your waiting friend, his slanted silver hair easily recognisable in the warm glow of the afternoon sun. He turns to pin you with a half-glare and you shrink back slightly, a nervous laugh fluttering past your lips as you allow a sheepish grin to slip onto your expression as a form of silent apology.
“You’ve been spending too much time with Obito,” he mutters, beginning to walk towards the training grounds where both of you frequently train at. You trail after him, laughing a little at how disgruntled he sounds.
“It was only once or twice,” you reason, your voice filled with mirth. “Don’t make it sound like hanging out with Obito is a bad thing. He’s a good guy, you know.”
Kakashi shrugs, pushing the gate open. You duck into the training grounds, hearing him say over his shoulder, “He’s a loser.”
You roll your eyes, heading over to the set of logs to set down the bottle of water you’ve brought with you. “He’s your teammate, you know. You can’t keep calling him a loser.”
“There aren’t any rules against calling a teammate names,” Kakashi counters, swinging a kick at the side of your head. You dodge, retaliating with one of your own, laughter bubbling in your throat.
“You’re a prick,” you shout at him as you jump back, putting some distance between the two of you. “What’s so hard about treating people nicely?”
Kakashi weaves through hand-seals and you copy him rapidly, both of you releasing steady streams of fire at nearly the same time, which results in a mini-explosion - not enough to cause much harm, but enough to leave a small area of charred grass and dirt across the training ground - which you use as an opportunity to perch yourself on top of the nearest tree.
“I can still sense you, idiot,” Kakashi says, and there’s a pause before he calls, “And besides, Obito is a loser. I’m just telling the truth.”
You laugh quietly from your spot. Kakashi’s not a sensor. It’ll only be a matter of time before the smoke and fire clears and he spots you, though, so you decide to reveal your location anyway. “Obito’s not a loser,” you tell him, the corners of your eyes crinkling as you smile, “If anything, I’d say you’re just jealous that I spend more time with him than with you.”
Through the dying embers, Kakashi looks up at you, the faint orange catching the dark of his searching gaze. You watch breathlessly, watching as he begins to weave through hand-seals faster than you can process, and then curse under your breath as the trees around you light up in a familiar burning orange.
You leap from the tree that you’re situated on, and it’s a mad rush of movement as you flee from the fire technique that Kakashi has unleashed upon your hiding spot, and as you flee deeper into a separate thicket of trees, you hear his voice ringing out quietly from behind the fire, behind you.
Your heart is hammering too loud in your head and the adrenaline is rushing too fast in your veins for you to think straight, and as you land on the ground several metres away from harm’s way, you pass it off as your imagination.
Later, however, after the rather intense round of training, Kakashi offers you a faint smile and a quiet good job, and you can’t help but wonder if you had heard correctly after all.
“Sorry for being late, I was-” Your voice falters and your words fade into the heavily-hanging silence, your breath catching in your throat as you take in the sight of Kakashi sitting with his knees curled to his chest and his eyes - eye - staring vacantly out of the window, the vase that was supposed to hold flowers from visitors lying in shattered fragments on the ground, and the flowers strewn carelessly across the floor, petals torn and leaves separate from their stalk. “... Kakashi?”
He offers you a listless glance, and you suck in a breath at the look in his eye. It’s a look you’ve seen before. The same look he wore on his face the day his father died. The day you stood trembling at the door as your childhood friend screamed until he cried and cried until he collapsed. Broken. That is the only word that comes to mind when you attempt to describe the very look that’s sitting so crooked on his weary face. He’s broken.
“Kakashi,” you avert your gaze, because the expression scrawled across his features is bringing a lump up in your throat and making it hard for you to speak. “I heard what happened. I’m sorry.”
“Obito-” He draws a shaky breath, and it’s almost as though it physically hurts him to even mention his teammate’s name. He turns his head from the window again, trying for some eye contact, but drops his gaze immediately after, shifting his eyes to the blankets in - guilt? Shame? Anger? A mix of emotions you can’t place? You can’t quite tell anymore; he lets out a breath, clenches his fists around the blankets hard, and chokes out, “- I couldn’t save him.”
You fight back the tears that are threatening to spill from the corners of your eyes - of course you’re sad, Obito was your friend too - but you can’t cry here, not in front of Kakashi, not when he’s already so broken inside. “It’s not your fault,” you say, hating how weak and hoarse your voice sounds, echoing emptily around the four walls of the otherwise silent room.
“It is,” Kakashi whispers, and you catch the cracks in his voice as he speaks. “If I didn’t care so much about the damn rules. If I had acted faster. Maybe then he wouldn’t be dead.”
“Kakashi,” you say, and he doesn’t bother to acknowledge the calling of his name, but you know he hears you anyway. “Kakashi, it’s not your fault. Stop blaming yourself for all of it.”
“But it is!” Kakashi half-yells, only that his voice breaks in the middle and the rest of his words abruptly grow faint, and he swallows hard as he stares over at you, his uncovered eye glimmering with a thousand unshed tears. “If I had been a better person, if I had cared more about my teammates-”
“Kakashi,” you interrupt gently, allowing a shuddering breath to pass through you, “There’s nothing you could have done.”
Kakashi is a smart shinobi.
He knows exactly what you mean.
And he must have seen the way the tears begin to run down your cheeks without stopping, because he turns away from you to face the window, and the scattered sunlight that filters in through the glass reflects upon his cheek, making its silvery trails glow with the light of a thousand tears.
Your footsteps sound awfully loud against the dead, damp leaves littering the ground, you think. Kakashi must have sensed your presence long ago, given the noise that you’re (unintentionally) making, and you’re only proven right when he doesn’t blink, let alone flinch, when you come to a halt a few metres away from him.
He looks… forlorn. Defeated, really. He’s standing in front of the gravestones in the pouring rain without an umbrella, and his normally-spiky silver hair is plastered to his skin, his dark clothes flat against his frame that’s thinner than you last remembered.
You hesitate from where you’re standing, your heart throbbing painfully in your chest. It must hurt. You’ve heard all the stories, all the rumours, all the perspectives and opinions from gossips who you couldn’t care less about. You can’t and you won’t bring yourself to believe any of them. Kakashi was your friend for as long as you remember; the same person you’ve known since you were a small child learning how to walk. He’s not the type of person to kill a friend, a teammate. You know him better than them. You know him better than the rumour-makers claim to.
“Kakashi,” you utter softly, your footsteps quieter now as you walk towards him, reaching up so that the umbrella covers both of you. It’s not that it does much difference, considering how he’s already soaking wet, but it’s better than nothing.
There’s a moment of silence that surrounds the two of you, save for the sound of raindrops pattering harshly against the umbrella’s surface.
It’s followed by a sudden, dull thud as the umbrella hits the ground, its tip striking the surface of a puddle, causing small droplets of water to splash lightly onto both of your clothing.
You stare at Kakashi, holding your bottom lip between your teeth. For a second, he looks almost apologetic for knocking the umbrella out of your grasp so roughly, but then his expression changes, written over by a steel-eyed look. You’ve never seen him like this before. So… angry. So dark.
“Go away,” he says, his words tinged - no, laden - with irritation, and you feel yourself recoiling at the harshness of his tone.
He cuts you off. “Go away,” he snarls, and you can hear your heartbeat ringing in your ears, a dull thud that’s increasing in speed by the second. “I don’t want you here. I don’t need your pity, your sympathy, your company. Just go.”
“It’s not your fault,” you yell at him, frustration causing your voice to rise in pitch. “You need to stop-”
“I need to stop what?” The cold frigidness of his tone makes you shut up, and you can’t bring yourself to do anything more than stare at him in stunned silence. “I need to stop blaming myself? I need to stop telling myself it wasn’t my fault when it was, when I was the one who killed my friend?”
He raises his voice, and you find yourself taking a step back unconsciously, a tangle forming in your throat and preventing any words from escaping. “It was my fault, so stop telling me it’s not my damn fault!” He runs a hand through his hair, his gaze furious, his words biting. “Maybe if you were there-”
You forget how to breathe.
“I was only dispatched as backup, under official orders,” you spit out hoarsely. “By the time I got there-”
“It was too late, wasn’t it?” Kakashi snaps bitterly. “Too fucking late, because she died.”
You refuse to let yourself cry.
“You’re telling me I was too late?” you choke out in disbelief, bewildered laughter tinging your voice. “You’re telling me I should have saved her? Fuck, Kakashi, you think I didn’t wish I could? You think I wanted to show up to see her dead? What the fuck do you want me to say?” You throw your hands up in the air, and you’re sure that Kakashi can hear the barely-contained rage in your voice as you continue to shout at him over the cacophony of the pouring rain. “I’m sorry for being late? I’m sorry for not saving her life? I’m sorry I wasn’t good enough to bring her back to life? She was my friend too, you know. Do you think I wanted her to die? Do you think I wanted to be too late?”
You stare at him, breathless from yelling, the back of your throat burning white-hot, and your gaze searches his to see what you can read from the expression that he slaps over his facial features.
Nothing. You can’t understand the look on his face anymore. You don’t know what he’s thinking anymore.
He’s different. Different from the same person you grew up with, trained with, progressed through the ranks with (albeit with him being a tad bit faster than you). Different from the childhood friend you knew so well, different from the person you thought you knew better than the rest.
You’re floored, the words evaporating past your lips and dissipating into thin air. You don’t know what to say anymore. You don’t want to say anything anymore.
“Yeah,” Kakashi rasps out, “You were too fucking late.”
A voice inside of you tells you that he’s being unreasonable. That he’s overridden by grief and guilt for letting his friend and teammate die. That it isn’t him saying all these terrible things, that he’s just letting his emotions get to him.
Another side of you tells you that he means every word he says.
You’re torn between staying and leaving - you look at him, searching desperately for anything, any sign that would make you stay, but you find nothing. Just a cold emptiness. A cold, uncaring emptiness.
“I’m sorry,” you breathe out, a disbelieving, strangled laugh forcing its way out of your throat as you shake your head and drop your gaze, turning your body away from him. You don’t bother to pick up your umbrella. “Sorry for being late.”
Kakashi doesn’t respond, but you hear his answer clearly in the preceding silence.
You begin to walk, your footsteps achingly loud in the quietude that settles around the surroundings like a suffocating blanket.
You’re half-expecting him to move, to run after you and catch your wrist like all those years ago when he shouted you to get out and never come back after you caught him crying over his father’s suicide. You’re half-expecting him to apologise for his words, for him to tell you he didn’t mean what he said.
He doesn’t move from his place before the gravestones in the pouring rain.
You swallow down your tears and take your leave.
You’re laying down flowers by Obito’s and Rin’s graves when you sense a distant presence; distant, but close enough to be recognisable. It makes you quicken your pace, arranging the flowers swiftly before taking your leave in a swirl of leaves. He’s on his way over from the Fourth’s grave, and he hasn’t sensed you here yet. He’s not a sensor.
You re-appear in another corner of the village, a more populated area you know he doesn’t frequent. He’s never been the type to like being around people. Neither were you, really, but you feel relatively secure blending into the shadows with your porcelain white mask fitted onto your face. It’s much easier to hide, to be just one of many, to be nobody. You prefer it that way, and you know he once did too.
But now - now everything has changed. For him, at least. A sensei to a genin team now, they say. You know that the possibility of him being one has been there for a while, ever since he was made to resign from ANBU (and you would know, because you were the one who filled the spot that he left behind). But no one - yourself included - really expected any team assigned to him to be able to pass.
Your eyes soften as you catch sight of a blonde-haired boy with the Third’s grandson. Uzumaki Naruto, and a genin of his team. You wonder if his current team reminds him of his genin team. The blonde boy who is a walking replica of the teacher he respected the most, the ambitious raven who bears the same crimson eyes and family name as the best friend he lost too early. You wonder if it haunts him sometimes, and you’re sure it does.
A part of you wishes you could ask him, even if you know you can’t.
You’ve never spoken to him. Not once. Not after the day Rin died and the two of you shouted at each other in the pouring rain. He’s never made any attempt to speak to you, either, and you suppose that being shinobi hasn’t helped in closing the divide between both of you - it’s surprisingly easy to cast someone out of your life as a shinobi, you’ve learnt.
Right after Rin’s death, he joined the ANBU, hiding behind the same porcelain mask you don now. You specialised in your respective field as a Toukubetsu Jounin, and it became almost too easy for the two of you to avoid each other just by keeping to your duties. You barely even had a chance to encounter each other, let alone bother with avoiding one another. And then he stepped down - no, was made to step down from his position, forced to join the ranks as a regular Jounin. And that’s when they contacted you, offered you a position in Konoha’s ANBU. He removed his mask, and you put yours on; you don’t think he knows. You’ve simply faded out of his life that same way you tried to let him fade out of yours, and you’ve just become another white mask in the crowd that he was once a part of.
After joining the ANBU it was even easier. You saw him more often - every time he walked into the Hokage’s office, really - but he never saw you from your position in the office’s shadows. You know he knows that there are ANBU members - four, to be precise - positioned in the office at all times, considering how he was one himself, but you know that it’s impossible for him to know it’s you.
He’s not a sensor, and he’s cast you out of his life too long ago to care about your existence anymore. The thought of it makes you laugh a little - you wonder if he still remembers you, if he even wonders whether you’re still alive or not.
Sometimes you wonder where it all went wrong; whether you should have tried harder to fix all the cracks in your relationship, whether you shouldn’t have left that day. Sometimes you wonder if this was supposed to happen after all; that the cracks couldn’t have been mended, that it was bound to collapse into oblivion and render your relationship to nothingness, that even if you had stayed it wouldn’t have made a difference.
And then you end up laughing to yourself after wasting all your time mulling over the possibilities - there are no possibilities, not anymore. Any possibility of reconciliation died a long time ago, and it’s far too late to fix anything now.
You’ve become familiar strangers now, you realise.
And each time, returning to the thought of him makes it feel like you’re standing on parallel shores and watching different skies, like you’re standing on opposite ends of a road that’s broken halfway down the middle.
Like you’re returning to a home that’s lost its welcome mat.
You’re a strong shinobi. Good enough to be recruited as an ANBU member. One of Konoha’s elite, one of the few trusted with guarding the Hokage’s life. It’s something you’ve always taken a slight pride in, knowing that you’re capable, that you’re good at what you do, and that your years and years of training and more training have paid off.
And yet you’ve never felt so weak, so incapable before. You’re a strong shinobi, proven many times by your mission count, your successes, your position, the enemies you’ve defeated. Yet you find yourself standing before an enemy you can’t defeat, an enemy who puts your abilities to shame; an enemy who makes you feel something you haven’t felt in a long time, not even on highly classified and dangerous ANBU missions.
Fear. Not the regular adrenaline-inducing kind of fear, nor the what-if-I-die kind of fear. It’s the kind of fear that pulses through your veins with every beat of your heart. The kind of fear that makes you feel your heart beating in your throat and the kind that makes you hear yourself screaming mutedly in your head. It’s the kind of fear that renders you immobile, that clamps down on your larynx and prevents any sound from escaping, and the kind that makes your thoughts go hazy and your brain unable to function.
The only thing you’re able to think of is, I’m going to die.
Your breathing is getting laboured; you cling to your sword, but you don’t miss the way that your hands shake against your will. Your eyes fix themselves on your opponent’s black robe, the colour of midnight, and the red clouds that adorn it, the colour of fresh blood. Your blood, perhaps, that you can taste in your mouth and feel wetting your clothes and staining them red.
You’ve done your duty, you think dimly as you struggle to maintain your grasp on your sword and fight to keep yourself from falling to your knees; you’ve done your best to protect Lady Tsunade, you helped to save Iruka, you helped by facing this opponent who can’t be beaten so that he claims your life before claiming the life of someone else. Someone more important than you, someone who has a name and a face, someone who doesn’t hide behind a porcelain white mask and shelve away their identity willingly.
For once in your life, you’re glad that you don’t mean anything to anyone, because you’re going to die and you’re tired of people crying over their lost loved ones. At least when you don’t mean anything to anyone - when you spend half of your life hiding behind a mask and living in the Hokage’s shadows, it’s hard to interact with anyone save the higher-ups, let alone mean something to anyone - so no one has to waste their tears on you. And no one will have to apologise for not saving you, for being too late to prevent your life from being taken, because you’re expendable.
You prefer it that way, you think.
You watch as he begins to walk towards you, his orange hair uncomfortably vivid in the saturated sunlight. You wonder how he’s going to kill you - if he’s going to manipulate gravity again to pull you to him, to push you away, or if he’s just going to walk up to you and run your own sword through your gut. You don’t think you’re strong enough to run; it’s not like it would do any use, anyway.
He raises his palm, and you grip onto your sword with all the remaining strength you have. If he tries to pull you towards him, the least you could do is attempt to run it through him before you die; but you’re sure he must have noticed, for the look in his purple-ringed eyes change and he intones something under his breath - and then the world freezes on its axes for just a moment before you feel yourself being pushed away by an incredible force, your sword ripping free from your hand as your body hurtles across the air like a ragdoll being thrown backwards.
You’re going to die, you muse as you close your eyes, preparing for the impact. You’ll either slam right into the rubble or the wall at an alarming speed, and with your chakra exhausted, multiple parts of your body broken, and your mental state collapsed, you know you won’t survive the impact.
You’re going to die, you think to yourself. You wonder when the impact will come, and if you’ll live to feel it, or if you’ll die immediately. You wonder what death feels like. You hope no one mourns your death.
You feel the impact, you note as you feel yourself crashing into something; and then your eyes snap open as you feel part of your body colliding with the ground, and you hear footsteps that don’t belong to you skidding along the ground.
You’re alive, you think numbly, and your eyes widen as you hazily take in your surroundings; the same blue sky, the same annoyingly bright sunlight - and looking down at you, a familiar yet strange face. The same mask that you’ve seen since young on an older, more mature, more tired face, the same slanted silver hair, the same dark eye that you learnt and then forgot how to read, coupled with a crimson one that spins wildly in its place.
You’re alive, you think, opening your mouth only to spit out blood all over his flak jacket, you’re alive and he’s here.
“Rest and recover for now, and I’ll take care of him,” he whispers, cradling your head close to his chest, and that’s when you notice he’s holding you in the bridal position, crouched on the ground several metres away from where your opponent stands. He must have caught you.
You shake your head at him, trying to warn him to stay away; just let me die, and run, you want to say, but the blood is thick in your mouth and the words refuse to escape your throat, so instead you settle for staring up at him, hoping he can read you just as well as he could in the past.
Even if you’ve become nothing more than familiar strangers.
Even if both of you had grown up, changed, and even if the two of you had never met each other’s changed selves.
He looks down at you, and you know he understands.
The corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles at you from under your mask, and you know from the look on his face that he isn’t going to listen.
“Just stay here and wait for me until I’m done,” he says softly, removing the remainders of your cracked porcelain mask from your face and wiping the blood away from your lips with his thumb.
“How did you know,” you rasp out, coughing a little as blood clogs your throat, “That it was me?”
He lays you down on the ground gently, the smile still playing on his lips. “I sensed you.”
You want to chuckle but your ribs hurt too much, so you settle for a half-smile instead.
“By the way,” he says as he rises to his feet, and you’re stricken by the look on his face - how similar he is to the him you remember in the memories of your past, how he wears it on his face the same way he always did back in the past when looked at you, and for a moment you wonder if you’re hallucinating, that you’re just imagining that a ghost of the past has come back. But you blink - one, twice, several times - and he’s still standing there, eyes soft and a smile pulled onto his face beneath his mask.
And then you realise he’s still him.
And after all this time, the part of him that you knew is still the same, and the part of you that he knew is still the same.
You’d cry if you had enough strength to.
“Kakashi,” you murmur, realising that he had stopped speaking, “What were you going to say?”
It’s been years since you’ve said his name, you realise.
And you’ve missed it, you realise.
You’ve missed it so much.
He says your name for the first time in years, too, his voice tinged with an odd mix of nostalgia, affection and regret, and his eyes curve into a gentle smile.
“... Sorry for being late.”
