All shinobi are haunted...by those they've killed and by the ones they couldn't save. No one of chunin rank or higher is free of the weight of the dead. But Kakashi is nothing if not exceptional.
For him, the dead are dead. He mourns at the memorial stone and remembers and perhaps picks up a habit, but that's it. The dead do not haunt him. His ghost is alive. And he welcomes her torture.
No one is sure how they did it. Not the Hokage or the doctors or the sealing specialists. He doubts the people who did it even know exactly how they succeeded. How they stuffed that monstrosity in her and then ripped it out but kept her breathing.
He doesn't dare say that they kept her living... He's not so sure it's Rin in there anymore. The extraction may have spared her life but it took everything else, everything that mattered. Sure it's her body and her voice and her memories but that's it. Rin's eyes sparkled in the dimmest situation, didn't stare blankly, distantly, at the wall. Rin smiled every time he walked into the room, didn't shrink into the corner and growl. Rin knew who he was, didn't merge him and Obito into one horribly traitorous and dead creature. Rin didn't absently tear at her own skin to ease some imagined burning.
He visits her. They keep her deep underground, in some half-forgotten cell-turned-psychiatric-hospital below ANBU Torture and Interrogation. She's well past six feet under. There's a schedule for visitors posted on the wall. Only his name has every signed it. Everyone else who would even think to come is long dead.
He has his own set time every week-Thursdays 5pm. She knows he's coming. She's waiting when the clock strikes 5. He arrives at 5:30.
He walks in and shuts the door behind him, never turning his back on her. It locks automatically. And he stands there and waits.
5:43. "Hi."
Words don't help, don't mean anything to either of them, but they interrupt the suffocation of silence. That's all the reason he needs.
"I'm glad it's you this time, Obito. You're always so nice." Something dressed as a smile tears at her lips.
Between his tardiness and the one red eye, she is seeing him as Obito. It always starts this way. He thinks its her version of wishful thinking. He can't really blame her. The dead are easier to deal with than the living.
Her nails are working just above her left knee, not seeming to notice that there is no longer any skin to be burning there. She keeps working, digging into the muscle. Maybe she finally decided that the demon was hiding deeper. He won't try telling her that it's already been pulled out. She's never believed him before and it usually provokes her to start ripping at her ears to stop the lying voices.
Her words start spitting. "Last time they let that stupid traitor in here. Can you believe that?!" The laugh sounds like clashing kunai and drowning. "Bastard had the guts to come here. And he wouldn't leave. I hate him!"
Her eyes are darting, panicked, around the room, looking anywhere but at him, dragging her self-delusion out a little longer.
He should probably leave now. He should walk away while it's still civil and they are both relatively uninjured. But what's one more bad decision in a life like his?
"He's sorry."
He can feel the delusion snap and her eyes are suddenly blazing into him. Her hands move to her arms, like she's hugging herself, except she's drawing bloody lines into her skin.
"AHH FUCK YOU KAKASHI! YOU BASTARD! YOU LEFT ME THERE! YOU DIDN'T COME FOR ME! GO TO HELL, YOU TRAITOR!"
"I'm sorry."
And these words mean even less than most. It doesn't matter that he's sorry. It doesn't matter that he did come for her, only he was too late. She can't forgive him and he can't blame her. He hasn't been able to forgive himself either.
"WHY CAN'T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE, DEMON! I HATE YOU! YOU BETRAYED ME! YOU KILLED OBITO! YOU DAMNED ME! LEAVE! DON'T COME BACK!"
She lunges for him and he won't move to defend himself or dodge. He deserves every ounce of pain she can cause him, physically and verbally. This, more than anything, is why he keeps coming back.
But her legs are not what they used to be. They no longer belong to a strong, bright kunoichi but a broken husk, haunted by demons and memories that have smeared together like ink and blood, that she can no longer distinguish from each other. Emaciated and torn by her own hands, her legs only support her one ragged step before she's falling to the floor. He moves without thinking, catches her, and lays her back onto the stained mattress. He moves slowly, heedless of the brittle arms pounding his back and the blood slicking his hands, giving her all the time he reasonably can to tear him apart like she does to herself. He always feels the blood drip through his fingers, whether its physically there or not.
Her little strength is gone, stolen by the anger, but her eyes are wide and accusing. He can see the broken edges in them and knows that she doesn't have any more words to stab him with today. He leaves.
He'll go home a get black-out drunk and try to make himself forget all of this, but really alcohol is a horrible pain-killer. He knows that the only real way to forget, to make the nightmare disappear, is a kunai sliding smoothly across his own throat. But that would be cheating. He still has sins to punish himself for.
He will be back next week. Thursday, 5pm. Or maybe 5:30.