Who Is Left
breakeven 2007
"War does not determine who is right—only who is left." —Burtrand Russell
It had been one hell of a ride. All those year of bloodshed and death, of fighting and conflict, of memorials and burials. All the years of looking over your shoulder because even at home, in your village, you couldn't be sure that you wouldn't be attacked. Killed.
Honestly, after everything, he could sufficiently say that death didn't scare him anymore.
Did he want to live? Yes, although it hadn't always been that way. Would he kill himself? No, though he'd thought about it before. His life had been a series of ups and downs that alternately dragged him through the mud and floated him on air. Nothing could really surprise him anymore.
He'd never had a childhood. To this day, it was the one thing that had been out of his control that he still hadn't forgiven. He grew up too fast because he was thrown into the world of a killer long before any sane person should rightly be allowed to. He was born and bred to be the most capable killing machine, a weapon for his village, a tool that would be used until it broke. He admitted it might have been different had his mother lived, but not by much. Not with his supposed genius.
His first kill was at the tender age of six years old. He hadn't been a genin all that long, but his sensei had finally allowed him to go on a C-rank. It was supposed to be a simple message delivery to Suna, but had turned into the pair coming across a group of bandits that had recently terrorized a village and decided to turn their sights on the "unsuspecting travelers". Upon finding their hideaway, his sunny blonde jounin sensei made quick work of the men and went around to free the women they'd kidnapped.
Walking into one of the tents to make sure there wasn't another person in there, he found a man, maybe twenty-five or thirty years old, brutally raping a young teenage girl. The man was pelting her and telling her to "shut the fuck up, dumb bitch!" even though she hadn't been making any sound to begin with. Tears were streaming down the girl's face and when she spotted him, her eyes plead not to help her, but to just go ahead and kill her already.
Please, her eyes seemed to say. Please put me out of my misery.
Even after all the years that had gone by after that, only twice had his anger gotten worse than it had then. Pulling a kunai expertly from his thigh holster, he didn't think twice about grabbing the man by the hair and slitting his throat. The man was dead within a minute. He might've thrown up outside the tent, and thankfully his teacher, man that he was, didn't comment right away, but eventually the rapist's face had faded from memory just like almost every other.
Not long after that he'd made chuunin. From then on it just got worse. His father's suicide when he was only five hadn't helped his social matters any, and even though he got through all those encounters alive, didn't mean he got through them whole. Every time, he'd later realize that he'd lost something—something vital. Maybe it was a piece of his humanity, maybe a piece of his compassion, maybe a piece of his mercy, but whatever the hell it was, he'd lost it.
For good.
"Incoming fire has the right of way." —Unknown
The Third Shinobi World War was truly a fuckton of bullshit. Excuse his language, but that was the truth. Everything screamed "political horseshit" in neon letters. And fuck him sideways, but he was pretty damn sure that the only people to pay the price for that was the soldiers.
You don't do anything when you're fighting except try to stay alive and kill as many of the enemy that is necessary to accomplish that goal. He never thought about the moral quandary of killing, the ethical quandary of testing out fun new jutsu on unsuspecting enemies, or the quandary of 'have-I-tortured-him-enough-to-justify-just-killing-him-because-he-doesn't-know-anything' when the battlefield was littered with bodies. Bodies of people he didn't know, or maybe did.
War did that to everyone, though, so he hadn't considered himself any different.
"Teamwork is essential—it gives them other people to shoot at." —Unknown
When Obito Uchiha and Rin Norhara became part of his team, he'd been thoroughly pissed off. He was stuck with two green-as-grass genins that didn't know shit about what it meant to be a ninja. They might've grown up during wartime, but they had no resolve, no discipline, and no responsibilities.
He envied them.
Minato-sensei, the ever-perky man that he was, had introduced the two new additions with a broad smile and a cheerful "This is Obito and Rin, you're new teammates". Since the first hour with those two he'd formed his opinions, ones that wouldn't change until sense had finally been forced down his throat very, very painfully.
Obito was brash, loud, reckless, moronic, dead-last, dobe, late, and utterly too damn trusting. His aim sucked, his taijutsu form looked like a drunk, and sometimes he was prone to tripping over his own goddamned feet. A crybaby, a sad little Uchiha reject, a talentless idiot, you name it and the Uchiha had probably heard it. (He hadn't said most of them. Not to Obito's face, anyway.)
Rin was weak, thin-shinned, shallow, timid, annoying, obsessive, and had all the resolve of a spineless civilian. Her constant role of mediator between him and Obito was ridiculous when she should've just beat some sense into both of them and told them to shut the hell up. She was a feeble sheep that couldn't stand up to the big bad wolves and needed protected at every corner should she dare scrape her knee. (Okay, that last one might have been an exaggeration, but he made his point.)
He still envied them.
And oh God, don't get him started on Minato-sensei. Frustratingly positive, maddeningly fun-loving, and frighteningly strong. The man could take out an entire battlefield all by his lonesome in the blink of an eye. One minute alive, the next dead. The blonde's pokes and jabs irked him to no end, but he put up with the idiot because he respected the man's strength and standing. While nice most of the time, Minato was not someone to fuck with when angry.
Yep. Practically glowing green with envy.
"Keep looking below surface appearances. Don't shrink from doing so just because you might not like what you find.
He lashed out at Minato, belittled and bullied Obito, and completely ignored Rin's existence because he couldn't dare to look at them without hating himself for feeling so envious. It was easier to see all of their flaws and problems and annoyances than to see them as people with flaws and problems and annoyances. A ninja was supposed to see underneath the underneath. Ha. So much for that.
If he'd bothered with seeing underneath the underneath, he might've noticed that Obito's smiles were actually painfully wide grins. They hid his pain under a mask of content idiocy that fooled most into believing he was always happy when in reality he felt worthless. His entire clan thought him a failure, his teammate thought him a failure, his crush ignored him, and his sensei always favored his stupid rival. (Him, he always reminded himself.)
If he'd bothered to take a second and look deeper, he'd see that Rin was a girl way out of her depth that just wanted to keep her village safe even if it meant killing and becoming something she wasn't. No, she hadn't been prepared for ninja life, but that was hardly a flaw and neither was it her fault. She was kind, caring, and compassionate, but she had to have balls of steel to be willing to give that up for a war she had no idea about. To protect her loved ones, she'd sacrifice herself in any meaning of the word. (He hadn't ever thought of it that way until long after her death.)
If he'd bothered to even scratch the surface of Minato-sensei, he'd see that the man's goofy antics and sunny disposition was all in an attempt to help him, to relieve some of the stress and grief and guilt that settled on him like a second skin. Minato didn't want to see his student, his surrogate son hurting, and the man had put everything into trying to get his student to see that. (At the time, he believed any relationships were weaknesses, and he couldn't stand to be weak.)
That envy just wouldn't go away.
"Five second fuses only last three seconds." —Infantry Journal
Oh God, oh God, oh God, ohGodohGodohGodohGodohGod—
What in fuck's name had he done? How had he been so fucking blind? Th-the rocks, a-and th-the Iwa nin, and oh God—
A gift. A gift. Obito forgot to give him a gift? So? He didn't deserve anything from Obito, or Rin or Minato-sensei. He was a despicable human being that deserved to rot in hell for being so heartless he was willing to let Rin be killed or raped or worse—
And now he had this eye. This godforsaken eye that would forever remind him of the friend (yes, friend) that he'd let die because he was a heartless bastard that couldn't see the truth if he was hit over the head with it. (It had come pretty damn close to that.)
Obito was supposed to be his eye for the future, but did he even want one? He sure as hell didn't deserve one. He had no family, and while the Uchiha may not have liked Obito much, the boy had just gained his Sharingan and therefore the clan might've taken the loud idiot back. (Absently, he wondered if the Uchiha would try to kill him for the eye. And if he would try to stop them.)
Rin didn't say it, but he saw it clear as day. She was devastated, but more importantly, she was disappointed in him. Not angry since he wasn't sure she even possessed the emotion, but disappointed in a way that made his heart squeeze and his lungs refuse to pull in oxygen.
Minato-sensei never said it either, but he assumed the man was just to kind to lay any blame right to his face.
"You can't say civilization don't advance—for in every war, they kill you in a new way." —Will Rogers
"…Kakashi…"
His hand. Blood. Her chest. Numb. No breath. No life. Nothing.
"…Ka-kashi…"
Absolutely nothing.
Should he feel so numb? He probably shouldn't, now that he thought about it, not that he could think all that straight right now anyway. The blood. It was transfixing. So red, so Rin—
He woke up later and realized what had truly happened. He hadn't slept soundly for any of the years to come, even after he'd finally allowed himself to accept that it hadn't been his fault.
It didn't lessen the pain or dull the memory, however, and it left him wondering if anything ever would.
Now he just had to wash the goddamned blood off his hand. It never came off, but he never gave up trying because then he might as well give up on life.
"In war, you win or lose, live or die—and the difference is just an eyelash." —General Douglas MacArthur
Of all the people in his life, Minato-sensei had always stuck by him. After dislodging the stick up his ass, Minato was the only one he was comfortable having a real conversation with because the blonde was so strong the he felt the man couldn't possibly die on him. He was a curse to regular people, but Minato was anything but.
He'd been half insane after Rin's death, but his sensei had been the one steady hand during all the chaos and death around him. Without truly realizing it, he'd come to see the blonde as a lifeline, an anchor that kept him from jumping off the deep end. He'd come to think of Minato as close to a father as he'd ever had, even over Sakumo because his sensei wouldn't leave him behind just like everyone else had.
When the Nine-Tails attacked Konoha, he felt the dread pool in his stomach, making it churn and bubble sickeningly. Because he was an idiot for thinking that anyone could be perfect or infallible. Minato was only human, and even if the blonde was the Fourth Hokage, that didn't mean horseshit if the opponent was the Nine-Tailed demon fox, known for is malevolent and destructive chakra that would smash a mountain to sand with one swish of its tail.
It seemed to him like Minato's body fell in slow motion. He watched, horrified and distraught, as his beloved teacher and surrogate father fell from Gamabunta, his Hokage cloak billowing in the wind like it would in a movie. He couldn't hear anything as Minato hit the ground since he was so far away, but he rushed over immediately to assess the damage.
All he saw was the lifeless eyes of Minato Namikaze, Fourth Hokage, Yellow Flash of Konoha, his sensei, his friend, his mentor, his guardian. Next to him laid his beloved wife, Kushina Uzumaki, and right in front of them both was their legacy. The only piece of his sensei that was left—Naruto.
Kakashi Hatake just sat back on the grass, staring off into nothing, wondering whether or not it was finally time to join his loved ones.
"The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." —General Douglas MacArthur
Love it? Hate it? I won't continue this one if no one particularly wants me to since I still have to update If Promises Could Be Kept. In fact, if you're waiting on that one, just hang in there. I've had a lot on my plate and chapter ten wasn't really urging me to write. Eleven, however, I cannot wait to write, so stay tuned for updates on that one.