Paper Ghosts
Written many months ago for Anamariewrites.
In the cool, silent darkness of Kakashi's empty house, he searches for photographs of dead friends at the end of every year and pins them up as high as he can reach. This ritual starts when he is eight years old, after finding his father sitting behind a desk with blood dripping over the edges, and then, a month later, losing someone at the academy.
There are pictures of his mother then—her head cut out of the photos or drawn over with in ink—and he nails them into his bedroom door in a spot that sits just above the jagged edges of his spiky, silver hair. Behind them, he tapes pictures of his father, hoping he's never tempted to rip them down and stare at the man that time will turn him into.
(Within a few months, he's forgotten the lines of his father's face.)
By the time that he's turned nine, there are more photos to hide away. These, he finds in a box under his bed. In the stillness of the black and white frames, he sees the faces of his classmates frozen forever and wonders if he's holding their last documented smiles.
He sticks these just above his parents, and forgets about them until his tenth birthday, when he's handed a stack of old mission reports, his targets' faces printed all over them. He decides then that it's okay to pin up pictures of strangers, and so he stands on his tiptoes and drives them into the wood.
After a year's worth of dust has collected on the door again, he adds more photos and notices that, while standing up straight, he can no longer touch the pictures at the bottom. Troubled by this, he stops gathering photos until he is twenty-nine and has a nightmare about Obito.
Once he's finally nailed up all of the pictures of his dead teammates, he steps back and wishes himself a Happy Birthday in spite of the photos that scream at him for it.
The next year, when Kakashi turns thirty and hears news that Sasuke has been killed by his brother, he examines his bedroom door and discovers that there's not any space left.
Fin.