Samsara
Samsara(n.)- the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound; to flow on
On nights when the moon is full, he's sick. He remembers the feel and taste of his father's blood painting the dojo walls the color of sacrifice. How every night after that full moon night he'd wake to find the previous day's fear still caked under his nails. He'd wash and wash and still not be clean of it.
When Kakashi was a young boy, too young to remember the bright, snapping lightning bolt of pain, his father led him into the woods to break his arm. Be careful what you do, son he said. Kneeling down so that his face was level with his son's little porcelain moon one. His voice was thick with the corpses of shinobi he'd slain, and villages he'd toppled, and hearts he'd pierced all with one word commands and times he couldn't turn back. Time heals the pain, he'd said, pouring these heavy words into the receptive barrels of his son's round, imploring eyes. Eyes that were the ones he used to own, before life pried them open wider, blood rushing in to fill the empty spaces. Before he became something other than himself.
No one would understand what it meant to do what had to be done. No one would know how heavy of a burden love was on one pair of shoulders, and that sometimes a man got tired of carrying it. And he had to put it down. And Sakumo had to take that slender wrist in his hands. Kakashi looked up at him curiously, then. And he saw the trust in his little boy's eyes. The naked, naïve, murderous trust. And if anyone had earned the right to kill that useless part of the boy, it was him. His son would not follow him to Hell.
He tightened his grip on the thin wrist. Thin and unassuming. Offering no resistance. A beautiful, baby bird's wing. Time heals the pain. But scars don't ever go away, he said. He could feel all the bones in that tiny wrist. And with a sharp twist of his hands he broke them all.
Kakashi has never forgiven his father for becoming the ghost that haunts him on the congealed-blood black nights when the scar of the crescent shaped moon seems too far from healing. He sleeps next to his father's blade, and the old, know-it-all tantou seems ever itching for his fingers to take hold of its hilt. But no. Now, he is lying on his back in a make shift tent, in the middle of a forest. The stars seem so far away tonight, the wind blowing through the trees like a cool breath, and the moon is larger than he has ever seen it. If he could stand it, he might close his eyes imagine himself to be the only one left on the Earth.
In the darkness he lifts his arm, holding his hand out in front of him. He spreads his fingers, the darkness coiling around and around them. The skin looks so white and thin. Almost transparent. He can see through it. Through the bone beneath. The muscle. Down into the deep roots of the scar tissue snaking up his forearm. He can see every individual ruined cell of old pain.
Or may'be it's the sake. And the night climbing inside of him. He's tipped over that taped up box, on that shelf, in that squalid room in his mind, and all the memories have come spilling out. Go away, he says aloud. He doesn't want them. He doesn't want to see his father's silhouette in the way his own sprawling limbs stretch like binding rubber bands across the tent floor. Kakashi can no longer tell who is haunting whom. Lately, he's been feeling like a ghost.
And if Sakumo could return to him, it would be as an Elm tree on the outskirts of the village. Rooted in place, just an outstretched hand away from its lover. Content there, untouched and uncared for, keeping watch. Even if only from a distance. Even if only for an eternity.
Earlier that day, Kakashi's squadron took out a battalion of enemy nin lurking in the forest, with a handful of explosive tags and the gift of a cunning ninja's luck.
Raindrops. Bodies fell like raindrops from the trees, and Kakashi kept his back straight as he walked through the puddles of mangled limbs instructing his squadron to search out any survivors.
There was only one.
A screaming, writhing woman.
A poor excuse for a kunoichi, really. Shinobi do not scream. But the right side of her face was missing, and the entire lower half of her body was an incongruous, bubbling mass of blackened flesh and pain. The smell. In the air there was the absolute stink of exerted chakra and cooked blood mixing with the absolute stink of human excrement and fear. Tickling Kakashi's well trained nose was the perfume that is released when the angel of Death spreads it's large black wings and bounds off, called to another unfortunate's side again. He would land there eventually. Soon enough. And cover her with His scythe. She was screaming for His arrival. Screaming for mercy.
And if there was any injustice in the world, it was that beyond retribution, Eve had offered that shimmering apple to Adam and then Heaven was rebuilt with gates around the city. It was that the woman lying there on the ground, screaming until her lungs deflated, punctured by the knife of her own ragged edged voice, was possibly the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. And on another planet, in some other life, she might have born him three brawny boys. And they might have found a thing called happy, wherever happy was hiding, and lived a pleasant life, a quaint, decent-ness by some gallant sea. If there was any injustice in the world it was that Kakashi had no mother. And no father he could be proud of until he had punched the lack of Sakumo Hatake's name on the Memorial Stone into so many faces, he had finally beaten it out of his own head.
"Leave her." he said amidst her cries, and turned to go. Heading back towards campgrounds and leaving them all to follow behind, her screams chucking knives after their every step. She would come back to him as a flower. Growing where no one would notice, until they developed the ability to recognize beauty. A red rose, thorn-less and breathtaking.
Kakashi turns over onto his side. The wad of blankets beneath him sigh their disapproval. He can smell the sake in his own exhalations and wonders where he put the bottle. The moon seems pressed up against the roof of the tent, its palms to the proverbial window pane, peering in. Don't worry, he thinks. I won't sleep tonight. Sweat glues his hair to his face.
"Captain."
A shape outside the tent. A hesitant voice. Reflexively, Kakashi bolts upright.
"Come in."
The tent unzips, broad shoulders pushing through. A relative rookie. Kakashi can smell the lack of blood on him. The white bird faced mask conceals his uncreased youth behind those infinite portals of black, carved where human eyes should be.
Foolishly, he thinks of offering him a drink. Remembers his place, the time, the hour. The importance of not slurring his words. Wide awake, the hardness dulled by the rice wine comes back.
"You should be asleep. We set out early in the morning."
"I know." The rookie falters, the white mask betraying nothing, but the tremble in his voice. "I just wanted to tell you…"
"Yes?"
"I went back for her."
"For…"
"That…kunoichi. The woman. I…went back and killed her."
Something in him broke. He had not noticed any one leaving the party. Something in him moved. This. This feeling. The moon so close, the stars so far. His arm was on fire. The scar like a blazed trail for fire ants to dig their hills into his flesh. Marching up his arm. Marching under his skin. Either the darkness was growing thicker, or his vision was getting blurry. The rookie cracks his knuckles. He has fluttery, nervous hands. Baby bird wings.
"Remove your mask." Kakashi says.
"I…sir?"
"Let me see your face."
Silence, slowly the hand rises up. Pries the mask off. Big brown eyes full of spilling over uncertainty. The neck bows, trusting there will be a blow.
"You?...Dare to defy my orders?"
Even in the thick moment, even to himself it sounds silly. Useless. He has lost something. His arm. It burns. It really hurts.
"She thanked me." Says the boy.
Kakashi says nothing.
"You don't feel anything... Have you….ever even loved anything?"
"Go back to your tent."
The swoosh of the tent flap closing and then he's gone. And the silence is so complete that Kakashi cannot be sure what just transpired. Did anything happen, or was it all just in his mind? The boy was never really there. Was he? And there's an empty bottle of sake at his feet. And the fire ants under the skin of his arm have taken up their cross and are marching across his whole body, now. He has become an emergency. There is something burning.
He tears out of the tent and across the campground, the tantou gleaming in his hand, resting against his thigh. There's a brook in a clearing not too far away. If he hurries the water will claim him, before the flames roaring in his gut swallow him up from the inside. All around him, his squad members are sleeping. The stars blinking lazily are sleeping. The trees quiet and still are sleeping. There is nothing breathing save for him and the moon keeping watch, the unblinking eye of God.
By the time Kakashi reaches the clearing he's out of breath. But the fire inside, desperate to get out, is screaming and so he can't rest. Is he screaming? Shinobi don't scream. He's scrambling into the water with determined force, his pockets heavy with the weight of his flaming heart. But the waves don't quench the burning. He's going to be eaten alive by the fire. If he doesn't get it out. Get it out. Get it out. Carve it out.
He raises the tantou above his head, the glow in his burning belly the only light; a beacon to guide the striking path tried and true. Flaming bullseye.
Wait.
There's a break in the canopy of the embracing tree tops, and in the sky the moon is watching. His father's voice. His father's blood. His father watching. Kakashi's arms are trembling. His face is wet. There's a noise coming out of him that is begging for love to be enough.
Have you ever even loved anything?
If it is true that you can only lose the things you love, then he has loved and loved and loved.
The tantou falls back to his side. Kakashi turns and wades through the water, and the darkness, and the embers towards the shore. He sits on the embankment staring up at the moon. There's a constellation modeled after his long gangly limbs in the sky. His long gangly limbs are his father's. No one would understand.
After he has come and gone, Kakashi will come back as a lightning bolt. A mighty dazzling whip strike of yellow light. There for a moment, and then gone again; before anyone spying it can fall in love.