Forlorn Echoes
Disclaimer: I'm a normal person with no income, ergo, I just (strictly) borrow characters.
Summary: Kakashi has lost so many loved ones in life. In the end, as all endings are sad, there's just no getting them back. One shot.
A/N: This is just some random crap fic with no plot, pairing, dialogues and anything resembling a real story. This is merely a product of sloppy catharsis. Nothing special.
There's always something eerily beautiful in the dark. He's been spending sleepless nights for far too long a time now not to notice it; it's a fact, a truth, that has been insisting on its admission in equal amount of time. In the shadows, all things beautiful move, alive, pulsing, inescapable. Memories that sank in time, disappeared to the bottom of consciousness, surge back as if to exact revenge.
Hatake Kakashi would've laid down his life to cut himself loose from all these. The sounds inside his head, inseparable from his being, grow more realistic in the dark. And even if he opens the window to admit what scant amount of light the moon offered, the haunting persists with no indication of ever ending.
And in this tiny corner in some vague part of the world, he bares his whole weakness to the night. Memories he's tried to avoid, marching off with time, leap vividly sideways before his very eyes, never failing to unnerve him. No matter where he runs, in the dark, they find him; or else, he finds them, there in his longing to be with them once more if only in some odd, supernatural way. But bitter truths remain as they are:
The Fourth Hokage has been long dead and gone. The only vestige of his existence was a giant engraving, barely a resemblance, on a cliff that stood august at the end of Konoha. Kakashi's father, too, is dead, he who should've known better than to shorten his lifespan but didn't. And for all his shortcomings and lacks, he probably was loved by Kakashi more than both were aware. And the Third Hokage, the last deserving person to play the father figure, even in Kakashi's mature age, has also left. Nothing is strange in the way their deaths played out, for weren't the people Kakashi loved, and bothered to care about, meant to die in rapid succession? Fate has done more than just that to prove it. Nothing is strange, indeed.
And others too were gone and if Kakashi isn't too careful, others would follow suit. As far as his heart goes, nothing could hurt him now. Or at the very least, Death has taken too much from him already that his capacity to grieve stood more or less exhausted now.
That's what he's thought all along. Even now, as the night vibrates with some kind of eulogistic song, he is aware of his own sorrow, quelled inside but never losing its honesty; however he twists, deforms and tries to break it apart, the sorrow is still there. Indeed, the night is never sorry for those who mourn.
He steers his eyes to the far end of the room, trying to weigh the silence that's perpetually there and perhaps, with an unconscious intention to conjure another lost piece of memory. From where he stands, he could see the unmoving image of Uchiha Obito. He hasn't uttered that name in a while. In passing thought, he blocks the name, attempts to forget it time and again, making a taboo out of it which only invariably proves ineffective. What that name implies, brings and results in, Kakashi is sure to stake no claim on. Obito, of course, is nothing but a ripped chapter from the story of his life, a blank occupying his pre-teen years. And he wants it left at that.
He moves a fraction for a better angle. A folded note, white and ostentatious in the dark, could be spied on his supper table. It contains a kind of conclusion to this suffering, or else a prolongation, an additional period to this lifelong mourning. Kakashi refused to open it, for it is something he could easily recognize for what it is; an unknowing death notice. He doesn't bother to find out who the subject matter is; he knows, too, that only one person, one last important person from his past, stood a reasonable chance at death. Rin.
He loved her in his own little ways and remembers, without fault, those days in the field when he, Obito and Rin would work on a pseudo mission, ever as one, as a team. And he knows, he just knows, that the skies won't shine any brighter thence. For the skies during those years when the three of them ran wildly in training, or simply on whim, out in the open, those skies were irreplaceable. And always will be. In fact, to this day, he still finds it hard to re-visualize those skies, because ever since the trio broke up, so many years ago, the skies became blunt, tired. And under those lost skies, the long line of great nin stood on its tip; Kakashi and his team were at the end of the tradition.
Then, as if for the last time, his eyes are led to the framed photo on his bedside table. Dust is gathered on the surface of the glass; nonetheless, the picture is clear. In it, their—he, Rin, Obito, the Fourth Hokage--smiles are priceless. And though literally colorless, Kakashi knows that in his mind, and hence in reality, the image contains infinite colors, hues and shades. Why he chose to display this photo out of the numerous ones he still keeps but never visits, it's pretty hard to say. What we know is that, he has so many photos taken in that time. Though, of course, in his mind, he has more.
And all of those who played a substantial part in his life are gone, spirited away or simply just dead, never to return. Nobody left to tell the next generation what Kakashi was like as a young boy, no one to vouch for his identity. He could cry for so long as he pleases and still not feel better. He could try to get used to the loneliness, something he's been trying to do for the last twelve years but miserably fails. He could try and die trying and still, memories won't stop in its unending recurrence. So many of them will come back long after he's stopped crying, so many memories he doesn't know what to do with anymore.
And like time, he would remember them only until the end.
END