(I do not believe in Chapter 424. Darn you, Kishi-senpai. -cries-)
_____
Watching the Wheels
Frightful fate,
you whirling wheel....
shadowed and veiled,
you plague me too.
--O Fortuna
Someone is crying.
The sound is faint and far away -- a catch in someone's throat, thick with grief, lingering on the edge of whatever senses Kakashi has left. Which aren't many, if he bothers to consider it; but that's probably of little consequence now, so he lets it go.
He listens, quiescent. It had seemed to take an age for anything to filter through the distance to where he is. There's a gaping eternity in silence that he has never noticed before, that would send shivers down his spine, if he still had one, or lay a hand upon his head and own him. He lets it lurk now because if he acknowledged it, he would go mad.
This is death, he thinks.
He had never expected it to be so peaceful.
.o0o.
Curiosity takes him after an indefinite time. He is a user of genjutsu and of the sharingan, and his inner world has always been highly developed, but this total isolation is foreign to his experience. His dreams are chaotic, his wakings sudden and complete -- he has never been aware of a space in between. If one had existed, though, it might have been like this.
He's never feared death, exactly. It has walked beside him for long enough, constantly peering over his shoulder or into his heart. It looked him in the eye when he stood over his father's body, and later, every time he stared into the unseeing face of a friend. He learned to look past it, through it, but that never meant it wasn't there.
Where does a candle flame go when it goes out?
So many faces, over the years: empty, broken, left behind.
Nowhere. It dances; then it dies.
He hadn't understood. Later, there was no one he would have asked.
Time washes over him, or timelessness: the space between heartbeats or breaths. Perhaps he's not dead after all. Couldn't he just be sleeping? Trapped in a dream? There was a first time for everything. Why else had nobody come to greet him?
Obito, he thinks. Rin.
But the distant voice, or whatever it might be, is too low for Rin and too old for Obito, and as he tries to decide how he knows this, he realizes that he can't remember what they sounded like.
Unexpectedly, this angers him. Has he remembered them for so long, kept their memories alive within him, only to lose them again like this? If enough of him is left to wonder, why can't he remember?
There is no light or darkness here, no dimension or depth. If he really thinks about it, there's no sound either.
Someone is still crying. He isn't sure how he knows.
.o0o.
He has no chakra left. It felt so cold, as it flickered away, and then all feeling had stopped. Perhaps that was all death was, in the end: a solitary dream with no escape.
The silence is maddening. He tries to remember how he came here, but there's nothing left to understand: only a sense of urgency, written into him with words as formless as the emotions that are already ebbing away. Has the village fallen? Is he already buried, under earth or the rubble of a dying world? Someone's heart is still beating, somewhere very near, and the voice is ragged and terrible and familiar. Go away, Gai. I died for Konoha; I did my duty. Don't you dare weep on my grave.....
The thought sparks something boneless, formless, within him: too deep to be flensed away by death. It's only a scrap of memory, but he darts at it with the instinctive desperation of one unsure what else has slipped away without notice. He's left his eyes behind him, closing over red tears, but Gai doesn't go away and the shape of the leaf, there and not there, burns across the remnants of his mind.
Sunrise; sunset. The mountain of carved faces, the rooftops, a warm bowl of ramen between his hands; the texture of a child's hair; a student's frustration when Kakashi managed to finish his food without removing his ever-present mask. Eye-stinging smoke and the reek of sweat. Training and fighting, year upon year -- blood, bone, and energy shaping a thousand and one techniques.
The knowledge is there, but the memories refuse to come.
He tries to remember colors, or gravity, or tree-bark against his skin. He tries to remember himself. He's going out like a candle flame; fear and wonder stab him like blades, over and over.
Then there is a sound. And Kakashi explodes.
.o0o.
Time takes him again so easily. There are sounds that remind him of fire and thunder; there is pain too intense to grasp, though he knows he'll be feeling it later, if later ever comes -- the first breath burns in his throat and someone's holding him down and shouting in his ear and he shouts back, the rough cloth of his mask catching between his teeth.
He knows those hands. He knows that smell: the Leaf, the land, the hospital in wartime. His shoulders are bare and he can feel the callouses on Gai's fingers, the air alternating hot and cold, a whisper of ink and blood flaking from his skin. Chakra pulses around him: his own, his rival's, a familiar touch at his breastbone where Sakura's strength pours into him like a river. She's yelling at him too. He taught her well, once upon a time.
He flares like a beacon, screaming, bloody tears drying on his face, occasionally aware of the war still going on in the background. Now and again, everything threatens to slip away and he claws himself back into consciousness with all the will he can gather.
After what seems an age, they declare him mostly stable. He opens his eyes, and closes them. (Obviously Gai and his whole team couldn't be sharing his room -- in identical green jumpsuits, yet -- at a time like this. He's obviously seeing quadruple... or something.) He wakes and sleeps, sensing Sakura flitting in and out on her rounds and Gai a strangely constant presence whose dark grumblings at incidentals like torn muscles and broken bones signals clearly that his team, wherever it is, is safe.
It's midnight when he wakes again, snapping out of a dream of darkness that he can't quite remember. The room resolves around him. He's not sure how he can see.
It's finally quiet outside. Gai, multiple casts explaining why he's still in the hospital, is propped against a dozen pillows in the next cot over, methodically sewing up a rent in his torn jumpsuit. Whatever has happened, it's all over. And Sakura is asleep in a chair between them.
A giant slug slithers past the room, poking its eyestalks through the door to examine the healer, but Sakura's sleep is only one of exhaustion -- she'll be more than all right in the morning.
Kakashi blinks. The sight has triggered the uncomfortable awareness that he is covered with slime.
So is Sakura. So is Gai.
For the moment, this is impossible to process. Gai, catching his bewildered look, raises a finger to his lips and smiles slowly. His face is streaked with tears. Of course, that's nothing new.
The back of his head feels weightless against the pillow and Kakashi lets his eyes close again. They may not be there when he wakes, but they will be somewhere.
So will he.
And for the moment -- a blessedly finite moment, what with his eternal rival plotting in loud whispers about getting them both healed up for the greater challenges of tomorrow -- for the moment, that is enough.
_____
(No, 'frightful' is not the usual translation of the original Latin word, but it's an alternate meaning that seems to better fit the sense of the story.)