Faded Story
Everyone knows the story. Knows what happened. Knows ihow/i it happened. He's seen to that, seen to it that the memory of a life given in honour lives on with every step he takes, every puff of the cigarette that he somehow still clings to. He doesn't understand why, doesn't really even think much on it. It should be gone, over and done with. A past relic, reminder of a promise made and a promise kept. Of a debt owed and a debt repaid. Repaid and yet with still so much left to pay back.
But then, that's how some debts are, he assumes, shoving long-fingered hands into his pockets, easy loping gait shifting only slightly to veer out of the way of a couple of children running down the road, barreling through the middle of the winding street with the sort of wild abandon that only the truly young and the truly free of heart can summon up. The sort of freedom that those like him have long-since carefully wrapped and placed upon a high and lofty shelf within their hearts. That kind of freedom isn't for them. Just as he knows that those same children will one day have to also place theirs on that same dusty shelf, a poignant reminder of innocence gone, stripped away amidst the world of blood and violence that they inhabit.
It's part of their past, and as such is a part of their future, for what is the future but time shaped by the past, by past mistakes and deeds. It's impossible to plot the future, impossible to stay but so far ahead, no matter how many moves one makes or how many strategies one plans out in their head. iWere/i it possible, the cigarettes in his pocket would be meaningless. In fact, they wouldn't even be there in the first place. They'd be where they belonged. In someone else's pocket, their worn and tattered carton rubbing up against the smooth steel of the jagged blades where an identical box had rested for years.
The knives are in his pocket too, though he seldom ever uses them. Not because he's afraid of damaging them, or even out of respect for the memory of the one whose hands warmed them. No, it's because they, like so much else, are a part of a story that he is only a small part of. And while he played an important, perhaps even a pivotal part, the fact remains that it was still ionly/i a part. And there are others whose parts were perhaps even more meaningful.
And it's for those others that he keeps the words alive, keeps the imemory/i alive. He doesn't fear that a brave soul will be forgotten; no, there's no chance of that. A man such as his teacher was, would never be forgotten so easily. But it's not really about the forgetting. It's about so much more than that. It's about those left behind, those who painted themselves onto the story of a life that enriched so much and that left a cruel emptiness behind when it faded in a blaze of glory.
But more then that, it's about a baby. The heir, if he feels whimsical, to that story. Who never knew father, and will only have the stories that friends and family tell to craft that fragile relationship from. Shikamaru understands, and he knows that though that child may never understand, not until it's grown and writing it's own story, that one cannot write any story without first understanding the story behind it. Especially life's own story.