Kakashi liked rainy days, the clarity of the air on cold days, the way you drank it in like soup in the heat. He liked the way sound muffled and people became scarce. When it rained, Kakashi liked to be in the woods, watching raindrops bounce from leaf to leaf as he stood under a tree, customary slouch in place, hands in pockets. Rainy mornings and midnights were spent at the memorial stone, no longer Kakashi, but a detached statue as he communed with his ghosts.
Rainy afternoons he walked in the woods, his ghosts traveling with him. Afternoons were spent at home in bed, when the days had been warm. His Genin team had disbanded, not a Chuunin among them, and he knew he'd failed them in some ways. If he'd consoled Sasuke sooner, built Sakura's confidence higher, given Naruto a bit more praise...but he hadn't, and if anyone knew the past was set, it was Kakashi. He saw his students in the forest, his sensei, his teammates, fallen friends, everyone he'd ever loved and failed in some way. The days were cold now, and it was perpetual cold, even when others felt the heat.
He took the back stairs to the apartment just as he took the back roads wherever he went now. The front door didn't seem proper anymore; there was no one to call out to now. He tugged at his sleeve and shivered, fumbling his keys in the cold before slipping inside. It was dark, the blinds forever pulled down, but he knew the way around and went straight to the bathroom. He stripped off his wet clothes and mask, left them in a pile on the floor, and wiped dry with a towel before heading to the bed to burrow in the blankets. He slept in his warm cocoon, dreaming.
"You look at everyone out there, doing their business and paying calls, surrounded by people, blood in the veins of the town. You look at them, and watch them, and you can see some loneliness in everyone. But Kakashi, look at yourself: You're not a person with some loneliness; you practically are loneliness. You can't live that way forever. I've seen you out there, at the memorial stone, every morning, like a religion. You've lost people and you've failed people-so has everyone else in this village. Kakashi, you can't let the past keep me out of your life, because without at least someone in your life it won't be long before you're spending all day instead of all morning at the stone, wasting your whole life away. I care about you too much to let that happen."
A river town in Ame, boats passing through all the time, and he was just waiting for his target to arrive. The constant rain was distracting, dangerous. He thought a lot about the past, about the things missing from his life. He marveled at how everything continued like the world wasn't missing the best person in it, when Iruka had only been dead for three months. Shouldn't something cataclysmic have happened? Shouldn't the ground have trembled, the world splintered, the sun gone out like a candle flame? But instead, everyone went on as if nothing had happened, nothing had changed. Tsunade-sama shouldn't have sent him on this mission.
Standing under an umbrella with Iruka in the rain outside a coffee shop. Iruka looked up at the clouds and smiled, lightning throwing stark highlights onto his face. He laughed, and Kakashi looked away. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, so beautiful it hurt.
He didn't go to the funeral. It was impossible. He was standing out in the forest in the rain, staring at the stone, fingers tracing that name until he could have found it if he was blind, and still they traced. He knew somewhere Naruto was waking in a cold sweat, uneasiness washing over him. There wouldn't be a happy homecoming for his blonde student. He knew Sakura was on the bridge, shaking maybe, tears like streams rolling tracks down her cheeks. He could almost see her dropping flowers into the river, a little prayer or a whispered happy memory with each blossom that floated away. Perhaps even Sasuke, with his new teacher, was feeling a prick of something, sadness or uneasiness, Kakashi wasn't sure what; perhaps Sasuke wasn't sure either. His fingers traced away. When he finally headed back to the empty apartment, where he would pull down the blinds and sleep for days, he passed a street where someone had dropped a stack of flyers. The yellow papers blew aimlessly in the strong wind, and Kakashi almost felt like he could fly apart and blow away as well.
He woke upright, divested of blankets and shivering with sweat. It wasn't new, simply the way things worked now. His Sharingan was spinning into overdrive, and not for the first time he contemplated having Tsunade-sama remove it. He was spending more and more time at the memorial every day, and it wouldn't be long before he never left it, as Iruka had predicted. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if he'd never had the Sharingan to memorize every small detail, to help construct them in his mind as if they still lived there.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if he didn't wake with Iruka's scent everywhere, feeling as if the teacher was in the next room grading papers and sipping coffee, his hair down and his toes digging into the carpet.
Maybe he'd just follow his father's legacy and save Tsunade the trouble.