Into Grey

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Author's Notes: Two things: first off, I have no idea how to treat a corpse or anything of that kind, so if that part is inaccurate you'll have to forgive me for my lack of experience. Secondly, I have no idea how they execute shinobi, I'm just making this up out of my own head because it's more… poetic this way. This story was originally inspired by a review left by Azamiko, who is generous enough to review most of my works (thank you!). It has since gone through many revisions to end up in the form you see today. So, you see, reviews are very helpful whether you realize it or not! I highly encourage them!

Sasuke has been gone for three years and Kakashi still wakes up expecting to see him when he goes to see his students.

He calls them 'his students' as if he was still their sensei, but in reality he hasn't taught a soul for close to two years. He doesn't like to think that Sasuke had any affect on his decision to quit teaching, but part of him knows that he can't ever feel for another team as he did with this one. They've gone through, are going through, too much for that. Instead he returns to something he has been unequivocally talented at, a mask that is much more powerful than the one he currently wears.

Assassinations are so much simpler than teaching.

Even after all this time, the adrenaline still courses through his muscles and the blood pounds in his ears to the exact same beat. He thinks his movements have become slightly sluggish and shrugs off the thought before it can form; when in motion, the slightest hesitation meant death. The thrum of a bull's-eye resounds hauntingly in his brain as he slips inside his apartment window and slides it shut, hearing nothing but his own breathing as he starts to rid himself of blood-stained clothing.

It is between the rustling that he hears it, the faintest tap-tap-tap on his door that may have constituted a knock. His brows crease in annoyance and curiosity even as his hands have gotten rid of his mask and any other evidence of his night time activities. Some habits are hard to break.

What is not habitual, what is not expected, is a wayward soul that has somehow wandered its way back home.

"Sasuke."

The word is caught halfway down his throat and the name comes out as a rasp, harsher than he'd intended.

"Kakashi…" The syllables are held and then thrown, tentative. "I… I didn't know…"

Sasuke's hands are balling themselves into shaking white fists and it is only then that he notices the large object lying in the doorway behind his (former) student's hunched body. Closer inspection reveals a small lump at the top, widening into a rectangular shape that eventually curves into a downward triangle. A head, torso, and legs.

For the first time Kakashi notices the scent of dried blood.

"Who is it?" he asks softly, although they both know the answer.

"I didn't know what to do with him," Sasuke's voice is nervous but leaden. "I thought it would be better to—to bring him back so that he could be… disposed of." A pause. "Properly."

"Ah."

His eyes are travelling up and down the body that has been the phantom of so many of Sasuke's years.

"Well," he says almost cheerily, "you better come in, then."

His left eye feels as if it's being torn apart.

-----

Sasuke feels like a displaced soul until Kakashi places a warm mug in his hands and instructs him to sit on the sofa.

Itachi's skin has turned the slightest shade of blue when Kakashi rolls him out of Sasuke's makeshift body bag, guts spilling over onto the hardwood floor. It is the mess rather than the corpse that makes him ashamed.

"Sorry, I'll clean—"

But Kakashi silences him with a glance of cold steel as he carries the body into the bathroom. Sasuke sees him place the remnants of his brother in the bathtub and stares resolutely at the ripples of the liquid in his hands as Kakashi makes several trips to and from the kitchen with buckets of ice. He glances up again to the sound of running water, and Kakashi adding a preservative to the pool. When Kakashi efficiently picks up and records the innards that have spilt onto the floor and scrubbed the area clean with a strong-smelling disinfectant, Sasuke is uncomfortably reminded that this is a man who has dealt with more bodies than he's ever seen.

But then again, that was why he chose to come.

Kakashi had been so methodical and self-assured in his work, but now a silence looms over their pasts and neither one knows where to begin.

"When will you tell them?"

"Tomorrow morning. His body will be okay until then, and I think it's been a long night for both of us."

Silently he is grateful for a night of reprieve, but Sasuke just nods politely and tries not to notice the speck of blood still stuck on the back of his hand. "I didn't mean to pick you."

They are both surprised by that statement. "No, I doubt you did."

"It's just that—" Kakashi sits down on the couch but leaves a space the size of a pillow "—I didn't expect him to die."

And then the whole story pours of him, the fight and the kunai and his fist halfway in his brother's intestines and how he had been sick right after. And once he has heaved everything out of his stomach onto the ground, the logical side of his mind had switched on and realized that he couldn't just leave the corpse for anybody to find. A corpse that was filled with horrors and secrets and half his life.

But in the aftermath of his own monstrosity and the enormity of the blood on his hands, he had known that he would end up here. Somehow he had known.

And as Kakashi gently leads him to lie down, placing a pillow in his hand and directing him toward the bedroom, not asking a question, not demanding a thing, he isn't sure whether or not he has made the right choice. When he hears the sound of springs coiling as Kakashi settles down on the pull-out sofa, his wonders if the distance between them is now too great to bridge.

For he is shrouded in grey, and he doesn't know where else to turn except backwards.

-----

It's still dark when he wakes, unable to catch the elusiveness of sleep. He is mindful of the creaking that his feet make as he ghosts outside the door and toward the bathroom.

Itachi's body is the same as he remembers, floating peacefully in the liquid grave that Kakashi has created. The wide-open eyes still give him cause for concern, but a second look is enough to confirm lifelessness. The air smells faintly acrid, chemicals and death intermingled into a cloyingly sweet scent. His hands grip the edge of the bathtub as he leans over Itachi, wanting to see how his eyes have changed, how they have stayed the same. He activates his own Sharingan and the swirling of his tomoe have just slowed, have started to line up, when Itachi's head snaps up to catch his gaze and his maniacal eyes bleed. His ice-cold hands have attached themselves firmly to Sasuke's neck and he can feel the air forced out of him, and he tries to scream but there is only grey clouding the edge of his vision, never black, never dark enough to block it out completely. When a sound finally does emerge he finds that his voice is that of Itachi's, laughing cruelly into the air.

Sasuke bolts upright in the bed, and finds that his own scream is echoing around the walls.

The night chill finds his clammy, sweat-soaked skin and it makes him shiver. Kakashi's face, uncovered, hovers over all of it.

"Drink." A glass is shoved into his hand, and he has no choice but to comply. "He's dead, Sasuke. Dead."

When Kakashi's hand reaches to take the glass back, Sasuke grabs him instead. "No," he says quietly. "He's not. He'll never die."

A sigh escapes the older man's lips. "Not unless you let him go."

In some curious fashion, the moonlight serves to illuminate Sasuke more than any sunlight ever did. It takes him a moment to notice and adjust to the fact that a man has returned in place of the boy he once knew. He notices the slightly longer hair, the broader shoulders and leaner torso. Sasuke is taller too, Kakashi thinks, as their eyes are of a level when he sits down on the bed. But there is a youthfulness that no amount of time has been able to erase, and for that Kakashi is grateful.

He notes that their hands are of a size, and that Sasuke has refused to let go. He can feel the subtle trembling through Sasuke's pale fingers and prays that the sedative will kick in soon as he puts a reassuring arm around the other's smaller frame, a lifeline Sasuke clings to almost desperately.

"Stay. Please."

Kakashi knows that agreeing to Sasuke's demands won't fix anything, but he has never seen anyone tremble quite so fragilely before and so he consents with only a small nod, pushing them both back down on the mattress and pulling up the covers. It isn't long before the laxness of the other man's muscles tells Kakashi that he is in a deep sleep, and would be none the wiser if he crept out of the bed and back to the sofa.

But when he gazes down at dark hair plastered on alabaster skin, he finds that he can't.

-----

And the next morning there are questions, half of which he doesn't know how to answer.

Kakashi is a silent shadow in these proceedings, leaning casually against the wall as a string of questioners are brought in to wring the truth from his cauterized mind. From time to time Sasuke's eyes will flicker over to his former mentor's, awkward and comforted to be waking up next to a warm body instead of the cold one in his dreams. The night is hazy but he remembers asking Kakashi to stay.

Later, when the medic-nins have come in to take Itachi's body away and the water is drained along with his strength, the hordes of people leave him in peace as Kakashi ushers them out. His past has been confirmed and re-confirmed, but his future remains uncertain.

"What now?" He knew the penalty for desertion, but he also knew that Kakashi was making a case of his "good deed" done for the village by killing a Bingo Book criminal.

"It hasn't been decided," Kakashi says evasively, and then, "Dinner."

When it's time for them to turn in that night, Sasuke hovers uncertainly at the door.

"Are you sure you don't mind me taking over your room?"

From behind the couch, Kakashi's hand waves away his question. "It's nice to have a little change."

"Technically, we could both share the bed."

A grey head pops up from behind blue fabric, eye—eyes—questioning. "Oh?"

He is still unaccustomed to Kakashi's face in plain view. A handsome face, to be sure, but the sight of Kakashi's lips ties his stomach into knots for no logical reason.

"Would that be okay?"

Sasuke doesn't know how childish the question sounds to Kakashi, and it is the sole reason he agrees. But this time there is no tremble to Sasuke's fingers and no drug to lull him to sleep, and Kakashi finds it harder to explain when another body presses tight against his own.

He takes both of Sasuke's hands off his chest. "Sasuke…"

"Why won't you let me touch you?" The question is sharp, and Kakashi knows he has made a mistake.

"Sasuke, you don't know what you're doing. Tomorrow morning you're going to wake up and regret all of this."

"I didn't regret it before."

The retort is childish at best, but Kakashi knows there is a grain of truth. "I'm not here for comfort, Sasuke. You should've gone to someone else for that."

"I don't need your comfort." Sasuke props himself up on one elbow. "I'm not a child. What I want is for you to kiss me."

"No," Kakashi says quietly. No, you're not. Not anymore. He is ashamed to admit that Sasuke has any kind of effect on him.

But Sasuke has misconstrued his meaning and his temper has flared. "Why won't you—"

If only to shut him up, Kakashi crushes their mouths together for a raw kiss. Sasuke's leg swings up over his hip and his hand fists into soft grey hair, and when Kakashi goes to draw back he finds that he can't and so he kisses Sasuke again, harder this time, rougher, thinking that maybe if he hurts him enough Sasuke will be satisfied and be able to let go, able to move on.

What he doesn't know is that to Sasuke, his kisses are breathing fire and life back into his mutilated body.

And as the night wears on they are absorbed into one another, grinded and shaken so that it is impossible to tell where one soul has sewn itself onto the other.

-----

"Execution."

The word is so simple, really, that Sasuke is half-thinking it must be a mistake. But when they relocate him from the relative comforts of Kakashi's house arrest to the leaner luxuries of a death-row cell, the reality of the situation begins to sink in. He didn't think he would get away from it, really. Didn't think he wanted to. He hadn't thought about what he would do with himself once his goal was accomplished, and now that he was here it was simpler to pretend there was still something left to prove.

Mostly he slept. Itachi is in all his dreams. Once in a while he hears noises from beyond the walls, but he tries to block those out as best as he can. He doesn't keep track of days and he doesn't have any thoughts of the outside world until Kakashi comes to visit, garbed in his jounin uniform with his mask in its place. It is only then, with chagrin, that he realizes he can't remember what Kakashi looks like. He has attached all that is left of himself onto this man whom he hasn't fully seen.

While in the dark they may be the same person, he comprehends for the first time the difference between life and death: he has spent all of himself on an all-consuming scar, while Kakashi's scars are but mere scratches on his life.

"Is there anything you want me to do?"

Kakashi's voice is soft and he finds it a fitting kind of irony in a way. He wants to ask Kakashi to take off his mask, wants to ask Kakashi to move closer so he can tear off the mask himself, gaze to his heart's content, but a part of him knows that asking would be to accept the things he has been denying, to accept that Itachi is dead and that maybe someone else means something to him other than his sadistic brother. To ask would be to accept and acknowledge the fact that his nightmares are not the only thing that drove him to Kakashi, that there were many things—reasons—that have been driving him to Kakashi for years.

His vision dims to a fading grey.

"No. Nothing." Because nothing is what he has become, and to ask for more was beyond his means.

Kakashi turns to leave and Sasuke thinks he can finally have some serenity to himself, and Kakashi is almost at the door, within a breath of the knob, when his voice shatters everything that Sasuke has been trying so hard to hold together.

"In the end, was it worth it?"

He leaves without waiting for an answer, because they both already know.

-----

There are four shinobi around him, chanting foreign words to end his life.

There is a crowd of people gathered, most looking on with something akin to pity that he does not like, but he knows that he is in no position to judge how they view him. From the throng his eyes (ever sharp) pick out Naruto's blond hair, his blue eyes clouded over in anger. Sakura is dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, refusing to meet his gaze. But his eyes settle on Kakashi and stay locked there as he remembers the reassurance of a warm body in the morning. He concentrates on Kakashi's face, willing his mind to remember, willing the Sharingan to see through his mask. For once, he finds his gifts completely useless, and when his bleeding stare spots Hinata's blank eyes in the crowd, it brings an excruciating jealousy into the pit of his stomach. He looks back at Kakashi's unreadable expression, and thinks that he would give anything to remember him.

But the chanting is growing louder and faster now, and he can see the ring of chakra forming around him. Vaguely his mind hears Naruto's loud protests of "Wait!" and there is a discharge of energy from outside his ring of death, but the flare only serves to bring up an image of the moon and one red, red eye.

And then the grey overtakes him, and Kakashi's face vanishes from his mind completely.

END