I came up with all of this in one sitting, laying in my bed, listening to Naruto music on my iPod... I just kind of let the ink take me where it wanted to go. I would like to make it clear that I do not have suicidal thoughts, nor do I think that this is the way Kakashi will end up. I think that he is too strong for that. I merely wrote this to (hopefully) flush all of the angst out of my system. Oh, and I make several assumptions in this piece; just warning you that not all of the things I use in here as facts are actual facts.
Kakashi Gaiden spoilers (forgot to put this warning on my other fics). I do not own Naruto or any related material. If I did, do you really think I'd be stuck writing fan fiction?
Hatake Kakashi always told himself that suicide was the easy way out. Some people said it took a lot of courage to do— Kakashi supposed there was a small, twisted truth to that, but for the most part, those people were horribly, horribly wrong. There was nothing brave about running away from all of your emotional torment, no courage in forcing the staggering weight of all of your worldly burdens onto the people who cared about you most. Kakashi told himself this every day; even when he thought he had tricked himself into moving beyond it, the idea of suicide was never far away, always bubbling darkly beneath the surface.
Hatake Kakashi never wanted to kill himself. Late at night, when he was home alone after a particularly gory or psychologically stressful mission, he would toy with the idea; he would sit on his bed, engulfed in the suffocating silence of his empty apartment. As both of his eyes would be fixed on the pictures sitting above his bed, he would turn a piece of his father's broken tantou over and over in his hands, which would still be stained with the name of a fallen enemy, another shinobi or civilian he had killed simply because he had been told to. With his left eye, the eye Obito had given him, he would see the picture of his fallen teammates, of the people he had failed to save. His heart would burn with anger, would weigh itself down with sadness, would burn with guilt. He would remember the fragile happiness that had been forcibly taken from him as a child time and time again, and his heart would ache.
With his right eye, he would see Team 7, the children who were so much different than he had been when he was their age. They had not yet learned all of the most difficult things about living the life of a shinobi; they had not yet figured out that they were inevitably going to fall into the trap that every shinobi who lived long enough would wind up catching themselves in, not yet figured out the harshest truth— That in the shinobi world, you could not help other people escape from the same hell you are fighting your way through because that would only make you plummet further. A shinobi must fight this battle alone: In the world of the ninja, you are never alone but you are always alone. These smiling, innocent children— Kakashi would look at them, the young genin he had selfishly tried so hard to protect from the cold and unforgiving way of the ninja— kill or be killed, use or be used. Every time he listened to their trivial arguments, his heart would quietly break, torn apart by their bittersweet naivety. His heart would break into pieces, each representing a different emotion he felt for these children. It would be weighed down by shame for his own selfishness in wanting to shield them from the inevitable, would be warmed by their unconditional (if often unrecognized) compassion for each other, would sink with the knowledge that one of them had already cracked somewhat and that it was only a matter of time until the other two did. He would remember the fragile happiness that had been forcibly taken from him again and again as a child, and his heart would ache.
Even though he spent hours entertaining the idea, staring at his father's blade but not really seeing it as it was (instead seeing it lodged in his father's gut, sometimes his own), Kakashi always came to the conclusion that he could not kill himself. Not yet. He knew he was capable, knew that if there was no one left to remember him he would easily sing the broken blade through his stomach, but he could not do this to the people around him. He remembered the pain he and his mother had suffered when Sakumo had taken his own; he would not soon forget it. In the end, Kakashi always quietly slipped the tantou back into the bottom drawer, pushing his conflicting emotions behind him as he locked his apartment door and left to greet the day several hours later than most people.
Hatake Kakashi had been through a lot of hell— in the twenty years since he had first killed another human, he had seen more, killed more, and lost more than most people would in five lifetimes. With his eyes (there had been three of them altogether), he had watched all of the people close to him die off, dropping and fading like fireflies: his father committing seppuku; his mother sobbing late at night until she took the mission that killed her; Obito being crushed by rocks that had been meant for Kakashi; Rin using up the last of her chakra in a final attempt to save Kakashi, unwillingly pushing the little blood she had left out of her body in the process; Yondaime sacrificing his life to seal the Nine-Tailed Fox inside his infant son. All of them had committed suicide in one form or another, and Kakashi had watched with eyes that had long since been frozen. With his hands, he had ripped out many a still beating heart, stolen the life away from many shinobi and civilians alike. For awhile, he tore his soul up after every kill, feeling pain as if he had been the one whose chest had been pierced with Raikiri. After a few years in ANBU, though, he found that he could no longer cry for them. He kept on killing when and who he was told to, and although he did not shed any tears for the blood he spilt, the churning pain somewhere in his chest that he got instead sometimes made him wish he had the tears back.
Hatake Kakashi never wanted to kill himself. Not physically. He had long since killed himself psychologically, but at least while he was still physically alive he could keep up a façade of happiness, pretend that he was okay for the sake of the people who refused to believe otherwise until the bitter end.
Hatake Kakashi was haunted. He was haunted by the ghosts of the people he had failed, by the sighs of disappointment only he could hear. He was haunted by the "what if"'s of life; the followed him around no matter where he went, whispering alternative outcomes into his ear, telling him in that sickeningly sweet voice what could have happened if he hadn't screwed up so badly. People had told him not to live life worrying about what could have happened— he arrogantly cast this advice aside, his stubborn pride refusing to let him listen to the words of people who, he thought conceitedly, had no idea what kind of tortured hellhole his mind was.
Hatake Kakashi never wanted to follow the footsteps of all of the people he had lost; he never wanted to tread down the Hatake path and take his own life. He did not want his ashes to be buried in the grave next to his father's; that would mean that, in death, he and Sakumo were no different: fallen from grace like the devil himself. However, he did not want his name on the Memorial Stone, either. He did not want to be honored on the same level that Obito and Rin and Yondaime were, because he knew that there was no way he would ever deserve that sort of prestige and respect. Oftentimes he wished that he could just disappear: fade away in the flow of time, not remembered for disgrace, or for honor, or for anything— just forgotten. He knew that this was selfish, but he had long since given up trying to fight his own selfishness. That and his stubbornness were what had kept him alive in the years after the people close to him had died; he merely added it to the list of reasons why he hated himself.
Hatake Kakashi fought the urge every day, going over the same thoughts again and again in his head. Towards the end, he pretty much just stopped talking altogether: he was so wrapped up in his own emotional tug-of-war that he could no longer pay enough attention to the things happening around him. Maybe that's why he finally cracked— at least, that's what people said afterwards. They would mutter those sorts of speculations and accusations under their breaths, for it was a general taboo to speak of it aloud. But people who really knew Kakashi, or at least thought they did— they knew that Kakashi knew what he was doing at the end. In fact, that's one of the only times in his life when he was somewhere close to sanity. As he pressed the jagged, broken blade against his tight, cold abdomen, his spirit slowly preparing to distance itself from his physical self, he finally understood what was going on. Many guessed that it was just too much for him, all of his emotions finally disentangling themselves and revealing themselves to Kakashi for what they were all at once—and before he could really register what was going on, it was too late.
In the end, his squad found him lying on his bedroom floor, his bare chest glistening with the blood seeping out of his deep stomach wound, his father's broken dagger still clamped in his cold, dead hands.
After he had tried so hard to protect them, to hide them away from the pain of the real world, in the end, it was Kakashi who introduced two of them to the pain and the horror and sent the other one over the edge and past the point of no return.
The funeral was supposed to be small, but everyone was there. In that way, at least, Kakashi had ended it differently than Sakumo had: few had come to mourn the White Fang, but many came to pay their respects to the Copy Ninja. Sakumo had been a broken man, his reputation skewed out of proportion, but Kakashi could have stayed longer— he could have pulled through. In the end, though, he didn't want to.
Even though it was not what Kakashi wanted, Konoha would forever remember a man who, just when he thought he had lost everything, suffered another painful emotional blow. He was a man who had felt much but said little— a man who blamed himself for things that were out of his control, beyond anyone's power to prevent. He was a great shinobi who was renowned worldwide— not only for his exceptional skills, but for his pledge to protect his comrades even if it cost him his life. Above all, Konoha would remember a man who had been so broken that everyone thought he would miraculously manage to stick together. In the end, though, they were wrong. Even Kakashi himself was wrong in that respect.
Because Hatake Kakashi never wanted to kill himself.
But in the end, Kakashi did.