While I don't particularly like this pairing, I wasn't kidding when I said I might write a oneshot about it one day.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
The raindrops still pitter patter over the stone street and the rubble, washing away sin and blood. Delicate leaves on deciduous trees are burdened with water, and flutter to the ground to be washed away by a torrent of incoming moans and suffering and rainwater.
Kakashi stands over her, lying peacefully on the street as she is. Her once ruby lips now curl in a blue mockery of a smile, a flaw on pale, veined skin.
She seems smaller somehow. She was once so lively and animated, and now all of that is sleeping. Her eyes will not flutter open; flashing leafy emerald eyes will not shine for him anymore. He will not feel the smoothness of her skin nor hear the chime of her laugh.
A ghost flutters between them, a pale specter keeping the living from the dead. The ghost does not have a form that Kakashi recognizes; it is an embodiment of what they once had, and what they won't have anymore.
The storm continues to roll, softly and steadily, as his thoughts hit the ground like bitter rain. Kakashi can not help but give her a long, steady look, from the soles of her black-clad feet all the way up to her rose-colored head. There is blood dotting her face and arms like freckles, and the state of her clothing makes her look as though she has traveled through a dense, tearing briar patch.
There is no rise and fall to her chest; Kakashi begins to feel his own heart flutter—Stop!
He clenches his forehead with one hand, wondering where his composure has gone. A body is just a body; it has no life or value to anyone, let alone him. Death should not, does not faze him.
A body is just a body, but it's not, because it's her body.
Looking closely, Kakashi knows that this is how she looked at night. Small and pale, strangely listless no matter what the circumstances. And quiet. She was always silent at night, even when the night itself was filled with pleasure or with pain; she cried silently.
Her small hands are free of the gloves that bound them; the soft, supple skin hasn't even begun to callus or wrinkle, as older and grizzled shinobi do. Her face is unmarked, the small smears of blood almost like paint; some of it dribbles onto her lips, and suddenly her mouth is crimson again, just as it always was. Water beads catch in her hair like dew on a cherry blossom in May; delicate and shining like crystal or spun glass.
If Kakashi imagined enough, he might be able to believe that the wind playing across her blouse was actually the rise and fall of a still-beating heart.
But it's not. It's just the wind.
Kakashi leans down, and smoothes back small wisps of silken hair from her high, unmarked forehead, having succumbed to that longing to just touch her skin one more time.
She is beautiful, and she is dead.
