A Scarecrow's Cinders
By: Song
Summary: When a fire goes out, only cinders remain, and when a person loses everything close to him, he becomes a scarecrow.
Warnings: Angst, and the rambling of someone delving deeper into the psychology of a fellow...
Disclaimer: If I did we would know more about Kakashi's past, but we don't. So obviously I don't.
A/U: In my mind Kakashi is a silent sufferer of much pain. Behind the facade of a lazy perverted ninja is a fractured soul of a boy no more than fifteen. When Arashi died I think it finally shattered an already cracked persona. Because of Sukumo, Obito and finally Arashi he seems to suffer confidence and trust issues, obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, survivor's guilt, anxiety, paranoia and depression. (Can you tell that I think Kakashi is one messed up person?) I believe that I have captured the repetitive and confusing nature of these psychological disorders (suffering from a number of them myself), but please review and tell me what you think.
Oh, and thanks to my beta, hatakekakashifan4000 for putting up with this.
Anyway, on with the story.
It was September fifteenth, once again. A sad day for one Hatake Kakashi. It was his birthday. He was slim and pale, mysterious, slightly imposing, gaunt and broken looking. A creature worn and tired after years abusing a frail body. A birthday is supposed to be a celebrated day. For a shinobi it meant that they were still alive, as death was an occupational hazard. It was a time to be with friend and family.
Kakashi had always been a loner. Proclaimed a genius at three, graduated at four, became a chuunin at six, and jounin at thirteen. Which made his few precious people all the more special.
But that was the problem with birthdays. You were supposed to spend them with somebody close to you, not all by your lonesome, or with the cold company of memorials.
Which is how Hatake Kakashi always spent them.
This year he was to be found awake, standing alone at the crack of dawn at the KIA Memorial. His silver hair glinted dully in the morning sun, drooping with dewdrops. If you didn't know better, you'd say he had been there all night. Then again he was a ninja, so perhaps he had.
The sky was gradually changing its color, shades of red and orange spilling over the clouds and surroundings mountains. It was a beautiful thing, but like any beautiful thing, sunrise lasts only moments.
Sunrise symbolizes the start of something new, as sunset; the end of something old. It happens again and again, over and over. Rise in the east and set in the west. It had happened that way since the earth began and it would stay that way until the earth was destroyed. A limbo, a balance, an equal potential that was created and destroyed in the same way for any comprehensible amount of time.
As with this, when something comes to this world it has an immeasurable amount of potential, and when it dies, that potential stops.
Everyone is born with a little spark inside of them, and it is a families' job to coax that spark into a flame. With out that precious coaxing it would simply cease to exist, as without fresh wood a fire will burn out. Kakashi was no different.
But, somewhere in his life his fire had been dampened, and now only the smoldering cinders of a once bright inferno simmered. With fresh kindling his fire would light again, if he let it feel the warmth.
His cinders were smoldering away.
The exposed eye closed, imagining his loved ones surrounding him.
A breath escaped his lungs as he lapsed into long forgotten memories. Good memories. Training with his team, those ridiculous contests with Obito, warm arms comfortingly around him... Happy memories.
What was 'happy' anymore? Did 'happy' and 'good' every really exist? Or were they just a memory of something that never really happened?
He wanted his Sensei, longed for him, needed him.
Kakashi, at age twenty seven was far to old for a Sensei now anyway. He was suposed to be the Sensei...
Sensei has been so much more than a teacher. You could tell anything to Sensei, as indeed Kakashi had. He had been friend, a brother, a father, a comrade, hero... all wrapped into one person. He knew that a scarecrow like himself had never deserved someone like that. And he knew that his Sensei's son deserved so much better, and that he, a scarecrow, was unfit to give it.
Scarecrows were complicated creatures. Nearly impossible to create, but so easily destroyed... If you take the stuffing out a scarecrow, it is no longer anything worth while, not that they were much of anything in the first place. By taking away simply the stuffing they become just a heap of tattered cloth tied to a pole.
The obsidian eye opened, glossing over with discarded emotions. He was a shinobi, a jounin at that. He was one of the best. The best of the best. He was Copy-nin Kakashi. Nin. As in Ninja. A tool. Emotions were for the worthy, which he knew he was not, or the weak. To be weak was to die. To die would be to stop. To stop was to fail. He would not fail.
Because failing would be disobeying the rules. And Ninja who disobeys the rules is trash.
He would not be trash. Tattered cloth was still able to at least postpone a hungry bird.
Though on the other hand (pole?) when something is desperate nothing short of death can stop it.
His hands were already stained red with the blood of his friends, so he was worse than trash, and he deserved the Hell he lived; being a scarecrow, that is.
A scarecrow was only good for one thing: Scarring crows. More often then not they failed at their only purpose in existing.
Scarecrows were waste of space.
Like he was.
He had neglected those around him, and lost his point in life.
Not that he had that much of a purpose in the first place.
The void of sleep is as forgiving as it was ilusive. Like it usualy was. It stayed away, taunting you, dareing you to try and catch it, then flitting away leaving painful darkness behind. A darkness that your mind fills with what you were struggling to keep away.
'In the ninja world, those who don't follow the rules are considered trash, but those who don't protect their comrades are worse than trash.'
Obito had said that.
Kakashi lived by it.
Obito died by it.
He had learned his lesson to late... to late to save them.
Did he get it now?
He thought he got it.
But thinking you get it and actually getting it were on separate ends of the spectrum.
He had learned that the hard way.
Why had he told that to Sensei's son if he didn't understand it himself?
Kakashi disgusted himself.
He scowled at the dirt under his feet wondering why he wasn't the one being stepped on.
Scarecrows were a waste of time and energy anyway.
A cold bead sweat found its way into his already soaked mask.
Maybe it was a tear. Either way, it didn't matter. It was something a scarecrow wasn't meant to do.
He opened his eye, despite the constant itching to go back to sleep and simply never wake up. Another thing scarecrows didn't do. Sleep or die. They simply existed, day after day for a simple task more often then not doomed to fail anyway. It was cruel and twisted way to live, tied to a pole and forgotten about. The wind would blow and knock him down, and he would be unable to stand himself back up. A forgotten life in an abandoned place. Eventually he and his post would rot away into the soil, corpse to hopefully be used for some greater purpose, and then forgotten completely. It wasn't really a life, but it was his.
His eye adjusted to the night air as the last sliver of light ducked beneath the horizon, darkness consuming the last rays of sun.
The moon rose quietly casting dull shadows around dark corners and turning an already haunted face more ghastly. The shadows loomed and contorted forming grotesque shapes and beings. One by one they began to form familiar figures and shapes, stepping away from the trees and looking at him, eyes white, forms ashen and vaporous.
Slowly he began to recognize them, one by one, each person he had killed each, comrades that had died, everyone he had once known materialized before him. The woman he knew from pictures to be his mother... the man he had called 'Tou-san', The first man he had killed, the massacrers he had caused, lifeless, nameless people, woman and children alike, young and old, weak, strong, friend and foe. White eyes starred at him boring into the shriveled thing that was once his soul.
Brighter then the others, Rin appeared, smiled sadly and pointing to a boy he had once known so well. Obito sneered at him, folding his arms and sulking in a very Uchia, un-Obito way, with a misgivious sparkle behind his goggle clad eyes. Sensei appeared next, looking down on his student of long ago. He looked at him with his deep blue eyes, studding a the weathered face of a long dead spirit. "Kashi-Kun" He whispered, holding a hand to the petrified pathetic excuse for a human, no, tool, before him.
A scarecrow would not know what the emotion in his voice was, it was part of a past better left behind.
Kakashi longed to reach out to see, to touch them, to see if they were real.
But the images of his guilt faded away, like the evening light. His comrades, his family, his friends, rivals, Rin... and finally Sensei and Obito, each sending him a look of disappointment before vanishing completely. All had dissipated into the cold night air, each soul finally winking out of existence. Not a cinder remaining.
He hurt. The eyes that had once looked at him as if he was actauly something worthwile, had finaly realized that a scarecrow was just tattered cloth and straw tied to a pole. Nothing more.
And it hurt that he could never become what everyone else saw, especially them.
The shame was unbearable.
Kakashi knew he had let them down.
Anguish seemed to be the only thing vile enough for something the likes of himself.
It was like his heart had been torn from his chest, the long to be with them again, the need for company, to make them proud...
The inablility and knowlage that he could not.
To be able to cry would be a blessing. To feal hot tears parading away from a distraught soul.
Shinobi didn't cry though. Scarecrows couldn't.
And as much as Kakashi needed it, somehow the tears wouldn't come.
He was only a scarecrow after all.
And like any farmland scarecrow, he was alone.
Fin