Vigor
1.
The room is modest, not too small nor too big, and the paint on the walls is jaunty but peeling. His mother is on the bed in front of the window, and in the sun her scissors flash.
She snips with absolute precision, and strands of silky buttermilk-colored hair cascade to the floor. His eyes are wide as it gathers in a pool on the ground, contrasting against the somber blue carpeting.
"Hey Kakashi-chan," She asks sweetly, "could you get me a broom?"
He hurries to comply, and when he comes scurrying back, the broom (taller than he is) feels heavy in his grasp.
Half tripping, he puts on a brave face and begins to sweep.
A slender hand rests atop his head, and then his mother is smiling.
"You will be strong someday," She says. "The strongest."
-
2.
He is a mere six years old when he becomes a Chuunin, and already, he lacks a zest for life. He lives to kill and kills to live, and everything has long since turned into a horrible cyclical game.
He wakes. He leaves. He kills. He returns.
And this is all very boring, but he will allow the cycle to consume him like all perfect (gifted) little shinobi do, like everyone expects he will.
But, as Kakashi's clothes are splattered with blood and he watches another grown man fall at his feet, he can't help but ponder how such a cycle began.
"You will be strong," His mother said.
And nobody doubts that he is.
The rest of the platoon is ahead of him, and Kakashi picks up the pace, tossing dirtied weapons aside.
-
3.
When he is nine and his father kills himself—and people begin whispering in the streets and the Hokage contemplates placing Kakashi in foster care—when he is nine, Kakashi cries on the inside.
He pushes past the crowds in the streets (crowds of people who are either celebrating or rioting) and goes straight to the cenotaph, the big shiny KIA stone where he'd always imagined his parents' names would end up.
But he stands there for hours and hours, and when his eyes are tired from reading, he has yet to find the name Hatake Sakumo.
-
4.
When he is twenty-three and a certain Uchiha Sasuke is nine, they both stand looking for names that aren't there.
In a few years they are placed on the same cell, and both pretend nothing ever happened.
"You will be strong," Kakashi says softly, when they are training alone just before the Chuunin exams. It's meant as reassurance, or maybe he just wants to hear it the way his mother had once said it.
Sasuke scoffs at him and punches a fist lit with blue through the ground, creating a crater that they will both sink into someday.
When his arm thrusts forward and becomes stuck, he digs a foot into the dirt trying to free it, and Kakashi catches a glimpse of the cursed seal.
His eyes narrow and his hands shake, and he can't help but tell himself that his mother was a liar, and he is not strong. He is not the strongest.
Fin.