For xx_pinkstar on LJ, who gave me this prompt: my old friend, i can't remember your eyes, all the stars are still here, all my tears turn to time.
The World Bends in Quiet Ways
By icecreamlova
- : -
He's been through hundreds of fights since one eye replaced another, and for all that she died not two years after her shaking hands gave him yet another eternal reminder of the dead, pride and shame mingling beyond any possible division, she is there at every spar, becomes half his shadow each time he raises his hitae-ate. It may be slightly morbid, but who doesn't have ghosts nipping like wolves at their heels from years under the burden of something as insubstantial, yet paradoxically heavy, as grief? Certainly no one his rank.
And so it is that he stands by the Memorial Stone, three weeks after Uchiha Itachi collapsed seventy-two hours of dripping water and exquisitely sharp blades into the space of three seconds, and he holds those ghosts within sight so they don't ambush him unexpectedly. Clouds, weighted to bursting with the promise of rain, shift against the darkened sky in ways decidedly different from the cold wind whipping against ankle-high grass. A fitting atmosphere, appropriately gloomy and dark - never mind that he's stood here placidly through snow and hail and scorching summers alike - since he's here to ponder life problems with the other half of his shadow.
(The Fourth bends somewhere between Rin and Obito, in the curve of his arm when Kakashi moves; Minato-sensei could never become a shadow.)
You never warned me about this, Obito, Kakashi thinks, quite unfairly. He has the odd sense the Memorial Stone is glowering back in its own resentful, inanimate way. Obito probably hadn't known this ability of the Sharingan - hadn't thought to learn - because for all his pride in the grief-honed weapon on which his clan placed such emphasis, he had been thirteen, with too much sense of self to mount a sustained search in his family archives in a quest of self-discovery. Obito had been the best-defined person Kakashi had never known, kindness contained within exuberance and a moral lodestone Sasuke, he thinks, either did not inherit or left in the empty Uchiha compound to gather dust.
Your family's sense of history was astonishing, and I've learned to read between the raving and the paranoia, (there had to be more than the usual given the number of Uchiha prodigies, he remembers deciding, when he'd first stolen into the compound for information) but... this...
They had never quite conveyed the reality of mangekyou. All that atmospheric prose gone to waste.
Or maybe he's wrong. He's spoken to the Obito in his mind for the past twelve years, but he had never really seen Obito until he couldn't see out of one eye at all. Maybe Obito would have thought-
Rin might have pieced it together, if she'd survived. She'd certainly figured out plenty else, after his initial pain, after the shock of being able to see out of two eyes once again as she connected the two severed optic nerves. Tissue rejection, chakra flow, sneaking infection, problems as simple as the cornea drying, they had been her domain. And later, in a hospital room filled with light, her fingers clamped, ungentle, on each side of his face to monitor his chakra as he sent it coursing through new pathways. So determined to master this challenge, too - he his new eye, she this new discipline. Lessons in intensive therapy kept her away for hours, trained as she was for the battlefield rather than the hospital, but she had never felt gone until she actually was.
His eye is Obito's legacy. His eyes are hers.
It's a particularly fitting irony that through this one eye that's not entirely his, he's seared a thousand different jutsu onto his brain, broken moves down into each minute individual motion - but it's never caught the seconds in between. Hundreds of battles cut into glittering diamonds of knowledge, and he does not remember her smile.
Her death? Oh yes. He remembers plenty of death. Remembers hers. The quiet moment of horror, There's something in me and it wants to get out, her voice trembling with repressed pain even as he was forced to follow her to the coastline, far from Konoha. Remembers the end, under salt spray and her blood, warm and sticky between his fingers. That elusive middle of the story - the Sanbi ripping free, gouging the earth until being brought under control once more (barely, the misty chakra flowing everywhere warned him), when he'd realised with a sinking feeling that Kushina, who could seal this properly, was not due to resurface for weeks - feels thin and worn, lost to the echoing halls of time. It hardly matters. Not in the face of what is burned in his memory instead: how he had watched his arm shatter her chest. How he'd lowered his eyes until he could see the world reflected in the trickle of blood splattering on dirt, but couldn't bring himself to watch, and remember, that final look in her eyes.
No, she does not walk along those moments of perfect recall. He can sketch her path to the sea with his mind; he cannot not sketch her, cannot imagine attempting to describe her but for how the world had bent in quiet ways in her wake, just never quite enough to save her or make a difference.
Kakashi focuses on the Memorial Stone again. There is something just waiting to be discovered in the itch behind his eyeballs, he knows, something that had lain quiet, waiting for Uchiha Itachi's abrupt awakening, but for the moment he traces the names that trail down long after Rin's.
The significance is not in what she was, but what she wasn't, a tragedy made lighter and greater all at once. He had known, even from the thud of her body hitting the ground, that she would be another chapter in the book of those who had come and gone in his life, compressed even further to simply her name in this memorial.
Rin was not the first, and not the last, of those he had loved and lost. Some days the ghosts are nostalgic rather than harrying. Some days, many days, he comes to the Memorial Stone and tells himself wryly that there are worse ways to be eccentric. He could be paranoid and raving instead.
He's alive. Where there's life, there's (porn, frustration, Konoha, his new team, pain) hope.
A lighter tragedy, for him. He did not lose so much that day.
(She could have been remembered, instead of being just a memory to catalyse him.)
"Not," he says aloud, into the darkening sky, "compared to what you lost."
- : -
Well?