Specters In The Snow
This is his body,
this is his love,
such selfish prayers
I can't get enough
The snow comes and the darkness rides along with it. A silent, predatory, partner. Alert and with its pale eyes open wide looking for a way to get in. The truth is that you will probably try to keep this darkness out. And you are entitled to this course of action. So bottle it up and put it on a shelf. Sweep it under the rug. Kick it into the back of the closet. But it will always get out. It will follow you. A shadow, another one of your faces. The nastiest, ugliest one. The one you pray nobody will ever see. The darkness follows Hatake Kakashi, grinning and huffing out pungent smoke from its acrid nostrils. Mostly, he tries to get away from it. But it becomes harder and harder to outrun yourself.
Previously, Kakashi's heart was pockmarked with hard blisters from rubbing up against things. Since then, he has become so good at building walls around his heart, he might have become an architect. If architecture had any means of supporting his bloodlust, his need for risk and bone breaking.
For 30 years he's been warning off Death with eye-stinging sake alone in his empty apart, and dog eared romance novels poised on the page in the book where the protagonist gets the girl and the girl gets to be beautiful. He has built himself a cage out of paper. But friends don't like to be kept at bay for too long. And the holidays roll around. And Death likes to visit him. And Death won't take no for an answer, then.
Kakashi passes spirited families on the street. Squawking children, toothless mouths open in protest of empty stockings. Their parents right behind them, holding hands, made of mistletoe. He's not fit to hold anyone's baby in his arms. Former students waves to him from their excited young clusters. They're thinking of bright lights and stolen kisses. Cups of cider. He waves back as if to say I'm ok. Of course it is convincing. Nobody knows that he sees Obito in every shop window. Screaming out at him with those child's eyes. Whatcha gonna get me, baka? Don't be an old Grinch. Did you get me anything? Did you?
His apartment isn't fit for company. He hasn't cleaned in a while. The lurking fangtoothed dust bunnies are an excuse for not inviting anybody over. What would they do if they saw Rin standing over his bed? You never even told me you loved me. Her white kiss on his ear. His face turning to frost. Eyelashes icicle-ing together. Do you love me or don't you? You never even said if you did.
More sake. More sex. More nothingness. Snow falling like a pillow pressed over Konoha's rosy face outside the window. A stranger's body in bed beside him. Obito, Rin, those ghosts, if that's what they are, are the song he can never escape. Blaring through every speaker. Pouring out of every pore. The lyrics he knows by heart. You never even said you loved me. Whatcha gonna get me, baka?
Their voices frozen in childish registers. Do you love me or don't you? Even after all these years. Whatcha gonna get me? One glass of sake. Two. You never even said you… Touch me here. Please, don't stop. Whatcha gonna get me? The snow still falling. The pillow over his head. Do you love me or don't you? Whatcha gonna give me. 12 glasses of sake. 25. Why didn't you protect me? You have something that belongs to me, give it back.
Sakura roams the streets like a specter in the winter. Just the faintest shadow of the sunbeam she used to be. No longer hungry, no longer foolish. No longer anything that could cause bruises. On a snowy, breathy night she finds Kakashi stumbling down a darkly lit street. He's leaning against the wall on his elbow, groping along in the almost complete darkness. Heavy footed and swaying. Sakura doesn't call out to him because she doesn't want to scare him. Or shake him from whatever spell he has fallen over into if it means he won't notice that he's out in the snow a little longer. The smell of sake radiates off of him like a thousand pointing arrows. Help, over here. I'm right here. Doesn't anybody see me?
She had just waved goodbye to her friends. Talking of eggnog and open presents. It's Christmas eve. They had gone their separate ways and she hadn't expected to run into Kakashi. Kakashi plodding through the snow like a deer shot in the belly. Kakashi doubling over, coughing up sick all over the slushy cobblestone streets.
Sakura had never seen him as a human being. She had only ever seen him as a shinobi. She goes around to the side of him, touches his muscle-y back. Kakashi looks up and doesn't recognize her. At that moment, she decides that she will walk him home.
They take the stairs up to his apartment slowly. One then another then another like counting stars precisely in the sky. Kakashi leans on her for support coughing a wet, monstrous cough. Sakura's knees tremble under his weight. She gets him into bed and peels off his wet socks. His toes are stuck together. She puts on tea. The snow has not let up.
His eyes pierce right through her. A stab to the gut and twist. His left eye is red on the other side of the hitai-ate, a crimson bloom of blood blossoming like a deadly rose against the curve of his cheek. There's blood under the nails of his hands. Sakura is shivering from something other than the cold. She kisses him.
Sakura had not been planning to do this. You don't have to go through with this she tells herself. Her self answers with I do. On the stove the tea starts scorching. Screaming louder than her pulsing, desperate skin. Kakashi's red eye thick with lust, from the corner it's slowly bleeding, bleeding. Some people bleed where you can't see.
His soft tongue in her mouth tastes of rejection. She tries to swallow it down. There are enough stones in her belly to last for days, she realizes. She hopes she doesn't cough them up onto his imploring tongue. She latches on to it, with the hope not to sink. All winter she's been sinking.
His "I love you." steals the gravity from the room. All of a sudden they are floating. She can no longer feel her head attached to her body. Her limbs are pulling out of their sockets, wading across the room. She's so lightheaded she doesn't resist when he lifts her shirt over her head. Eyes eating her skin. Her goose pimpled arms, naked and white.
May'be tomorrow they wouldn't speak of it. May'be tomorrow, Kakashi wouldn't remember. May'be the glaze frosted his eyes like heated breath against a window was all the sake and nothing more or less. Sakura didn't want him to remember.
He held her in his arms crushed against his chest afterwards so close their hearts thumping against their chests sounded like the same knocking, frenzied visitor. And she couldn't tell who the tears in her hair belonged to.
Kakashi rolled away from her, mumbling into his pillow "I finally said it, Rin." He was going to go to sleep. Sakura's eyes were on the window. Konoha must have suffocated in the night under the heavy blanket of snow. Sakura was having trouble breathing. Sasuke would have to go.
He was sitting in the corner of the room. He had been there all night. Sakura wouldn't make eye contact with him. He was the way she remembered him purely, the blue Uchiha, shirt the tiny shorts. His fledgling little boy body, leaning forward on his knees, hands clasped beneath his chin. Those dark eyes watching them. Had been watching them all night. Trying to pick Sakura's limbs apart from Kakashi's. In the winter he always followed her. May'be now. May'be now he would leave her alone.
"Rin." Kakashi's eyes were closed, his speech still regrettably slurred. His face was quiet. He looked like a little boy. He would sleep well. Sakura would see to it. The room was warm with body heat. The sheets would stink of desperation for the next three washes. Everything was comfortable. "I said it, Rin." Sakura absently patted his knee. "Yes, Kakashi-kun. You did." Her eyes were on Sasuke. Sasuke was no longer grinning.