Ticking Time Bomb
And anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain
Don't carry the world upon your shoulders
For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder
It's the kind of rain that requires that you blink beautifully, in order to see. Fast, hard little pinprick kisses that seem to soothe more than they hurt if you let them melt on you, like snowflakes on a tongue. They are both wearing heavy coats, their hands solid balls of ice shoved into their pockets. Heads down and Guy's hair is washing out, all the gel he used for coifing bleeding into his blinking eyes.
Beside him, the exposed parts of Kakashi's skin glint like ivory in the grey haze. The way anything that is beautiful or light is magnified in darkness. They are both young, at the able breasted pinnacles of youth, in the Summers of their lives. But Kakashi with his giraffe-legged lope, and his coffee bean black eyes, makes eyes turn to approach him when he walks into a room. Kakashi with his shaggy silver mane, and his beat-up cigarette jacket, the ragged ends pointing down out of his coat. Kakashi with his shoes that bear blacker than shoe polish scuff marks, and the little silver barbell through his lip that radically dances when he talks.
Guy does not understand him at all. And so there comes a certain fear. And so he wants desperately to emulate him. The air between them is almost too thick to breathe through. They are not really friends. Are not really much of anything to each other. Being in ANBU makes humanity almost unachievable, and the marble eyed Kakashi that wears the red dog mask squashes all potential buds of friendship under his thick soled boot.
Guy in fact does not fully know why they are walking together on this dark, rainy day;except that they are the ones always left alone in their quarters when the other shinobi have gone out to lay hands on the town. And when Kakashi was stumbling bleary eyed past Guy who had been standing at the corner of the street gazing bitterly into the rain; he had asked, his voice muffled behind his sleeve, because he also chose that moment to wipe his mouth the back of his hand "Are you going my way?".
And Guy did not have to force himself to say "Yes." It simply came as if it had been waiting there on the tip of his tongue looking for an escape route between the jail cell bars of his teeth. And when Kakashi offered him a lopsided grin, his eyes glinting like charcoals lit under their heavy brows, he felt as if he had been waiting under the stars and in the rain for the younger, charmed boy to arrive.
They walk together in a slow timed step, Kakashi silent while Guy watches him from the corners of his eyes , trying not to make his fascination apparent. Kakashi wears a concentrated look on his face, perhaps because he's trying so hard to walk civilly in the quickly falling icy sheets of rain. And he has a fine film of crust laying on his lips. A ruddy, salmon color, as if he bites down on them a lot, or they are chapped, or someone had kissed them hungrily, kissed them raw. Guy unabashedly allows himself to imagine the latter, his companion with his milk white spider limbs twined around some girl.
He pegs Kakashi for a burnout. He is like a quiet flame smoldering under a lamp shade. You cannot see it pulsing, but if you put your hand to it, it burns you just the same, and incriminates you with the black, flaking flesh left behind, reminding you of the time you were unknowing, and played with fire. The quiet flames are the blackest, the hottest, the most dangerous ones to be found burning inside of a man. There is no place for people like him to go after ANBU.
They don't end up as teachers or working in the village shops, or nesting in the mountains content to wallow in the leftover scraps of their beings. They don't allow themselves to end up as anything. They are the people that take charge. That make things change. That make things move. They are the comets streaking across the sky full of short-lived beauty that glows longingly only for a split second before their shining bodies self destruct.
Kakashi is one of those people. His edges are too rough, his eyes are too clear. Guy assumes that Kakashi, who has seen things older and maliciously beyond his age, could not possibly ever look away, now. Guy pictures the younger boy giving burning kisses, his eyes hanging wide open. People say he will snap a pleading man's neck with his bare hands, without even blinking. That kind of person is too ruthless to become a sensei, to become anything. He will die, he would become a pile of bones in a moonlit field. Guy shivers from something other than the rain's frigid handprints on his skin.
Next to him Kakashi reaches up to scratch at his thick, soggy head of hair, and the sleeve of his jacket rises exposing a pale, chicken bone of a wrist and a chain of delicately linked words, etched in infinitely fine black ink. Then he drops the lanky limb to his side again and it disappears before Guy can be sure that he even saw it to begin with, shucked away into the sleeve like a turtle that has noticed its neck sticking too far out of the shell.
Kakashi smiles sharply at him, perhaps amused to have found him staring. He says stiffly, as if he's accustomed to having to make the effort to speak often "Sorry, I look like trash."
"No." begins Guy, but Kakashi has already turned his face away rubbing hard at his chin, and the older boy waits for more signs of the black letter chain to resurface on his wrist, but it is being stubbornly coy. Kakashi turns into a little café, walking with determined direction and Guy follows docilely.
There is nowhere better to go, and there is nothing better to do. And being in the presence of the silver haired enigma's black fire makes Guy feel as if he himself is burning alive. He presumes that all of the people in the little place feel the heat radiating from Kakashi too. They all turn to look at the two weather beaten boys as they enter, their eyes as if pulled by hooked strings fixing solely on Kakashi, who is shaking the water from his hair obliviously.
The waitress that comes to seat them stares transfixed into Kakashi's face as if he really were on fire. An energetic bundle of flames rather than a man. Guy is starting to resent his decision to play tag-along. When they are seated their orders are taken, and then Kakashi subtlety pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and jams one of the slender sticks in his mouth.
He gives Guy a stare from under those brooding brows that can only be interrupted as apologetic, but doesn't offer him one. Kakashi's dark eyes are the only things hard and knowing about his otherwise youthful face, cheeks still round and smooth with infantile tenderness. They go down at the corners, like drops of rain, like someone tacked two little teardrops to his face.
Girls that Guy cannot help but to over- hear often swoon over the younger boy's "bedroom eyes", but Guy has always thought they make him look a bit sad. Weighed down at the corners with some unbearable heaviness, a burden that he cannot blink away. Or at least they are unless he smiles so big, they crinkle shut like little crescent moons set in the galaxy of his face, but that was about as likely to happen as Kakashi someday becoming a sensei.
There's a pretty girl just getting a seat at the table across from theirs. She has a mouth that would remind you of a ripe strawberry, and eyes like a clear Summer's sky, and hair blacker and shinier than a jaguar's silken hide. A strawberry. A ripe, heart shaped strawberry, sweet enough looking to have been picked by the very hands of God.
She keeps looking over at their table, and when her eyes fall on Guy, he feels like he is sucked ten feet deep into them. Wading upstream in all of that, sparkling iridescent blue, being swept along by her eyelashes. He can't breathe.
He thinks she's looking at Kakashi. Attracted to his fire, can smell the scent of his slowly burning flesh in the air. But she looks away and then looks back at him. Directly at him. And a bright raw smile breaks her mouth open. One that makes him swell with anxious anticipation, having come across the sweetest fruit and being desperate for the first, saccharine bite.
His heart stops and he thinks that he might die when she comes over and sits in his lap. He does die when she begs him back to her place. He goes to Heaven, it must be Heaven, because she unbuttons her shirt for him, and straddles his strong body with her slight one. She tosses back her head, her hair flowing around her shoulders like a dark river, and whispers his name. In her voice… "Guy."…….In…"Guy?"
Her…..
Smooth….deep….drawling…voice….
"Guy. Transmission coming to you from planet Earth. Do you read me?"
Guy blinks hard and the girl with the strawberry mouth vanishes from his touch. She walks with swaying hips up his arms and into his mind again. Into a place that he cannot reach again. She is only sitting at the table next to them staring.
"Yes." He says, clearing his throat.
"See that girl over there?" Kakashi is asking, and he nods towards her and even though he closes his eyes then, Guy can see the way her eyes are opened like two sinkholes trying desperately to pull Kakashi in.
"Guy?"
He opens his eyes again, slowly and looks at Kakashi leaning earnestly across the table, pointing the stubby, lit end of his cigarette at him. Guy chews softly on his tongue feigning deep thought. "Mhm." He says.
"I'll talk to her." Says Kakashi, clearly. But he bites down on his lip, the blasé mask breaking and he looks vulnerable, and open, and…sexy. Sexy, thinks Guy bitterly. He wants to spit. "Mhm." He says.
"You see her. She's beautiful. A muse. And I want to trace her. Every outline. If you think of it that way, the sex…it's more like art…" he says as if to justify himself. The mask cracks a little more and he takes a deep puff from the cigarette before stubbing it out.
"Mhm." Says Guy, but Kakashi is already sliding out of his chair and traipsing his way over, his hands shoved in his battered coat pockets. Guy lifts the mug before him to his mouth and takes a sip and tries not to look. But he can see the sun breaking on the girl's face, the light spilling out of her eyes and running all down her cheeks when Kakashi approaches her.
Guy can probably guess that Kakashi is mucking up his introduction. He can see the boy scratching, aimlessly at his hair, the strain on his face when he talks to the girl. But she giggles. Guy already knows what he ,himself would say to her. But he cannot imagine her giggling.
He doesn't care so much that he's alone now, with his mug of whatever it is the waitress brought him, and the plate of food he has barely touched. He doesn't care. He doesn't care about the girl, she was not really that pretty. She's probably inexperienced. She probably has bad breath. It will be Kakashi's bad luck. Poor Kakashi. Who he certainly, definitely, absolutely doesn't care about.
Because that kid is going nowhere.
He takes another sip from the mug. "That kid is going nowhere." He says out loud. Kakashi and the girl are arm in arm and walking out of the place. Kakashi holds the door open for her, putting himself out in the rain, in the darkness again, and his skin starts up that stupid glow as if he were made of a precious metal, a blessed piece of unearthed alabaster.
Guy is having such a good time eating and drinking alone that he does not imagine Kakashi touching the strawberry girl all over with his fire. Leaving burn marks on her throat. Her thighs. Her hands. Inside her. Lip shaped burn marks, kisses she dared to swallow.
That kid will self destruct, he thinks. And the girl slips her arm around Kakashi's waist as if they had not just met, and Kakashi looks at Guy fleetingly over his shoulder. But Guy is having such a good time that he can't possibly spare the moment to notice. They start up the street together, two long legged beautiful bodies in beautiful synchronization.
And Guy begins to mumble under his breath, watching their lithe backs retreating. "That kid will self destruct. Five. Four. Three. Two. One."
He waits for the boom. The blast. The tufts of silver hair and charred cigarette coat blowing in the wind. But nothing. Comes. Nothing. He would have said "Not soon enough. Eventually is not soon enough." But they are moving fast, are already down the street and have turned the corner. And Guy is having too much fun to care.