When Kiba gets up from the bed, he stumbles. It's been six days since he's stood on his own feet. Kakashi grabs Kiba beneath the shoulders and forces him upright. The boy smells of blood and grass and earth, of something raw and strangely natural. Kiba growls and brushes off Kakashi's hands.
"I don't need your help. I'm not a kid."
His pupils are thicker in the darkness, dilated by the lack of light in the apartment. There's a deadly glint in them, the metallic kind present only in the eyes of wild animals.
"There's a nice clearing up past this block," Kakashi says, deciding to ignore Kiba's immature behaviour, "That's where we'll go."
"This is you, isn't it?" Kiba's examining one of the photographs of Kakashi's old team. "The Fourth was your teacher, huh?"
He suddenly remembers the old nightmares, the ones that are less frequent but still present. Remembers the smell of coppery blood and dust and dirt, remembers Obito being slowly crushed to death while he could only watch.
"Yes." Kakashi pauses for a moment, "All of them are dead, excluding me, of course."
Kiba freezes for a fraction of a second, then he nods, "Of course."
It wasn't good to hang on to memories. No, the memories themselves weren't good for anything at all.
They stand in the clearing, beneath the thin canopy of trees. Gentle rays of sunlight seep through the spaces between the trees, little pieces of light that illuminate what they touch. Kiba turns his face up into the sunlight, his eyes squint as he gets used to the light – after all, he hasn't been outside in several days.
Kiba inhales deeply, tasting the air, "A storm's coming," he grins, "How ironic." He lays a hand almost affectionately against the trunk of a tree before speaking again, "It might not make sense to you, but the bond between Akamaru and me is- was much stronger than any bond you could have with another human. That is why… separation is so hard for me to tolerate."
"Explain it to me, since you appear to think that I have problems understanding you." Kakashi leans against a tree; the bark is prickly against his back, even through his thick vest.
"That's the whole thing – I can't explain it to you. After all," Kiba gave a grin that could only be called feral, his teeth were bright white against his tanned face, his canines looked sharp and dangerous, "You're only human."
"You state those words over and over again, 'you're only human'," Kakashi mocks Kiba in a somewhat stoic manner, his voice utterly deadpan, "But you are a human yourself – so of course I can't understand you."
"I'm not like you. Have you forgotten that I am from the Inuzuka clan?" Kiba laughs, "We live as a part of the earth. We go with the cycle of nature, not against it, like you humans."
"For a kid from the Inuzuka clan, you sure have a strange philosophy."
"My mother always scolded me for being different." Kiba smiles to himself, "Well, she told me I was too free-spirited and uncaring to be a ninja. I'm not like the rest of you – my interests don't lie within making myself a skilled killer. All I ever wanted was knowledge about nature. Just by understanding nature, you can understand a whole lot more about the world than you think. After all, who else is there to witness us do anything but the earth?" Kiba closed his eyes and leant against the tree, "The trees tell me things, you know."
"What sort of things?"
"Memories that they have. Every action a person performs leaves an imprint in the world – an imprint which can resurface even a thousand years later, if the trees are still there to tell their stories. It's not intentional, it's more like… A good analogy would be the wind. When someone steps into the forest from a thousand feet away from you, the wind can carry that sound to your ears, correct? Like an echo of the sound, but still essentially the same sound. In the same way, the trees carry the sounds, smells and images of what has happened in the past. They tell their memories to each other, over and over, so the memories fade but never disappear."
"Do these trees have those kinds of memories?"
"Oh, they have plenty. If I were to listen to them all, time would end a thousand times over. But instead, I listen for the words that I think I might need to hear…" Kiba let out a low growl, not out of aggravation, but one of interest. "The trees tell me of a silver-haired man who dares to challenge the storms. A man with an affiliation for the lightning element. A man with a jutsu he calls chidori."
"You're talking lies," he answers, doubt edging into the back of his mind.
"Whatever," the boy shrugs without a care, "It doesn't matter to me whether you believe me or not."
"What else do the trees say?" Kakashi asks hesitantly, and he's not even sure why he's hesitant. He shouldn't be.
"They tell me of these animals called humans," and there's another feral grin, "These animals that cause death by ill-intentioned murder. They tell me that there is a continuous cycle of death in nature, but the humans disrupt this cycle with their selfishness, their greed."
- Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.