Okay, I have finally updated! I hope you guys like this one too.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
—Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen
Why do dreams always entail fog wherever the mind doesn't want you to look? Kakashi sighs wearily as he wanders the dreamscape and prays the ground won't give out underneath his feet again.
He had that happen to him once. It was annoying, not to mention Kakashi thought he was about to have a heart attack in the middle of a dream. That would not have been good.
You'd better hurry up, Kakashi.
"Why do I always have to be hurrying, Obito?" He can't bring himself to be annoyed with his friend, but it's getting wearisome. "Why do I always have to hurry?"
Don't ask questions, Kakashi. Obito's voice seems strangely sad. Just…Just hurry.
Kakashi wakes up to the softly acrid smell of the fire burning down. A thin spire of sickly gray smoke rises from cool wood, and he's alone.
With a jolt, Kakashi sits up.
The place where Yugito was sleeping is bare. He swings his head around sharply, surveying everything he can see in the gloom of the forest, heart racing.
"Bloody Hell!"
.
Kakashi searches, frantic in a way he hasn't been in years—the flavor of horror is coppery and not quite far gone enough to be a stranger—as the trees all look the same, dark and twisted with long fingers for branches.
He can't believe Yugito could just be carried off in the middle of the night without enough of a fight being put up to wake him up; he's a light sleeper and he's sure the sound of a struggle would have woken him.
Of course, given her personality, Yugito could have just as easily wandered off. He wouldn't put that past her.
Finally, Kakashi picks up on the smell of fresh blood and his heart jumps even harder, and skids over wet, dewy leaves in the direction of the smell.
And there, kneeling on the stony shore of a large pond, the waters gray and smooth as glass, is Yugito, placidly jointing a hare in hands soaked and encrusted with congealing blood. The ends of her pant legs are sodden with water.
Kakashi expels a relieved breath, and wonders why on earth he was so worried.
"Would you mind warning me the next time you plan on wandering off?" he snaps, sounding more like a shaken parent than a nin escort.
The look the young girl gives him a look out of veiled, glossy eyes that is to Kakashi's eyes disturbingly knowing and piercing. "You were asleep." Her voice is soft, unusually neutral. "And I was hungry."
Then, without further ceremony, she tears a bit of flesh off of the hapless hare's rib cage and pops it in her mouth, smearing pale lips and white cheeks garish, gaudy crimson.
Kakashi gapes at her. "Uh, Nii-san?"
"Yes?"
"That's…that's…"
"Raw?" An icy glint of humor appears in Yugito's eyes, as she wipes the blood off of her cheeks with the back of her bandaged forearm. Her lips are still stained dark though, making them seem wider. "Yes, I know." She holds out another gory hunk of meat. "Did you want some?"
The look out of one black eye mingles horror, disgust and exasperation. "No thank you." He can feel his appetite dwindling with every moment.
She merely smiles thinly and pops the bloody meat in her mouth. "More for me, then."
This is the point when Kakashi notices something about Yugito's cast-in-ice smile. It's false. All of it, lies, and Kakashi can't say he's surprised. She hasn't really smiled once, the whole time they've been together in this forest.
For a few moments, Yugito continues to tear at the flesh of the hare and eat her fill, with a suddenly voracious appetite unlike anything Kakashi's seen out of her before.
A single eye levels coolly on Kakashi, vertical pupil keen and nearly invisible among pale, glacial blue. "So…" The keenly inquisitive note in her voice is almost completely submerged. "Who's Obito?"
He stares at her, not sure he's heard right. "What?" Kakashi blurts out.
Her face becomes even more intensely mask-like as she repeats herself—an ANBU's most valuable trait. "Who is Obito? I heard you muttering that name in your sleep."
A sharp, sick stab of pain splits through his stomach, eradicating what little of his appetite he has left. He doesn't want to discuss this, especially not with her. "Nii-san…"
"Yugito," she suddenly mutters, back tensing.
"What?"
"Call me Yugito." Yugito looks up, an uncharacteristically strained look on her face. "Everyone in Kumogakure, apart from Kirabi, always called me Nii-san, even my cousins. Please."
Slowly, he nods, taking note of this with numb interest. "Yugito… I… I am under no obligation to explain myself to you." Sarcastically, he adds, "Should you hear me muttering in my sleep again, you should kick me in the ribs until I wake up or die. Whichever happens first."
Yugito nods obediently, sagely. "Alright." Her crimson-dyed fingernails run lingeringly across the soft, dull brown fur of the hare's corpse. "You must have killed him," she notes absently.
This gets Kakashi's attention. "What?" He is sharp as the edge of any kunai, visible eye glinting hard.
The Kumo nin doesn't quail under his gaze, pale brow perfectly smooth as she tilts her head up to look at him. Perfectly bland, but somehow more incisive than ever. "The only comrades," Yugito murmurs, "that we ever dream about after they're gone are the ones we had to kill."
She's got it all wrong. However, Kakashi doesn't see any need to disabuse her of this notion. If Yugito thinks he killed Obito, fine; let her continue to labor on this notion. He has no scruples about letting her believe erroneous notions in order to throw her off the scent.
And Yugito doesn't stop, unusually chatty this gray morning. "You know, I had to kill a fellow Kumo nin on a mission once." It's amazing, how she can give bits of information like this so casually.
Kakashi doesn't stop her. He's hardly surprised by this, and doubts he'll hear anything out of this little anecdote—he's sure this is what this is going to turn into—that he hasn't heard before.
Light silvery blue eyes are blank and distant, seeing something different as she tosses the hare away and laces her fingers together, fingernails of her index fingers scratching absently over each other.
"It was about two years ago, and I had been sent on a mission with three others. We were infiltrating a post in Iwa, and we were discovered. My partner for that mission was badly wounded in our escape.
"He didn't like me all that much. In fact, he didn't like me at all. Must have been my charming personality—" her face is very bitter now "—because he wouldn't so much as speak to me politely the whole time we were there.
"I remember, there was his blood staining on my palms. I'm…I'm no good for heavy lifting," her voice is getting very soft now, "and I couldn't carry him. Our teammates had already left; they preferred to save their own skins rather than risk them for a wounded man and a jinchuuriki." She spits the word out like an obscenity, and Kakashi winces.
"He was coughing up blood; he'd been stabbed in the liver. Then," Yugito's voice drops to a whisper, barely audible, "he looked at me and said, 'Kill me, Nii-san. If there's anything you're good for, it's making a quick kill. I know you know how to do that.' And I remember laughing, a little bit, because he hated me, yet he trusted me enough to have me kill him.
Kakashi feels the need to interject in this point, eyeing her a little warily, feeling pity, unwilling and numb. "And you slit his throat?" he asks softly. The cutting of the throat is the most common method of mercy killings in the shinobi world.
Silver-sheen hair glistens as Yugito shakes her head vigorously. "No." She still sounds like she's recounting a day at the grocery store. "I took a kunai, and put it through his heart. I hesitated a little—I don't know why, really—but I didn't take long." She looks up, and smiles, and Kakashi shivers. "He was right. If there's one thing I know about, Kakashi, it's how to kill quickly, with no pain."
Kakashi nods, silent, and when she continues to scratch at her fingernails, he tentatively reaches out, and puts a hand on her thin, painfully bony shoulder. "Yugito?"
She hops away as if burned, and stands, washing her hands in the water and then wiping them off on her black trousers indelicately. "We should get going," Yugito points out unnecessarily, back to a falsely chirpy soprano.
What a charming and utterly transparent façade.
As Kakashi walks, still listening for the sound of brush being disturbed or birds being upset, Yugito taps his shoulder, and stares up at him with wide, solemn eyes.
"I am…sorry about your friend."
Kakashi frowns, and wonders if he shouldn't be the one saying this to her.
Okay, that was kind of pointless, but I swear, it will be the last filler chapter. I was just trying to get a feel for the extent of Yugito's dysfunctional mental state.