Of Duty and Bonds VI - Chapter 2, a naruto fanfic

Part VI | Chapter 2

Gohama's trembling fingers reached for the cheapest whiskey in the store. Bottle after bottle, she filled her basket. She stopped by the instant food section and pushed a few ramen cups into it. The thought of food made her quivering stomach sick, but she would have to eat, if not now, later.

Making a quick escape for the cashier, desperate to leave that store and the presence of other people, Gohama sped down the lane, the colours of the products a grey blur around her. Everything felt like a grey blur around her, drowning her, when she needed her mind sharp.

She deposited her things, the beep of items passing through the register made her jittery nerves twitch every time and the upbeat jazzy tune echoing through the store hammered into her mind. In an attempt at distracting herself, Gohama let her eyes float around the store, unseeing, careful so her hood covered her profile. She hadn't put on a henge, afraid her unrest would make the jutsu falter.

A light flickered at the corner of the store, right down the corridor in front of her, and her eyes were pulled into the changing blink. When that proved fruitless, she turned to the advertisement at her side, something colourful and loud about a product she couldn't even find in the store.

The lamp blinked and with the sudden light the corner of her eye caught the sight of hunched shoulders and silver hair. Her heart stopped as her head snapped towards the corner of the store and then restarted all at once, thundering so loudly she could feel it in her ears.

Nothing. Just multi-coloured stacked products and the occasional shifting shadows from the faulty lamp. Nothing.

There was no one there, her chakra sense hadn't felt it, so why would someone be there? Especially that someone. Nothing. No one.

A weight on her arm made Gohama's chakra frenzy. She twisted the offenders arm and pointed a kunai to their throat. Two wide mismatched eyes stared back at her, terrified and searching. Gohama jerked back, kunai slipping from her fingers, now free to wrap around her temples, but it wasn't enough to placate the pang in her head at the horrifying image.

"I'm sorry, lady, I'm sorry. You weren't listening. And I—" The employee spilled, frantic voice faltering in shrill high notes. They banged through the walls of her brain and made all her muscles shudder.

"Shut up!" Gohama growled.

The employee, only a few years younger than Gohama, backed away until he hit the wall behind him, his wide eyes were blue, not mismatched, and certainly not grey and red. She was fucking up so bad. What kind of runaway ninja would call this much attention to herself? The genin kind, maybe not even then.

She picked the kunai back up, cold eyes, the coldest she could muster when the panic the kid was feeling simmered in her guts too, and pointed the tip to him. "If you tell anyone I was here I'll come back and kill you, slowly and painfully until you're begging for you mother. Do I make myself clear?"

The employee gave her only a small nod, imperceptible over the shudders hitting his body. Gohama hoped her lame intimidating tactics would work, but already planned to make a sprint for a town away from this one.

She spied the price shining on the register and searched for the money in her back pouch. Her fingers couldn't grab onto the right notes and her mind couldn't distinguish the numbers written there. She grabbed whatever she could and laid it down on the counter, certain that it payed for the triple of her groceries.

The cold air did little to snap her out of the jittery panicky state of her body. Gohama ran through trembling legs and blurred eyes, her hours long journey feeling like nothing but a second long hitch. She found herself breathing heavily against the door of her inn room, her hair and shoulders wet from snow, only now did she notice it was snowing, and her hands latching onto her grocery bag.

It was night again, Gohama realised, as she looked out through the window at the snowflakes falling across the outside lamp.

Her thoughts felt as if they were running as a fast lightning and as a slurred indistinct mess.

Gohama let her hand hover the air and saw the uncontrollable shakes that quivered up her arm. It had always been disconcerting to see her hands, the weapons of preciseness and skill, succumb into this frazzled rebellion. Curling her fingers into tight fists, Gohama forced herself to breathe in deeply and her mind and body to calm itself. She needed only to raise the protective seals around the room and then she could drink herself into a dreamless stupor.

Her back pressed on the door as she dragged herself up, legs trembling with her weight. She let the grocery bag drop to the floor and moved for the bathroom. The murmuring of water from the opened tab helped calm her mind and the biting chill running through her hands helped seize the nervous state of her muscles.

She cupped the clear water, it overflowed around her palms and ran between the gaps of her fingers, before she brought her hands up to her face, rubbing the edginess out of her skin. As her fingers lowered, Gohama raised her gaze to the mirror.

Two evil piercing green eyes. The ones she had feared for so long, the ones that had no snowdrop behind them, only the sharp opaque edge of a weapon.

A jerk shot through her muscles and, with a scream, Gohama shoved her fist into the glass. It smashed into pieces, the shattering pierced through her ears and the shards cut her hand. She didn't care, as long as that image wasn't there, as long as it wasn't a reflection.

A curse on her lips, Gohama flew back only to bump into the wall. With a lump in her throat, she forced herself to look down at a large shard on the floor. Her vision met only two wide scared eyes, circled by deep purple circles and ghostly pale skin, no great monster behind the mirror, just a pathetic mess of crumbled pieces.

Only then did she notice a red mark on her neck and it made her heart tremble. There was something absolutely agonising about having the mark of a dead man seared into her skin, a token of a life, of the one that no longer had a beating heart, a living soul.

Her hand wrapped around the side of her throat and she winced at the burning from the cuts. Her neck was a stained in blood, but at least the mark was covered. Now Gohama just had to leave that bathroom and that mirror.

She stumbled through the bedroom for the grocery bag and picked up two bottles of whiskey, only to stumble back, until her legs felt the edge of the bed and she slid down on to the floor. Her shaking fingers cracked the cap open and immediately she raised the bottleneck to her lips, the glass cold, but her lips colder. The large sips she took burned down her throat, sweet and familiar, making her eyes water.

It had been too long since she had last had whiskey and it felt like a warm embrace that would stop her shivers and her frantic mind. Already she could feel her thoughts slurring and her legs and arms numbing, it wouldn't take long for her to pass out and the dark searing anguish to quiet itself in her chest.

Gohama let her head fall back on the edge of the soft mattress, sometimes bringing the bottle for long slow drinks, her unseeing eyes studying the wood of the ceiling as it spun, with each spin her lids became heavier, until they finally closed over her eyes.

"You're all about love, Gohama." Kakashi whispered close to her face, his voice low and mellow, cold rigid fingers pressed to her cheek. She hummed at the calm that flowed through her, forehead leaning into his.

"Self-love."

Her eyes snapped open at his spat resenting words and were met with a yellowish pale skin, blank eyes and a red drop falling from the sharingan. Gohama jolted away at the sight of Kakashi's cavernous dead face, but his cold hand – dread froze through her veins at the realisation that it was cold because he was dead – had a burning grasp on her neck.

In a frantic trembling try, her fingers fought against his stiff ones stuck around her skin, but she couldn't pull them away, she couldn't crawl back from that sight.

"Kai!" She screamed, but the image didn't disappear. "Kai! Kai! Kai!" And still it was glued to her eyes, it wasn't a genjutsu, it wasn't a dream, it was real.

"Don't run from what you've done, Kyura! Look at me! I need you to see me!" Kakashi's words copying the ones she had thrown at him on that fatal night stabbed though her and even through the wrenching it caused in her heart, Gohama opened her eyes. "Don't idealise what you did. It wasn't duty. It was murder. It was betrayal.

"Are you happy now, Kyura? Are you happy that you've failed everyone that ever cared about you. You failed your parents, your little brother, your friends, your uncle, your team, your lover. You're the biggest failure humanity has ever made. You're scum."

"You're scum."

The words continued to echo through her ears as Gohama clenched her eyes shut and willed the ghost before her to vanish. She didn't mind the spat accusation, all she wanted was for the feel of Kakashi's dead fingers on her neck and the sight of his dead face to disappear. It was too much and she didn't know how long she would bear it without going mad.

Gohama's arm search around until she found the cool touch of the glass bottle. She dragged it towards her and drank. Then she curled onto herself, her forehead pressed to her knees and her hands over her ears, but they didn't muffle anything, the sounds resonating inside her own head.

"Onee-sama!" A happy glittering voice quirked beside her, pulling her back from her drunk haze, but Gohama kept her head locked between her arms. "Onee-sama…" Yukine sing sang and Gohama cried at the beautiful sound of his childish happy voice.

A finger poked her shoulder, and still she couldn't lift herself from her hiding spot between her arms and legs, afraid his face would also hold the stare of death.

"Nee-chan." She corrected. Yukine had never called her onee-sama, Gohama had made sure she would only be his older sister, his nee-chan.

"But you're Onee-sama. You killed your lover. She killed her lover. You are the shuriken. She was the shuriken. Your time is the same time hers was, except in one thing."

Yukine leaned closer to her, his voice dropping to that conspiring whisper that had filled her heart with mirth when they had conjured secret plans during formal dinners or simple plays. Now it only made a shiver run through her body and her hairs stand on end.

"Onee-sama, it could have been us, if you hadn't left me behind to die. I would have hated you, just like Onee-sama's brother hated her. And you would have hated me—"

Her head sprung up then, her heart relieved to find Yukine's face full of life as it had always been. Her hands held onto his cheeks, marking her words into him. "No, Yukine, I could never hate you, would never hate you. Never."

"You would, Onee-sama." His voice was the same as she remembered it, high and childlike, yet there was a sinister overtone that made her blood run cold. "You felt it, even before the massacre, and you already felt it, how your snowdrop drowned in blood, how the power gnawed, the darkness, the beast. How you envied me. You have always envied me because I was made of white petals. Because I was born after. Because I died."

His lip twisted into an accusing snarl. "Because I wasn't you. You would have hated me, just as I would have hated you."

Yukine pushed against her hold on him and ran away from her. Dread froze through her stomach, cold and quivering, as she rose to follow him, but she couldn't sense his chakra and a snow blizzard pushed her backwards and blinded her vision.

"Where are you going? Yukine, come back here. Yukine! Please, come back here, Please!"

Gohama pushed forward through the blizzard and only as she fell back from the force of the wind did she realise it wasn't snow, it was ash.

"Onee-sama!" His voice came out as a strident cry and she tried to search through the ash for his familiar back and hair. "Onee-sama! Take me with you. Onee-sama!"

She found him to her left, eyes wide with terror as he was dragged away. Gohama pushed chakra into her feet and ran, she ran as fast as she could, she ran the fastest she had ever run. Her hand reached for his little chubby one, but her fingers passed through it, as it were nothing but smoke. "Please!" Yukine cried and fat tears ran down his cheeks.

"It's okay, I'm here, Yukine. I won't let you go." Gohama tried to comfort, but the fear was taking over her too, as every attempt at holding him made only smoke slither through her hands.

She threw herself at him, trying to grasp onto his immaterial shape, trying to hold him into her chest and inside her arms, but once she looked down there was only ash and Yukine was nowhere around her. Gohama raised herself and started running again, she ran for hours and days, screaming after her little brother, her voice cutting against her throat until nothing left but croaked whispers.

Her eyes fell onto the slump body of a child when she could barely hold herself up against the wind of ash. "No! No! No!"

This time he didn't dissolve in the air, this time Yukine was real and touchable under her hands as she turned his body around. "Yukine, who killed you? Tell me who killed you. I'll go after them. Please. I need to know. Yukine, show me. Show me, please!" It was useless, Yukine was dead.

Her fingers brushed through the soft cooling skin of his cheek, chubby and soft and childish. He was too young to die, her beautiful little brother, too young and too good. Tears fell from her eyes as she watched his blank face, the clear salty water mixing with the red stain around his neck. She sent healing chakra onto his body, mending the dead chakraless skin, but it was useless, Yukine was dead. He had been dead for eleven years.

"I'm so sorry, Yukine… I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you… Oh kami-sama, please… please…"

Her hands held the small cold body to her chest, her cheek resting on his dark short strands. And she cried, she cried for her dead little brother, cradling his dead body in her arms as she hadn't done eleven years ago. At least now she would, at least now she would mark him, as she should have marked him in his funeral.

But before she could the body in her arms crumbled to ash and smoke, the blood on her hands not disappearing with the vision. Her shoulders continued to shake as she crawled around her, hands burying into the ash. Gohama needed her whiskey. Where the fuck was her bottle?

A wheezing cough made her eyes turn to the side. The white masked man was slumped against the wall, the wound in his stomach bleeding out onto the wooden floor. She dragged herself towards him, her knees stopping over the still warm red pool around him. His chakra had washed out with his blood, his core dry and barren, and his signature empty in her senses.

Gohama's fingers trembled as they reached for the porcelain mask. Slowly she pulled it away, trying to ease herself into the uncovered face under it, trying to ease herself into the two mismatched eyes staring blankly at a void beyond them.

A faceless face, a blank stretch of skin, with no mouth, no eyes, just the dips where they should be and a small raise for the absent nose. Gohama's fingers tapped at the edges, trying to find the seam of the skin mask so she could pull it back. She sank her fingertips into the hairline and tugged harshly, the sound of ripping flesh making her cringe.

A chaos of dark and red scribbles, scrawls and scratches rampaged over the face, Gohama tried to wipe them with her hands so she could see the real face, but they were stuck, branded, inked into it, and no matter how much she wiped they continued to tremor and revolt. The scrawls fought against her, growing and slithering up her fingers, wrists and arms.

Gohama pulled away from the masked man but they followed her, piercing and cutting through her skin as they reached her shoulders and spread to take over her torso, neck and face. They clawed and clashed through all her insides, into the smallest crevasses and the widest hollows. And she drowned, like black fire burning at her lungs and throat, her mouth feeling as ash. When she screamed only a shrill shriek left, something out of a monster not herself.

It was like losing control of Seiryu's chakra, the power overruling her awareness. Only this time, it wasn't power, it was this turmoil of blistering and bitterness that erased her mind. It was in her eyes now, her ears, until there was only the blinding deafening heavy agonising chaos of scratches and she could not feel anything.

When Gohama came back to herself, she was a lump on the inn floor, her arms clutched around herself, nails biting into the skin of her shoulder and scalp. Her face was already wet with tears and snot, she hadn't even been awake before the desperate cry ripped itself from her chest. Maybe the wooden boards would slid apart and she would fall into the ground.

"You're running away. Again. You're abandoning us. Like you abandoned your people, you abandoned all of them." Hansuke hissed beside her, his voice rough with anger and hatred. "You were right, Gohama, it's not my job to fix you. Because you're unfixable. You'll always fail in the same ways. You're unfixable."

Gohama's feet stumbled backwards as she hit the wall of his bedroom, their bed still unmade from where they had slept together.

"To think I thought you could love me, you could love us. To think I thought I loved you. It wasn't you I loved, I thought I did, but it wasn't you, it wasn't this. This... This scum."

Her fingers searched behind her for the handle of his door.

"You're scum. You'll always be scum."

She slid the door opened and rushed away past his dining room, his house, that civilian street. As she ran, her eyes unseeing from the stinging of tears, Gohama bumped against someone and two hands held onto her biceps.

"Where you going, Gohama? Ippon is that way."

Gohama lifted her head to two dark amused eyes. "I'm sorry, I can't, Nikato." She whispered as she tried to pry those hands from her so she could run.

"Hey, Gohama, what's going on?" He asked as his eyes mellowed into worry.

"Can't you see what's going on?" An even voice asked beside them.

Nikato turned his head towards Kisamaru, a silent question in his expression.

"She's running away." Kisamaru explained and activated his byakugan, the veins around his eyes raised and her skin prickled. "Let her go, Nikato."

A shock of pain burst through her chest and Gohama's hand pressed to it only to find her skin raised there. She lifted her head to find Kisamaru's byakugan fixed on that spot, making the skin tear apart from her body. Gohama writhed at the pain and once she looked back down the muscle was being ripped open too and then the sinew and the ribs and her lungs, until all that was left was a dark chaotic hole where her heart should be.

Nikato shoved her away with a yelp of disgust and Kisamaru continued to stare at her with his all-seeing intent eyes, sharp and cutting against her.

"I can see you." Kisamaru said calmly and yet with no less repulsion. "I see you, Gohama. You're loveless. You're scum."

Gohama stumbled in her feet as she turned around and ran away, her hands trying to pull her chest together again, trying to fit her lungs inside her ribs and link the bones to her sternum so it would close and her muscles glue to the gaps, her skin to the muscle. She hugged her arms around herself trying to keep her chest from breaking apart. Her foot hooked around her ankle and she tripped to the ground.

Her blurred eyes opened to the sight of endless white, from the soil under her to the trees that spurted from it. Gohama turned on her back to watch the naked branches of the birches as they reached up for the frail pale blue of the sky.

Pushing her hands into the ground, Gohama pulled herself up and stumbled a few steps until she found her balance again. She wandered through the gaps between trees on the endless white.

A woman was slumped over a man's dead body, her dark hair flowing down to cover her face until it reached the glistering white ground. And only then did Gohama realise it was not white from snow, but flowers. Snowdrops. They bloomed from the tears of the woman and spread, covering the ground below the birch trees and the body of the dead man.

The woman's haori was embroidered with a clan symbol Gohama recognised only from ancient tales, a compass rose that resembled a shuriken with elongated points. The woman raised her face and looked over her shoulder, her hollowed gaze pinned to her own.

Gohama startled back as she found only her own eyes, the air punched out of her lungs, and she fell again, her elbows ringing as they cushioned the fall. Her eyes met the face of the dead man, Kakashi's dead face.

A scream ripped through her throat and she tried to scrape the image out of her eyes with her nails.

"Don't be scared, my child." A soft voice whispered softly, with the musical tones of a lament.

Gohama opened her eyes again, the skin around them burning from the scratches her nails had dealt. Where Kakashi's dead body had once been there was only the tanned yellowed face of another man, the tribe's chief. She met the woman's warm gaze.

"It was our duty, it was our lives. Mine the same as yours. Lives given for the greater glory of our people."

"Onee-sama…"

Onee-sama offered her a small smile with watery cheeks and she raised her hand in a graceful wave. "Come, Gohama, child of my children and of their children and so on. My own child."

Gohama crawled through the snowdrop covered ground, her eyes fixed on Onee-sama's own so she would not meet her lover's dead face. There was a godly aura to Onee-sama's figure and yet she appeared so human in her grief and her acceptance, it reminded her of Mother.

"My own life. A life given for the greater glory of our people." Onee-sama's hands held onto her cheeks, her touch a ghostly whisper in Gohama's skin. "But death, Gohama, our death is only ours. Death will always be only our own. Death will always be our ownmost thing."

A soft hand soothed down her head, fingers brushing through the short strands of her hair. Gohama recognised its gentle, graceful ministrations.

"Mother…" Gohama choked out wetly. "Please, Mother…"

"It's okay, my little snowdrop." Mother's voice whispered, full in motherly tenderness. "It's okay, it's okay. It is what it is. Your life overflows with death, but it's okay, because it is what it is. You're still my daughter, my loveless failed daughter, but my daughter nonetheless."

The smell of iron bit through her nostrils and Gohama felt her hair and back slowly soak in wet warm liquid. Blood. Mother's blood.

"Don't leave me please Mother I'm so scared."

"What are you scared of, my loveless failed daughter, whose life overflows with death? Are you scared of the monster hiding on the other side of the mirror?"

"It's not real…"

"Of course, she is real." Mother explained with a jingly amused tilt. "You are real, Hama-chan."

Mother's careful hands held onto her head and raised it to rest on her cold soft lap. "Sleep now, my loveless failed daughter." Her cold lips pressed to Gohama's temple as she whispered with the same comforting gentle voice. "Tomorrow will be dark all the same. And it's okay, because it is what it is."

Gohama's heavy-lidded eyes, swollen from so much crying and so much drinking closed effortlessly. "Will you be here when I wake up, Mother?"

Mother didn't answer, but the soothing touch on her head continued with the same tenderness, the same placid grace as before. It lulled her to sleep.

When she woke up, Mother was no longer there and her chest burned from the alcohol. She crawled towards the bathroom as the nausea hit, her head resting on the cool sit of the toilet as she puked all of her putrid self out. And once it was over she just stayed there, without the strength to move, think or feel.

Maybe she had fallen asleep, Gohama didn't know, but when she opened her lids to watch the water inside the toilet, she wasn't alone anymore. It wouldn't stop and a part of her was terrified that it probably never would.

Her eyes were pulled to the slouching figure on the doorframe and she let her head rest back on the edge of the bathtub. This time Gohama wouldn't turn away, not when Kakashi looked so much like Kakashi, reading his porn with that nonchalance of his, with that terrible posture. A lump tightened against the walls of her throat. He looked so real, so alive, and this would be the last time she would see him.

He didn't shift his gaze from the pages of the book as he spoke with his casual drawl. "This doesn't mean you won the bet, Hama. Killing me counts as cheating."

Kakashi closed his Icha Icha with a snap and snaked his hand behind his back to put it in the pouch. His hands shoved into his pockets as he turned to lean only one shoulder on the doorjamb and face her, his dark grey eye intent on her but no less droopy.

"I'm sure you'd have been the first to die. My curse has always been worse than yours. Or maybe we could have countered each other, you know how they say it, minus and minus equals plus. Maybe we could have lived a full life together, and no one else would have to die because of us, even we would have died of old age." His eyes crinkled into half-moons as he tilted his head slightly. "But you just had to win, didn't you, my love."

"Don't call me that, please…"

His muscles tensed and in an instant he was crouching before her, his face a breath away from hers, sharingan free from his hitai-ate and spinning. The hand grasping onto her jaw tilted her head back so her gaze would be in line with his.

"You're mine now, Gohama. You're chained to me. Everywhere you go, the memory of me dead, killed by you, will follow. You're mine, my killer, all mine."

With those words, Kakashi disappeared, the points where his fingers had held onto her face still aching from his touch. Gohama promptly took large sips of her whiskey, without even the energy to let her emotions linger on whatever her crazy mind had just drawn for her to see. She was exhausted, so incredibly exhausted the deep-rooted anguish in her no longer felt of anything but a dark heavy weight pressed deep into her marrow.

When would it end? It was the only thought her brain could string together. Somehow it reminded her of when she had been tortured, the same despair for the pain to end, the same plea for it to stop.

The same hummed litany, 'I can't bear it anymore'.

But she could, somehow she always could. She could bear it again as she opened her eyes to find Kunimaru's face and his dark grey eyes locked to hers. Gohama continued to drink, her nape still propped on the edge of the tub, as she watched him.

"Why are you crying?" Kunimaru asked and his voice still sounded the same as it had eleven years ago. She hadn't even noticed she was crying.

"Because you're here and it's not real." She rasped through a scrapped out throat.

"Does it matter if I'm real if it feels like I'm real?"

"Yes…"

And she shook her head with a frail sad smile as she remembered her discussion with Kakashi on her last mission for Konoha. If he would ever live through this he would be certain of how much it mattered.

"I'm finally crazy, you know. It took me killing my—I don't even know what he was to me. Not even the massacre… What does that say about me, Kunimaru?"

"That you should see a doctor." He replied with a playful tilt to it.

Gohama chuckled and took a few more sips from the whiskey.

"I had forgotten, Kunimaru… all the doubts I had before the massacre, the fear about who I am meant to be, about being the shuriken… They brought them back. These four years in Konoha, the past month with… with… They brought them back and I don't know if I should hate it or be relieved that they're back…"

Kunimaru didn't answer, he just smiled sadly, boyishly, as he looked at her and Gohama closed her eyes with a sighed, "I'm ready."

"For what?"

"For you to spill whatever speech my subconscious decided to impinge on me through you."

"I don't really have a speech. I don't really have anything to say, actually. Everything I wanted to say to you it's in your own memories, Gohama."

Gohama opened her eyes to access the vision before her. Three stains of blood spread from different points on his chest. It was worse than any speech, it was making her relive his death, the death he had stolen from her.

"No…" She breathed in a plea as she moved towards him. "You're so young…"

"It's okay." Kunimaru said quietly and his left eye shone bright red, a scar running from his eyebrow down his cheek.

Her head throbbed at the familiar mismatched eyes and her hand raised to cradle it. The image disappeared in a flash and then Kunimaru was falling, the same way he had fallen that night eleven years ago.

Gohama knew it wasn't real, she knew it, but she couldn't stop herself from kneeling beside him, holding his small hands in her own and bringing his head to rest on her leg.

"Was it for me? Or Seiryu? The Shuriken?" She asked him and Kunimaru just looked up at her with those eyes of his, accepting and gentle as the life drained from his body. "Answer me, Kunimaru… please… please… Was it for me? I need to know. I need to know."

He was dead by the time she finished her plea. Gohama pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes as sobs shook through her shoulders and she waited for the weight of him to disappear and with it his vision. She certainly could not bear it anymore.

"I didn't do it for him."

Her eyes snapped open at the low manly voice that sounded and she found two green eyes watching her with an aching softness, Uncle's hand reaching for her face. Gohama held it against her cheek, as she had when Uncle had died and, when he spoke, it was his own last words.

"I did it for you, my dear Hama-chan."

Gohama truly couldn't bear it anymore. She had buried Uncle. This was not real, this was not real no matter how real it felt, it was not real.

"I'm sorry." She whispered as she dropped Uncle's hand from her gasp and abandoned his dead body.

Gohama needed to get out of that bathroom and she crawled through the wood floor, her legs useless as they shook, her sense of balance soaked in whiskey and making her sway. Once she found herself in the room, her hands palmed for that comforting cool feel of a glass bottle, until they finally found it, still inside the grocery bag. The last one. Fuck. She wouldn't survive this without alcohol. Maybe if she drank it all at once her mind would black out and once she came back it would be normal.

Instead she swallowed only a couple of sips. There was a chance that she would actually kill herself with alcohol poisoning. Gohama wouldn't kill herself, she wouldn't. So she just lay there on the floor of some inn room and waited for the weight of everything to settle and stuck over her so she could finally push through it.

Her heavy eyes fluttered open, prickling from the sleep still glued to them. In front of her was Kakashi, unmasked, unguarded, his hair falling over his grey eye as he lay on his side, and his lid closed over the sharingan.

Gohama wanted to run her fingers through his messy strands and brush his hair back so she could see the white lashes underneath, as they framed a charcoal eye. Her fingers wrapped harder around the bottle, she didn't even deserve to touch the Kakashi her subconscious created to torment her.

"You can pretend. Just for a little while. Anything you want, Gohama. You and me. We can pretend." Kakashi said softly, almost whispered, his face with that tenderness of his that made her heart ache, but now it was with none of the warmth of before, just a piercing agonising blade.

"I don't want to pretend. Go away, Kakashi… You're not real."

He smiled then, entirely too cocky for a dead man. "Of course I'm real. I may not be the Kakashi, but that doesn't make me any less real."

Gohama clenched her eyes closed. "Go away, please…"

"You're not back yet, Gohama, and those who leave their precious people behind are worse than scum."

A shiver crawled up her spine, painful and racking, as her body started shuddering, her throat burning from the bitterness of bile. They were the same words Kakashi had said, the words that led her to kill him.

"I killed you, Kakashi, there's no going back from that."

It felt so real now, the finality of it, the finality of Kakashi's death, of Gohama's terrible disgusting evil act, the lowest of the lowest in all her life, the scummiest of the scummiest. There was no going back and it was seared into every inch of her body.

"It'll be alright."

"It won't." Gohama croaked, a scraping sound in her lungs, and she rolled onto herself, arms holding onto her, as her head pressed to Kakashi's unbeating cold chest. "You're dead. You're dead… You're dead, Kakashi… And I killed you. I'm sorry, Kakashi… Please… I… I wished I could go back… I'm so sorry… so sorry."

A soft weight pressed to the back of her head and it felt only as the wind. "Shh, just sleep, Gohama."

She continued to whisper apologies to the nothing beside her and when her voice failed she just mouthed them, even when there was no one else there, real or not.

"Gohama, my love, are you calmer now?"

A thing was hitting her cheek, bringing her back from a dreamless sleep, one she hadn't even realised she had fallen into. Gohama raised a sluggish hand to stop it as her blurred eyes tried to familiarise themselves with the light. Her fingers wrapped around a smooth stick and after blinking a few more times, she realised it was the end of a broom and on the other side was a scowling nevertheless frightened woman.

"You're alive after all. From the sounds and the smell we'd thought you were dead."

Gohama let go of the broom and grunted at the thundering the voice agitated in her head. She was dying, Gohama was sure, she had never had an hangover this excruciating.

"You're being expelled from my inn."

Gohama tried to talk, but her rough voice would only grate against a dry throat. She brought the glass bottle, still safely held in her hand, to her lips.

"It can't be the first time a drunk makes a little too much noise in the room. I'll pay extra."

"You've been locked in here for a week."

Gohama was taken aback by those words. She would have sworn it hadn't been more than a night, but between nightmares, visions and passing out, she hadn't been sure what was real or not, including time.

"I'll still pay extra." The woman continued as unrelenting as before. "Whatever you name it."

Gohama's brain still wasn't functional enough to make sense of the numbers, but she could understand how absurd the price was. She accepted it anyway. Her body was certainly dying and she wouldn't go very far in the snow before collapsing.

The woman disappeared with a bang of the door and Gohama was left alone to stare at the baseboard of the wall.

Her fingers slid through the floor onto the backpack Gohama had brought. They searched inside and when she finally felt a scroll under them, she pulled it out. Her fingers shook as she loosened the thread and pushed the roll, the white paper unfurling through the floor and her dry eyes stinging as they looked over the names of the shinobi she had killed in honour and duty for Bukigakure.

Gohama grabbed the brush and it slipped from her strengthless hand. Another try and this time she pressed the tip over the red ink. It trembled as she directed it towards the next blank space, beside it was written the name Hoshigaki Kisame. The brush left red blotches and scratches on the paper from her trembling and before she could begin to write the first character, she stopped.

Her fingers tugged at the scroll. Her wrist brushed over the cold wooden floor as she brought the tip of the brush farther onto the blank paper. Her other hand fished the bottle and she downed almost half of it, the rest spilling down her lips and cheeks. Without caring about the side of her face drowning in whiskey, Gohama tilted her head back to the scroll.

After three deep breaths, that quivered inside her throat, she spoke the ceremonial words. "If death comes, may it be in honour of the Arms." Her voice was raspy from drinking, maybe even screaming, she couldn't be sure of what had been real or not.

Gohama slid the brush over the white paper, a thick stroke of red following it, in the same line as the flow of the scroll, opposite to all the other names. With the most precision and care her trembling hands could muster, she drew the characters following Keiko-san's calligraphy classes. Six characters and she drew them out as if they were meant to hang over the wall of someone's home.

A tear slid down the side of her nose onto the whiskey on the floor when the last thread of red was finished.

Hatake Kakashi

It needed to be enough, but it wasn't. Gohama didn't even know what she wanted it to be enough for, but something was missing and it hurt, it hurt so much she thought she would break. She had broken. And still there was more. Always more.

Gohama redrew his name, Hatake Kakashi, and it floated in a chest of white around the lines of red from the scroll. Ha-ta-ke Ka-ka-shi, she wrote again over the lines already marked there, her lips mirroring the name she wrote. This was the final moment, the final line of red.

She drank as she waited for the ink to dry, the characters beside her a ghost soaring through the room.

The scroll closed and she threw it inside the backpack again, fetching another scroll from it. Her hand rested it against her chest as she stared at the ceiling for a few more moments. The last moments.

It had to be enough. She would make it enough. This was the last time she would mourn Hatake Kakashi.

"Seiryu…" She called and expectantly waited for his voice to echo in her head. It had been a week since they had last spoken, a week since she had breached their connections. Or maybe Seiryu had tried to say something, Gohama still didn't know what had been real or not.

"Gohama." He whispered, his low rumbling voice blended in relief and warmth.

"Talk to me. Anything. Just talk."

"Hmm." He started, his tone lighter than before. "Have I told you about this time I brought your grandfather out of real trouble with Earth?"

Seiryu talked all throughout the day and night. His stories light and funny, his familiar voice filling the void that always crept inside of her and made everything hurt deeper. Gohama ended up falling asleep and when she woke up the next day, her head still splitting from the hangover, the scroll was still secured in her hand against her chest.

Gohama brought it to the line of her eyes and read the tag. White Wolf Summoning Bonds.

"Seiryu, do you remember Yukine?"

"Your heart for slaughtering Bukigakure."

A blade pierced through muscle and bone until it reached the heart, leaving through the other side. The man gurgled on last grunt of pain before she pulled the tachi out of his chest and let him fall onto the floor.

Shuriken stepped around the dead body for the sink of the bathroom. A few drops of blood had spluttered onto her knuckles as she had punched the man and she needed it out of her skin fast.

The cool water soothed her hand and on the other side of the mirror she met shadowed eyes behind the slits of a mask. Bright tendrils of snowflakes, frail and light, were painted beautifully on the dark lacquered background. A shuriken, the symbol of Bukigakure, was carved proudly on the forehead, unlike the rest of the village's ANBU masks. The mask of the Shuriken of Bukigakure, the mask that erased the one behind it until they were nothing but a weapon, the weapon.

Once her hands were clean, Shuriken unrolled the scroll on her thigh pouch and pulled out the brush with the red ink. The sight the large characters of his name, a beacon above the others, always sent a pang through chest. She was certain she would become unsensitised to it eventually and if she didn't, it didn't matter.

Matsushima Yuu, she wrote in small characters and blew on the ink to dry it.

Death was what happened when one decided to boast partaking in the Buki massacre over cups of sake on some rundown bar. Gohama was glad Konoha had officially declared her as a missing-nin and printed her face into their Bingo Book. The towns of Snow had made the defection of the Kyura heiress their primed gossip topic and that meant talking of Buki and the massacre.

Matsushima had spilled his involvement with a drunk slur of his disgusting tongue to everyone in the tavern and she had highly enjoyed it, especially when she imagined all the ways she could kill him. He had explained that some mysterious organisation had hired criminal syndicates – at the time, he had belonged to the now dismantled Boars –, seeing as only the leaders needed to know of the assault and the information would be kept secret.

The independent missing-nin had only been S and A-rank that knew how to keep their mouths shut and actually did some damage to the village other than being used for jutsu fodder and stirring chaos.

The information would help her immensely and she had only one more matter to take care of in the small towns of Northern Snow before leaving for the densely populated Osaka, simmering with missing-nin syndicates.

The only reason Gohama was even there was because, in her frenzied run away from Buki, her subconscious had routed her steps towards the Monastery. She was only a few kilometres from Uncle's grave but the shame wouldn't let her make the detour even if her heart was craving it.

How could she stand before Uncle's grave – where she had once stood with him silently behind her – when his friend's blood was inked into her hands and his name drawn into the scroll with all the filth of the shinobi world she had killed? How could she stand before Uncle's grave when she was his loveless failed daughter, whose life overflowed with death?

Outside it was still snowing and she took off the mask, no longer in Shuriken-mode, to feel the cold flakes against the skin of her face. With a last inhale of the crisp air, she pushed chakra into her palm and pressed it to the ground.

The cloud of smoke from the summoning jutsu unveiled to show the fur of a wolf, two green eyes looking back at her through the white of fur and snow.

"Yukine." Gohama smiled as her hand brushed over the soft hair of his neck.

"Gohama." He answered with a graceful nod and a warm deep voice.

He was the only thing from her past life in Bukigakure that hadn't changed and she was grateful for him, grateful for the small token of her Father and the Kyura, for the quiet wise presence of him whenever she needed it.

"I need you to track down the Konoha ANBU after me. I think they're about fifteen and probably making their way through the forest."

Yukine obeyed her request immediately, his snout high in the air as he sniffed. Even through the snowfall, he caught their scents and started southwards for her to follow. It didn't take them long to find the fast moving squads. Five of them apparently. Konoha seriously wanted her dead.

"I advise you not to kill them." Yukine's voice rumbled as they stopped on branch a kilometre north of the group, right on their path.

Her fingers easily found a warm spot through his fur. "I'll probably go for a hunt when I get closer to Osaka. Would you like me to summon you?"

"Of course, Gohama."

A smiled bloomed on her face as she leaned down, her hand sliding to hold onto his chin, and she left a soft kiss to his muzzle. "Thank you, Yukine. You can go home now."

Gohama dropped onto the ground of the clearing, her hands moving into the seals for kage bunshin no jutsu. The five copies of herself supressed their chakra as perfectly as she knew how to do and hid on the trees around them.

She didn't put on the mask. This had nothing to do with the Shuriken, it was only Gohama taking care of a small hitch in her path.

Chakra signatures quickly encircled the clearing, she recognised eight of them from Ippon. Her heart thundered in a calm rhythm inside her chest even if her veins and pathways buzzed from the anticipation of a battle. Her muscles were ready to snap, her mind was sharp and her chakra washed over the air as a vast smothering cloud of fog.

One of the ANBU, some feline and the leader, showed himself on one of the branches above her, other masked operatives followed his lead, surrounding her.

"Kyura Gohama, we are here to detain you and bring you back to Konoha so you can answer for your treason and crimes against the village."

"I advise you not to fight me."

"I advise you not to resist."

"Well, now that the warnings are on the table, detain all you want." She answered with a careless gesture of her arm.

They let the tension rise for a second and then they swarmed towards her, movements precise, positions well balanced and cooperation tuned into one perfect organism of combat. They weren't ANBU for nothing.

Gohama felt like laughing from the giddiness bubbling in her at a good fight. Instead she was the sharp edge of a blade, all precision and fierceness and cutting. It would require some skill and patience to achieve her goal but their speed, although overwhelming, could never compare to the sharingan and Gohama had had a month of taijutsu spars against the Uchiha eye. Soon the operatives were falling and their slotted organised attacks becoming more frantic.

Her tanto clinked against the blade of a ninjato while she wrapped another ANBU on her chakra. Through the round slits of the cat mask she could see brown eyes and framing the white porcelain purple hair. Gohama's eyes widened and for a second she let her chakra waver on the other.

"Yugao." Gohama whispered.

The woman's frame tensed, the muscles of her biceps bunching, as she heard her name. It only spurred her into wrapping her fingers tighter around the hilt of her ninjato and a small grunt to rumble in her throat. With a skilful slide of her blade over Gohama's shorter one, Yugao gained an opening in Gohama's defence and didn't hesitant in taking advantage of it.

Gohama jumped away in an evasion and the other operative in her chakra hold slumped to the ground. Another filled his space in an instant and she continued to fight, while Yugao followed her, fire burning in her chakra.

"Hansuke would be heartbroken if you died." Yugao taunted with a bitter edge to her voice.

Another ANBU fell as Gohama parried Yugao's strike. "Bringing me to Konoha means my death."

"If you ask for a pardon—"

Gohama pushed with her tanto, her face nearing Yugao's. "I know of the mission, eleven years ago. I know you were there with Hansuke. I know of Konoha's involvement. Why do you think they sent five squads after me when Akatsuki is their main threat?"

Her eyes widened in realisation behind her mask, her position slopping as she stumbled in her hold. Whatever rumours about her defection were being spread around Konoha they were clearly very far from the truth.

Gohama didn't take advantage of Yugao's faltering, instead shoved her out of the way, and jumped onto a branch as a series of explosive tags detonated where they had once stood. The ANBU's tactic had unfortunately changed from organised attack to dealing whatever damage they could to her even if it meant sacrificing their own.

One of her kage bunshin dispelled and Gohama made ten more, firm on finishing this battle soon. While her copies entertained the remaining ANBU, she flickered to land right behind Yugao as she stared at the mess of a fight around her.

"Hansuke would also be heartbroken if you killed me." She said calmly, just loud enough for Gohama to hear it above the chaos. It could have been a plea for her own life, but there had been no fear in her voice nor in her chakra. Yugao was right, Hansuke would be heartbroken.

Gohama shrugged. "He started it."

Yugao's hair was a wave of purple as she turned around to face her, the metal of her weapon reflecting the fire roaring beside them. Her killing intent prickled Gohama's skin and made her stomach jerk.

"The mission broke him. He spent a year stuck to D and C rank because he couldn't bear the thought of killing another person, of finding himself in the middle of a bloodshed again. So don't you dare talk about it as if you know anything. You weren't there!"

"You also weren't there."

"And I've regretted it every day since. Hansuke loves you, he would do anything for you and this," Yugao gestured to the chaos around them. "this is how you repay him, Kyura? You're breaking his heart."

"You're accusing me of breaking his heart? Hansuke broke my heart first! All those years he deceived me, when I trusted him more than anyone else."

"Hansuke was there for you every step of the way. Do you think it was easy for him? What choice did he have, Gohama? Have you thought about it?"

"He wasn't just there. He lived in the future, a future he wanted for us even when he knew it would be built on a lie."

"Hansuke just wants you to be happy."

Gohama let out a bitter cutting chuckle from deep in her lungs and up her throat as her fingers held onto the hilt of Father's tachi, an heirloom of the Kyura, one she had decided only Shuriken would wield. The shrill chuckle, accompanied with a shake of her head, deepened into a cry and Gohama lunged towards her.

Yugao's kenjutsu was even better than Hansuke's, but it didn't matter, they both knew Gohama would win the fight, she was just delaying the inevitable and Gohama was letting the resentment and rage boiling through her burst so it could wash away.

Her eyes were filled with afterimages of Yugao's arms as she attacked her with a jutsu, making it difficult for Gohama to block her movements. The blade slashed at her arm and suddenly Gohama found herself on her back, the cat mask looking down at her through round slits. She could see the surprise in Yugao's shadowed eyes at actually having Gohama pinned down.

"He always loved her more than me." Gohama whispered, the violence having bled out of her veins.

"What?"

"Future Gohama… She is the one he wants to marry, she is the one he wants to build a future with, she is the one he wants to share his life with. Not me."

Yugao looked down at her, the blade of the ninjato hovering too far away from her throat to pose a serious risk. Gohama covered her hand in chakra.

"I'm sorry for this."

She pushed her hand onto Yugao's stomach.