Part V | Chapter 5
During the first two weeks together, Kakashi and Gohama almost didn't acknowledge each other. They had their trainings that were as professional and cold as if they didn't know each other. For the remaining hours of their days, they were free to do as they wanted, which, for her, consisted of getting away from him, either in the cedar forest surrounding the Arms or inside Seiryu's seal. Kakashi usually spent them on her engawa reading his book, the same exact spot where Mother used to read.
She also knew he would summon his ninken when she wasn't there, as she would arrive late at night to a backyard marked with paw prints and fur, their chakra signatures still lingering in the air. He didn't seem to want his dogs and Gohama to interact, which she could somewhat understand. Their circumstance was as bizarre, even absurd, as it was fragile.
There were days were Gohama had to fight hard and rationally the impulse of leaving and never coming back. The solace that could have come from being in her home was completely supplanted by her memories and the abyss separating them from reality. The ruin she had to see and live in everyday was not the home she had grown up in.
During the times when she felt like drowning and fleeing away for shore, Seiryu would pull her to the surface so she could keep on swimming. He was an amusing old lizard and Gohama regretted only meeting him now. After so many years alone, it would have helped her to have him by her side, and not just as power inside her she couldn't control.
They would use their telepathy to talk from time to time, but their moments of true connection where always inside the seal. Gohama would secure herself up on a branch, make the hand signs and enter the place of endless white. The Kyura had made it so the seal worked as a blank slate that the biju could alter into any scenery, similar to controlling a genjutsu.
Seiryu's setting of choice was the high mountains of northern Snow where he had lived before being captured and sealed into Kyura jinchuriki. Gohama hadn't had the courage to ask about his complicated and conflicting relationship with her clan. The Kyura had always been different in their handling of the ten-tails. They acknowledged the biju with awe and reverence, separating themselves from the common belief of the tailed beasts as enraged, horrifying monsters.
Still, Seiryu wasn't a partner, he was a tool and he was a prisoner. His stray comments over his relationship with the Kyura were always tinted with a biting edge, but they came closer to the bickering between sour siblings than hate towards a captor. Gohama wondered if he had been this lenient during his first years connected with a jinchuriki. He certainly didn't hate Gohama, he acted careless, but those moments where he calmed her with detached comments about life showed that he actually cared about her. And she cared about him too.
Gohama was counting the days until she learned how to summon him. The Seiryu Scroll explained how the seal allowed them to enter a complete beast mode without the jinchuriki transfiguring their bodies into Seiryu by keeping a thread of chakra between beast and jinchuriki.
Seiryu had said that the ability to mould the appearance of the seal was good to fight boredom, but deep down it stung with cruelty, because there was always something missing, there was always the awareness that it wasn't real and he wasn't free. Once Gohama learned how to summon him, at least for a few moments, he would live a sliver of freedom, smell the true air, feel the true warmth of the sun, and truly fly. Not inside a seal, but in the real, true world.
Once her duty was complete, Gohama would give him full freedom.
Her nightmares hadn't eased and most nights she woke up with Kakashi's hand shaking her arm and offering her a glass of water. Gohama never asked him if he woke her up out of consideration or if she made too much noise for him to sleep.
With the amount of times he had had to stand in the middle of the night and shake her awake, Kakashi's futon, in the first week all the other way opposite of hers, had drifted to an arm's length distance. He had nightmares too, so they had this system where they would wake the other up if the shaking or the sounds were too loud.
Having her parents' killer sleep right beside her never disturbed her sleep. His chakra was still that contained wildness of lightning so different from the one she had sensed eleven years ago and didn't remember. Even if Gohama tried, she couldn't evoke how it had felt against her senses, only that it had stabbed and torn. And so, despite the tingling his nature had always left on her skin, Kakashi's chakra never bothered her.
In fact, he had integrated himself into her awareness. She had grown so accustomed to his presence that his chakra no longer stood out through her surroundings. Only her team and Genma had managed that. Familiarity was a treacherous thing to have with her parents' killer. It ripped through her as a betrayal and it only added to her guilt.
One morning, Gohama woke up to the quiet thuds of rain and an empty futon in front of her. His signature was outside, as always, sitting on the engawa. He had monopolised the best place of her own home.
For a few moments, she had considered leaving through the front door and enduring the pouring rain. But in Snow it could either last for an hour or days and, considering the lack of light filtering through the glass doors, the clouds still had much more pouring to do. Gohama wasn't keen on getting soaked day after day, even enduring Kakashi seemed better.
With a steeling inhale, her feet stepped onto the cold wood and she watched the downpour in dismay. Gohama hesitated slightly but chose to set down opposite to him, against one of the porch posts. Her hand extended to a heavy thread of water falling from the roof and then to the cold prickle of drops on her palm. The tinkling of the kusari-doi, as the heavy flow of water made the metal clank against each other, accompanied the quiet thuds and splashes over the roof and dirt. It was so familiar it hurt.
"There's no avoiding each other now." She commented with a wry tilt to her voice.
He only lifted his eye from the pages and gave her his eye-crease smile, promptly going back to the book, his routine unchanged by her presence. As for Gohama, she could feel her heart pounding in her ears, as it had during their first trainings. Breathing in the smell of damp earth, she coaxed herself into the nonchalance Kakashi exuded naturally. She dried her hand against her pants and crossed her arms.
"What are you reading?" He lifted the book and her eyes widened at the cover. The Kyura Anthology. "Interesting choice for someone that only reads porn."
He smiled again. "Someone got me started on poetry a couple years ago." His fingers brushed through the pages and he opened the book to show her a specific one. "I now know from where she took one of the poems."
Gohama could feel the warmth of a blush spreading through her cheeks, as she recognised the haiku she had shared with him in the hospital room after her first seduction mission. Her face turned away towards the backyard. "Don't mock me."
"I'm not." Kakashi answered seriously. "When I said I wanted to hear another one, I wasn't lying. I never did thank you for leaving that note."
"Your avoidance wouldn't have been very efficient if you had." She bit out without turning back to him.
Her aggressiveness was mostly directed towards the man as a whole than his disappearance two years ago. With her current knowledge, she could understand it. What bothered her was why he had chosen that particular moment to let his guilt over killing her parents speak louder.
"No, it wouldn't. But more than efficiency it was out of cowardice."
Her eyes widened, but Gohama didn't dare react in any other way, her arms still in their place and face turned away from him. Had the famous Kakashi of the Sharingan, the great Copy-nin and genius of Konoha just admitted that he had acted cowardly? Enemies would relish on those words, even Genma would pay the corner table of Ippon an entire week of drinking just to hear them. And he had given them so freely to her now.
Why? With Kakashi it always came down to that question. Why?
"Pakkun also liked the biscuits, by the way."
Still not letting her gaze stray from the rain hitting the puddles on the backyard, Gohama was carefully making sure her hair covered most of her face. She missed how easy it had been with a longer length.
"What's your favourite poem so far?" Her voice was as disinterested as she could make when her stomach twisted with the glimmer of curiosity.
She could see that he was giving her a look and she spied him over the corner of her eye. Kakashi cleared his throat, the strong rumble an obvious act, and read.
"'Spring is short―
What has eternal life?'
I thought, and
let his hands seek out
my strong breasts"
Gohama let out a rich snort and tilted her head back to rest it against the post. "Of course, out of all poems, you'd love that one. Probably one of the few with anything erotic in it."
"And just like Icha Icha, it only makes it deeper." It did make the poem deep, in a shinobi's life sex was even better than alcohol when shunning the shadow of death for a few oblivious moments. As for Icha Icha, Gohama was sure it had only meaningless smut for the sake of entertainment and sexual needs.
She turned to look straight through him, teasing seeping through her eyes. "Go deeper."
He stared at her for a moment, and then turned down, his fingers searching for the right page. "Nakahara, friend!
The earth is wintry, cold and dark.
Well then, good-bye."
Gohama couldn't stop the smile that upturned the corner of her lips and she tilted her head away, her hair falling to cover her profile. She loved that one and was sure Seiryu would also love it.
He closed the book and pushed it towards her with an extended arm. "I showed you mine, now show me yours."
With hesitant hands, she took it. The cover was made of sage green leather, the same colour as her Kyura haori, and at the front was her clan's crest. Her fingers glided over the white painted dents of the wolf head before she opened the book. She streamed through the pages, trying to ignore the strong stare Kakashi had pinned on her.
Her chest tightened as she landed on the poem that hadn't left her mind since the beginning of all the mess they had fallen into. Her eyes roamed the words, letting them come and dwell into her, but she didn't read it out loud. Kakashi knowing of it would make her skin shed until he could peruse all of her with those red and black eyes that already knew too much, that had already uncovered too much of what was hers. This time, she would guard at least a piece for herself in the words of the poem.
Blue chakra on red hands.
My charred snowdrop
Leaves nothing but a sharp blade.
"You don't have to read it, if you don't want to."
But if she didn't read anything, he would know that inside of that book was a secret piece of herself she had wanted to keep. Her finger pushed between two random sheets and opened the book there. Maybe it had been the gap made by the paper stuck between the pages, but her finger had opened where a stray written paper was saved.
Gohama frowned as her chest tightened until her lungs couldn't move and her breath caught inside her throat. She knew that handwriting, she knew it as if it had been branded onto her own mind. Mother's handwriting and Mother's poem.
Before she could think about Mother's privacy, her eyes were speeding through the lines. She wished they had stopped on the first letter, she wished she hadn't known of how much Mother understood who she really was. She wished the image of Mother as Gohama had smiled at her had stayed as nothing but the common smile of a daughter to her mother.
She smiles
A child's smile to her mother
And I forget
I forget
She's not mine
(I am always hers)
I forget
Her life
Overflows with
Death.
Again, another shattered glass that cut through Gohama's hands. She had thought her childhood was safe from the wrecking force blowing through the pieces of her life. Even now, with everyone dead, with no one to rearrange the pieces, they moved and they fell and they broke.
Her mind ran with all the blurred images of Mother. All the smiles and words and tender affection she had given her. How hadn't Gohama realised it before? How hadn't she seen the lurking sadness every time Mother had looked at her? It was so clear now, so painfully clear. It was the truth but Gohama wished she had never known of it.
Gohama closed the book, but she couldn't pretend that the poem was not in there. She couldn't pretend that everything had been perfect and she had been perfect, the perfect ninja, the perfect daughter, the perfect childhood. Even then she had failed Mother, even then she had made her write sad poems about the girl filled with death she had had to call daughter.
It was always death with Gohama. Death, death, death. Until she didn't know where she started and death began.
"Are you okay, Gohama?"
Her startled eyes shot up to Kakashi, still leaning against the wooden post of the engawa, the same place Mother had sat when she read. He saw right through her and she hated it. She hated the shame that crept up her neck and burned on the skin of her face. Why was she ashamed for him? Why did she care what he thought of her? He already knew, he had already known for a long time of the death that was stuck to her, of the stink of blood and putrid corpses looming around her.
Her hands heated with chakra and the smell of burning leather reached her nose before she could understand what she was doing. Her gaze turned down to her blue hands as she tried to turn the words on that book into ashes and maybe then they would fade away from her flesh.
"Hey, hey, what are you doing?"
The urgency in his tone pulled her away from the haziness covering her mind. Gohama threw the book away from her deadly hands and the chakra receded back into her pathways. She just stared at the smoking cover laid out on the engawa, her eyes wide with horror.
What was she doing? She hadn't wanted to burn The Kyura Anthology. The piece of her clan she had always admired more than all the power of their bloodline limit. The piece that showed her they were more than killing machines, that maybe Gohama could be more than a killing machine.
Kakashi was the one to move, taking off his flak jacket and using it to put down the small fire. Book salvaged, he roamed through the pages and most of them had only had the corners burnt. The major target had been the cover, with the mark of her hands dented onto the leather.
"You could have just said you didn't want to read it, you know? No need to go off burning books." Kakashi tried to lighten it with a joke, tried to spare them from the awareness of Gohama's craziness, but there was no pretending. She had freaked out and almost burnt off her favourite piece of the Kyura culture.
Gohama was going mad. The mental balance she had cultivated over the last eleven years had shattered on that valley between Fire and Hot Waters. She just had to hold the shards together for a little longer. Just until she learnt how to summon Seiryu and then her weapon could finally take over and her duty be fulfilled.
"Can you please just say something, Gohama?"
She turned around towards the backyard and jumped down from the engawa. "Let's spar." It was still pouring down hard and, in a few seconds, Gohama was already drenched and cold. It didn't matter, she just needed to spar. "You can make a bunshin."
"No, it's okay, let's spar. I like fighting in the rain." It was a sympathetic lie and she hated it too. "Gai and I do it all the time." Maybe it hadn't been a lie. Gohama could see that happening.
They stood in front of each other, Kakashi's hair falling down with the weight of the water and Gohama's plastering to her forehead and neck. She attacked first, ruthless and wild, and he blocked it with the easiness of a jounin against a genin. It made her skin cringe and her blood boil, as she continued to attack and he continued to block. Maybe if she hit hard enough his defence would break.
"Come on, Gohama, use that head of yours." He chastised, at least it sounded that way. It reminded of the times Katsuo-sensei had sparred with her when she was a genin blind with the ambition of defeating a jounin.
"Shut the fuck up." She growled, as her fists turned even more frantic.
Gohama didn't want to use that head of hers, she didn't want to think. All she wanted was to smash and win and move so fast and hard that there would be nothing inside of her besides raw strength and victory. No thinking, no memories, no failures.
Kakashi sent her face straight onto the ground. She spit the mud shoved into her mouth and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. She stood and again they fought the same way. At the end of fifteen minutes, she was panting and covered in mud.
Again, he ended up pinning her down against the cold sodden soil. "If you're just throwing fists around, use a tree trunk next time."
He had fought the entire time without his hitai-ate but the sharingan was closed. And still he had sent her to the ground enough times that her hair was coated in brown and her teeth teetering from the cold water and mud soaking onto her clothes. It irked her and yet she was glad she didn't have to face that eye again.
Fear and weakness. A shinobi's worst flaws.
Before he could pull himself away, Gohama grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him closer. "Open the sharingan."
Kakashi just looked down at her, his scarred eyelid still closed, his chakra wavering against her front at the words.
"Open it." She demanded again with a little push of his fabric. A few drops dribbled out of his hair to fall onto her forehead and cheeks.
"I don't want to."
Her other hand shot up to his face, but even without using the sharingan his reflexes were faster than hers were. He pushed her wrist hard against the ground next to her head, smacking mud onto her cheek.
"Stop it, Gohama. Just stop it." He hissed as his hand pushed harder and she could feel her pulse throbbing into his palm.
Gohama hadn't expected such a fiery reaction to it. She could understand his protectiveness over the eye of his dead teammate, but not his reluctance at just showing her the damn sharingan.
Her surprise must have showed through her expression, because, with a little jerk and whispered curse, Kakashi pulled his hand away from her wrist and was ready to stand up. Again she locked him in place, her hold steady.
"I need to get over it." She explained.
Kakashi did nothing but stare down at her, yet he also didn't pull away. Grey, almost white, lashes shook as the sharingan moved under the thin skin of the eyelid. She had never noticed how light they were, how long, how they framed the almost black eye now trapping her down into the cold mud.
His gaze flickered away, as the scarred lid fluttered open and she trembled with it. Instead of the twirls of excitement from the previous times, her stomach was filled with cold leaded dread. Gohama could only see a sliver of red as he had his gaze fixed on her collar, not her face. She twisted the fabric in her hand and he understood her request. Slowly his eyes moved upwards until they met hers.
Her muscles tensed and she could feel the ominous grip of the sharingan pushing through her veins, forcing her members to clamp up, to freeze and lock in place for a quick easy kill. How hadn't she felt the horror of it all those times before?
It pulled her in, not from fascination. Gohama felt as if she were gripping the ground and the eye pulling her by the ankle, nails bleeding with the attempt of holding her to something, anything. The images it had forced her to see weeks ago danced through the blood red iris.
Then it was gone, her breath coming out all at once. Kakashi had closed the eye. "Don't close it… I need to…"
"I don't want to use it on you, Gohama."
"Then don't use it."
"If I open it, then I'm using it. The hitai-ate is not just for show."
"I just need to get over it. You're better than Uchiha Itachi."
His brow creased and those clear lashes wavered. They framed the black tomoe floating around blood red and again Gohama's muscles froze under her skin. "It's different from that time."
"That one was another phase. The Mangenkyo. It made sure you wouldn't break through my genjutsu. And no, I'm not going to activate it."
Her hand twitched by her side with the impulse of touching the skin around the sharingan, the ragged scar that ran down the side of his face and disappeared bellow his mask. "Why is it spinning?"
"I can't stop it from taking in the details or memorising things."
"What does it see?"
"Your temperature, your chakra flow, your heartrate, every little change of your expression." Kakashi explained as his pupil jumped around in quick frantic movements, searching through her face. He blinked before continuing, "The fastest way to kill you…"
"Tell me."
Kakashi blinked again, his eye crushed shut for a longer time, as a crease deepened in between his eyebrows. "Snapping your neck."
"Do it." The words were out of her mouth before she could even make sense of them. She was definitely going mad.
"You're crazy." He knew it too.
"You should."
"For me or for you?"
"For Konoha." He tried to pull away but Gohama held him in his place with the grip on his shirt. "I'm not your teammate and I'm not your friend. I'm an enemy of Konoha. A liability, right, Hatake Kakashi? Not doing it is what makes you worse than scum."
"What does that matter to you?" His tone was biting and the sharingan's ominous feel crept over her spine in a shiver. He pried her fingers away from his collar and she didn't fight him this time. "Stop testing me, Gohama."
"I want to know why you won't, why you're here." She could never understand why he did the things he did.
"I got lost on the road of life and ended up here." He joked with his typical eye-crikle, as he looked down at her from his standing position. "Get out of the rain. You're freezing."
He turned away and left, his sandals squishing against the wet grass. Gohama moved her head to look at the dark clouds above her, a hand coming up to shield her eyes from raindrops, now that Kakashi's face wasn't serving as a cover.
It was too much again, whatever it was that kept getting stuck to her chest, heavy and gnawing. It was too much.
For the next days they were back to avoiding each other. Well, Kakashi wasn't really bothering himself with avoiding her. She was certain he spent most of his day on the engawa and just stood off his butt when they had training sessions. Gohama was the only one that left the house every day to stay as far away from him as possible.
There was now an itch under her skin every time Kakashi was near her and Gohama did everything she could to keep it there. Familiarity was the worst thing for her, because it brought habit with it and carelessness. She had to work on grooming that ambiguous itch into resentment and then hate.
Gohama hadn't forgiven him for killing her parents and certainly hadn't forgotten. Yet, except for that hour long battle where she had boiled with fresh hurt, anger and chakra, any type of hatred towards Kakashi had deflated into a void. Maybe it was because of the dark shadow of grief and loss grasping at her heart and leaving her incapable of any potent emotion.
Because hate was powerful. Gohama knew hate. It was a ruthless gnawing that took over everything inside her, erasing everything but that hate, that burning, crushing hate. She had hated the white masked man from that night eleven years ago, his ninjato dripping with Mother's blood. She still hated him. But Kakashi was not him. Gohama knew his face had been behind that white mask, his hand had held that sharp blade and pierced Mother's stomach. She just didn't feel it.
Why didn't she feel it? Why didn't she hate him?
But at least now there was that itch. Every day when that itch didn't darken into hate, Gohama felt the heavy guilt pull her down. Her parents' killer slept beside her and not once had she felt the temptation of pushing a blade into the ribs of his back, not once had she felt enough resentment to want to hurt him.
What would Mother and Father think of their loveless, hateless daughter?
Gohama knew she would kill him, either way, hating him or not, she would end up piercing a chidori through his heart, just as he had done with Father and every target of his. It would just be so much easier if she hated him.
And so, every day she followed Hatake Kakashi's example, a sign of the great irony of life, and spent hours staring at the cold granite and marble gravestones of her people, reading each name, and leaving flowers for the ones she had known and loved. Gohama didn't know what she was supposed to do when visiting the memorial, but every day she stayed there and just remembered. In memory they live on.
Even Uncle Tsukate. Gohama had laid a stone next to her family and engraved 'Kyura Tsukate' into the granite with a chakra-covered finger.
It was the memorial for the victims of the massacre, but she felt Uncle deserved to be there. He had been a victim too, in a way. Gohama was sure a part of him had died that day, just as hers had. And her name was there too, between Mother's and Yukine's.
The Third Shinobi War had made him leave Buki to become a monk, it had made him leave a shinobi's life, of fighting and killing, of protecting his people. Everyone spoke of war as the culmination of humanity's evil and suffering. Everyone seemed to hate it and yet everyone seemed to seek it.
Was war that horrifying that he had felt his duty was to preserve peace above protecting his people? Uncle had thought he was doing good and where had it led? Destruction and death.
Gohama was following that path too. She had accepted it eleven years ago and continued to accept it now. At the end road, loomed the shadow of death. Whatever path she chose it was always there. It was not just her, Gohama realised, and instead of misery, it filled her with consolation. Yet, it still hurt, the piercing consciousness of it, inevitable, final and absolute. Life overflowed with death.
"You're quiet."
Gohama didn't even bother herself with lifting her eyes from her weapon sharpening to Kakashi. "Because we usually talk so much."
"It's a different type of quiet."
"Who would have thought? Hatake Kakashi actually misses socialisation. Genma would love to know about that." She mocked, as she dragged her kunai more roughly over the whetstone. She had been sharpening it for too long, so the blade balance was ruined either way. "Or better, Gai." He visibly shuddered.
"I'm just not used to such peace."
"Then enjoy it and don't ruin mine."
"That kunai would agree that your peace has been ruined a long time ago."
Said kunai imbibed into the wood post above Kakashi's head, cutting off a few strands of silver hair that glided softly to spread across the wind and his lap.
Instead of looking startled, he gave her a crinkled smile. "Now we're matching."
"What?"
"Our uneven hair."
"Don't compare my hair to whatever animal died on top of your head."
"The only difference is that mine sticks up and yours sticks down."
Her fingers glided through the length of her hair, feeling the strands shorter on the back than on the front. With a new blush tinting her cheeks, Gohama brought her dark ends, that now reached her shoulders, closer to her line of sight.
They were ragged. A single swipe with a tanto would obviously do that to any person's hair, but she hadn't been bothered by that. She had actually completely forgotten about her new style, except for the sporadic surprise of untangling her morning knots and finding that her swipes ended sooner than expected. Gohama hadn't looked into a mirror in weeks and maybe that had helped her forget about the awful state of her hair.
There were a thousand of worries circling through her mind, but somehow Kakashi's sudden comment had made this superficial, little detail of herself stand above all else.
"I can even it." She frowned with doubt at him. "I cut my own hair."
"Is that supposed to reassure me?"
"Yes."
"Have you looked at your hair?"
"You've seen me handle a blade, Gohama, you know I have talented fingers." There was a cocky, teasing glint to his eye she hadn't seen in some time. "Cutting hair can't be much different from dealing a well-placed cut on an enemy."
"Oh, yes, Copy-nin, please reassure me with more battle comparisons when you'll have a kunai near my neck."
"I promise I won't slash your throat." Kakashi said with his eye-crinkle, while a kunai spun around his finger. When had he taken it out of his pouch?
"If you kill—"
"Gohama," He cut in with a strong tone. "we both know that I won't. Now turn around so I can at least try to make you bearable to look at."
She kicked his leg half-heartedly at the rude comment. "You're having fun with this."
His smile never left as he grabbed her ankle, the touch making her jolt, dragged her through the floor and forced her to turn around. Gohama sat with a stiff back and sprang up muscles, her legs dangling over the edge of the engawa. Kakashi settled behind her. His chakra seeped into the nerves on her back and made the fine hairs of her neck stand.
Her shoulders jerked again as he pulled all of her hair back with two gloved hands, one already holding the sharp kunai. His fingers threaded through her dark waves, gentle and unhurried, almost lazy, as they pulled at the knots and smoothed down the strands. Her scalp tingled and Gohama couldn't quiet the small shivers trembling through the top of her spine. Kakashi took his time playing with her hair and easing her into his ministrations before actually starting cutting, the blade too close from such a vulnerable spot.
At the first rustling of the metal against her stands, Gohama closed her eyes, the same soothing tingles and sound guiding her mind onto other times someone had cut her hair.
Koroko, her nanny, had done it with careful snips of the scissors, as they stood in front of a mirror, her throat murmuring an out-of-tune song, only interrupted when she snapped at Gohama for moving around. Gohama had always watched through their reflection the moment she finished, looked over her head with a smile to make sure the work was well done and kissed the top of her head.
Uncle had cut her hair too, at the monastery. His movements hadn't been as sure in the beginning, as Koroko's. There was no mirror and Gohama was old enough to keep herself still. He had worried about making her pretty, an attempt at inspiring a typical girl's sense of self-care in a time when all she had cared about was training and being a better shinobi.
Still, she hadn't cared, one time going as far as shaving her head, as all the other monks. It had devastated Uncle, she had seen it in his smile as she first appeared in front of him. It was marked with the realisation that no matter how hard he tried, Gohama would never have the normal cares of a teenage girl.
Those had appeared later, in Konoha. Gohama still remembered that festival night on her birthday when she had dressed in a kimono. For the first time in years, she had felt pretty and had cared about feeling pretty, a prideful sort of elation making her smile at her own reflection. It hadn't compared to the thundering of her heart when Hansuke had complimented her.
A lump pressed into her throat at the thought of him, of Uncle, of Koroko. All the people that either were dead or shunned out of her life, all of them she had lost.
"How is war?" Gohama asked quietly and only the little shudder of Kakashi's chakra made her sure that he had heard her. Still, he continued to work on her hair and didn't answer. "You were there, in Uncle's company. That's why he knew you, why he called you, a Konoha nin, his friend… So, how was it?"
"Just death all around. Everyone around you is dying and there's nothing you can do to save them."
Gohama had lived through that, through a massacre. Was war the same?
"Still, you'd never make the choice Uncle did had you been in his place." If there was one thing Gohama knew of Kakashi was his unwavering loyalty to Konoha.
At these words, Kakashi's hands finally stopped and pulled away from her.
"No, but I've always been a selfish man. Tsukate didn't just fight for the lives of his people, but my people too. It's why I'll always owe him."
"It doesn't justify the betrayal."
"Tsukate never tried to justify it. He knew what he was doing and he took it as it was." Gohama felt his sad sigh shaking the strands of her hair. "He was a too good man." His words made her heart tremble and her fingers tighten around the fabric of her haori, where it rested on her thighs.
"Do you know who Uncle lost?" Her voice left a little too shaky for her pride.
"Katsuo."
Even Gohama, as little as she had been, had felt the impact, the cavernous and piercing blow, that her older uncle's death had brought to their family. Grandmother hadn't lasted long after that, Uncle Tsukate had left Buki and the only one remaining of the main Kyura branch had been Father. In few years, he had been left alone to lead a village and a clan. It made all his tired looks and his kind smiles burn deeper in Gohama's memories.
"A Buki nin called Keishi. They were together."
"Keishi…" Gohama whispered, looking down at her white knuckles through stinging eyes. "I've seen their photo together. Uncle never told me about him. He never told me about anything."
"He didn't want to put his burdens on you."
"I wanted to know, I should have known. I always thought his grief was for our Village because it was what I was grieving. The war was the reason he left Buki and became a monk and I never even thought about how much that had broken him."
A stray tear escaped her waterline, sliding down her cheek. With a quick, hidden move, Gohama's thumb dabbed it and stopped it from slipping down her chin. She hated herself from letting it show when Kakashi was right behind her.
"Only when I found out the truth did I truly realise Uncle was his own person with his own worries and griefs. And I… I—"
"That's usually how things go with parents. One day you realise they're people too, for the best and for the worst…" Kakashi laid a hand on her shoulder, heavy and warm, accompanying his words with a gentle squeeze. "Don't let it get so much to you, Gohama."
"It's not just him, it's…" Mother, she whispered in her heart and somehow Kakashi heard it too.
"The poem. Your mother's poem… It didn't mean she despised you. It's full of love and of the helplessness of a mother that can't give her daughter the life she deserves."
Gohama brought her knees to her chest and dropped her forehead to her arms, as they wrapped around her legs, her face hidden from him. The movement made Kakashi's hand slide down until it rested on her back, awkward and tingly, but he didn't pull away.
Her throat burned from her attempt at keeping the bitter tears secret inside her chest, but she couldn't hold them back anymore. With a silent sob, they fell from her eyes onto the skin of her thighs. Her shoulders were stiff as she tried to stop them from trembling, even if either way Kakashi could smell her crying.
How could the man that had killed Mother talk of her with that heart breaking tone? Where was the man in the white mask she had wanted to kill?
"We're shinobi. Our lives overflow with death." Kakashi added in a tired accepting tone. "That's what allows us to protect our people."
Somehow that word justified everything, somehow it made everything acceptable. They were what they were meant to be and that was enough validation for all of its horrible parts.
He accepted it, Gohama also accepted it, but sometimes, as today, as for the past weeks, it hurt too much and made all the self-loathing and disillusion surface onto her skin. She hated herself for crying, she hated herself for not hating the man sitting behind her. Gohama was a Buki shinobi and the daughter of her parents, the death overflowing through her should also be his, she would make it his.
Gohama used her forearms to dry the wet tracks on her cheeks, but she didn't pull away from her buried position, she couldn't.
"You are good at protecting them." She envied him for it.
The massacre of Buki was a proof of that. Kakashi had managed to invade the village and kill the Yukikage, preventing a war that would devastate Konoha. Few ninja had the skill for it.
"I'm not. People usually have a tendency to die on me." He shared with a rooted weariness than only added to his usual low drawled voice. "Or hurt because of me."
The back of his knuckles glided up her back, making goose bumps spread over her skin, until his fingers stopped at her nape to brush through her hair. His other hand wrapped around her jaw and her hand shot out to his wrist at the intrusive touch.
"Sorry. Just need you to sit straight again."
Gohama had forgotten what they were actually doing. She didn't take her hand away from the one dangerously settled on her jaw, but she let him guide her into the position that best worked for him. Kakashi let go of her and set out to deal the final changes to her haircut. The little tugs and brushes made her scalp tingle again and her muscles unwind.
"It's done."
Gohama brushed her own hands through her hair, testing the length, now even and falling a couple of centimetres above her shoulders. As always, the great Copy-nin's skill with a blade didn't let down.
It was awkward now. Gohama didn't know what she should say. A 'thank you' would be expected but she couldn't get the words pass her throat. She started to stand up and leave without saying anything, when two hands pushed down her shoulders.
Kakashi inhaled, set on saying something, but seemed to give up at the last moment. His hands left her with a quick twitch. "Sorry."
He stood up and went inside, taking away a sigh of relief from her now that she didn't have to think of anything to say to him.
Her fingers brushed through her hair again, as she leaned on chin on her knee, breathing in the scent of dried twigs and thinking back to the days when Yukine would run around lush grass and she would help him stand up when he fell, Mother lifting her eyes from a book to smile at them. That one she was remembering had been nothing but the common smile of a mother to her children.
Her head turned to look inside, even if she knew Kakashi was no longer there. Maybe he was right about Mother's poem, but it wasn't enough to erase the aching feeling inside of her. Why had he even tried to do reassure her? Why had he even searched for what had freaked her out?
Her hands pulled at the ends of her strands. Why did he even care about her hair enough to actually cut it?
Where the fuck was the man in the white mask?
"There's tea for you."
Gohama quirked her eyebrow up as she brushed the sleep out of her eyes. "That's very domestic of you, Copy-nin." Usually they cooked for themselves and ate by themselves, the only thing they shared was her game meat and rice provisions she had bought on a small town near Buki.
"Maa, I was making some for me..." Kakashi shrugged as he took sips out of his cup and kept his eyes locked on a book.
Her fingers threaded through her hair, trying to smooth down the knots from sleeping. With a little upturn of her lips, she took in the definitely too domestic picture of Kakashi in the low table, facing the opened doors that led to the backyard, as he drank his tea and read his book. (It was intact, so it wasdefinitely not the Anthology. He would probably stay away from that one as much as possible after her break down.)
Her heart soured as the picture reminded her of the rare mornings she woke up soon enough to catch Father before he left for the Yukikage Palace.
Snapping her gaze away from him, she stood up and folded her futon closed. Why did he always make her relive the warm comforting feelings of her childhood only for Gohama to be slapped back into reality? Sitting with him and drinking the tea he had prepared for the both of them, as if they were nothing but two normal people enjoying the quiet morning, would definitely only deepen the ache in her heart.
"You shouldn't have bothered. Drink it yourself, I'm going to train."
"It wasn't really a bother." He mumbled under his breath, but Gohama was already leaving the room with a change of clothes and she didn't know what to quip at that. Maybe something about Kakashi only knowing how to boil water. Or how he was so lazy he would never do anything that actually bothered him.
Anything that would mask away how seriously she took the act of drinking tea in the morning on her childhood home, looking out onto her childhood backyard. How wrong it should feel to do it with a person Gohama had to hate. How wrong it felt that she knew it wouldn't.
As she was moving through the doorframe, Kakashi's low voice made her fingers grip onto the jamb. "Are you afraid of me?"
Gohama ignored the tightening around her chest at his dejected tone, making her answer leave her tongue cold and mocking. "If I was afraid I wouldn't sleep next to you."
"It's my sharingan." He stated and it pinched because it was true. She wasn't scared of the sharingan itself anymore, but the image of the red eye still made her muscles freeze with the shadow of that horrifying genjutsu.
"What's your point, Kakashi?"
"You're avoiding me."
She shifted slightly on her feet, so he could see her raised eyebrow and mocking expression delivered over her shoulder. "You are feeling lonely."
He shook his head slightly, his gaze fixed on the cup between his hands. "You should avoid me. I can leave Buki, if you want."
"Why? Do you seriously think that you'll look at me and I'll crumble like a broken doll?" That it had happened before wasn't her current point. Gohama wouldn't let such a crippling weakness surface again.
"When I said that everyone around me dies, it's not just during war, Gohama."
Gohama laughed, a twinge of offence and a full glass of bitterness rumbling through it. Did he not know who she was?
"Well, then, Kakashi, I guess we'll have to test which curse strikes first. Mine or yours."
Just as she was passing through the threshold of the room again, her feet suddenly stopped and her hand tightened around the doorjamb. "Actually," Gohama spun around to face him with a tilt of her head and a sardonic smile. "I'll have that cup of tea after all."
Poem #1 is by Yosano Akiko
Poem #2 is by Kusano Shinpei