Part VII | Chapter 4
"Gohama." Kakashi called as the white things broke though the edge of the trees on the other side of the clearing. "Be careful."
She threw him a dismissive "I will", but before Gohama could move past him and towards the enemy, Kakashi reached for her elbow with a rough grip. "I'm serious. Promise me you won't risk your life for nothing."
This time she met his eye with a defying glare. They were entering a fucking battle and he was their division's taicho. Kakashi should be thankful she would deal the white things alone without risking the lives of his soldiers, not disgruntled.
"Promise me."
There was the smallest hint of desperation in his hold. Gohama searched it in his eye, his brow, but he didn't let it show through. His grey and his lines had only his usual detachment. Her defiance died there. She wasn't taking an order from her commander, she was yielding to the wish of a man she owed, more than owned, just the mere sight of him made her heart do wonderful and annoying things inside her chest.
It was as she had realised on that distant day when fighting against the masked bastard, Gohama was his, more than trust, more than duty, it was surrender.
"I promise."
The tenseness in his muscles eased along with his grip on her, it lingered until his thumb brushed the inside of her arm and he let his hand fall to his pouch. Gohama spun around to face the line of enemies before her. With a deep inhale, she closed her eyes and let her mind ease away. "If death comes, may it be in honour of… the world." She whispered to the dense air between her and the enemy.
Two shrill blue orbs shone through the grass field, the dark void of the pupils a mere slit. Seiryu's chakra burned through her pathways. Every cell in her body ignited with the power of the tailed beast, from her core to the tip of her fingers, she was sharp with unfathomable strength.
A slight press of her heel against the soil and her image was cutting through the distance. It happened in an instant, her movements too fast, her mind too focussed on the next kill. One after another, sometimes in lots, she crushed and cut and burned and tore.
The chakra emanating from her skin was enough to melt the ones that dared near her. She was precision and wildness, as the lightning of Kakashi's own raikiri. Her hand broke through the white fibre of the last one and he crumpled, limp and powerless, against her arm. She let it slide to the ground with a quiet thud.
Her heart thumped fast and alive against her chest and she waited with heavy breaths for it to quiet. Gohama looked down at her hands, steeling herself, but there was no red, no wetness, no blood.
She glanced to her side, where at the end of the clearing, her division stared back. Kakashi's arm started to wave her to retreat, until it faltered halfway, only for a moment, a frail sign of hesitation, but Gohama saw it and now the desperation was back on his movements.
Gohama forced her senses into taking every little detail of her surroundings. New chakra signatures were advancing through the edge of the forest, but… one of them was familiar, one of them was so painfully familiar. It stole her breath, it stole her mind, everything from her except for the familiar flow of it washing over her, steady and powerful and aching. She turned her head and she saw what she had already felt in her guts.
At the edge of the treeline, two forest green eyes swallowed by black.
Kakashi was running towards her now, but she didn't notice it. She also didn't see the blur of white invading the clearing once again, the roar of a thousand feet running towards her like a wave, the shouts of a thousand shinobi ready for battle. Her whole being had been engulfed into those two green eyes.
"Father…"
"Hama-chan."
The real solid voice of Father echoing through her real solid ears, a dead name called back to life and the simple name with the power to paint everything with its simplicity.
Slating clear light fell onto the tatami, her warm cup of tea between her small hardened hands from frost, Father smiling behind porcelain with tired bright eyes and her small heart soft with childlike love.
The diminutive Father called her when Gohama was only Gohama, and Father was only Inaku, no great shinobi duty underlining them, no great sound carved out of their roles, just father and daughter, the simplest, most essential of things.
Before her body could learn how to move again, she was staring at the silver hair of Hatake Kakashi. Her shaking hand reached for his flak jacket, fingers tightening around the thick fabric.
In her heart a multitude of emotions she couldn't pin-point clashed against each other, and they both hurt and felt good, they both made her cold with fear and warm with love. They drowned her and all she could feel was them and the faint, shadowy fabric grasped in her fist.
Gohama was only a fog of thought emerging from feeling, a chaos she couldn't make sense of. All those childish dormant things that had deformed into monstrous things, were rising, soft and tender, the love and admirations of a child for her father jumping around in her heart until Gohama thought she would drown, and she was drowning, how could such a wonderful thing smother with cold vines around her ribs?
The warm steady touch of Kakashi's hand on her own pulled her back to that battlefield, but everything felt as unsubstantial as smoke. Her eyes rose, heavy and delayed to his face, a blurred wet outline of his familiar steady profile.
"Gohama." Kakashi's low voice called softly and it yanked her gently through the fog's edge. Her fingers squeezed his firmly and he answered back with a squeeze of his own, his face turning back to the shinobi in front of them.
To Father.
The realisation was no longer a bundled mess of emotions she couldn't process. Finally it reached her mind and, even if the walls of her heart were still being hit with riots, she could think clearly and process the fact that Father was standing in front of her.
"Sakumo's son." Father greeted and, after so many years of silence, she could still distinguish the smile in his voice. "The Copy-ninja. I'm afraid I don't know your name."
"Hatake Kakashi." He answered with a bow. "Inaku-sama."
"I'm a dead man, Kakashi, I'm beyond honorifics now."
The words rang loudly in her ears. Father was a dead man, had been a dead man for twelve years, a dead man she had missed so dearly a hole had been left in her life and in her person. And she was frozen behind Kakashi's back when she would have done unspeakable things just for the chance of glimpsing Father's face again.
"How many years?"
"Twelve. It's the Nidaime Hokage Reanimation jutsu."
Gohama finally snapped out of her stupor completely. Her fist unclenched around Kakashi's flak jacket and with a final squeeze she let go of his hand, but his fingers tightened around her wrist.
"You'll have to fight him."
She gave him a reassuring smile and pried his fingers from around her. "It's okay, Kakashi. I want to do this."
Gohama stepped from around his protective back, mind readying herself for the blow of Father's image and yet nothing could ever prepare her heart as she found him in the middle of a battlefield, the green edge of the forest behind him, Kyura haori fluttering against his legs as if it were another morning on Mother's garden, his figure cut out of leaves and sky.
Father smiled with so much warmth it almost dissipated the eeriness of the ink black darkness around his eyes, the reality that he was under the enemy's power. "Gohama, my daughter…"
Her grieving mind had always built those stupid scenarios of what she would do and say if she ever had the impossible opportunity of meeting her family again, but now that it was here Gohama didn't remember a single thing she had planned. And Father seemed as lost for words as she was.
"Father… I have so many things I want to say, I… I don't even know how I can fit them in the little time we have… I'm sorry. Mother, Yukine… the village… everyone… I couldn't protect them. I fail—"
"You don't need to apologise when it isn't your fault. That's not a failure, Gohama. You didn't fail your village, your clan and you certainly didn't fail us, Mother, Yukine and me."
"It's not just that. I…" Gohama spared a quick glance at Kakashi, now standing a few steps beside her, shoulders tense and ready for an attack. "I know that Kakashi was the shinobi ordered to kill you, Father. And I…"
Her fingers shook and she had to hide it in a fist, her stomach churning nervously with that familiar childish fear she had always had for disappointing Father. There was something new, impossibly harsher than anything she had felt as a child, a shame that made that self-loathing flare.
"I failed everything that you ever tried to teach me, Father…"
"Hama-chan." Father called gently as he took a step towards her, before stopping himself. It was cruel that they were standing before each other and couldn't break the distance, that a father was being controlled to fight his own daughter.
"It's okay, whatever happened, whatever you did, it doesn't matter now, not to me. You seem to have found your way now, Gohama." Father's finger pointed at her hitai-ate and he glanced over the other shinobi of their division, lingering at Kakashi by her side. "It's a beautiful sight for my dead eyes to see."
"Yes, but… we only came together for terrible reasons. Father… the ones controlling you now were behind Buki's destruction…"
A terrifying revulsion Gohama had never seen burn behind Father's eyes flashed, her heart leaped in her chest at it and Kakashi shifted beside her, steadier on his feet. It lasted only for an instant, quickly smothered into a quiet sorrow. Not only was Father a pawn against his daughter, his body was complying with everything that went against his duty, his principles, his will, and even through that bloomed a sincere smile.
"Then, Gohama, why not spar with me one last time, like old times? Children are meant to surpass their parents."
"One last spar, Father." Gohama agreed, appeased by the familiarity of it, the tenderness she had for when Father would train her.
"You can join us too, Kakashi. Your efficiency at killing me is highly appreciated now."
Her jaw fell slightly at the ruthlessness of Father's joke, as he shared with her a side she had never seen from him. "That's some dark humour I never knew you had, Father."
"You were nine years-old last time I saw you, Gohama."
"Even at thirty-one I don't think I can handle it." Kakashi commented beside her, his voice with none of the lightness of theirs. It was the same as on the command tent when she had first arrived, suddenly back to life.
"Kakashi…"
Kakashi glanced at her with miserable guilty eyes and it rocked her entire balance. Gohama had been so focussed on herself, she had completely ignored Kakashi while another dead person spurred up on him, a person he had killed and whose death had never stopped gnawing at him.
Father wasn't helping with his inappropriate jokes, if Mother were there she would have admonished him with one of her scary glares right away, the ones she reserved for diplomacy meetings, doubled in rule and efficacy.
"Kakashi, you don't need to fight me again, but it would reassure me if you would fight beside Gohama. That was a thoughtless joke before, I'm sorry, but there's no need for guilt, not now, not later." Father hadn't lost his sensitivity, reading Kakashi even through his masks with an easiness Gohama had always admired.
"I killed your wife, your children's mother. Gohama's mother." And Kakashi, even through his mad masochistic impulse, understood enough to know where to poke.
"It hurt yes, but my anger was never directed at you, Kakashi, but at our circumstances. It's a shame they haven't gotten any better."
"You weren't here to see how your daughter grieved you because of me. You weren't here to see how she hated me for robbing her of her parents."
"Kakashi, don't fish for my hate. I remember you giving me an honourable death and laying me by my Misaka, that's more than what I'd ever expect from my killer. I never resented you for being the one chosen to deal my death, not that night and certainly not now, when all I see is you taking care of Gohama."
Kakashi wanted his guilt validated through Father, as if it didn't have enough roots too thick and deep for her to tear out, and it was breaking her heart to see it.
"Kakashi…" Gohama didn't mask the begging in her voice as she called him, her hand coming to hold his arm gently. He understood her unnamed request and looked down at her. "You don't have to fight Father. I just need you to back me up, okay?"
The demand in his gaze washed away and she felt the tenseness ease from the muscles of his arm. His hand held back onto her arm, Gohama infinitely aware of how the tough pad of his thumb brushed over the uncovered slit of skin where her long glove ended.
"Okay, but if it's too much for you, don't hesitate to tell me, Gohama. I can take over."
"Thank you."
Kakashi with all his insecurities was still her Kakashi, the man she had admired since coming first into Konoha, the man that was all focus and skill, when the people he cared about were on the line and this time it was her, this time it was all the shinobi surrounding them.
A love so deep and encompassing it drowned the self-doubt that shook him and that was what Gohama had always wanted for herself, that type of stoutness, of strength, of duty and most of all of love. The same she had always felt in Father, in Mother and in Uncle, the same that she had always tried and failed to make for herself. With one look at Kakashi she knew he would take over into any gap, any small falter of her stance.
Gohama summoned her tachi and turned to Father, his expression movingly serene even as she charged at him.
It was nothing like old times. Father had been pulling his punches back then and now that mad people had control of his kage-rank power they unleashed it onto her. Father was all she had ever wanted to be when he moulded his chakra, grace, power and beauty. Excellence that made her throat tightened and her eyes widen with awe. But now Gohama had to fight, to reciprocate with her own skill that seemed as a mere sloppy wave of force beside Father's dance of chakra.
Everything around them deemed until it was nothing more than a spar, an exchange of skill and shinobi abilities, not a war for their lives against dead people torn back to life. There was no thinking, just doing and it was beautiful, their super-human skill honed after years of training, of sweat, pain and blood. This was what shinobi had always meant for, to feel their chakra connect them through skill in an art that transcended the hands they fought with, transcended themselves.
Gohama was confident she could win. The fight with Father, the one she had looked up for greatness and fixed as her measure, made her realise how far she had come and made her ashamed, because all her power, all of Seiryu's power, the Kyura chakra, had been used for nothing but death.
It wasn't enough, the seconds were draining through the wide gap of time and she craved so much more than a fight. Gohama craved days, months, years of a life, of growing old, of seeing wrinkles press onto Father's face, of family dinners and the occasional scold, evenings on the engawa playing koto, dawns immersed in the life of the forest as they hunted. She wanted to see that fatherly love, the one that gleamed now through Father's eyes as they fought, every day of her life. But Father's green was drowned in black, and he was still dead.
On the other side of Father's stance, her eyes met Kakashi's and Gohama confirmed her purpose in the shades of grey and the deep bloody ink of red of his sharingan.
Gohama shoved Father's back into the ground, the earth shattering around them. Father conceded victory with a smile, the tendrils of her chakra locking him in, slithering inside his pathways and destabilising his flow.
Now that she had subdued him, two members of the sealing team approached from the side, but Kakashi stopped them with a raise of his hand, his back turned towards her, a silent gesture that he would stretch this precious moment while he could for her and for Father.
Her hand tightened around Father's and she brought it up to her face, leaning her cheek into his calloused palm. "Can you feel this?" Gohama whispered, voice strained around her rough throat.
"I can." Father answered with one of his familiar sad smiles, as known to her as the last time she had seen them twelve years ago. The long suffering years of loss suddenly crumbled into nothing with the familiarity of Father, real and yet not real, his green eyes the same, and yet with the disconcerting void of blackness around them.
Her eyes prickled with tears, as she realised even this jutsu-made Father, unnatural, a freak in the order of life and death, seemed all that Gohama needed now, had always needed. Even through her choking anguish that hole of loss was once again filled and yet it was nothing but smoke, already seeping through her fissures.
"I'm sorry I couldn't protect you as a father should, I'm sorry I couldn't do better for you, my daughter."
Father could read the decade-long grief in a single look of hers, but Gohama didn't want this to be stained with her raving deformed grief, Gohama didn't want any guilt and any regrets now. This was a precious treasure, a freak of nature, yet fleeting as everything in life, and it required gratitude from her, love, not resentment, not anguish.
"No, Father, you gave me so much more than I could ever ask for. Mother too, Yukine, all our family, the Kyura, Buki." Her broken mind after the massacre had been the one to jumble things, to twist them. "I'll be forever grateful for the time when you filled my life, how you continue to do it."
Father smiled, the sadness easing from his eyes, the blackness hidden behind the gleaming warmth of his love. "I'm forever grateful for the chance of seeing the wonderful person you've become. Your own person. I'm so proud of you, Gohama. I've always been so proud of you."
"Father…" Her chest tightened at the overwhelming wave of consolation that bloomed there.
Her heart would forever save and cherish this gift in careful soft hands.
"And meet one of your snowdrops." The left corner of Father's mouth rose in a knowing cheeky smile as he glanced to the side. "A surprising turnaround, I have to say, but I'm glad for it, make sure he knows that too."
"How do you…?"
"Your eyes haven't changed, Gohama. I wish Mother could be here too, she would have known all the right things to say." Father commented lightly and her throat rumbled in a wet chuckle, because it was true, only Mother would know what to say in a time as this. "I'll tell Mother about you, Gohama, our little snowdrop. I'll tell all of them."
She could see the finality in Father's tone, the gentle gut-wrenching goodbye in his eyes. They hadn't had the chance before, and now a minutes-long sliver of a redemption could never be enough to make all the wrong things right. Even as her fingers held desperately onto Father's, Gohama knew things were set in time and Father was dead, her chakra seeping in his pathways and fighting against his chakra, against the puppet strings of Akatsuki.
And still it was Father. It was Father. It was Father, alive and full of love.
"It's time now, Hama-chan."
Her head fell, not wanting Father to see the anguish tearing through her face, her hand pushing Father knuckles against her forehead, demanding the painful concrete touch as a spoiled child in a furious jealous tantrum against death.
"I miss you all so much…" Gohama sobbed out, her voice wet with the tears stuck in her throat.
"I know, Hama-chan." Father answered softly. His hand tried to fight through her chakra's interference and her breaking gasp to brush down the side of her hair. "I know."
Gohama straightened her neck, the back of her hand wiping the haziness out of her eyes so she could see Father's face clearly, could relish in having him there, not only the shadow of a years-old memory. Then she tore her gaze away towards the sealing team, awkwardly trying to pretend they weren't paying attention to her, while Kakashi watched their backs for Zetsu clones. With that simple look from her, they readied their sealing tools.
Gohama took Father's arms carefully and crossed them over his chest as she had done to Uncle before, as was the Kyura's tradition. Father smiled, no sadness in his eyes or fear as he readied himself for death once again. She would never stop admiring Father's courage, Father's honour and greatness in everything he did, even death.
"Gohama, don't forget that we're always with you."
The white bandages wrapped around his legs, slithering up the familiar garbs, the sage green haori of the Kyura, which Gohama had renounced to for Buki's uniform when she had taken on Shuriken's mask.
"I know." She smiled as the binds covered Father's face and the black seal inked the white threaded fabric with chakra. Her fingers brushed through it, resting over the tag at the centre of Father's chest.
"Gohama…" Kakashi whispered quietly, his hand coming to rest on her shoulder.
"Just a little longer. Please… a little longer…" Gohama asked for it and she didn't even know why she needed it now that Father was nothing more than stolen corpse sealed into a white shroud. "Okay…" she whispered, so mutedly it almost didn't leave her mouth.
Kakashi's hand pulled her away, so the sealing team could take Father's sealed body. She turned away from them, trying to get up, until her knees bent and she fell. Kakashi caught before she could make a fool of herself and coaxed her head to lean against his shoulder. Was he hugging her?
"I'm sorry, Gohama." He murmured against her temple.
Kakashi was hugging her. Her arms moved by themselves as they clung to his shoulders, anything that could support her as she felt herself drown again, and he felt so warm around her, so steady.
It was painful, and cruel and it was freeing.
The sounds of war chimed through her ears, now open to the shouts and the clash of metal. The sudden overwhelming wave of chakra signatures from her comrades stirred her own energy, roaring deep in her core and up her pathways as a lit spark spreading through oil. This was not the time for mourning, this was the time to fight as she had come to fight, wholeheartedly and ruthlessly.
Gohama wiped away the dried salt on her cheeks. She used Kakashi's shoulders to steady herself, the spark in her chest inflaming into resolve in full bloom, as she stood up and met his gaze.
Gohama offered Kakashi her hand, a small gesture of gratitude for being there, even after all the shit they had been through. He took it and hoisted himself up, the same resolve burning in his eyes, the sharingan spinning straight through her. It would never stop awing her.
"I'd missed those fierce eyes." Kakashi commented as he squeezed her hand before letting go.
Her arm extended to the side and her tachi appeared in her hand. His arm moved the same and his fist glowed and shrieked with the sound of a thousand birds. Together they tore through the battlefield.
The smoke clogged in her throat, a burning paste hardened down to her lungs and numbing her tongue.
Gohama could see the edge of the horizon clearly, the morning air limpid and white with light. Her eyes finally saw after the instinctive blur of a battle. Once the battle ended a sudden white quietness settled through the battlefield and extended, endless and deafening through the mounds of overturned earth, wrecked forest and corpses.
But everything was moving, the stillness wasn't real, the fight was over and still the air was a disarray of chakra signatures, some strong, enraged, others as muted as a gentle whisper in the air, and Gohama had no idea where Kakashi was.
The howling echoed around her head, shrill screams that trembled right through the bone and muscle of her chest. Laughs too and she didn't know where they were coming from, she didn't know how someone could find any amusement in the crumbling ruins of a village and the deformed faces of dying people, screams bursting through blooded lips and no ears to fall on.
Everything was a repeated gesture, the formless black chaos crawling out of every ordered thing, a wave of destruction and death. This now was horror, ugly despairing horror Gohama had only once felt as a child, her mind unprepared, unlearned for such evil, and yet, so many years later, so many cruel encounters later, red blood stains in her hands, Gohama was just as unprepared.
She knew it would destroy her, as it had before, she knew she was already cracking, drowning in black tar. Her heart both clung to life with each hastened hammering beat and craved to escape her chest, up through her mouth in a gagging sob or tear right through the tightening bone caging it in. She had never thought that despair of death, a mudded mixture of the will to live and the desire for the peaceful void of nothingness, would wrestle inside her once again.
"Gohama."
"Seiryu… help me please…"
"I'm here, kiddo, we'll get through this together."
"I don't want to be here… why did I leave? Why did I come here? Why am I here? Why am I here, Seiryu?"
"To protect them."
"That can't be right. Look at this…" Her eyes glance through the wide battlefield, the fallen bodies with other village's uniforms, no buildings around them, only trees around an open field, and still… "That can't be right… It's the same… it's the massacre. They want us, Seiryu… not them, they want us…"
"What are you thinking, Gohama?"
Her feet stumbled backwards, guiding her for what she hadn't actualised in her thoughts yet. Her hand shook at her side, vibrated under the stifling stench of death and burning, as if already sensing the fate that was sealed onto it.
"My life isn't worth thousands."
"Gohama. No."
The screaming echoed through her head and even if she covered her ears it was still there, it would never not be there, inside her head or on the ground before her, throughout the world, there would always be that screaming and Gohama couldn't bear to ear it anymore as it called out for her, begged and begged, had begged for years now.
"I promised I wouldn't run away again. I can save them this time. Buki doesn't need to die again."
"We're not in Buki, Gohama. Listen to me, we can still fight and win. Gohama, not like this. Listen to me, listen to—"
The ashes of burnt homes tingled her cheeks, falling over her eyelashes like snow, but there wasn't the bite of cold, only the scorching smoke dragging down her throat. Her steps took her back through the narrow street, soles scraping over the white stones, because she wouldn't run away this time.
Her ankle caught on a something and she fell back onto the tousled grass and dirt. At the other side of her gaze were two green eyes staring back at her, a misplaced pair of candid green eyes that should never belong on that battlefield, surrounded with bruised bloodied pale skin. It was impossible, he didn't belong there, could never belong there.
"Gohama-san…" The rasp of her name shattered the veil over her vision and she exhaled the sob caught on her throat.
"Daiki." Gohama whispered in selfish relief, before the reality crashed back onto her chest.
Gohama straightened herself, kneeling beside him. Her hands searched through his ragged flak jacket for the wounds that spread pulls of blood over his clothes and soaked the dirt underneath him. She found a long gash on his stomach and another right on his vulnerable neck. One hand searched on her back pouch for the little medical supplies she had brought to battle, while the other flooded his tattered pathways with Seiryu's chakra.
"Am I… dying…"
She had known of it before, but Gohama still tried to suture the wound, too deep for the little knowledge she had gotten with Obaa-chan of the Kuma. Hearing Daiki name it as a question, muted and sharp on his broken throat, had marked it impossibly real.
Gohama summoned Yukine, a part of her grasping onto hope and with one look at the white wolf, he disappeared through the battlefield in search of a proper medic.
Her fingers dropped the needle and she propped Daiki's head gently on her lap, fingers trembling as they threated through his hair, pasted with sweat and dirt. Gohama didn't let her eyes waver as they held his own.
Daiki let out a wet, gurgling sob. "I'm scared…" His green wide eyes quivered and he started crying, eyes focussing and blurring over her face.
Years had passed for Gohama, a long path stretching between the girl that had first entered Konoha and herself, and yet Daiki hadn't grown a day past that class, when he had looked at her with hurt lost eyes, sniffling as she healed his little cut from the kunai his cruel classmate had thrown at him. This time she couldn't heal him, this time she couldn't the damage. Were the villages sending kids as young as this? Hadn't they learnt anything from the Third War?
"It's okay to be scared… I'm here with you, I'm not going anywhere."
"My parents… I wro—" A coughing fit cut through his words, but his feeble hand still reached for his jacket. "letter…"
Gohama helped him reach the inner pocket of his flak jacket and took out a blooded letter from inside it. It was a common practice to write letters to loved ones when going into battle. One never knew if death waited in the battlefield and this way at least some words would not be left unsaid, not that it could ever replace anything.
"I'll give it to your parents myself."
While before her heart had wanted to be heaved past her mouth, this time there were cold sharp hands piercing through her ribs and carving it out. It was just, seeing as she had always killed them that way, it was just that she would suffer through it without dying. The despair was less like horror and more like deep wrenching anguish.
It was fast, faster than she had ever wished for as Gohama still clung to the medic that wasn't coming, it wasn't fast enough as he grunted in agony and rasped out his last living breaths. Gohama held him closer to her, even if he probably couldn't feel that, his eyes still so scared, so childish as they watched the sky, unseeing.
And Gohama watched him, her gaze gentle and steady, as steady as she could make it as all of her pieces shook, unrooted, unprepared for this blow. So many times she found her eyes running away from the horrifying sight of a dying boy and so many times she had returned with double the gentleness, double the steadiness. Daiki deserved to be seen as he died with honour for his duty and yet she could find none of it, she could find only the air sucked of meaning, cruel and heavy as tar.
Daiki was already limp in her arms and she continued to flood him with Seiryu's chakra. It felt wrong of her, as she brushed the back of her fingers through his cold cheek, to see in him the overlapping image of another little boy, so so little, with green eyes and dark hair. The grief she felt for the life lost between her arms rose from the grief she had carried for twelve years, a darker, more personal one.
Daiki deserved to be more than a shadow of Yukine, his death deserved more than a reused grief and yet her heart rebelliously tied them together, uncaring for the particularities of reality.
"Yukine…" Gohama whispered as her dry tired eyes followed Daiki's path to the sky and she met only a blank solid blue, cold as ice and silent as night.
Death, always death, and while it had given her life meaning, death robbed it just as easily.
"Yes…?"
Gohama glanced over her shoulder, as Yukine walked closer to her, a medic following behind him. "I can take him with me." The medic said and Gohama only needed to shake her head before he left to heal others.
The side of her head leaned onto Yukine's warm flank, his heartbeat pulsing onto her temple cuddled against his fur. "Have you ever wondered how he would look like now?"
"Many times." Of course he had, her brother had been named after Yukine, he had taken as his personal duty to protect and care for his little namesake, his summoning partner's son.
"I saw Father."
"I know, our bond resurfaced. I hadn't realised how powerful the reanimation jutsu was, reanimating even summoning contracts."
"Why didn't you come see him?"
"I had the impulse, but I think it would be cruel to meet him only for a flicker before he vanished once again. Feeling his chakra again seemed enough."
"I'd take the cruelty again if I could choose. I'd take it every time and for all of them."
"Even if it is cruel for them too? It cannot be easy for a father to realise he has missed more than half his daughter's life, and that she has missed him."
"I know." Gohama whispered as she wrapped her free arm under Yukine's neck and pressed her face closer to him, in turn he rested his chin on her shoulder. The anguish had deformed into a rotting tiredness, a cavernous exhaustion that made her bones feel as lead. "Tell me to get up, Yukine."
"Get up, Gohama."
With the gentlest of hands, she lifted Daiki in her arms. Gohama walked onto the edge of the battlefield, her feet covered in chakra to hover above the dips of mud and tussled earth. There were already so many bodies carefully laid on the ground, side by side, name tags pulled out from inside their shirts so they could be identified later.
The stench of blood and burnt flesh made her eyes water as she lowered Daiki onto the grass, her fingers pulling out his tag. Gohama didn't linger, it was still not the time to mourn and she had already mourned enough, stolen enough of her attention on that battlefield. She untied his hitai-ate and laid it at his chest, his hand around it, the shinobi character open under the light, before parting with one last brush over his hair.
Her feet remained planted, her hands useless at her sides. What could she do? Her skill had always been nurtured and perfected for the killing never the aftermath. Her heart pounded in her ears above the shouts and the shrieks and she walked aimlessly through the devastated battlefield.
Gohama couldn't find the shape of Kakashi, a trace of his chakra signature in the tangle of chaos. Her stomach quivered at the thought she never let fully form in her mind. A part of her that needed to see him was selfish, it wanted to drink in the steadiness and trust he always exuded, to use him as her personal clutch when he was the taicho of their division.
Gohama couldn't be weak and their division didn't need uselessness.
"You can go home now, Yukine. Thank you."
"Will you be fine?"
Her eyes caught the green light of healing chakra, full in hope and illusion. There were few in the field, too few.
"I will."
Gohama ran for the closest medic healing an injured man, her hands settling on his back as she explained she would share her chakra with him. Once his reserves were full she left for another.
She found Sakura through the chaos, pink hair up. If there was a medic that could save lives, it was Sakura, the apprentice of the Godaime. Gohama fell onto her knees next to her.
"Use my chakra, Sakura."
Startled green eyes looked at her. "Gohama-san, wha—"
"My chakra, I can give it to you. Don't waste yours."
Her hands pressed to Sakura's back, as she spoke, not waiting for a confirmation. With a stable rhythm, Gohama let her chakra seep into the medic's pathways. The green glow at Sakura's experienced hands revived and soon the wound was closed and Sakura was moving to another injured soldier, Gohama following her. She would leave to share with other medics in need, but always found her way back to the most promising, almost miraculous hands.
The ache circling in her pathways from exhaustion was starting to spread like fire through her body. Her hands were forming red painful blisters and Sakura's back probably looked the same, even if Gohama tried to shift the place of contact from time to time. The shakes made controlling the flow of energy more difficult and painful. It meant nothing in almost twenty years as a ninja, she could push through the pain and exhaustion and she would push through.
This was all she could do to help and Gohama would offer every last drop of her chakra to any medic that was willing to take it.
"Gohama-san, you can stop. My reserves are more than replenished with your chakra."
"Take it as coverage for when I pass out." She explained through ragged breaths, as they burned in her lungs. "And just… Gohama."
Her head throbbed as she rested it against Sakura's back, too tired to hold it up on her own. She fought to keep her eyes opened and shake off the dizziness. How long had it been since she had been this low on chakra? Probably since she was a genin. So many years ago, too many years ago to count. Thinking took too much energy and all she needed to do was keep the steady flow.
"You're blowing out your reserves, Gohama." Seiryu commented softly. This wasn't a warning, Seiryu knew she was aware of it, this was a request. "It's enough."
"We both know it's not."
"Of course you're not going to listen to me. You never listen, never. I thought I lost you before."
"Seiryu."
"We were never in this together, were we?"
"Of course we are." Gohama reassured, but he didn't answer back. "You lizard, stop being stubborn and talk to me. Seiryu, I'm sorry, but please just say something."
She tried to shout at him through their connection, but her mind met only a cold lonely emptiness. He had breached their connections, he had never done that, Gohama didn't even know he could do that.
Panic started beating through her chest and Gohama pulled herself away from Sakura's back. A wave of dizziness swayed in her head, but she pushed through it, her frantic burnt fingers had not strength as she tried to tear her armguard away. Once it was finally off, she used her blood from a cut and spread it over the jinchuriki seal, her hand shaped the sign that would throw her inside the seal. Instead of a wave of chakra circling through her pathways Gohama felt only the clash of nausea and vertigo and before she could steady herself, she was falling back.
Gohama nuzzled the warm pillow her face was pressed to, her arms wrapping around it and trying to bring it closer. The familiar scent rang in her hazy memories, but she was too tired to try to remember to what it belonged.
Her eye cracked open to dark fabric and she turned to lay on her back, frowning at the light that burned on her eyes. The headache from chakra exhaustion pounded against her brain and Gohama brought a frail shaking hand, her muscles sore, to her eyes, so she could cover the offending light.
It took her a moment to realise she was staring up at Kakashi's masked face and an even longer one to realise that he was blushing so hard it spread above the fabric.
"Are you in pain?"
"No." Gohama whispered, her voice rough against her throat.
They both knew it was a complete lie, Kakashi was all too familiar with the terrible effects of chakra exhaustion. Kakashi's hand rested on her forehead, a soothing familiar weight against her warm skin. She let her hand fall onto her stomach as he started rubbing calming circles on her temples and a whispered hum rumbled through her chest, almost a purr.
"You can close your eyes."
But Gohama let them open, narrow to ease the bite of the light, and let them settle on Kakashi's face, as he looked down at her with that familiar and so painfully missed tenderness of his. Her heart throbbed with her head, each pump spread with pain and comfort, a bursting ache that felt entirely too good and too bad.
"Where are we?"
"We're a few metres away from the battlefield. You needed to sleep off the chakra depletion and this seemed better than an overloaded medical tent."
"Don't you have taicho duties?"
"Already done. You were out for some time. I asked Bisuke to watch after you for me."
Her arm reached up, but she let it hover halfway, suddenly catching her hand, flaring with the cruelty she had done to him. "Your sharingan… I can ease it, if you want me to."
Kakashi nodded and Gohama finished the rest of the journey. Kakashi had already taken off his hitai-ate even if he kept the sharingan closed and so Gohama let her hand press gently to the side of his face, the tips of her fingers touching the damp strands near his hairline.
The skin of her palm burned as she let her chakra seep gently into Kakashi's pathways, his other eye closed too with a small sigh. Her body was suffering from her donations, pathways overworked and muscles aching, as her arm shook from the simple effort of keeping it up.
"Kakashi, can you…" Gohama cleared her throat awkwardly. "…help me hold my arm up?"
His grey eye opened sloppily and his free hand, the one not soothing down her own headache, held onto her own. His hold was strong enough that Gohama could let her arm fall limp, and focus only on sending tendrils of fresh chakra to settle down Obito's chaotic flow and the eye's greediness.
"Hmm, still a very nice trick." Kakashi commented with a smile that was both teasing and tender, a small memento of the first time she had done it in Buki.
"I'm still full of very nice tricks."
His thumb brushed through her knuckles as she worked and Gohama was actively trying to distance herself from their position. It was intimate, like lovers sharing gentle caresses. And Gohama wished she hadn't thought of it as her face blushed bright red. Kakashi seemed completely unbothered, eyes closed and cheek leaning onto her palm with too much casualness when her heart wanted to rush out of her chest.
She couldn't stop looking at him, his hair falling down messily over his sharingan, the curve of his silver lashes hovering the dark tired circles marked onto his pale skin. She drank in every detail of his face and it almost felt as if it was the first time she was noticing them. Maybe it was, since she had returned, this was the first time Gohama was seeing him, truly seeing him.
Kakashi finally opened his eye before creasing it in his familiar half-moon smile and guiding her hand down to rest on her belly.
His fingers left their calming massages on her temples for soothing down her hair, sometimes getting caught in knots that he had to gently tug down to loosen them. The tenderness was what pierced her the most, was what had always pierced her the most about Kakashi, how his aloofness would wash away for silent, whispered, gentle care, not less intense, never less profound.
It was so painfully and wonderfully clear.
Gohama was in love with Kakashi.
She closed her eyes then, not wanting Kakashi to see what was swirling behind their green. She had no right to being in love with him.
She turned on her side and the shifting made heavy fabric brush over her shoulders. Gohama realised then that he had covered her with his flak jacket, her hand searched for the collar of it and brought it up to hide the lower part of her face, her chin tucking down and nose brushing through his scent soaked jacket, with sweat and dirt.
As she was laying with her head on Kakashi's lap, the smell of blood still stuck to them, the fear of that phantom impulse of killing herself still trembling through her hand, a masked monster wanting Seiryu and her dead, and yet Gohama couldn't remember ever feeling safest in the past years, not even with the Kuma where she had been dead to the world, the danger erased from her flesh. This deep-rooted safety that was all warmth and vulnerability, the safety of being home.
And so Gohama took off the rough sandals around her mind and the armoured vest around her heart, leaving them hanging, still and useless on the genka, and then she was crying.
She let it out, let all of it out. The missing of years, the loss, the guilt, the shame, the blood melted to her hands, the memory and realness of Father, the memory and loss of Yukine, the anguish and death of war, the sight of guts spilling onto the grass and bones piercing through flesh, of dead comrades in rows with their tags glinting under the sun, of scared childish eyes as they lost their life.
The tears fell down the bridge of her nose and the arch of her cheek onto his pants, but Kakashi didn't seem to mind, his ministrations, real and grounding, never faltered. He didn't say anything, of course he didn't say, anything, he was Kakashi and his presence was more reassuring than any words could ever be. She loved that about him.
She loved him.
There was almost a sort of teenage giddiness as she named it once again in her mind. Gohama had always been sceptical of whatever motions her heart made for Kakashi when walking alone through the shinobi world, even when mending herself with the Kuma, but she couldn't skirt around it when faced with the real human Kakashi, when her head rested on his lap and he looked down at her with those tender eyes. Gohama didn't want to skirt around it.
"I'm sorry…" She croaked out, her hand plucking the wet fabric of his pants, once the tears had dried from her eyes and the smothering weight had eased from her chest.
"That's fine."
Gohama turned around, so she would lay on her back, her eyes swiping through the leaves above them and the clear greens from where the light of the sun peeked to meet them. Her eyelids closed, heavy after so much crying, and she felt herself so close to sleep, her nape pressed onto Kakashi's thigh, the comforting weight of his jacket on her chest and his gentle ministrations on her hair.
Her stomach ached as she tried to sit up to fight the sleepiness from her body. Kakashi helped her settle beside him against the tree and she gave him back his flak jacket.
"Thank you, Kakashi."
"Anytime, Gohama. And I really mean it."
He had his Icha Icha opened on his lap and her eyes absently roamed the letters on the pages as he read, or at least pretended to read.
"It was… bizarre." She let out in a dry chuckle. "And painful and good. A little messed up blessing in all this shit. I needed it."
Seeing Father had soothed the scared lost child in her that had always bled as an open wound after the massacre. The child that had always tried to make her parents proud, to make her life a living image of all the things she admired in them, and had only seen in herself a failure, disgraced and deadly, unlovable.
A part of her would always remain, trembling and aching, as a token scar of what made Gohama who she was but it didn't need to cripple her, it didn't need to overpower her with its anguish and its trauma.
"And you needed it too." Gohama knew it wouldn't be that simple, but perhaps Kakashi knowing of Father's forgiveness could help him forgive himself. "You heard what Father said. He understood why you had to do it and he forgave you. Father respects you."
Kakashi continued to stare ahead, his droopy eye giving her no indication that he was listening, but she knew he was. "He wouldn't if he'd seen you for all those years."
"He's my father, Kakashi, he has always known me so well, Father didn't need to see it to know it. Most of all he understood what you mean to me and Father's glad for it, he wouldn't be glad if he thought you weren't a good man."
"Gohama…"
"Tell me why it's hard for you to hear this."
"I don't know, I don't… I just…"
"I'm sorry, Kakashi, I shouldn't be pushing this on you, there are definitely much more important things for you to worry about now. But I want you to know I'm glad Father could see you and me now, Kakashi, even if it's bizarre and painful, and will probably make me lose my mind if I dwell too much on it."
"I saw my father too." He looked down at his finger, as they brushed through the pages of his book. "I died during Pain's attack on Konoha."
"What…" She let out in a quiet whisper as her eyes widened and she pulled away from him enough to see all of his profile clearly.
"Pain gave life back to anyone that had died."
A cold hand grasped her heart at the words, drowning all the possible confusion and disbelief in a frigid riptide of grief. Gohama remembered how she had reacted to the news of Konoha's attack, how she had turned against Seiryu because of the fear trembling through her. It was there again and it made her hand tighten around his arm, making sure the warmth, skin and muscle were actually there, alive.
"That's…"
Honestly, Gohama couldn't even grasp the full significance of dying and coming back to life. The thought sent her heart into a frenzy and her stomach into riots, that entrenched existential anxiety even ruled over the fear of how close she had been to losing Kakashi. Her team sprang to her mind in a second, and she wondered if they had been dead too.
Kakashi snorted. "Imagine how I felt when I came back."
"How did you feel?"
The question seemed to surprise him and he frowned. "I don't know… confused… But that's not the point. It may not even have been real, afterlife and things like that… just a burst of endorphins or something…"
Curiosity was burning through her veins, but Gohama didn't push him, knowing in his own time Kakashi would tell her what he wanted to tell her. And if it wasn't enough to quench the thirst for the millennial long question of what happened after death, then it wasn't enough.
"He was sitting on some rocks by a bonfire." Kakashi chuckled. "Weird place for the afterlife, don't you think?"
"Throughout humanity's history, fire has brought us a sense of safety. It makes sense that the—" Kakashi was staring at her with an amused glint to his eye and quirked eyebrow. "Rhetorical question, got it."
"You're really thinking this through, aren't you, Gohama?"
"And you're not?"
Kakashi answered her with a dismissive shrug. "Why would I go after another reason to not sleep?"
Gohama threw him an unconvinced look which he decided to ignore. Kakashi was a practical man, but that busy mind of his could never shut down, especially over unresolved matters.
"Well, you've always been the smarter one."
"And that's the one thing we never have to question." Kakashi teased her.
Gohama shoved his shoulder lightly with hers at his banter, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. "I missed you."
Her heartbeat stopped in her chest as she realised the words that had fallen out of her mouth. With a stilled breath and body, she waited for his reaction, which seemed to take ages to show.
His hand came to rest above her knee and he squeezed gently. "I missed you too, Gohama."
She sagged back against the trunk, finally spying his expression from the corner of her eye, but he was looking down at his hand on her leg. She wondered if it was the first time Kakashi was sharing the meeting with his Father with someone other than the ghosts at the Memorial Stone.
Once again Kakashi was resting his heart in her hands, and even if they weren't the monstrous ragged claws of that night, she felt they were too stiff and cold, too broken to hold it. But she would hold it still, treasure it with the fierce love she felt bursting inside of her, painful and wonderful, hoping just listening would be enough to ease some of the weight Kakashi shared with her.
"I interrupted you, sorry."
Kakashi let out a long sigh and his head fell back onto the trunk, his gaze turned up to the canopy of leaves. "We talked. I understood my father and after so many years I fully forgave him. It wasn't really the afterlife, but more of a… transition place. He said he could finally meet my mother again… and then I was alive."
He stayed silent for a long time and turned to her with shy, but soft gaze. "The point is that I know how it feels like…"
The point should be something else, but it was already good that Kakashi was talking of it with someone, independent of his reasons for it. Gohama let her hand lay over his, offering a gentle squeeze with her words. "Thank you for sharing it with me."
Before her hand could slip away again, his fingers wrapped around her own. "Thank you for listening." Kakashi answered, his tone quietly sheepish, as he continued to stare down where their hands settled on her knee.
With a sigh, Kakashi let his fingers loosen around her own but Gohama didn't pull her hand back to herself. "It's madness, isn't it?"
Gohama smiled at his words, her chin coming to rest on her raised knee, back muscles pleasantly aching under the stretch.
"It is, but sometimes that's not such a bad thing. It gives me… faith, I think." She started softly, her eyes obliviously pinned on the taller twig of grass swaying before them. "Maybe our precious people are waiting for us somewhere better, somewhere good… maybe we'll meet them again. The Kyura believe the red powder bonds living and dead together. I've always felt this void where they should be, but maybe I just wasn't searching for them in the right places… not maybe, I know I wasn't. But I'm trying now."
Gohama had always been terrified that loving other people would replace her love for them, for Buki, but not loving was what had withered and deformed it, withered and deformed everything they were and had been for her.
She turned her head to support her cheek on her knee and smile timidly at Kakashi, and he answered a warm intent look. His hand rose to her face, wavering halfway through, and he let only his fingertips brush down the side of her jaw. The gesture was honest, even if stiffly awkward, as he treaded around whatever unclear and so painfully real line Gohama had marked between them with that drop of blood that had fallen from his sharingan.
And she wanted more than a weightless burning brush, her skin singing at his touch and her gaze paralysed around that piercing tenderness of his. Now that she had named it, now that she had acknowledged her love for Kakashi, the real true Kakashi, everything she felt seemed to stir clearer, distinct, realer.
Gohama selfishly wanted him to know of it, it seemed so easy to shape the words, so easy to let her eyes express it in one single look, one simple touch or kiss. She straightened herself, Kakashi's fingers sliding way from her face and pressed her shoulders onto the rough bark.
"The count?" Gohama asked, and, from where she leaned against the tree, she couldn't see Kakashi's expression, but nothing could sober a person better than remembering they were in the middle of a war.
"Three hundred and seventeen dead. Eleven missing. More than twenty probably won't make it past tonight."
"We would have been more if it wasn't you leading us, Taicho." Gohama told him softly, honestly but she knew he wasn't listening through the roaring of self-doubt, the unbearable weight of responsibility and guilt cloaking his shoulders and twisting his uncovered eyes. "There was a kid, a Konoha shinobi. I didn't know they were coming in so young…"
"How young was he?" Kakashi asked, voice strained as he obliviously watched his thumb flip through the pages of his Icha Icha.
"I don't know, fourteen maybe. He was from one of the classes I taught at the Academy on my first year in Konoha, as a punishment for getting drunk on our mission to Suna, remember?"
"Yamamoto Daiki."
"How do you know?"
"I know who everyone under my command is." Of course Kakashi did, it was one of the things that made him such a good taicho, his consideration for his warriors as individuals, as people, not as a mere indistinct mass of manpower. "I was a team leader on one of his first missions as a chunin. He asked me about your… death. He was the first random person to have the courage to ask me anything, so I wouldn't forget him."
The information rang through her ribs as a punch and Gohama turned her face slightly away from him. "Daiki reminded me so much of… of my brother…" Gohama whispered, as she tried to control the sting of her eyes, her heart still so raw from the battlefield, from the still unhealed wounds of the massacre, torn opened once again.
"You never talked to me of him."
"I know…"
It was almost embarrassing how much Kakashi knew of her family, the good and the dirty, and yet this was the first time she shared anything of Yukine, even if it was only about a misplaced memory onto a boy of his own. Parents moulded children, settled at their foundations, but Yukine's death had always been the most excruciating cruel loss, even crueller than the ruins of her entire village.
Gohama remembered meeting the small bundle of cloths on Mother's arms, big eyes and face scrunched up as a little mouse. Gohama had offered her finger and Yukine had gripped it in his frail tiny hand, hold impossibly strong. Something had burst in her, a curious frightened wonder for that little new creature and another warm fierce thing she hadn't understood then. Love.
Yukine had been the first person she had loved. Her love for Mother and Father had taken longer to branch and bloom from a child's selfish attachment and instinctive need for care, but with Yukine, from the first moment, it had been love.
"I'm sorry, Gohama, I didn't mean—"
"It's okay. It's not your fault. It's just… siblings…" Gohama exhaled through the lump in her throat. "I still don't know who killed him… or even if he was killed, he could just have just died…"
His fingers clamped around the fabric of his flak jacket, resting of his lap. "If I could go back, I would take him with us, like Han—"
"Kakashi." Gohama said sternly, breaking off his destructive line of thought, not even wanting to hear it herself. "No what-ifs, no worthless regrets that will never change anything. That will only drive you mad. If there's one thing I learnt after fucking up so bad and so many times is to worry about how not to repeat the same mistakes in the future, not how I wish I could have changed the past. Don't forget what you said to me, because I haven't, what happened happened and we can only go from here, the real actual present."
"I've always been terrible at following my own advices." Kakashi answered sheepishly, the tiredness muting his voice again, but then he raised his gaze to meet hers, a new intent striking the grey, with none of the remorse, none of the always-there guilt. "I trust you to hold me up to it, Gohama. I'm asking you to." His eye mellowed, corner turning slightly in a small smile. "And maybe I can do the same for you, if you want me to."
"Kakashi…" Gohama could only whisper his name, her uncertain tongue was tied by the open giving beauty of his expression, by the love that fluttered in her heart, by the contrasting image of his steadiness, so sure and so timid too.
This time Kakashi wasn't taking half steps, hiding behind social niceties and friendly drinks out, he was saying it head on, no veil of hesitation. Kakashi's willingness to work through their issues wasn't just to lighten their burdens and drop them with finality, drop each other. He wanted them to step over their impasse, to move forward, into an actual relationship where they would be present in each other's lives, as support, as a shared reciprocal trust, as friends.
"Think about it."
Gohama wanted to say 'There's nothing to think about' but that would be a blatant petty lie when she would obsess over his words in the quietness before falling asleep, would repeat them in her memory for the pleasure and torment of her heart.
Instead she turned her face away again, her cheeks paling with shame, because they were already doing it. Gohama had started it, talking of Father, talking of Yukine, using Kakashi as emotional support for her own selfish issues while he carried the weight of an entire division, while there were children dying in a war, children that she attached to masks of dead people, never even knowing they were being robbed of their own existence, their own single and unique death.
"Why did they let them come so young?"
Gohama could hear as Kakashi's thumb continued to brush through the pages of his book, letting them fan shut.
"He had three B-rank under his belt and a lot of potential." It was so easy to make his beautiful hopeful tone fall into that resignation of a taicho with too many years of combat and war, of seeing and dealing death.
Her face snapped to his but he was looked down. "It doesn't justify it. He was a kid."
"He was a shinobi." Kakashi stated, but there was only deep tiredness in his voice. "I was younger than him, you would have been younger too had Buki lived to work on the coup with the Uchiha. We try to do what we can to protect our people, no matter our ages."
"Sending kids to war isn't protecting our people. They're what keeps the world going, what makes people strive for better. They're the future. A culture is lost when it stops caring for its future."
"Are you saying we're lost?"
"The shinobi world is more than lost, more than ill, we're rotten."
"Those are dangerous words when they come from someone with so much power and so little care for the ones in charge." His comment was a warning, she could see every word spelled out in his look, 'What other mad thing are you planning now, Kyura Gohama?'
Nothing big. Gohama knew that was not what she was meant for, she was no Uzumaki Naruto, his name running through the mouths of soldiers with so much admiration and hope. She was no Uchiha Madara – the real one – and Senju Hashirama, actualising their dream into a village. She wasn't Father who could have changed Bukigakure and the Kyura for better hadn't he died so young.
Kakashi, in all his unassuming way, was one of the most inspiring people she had met in her life, leading by example, the next in line for the Hokage position and thousands of shinobi that would follow him.
Maybe Gohama could have changed something, if she had spent her years after the massacre using her grief and persevering love into realising a dream of a better future, a good future, instead of her hate and revenge that could only add to what she so deeply despised. Gohama had stuck, glued herself to the past, a desperate attempt at clasping life, where there was only death.
And now she saw it so clearly, life could only be in the future and it contained in itself all that had been before. Her future could not be without the past and only as she reached for it could the life that had once been perpetuate itself. The Kyura had known in too, treasuring the ties of old and new.
There were no great aspirations in her heart, because the present, every new moment was simply the future being realised, was simply the thirst for another new moment, the beyond. Eternity could fit into a single instant, the simplest of lives could hold in itself all the greatness in the world.
"They are dangerous words but I'm not, not anymore. And this…" Gohama said as she poked his hitai-ate, fingertip gliding through the shinobi character. "this is us fighting for the future."
Her timing had failed but she now knew it could be entrusted to others, to people better than her, she now knew there was a possibility. A few months ago, Gohama didn't even think the words that bloomed in her mouth, rooted in her heart, could ever spill past her lips, but they did.
"This gives me hope."