Part VII | Chapter 9
"Gohama."
At the sound of her name, Gohama's head turned from where she was staring over the edge of one of the blocks of his kamui.
Kakashi remembered still the last image of his father of when he had been alive. It had been an afternoon and he had just returned from a day in the park, his sandals carelessly thrown in the genkan and his feet leaving dirt on the wood and tatami. His father wouldn't have cared and he had only cared for a glass of water to quench his burning thirst. He had filled the glass and only when the tap closed, the sudden quietness settling over the running water, had Kakashi realised his father had been out of his study.
His father had been standing between the engawa and the room, one foot on each side of the gap for the running windows. Kakashi remembered how his heart had fluttered with fear and joy at seeing his father, after weeks of sneaking with light feet to listen to the back of a closed door, his father's chakra washing out from the wood, but there had never been any sound. There had been no sound still when his father had been watching the empty spot reserved for his mother on the engawa, her favourite place that had always silently belonged to her, even when she had no longer been there to enjoy it.
Kakashi had been ready to call for his father, hoping that night he wouldn't have dinner alone, when his father finally turned.
There hadn't been any anguish in his father's face, his expression cut out of marble, so incredibly smooth it hadn't seemed human, his eyes so incredibly dark they had looked blind. But father had seen him because he had called for him, the last thing he had said to him.
"Kakashi."
(That same murmured name would haunt him years later, his fist breaking through muscle and bone.)
And Kakashi had made up a glint of improvement on his father's face, because at least it hadn't been hurt and grief in his expression and nothing could only be better than that. So much childish illusion gleaming through his eyes, when his own heart had been cold with dread, the sight of his father so unsettling he had forgotten there was such thing as thirst in the world and water. His father had left the spot, disappeared as he had appeared, a mirage, a ghost already on his way to the afterlife.
There had been no surprise in Kakashi as he finally saw the red blood soaking into the wood of his study and the tanto piercing into the stomach of his father. It had been as recognising what he had already watched but not seen on the dead man that had last called his name.
There had been nothing of his father on that last day Kakashi saw him, there had been nothing human in the voice that had last said his name. Except perhaps for the distant memory of his only child and the distant need to watch the faint shape of his dead wife on the engawa.
Now Kakashi was seeing his father's eyes again. They weren't dark as they had been on that afternoon thirty years ago. They were grey like ash.
Kakashi had seen them blue and cut in two, had seen them burn with the fire of an ancient dragon and so much hate and agony all piercing just through him. Kakashi had seen them red, all the anguish of the world in them. Kakashi had seen them green as a forest and green as only they could be, Kakashi had seen them like ice and had seen them like void, Kakashi had seen them like dreams and hopes and home.
But he had never seen grey eyes on Gohama.
"Kakashi."
It was repeating itself, that afternoon. Even if there was no golden light falling into the dark floor of their kitchen, even if there was no childish illusion that saw what he hoped for and not what was there, even if there was no father as he called his son one last time and a son seeing and yet not seeing that there was a goodbye in those words while he wondered if he should lay two plates at the table for dinner.
The kamui had no sun and no light, no shadows to darken and brighten Gohama's pale skin and it only made her look dead, not hiding from his hopeful eyes every stale shade of hollow in Gohama's face. He had seen it before, something he desperately wished never to see again. He had seen it the day Tsukate died and Gohama had turned her face to him as now, her skin ashen, cheek red with her uncle's blood and two hollow eyes, greyer than his own.
Kakashi had wanted to take the entire weight for the world for Gohama and yet he hadn't taken a single stone.
With small careful steps, he neared her, his rebellious mind falling onto their last night in Buki, where he had stood across from her, the same blankness in her eyes, the same icy beauty of her profile and a white porcelain mask that he couldn't see through, couldn't shatter to understand what was happening underneath. Kakashi couldn't fuck up as he had then, the stakes were higher now.
He didn't have a plan. Kakashi had no plans when it came to Gohama, he had all the dreams and none of the plans.
Kakashi took one last step, leaving a cold distance between them, even if his hands were pulsing with the need to touch her, as they had that last time, in Buki.
"Gohama." He called once again, quiet, only a small whisper that wouldn't shake through the frail air around her.
She turned to face him this time, her thin gloved fingers reaching out for his hand. Kakashi puffed out the tight lump around his throat as he held her hand in his.
This wasn't Buki again, this wasn't his father again and this wasn't Rin.
Her eyes lifted to his still with that unsettling grey, not shedding even when he searched deeper behind them for everything that made them grey so he could take it on as well.
Slowly he opened his scarred eyelid, watching from any discomfort in Gohama at the red shade of Obito's sharingan. His own eye had failed and now he was seeing with the twin sharigan what Obito had done to Gohama. Genjutsu, the residues of his chakra still circling through her brain.
His nostrils flared and he forced himself into taking a deep breath. Still the cold air of the kamui was not enough to quell the boiling rage trembling under his skin.
The sight of Obito alive had blinded him, filled his heart with senseless hope and excuses, trying to overlap his own Obito, the boy that had given him his sharingan so he could see the future, the boy that had only goodness in his heart and so much burning resolve to share it with the world, with the Obito that had devastated all that they had tried to build.
Obito was still Obito, a dreamer, but all the goodness had wrapped with bitterness and hate, all those dreams had been poisoned into delusions. Even if it was Obito, Kakashi was no longer open to compromises, not when he picked Gohama apart, not when he wanted her and Naruto dead, not when he was willing to destroy their world and everything they had ever fought for.
"Not you too, my love." Her voice was softly quiet and the loving honorific only made dread freeze through him, it sounded like the confession of a dying woman.
They were standing at the edge of one of the blocks, an endless nothing spreading just a step away. Gohama's fingers had no strength as they held onto his and he wrapped his hand more firmly. He pulled her gently to him and she easily followed, her grey eyes never straying from his.
Kakashi didn't know what would happen, he didn't know if the same laws of their world applied to this empty one, he didn't know if Gohama was fully there beside him or already falling down the abyss in front of them. Kakashi would keep her there, he would hold her by the hand and he would keep her there, as she had kept him there with her hand before.
"Gohama, where are we?"
"Death."
The kamui was unlike anything in their dimension of reality, bare and cold and sunless, but there had to be more to Gohama's assumption. Obito's chakra on Gohama's mind was no longer enough to meddle with the reality around them, and still, he sent a thread of chakra through her pathways.
"We're not dead, Gohama, we're inside my kamui. Obito pulled you in, he thought I was outside and he pulled you in."
It seemed at least that Obito had believed the kage bunshin Kakashi had sent was actually him. With the time-space discontinuity, Kakashi was blind to what his kage bunshin had seen and was seeing, but he appeared to be giving Obito enough of a fight to keep him away from Gohama, hopefully he would buy them enough time.
Her hand settled above his heart, pressing down onto his flak jacket and eyes lowered to watch it. There was little need to, Kakashi was certain Gohama could hear how it hammered in fear through the air between them.
"You're alive…"
"We're alive." Kakashi reminded softly as he rested his hand above hers. "Tell me what happened, Gohama. What did Obito do?"
"They're dead."
There was only one 'they' in Gohama's life and it was her team.
Obito knew where to tear, he had done it with him and Gohama had helped pieced him together, and now he had torn through her with the same precise ruthlessness, taking advantage of Seiryu's dormancy to catch her in a genjutsu.
Kakashi just needed to pull her out from the shock, just needed to crack a vein in the unfeeling shell Gohama had crystallised around herself, that blankness in her lines, that greyness in her eyes.
"It was genjutsu. Obito put you in a genjutsu, Gohama."
"It's real. I saw them, I felt them."
His fingers rose to trace the porcelain edge of her jaw, hoping the familiarity of his soft careful touches felt real. "I know you did, Gohama. I know that you saw it and it felt real, but it wasn't true. It was genjutsu."
"No, it was real… like Buki. It makes sense, they tried to protect me… it makes sense…"
The realism of the genjutsu wasn't only from a well woven illusion that snaked around and fused with what was real. It was also that Gohama had no trouble feeling it as real, her greatest fear realised as a mirror of the past, another tear to a wound that was already there, a fear that part of her already believed would once become reality.
How could Kakashi compete against a trauma of a lifetime and that had moulded Gohama? Against the always and forever bleeding wound that was Buki's massacre? Against the great fear that that night and that devastation were attached to her, shaping every of her seconds and of her gestures?
"I can see Obito's chakra in you with the sharingan. Can't you feel it, Gohama?"
A thin crease appeared on the skin between her eyebrows and then there was a small flicker in Gohama's eyes as she searched his own. It was better, it was a start, a trace of emotion, of life behind the grey.
"It was genjustu." Kakashi's hand tried to mark the word into her flesh as he cupped her cheek.
The fog trembled and shed, Kakashi's own heart mimicking the relief washing through Gohama's expression. Her hand rose to his face, cold fingers on his cheek, and he leaned into her touch.
"Why does it matter?" His stomach froze at those odious words but there was only a frightening peace in Gohama's eyes. "Genjutsu or not, it doesn't matter."
"Gohama, what are you trying to say?"
The words were drowned in the roaring of his ears and still the sharingan read the shape of her mouth perfectly, no hesitation in the certain way her lips formed them. "Obito is right."
"What?"
His heart thundered in his chest, his ribs felt like cracking under the painful force of it, a pulse that pushed against his chest and made his lungs ache.
No. This was the worst thing Gohama could have said. No. It was the worst thing, because it wasn't her.
"We can make a world with no more suffering, no more loss, no more war. A perfect world. I can finally pay my debt."
His fingertips pressed down onto the skin of her nape. "There's no debt, Gohama, there never was a debt, especially not one you pay with your life and not for a lie."
"What does it matter when it feels like the truth? Doesn't it make it real if it feels real?"
"Do you think it would feel real? Perfectness is not real. There's death and pain and evil and shit all around, but there's also beauty and good and life. We need both, Gohama."
His hands palmed her arms and her face, Kakashi guided her own hand to feel the shape of his face and the feel of his heartbeat, his fingers traced the ragged skin of her scar and he pressed her own palm into it. All of his touches a little too forceful, a little too heavy, but there was nothing that could lift that grey.
"This is real. This feels real."
"Is it? Can you be sure that it is, Kakashi? How do you know you're not inside a genjutsu. How do you know this is not all just a nightmare? Tell me with absolute certainty that this is real, this is true, tell me."
How could Gohama look like a shell of herself, like one small touch would crack her into powder, and still hold so much sharpness in her logic? His mouth dried, tongue stuck to its roof, so tempted to roll into the lie but Kakashi couldn't lie to Gohama in this, not when he was trying to show her the truth of their fucked up world, even if they couldn't be certain that it was real.
"Tell me, Kakashi."
Not when she knew he would be lying to her.
"I can't." Kakashi breathed out, the hard words stuck to his throat and his fingers pressing down onto her arms, because with each new moment he felt like Gohama was washing away from the gaps of his fingers and he didn't know how to keep her there with him and with them, with herself.
"Then why should we let it stay a nightmare when we can make it a dream? Everything would be perfect. You'll be happy, the happiest you can be and more, no pain, no guilt and regrets. Everyone you ever loved alive and with you. All of your what-if's made true."
The sweet perfect words in Gohama's soft hopeful tone sounded like nothing but shards of glass in his ears.
"Gohama, I don't want to run away, I don't want to abandon the world they gave their lives for, the future we're fighting for. Whether it's real or not, I want this world and I want you in it. Happiness isn't about not suffering. That's what Obito doesn't understand, that's what Obito forgot."
Kakashi could see the motions of her thoughts behind Gohama's blank eyes and knew he was losing. Despair was bustling through his veins, his pathways, the lightning of his chakra smothering from inside out. His words and his actions had always been useless, he hadn't stopped Sasuke from losing himself and he hadn't brought Obito back and now Gohama was also falling away from him.
What could he do? What could he do? What could he do?
"I trust your hands with my life, Kakashi. And I trust them with my death."
Her words spurred into his brain like the sharp blade of a kunai.
Fuck. No. No. No. Gohama wasn't Rin. Never would she be Rin. Never.
"Please, Gohama, please. Listen to me… just… stay with me…"
"I will, Kakashi, always. Don't you see how good it will be? We'd be perfect. We wouldn't have to leave each other. The timing would be perfect, our lives would be perfect, my love would be perfect. I would be perfect. For you, Kakashi. Nothing would pull me back from being perfect for you, not even myself."
"You wouldn't be perfect. You'd be dead."
"Does it matter? I'd look like me, the best version of me, I'd talk like me, feel like me, smell like me, but better, the best. The perfect Gohama." She said it with a gentle expression as if she were offering him the most heartfelt present and it only made his stomach cringe.
"I don't care about perfect Gohama! I don't want her, I never wanted her. I want you! I want you, Gohama, this." Kakashi rushed out as his hands wrapped around her arms, fingers pressing down to her flesh, and maybe his touch could brand his words into her skin deeper than his voice, deeper and sharper than all those things that had carved her for all her life.
"This Gohama, this Gohama that is driving me crazy and terrifies the living shit out of me, the one I'll never stop feeling guilty about even with the amount of times she asks me to stop, the one whose parents I killed and that had a tanto to my throat and a duty to kill me, the one that makes it hurt for everything that hurts her, there are too many things for anyone to bear, and I'll do it with her if she lets me. I want the flawed Gohama…
"I want you. I love you, Gohama."
After words so full that had rushed too easily from his mouth, Kakashi felt the hand of the sudden silence as tight claws around his throat and lead between them. Gohama just watched him, a confusion in her eyes that mirrored his own, his confession as much as a surprise to him as it was to her.
The silence grew heavier and his mind was already running with anything else that could make things better for Gohama. And then there was a crack, thin and long, running down her forehead, to her nose and chin, a small fissure on the frail shell Gohama had plastered around herself.
It spread, the hollow porcelain cracking and shedding to show creases deep into Gohama's skin, the twisted shape of her mouth, the wrinkles of her forehead, all that smothered emotion finally rising up to her eyes.
The rawness ripped the air straight from his lungs, so raw and so real and free. Kakashi's fingers twitched around her arms, needing to pull her into him, holding onto her true pieces as the mask crumbled away. He didn't, he was scared of overwhelming her and so he let Gohama take her time and space, the touch of his fingers hopefully enough to show that he was there.
"Not in this war, Kakashi…" Gohama whispered, her voice breathless and her eyes so incredibly sad. "There's no place for flaws in this war…"
"Even more so in this war, Gohama. This is what this war is all about."
"What more is there for me?"
Kakashi tried to search in her expression the full meaning of her vague words. More than what? What more? More than perfection, Gohama had always measured of her life through it, and if she wasn't perfect then she was nothing. More than being a jinchurki, more than being an obstacle and a weapon, more than being a sacrifice for a victory, being a death, her life as a debt, a token and not a thing of her own?
"A life, a future. Isn't that what you want to fight for? Not only the future of the world, but of your own?"
"I don't think I can see it anymore…"
"Maybe you'll have to trust that I see it, until you can again…?" Kakashi brushed the fallen hairs away from her eyes, his voice a little too uncertain when he wanted to be firm and steady.
Gohama had a war of her own lashing behind her gaze and an eternity passed between them as they bore into each other's eyes. Her head shook softly, the corners of her lips quivering down.
He couldn't control the sting in his heart that his open and pronounced love hadn't been enough to open Gohama's own heart to a shared future between them, a future Kakashi was terrified of losing and the real world seemed to want to rip away from them. His love wasn't enough to show her how much value she had for herself, human and broken and good, from how he valued her.
"They came for me and they died…"
His heart sank, guilt burning through his stomach. Kakashi had almost forgotten what had made Gohama lose herself, so completely and selfishly focussed in his own loss of her. His thumb brushed over the downturn of her lips in a feeble attempt at consoling her.
"Gohama…"
"It felt so real, their blood… it felt so real…" Her own fingers rose to her face, wiping at her cheek, and she looked down at the curling of her hands. "Do you see blood, Kakashi?"
"There's no blood, Gohama."
"Isn't there…?" The whisper almost didn't leave her lips, in their home dimension where there was the sound of a filled world, Kakashi wouldn't have heard it.
Gohama's chin tucked down to her chest and all he could see was the crown of her head, his fingers brushing down her hair. Her palm pressed down to the scar on the nook of her shoulder, it was enough of a gesture to show him all the turmoil waging inside of her.
"I'm trying, I swear I'm trying so hard, Kakashi… I'm always trying so fucking hard… but I always lose it…" Gohama lifted her wet trembling eyes to his. "Why do I always lose it?"
The fear tormenting her throughout the war unleashed fully now, freezing Kakashi's own guts. Her fear of Shuriken, of having the mask crusted deeper than her face, built into her own nature, where she could never wash it out.
"Why, Kakashi…?"
Kakashi had thought his helplessness would have washed out when the cold shell finally cracked to show Gohama, but all the raw emotions, naked and vulnerable paralysed him just as deeply. There was something about her eyes as she looked up at him, they weren't grey anymore, even through the dread they shone with their familiar bottomless green.
She was looking up at him as if he was the measure of her world and it terrified him.
"What would I be without you, Kakashi?"
The complete reliance, the complete surrender, almost erasing—
Gohama kneeling on the ground, fallen hair hiding her face, Obito gently extending his hand to her and her accepting it, Kakashi rushing after her but holding onto nothing but air as she swirled away under his fingers. Then the fight, his bunshin avoiding every hit as if they had the sharp blade of death on their end, until one finally pierced through him.
Kakashi didn't need to tell Gohama for her to understand there was no more time left.
"I don't have anything that I can say or give you, Kakashi. I really wish I did, but I don't know how."
Gohama's fingers grasped tighter onto his flak jacket and she looked up at him with a similar earnestness of before, but her eyes were radiant green this time, hiding nothing of her inner motions.
"All I can say is that I'm here for you, Kakashi, you can drop anything and everything on me and I'll take it. I promise."
Kakashi clenched his eyes close, too many things crushing inside the walls of his chest, prickling up his throat, up to his eyes. He let his forehead press to hers, the same carvings of their hitai-ate clinked together around the void of his kamui.
"Obito is right on one thing, this world is absurd. And you, Kyura Gohama, are the most absurd thing in my life," Kakashi pulled back to see her green eyes, marking their shape once more into his memories. "but you're also the best one."
He didn't wait for Gohama's reaction to his words, his heart already tightening with a smothering emotion and now they both needed their mind sharp and muscles light and nimble. Kakashi turned around as he sensed the beginnings of Obito's chakra fluttering at the nape of his neck. "Now, let's kick some Uchiha ass."
The opening was only a second long, Obito was down, Kakashi had made him fall, exploiting his slip with ruthless precision. Seiryu's chakra was already rushing through her hand, Gohama already cutting through the air. She could feel Seiryu's anticipation running across her own pathways. He needed to see the end of this war just as much as they all did.
There was only an instant between her and the heart she had marked for her fist and yet time seemed to still, the kamui just as empty of the tac of the next second as it was of life.
Obito watched her through unfeeling eyes as she tore the space between them, death at the tip of her fingers. And still there was a flicker of something in them, something Gohama had seen before.
"You're late!"
"Shut up, Kakashi!"
The stone cracked under the halting force of her foot and with wide eyes Gohama watched as her blue burning fingers stopped on nothing but air, Obito's chest raising with a new breath, untouched.
"Kiddo!" Seiryu growled through the walls of her mind but that wasn't enough to rouse her frozen hand.
He was there, under her, even if Gohama tried to erase the image of him from the older, cruller shapes of his face. The boy was there in the creased lines of his scar, in the hatred filled eyes, in the gaze that had always been more pained than anything else.
Fuck, why had Kakashi showed her his memories, why had he made her feel everything that Obito had been to him when he was only a boy with big dreams and a bigger heart? There was that warm flicker in her again, the one that had no place in this war, the one that stung with the bitterness of betrayal. So small and yet powerful enough to wipe away the mark she had crusted onto Obito's heart.
What she was feeling, what she was seeing wasn't true, it didn't overlap with the reality of the man under her. There was hope and then there was madness and Gohama had lost to it again.
Seiryu's chakra flamed through her fist again, the blue hues gleaming over Kakashi's red sharingan.
Her eyes flickered up to him. She couldn't let him be the one to make the cruel last blow, not when he already had Rin's blood in his hands. But how could she just pierce her fist through his teammate's chest, his childhood friend, who was also the measure of his shinobi duty?
Obito's mouth spread into a sneer. "Weak."
His hand extended towards her and Gohama could feel the void of his kamui through the shape of his vine fingers, thin and slithering.
It was the hand of doom, the hand that could bring all their nightmares into being, it was the hand that could bring death and devastate life. The hand that could make her disappear.
Gohama fled from his grasp, her legs jerking her back with all the force she could put into a push as she felt the whisper of a touch on her vest. Kakashi jumped in towards them, ready to fill in her most treacherous blank. But Obito didn't follow her, he didn't spring for her, creeping through the crack on her composure. He was smarter than that, he was more devious. He was the prince that, for a decade, had held the rule of the shinobi world.
Her feet landed, an infinite stretch of cold dark stone settling between her and Obito as his held onto Kakashi's hair instead, pulling his vulnerable neck open for the tip of a metal rod.
"Give me the biju." He ordered so simply, not a tone of command in his voice. There was no need for it, his hands shaped the biggest threat in her life.
Because he had tried to fill in her blank, Kakashi had let his breach open and she hadn't been there to close it back for him.
"You won't kill him."
As he spoke, Obito neared the sharp edge to Kakashi's jugular. "If even you with your weakness almost did, why wouldn't I? Never underestimate the force of a purpose, Shuriken."
The image of that shrill piece, a breath away from Kakashi's neck, close enough that the raise of his pulse point seemed to brush against it, froze through all of her. In her mind there was only that image, growing, drowning, deforming into a pull of blood on the ground and Kakashi's dead eyes accusing her, piercing her from the other side of that infinite strip of stone.
An unbearable pull coiled around her stomach, bile raising up her throat, spreading through her numb limbs.
"Still naïve." Obito ground out and then it was gone, almost commanded by his words.
It hadn't been her own, but Kakashi as he tried to kamui her away, back into their world. It jump-started her heart, its pumps hammering against her small constricting ribs. Gohama lifted her trembling eyes from that point of death to Kakashi's own.
He looked so calmly at her, so steadily, not a hint of all the dread crashing into her behind the mismatched colour of his eyes. He looked at her as if they weren't standing on a precipice, as if his childhood friend and the boy that had shaped the man he was today wasn't using him as a means to an end, wasn't ready to kill him so he could kill her later.
It cringed through her, scrapped her from inside out and Gohama lifted her gaze to Obito, her lip curling over her teeth, fists closing to hide her shaking fingers.
"You're using the life of your childhood best friend as a bargaining chip." She spit out, the rumble of her growl growing from all the hate that had always crusted around herself and that now coated him instead.
"What part about this world being an unfair son of a bitch didn't you understand?"
In that moment, she hated him more than she had ever hated herself.
"It's not the world. It's you, Obito, you're the scum here."
Gohama turned her head to the side, letting the loose hair of her braid fall to cover her profile. If she was hidden from them then she was free to let the reality settle and burn. Her face crumpled onto itself, the horror twisting its lines, digging creases deep around her mouth and eyes, it hurt as if her skin was being torn straight from her bones. She let out the rasp of a breath when all her lungs wished for was a scream that would release them from their doom.
What could she do? She couldn't even think, her thoughts nothing but vague fragments of her mind.
Had every decision in her life slotted themselves into this? Where had it gone so wrong? Where was it that the curse of failure had etched itself into every single cell of her being? The war, the Shuriken, Konoha, the massacre, her birth? There were so many things she could have done differently, if only Gohama had known better, if only she had trained more, if only there wasn't weakness stuck forever into every piece of herself.
Weak, Obito had sneered, and he was right.
She should have killed him. She should never have come back to the war. She should never have left the monastery. She should never have survived the massacre. She should never have been born into the legacy of Kyura Gohama.
Please! Kami-sama! Kami-sama, please!
And she waited for something to come slithering out of the void around the kamui but there was nothing.
Why would they listen to her now? Why would they answer to this scrap of the earth? Why would they rescue them from the tragedy of their doing?
There was always silence and nothing. Silence and nothing.
This was what her life had been leading to. For a moment, Gohama had closed her eyes and hoped and somehow… somehow she hoped still. The wasteland of her heart burning with fury and revolt against and for the world.
Her flesh seemed to melt off her bones as Seiryu's chakra boiled in her core and rose, scorching and devastating, up to her skin. His power spread, the ancient blue of his chakra solidifying around her as a second skin and still it was never enough to wash her of her tragedy, of herself.
"Control the chakra or Kakashi is dead."
Kakashi is dead.
The bond between the words, too real and too searing, was enough to yank her back from the despair burning inside and out of her, Seiryu's chakra rushing back into her core.
No thinking. Gohama didn't need to think, only to do, thinking only paralysed her and this time the only possible decision was already made. The consciousness of the full reach and height of that decision didn't matter now. Once Kakashi was safe and away, she would think.
Gohama inhaled once, the crisp air of their kamui soothing down the bile in her throat and the lead in her lungs. Her eyes opened to the dark void around them, her muscles mellowing and creases smoothing, eyes softening. It wasn't a mask this time, because she felt the calmness of resolve around the chaos, and most of all, above everything and immersing all around them, Gohama felt her love for Kakashi.
She turned her face to see him and nothing else mattered now but him, the familiar colour of his red and grey eyes, the familiar shape of his face and just the sight of him impinged worth to all her life.
"Gohama, no, no. Don't you dare. That's the cruellest thing you could ever do to me..."
"I know."
Only now did she realise it was always like this with them. If one wavered and the other held strong, and when one held strong the other was safe to waver, but it never seemed as if they could be fine together.
"I can also give my life for the world."
"The choice is in my hands."
"Don't give up. The war, we can't lose. The stakes are too high. Please, don't give up, Gohama…"
"I'm not. I'm entrusting the future to Naruto, to the Alliance, to you, Rokudaime Hokage."
Even through his franticness, Gohama drank in the sight of him before raising her eyes to Obito. The rushing of her heart through her ears was comforting, it helped her mind distance itself from the sounds of Kakashi's begging as she took a step forward.
No thinking.
"You have me. Get him away from here."
Another black receiver sprouted from the palm of his hand and Obito threw it towards her. Gohama didn't move as it tore through the air and pierced into the muscle of her shoulder, the growl of pain staying locked in her throat.
"Gohama!"
Only her tendons shook at Kakashi's shout, and yet the despairing tone of his voice rocked through every piece and crevasse of her, her heart physically hurting with each new pump of blood.
Only the sounds of the massacre had ever unearthed her this badly. Gohama knew it would haunt her for the rest of her life. It was the kind of sound that would wake her up in sweat-drenched nightmares and tear her from the obliviousness of the day-to-day life, that would remind her this world was as horrifying as it was good each time she laughed a little too much, each time there was calm in her life, that would make the quiet whispering of the wind in her cheeks feel like blades under the deep blue of a summer day.
"You said you'd take everything for me. You promised me, so take it. Take my death."
And those words were worse than the scream of her name. They were enough to make her feet falter in the already marked path for them, to break the stones that made it up in two. Gohama's eyes ached as she stared in horror at Kakashi and saw that the horror was gone from him, leaving only certainty and that burning plea.
"You promised me everything, Gohama, everything for me. And I'm begging you to take it. Take my death."
Her dried lips parted, no breath left through them, not when there was a void where her ribs should be.
And then Kakashi was gone.
Something wrenched at her chest and only when she heard her own scream of pain, the tear of the flesh and the break of her collarbone still louder than her voice, did she realise it was actual physical pain. Seiryu's chakra exploded through her pathways but it only seared like vines into her skin. It was the purple chains than sucked in chakra and the more she tried to fight them the more they emptied her pathways.
This was the power of the rinnengan. The power of the gods that were only silence and nothing.
That same coil returned and only grew, the clashing forces ripping her apart, as Kakashi's sharingan tried to yank her to him and Obito tried to keep her there, face creasing with the effort of it. Gohama knew who would win, even human will wasn't enough against reality. The white side of Obito's face was more resistant than any human material could be.
Kakashi was wasting so much chakra and in the back of her eyes she could see him fighting through the pain stabbing from his eye to the back of his skull, could see the cursed line of blood falling down the side of his nose.
Her chakraless hands snapped for Obito's eyes, rinnegan or sharigan, it didn't matter, if one was gone it would have to be enough. Her fingers scrapped the angle of his brows and Obito caught her arms. He twisted, her bone cracking under his grasp, and Gohama's fingers buried deeper into the sockets.
She wasn't fast enough, in her weakness, it took him only a touch of his foot to her leg for Gohama to fall to her knees. He looked down at her, eyes untouched.
"Seiryu?"
Just from the tone of her voice, he understood her perfectly. "There has to be another way."
Buki had wanted her to be an unfailing weapon, it was only fitting that she would fail entirely, had wanted her to be an otherworldly saviour, meant to protect an entire village. Father had wanted her to be someone like Naruto, a hero that burned hope into people's hearts and made change into better things.
Gohama had failed all that but it was okay, she would also fail all that wasn't that. Her future whatever it could have brought her, she would fail that. Her death didn't belong just to her. She had saved and failed Kakashi, she would fail her boys again.
There was one thing she wouldn't fail, the one thing that was the size of the world.
Even through the fear, even through the grief, even through the quivering of her heart and fingers, her spirit was clear, sharp, the sharpness of the blade of her tanto when for the past days everything had seemed so hazy and uncertain.
No thinking, Gohama had to stop thinking and just do it. Thinking made a coward of her.
What needed to be done had to be done.
"We always seem to end up here, don't we, my dear old lizard?"
"Kiddo… If only you weren't stuck to me…"
"It's not your fault."
Gohama wrought her and Seiryu's chakra from her core into a steady flow inside her pathways, the overload already burning them.
"It was good, it could have been much better, but it was good."
"You are good, Gohama."
Gohama's lips turned into a soft smile. It was a merciful lie, but this time she wouldn't fight Seiryu on it.
"You're going to fail, Obito." Gohama spat as she gathered Seiryu's and her own chakra at the edge of her chakra points. "You can't cheat time, you can't cheat reality. You can't cheat death."
"Neither can you, Kyura Gohama. Your death belongs to me." Obito growled as he tore her arm guard away to expose the dark blue lines of her and Seiryu's seal.
"I'm afraid not," Gohama hissed through clenched teeth at the pain. "you're the one person it doesn't belong to."
Their chakra blasted out of her, the largest explosion Gohama had ever made, crushing through her pathways, blowing away at her pressure points and everything around her. It was as if she had set her body on fire, metal rod melting with her skin, and still Gohama pushed on, each time faster, more powerful, and when she thought she couldn't fight the blurring of her mind, the chains gave out, or perhaps Obito had.
Her tanto was already in her hand as she fell to the ground alone, the edges of her vision dark, and her fingers clutched tighter onto the corded handle. At least Kakashi wouldn't be there to see it, Obito showing her a flicker of mercy in all of his cruelty, taking the decision away from them when he pulled Kakashi out of the kamui.
As if summoned by her thoughts, her eyes were seeing him above her, expression twisted with the despair she had quieted in her core, that drop of blood printed into his skin. Gohama tried to lift her tanto to the place above her heart through the burst of burning and tearing pain but he stopped her.
It was a repeated gesture from an evening that now seemed too long ago, her mind had always liked repeating gestures in her visions.
Gohama's spine snapped straight in pain, her throat rasping out a howl against her clenched teeth as his fingers buried into the wound on her shoulder, trying to dig out the chakra receiver melted into her flesh.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Hama, but I need to take it out. I'm so sorry."
Her glassy vision opened to the dark sky above her, not the darkness of a foreign void, but the darkness of clouds and rain. It wasn't a vision, Kakashi had pulled her out of the kamui.
"He's going to come back, Kakashi, and I can't fight."
Kakashi's serious eyes roamed through her as he tried to understand what to do next on putting together the scattered pieces of the broken doll that she was.
"Gai and Naruto are coming. I'm getting us out of here." He was using his taicho voice, stout and detached, but his resolve went against everything that was the Alliance taicho, deserting the battlefield for a woman, delaying what was inevitable instead of facing it head on.
"Our duty is to the Alliance, our duty is to the world."
"No. No. No. I need to protect you. I need… I need it. Please." Kakashi ground out, his fingers burying in the soil beside her head, too afraid that touching her would shatter her body more. "Can't you see it, Gohama…? don't you know…?"
Still, her burnt fingers curled around the back of his hand and pushed the remains of Seiryu's chakra into him. She could only share a few wisps and still they scrapped her devastated pathways, toyed with her ability to keep her consciousness. And then, the last drops of her own chakra, it wouldn't last long in his body but at least for a few moments he could keep her there, Kakashi would carry her in him.
All that was a modicum of pain compared to the words in her mouth. "I know, but I've made my choice."
And maybe it would be the worst choice of her life, maybe it would be worse than fleeing Buki on Yukine's back, worse than pressing a tanto to Kakashi's throat the same night she had learnt it with her lips, worse than every single choice that had led them to this. But it was her choice to make, it was hers.
"Gohama." Her name gurgled in his throat, his fingers trembling as they tried to tug a clasp of his vest open. "It's the worst possible choice. We're fighting for our lives this time. Remember?"
Gohama tried to focus on the blur that was his face, tried to see him in all of his rawness, even with how much it hurt. He deserved that she hurt for how infinitely more she was hurting him, how infinitely more she would hurt him.
"I'm a Kyura."
Her hand slowly and painfully lifted for his face, finger tracing down the red mark of blood falling from his sharingan down the side of his nose, flowing as much chakra as she could into his eye. It was another repeated gesture, she had been the one looking down then and he had been the one with death in his veins.
That drop had been what had marked Gohama to Kakashi, surrendered and bonded her to him. It would do so once again, now and forever.
"My life is in my bonds."
"No. No. No." Kakashi repeated in harsh rasps of his throat.
He ripped her tanto from her fingers and threw it away. The clasp of his vest finally came free, a scroll falling onto his hands. Kakashi unrolled it on top of her, a transportation scroll. He had already planned to tear her away from the battlefield if things became this desperate.
"It's my selfish choice, it's mine. The burden of it falls onto me." He hissed.
His chakra built up as his fingers shaped the needed signs with lightning-speed. They formed the tiger seal sharply and finally. There was no tug and no pull, no nausea or fragmentation, they were still under the same sky.
"Did you think I wouldn't learn anything from our first fight?" Obito asked from behind them and Kakashi's face crumbled with all his hope. "Kyura Gohama always runs away when things get dire. Buki, Konoha, Buki again, our fight, the past months and now… The moment I sealed her with the black receiver, this battlefield became her cage. There's no running away this time."
Kakashi pulled himself up, hand pushing on his knee as if the entire weight of the world was on his shoulders and still his eyes burned with a wildness and ferocity Gohama had only seen once in him, on a cursed night behind the holes of a porcelain mask.
"You have a life of your own, Gohama. I'll make sure you do."
His chakra signature exploded, his lightning prickling into her tattered skin, smothering the air until she could barely breathe. It wasn't the time to let the awe freeze her. She searched for the glint of metal of her tanto through the dark edges and white spots flashing in her eyes. She just needed to hold on to consciousness a little longer, just a little longer and then her mind would be free to sleep forever.
Her arm stretched, fingers brushing over the familiar touch of the handle, but before she could reach it, the chakra chains slithered around her. The same unbreakable push from the rinnegan she had felt during their first battle rushed through the field, throwing rocks and boulders away, throwing her tanto and Kakashi powerlessly away from her. Gohama stayed, the chains sealing her still to her doom.
Obito's steps clinked against the gravel as he neared her and crouched down to her level. Gohama's eyes watched the grey clouds, waiting for the clearer gaps to breach open and swallow her whole. He grabbed her arm and twisted it to expose their seal, a bit down shriek scrapped against her throat.
"Your Kyura scrolls were very useful."
Obito pushed his palm down on it and pain shattered through her pathways. Her very soul was being wrenched, torn away from herself and her teeth weren't enough to keep her scream down.
A fear, a fear that didn't feel her own shook through her muscles and a bottomless grief drowned her heart. The fear didn't feel her own because it wasn't hers, it was Seiryu's. Whatever Obito was doing with the seal seemed to be blending their chakra until they didn't know when one started and the other ended.
Seiryu's memories settled in her mind as if she had lived them herself, as if they had always had that place in her heart, knowledge of centuries of the world, but, most importantly, it was Seiryu's own knowledge, shaped and built through him.
"The time shall come when you will become one…" A horned man, so pale he was almost white spoke to the small biju, Otsutsuki Hagoromo, Seiryu's father. "You each carry a name… And with a different shape than you had up to now, you will be shown a righteous path, different from the time you spent inside of me. What is true power… Until that time…"
Seiryu looked down onto Naruto as he faced the masked man, his voice made of liberating fire, his dreams realer and brighter than the sun.
He had brought the memories forth to share his own hope with her, his hope that Naruto was the one the Sage of the Sixth Paths had spoken of, his hope that the Alliance would win the war.
The abyss that had always seemed to spread between her and Seiryu crashed into itself, so suddenly and so naturally.
They were together, biju and jinchurki, they were always together.
At least, the world had given her this one small consolation in the middle of the furious anguish that was her heart.
"Obito!"
The scream of despair from Kakashi ripped her back to the front, Seiryu an underlying presence in everything that they were living, pulling at her own motions, blurring them until she didn't know if there was even something of her own anymore.
Gohama opened her eyes to find the sky, herself dangling from Obito's grasp onto the void of the statue's mouth. Her vision misted over with tears, the sharp wind cooling them against the sides of her face. Her physical pain had grown quiet and she couldn't hide behind it anymore.
The pain slashing through Kakashi's lungs now would only grow and pester in him, in her boys, Yukine, Seiryu. She could feel the looming hole of their grief in herself now. The entire world. Because her death wasn't only her own and she was losing it to the one bastard who had no right to it.
This had to be the biggest failure of her life. But there was hope, even if it felt that her own life was the complete breadth of the universe, everything was greater than her self and this time there was hope because it wasn't in her.
Gohama just looked up at the sky, even if it carried nothing in its grey.
Obito seemed to be stretching the seconds, maybe taunting her with hope, maybe tormenting her with the sounds of Kakashi's misery, echoing what was yet to come to him and all of her dearest snowdrops. She just looked up at the sky, let it be the measure of all her thoughts, let its faraway emptiness wash over all the useless regrets in her heart.
His arm stretched farther into the mouth of the statue, a few useless centimetres that wouldn't add any more certainty to her fall.
"You don't need to worry. He'll have everything he ever wanted in his dream."
Her eyes lowered to her killer, the tone of his voice ringing with something hidden, something wounded. Obito wasn't even looking at her, his unseeing gaze stuck somewhere beside her face and still Gohama could guess all that moved behind it. He was standing at the edge of a precipice just as she had been.
Was this what Father had felt with Kakashi as he ruled over the thread of his life, defeat and a bitter warm wave of understanding?
"You didn't kill him… you could have killed him but you didn't. This thing… it's not just for Rin."
Obito snapped his eyes to hers and all she could see was the shape of Kakashi's sharingan.
"You never lost your habit of making people wait for you…"
Maybe if Kakashi was going to lose one of his precious people, she could help give him another one back.
"You're late, Obito."
His eyes widened for a moment, his mask chipping down the middle of his face, following the creases of his scar, and without the mask he couldn't hide anything from her, he couldn't hide the glimpse of a buried boy. There was an absurd chuckle bubbling in her chest, because it seemed Kakashi had a type. Her beautiful loving Kakashi and his cruel destructive type.
Obito pressed his fingers harder into her neck, too much personal emotion seeping through the hold. Gohama watched Kakashi's sharingan. Then, hitting as a jerk against her ribs, he let go of her.
Gohama was falling, the panic clawing at her chest as with each new endless second, that never lasted long enough, the darkness spread at the corner of her eyes, the light on top a mere dot.
As a child, Gohama had always wondered how she would die. A large act of sacrifice, so great it would save an entire village, a great heroic death that sang of victory even through the silence of nothing, a death that would tie her to the future. Later there was the dream of a return home with honour and love in her hands, the dream of release after a fulfilled promise, the dream of rest.
For so long, the way she died had been more important than the way she lived, her death the reflection and the consummation of her life.
Her life was ending in a failure, the greatest of all, one so large it would erase all she had ever built with it.
There was no peace this time, there was no freedom and no relief. There was only gut-wrenching mind-tearing terror.
Everything always came down to death, didn't it?