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He carries her smile.
Even though it's pointless since he covers his mouth with a health-freak's conscience, it's her particular way of stretching her lips in mirth that he wears. That way of diffusing a situation, that way of cheerful innocence – that way of smiling. And when that too-vivid picture of her rosy cheeks and pale hair and dark, dark eyes lacerates his retina yet again, he loves her.
He carries his grin.
Even though it's useless because, damn it, he's gone and sacrificed himself and he'll never come back to see his confident grin that inspires plastered on the face of another teacher. Never see him with these young bodies of hopes and dreams and aspirations; grinning for all he's worth, curving his eyes into amused arcs at their antics. And when the pale-haired girl attempts to – like that girl whose smile he carries – ease the tension between her two boys, he loves them.
He carries his person.
It's not pointless. It's not useless. It's his sphere of heroic, gods-damned sacrifice that sits in his left eye socket; that whirrs with pain and tears and anguish at all this loss, this agony-beast that trails him, stalks him, and finally snares him into a death-trap of endless misery. It's his red-black-evil eye that's saved his life more times than there are stars in the sky – stars that she stared up at before she – and it's this spinning-spiraling-never-ending-nightmare that reminds him each day when he glares at the grimy mirror to visit the person he carries. It doesn't matter that he's not actually there, underneath the underneath, but he breathes in a little bit of him from the unsympathetic stone ingrained with the harshest words of his world. It helps. It helps him to go about life with his inability to arrive on time, his forever-youthful vigor, his spirit – his love for the girl who saved their lives.
Kakashi carries these parts of them in his empty self and becomes who they were.
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