Title: Lost Generation
Rating: PG
Pairing: None
Word Count: 247
Warning/s: Kakashi Gaiden spoilers?
Summary: The war took their friends, their families, and their innocence. They never were children, but they've always been shinobi.
Notes: The summary line came first, then the first line, then the last. The middle sort of filled in by itself. I've always been fascinated by the Gaiden—in fact, I'm listening to sna's wonderful Kakashi Gaiden soundtrack right now!—and the dynamic between all the members of Team Yellow Flash. This is, I suppose, a bit more angsty than my previous drabbles, but not quite so much as Breaking My Heart.

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The war took their friends, their families, and their innocence. They never were children, but they've always been shinobi.

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Hatake Kakashi lost his left eye when he was twelve years old, and Uchiha Obito was thirteen when he lost his life.

But by that point age didn't really matter. Kakashi had been a man at seven, when he'd slid his first kunai into a beating heart and felt his fingers grow hot and slick with blood, felt the heart-beat stutter and die. He'd been a shinobi long before that, so long ago that he thinks maybe he always was. Maybe he was born with a kunai in his hand and the One Hundred Shinobi Rules tripping off his tongue, and maybe that's why his father killed himself, because he'd failed to end the war that made sure Kakashi would never be a child.

Obito came a little more slowly, but then he'd always been a little slower, a little clumsier, a little weaker. Except when it mattered, which is why Kakashi sometimes wonders if Obito really did manage to break a barrier Kakashi never could. He awakened the Sharingan (a little late) and then he died, and he died saving his friends and giving away the prize he'd won and the girl he'd loved and the life he deserved to live.

Maybe the shinobi concept of becoming a man is a little skewed. Maybe the first time you slit someone's throat isn't such a rite of passage. Maybe most of the people Kakashi knows have never really grown up.

But then, they never were children either.

And for this generation, it's always been too late, and all that's left for them to be is ninja.