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Genre: General
Rating: T
Disclaimer: If you think I own Naruto then admit yourself to your local psych ward…now!
Author's Notes: Warning: Character death.
Please R&R…Thanks! (Really, please review/begs/)
Remember, I'm taking requests too. Requests on /anyone/. That means /any character/. Not just Kakashi.
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Blood; warm, wet, sticky, red. She has seen a lot of it in her months on the frontlines.
Wars tend to involve a lot of blood; it's just one of those things. Over the months she has learnt to ignore its smell, ignore its feeling, ignore its presence.
But she can't ignore the blood this time, this tainted blood.
Red.
Sticky.
Wet.
Warm.
Flowing.
She can't ignore the blood this time because she can do nothing to stop it.
Her hands press against the wound on his chest, her chakra flows into his body.
She can feel his heartbeat slowing down, she can see death slowly take his life, she can hear his breathing become shallow and ragged.
She can't save the man who taught her about teamwork, the man who saved her life so many times, the man who gave her hope in the middle of a war when there was no hope to give.
All she can do is watch him die; watch and wait with the others.
He gave his own life to save his comrades, like he always promised he would.
"I won't let anyone on my team die." Words he spoke many times, on many missions, to many people. A promise he's rarely broken and done everything he can to hold on too.
It has always been his life line.
It was fitting, she thinks, that he will die on the battlefield. Die protecting his eternal rival.
Still, even with death inevitable and unavoidable, she pushes her chakra into his body.
His hand reaches up and grabs her arm.
"Stop," he chokes out, coughing up tainted blood, "Don't waste your chakra."
Tears sneak out of her eyes and flow down her dirty face. She tastes their saltiness when they collect at the corners of her mouth.
"I'm proud of you Sakura," he whispers, the last of his life slipping away, "Of you and Naruto. The only team I've ever passed. Make sure you tell Naruto that," his hand loosens its grip on her arm and drops back to the ground.
A smile appears on his face, the first time she's ever seen him smile with his mouth and not just his one visible eye. He had torn his mask off long ago, in the middle of the battle. He had been forced to because coughing up blood is easier when the mask is removed.
"Kakashi," A Jounin sitting beside her says.
"Mh?" the dieing Shinobi mumbles in question.
"You've served Konoha well. You've done us proud. All of us."
He chuckles, but he's cut off as he chokes on his own blood, "Thanks Genma," he mutters after coughing up more of the red, sticky, life-giving liquid.
"Tell Gai I'm sorry for losing our last, ridiculous competition. I think he was supposed to die before me."
"Don't worry eternal rival," Gai speaks up from his crouched position on the other side of his friend, his voice more subdued than normal, "You won anyways, seventy-eight to seventy-seven for you. And that's with me counting our final competition."
He chuckles again, but quieter this time, more careful of his painful wounds.
"You should have let me die," the green-clad ninja continues, grief beginning to overtake him and blood seeping out of his own, life-threatening injuries, "You're more needed in Konoha than I am."
"I won't let anyone on my team die," he replies with another sad chuckle, "That's a promise that applies even to you, Maito Gai."
He takes one more shaky breath before she feels his heart give out. A shudder passes through his body as the last of his life leaves him.
She reaches up and closes her ex-sensei's eyelids. For the first time since the silver-haired Jounin had received Obito's Sharingan eye it was deactivated. Instead of his eyelids closing on mismatched gray and red eyes they were closing on matching gray eyes. It didn't seem right to her.
Slowly, quietly, Genma unclenches the dead Jounin's hand and removes the Forbidden Scroll from his grip. The Forbidden Scroll they had been hastily sent to retrieve from the missing-nin who had managed to steal it.
They buried him underneath the apple tree and carved his name into the Memorial Stone.
Everyone asked the same questions, "Why him? Why like that? Why now?"
The Hatake clan was no more. Team Kakashi was no more.
They didn't even have time to grieve. In the middle of a war there is never time to grieve.
Konoha, the hidden village of leaves, has never been the same.