in death's dream kingdom

[ura_no_ura]

Who: Hatake Kakashi and Namikaze Minato
What: Kakashi arrives in Luceti and thinks he's dead
When: July 10
Where: Somewhere in the forest....
Summary: In which Kakashi thinks he's dead and arrived in the glorious afterlife with a set of wings! ...and no clothes... OR MASK! WHEE
Rating: R for graphic depictions of violence and a warning for massive TLDR and ALL THE EMO EVER. V___V ....AND SPOILERS, LOTS OF SPOILERS.
Note: Action or prose, whatever works, I just am putting this massive thing of an intro hereeeeee /o/

It's living that's most difficult.

Living, when there is nothing left to live for, or when you've forgotten why you do in a world where boys are never really boys. They spend their childhoods running through mud that is made up of blood from the throats of grown men they cut down in the quiet of night, with only the wind and the trees to bear witness and keep their secrets (the secret is that there is never a choice. they want you to believe there is but in the end you are standing in mud that fills up your shoes and runs between your toes and a rock too large for you to move because you are too small), so no one ever really knows the truth or how they all go mad living a life that is not a life because it doesn't belong to them.

This is what they are all told when they are young: it is an honor to die for your village and have your name carved into the stone of heroes and legends. It is an honor to die, so it's the living part that's harder, the living part that remembers what your best friend was like, that can't forget the face attached to the name or the truth that is never told because no one knows it (they think they know it, but they never do; no one could know the feeling of that mud filling up your shoes). So the truth is the accusation swimming in a hundred pinwheel eyes that demand justice; justice for the empty coffin they bury with a picture inside, justice for the picture and a pair of goggles that he'll never wear again, and justice for what was implanted in Kakashi's head.

"I'm going to become your eye and see the future for you."

(The weight of those words, they're as heavy as rock. And sometimes I can't hear anything but them, when they fill up my ears and weigh me down. I was buried with you all those years ago. The rocks came down and took me with it when it took you away, and I had to live for us both. More for you, than for myself. My life stopped belonging to me the moment those rocks fell. The moment you looked at me and said you'd see the future for me. And I guess you always were looking forward when I was only ever looking back.

It's harder to look forward when there's so much there, in the past.

This grave of stone and dirt. This mausoleum of broken promises and hope. I am here but not here anymore, and I don't know how to tell you that your words are still heavy even if I can't hear them in my ears. They've grown into my spine and I can't separate them, splice them out. They are a part of me the way you've grown into me, too. And sometimes I'm not sure what parts of me are still me and what have become you. I can live with that, even if I can't live with myself. I can live for you. For her. For us. )

Life becomes this: living to remember, living in memory or for it, to keep him and her and all of the lost ones alive. You were so busy living for them that you stopped living for yourself, because you were not really alive anyway, except to memorialize the silence of all that was unspoken, all the truth that got buried with a pair of goggles and the whispers of legends of heroes that fell so sweetly from the tongues of mothers and filled up the ears of anyone who would listen. The truth got left behind, except for the sound of his voice in your head that went on for all the years after. His voice that said your name in a way no one else did.

Sometimes it was all you ever heard, in the silence after missions when the mud filled up your shoes (but it wasn't that mud, no, not the mud made up of blood that belonged to him, which you never could wash off because that blood was his, and it was all you had left of him) and the feeling reminded you of the rock you couldn't move. And maybe it was his voice saying your name the way he always did in your head that kept you alive, that gave you a reason to keep on living even when you sometimes forgot why you did in a world where boys are never really boys and the missions went on forever. Especially the kill at the end. That always took longest, every second yawning so wide you felt it pass like hours instead -- the feeling of your hand passing lightning through a man's chest and the life that left the heart a moment later.

Nights like that stretched on for an eternity, and sometimes Kakashi thought morning would never come.

Daylight was for the living, for the people who looked in the mirror and saw their own reflection, which Kakashi never saw back then. He'd look in the mirror and see the reflection of someone else. Someone with a red and white face and holes cut out for his eyes, which were not completely his own, because one of them belonged to Obito. He would look in the mirror and there would be someone else standing there, someone who was not really alive and not quite dead, but was trying to be alive or figure out what alive meant, and in the middle of all this being and not being alive, he was busy ending lives. Putting them out with his hands. He never asked why he did it or what they did to deserve it because the answers belonged to the rich man who lived in his castle far away, and the elders who wafted above the ground in fine silk robes that smelled of camphor and jasmine and not at all like the blood and dirt and the stink of death that was the smell of men who were boys and boys who were men like himself with no faces.

Only hands. Hands to kill, hands to put out the lives they were commanded to take without knowing why they should, and hands to bury the dead or the empty boxes that signified them.

Those hands, the feeling of a man dying by them, they remembered the moment because they could not forget the flesh and blood feel of life disappearing because they were told it must. And he was not really sure if it was because it was his own hands that were doing it that dragged out the moments as long as they did or if it was because he was living for someone else. For Obito who wanted to see the future, for Rin who sacrificed herself so that he might live on, and for a teacher who gave up his life to save his and the rest of the people in the village. Living for three people who were not himself made life slower and longer and made death even more so. The memories of him and him and her and everyone else who he lost along the way, every breath he took without them or for them crawled so slowly, he must have lived a thousand lifetimes by the time he died by Pain’s hand.

But death was not ready for him then.

It spat him back out to continue being what he was the moment the rocks fell: a living memorial.

He would’ve carried their memory to the ends of the earth, he could’ve carried Obito’s memory to his very last breath, but he had never thought, could’ve never imagined, that he had spent the past seventeen years of his life memorializing a boy who had never died, a boy who had been to him a hero, who grew up to tear down the world and Kakashi with it. He could’ve never thought that this is how the world would end: in a genjutsu with with his hand though Obito’s chest and a fuuma shuriken through his own.

Maybe they were meant to always be the end of the other. Two halves of one broken whole coming back together in the most violent of ways. Like two stars crashing in the distance, becoming whole for a singular moment only by destroying each other with such fury that the two parts went flying off into different worlds entirely: to the afterlife itself.

Here, Kakashi has a set of wings that are silver and tipped in black, which he flutters experimentally for a moment. And he stands without the hole in his chest that Obito had placed there just moments ago. He stands in the midst of a forest, green and filled with life, far from the battlefield, from war. From Obito, who has gone from a memory to a reality to a memory once more. Obito, whose heart he held his hand in a genjutsu just before he woke up here. A genjutsu that clearly was so powerful it must have killed him along with it.

He stares up at the sky, at the endless blue above, then back down at his hands, which are clean, and are not stained with blood. Hands that will never have to kill again. That will never hold a heart just to feel it die. That will never again be covered in blood, because the afterlife is a place where he can rest, where he no longer has to be a shinobi of Konoha, a weapon of war. Where he can close his eyes and breathe in and feel, for the first time, a kind of freedom he’d never felt before.

The setting sun casts a warm glow over the forest, painting the leaves a glorious gold that shimmers along the treetops.

Kakashi takes one step, then another, and then many more as he begins to head towards the direction of the setting sun, his new wings aching a little between his shoulderblades. They seem too small for flight, but perhaps all men and women who pass on into the afterlife are equipped with these, to remind them that they are no longer alive.

Perhaps Kakashi should regret that he’d died, to mourn the loss of his own passing. And maybe he will, in due time.

But for now, all he can feel is relief.

Because it’s finally over.