[Log] Marks.
Characters: Kakashi and Sai
Date: Basically forever ago which I think we decided was July 1st. Set between these two logs.
Location: Military cemetery in Ceno
Rating: G I suppose
Warnings/Notes: Smoking's the most offensive thing really. Also, the ending is terrible and I appologize for that.
Summary: An extremely shaken Kakashi contemplates what he considers to be his greatest failure, which the rest of us like to call his life. Sai interrupts by accident as he's sneaking back into Celo.
Smoke curled idly from the cigarette dangling from Kakashi’s bruised bottom lip. He inhaled slowly, half parted mouth filling his lungs more with the clean, still air surrounding him than the chemicals he was intentionally ingesting but the cherry at the end of the white stick flared up regardless. He exhaled on a sigh, shoulders caving faintly as they lost their support, hands shoving even deeper into the front pockets of his jeans. The black stone in front of him didn’t react; it simply continued its glossy glow in the bright sunlight that was completely offensive to Kakashi’s eyes.
He didn’t know what he had expected when he’d risked fines and arrest by crossing districts and entering the Ceno military cemetery. All that was really registering was that Obito’s grave looked exactly the same way it had the last time he’d come to see it, and the same way it had every time he’d come before that. On some level, it really bothered him. The grass was neatly cut, the stones had been swept, and the gravel was raked. The grave still looked new but no part of it looked fresh, like he was staring at a photograph that had faded with age. It was like nothing ever changed here, and he supposed nothing really did. Even the air around him felt still and stale, heavy on his shoulders and in his lungs.
Staring at the opaque stone, his mind meandered backwards along the path that connected him standing here to the friend he’d never appreciated enough. Familiar guilt and regret welled in the hollow space trapped by his rib cage but the anger that had driven him so many years ago had quieted. In retrospect, he knew what had gone wrong, and he’d gained the experience to know that even if he had acted differently, the outcome probably would have been the same. These days, it was simply a supine sadness that weighed in his veins like blood and ghosted through all of his thoughts and actions.
Most of the time, anyway.
Kakashi looked away from the stone, victim to shame once more as he remembered his most recent slip, his most recent betrayal. His left eye had quieted some but the lid remained closed to help it rest, his right eye was already feeling the added strain and eyesight that was starting to become sceptical on a good day was blurring the trees and the iron bars of the fence keeping them at bay together in the shadows. The rows of the cemetery were neat and perfect, the black stones were all identical and devoid of decoration, and each plot was the exact same square footage. Like everyone in life had been exactly the same size and everyone alive needed the exact same amount of space to grieve.
He hated it there, hated how everything had been standardized and everyone had been completely robbed of everything they were outside of their official duties. He hated that Obito was trapped there, among people that surely he would have hated in life, in a place designed by an organization that had never once recognized him. He hated that he’d never be buried there with him. If nothing else, Kakashi had never managed the good sense to die in the line of duty, and now he didn’t even have the sense to keep trying. The events of the morning had proved that he probably didn’t have any sense at all, and he remained suspicious as to whether or not he ever had.
“Do you remember…” his voice was muffled as he spoke around the filter of his cigarette and trailed off as the words got caught up in the rotting, sticky mess that was supposed to be his heart. A large hand slid from his pocket to steady the white stick as he took a long drag. He held his breath, letting the acrid smoke swirl and burn inside his lungs. Finally, he exhaled, feeling like he’d lost some sort of battle with that surrender to natural instinct.
With the sigh, Kakashi crouched down on his haunches, resting his elbows on his knees with the cigarette now dangling from his fingers as he stared intently at the engraved name.
“Do you remember a time where I actually knew what I was doing?” he asked, eyebrows pulling together earnestly. “I know there must have been some, but I can’t actually remember any. I can’t even remember what it feels like. You know, to have your head on straight.” The hand dangling the almost burnt out cigarette reached out and traced the dates engraved below the name. Surely at some point between those two days there had been some moment, some split second where Kakashi had managed to pull everything together. But as he stared at the dash, the space between those two key points in Obito’s life, it seemed woefully short. How could there possibly have been enough space to even draw breath, let alone achieve anything when you were given so little room.
Placed at the foot of the stone, on a small grey step, was an iron incense burner. The automaton hand stood the still smoking cigarette butt in the center of it and watched as the idle grey obscured the sparse details that summed up Obito’s entire existence and softened the sharp, clear, definitive edges of the carving. It was a cruel trick, this sudden allowance of leeway in the immutable state of the stone. Not for the first time, not even close to it, Kakashi wished they’d gotten the name wrong.
Before he realized it, his hands had slid back into the pockets of his jeans, one knee dropping down to the grass so he could pull out his key ring. The metal was sharp and a little warm against in his palm, having picked up some of the body heat from his thigh he supposed. He reached out and pressed the key to the stone and scraped. The stone didn’t scratch. So he tried again, harder, and again and again until finally he left a mark.
But one wasn’t enough. Obito had left a lifetime of marks, and Kakashi just couldn’t take the denial of them anymore.
Sai discovered from his trips to and from Ceno that the cemetery was a good place to cut through to reach one of the back roads to return into Celo. No one guarded the dead so he was free to pass through. Sai found that despite the sombre image of a cemetery, he quite enjoyed the atmosphere. In the ten minutes that it took Sai to pass through, he was allowed a comforting moment of peace. The uniformity of all the headstones soothed him and the opportunity to be silent for once was very welcome to Sai. Sai would walk through the cemetery much more frequently but a routine passing through would be suspicious. So the times in which Sai was able to pass through, he considered it a small vacation from illogical relationship forming and conversational manual books.
Sai crossed over to the path that separated each plot of land for graves and found his upstairs neighbour kneeling next to a gravestone. Sai stilled, wary that the other man would notice him because Sai was not supposed to be in Ceno. However, his neighbour was kneeling in front of a headstone that was nearly in front of the fence that Sai had to jump over. The other man's actions near the graves, however, caught Sai’s eye and spurned him forward out of curiosity.
The sight of the man defacing a grave provoked Sai to speak. "What are you doing?"
So caught up in the utter desolation and numbness of his grief, Kakashi didn’t hear the telltale shushing of boots on gravel. At that particular moment though, he was so far gone that he wouldn’t have cared. Part of him desperately wanted to be discovered. He wanted to be arrested, he wanted to be incarcerated, he wanted to be tried. He wanted a roomful of people to stamp ‘GUILTY’ all over him and imprison him for the rest of his natural life. And then he wanted to be beaten to an early finish line. He wanted all of it taken out of his hands and proclaimed in every historical record.
His large hand hesitated, paused and dropped away as he was suddenly interrupted. A simple question, a moment of contemplation, and everything Kakashi had been so wrapped up in suddenly drained away.
He straightened, blinked at the stone and then looked up, blinking blearily as if he hadn’t looked at anything for days. After a drawn out moment, Kakashi finally recognized Sai as not only a real person rather than a figment of his imagination, but as his neighbour. As someone who he was actually casual acquaintances with.
“I don’t know,” he answered finally, voice weary and raw with honesty. Once the words were past his lips, the realization of them seemed to sink into his muddled brain and awkwardness crept through his frame. He was fidgeting, one hand sliding his keys back into his pocket, the other scrubbing at his face before pulling his black mask back up over his nose. Piece by piece, Kakashi physically recomposed himself.
Sai was silent. He tried to decide what to say and what to do. Sai knew that he was relatively safe for revealing himself as Kakashi couldn't turn him in without implicating himself. Sai thought that he could just leave but Sai's feet seemed rooted to the ground. The moment he had stumbled upon seemed very personal but as Kakashi recomposed himself, Sai believed it was safe to say that that moment was over. He did not know Kakashi at all, really. The meeting after Kakashi had saved him from Milton was brief. All Sai knew of the other man was from Anko and Gaara's angry grumbles when Gaara would skulk over to stay late at night. This person in front of him didn't seem like Kakashi-from-upstairs that he has heard about so often at all.
"You were defacing a grave." His voice was surprisingly loud and clear.
Kakashi blinked at the deadpan statement, at the pure cold fact. Was that really what he’d been doing?
His mismatched eyes slanted back to Obito’s marker, taking in the newly added scuff marks that already seemed to be fading into the thick gloss of the stone. The face of the grave suddenly glowed as the slowly shifting sun hit it at the right angle, erasing the scratches even more thoroughly. Was that really what it had looked like he was doing?
Under the sleek, porous, black fabric veiling his face, his thin lips quirked up in the corners. Obito would have liked that, he, Kakashi, being chastised for defacing his, Obito’s, grave.
“He deserved it,” Kakashi replied, already his voice taking on the aloof overtones that normally characterized him, already disconnecting from this, from the events of the morning. Even as his fingers lingers one last time on the carving.
Obito Uchiha.
The digits dropped away and he stood, body slumping into his indifferent slouch as his hands slid deep into the pockets of his jeans.
“Heading home?” he enquired casually and politely, figurative mask now as firmly in place as his physical one as he offered Sai the olive branch of casual conversation. Or perhaps instigated it to sever any continuation of previous topic.
Kakashi's reason for defacing the grave was disturbing Sai's strong sense of curiosity and Sai found it difficult to resist asking why. Sai didn't want to risk the chance of starting an argument and fouling the sliver of a connection he had with this elusive neighbour, so he quickly stifled the inquiries that shot through his mind. Not only that but he didn't want the other man to ask him about his business either.
"Yes. Will you be heading home soon?" Sai replied tentatively.
Kakashi took his time answering, blinking slowly and thoughtfully (his scarred eyelid dropping and rising a second after the other) before he tilted his head back to contemplate the frustratingly clear sky. Blue, blue, nothing but blue. This blue that was associated with freedom, with hope, that was only ever cold and endless to him. Give him clouds, give him rain; anything he could see and feel. Anything other than thin air and absence.
‘Home’ was a foreign word in the ex-soldier’s vocabulary. “Mmmmm,” he replied noncommittally before turning on his heels and wandering towards the gate, leaving the youth to his adventures with the fence. Kakashi was going to try the gates today. Maybe ‘home’ would be a prison cell, maybe it would be the soft earth under foot. Nah, he wasn’t that lucky.
Date: Basically forever ago which I think we decided was July 1st. Set between these two logs.
Location: Military cemetery in Ceno
Rating: G I suppose
Warnings/Notes: Smoking's the most offensive thing really. Also, the ending is terrible and I appologize for that.
Summary: An extremely shaken Kakashi contemplates what he considers to be his greatest failure, which the rest of us like to call his life. Sai interrupts by accident as he's sneaking back into Celo.
Smoke curled idly from the cigarette dangling from Kakashi’s bruised bottom lip. He inhaled slowly, half parted mouth filling his lungs more with the clean, still air surrounding him than the chemicals he was intentionally ingesting but the cherry at the end of the white stick flared up regardless. He exhaled on a sigh, shoulders caving faintly as they lost their support, hands shoving even deeper into the front pockets of his jeans. The black stone in front of him didn’t react; it simply continued its glossy glow in the bright sunlight that was completely offensive to Kakashi’s eyes.
He didn’t know what he had expected when he’d risked fines and arrest by crossing districts and entering the Ceno military cemetery. All that was really registering was that Obito’s grave looked exactly the same way it had the last time he’d come to see it, and the same way it had every time he’d come before that. On some level, it really bothered him. The grass was neatly cut, the stones had been swept, and the gravel was raked. The grave still looked new but no part of it looked fresh, like he was staring at a photograph that had faded with age. It was like nothing ever changed here, and he supposed nothing really did. Even the air around him felt still and stale, heavy on his shoulders and in his lungs.
Staring at the opaque stone, his mind meandered backwards along the path that connected him standing here to the friend he’d never appreciated enough. Familiar guilt and regret welled in the hollow space trapped by his rib cage but the anger that had driven him so many years ago had quieted. In retrospect, he knew what had gone wrong, and he’d gained the experience to know that even if he had acted differently, the outcome probably would have been the same. These days, it was simply a supine sadness that weighed in his veins like blood and ghosted through all of his thoughts and actions.
Most of the time, anyway.
Kakashi looked away from the stone, victim to shame once more as he remembered his most recent slip, his most recent betrayal. His left eye had quieted some but the lid remained closed to help it rest, his right eye was already feeling the added strain and eyesight that was starting to become sceptical on a good day was blurring the trees and the iron bars of the fence keeping them at bay together in the shadows. The rows of the cemetery were neat and perfect, the black stones were all identical and devoid of decoration, and each plot was the exact same square footage. Like everyone in life had been exactly the same size and everyone alive needed the exact same amount of space to grieve.
He hated it there, hated how everything had been standardized and everyone had been completely robbed of everything they were outside of their official duties. He hated that Obito was trapped there, among people that surely he would have hated in life, in a place designed by an organization that had never once recognized him. He hated that he’d never be buried there with him. If nothing else, Kakashi had never managed the good sense to die in the line of duty, and now he didn’t even have the sense to keep trying. The events of the morning had proved that he probably didn’t have any sense at all, and he remained suspicious as to whether or not he ever had.
“Do you remember…” his voice was muffled as he spoke around the filter of his cigarette and trailed off as the words got caught up in the rotting, sticky mess that was supposed to be his heart. A large hand slid from his pocket to steady the white stick as he took a long drag. He held his breath, letting the acrid smoke swirl and burn inside his lungs. Finally, he exhaled, feeling like he’d lost some sort of battle with that surrender to natural instinct.
With the sigh, Kakashi crouched down on his haunches, resting his elbows on his knees with the cigarette now dangling from his fingers as he stared intently at the engraved name.
“Do you remember a time where I actually knew what I was doing?” he asked, eyebrows pulling together earnestly. “I know there must have been some, but I can’t actually remember any. I can’t even remember what it feels like. You know, to have your head on straight.” The hand dangling the almost burnt out cigarette reached out and traced the dates engraved below the name. Surely at some point between those two days there had been some moment, some split second where Kakashi had managed to pull everything together. But as he stared at the dash, the space between those two key points in Obito’s life, it seemed woefully short. How could there possibly have been enough space to even draw breath, let alone achieve anything when you were given so little room.
Placed at the foot of the stone, on a small grey step, was an iron incense burner. The automaton hand stood the still smoking cigarette butt in the center of it and watched as the idle grey obscured the sparse details that summed up Obito’s entire existence and softened the sharp, clear, definitive edges of the carving. It was a cruel trick, this sudden allowance of leeway in the immutable state of the stone. Not for the first time, not even close to it, Kakashi wished they’d gotten the name wrong.
Before he realized it, his hands had slid back into the pockets of his jeans, one knee dropping down to the grass so he could pull out his key ring. The metal was sharp and a little warm against in his palm, having picked up some of the body heat from his thigh he supposed. He reached out and pressed the key to the stone and scraped. The stone didn’t scratch. So he tried again, harder, and again and again until finally he left a mark.
But one wasn’t enough. Obito had left a lifetime of marks, and Kakashi just couldn’t take the denial of them anymore.
Sai discovered from his trips to and from Ceno that the cemetery was a good place to cut through to reach one of the back roads to return into Celo. No one guarded the dead so he was free to pass through. Sai found that despite the sombre image of a cemetery, he quite enjoyed the atmosphere. In the ten minutes that it took Sai to pass through, he was allowed a comforting moment of peace. The uniformity of all the headstones soothed him and the opportunity to be silent for once was very welcome to Sai. Sai would walk through the cemetery much more frequently but a routine passing through would be suspicious. So the times in which Sai was able to pass through, he considered it a small vacation from illogical relationship forming and conversational manual books.
Sai crossed over to the path that separated each plot of land for graves and found his upstairs neighbour kneeling next to a gravestone. Sai stilled, wary that the other man would notice him because Sai was not supposed to be in Ceno. However, his neighbour was kneeling in front of a headstone that was nearly in front of the fence that Sai had to jump over. The other man's actions near the graves, however, caught Sai’s eye and spurned him forward out of curiosity.
The sight of the man defacing a grave provoked Sai to speak. "What are you doing?"
So caught up in the utter desolation and numbness of his grief, Kakashi didn’t hear the telltale shushing of boots on gravel. At that particular moment though, he was so far gone that he wouldn’t have cared. Part of him desperately wanted to be discovered. He wanted to be arrested, he wanted to be incarcerated, he wanted to be tried. He wanted a roomful of people to stamp ‘GUILTY’ all over him and imprison him for the rest of his natural life. And then he wanted to be beaten to an early finish line. He wanted all of it taken out of his hands and proclaimed in every historical record.
His large hand hesitated, paused and dropped away as he was suddenly interrupted. A simple question, a moment of contemplation, and everything Kakashi had been so wrapped up in suddenly drained away.
He straightened, blinked at the stone and then looked up, blinking blearily as if he hadn’t looked at anything for days. After a drawn out moment, Kakashi finally recognized Sai as not only a real person rather than a figment of his imagination, but as his neighbour. As someone who he was actually casual acquaintances with.
“I don’t know,” he answered finally, voice weary and raw with honesty. Once the words were past his lips, the realization of them seemed to sink into his muddled brain and awkwardness crept through his frame. He was fidgeting, one hand sliding his keys back into his pocket, the other scrubbing at his face before pulling his black mask back up over his nose. Piece by piece, Kakashi physically recomposed himself.
Sai was silent. He tried to decide what to say and what to do. Sai knew that he was relatively safe for revealing himself as Kakashi couldn't turn him in without implicating himself. Sai thought that he could just leave but Sai's feet seemed rooted to the ground. The moment he had stumbled upon seemed very personal but as Kakashi recomposed himself, Sai believed it was safe to say that that moment was over. He did not know Kakashi at all, really. The meeting after Kakashi had saved him from Milton was brief. All Sai knew of the other man was from Anko and Gaara's angry grumbles when Gaara would skulk over to stay late at night. This person in front of him didn't seem like Kakashi-from-upstairs that he has heard about so often at all.
"You were defacing a grave." His voice was surprisingly loud and clear.
Kakashi blinked at the deadpan statement, at the pure cold fact. Was that really what he’d been doing?
His mismatched eyes slanted back to Obito’s marker, taking in the newly added scuff marks that already seemed to be fading into the thick gloss of the stone. The face of the grave suddenly glowed as the slowly shifting sun hit it at the right angle, erasing the scratches even more thoroughly. Was that really what it had looked like he was doing?
Under the sleek, porous, black fabric veiling his face, his thin lips quirked up in the corners. Obito would have liked that, he, Kakashi, being chastised for defacing his, Obito’s, grave.
“He deserved it,” Kakashi replied, already his voice taking on the aloof overtones that normally characterized him, already disconnecting from this, from the events of the morning. Even as his fingers lingers one last time on the carving.
Obito Uchiha.
The digits dropped away and he stood, body slumping into his indifferent slouch as his hands slid deep into the pockets of his jeans.
“Heading home?” he enquired casually and politely, figurative mask now as firmly in place as his physical one as he offered Sai the olive branch of casual conversation. Or perhaps instigated it to sever any continuation of previous topic.
Kakashi's reason for defacing the grave was disturbing Sai's strong sense of curiosity and Sai found it difficult to resist asking why. Sai didn't want to risk the chance of starting an argument and fouling the sliver of a connection he had with this elusive neighbour, so he quickly stifled the inquiries that shot through his mind. Not only that but he didn't want the other man to ask him about his business either.
"Yes. Will you be heading home soon?" Sai replied tentatively.
Kakashi took his time answering, blinking slowly and thoughtfully (his scarred eyelid dropping and rising a second after the other) before he tilted his head back to contemplate the frustratingly clear sky. Blue, blue, nothing but blue. This blue that was associated with freedom, with hope, that was only ever cold and endless to him. Give him clouds, give him rain; anything he could see and feel. Anything other than thin air and absence.
‘Home’ was a foreign word in the ex-soldier’s vocabulary. “Mmmmm,” he replied noncommittally before turning on his heels and wandering towards the gate, leaving the youth to his adventures with the fence. Kakashi was going to try the gates today. Maybe ‘home’ would be a prison cell, maybe it would be the soft earth under foot. Nah, he wasn’t that lucky.