[Dream | Week 8, Day 3 - Early Morning ] Burial
It's the silence that's the most dangerous part of all.
You have it down to an art, swallowing down the screams that come in the middle of the night when no one is listening. They are all so busy living their lives that they don't notice the loudness of the quiet, how wide it goes and what happens when it fills up a man that has nothing left inside because he is not a man. There were no men left in the world you lived in, except for the ones who signed the papers and controlled the money; and children from your world are never quite children, when they are spending their little lives running towards sharpened knives and living on all the legends of unremembered but not forgotten warriors that slip through the midst of the night. Their stories are told only through whispers, too many secrets curling the tongue.
No one really seems to know the underbelly of the truth, only its glory. And the truth is always glorious.
What is never told, always left out of the telling, is the silence, the sickness of it. The quiet way you all go mad living a life that is not a life but a continued existence of blood running, running, running out of broken bodies left behind under falling rocks without proper burial, holding your tongues and never speaking. Swallowing down the memories of him and her and the rest of them left behind, until there's no more room left to swallow anymore because a body can only handle so much filling before it bursts. From the pressure or from the feeling of losing a little more of yourself each time you cut out parts of you to make room for what you have to swallow.
So you keep cutting and swallowing until there's nothing left.
You thought the cycle had been broken when you arrived in this world, but you were wrong, wrong, wrong, and now his life rings itself again around your neck and cuts into you where you are soft. You thought you would be stronger than this, thought you could handle the weight of it: the knowledge that you had created a life here by forgetting Obito's, and could have prevented it like you could have prevented Obito under the rocks, with only an empty casket to bury. An empty casket and a hundred eyes with commas swimming to memorize the moment and the face of the murderer, the one who should not have lived, who came back home with Obito's eye in his head.
Some silences are too large to swallow. You choke trying to force it down.
You know this place as it knows you, know it as well as the silence. This place of rocks and green things and the memory of blood, which you left behind all those years ago, along with the boy it belonged to. Crushed and buried under these rocks.
There was a tale passed down in the village you came from, a myth that went something like this: spirits not properly laid to rest can never move on. They stay trapped in the world of the living, hungry and starved for attention, for the life that had been taken, for the rite of burial that had been denied. Their souls are tied to the earth which they lie above instead of within. And without the embrace of the earth, without being returned to that from which they came, their hunger can never cease. They begin to eat away at the souls of the living, chipping away at lives they no longer have.
You had lived so long for the both of you, that you forgot the truth of the legend. Let yourself forget that you were what kept him alive.
"I thought I told you to stop coming here, Kakashi." His voice sounds weary and resigned, buried below the rocks you stand upon.
A burial of rocks could never lay a soul to rest.
A part of you has always known this.
And maybe it is that part which stopped you from going back to that place to dig up what remained of him and give him the burial you never properly gave. But to bury him would be to bury yourself, to bury the only meaning that you had for so long, this purpose you constructed which gave you some kind of understanding of this life you could not truly call your own. Maybe that was why you never buried him after the war. Why you never broke the terms of the treaty to give him the burial he deserved.
"I don't know how to," you admit, and he materializes before your eyes the way you always see him when you speak to his name carved in stone.
Half of him is crushed, pieces of bloody bone protruding through flesh. The other half is what you remember, before the rocks came crashing down. After you had let yourself believe you could live for something besides keeping his memory alive. Maybe it was the before that arrived in this world and not the after, because you left the rocks you had always carried behind. Let Iruka take them away.
"You have to." Obito takes a step towards you and his body is crumbling apart. Each step he takes eats up a little more of the part of him that still looks alive. You want to tell him to stop, to keep his distance, because from here you can pretend that the half of him you can still see, the perfect half that still has his eye in his head, won't decay before your eyes. That he is not coming apart more with every step closer to you that he takes. You are stealing his life away again, and it's the loss that reminds you of that fact, the absence of the living part of him that grows larger than life itself. It is in the empty space where he once lay on his futon which still holds the impression of his body, in the Hitomi he left behind and in the empty clothes that you couldn't bear to part with. They carry his scent like the futon he laid upon, the one you laid next to for days after he was gone and hoped if you closed your eyes long enough, that when you woke, he would be lying there with a scowl on his face and a question in his eyes like he always did when you got too close to him.
You should have known that you were killing him. That the closeness was what did it.
But what sealed his fate was the forgetting.
How long have you been living, Kakashi?
Obito's fingers are brittle and cold when they reach your face and drag down your mask, clawing upwards and into your eye, which belongs to him. He is opening you up with his bare hands and climbing back inside, leaving behind a trail of blood and flesh and the smell of rain that fell on the day you buried an empty casket carved with his name.
He buries himself inside of you, where he has always belonged.
"You're killing us both, Kakashi. It's only a matter of time."
[ Kakashi awakes with a ragged gasp and sits up, shadows spilling over his face and body, his heart a wardrum in his chest. He can still feel Obito's hands inside of him. Hear his voice ringing in his ears. And the smell of blood is thick, as oppressive as the humidity that threatens to suffocate, cloaking him in a sheen of moisture that he has to remind himself is sweat.
He reaches for his Hitomi quietly after a moment, and turns the feed off. ]
[ooc: red text is a link]
You have it down to an art, swallowing down the screams that come in the middle of the night when no one is listening. They are all so busy living their lives that they don't notice the loudness of the quiet, how wide it goes and what happens when it fills up a man that has nothing left inside because he is not a man. There were no men left in the world you lived in, except for the ones who signed the papers and controlled the money; and children from your world are never quite children, when they are spending their little lives running towards sharpened knives and living on all the legends of unremembered but not forgotten warriors that slip through the midst of the night. Their stories are told only through whispers, too many secrets curling the tongue.
No one really seems to know the underbelly of the truth, only its glory. And the truth is always glorious.
What is never told, always left out of the telling, is the silence, the sickness of it. The quiet way you all go mad living a life that is not a life but a continued existence of blood running, running, running out of broken bodies left behind under falling rocks without proper burial, holding your tongues and never speaking. Swallowing down the memories of him and her and the rest of them left behind, until there's no more room left to swallow anymore because a body can only handle so much filling before it bursts. From the pressure or from the feeling of losing a little more of yourself each time you cut out parts of you to make room for what you have to swallow.
So you keep cutting and swallowing until there's nothing left.
You thought the cycle had been broken when you arrived in this world, but you were wrong, wrong, wrong, and now his life rings itself again around your neck and cuts into you where you are soft. You thought you would be stronger than this, thought you could handle the weight of it: the knowledge that you had created a life here by forgetting Obito's, and could have prevented it like you could have prevented Obito under the rocks, with only an empty casket to bury. An empty casket and a hundred eyes with commas swimming to memorize the moment and the face of the murderer, the one who should not have lived, who came back home with Obito's eye in his head.
Some silences are too large to swallow. You choke trying to force it down.
You know this place as it knows you, know it as well as the silence. This place of rocks and green things and the memory of blood, which you left behind all those years ago, along with the boy it belonged to. Crushed and buried under these rocks.
There was a tale passed down in the village you came from, a myth that went something like this: spirits not properly laid to rest can never move on. They stay trapped in the world of the living, hungry and starved for attention, for the life that had been taken, for the rite of burial that had been denied. Their souls are tied to the earth which they lie above instead of within. And without the embrace of the earth, without being returned to that from which they came, their hunger can never cease. They begin to eat away at the souls of the living, chipping away at lives they no longer have.
You had lived so long for the both of you, that you forgot the truth of the legend. Let yourself forget that you were what kept him alive.
"I thought I told you to stop coming here, Kakashi." His voice sounds weary and resigned, buried below the rocks you stand upon.
A burial of rocks could never lay a soul to rest.
A part of you has always known this.
And maybe it is that part which stopped you from going back to that place to dig up what remained of him and give him the burial you never properly gave. But to bury him would be to bury yourself, to bury the only meaning that you had for so long, this purpose you constructed which gave you some kind of understanding of this life you could not truly call your own. Maybe that was why you never buried him after the war. Why you never broke the terms of the treaty to give him the burial he deserved.
"I don't know how to," you admit, and he materializes before your eyes the way you always see him when you speak to his name carved in stone.
Half of him is crushed, pieces of bloody bone protruding through flesh. The other half is what you remember, before the rocks came crashing down. After you had let yourself believe you could live for something besides keeping his memory alive. Maybe it was the before that arrived in this world and not the after, because you left the rocks you had always carried behind. Let Iruka take them away.
"You have to." Obito takes a step towards you and his body is crumbling apart. Each step he takes eats up a little more of the part of him that still looks alive. You want to tell him to stop, to keep his distance, because from here you can pretend that the half of him you can still see, the perfect half that still has his eye in his head, won't decay before your eyes. That he is not coming apart more with every step closer to you that he takes. You are stealing his life away again, and it's the loss that reminds you of that fact, the absence of the living part of him that grows larger than life itself. It is in the empty space where he once lay on his futon which still holds the impression of his body, in the Hitomi he left behind and in the empty clothes that you couldn't bear to part with. They carry his scent like the futon he laid upon, the one you laid next to for days after he was gone and hoped if you closed your eyes long enough, that when you woke, he would be lying there with a scowl on his face and a question in his eyes like he always did when you got too close to him.
You should have known that you were killing him. That the closeness was what did it.
But what sealed his fate was the forgetting.
How long have you been living, Kakashi?
Obito's fingers are brittle and cold when they reach your face and drag down your mask, clawing upwards and into your eye, which belongs to him. He is opening you up with his bare hands and climbing back inside, leaving behind a trail of blood and flesh and the smell of rain that fell on the day you buried an empty casket carved with his name.
He buries himself inside of you, where he has always belonged.
"You're killing us both, Kakashi. It's only a matter of time."
[ Kakashi awakes with a ragged gasp and sits up, shadows spilling over his face and body, his heart a wardrum in his chest. He can still feel Obito's hands inside of him. Hear his voice ringing in his ears. And the smell of blood is thick, as oppressive as the humidity that threatens to suffocate, cloaking him in a sheen of moisture that he has to remind himself is sweat.
He reaches for his Hitomi quietly after a moment, and turns the feed off. ]
[ooc: red text is a link]