[log | week 1 day 5] now die, for the debt you have accrued

[a_for_tiori]

Who: Uchiha Sasuke, Hatake Kakashi
Status: Active and Closed
Style: Paragraph
Where: Hisato - Kakashi's place
When: Week 1, Day 5, evening/night
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Burnsauce

Comments

[ura_no_ura]

A thing like that can be dangerous.

Letting this consume you. Something hot and burning at the pit of your stomach that feels and tastes like anger but is really something else. Because you need it to survive, this thing. Need it to tell you who you are and what you can call your own. That your hands are your hands, and they belong to you like the eyes that are in your head, looking at a world that doesn't understand and never could. Because your life is not really your life and it has not been since the day you were born.

You are lost in the pull of the wind, without any place to go and nowhere where you belong.

But at least you have this: this anger, spiraling out in hot, prickling waves that burns what's inside more than the outside part.

And Kakashi knows that feeling too. Knows what it's like to not have any ownership over yourself. So you reach for something else instead. Anger or emptiness, whatever fills the palm of your hand and gives you a sense of purpose. A sense of meaning in a life that never really had one.

He saw it in Sasuke's eyes back then, when he still had it -- a purpose driven by the fire that burned on the inside but never reached the outside part. The outside was all smooth polished rock that Sasuke held around himself so tightly, it squeezed the air out of his lungs and replaced it with something hot and vicious.

Kakashi never understood how he could breathe like that when every breath was desperate and burning for vengeance instead of air. But in between the breaths that Sasuke took which felt like fire and burning, there was something else. A different kind of breathing in a memory that once puffed against the curve of Kakashi's neck. It felt like too much loss and smelled like the tears of a thirteen-year-old boy who woke up screaming in the middle of the night under the same sky that had watched his brother cut his family down. And the grief was so great, so deep in those breaths, it soaked through fabric and skin until Kakashi held it too, held it the way he held Sasuke's small, shaking body and waited for him to calm down.

It's something he can never let go of. That grief, like a river that pulls and pulls until the sky is gone and all you can see is water. And when you breathe, it fills your mouth and lungs. You can drown that way. Trying to swim to the surface, but the currents never let go.

Or maybe it's you who doesn't know how. Because your eyes are always looking back, while you take steps forward.

So when Kakashi felt that distant burn, a dangerous chakra filled with fire and anger and threatened to spill out of control, he knew immediately what and who it was.

And that is why he is standing outside of his house, pulling the zipper of his vest up with one hand as he adjusts the kunai holster around his thigh with the other. Iruka's still inside, and if this is going to get ugly, Kakashi knows he needs to lead Sasuke away. He's not sure why Sasuke's coming towards him with this kind of intent, but it's not like he hasn't felt it before: a feeling ready to stab, hungry for blood.