Fic: "Red Days" (yama/kaka)
Title: Red Days
Raing: M for language, dark themes, sexual situations, and a severe amount of angst.
Pairing; Yamato/ Kakashi
Disclaimer; I don't own Naruto
A/N: So this is a Yamato fic, and it was done as an exchange with erxyl. Supposed to be about Yamato and his feelings about Orochimaru, with the prompt "not enough".
Somehow my wierd!ypsychol!Kakashi snuck in and it transformed into a Yama/Kaka with Orochimaru flashys. Hope you enjoy!
Warnings: Rated M for sexual situations, dark flashbacks, some weird psychological issues with both Kakashi and Yamato, and a serious amount of wierd.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. At all. Not even a kunai.
Pairings: Yamato/Kakashi, a twisty side reference to Obito/Kakashi, and a little squicky Oro/Yamato
Red Days
And I would long for my ghosts to follow,
If not for shame that they would see.
Konohagakure sometimes has those days, right before spring hits the brick wall of summer, where the air hangs stagnant and thick and the sun shines with a dark cast to the edges of its rays, as though it wants to trick you into thinking it is twilight.
The trees look like knurled roots on this sort of day, and when you turn the corner you start, even though there is nothing to flinch at. On these days, purposes peter out quickly, and motivation comes in slow, taffy-stretched drips. People wander. It is common to see a child crying, overcome by the pressure of the heavy air on their fragile skull. It is also common to hear your ghosts on the occasional breeze, and so most shinobi stay inside.
They have more ghosts then most people you see, and it gets hard to organize them when you go walking and they all lie whispering in your path like hopscotch stones.
Yamato stays inside those days, for example, and today is no exception. He calls them the Red days. Yamato has always named things, his habit from childhood of christening everything he could lay his hands on with a slightly manic pleasure. He remembers them all too. Remembers everyone's names. What sort of manners would he have if he didn't? Manners are important.
On this Red day, Yamato cuddles up under the sheets of his bed (named Miri) and waits for the dreams to come. It's only the polite thing to do.
They do come. It's always the red days. (They actually come a lot more often then just the red days, but Yamato likes to think that they don't. It's not as if it really affects him, his performance, his self, at all.)
ooo
It starts out slow, and so very benign that he is always lured into a sense of security. Perhaps that is because he is small, very small, and when you are that small you think that nothing bad will ever happen.
Perhaps that is how life is. You start out thinking that nothing has ever been wrong with the world. Then as you grow you realize that in fact you were actually very, very wrong. The earlier you realize this, the more prepared for life you are and the less pain you will have to deal with as you grow wrinkles. Or perhaps the earlier you realize this the more fucked up you are, but Yamato has always been an optimistic sort of person.
In any case, he is very, very small, so tiny that when he lifts his hands up in front of his face, they barely block out the light that hangs fluorescent-glaring and shiny above his head and the table he lies on. The table he's decided to call Nicks. It's all smooth and shiny and cold, only it has nicks and scratches around the edges, scoring lines in the stainless-steel that look like someone's fingernails decided to scratch at the tables itches. Yamato doesn't know that tables don't have itches.
So he lies there very quietly, because he must be good. If he is good, nothing bad will ever happen. This is around the time in the dream where things start to darken around the edges, and he feels a strange sense of waiting. He wants to leave but he has to wait. He wants to leave, but they aren't going to let him. He wants to leave but- someone is there, a man with black hair so dark that it looks like spilled ink, and Yamato can't see their face. Yamato feels something like sick in this mouth, and something like scales in his ears, and then something is hurting him, sharp and stinging in his stomach as something goes in and the mans hands move too fast for Yamato to see. Everything moves inside of him, shifts and splits and splices and oh, it hurts. His fingernails are scratching at Nicks itches as trees sprout thick and leafy from his palms.
This is where in the dream Yamato realizes that this has happened before, and it will happen again and again and again, for days and days and days. He remembers that Nicks' scratches were all made by him, and he remembers that he doesn't remember a life outside of this room. This is all that has ever existed.
If nothing bad has ever happened in the world, then he guesses that he's not in the world yet.
The black-night-ink-dark head turns, and its face is sleek and pristine and pasted on the insides of his tiny eyelids as they observe him clinically, taking some sort of notes on a clipboard. "Hn. Perhaps this compound is not enough..."
ooo
Yamato dreams multiple times. When he wakes up, he is still-the pond that has frozen too quickly. He stares at the ceiling and considers the cracks that run along the edge of the wall as his heart thumps a tattoo beat on his ribcage, so hard it hurts to draw breath. He feels his ghosts wandering around the room, poking around his things. He considers telling them not to mess with the eggs he's put in Spoilo (the fridge) but decides they probably aren't interested in the greening contents anyway.
They are interested in seeping into his mind, leaving a footprint, leaving a memory. They are interested in being that thing that makes him flinch. They relish it. He can hear their giggles, chalkboard rough and shrilling. It could be that they are interested in sticking him full of somebody else's DNA, someone else's code of wonders, interested in watching him sprout wood from every conceivable orifice of his body and not be able to retract it. Measuring the way eye color changes, hair gets coarser, skin darkens about a shade and a half. Sliding fluid into the hollows of his finger bones to make them bend easier when petrified wood spreads up his extremities. It could be. But no, none seem to, yet.
Yamato stumbles from the bed. Sweat has dried in cold tracks down his temples, made his sheets stick to his legs. He sits down at Marci, his (ceramic) kitchen table and puts his chin in his hands, staring out the window at the tranquil play of Red Day pink and gray light, full of secrets and sadness, blinking away yellow eyes from his sight and a childish, irrational urge to dig his fingers into poor Marci's formica top.
Outside, a flicker of movement catches his shinobi eye through the window. A red scarf, a wildfire of silver hair that splashes bright against the monochrome sky shifting with all varieties of gray. Kakashi-sempai.
Yamato debates with himself for a moment. Stay in safe, or go tend to his superior who is crazy enough to be outside with all the ghosts on a Red Day? Kakashi has a great many ghosts, Yamato knows. More perhaps than he does. Yamato doesn't know the exact number. Unlike Kakashi, he doesn't count any of his spider-silk followers. Except one.
After a moment, Yamato has almost decided to let it go and start polishing a kunai or two, when something shutters and winks at the corner of his vision, caught in the web of tumbleweed wind that blows eerily on a day like this in Konoha, breezing into the cracks between your doors and your mind. A garden snake's discarded skin.
Yamato leaves immedialty. It's only good manners, and he has impeccable ones.
ooo
When he catches up to Kakashi, reading amiably at that ramen stand Naruto-kun was obsessed with, Yamato is beginning to regret coming out. The sun cries like an abandoned baby in the sky, and he has twitched at two disembodied thoughts and three housecats on the way here. He shoulders his way through ghosts; Kakashi seems to string them along like toys. A few latch onto his shoulders. They put their cracked corpse-breath lips by his ear and moan, maggot-slippery fingers and trailing ropes of hair gripping his clothes.
He notices some of his own; a war-orphan casualty here, a lost ex- shinobi with a dagger still in his chest there.
One of them, an ANBU assassination victim, Kakashi notices too. His eye crinkles. "Care for a hot meal, pretty lady?" The ghost turns her slit-red and gaping mouth towards him. Yamato recognizes her; she is from a mission that both he and Kakashi wore bone and black for, back when they were often ANBU mission partners. Kakashi glances at him. "Ah Tenzou-kun. Coming to find me again?"
"I thought we agreed that I would be called Yamato from now on Kakahshi-sempai."
He ignores the way Kakashi puts a few coins on the table, gestures the ghost to sit down and partake in a meal. He shakes off the shrouds of spirits clinging to him, within the folds of his clothes, the follicles of his hair. He tries not to breathe the air, for fear of letting them in.
"You agreed Tenzou. I suddenly remembered I had an appointment with a microwave and had to exit the conversation quite suddenly."
"Hmph."
"Eloquence has always been your strongest point Tenzou-kun."
Yamato watches the ghost woman hovering over the bowl of ramen Kakashi has put in front of her, mouth open and dripping slivers of worm and dust onto the gently steaming food. Her eyes are crazed, craving, longing. He can feel her desire like a stretched rubber band, like mucus in the air…
Kakashi claps him on the back, startling him from his stare. "Manners, my darling Kohai. Let's go for a walk."
Yamato would've bristled at the implication that his manners are less than the highest caliber, (Manners are important. Fuck, manners have been drilled into his skull. Manners are things that would get him an extra blanket, a bowl of gruel, and maybe, God maybe, a little anesthesia) but he is too distracted by the way Kakashi passes through the ghostly ensemble as though greeting friends. His fingers stretch to brush their bloated sides. He tips his head in acknowledgement to a few. Yamato scurries in his wake and focuses on not trembling as the woman behind plunges her face into the ramen bowl, keening.
Outside Kakashi is making his way down the leafy street. His form is wraith-like, black mask and shock of hair, red scarf weaving like a streamer, meandering along the outer shell of the world as though made of more smoke than substance. Kakashi has always been like that.
Yamato slings his hands in his pockets and falls in step with him.
"You could be more accepting Tenzou-kun. They're always going to be there."
Yamato angles his head sharply at the pleasantly light tone, but Kakashi is impentrenable as usual, mask clinging to his lips as he breathes the air wetly through is mouth.
ooo
Yamato remembers when he met Kakashi-sempai, when he was young, new to the porcelain mask and jitterier than a shying horse. They went on a mission together, Tenzou-kun and the famous Chidori-wielder, Sharingan no Kakashi, the legend. Kakashi was a faceless black wall throughout the mission, and, when he did speak, it was with spitting sarcasm and cutthroat wit. Tenzou felt the urge to stab his renowned partner more than once.
The mission was completed, with lots of nastiness that Tenzou didn't want to think about ever again, with chilling blades carving off limbs delicately, like slicing meat, and cold voices and targets neutralized. A mission where maybe he had saved Sempai's life once and maybe Sempai had saved his life multiple times, but most of all where he just wanted to throw up and scrub underneath his fingernails for a month. They rested in a cheap and picturesquely dingy motel on the way home.
Tenzou comes into the drafty room with greasy takeout to see Kakashi lying on the bed, long and ragged as the scarecrow he was named after, mask tucked under his chin and smoking a pack of cigarettes in a hazy fashion, as though he didn't realize he was actually doing it. Tenzou could see the cut of his jaw, the line of his nose, and the shaking of his crow-fingers.
He remains very still, sure that the moment he inhaled would be the one that Kakashi would snap the cover over his features (amazing, perfection-streaked features) and glare out of that single deadpan eye. Instead,
"They're always hanging around y'know, Tenzou-kun. Just hanging. Swinging by their necks maybe, or by their guts, or in the water. I hate it when they're in the water." Kakashi mentions conversationally, puffing and shaking and looking like long-limbed bird, face glowing so pristine against the pillow, hollows of his cheekbones like mysteries.
Tenzou could feel his head getting dizzy and his stomach swinging at the other ANBU's words. He could feel the whispering starting up in the air, prickling the back of his neck. "I hate it when they're in the water, because then they've all got lips like great big white worms, and they don't really have faces anymore because its all just so full of water they're about to burst."
There had been a snake in the mission, a cloudy crushed-violet pet of one of the targets, and its hisses rattled his eardrums like the march of a hundred demons. He'd sliced its tongue out, laid the venom against the lips of the target, and whispered pretty as you please for the sniveling man to give them the information they needed. Stabbing the belly of the thing later, blood welling an unsatisfying crimson along split flesh, hadn't helped him to stop hearing something like scales in his ears.
Tenzou throws up. Messily. Kakashi observes from the bed, something like a smile playing around his mouth. "You know what I'm talking about don't you? I thought you would. You understand. You've got your own ghost don't you, you little wooden toy solider."
Tenzou would've punched his raw-open face blue if he wasn't busy throwing up. He wipes his mouth, heaves in a breath. Kakashi flops back down on the bed. "You have to get used to it Tenzou-kun, its just starting now. Flood's coming. Honestly, they don't matter so much in the long run. Y'know, really, sometimes I think it's nicer to have them around."
The copy-nin's face is angled outward, upward, his one uncovered eye considering the cracked ceiling as though searching for the very first rip in moldy plaster that started the web.
Tenzou looks incredulous. "You want to have your ghosts around? You want to talk to them?"
Kakashi laughs the laugh of a lost child, cast by on the roadside. "Only a few."
Now his face is full of secrets, mysteries darkening further in the crests of his cheekbones, gathering on the lid of his eye, fluttering in his lashes like mist over a battlefield, covering wrongdoings. His lips are full, round, and Tenzou can see the ash on them, even if he can't see anything else.
Kakashi draws lazily on his cigarette. There is still blood under his fingernails as he considers Tenzou there, gaunt-faced and white-cheeked, blending with the ANBU armor. He blows a sheet of smoke into the air.
"Wanna fuck?"
Tenzou looks at it if from all possible angles, and decides it wouldn't be good manners to say no. And actually he really did wanna, maybe just because of that face, glinting perfect through the daze of bloodlust and whispers, all jagged edges. So he kisses the ash lips that want to talk to ghosts, and hopes that his own spirits stay away for a little longer.
Kakashi murmurs things to himself as they pant and slick skin over one another, as Yamato fists his hands into all that hair and Kakashi pushes whipcord muscles against him, long shaking fingers clenching into hips leaving white and purple marks on goose bumps. Tenzou is trembling too, but shaking together is better than quivering alone. It was easy to blame the endorphins that way you see. (Never affects him, his skill)
The wood of the flimsy bed had creaked beneath them.
ooo
Now Yamato considers his Sempai, his teammate, strolling along beside him with something resembling mirth in his one visible feature, and reminds himself that Kakashi-sempai is a little crazy. Everyone knows it, except maybe his students, but Yamato is sure they're beginning to figure it out.
Kakashi hides it a little better now, but its fact. Kicked out of ANBU after some nasty snap Yamato won't get the details about, blade-keen and blood-splattered. Now still the highest-caliber jounin, secrets tucked into his joints, laughing the laugh of a lost child to himself and giving his ghosts free meals.
Yamato likes to conveniently forget that. Just like he likes to forget that he's a little insane too, in everyone's book.
They'd fucked a lot since that first time. Usually after a mission, but not always. Usually in a fit of despair or blood-lust, grime still coating their faces and unmentionables hanging from their blades. Usually rough and bruising and melding-hot, so exhaustive that Yamato has to struggle to think afterwards, which is exactly what he likes.
He wouldn't call it a relationship or anything, but he could say he knows Kakashi pretty well, as much as anyone can know someone they've only seen the face of a handful of times. (Kakashi doesn't like to let him see, not much, and usually only when Yamato gets the upper hand somehow, which isn't often, does the silk slip off)
He doesn't like to admit that Kakashi knows him, inside out and backwards and sideways, every nook and cranny of his skin and his mind there is, but Kakashi intrinsically can root out secrets, and it's hard to keep anything from a genius anyway.
Now, meandering along the hill, Yamato remembers that Kakashi likes his ghosts or a few of them anyway, and tries once again to wrap his head around the idea as he sidesteps a gust of wind that sings with whisper-nothings.
They are heading to the graveyard with the memorial stone. Yamato already knows by the deliberate pace Kakashi sets; it is the only time Kakashi is deliberate about anything.
He shudders inwardly. This will be where they all are, convalescing and twisting about, so thick on the ground that the air is foggy. No one has wanted to strap him on stainless steel yet, dig tweezers in to find wood shards from his feet, slice skin shavings from his chest for samples, not yet, but they could. They will…
He realizes he's stopped walking, frozen to the spot, when Kakashi turns around, suddenly more than three strides away, and raises one sharply knowing eyebrow.
Yamato sighs, flounders, and follows. Not following now would be bad manners, and Kakashi would make him go even if it wasn't, with a well-placed sentence to shiver into the core of his being, whip-smart and scathing.
The sun is boiling down around the horizon, somehow blood-red and slate-grey at the same time, leeching ripeness from the air steadily when they reach the looming memorial stone, with graves riddled around it in rows and lines, some so faded that the stone is rough and any name has long since become a white-wash of obscurity.
Sure enough, the ghosts are plentiful here, some lost and shrieking with eye holes sunk and sagging, trickling rusted-red, others sitting atop their graves as though too tired to go on. They coil around the two living men like merpeople to those they sing into destruction. Yamato can hear the hissing underfoot, subconscious, rattling through his brain like a live wire. His jaw is tense, and he can feel sweat beading along he edges of his face-plate, metal-chilled and nauseous.
It's really very hard to focus on anything else, so he looks for Kakashi-sempai.
Kakashi is in front of the memorial stone of course, and next to the shining granite he is nothing but a wraith of darkness through the fog, downcast and wrapped up in shimmering undulations of dark sunlight. Too far to hear, Yamato watches as his mask falls from his face and lips shape around ghosts names, tracing them as though scripture, eyes following the matching kanji engraved upon rock.
Names on monuments are pathetic excuses for closure, and Yamato never wants to see his on one, though he knows it is Kakashi's last wish, and already exactly knows his spot. A last-ditch attempt at peace for those dear to the one passed Yamato thinks, as though characters would make up for having true grave-dirt to dig your fingers into, to taste on your tongue the essence of whatever poor shit was underground.
Then again, Yamato barely ever has had anyone to lose, so what does he know?
He does know that he hates this place, every last fiber of his being screaming at him to run, run, run, and hide away quick, because any moment now something will stick and burn and split, here in this forsaken place that holds tear-grown grass and spirits-breath.
He busies himself with naming the headstones too old to decipher lettering upon. Everything deserves to have a name, and who's to say that these rotten bones buried underneath weren't really called Machiko, or that poor dead sod wasn't really a Kazuma? If it has a name, Yamato knows deep down where blood pumps thick and soft and slow, if it has a name than it can't be named anything else, can't be anything else. It's simple.
He has almost finished naming a whole line of crumbling gravestone, ending with Chihiro, when Kakashi materializes beside him, apparently finished repenting to his lost selves for the day.
He makes entirely no sound, but Yamato can see the snapping in his visible eye, the mirth twisting into something else, something a little more sinister, a little more broken.
Ninja have a duty to be stronger than steel, last longer than eternity, frost colder than ice. It's in the rulebook, literally. Page 64 of the ninja code of honor they memorized in academy. But Yamato was dammed if he knew a single ninja who really lived up to those stipulations. Not any who'd been in ANBU, that's for sure. And Kakashi-sempai, he was all full of shards, hidden behind a creased eye and silk.
(It's a good thing Yamato wasn't broken, in the two of them. No he really wasn't, not at all, not even a crack. Nothing ever affected him, his skill. It didn't)
As if reading his mind, and of course Kakashi might have been, the masked ninja spoke, and his voice held whip cracks.
"Think you're not broken Yamato?"
Yamato starts for a moment, caught by those three syllables that so rarely came from Kakashi's mouth. The copy-nin hardly ever called him Yamato.
"Not broken at all. No ghosts at all. No debts at all. Not a fucking thing." Kakashi's chin rested on Yamato's shoulder, gentle as snow, a contrast to the vile sting of words leaving his mouth, the tense set of his shoulders. Yamato shifted warily.
"Kakashi-sem-"
"Naming things again Yamato-kun? Giving it all a pretty title? All cotton-candy fluff? Well, beats me why this works for you, but you've always been strange. Why don't I help out, huh?"
There was something in Kakashi's voice, something raw and hungry, something so shattered it sounded bloody. Something craving, longing, crazed, like that ghost in the ramen shop that seemed so very long ago. Yamato would've tried to focus on it, but his stomach was twisting, his mouth drying, his head spinning. (No, no, no)
Funny how Kakashi's words could always do this to him, melt like butter or spew like bile. If Yamato admitted it to himself, it was because of course Kakashi knew him, every last inch, and every last thought.
He doesn't like to admit it to himself often.
Kakashi's breath ghosted over the shell of his ear, and Kakashi almost seemed like a ghost himself, right there among the hundreds dead, crying and wailing and siphoning closer every second.
It occurred to Yamato in the small part of his brain where things tried to remain rational at all times, that he had never walked with Kakashi on a Red Day before.
"This grave, this one right here, how about its name can be Sadao. Oh, and this one can be Machi." Kakashi is moving, body pushing Yamato forward, hand dancing as he pointed out more tombstones.
The ghosts were getting closer.
"What do you think? Do you like the names? Aren't they pretty? Here, oh I know the perfect name for this one, you'll just love it Yamato-kun." Kakashi presses up close behind him, teeth snapping and a voice like dying as he pushed Yamato until he was almost on top of a grave, small and white.
"This one can be Orochimaru."
Yamato's stomach bottoms out.
In the foggy constant-twilight of a mournful sunset he is gone, grappling over the edge, pieces splintering apart as he fails to hold them together anymore.
The hissing is everywhere, inside his very skin, and his skin is all coming off, in great big sheets, because the yellow eyes are back and Nicks is back, just like he knew they would be, and everything is hurting again. Snakes are biting his wrists; beads of blood dripping that don't belong to him.
A head turns, inky hair splashing against the red inside his eyes. A mouth smiles perfectly, fanged and forked and grotesquely handsome, whispering for him to be good now and perhaps they should increase the dosage of polypeptide compounds.
He knew the dose would never be enough, not of anything; magic DNA or blessed anesthesia or anything, because he wasn't enough and he couldn't stay together, and now it is all falling down the drain. Kakashi might be broken, but Tenzou is no better…
ooo
When he manages to come back to himself, slowly in bits that don't really connect as well as they used to, he is lying on that soft moss-grass of the graveyard, in a pool of his own vomit. Kakashi is pinning him to the muck, wrapped around his shaking legs like the wood he's coiled from his hands to dig deep into black soil.
Kakashi's mask is down, his mouth a sickly hysterical smile, and his eye is cut-glass.
Yamato spits, seething and puke-mouthed and just so close to being nothing at all, walking the tightrope and stumbling, whole body aching with phantom things that hadn't been true in twenty years, but felt like only moments ago.
He glares up at his Sempai, eyes rolling in his head like a crazy-man, because alright, fine, maybe he was.
"Maybe it should be named Obito-kun, Kakashi-sempai."
(The copy-nin has a great many more ghosts than he does)
Kakashi goes very still, mouth frozen in his smile, eyes blank. His fingers tighten in Yamato's vest, and really, it's a miracle neither of them have stabbed each other with the kunai that line their pockets yet.
Instead, Kakashi only punches him in the jaw. Still, it's chakra-packed and hurts like lightning, aching, slamming, crushing, and Yamato gargles a mirthless laugh and punches back.
Kakashi blocks it. He is a genius, even when he's nothing but skin and muscle holding sliced edges together.
But the sharingan wielder doesn't go for another blow. Instead he sits atop Yamato, hands fisted roughly in his vest, and looks at the sky for a long moment. The line of his jaw is knife-struck beauty under the last dying rays of the sun. There are ghosts lying all around them, curled up and watching, moaning to themselves. Their outlines are faded, blurred; with the setting sun they lose their blood-flushed cheeks.
Kakashi looks like a small child again, huddled on Yamato's abdomen, as beautiful, as hidden, as full of mystery as that first night at the motel.
Yamato is struggling with himself, whether to buck out from under his sempai and nurse his wounds alone; try to glue himself together again; clumsy shoddy work because ninja aren't artists first but soldiers always, or whether to quietly come apart underneath the hot weight of Kakashi, to stay that way and to hell with this stupid façade.
Kakashi makes the decision for him, leaning down and pressing his lips on Yamato's ear, all ghost breath and deadly fragility.
"Fuck it all, the thing is you're right, fucking little wooden toy soldier, you and your shitty world."
He rolls away sitting in the grass. His fingers tremble, twitch for an absent cigarette.
After a long moment he smiles suddenly, as though suddenly he was anywhere but here on earth, like maybe he was a billion light-years away, where time moved slow and revolutions were still only buds, where the day was golden-sweet.
"All your ghosts are still alive Tenzou."
And maybe that didn't quite hit the nail on the head or anything, and maybe Yamato didn't quite understand, but Kakashi refused to be understood usually, so it wasn't new, and all Yamato could do was turn it over in his mouth.
They are silent, shaken. Nothing seems to be real, not the fading death in the sky, not the clink of his protector as he turns an aching neck, not the squelch of fouled grass under his fingers.
All the ghosts were drawing close, petting Kakashi's hair or sliding against his clothes. They leave smears of sadness in the fading light, cobweb trails along his raw-open face, rotting secrets on his lips.
(Kakashi laughed, the laugh of a lost child, cast by on the roadside. "Only a few.")
Yamato hauls himself up, creaking and wooden but all he wants to do is get over to where the copy-nin was, and grab him, touch him. He makes it there, falls to his knees. It's a Red Day, and the ghosts squeal at being disturbed, but Yamato for once can't bring himself to draw away. (All his ghosts are alive)
He pushes through, takes Kakashi-sempai glorious face in his hands and kisses him like he wants to break. Like he wants to shatter. Like he wants to plunge into a grave.
ooo
They translocate back to Kakashi's place, away from grave-dirt and the giant granite stone listing the dead, away from the spirits nest. There are still some ghosts here; sitting on countertops staring with empty sockets, peeking around corners with bloody footprints, but Yamato doesn't bother to care.
Kakashi shoves him against the wall and kisses him, stinging and hard and more than a little mean. His eyes still hold that crazed glaze to them, menacing and eerily supernatural, but Yamato doesn't care about that either; he is just as broken, he knows.
Kakashi pushes his hand up Yamato's shirt, traces the butterfly cage of his ribs with bruising fingers, long and trembling. Yamato assaults his throat, the hidden small hollow at its base. His nips the exposed blade edge of his jaw and feels something like delight claw through his skull in one deep bright burst as Kakashi pulls flush against him, rocks hard, demanding.
They stumble onto Kakashi's bed and fuck, hard and forceful and so suffocating that Yamato gasps for breath against Kakashi's skin, velvet sheathed muscle. He thinks he can see the oxygen between them, thick and glittering and liquid.
Kakashi pushes, shins and hips and chests sliding, palms and fingers dragging against angel-bones, leaving white lines that burn and tingle. Hands curling around hips, lips spit-slick and heady, possessive purple bruises shaped like fingers along pelvic bones.
Yamato shudders, blanks out hard. Jolts back as heat crackles up his spine, bursts fireworks in his head. He runs his tongue down Kakashi-sempai's clavicle, salty sweat burning in his throat.
Kakashi's mouth is open above him, cheekbones filled with mysteries Yamato can taste. His eyes are heavy-lidded but open, and the Sharingan spinsspinspins, blood and black, pulling Yamato out of his head into nothingness that smells of sex and feels like electricity.
He lets his eyes roll, a bone-rattling snarl thrumming through the skin of his neck, shaking fingers curled along all the cracks in his skin.
ooo
When night has draped its skin over Konohagakure, and the last dying bits of Red Day are finally chased away in the Zen covering of darkness, ghosts' cries an echo in shinobi's heads again, Yamato realizes that he is still with Kakashi-sempai. The other man has fallen asleep, skin a shivery silver glow, spangled with scars, some so fine they looked like threads of silk.
Neither of them has ever spent the whole night with one another before. Yamato considers this, just as he considers the way that Kakashi's bed had creaked beneath them, steady as you go.
He was going to call Kakashi's bed Nobu.
At least, maybe he was.
Yamato considers Kakashi, debating between slipping out the window and giving into exhaustion that slogs his limbs down into the sheets. The copy-nin's flops an arm possessively over Yamato's chest with a grunt, and he decides that it would be better manners to stay.
Kakashi's still-raw features look different with sleep, in a matter he can't place. He stares without blinking until the slanting darkness turns from black to navy-periwinkle, drinks in the broken-perfect features until his eyes water, lashes and edges and bitten blue-white-grey lips.
He can remember the hurt, the scratches on stainless steel and the yellow eyes and that dazzlingly horrific smile that spikes across every neck he slits open to this day, mocking.
But he remembers Kakashi-sempai too, remembers Kakashi is beautiful when his head throws back against the pillows, face contorted into something even more terribly, painfully perfect, hips thrust forward, neck a series of angles sharp enough to bleed on.
A jagged smile and a mirthless eye that bled on him, drip drip drip.
The hissing rattles in his ears, a march that spirals his head and seizes his muscles until he turns and sees the garden snake passing on the ledge outside of Kakashi's window.
He watches it for twenty heartbeats, slow and scaled, before realizing that he hasn't yet jumped to his feet and left the building. That could be considered as rude.
The thought makes him turn his head into the pillow and laugh hysterically until the dark of the room pales into grey.
ooo
Fin
ooo
Raing: M for language, dark themes, sexual situations, and a severe amount of angst.
Pairing; Yamato/ Kakashi
Disclaimer; I don't own Naruto
A/N: So this is a Yamato fic, and it was done as an exchange with erxyl. Supposed to be about Yamato and his feelings about Orochimaru, with the prompt "not enough".
Somehow my wierd!ypsychol!Kakashi snuck in and it transformed into a Yama/Kaka with Orochimaru flashys. Hope you enjoy!
Warnings: Rated M for sexual situations, dark flashbacks, some weird psychological issues with both Kakashi and Yamato, and a serious amount of wierd.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. At all. Not even a kunai.
Pairings: Yamato/Kakashi, a twisty side reference to Obito/Kakashi, and a little squicky Oro/Yamato
Red Days
And I would long for my ghosts to follow,
If not for shame that they would see.
Konohagakure sometimes has those days, right before spring hits the brick wall of summer, where the air hangs stagnant and thick and the sun shines with a dark cast to the edges of its rays, as though it wants to trick you into thinking it is twilight.
The trees look like knurled roots on this sort of day, and when you turn the corner you start, even though there is nothing to flinch at. On these days, purposes peter out quickly, and motivation comes in slow, taffy-stretched drips. People wander. It is common to see a child crying, overcome by the pressure of the heavy air on their fragile skull. It is also common to hear your ghosts on the occasional breeze, and so most shinobi stay inside.
They have more ghosts then most people you see, and it gets hard to organize them when you go walking and they all lie whispering in your path like hopscotch stones.
Yamato stays inside those days, for example, and today is no exception. He calls them the Red days. Yamato has always named things, his habit from childhood of christening everything he could lay his hands on with a slightly manic pleasure. He remembers them all too. Remembers everyone's names. What sort of manners would he have if he didn't? Manners are important.
On this Red day, Yamato cuddles up under the sheets of his bed (named Miri) and waits for the dreams to come. It's only the polite thing to do.
They do come. It's always the red days. (They actually come a lot more often then just the red days, but Yamato likes to think that they don't. It's not as if it really affects him, his performance, his self, at all.)
ooo
It starts out slow, and so very benign that he is always lured into a sense of security. Perhaps that is because he is small, very small, and when you are that small you think that nothing bad will ever happen.
Perhaps that is how life is. You start out thinking that nothing has ever been wrong with the world. Then as you grow you realize that in fact you were actually very, very wrong. The earlier you realize this, the more prepared for life you are and the less pain you will have to deal with as you grow wrinkles. Or perhaps the earlier you realize this the more fucked up you are, but Yamato has always been an optimistic sort of person.
In any case, he is very, very small, so tiny that when he lifts his hands up in front of his face, they barely block out the light that hangs fluorescent-glaring and shiny above his head and the table he lies on. The table he's decided to call Nicks. It's all smooth and shiny and cold, only it has nicks and scratches around the edges, scoring lines in the stainless-steel that look like someone's fingernails decided to scratch at the tables itches. Yamato doesn't know that tables don't have itches.
So he lies there very quietly, because he must be good. If he is good, nothing bad will ever happen. This is around the time in the dream where things start to darken around the edges, and he feels a strange sense of waiting. He wants to leave but he has to wait. He wants to leave, but they aren't going to let him. He wants to leave but- someone is there, a man with black hair so dark that it looks like spilled ink, and Yamato can't see their face. Yamato feels something like sick in this mouth, and something like scales in his ears, and then something is hurting him, sharp and stinging in his stomach as something goes in and the mans hands move too fast for Yamato to see. Everything moves inside of him, shifts and splits and splices and oh, it hurts. His fingernails are scratching at Nicks itches as trees sprout thick and leafy from his palms.
This is where in the dream Yamato realizes that this has happened before, and it will happen again and again and again, for days and days and days. He remembers that Nicks' scratches were all made by him, and he remembers that he doesn't remember a life outside of this room. This is all that has ever existed.
If nothing bad has ever happened in the world, then he guesses that he's not in the world yet.
The black-night-ink-dark head turns, and its face is sleek and pristine and pasted on the insides of his tiny eyelids as they observe him clinically, taking some sort of notes on a clipboard. "Hn. Perhaps this compound is not enough..."
ooo
Yamato dreams multiple times. When he wakes up, he is still-the pond that has frozen too quickly. He stares at the ceiling and considers the cracks that run along the edge of the wall as his heart thumps a tattoo beat on his ribcage, so hard it hurts to draw breath. He feels his ghosts wandering around the room, poking around his things. He considers telling them not to mess with the eggs he's put in Spoilo (the fridge) but decides they probably aren't interested in the greening contents anyway.
They are interested in seeping into his mind, leaving a footprint, leaving a memory. They are interested in being that thing that makes him flinch. They relish it. He can hear their giggles, chalkboard rough and shrilling. It could be that they are interested in sticking him full of somebody else's DNA, someone else's code of wonders, interested in watching him sprout wood from every conceivable orifice of his body and not be able to retract it. Measuring the way eye color changes, hair gets coarser, skin darkens about a shade and a half. Sliding fluid into the hollows of his finger bones to make them bend easier when petrified wood spreads up his extremities. It could be. But no, none seem to, yet.
Yamato stumbles from the bed. Sweat has dried in cold tracks down his temples, made his sheets stick to his legs. He sits down at Marci, his (ceramic) kitchen table and puts his chin in his hands, staring out the window at the tranquil play of Red Day pink and gray light, full of secrets and sadness, blinking away yellow eyes from his sight and a childish, irrational urge to dig his fingers into poor Marci's formica top.
Outside, a flicker of movement catches his shinobi eye through the window. A red scarf, a wildfire of silver hair that splashes bright against the monochrome sky shifting with all varieties of gray. Kakashi-sempai.
Yamato debates with himself for a moment. Stay in safe, or go tend to his superior who is crazy enough to be outside with all the ghosts on a Red Day? Kakashi has a great many ghosts, Yamato knows. More perhaps than he does. Yamato doesn't know the exact number. Unlike Kakashi, he doesn't count any of his spider-silk followers. Except one.
After a moment, Yamato has almost decided to let it go and start polishing a kunai or two, when something shutters and winks at the corner of his vision, caught in the web of tumbleweed wind that blows eerily on a day like this in Konoha, breezing into the cracks between your doors and your mind. A garden snake's discarded skin.
Yamato leaves immedialty. It's only good manners, and he has impeccable ones.
ooo
When he catches up to Kakashi, reading amiably at that ramen stand Naruto-kun was obsessed with, Yamato is beginning to regret coming out. The sun cries like an abandoned baby in the sky, and he has twitched at two disembodied thoughts and three housecats on the way here. He shoulders his way through ghosts; Kakashi seems to string them along like toys. A few latch onto his shoulders. They put their cracked corpse-breath lips by his ear and moan, maggot-slippery fingers and trailing ropes of hair gripping his clothes.
He notices some of his own; a war-orphan casualty here, a lost ex- shinobi with a dagger still in his chest there.
One of them, an ANBU assassination victim, Kakashi notices too. His eye crinkles. "Care for a hot meal, pretty lady?" The ghost turns her slit-red and gaping mouth towards him. Yamato recognizes her; she is from a mission that both he and Kakashi wore bone and black for, back when they were often ANBU mission partners. Kakashi glances at him. "Ah Tenzou-kun. Coming to find me again?"
"I thought we agreed that I would be called Yamato from now on Kakahshi-sempai."
He ignores the way Kakashi puts a few coins on the table, gestures the ghost to sit down and partake in a meal. He shakes off the shrouds of spirits clinging to him, within the folds of his clothes, the follicles of his hair. He tries not to breathe the air, for fear of letting them in.
"You agreed Tenzou. I suddenly remembered I had an appointment with a microwave and had to exit the conversation quite suddenly."
"Hmph."
"Eloquence has always been your strongest point Tenzou-kun."
Yamato watches the ghost woman hovering over the bowl of ramen Kakashi has put in front of her, mouth open and dripping slivers of worm and dust onto the gently steaming food. Her eyes are crazed, craving, longing. He can feel her desire like a stretched rubber band, like mucus in the air…
Kakashi claps him on the back, startling him from his stare. "Manners, my darling Kohai. Let's go for a walk."
Yamato would've bristled at the implication that his manners are less than the highest caliber, (Manners are important. Fuck, manners have been drilled into his skull. Manners are things that would get him an extra blanket, a bowl of gruel, and maybe, God maybe, a little anesthesia) but he is too distracted by the way Kakashi passes through the ghostly ensemble as though greeting friends. His fingers stretch to brush their bloated sides. He tips his head in acknowledgement to a few. Yamato scurries in his wake and focuses on not trembling as the woman behind plunges her face into the ramen bowl, keening.
Outside Kakashi is making his way down the leafy street. His form is wraith-like, black mask and shock of hair, red scarf weaving like a streamer, meandering along the outer shell of the world as though made of more smoke than substance. Kakashi has always been like that.
Yamato slings his hands in his pockets and falls in step with him.
"You could be more accepting Tenzou-kun. They're always going to be there."
Yamato angles his head sharply at the pleasantly light tone, but Kakashi is impentrenable as usual, mask clinging to his lips as he breathes the air wetly through is mouth.
ooo
Yamato remembers when he met Kakashi-sempai, when he was young, new to the porcelain mask and jitterier than a shying horse. They went on a mission together, Tenzou-kun and the famous Chidori-wielder, Sharingan no Kakashi, the legend. Kakashi was a faceless black wall throughout the mission, and, when he did speak, it was with spitting sarcasm and cutthroat wit. Tenzou felt the urge to stab his renowned partner more than once.
The mission was completed, with lots of nastiness that Tenzou didn't want to think about ever again, with chilling blades carving off limbs delicately, like slicing meat, and cold voices and targets neutralized. A mission where maybe he had saved Sempai's life once and maybe Sempai had saved his life multiple times, but most of all where he just wanted to throw up and scrub underneath his fingernails for a month. They rested in a cheap and picturesquely dingy motel on the way home.
Tenzou comes into the drafty room with greasy takeout to see Kakashi lying on the bed, long and ragged as the scarecrow he was named after, mask tucked under his chin and smoking a pack of cigarettes in a hazy fashion, as though he didn't realize he was actually doing it. Tenzou could see the cut of his jaw, the line of his nose, and the shaking of his crow-fingers.
He remains very still, sure that the moment he inhaled would be the one that Kakashi would snap the cover over his features (amazing, perfection-streaked features) and glare out of that single deadpan eye. Instead,
"They're always hanging around y'know, Tenzou-kun. Just hanging. Swinging by their necks maybe, or by their guts, or in the water. I hate it when they're in the water." Kakashi mentions conversationally, puffing and shaking and looking like long-limbed bird, face glowing so pristine against the pillow, hollows of his cheekbones like mysteries.
Tenzou could feel his head getting dizzy and his stomach swinging at the other ANBU's words. He could feel the whispering starting up in the air, prickling the back of his neck. "I hate it when they're in the water, because then they've all got lips like great big white worms, and they don't really have faces anymore because its all just so full of water they're about to burst."
There had been a snake in the mission, a cloudy crushed-violet pet of one of the targets, and its hisses rattled his eardrums like the march of a hundred demons. He'd sliced its tongue out, laid the venom against the lips of the target, and whispered pretty as you please for the sniveling man to give them the information they needed. Stabbing the belly of the thing later, blood welling an unsatisfying crimson along split flesh, hadn't helped him to stop hearing something like scales in his ears.
Tenzou throws up. Messily. Kakashi observes from the bed, something like a smile playing around his mouth. "You know what I'm talking about don't you? I thought you would. You understand. You've got your own ghost don't you, you little wooden toy solider."
Tenzou would've punched his raw-open face blue if he wasn't busy throwing up. He wipes his mouth, heaves in a breath. Kakashi flops back down on the bed. "You have to get used to it Tenzou-kun, its just starting now. Flood's coming. Honestly, they don't matter so much in the long run. Y'know, really, sometimes I think it's nicer to have them around."
The copy-nin's face is angled outward, upward, his one uncovered eye considering the cracked ceiling as though searching for the very first rip in moldy plaster that started the web.
Tenzou looks incredulous. "You want to have your ghosts around? You want to talk to them?"
Kakashi laughs the laugh of a lost child, cast by on the roadside. "Only a few."
Now his face is full of secrets, mysteries darkening further in the crests of his cheekbones, gathering on the lid of his eye, fluttering in his lashes like mist over a battlefield, covering wrongdoings. His lips are full, round, and Tenzou can see the ash on them, even if he can't see anything else.
Kakashi draws lazily on his cigarette. There is still blood under his fingernails as he considers Tenzou there, gaunt-faced and white-cheeked, blending with the ANBU armor. He blows a sheet of smoke into the air.
"Wanna fuck?"
Tenzou looks at it if from all possible angles, and decides it wouldn't be good manners to say no. And actually he really did wanna, maybe just because of that face, glinting perfect through the daze of bloodlust and whispers, all jagged edges. So he kisses the ash lips that want to talk to ghosts, and hopes that his own spirits stay away for a little longer.
Kakashi murmurs things to himself as they pant and slick skin over one another, as Yamato fists his hands into all that hair and Kakashi pushes whipcord muscles against him, long shaking fingers clenching into hips leaving white and purple marks on goose bumps. Tenzou is trembling too, but shaking together is better than quivering alone. It was easy to blame the endorphins that way you see. (Never affects him, his skill)
The wood of the flimsy bed had creaked beneath them.
ooo
Now Yamato considers his Sempai, his teammate, strolling along beside him with something resembling mirth in his one visible feature, and reminds himself that Kakashi-sempai is a little crazy. Everyone knows it, except maybe his students, but Yamato is sure they're beginning to figure it out.
Kakashi hides it a little better now, but its fact. Kicked out of ANBU after some nasty snap Yamato won't get the details about, blade-keen and blood-splattered. Now still the highest-caliber jounin, secrets tucked into his joints, laughing the laugh of a lost child to himself and giving his ghosts free meals.
Yamato likes to conveniently forget that. Just like he likes to forget that he's a little insane too, in everyone's book.
They'd fucked a lot since that first time. Usually after a mission, but not always. Usually in a fit of despair or blood-lust, grime still coating their faces and unmentionables hanging from their blades. Usually rough and bruising and melding-hot, so exhaustive that Yamato has to struggle to think afterwards, which is exactly what he likes.
He wouldn't call it a relationship or anything, but he could say he knows Kakashi pretty well, as much as anyone can know someone they've only seen the face of a handful of times. (Kakashi doesn't like to let him see, not much, and usually only when Yamato gets the upper hand somehow, which isn't often, does the silk slip off)
He doesn't like to admit that Kakashi knows him, inside out and backwards and sideways, every nook and cranny of his skin and his mind there is, but Kakashi intrinsically can root out secrets, and it's hard to keep anything from a genius anyway.
Now, meandering along the hill, Yamato remembers that Kakashi likes his ghosts or a few of them anyway, and tries once again to wrap his head around the idea as he sidesteps a gust of wind that sings with whisper-nothings.
They are heading to the graveyard with the memorial stone. Yamato already knows by the deliberate pace Kakashi sets; it is the only time Kakashi is deliberate about anything.
He shudders inwardly. This will be where they all are, convalescing and twisting about, so thick on the ground that the air is foggy. No one has wanted to strap him on stainless steel yet, dig tweezers in to find wood shards from his feet, slice skin shavings from his chest for samples, not yet, but they could. They will…
He realizes he's stopped walking, frozen to the spot, when Kakashi turns around, suddenly more than three strides away, and raises one sharply knowing eyebrow.
Yamato sighs, flounders, and follows. Not following now would be bad manners, and Kakashi would make him go even if it wasn't, with a well-placed sentence to shiver into the core of his being, whip-smart and scathing.
The sun is boiling down around the horizon, somehow blood-red and slate-grey at the same time, leeching ripeness from the air steadily when they reach the looming memorial stone, with graves riddled around it in rows and lines, some so faded that the stone is rough and any name has long since become a white-wash of obscurity.
Sure enough, the ghosts are plentiful here, some lost and shrieking with eye holes sunk and sagging, trickling rusted-red, others sitting atop their graves as though too tired to go on. They coil around the two living men like merpeople to those they sing into destruction. Yamato can hear the hissing underfoot, subconscious, rattling through his brain like a live wire. His jaw is tense, and he can feel sweat beading along he edges of his face-plate, metal-chilled and nauseous.
It's really very hard to focus on anything else, so he looks for Kakashi-sempai.
Kakashi is in front of the memorial stone of course, and next to the shining granite he is nothing but a wraith of darkness through the fog, downcast and wrapped up in shimmering undulations of dark sunlight. Too far to hear, Yamato watches as his mask falls from his face and lips shape around ghosts names, tracing them as though scripture, eyes following the matching kanji engraved upon rock.
Names on monuments are pathetic excuses for closure, and Yamato never wants to see his on one, though he knows it is Kakashi's last wish, and already exactly knows his spot. A last-ditch attempt at peace for those dear to the one passed Yamato thinks, as though characters would make up for having true grave-dirt to dig your fingers into, to taste on your tongue the essence of whatever poor shit was underground.
Then again, Yamato barely ever has had anyone to lose, so what does he know?
He does know that he hates this place, every last fiber of his being screaming at him to run, run, run, and hide away quick, because any moment now something will stick and burn and split, here in this forsaken place that holds tear-grown grass and spirits-breath.
He busies himself with naming the headstones too old to decipher lettering upon. Everything deserves to have a name, and who's to say that these rotten bones buried underneath weren't really called Machiko, or that poor dead sod wasn't really a Kazuma? If it has a name, Yamato knows deep down where blood pumps thick and soft and slow, if it has a name than it can't be named anything else, can't be anything else. It's simple.
He has almost finished naming a whole line of crumbling gravestone, ending with Chihiro, when Kakashi materializes beside him, apparently finished repenting to his lost selves for the day.
He makes entirely no sound, but Yamato can see the snapping in his visible eye, the mirth twisting into something else, something a little more sinister, a little more broken.
Ninja have a duty to be stronger than steel, last longer than eternity, frost colder than ice. It's in the rulebook, literally. Page 64 of the ninja code of honor they memorized in academy. But Yamato was dammed if he knew a single ninja who really lived up to those stipulations. Not any who'd been in ANBU, that's for sure. And Kakashi-sempai, he was all full of shards, hidden behind a creased eye and silk.
(It's a good thing Yamato wasn't broken, in the two of them. No he really wasn't, not at all, not even a crack. Nothing ever affected him, his skill. It didn't)
As if reading his mind, and of course Kakashi might have been, the masked ninja spoke, and his voice held whip cracks.
"Think you're not broken Yamato?"
Yamato starts for a moment, caught by those three syllables that so rarely came from Kakashi's mouth. The copy-nin hardly ever called him Yamato.
"Not broken at all. No ghosts at all. No debts at all. Not a fucking thing." Kakashi's chin rested on Yamato's shoulder, gentle as snow, a contrast to the vile sting of words leaving his mouth, the tense set of his shoulders. Yamato shifted warily.
"Kakashi-sem-"
"Naming things again Yamato-kun? Giving it all a pretty title? All cotton-candy fluff? Well, beats me why this works for you, but you've always been strange. Why don't I help out, huh?"
There was something in Kakashi's voice, something raw and hungry, something so shattered it sounded bloody. Something craving, longing, crazed, like that ghost in the ramen shop that seemed so very long ago. Yamato would've tried to focus on it, but his stomach was twisting, his mouth drying, his head spinning. (No, no, no)
Funny how Kakashi's words could always do this to him, melt like butter or spew like bile. If Yamato admitted it to himself, it was because of course Kakashi knew him, every last inch, and every last thought.
He doesn't like to admit it to himself often.
Kakashi's breath ghosted over the shell of his ear, and Kakashi almost seemed like a ghost himself, right there among the hundreds dead, crying and wailing and siphoning closer every second.
It occurred to Yamato in the small part of his brain where things tried to remain rational at all times, that he had never walked with Kakashi on a Red Day before.
"This grave, this one right here, how about its name can be Sadao. Oh, and this one can be Machi." Kakashi is moving, body pushing Yamato forward, hand dancing as he pointed out more tombstones.
The ghosts were getting closer.
"What do you think? Do you like the names? Aren't they pretty? Here, oh I know the perfect name for this one, you'll just love it Yamato-kun." Kakashi presses up close behind him, teeth snapping and a voice like dying as he pushed Yamato until he was almost on top of a grave, small and white.
"This one can be Orochimaru."
Yamato's stomach bottoms out.
In the foggy constant-twilight of a mournful sunset he is gone, grappling over the edge, pieces splintering apart as he fails to hold them together anymore.
The hissing is everywhere, inside his very skin, and his skin is all coming off, in great big sheets, because the yellow eyes are back and Nicks is back, just like he knew they would be, and everything is hurting again. Snakes are biting his wrists; beads of blood dripping that don't belong to him.
A head turns, inky hair splashing against the red inside his eyes. A mouth smiles perfectly, fanged and forked and grotesquely handsome, whispering for him to be good now and perhaps they should increase the dosage of polypeptide compounds.
He knew the dose would never be enough, not of anything; magic DNA or blessed anesthesia or anything, because he wasn't enough and he couldn't stay together, and now it is all falling down the drain. Kakashi might be broken, but Tenzou is no better…
ooo
When he manages to come back to himself, slowly in bits that don't really connect as well as they used to, he is lying on that soft moss-grass of the graveyard, in a pool of his own vomit. Kakashi is pinning him to the muck, wrapped around his shaking legs like the wood he's coiled from his hands to dig deep into black soil.
Kakashi's mask is down, his mouth a sickly hysterical smile, and his eye is cut-glass.
Yamato spits, seething and puke-mouthed and just so close to being nothing at all, walking the tightrope and stumbling, whole body aching with phantom things that hadn't been true in twenty years, but felt like only moments ago.
He glares up at his Sempai, eyes rolling in his head like a crazy-man, because alright, fine, maybe he was.
"Maybe it should be named Obito-kun, Kakashi-sempai."
(The copy-nin has a great many more ghosts than he does)
Kakashi goes very still, mouth frozen in his smile, eyes blank. His fingers tighten in Yamato's vest, and really, it's a miracle neither of them have stabbed each other with the kunai that line their pockets yet.
Instead, Kakashi only punches him in the jaw. Still, it's chakra-packed and hurts like lightning, aching, slamming, crushing, and Yamato gargles a mirthless laugh and punches back.
Kakashi blocks it. He is a genius, even when he's nothing but skin and muscle holding sliced edges together.
But the sharingan wielder doesn't go for another blow. Instead he sits atop Yamato, hands fisted roughly in his vest, and looks at the sky for a long moment. The line of his jaw is knife-struck beauty under the last dying rays of the sun. There are ghosts lying all around them, curled up and watching, moaning to themselves. Their outlines are faded, blurred; with the setting sun they lose their blood-flushed cheeks.
Kakashi looks like a small child again, huddled on Yamato's abdomen, as beautiful, as hidden, as full of mystery as that first night at the motel.
Yamato is struggling with himself, whether to buck out from under his sempai and nurse his wounds alone; try to glue himself together again; clumsy shoddy work because ninja aren't artists first but soldiers always, or whether to quietly come apart underneath the hot weight of Kakashi, to stay that way and to hell with this stupid façade.
Kakashi makes the decision for him, leaning down and pressing his lips on Yamato's ear, all ghost breath and deadly fragility.
"Fuck it all, the thing is you're right, fucking little wooden toy soldier, you and your shitty world."
He rolls away sitting in the grass. His fingers tremble, twitch for an absent cigarette.
After a long moment he smiles suddenly, as though suddenly he was anywhere but here on earth, like maybe he was a billion light-years away, where time moved slow and revolutions were still only buds, where the day was golden-sweet.
"All your ghosts are still alive Tenzou."
And maybe that didn't quite hit the nail on the head or anything, and maybe Yamato didn't quite understand, but Kakashi refused to be understood usually, so it wasn't new, and all Yamato could do was turn it over in his mouth.
They are silent, shaken. Nothing seems to be real, not the fading death in the sky, not the clink of his protector as he turns an aching neck, not the squelch of fouled grass under his fingers.
All the ghosts were drawing close, petting Kakashi's hair or sliding against his clothes. They leave smears of sadness in the fading light, cobweb trails along his raw-open face, rotting secrets on his lips.
(Kakashi laughed, the laugh of a lost child, cast by on the roadside. "Only a few.")
Yamato hauls himself up, creaking and wooden but all he wants to do is get over to where the copy-nin was, and grab him, touch him. He makes it there, falls to his knees. It's a Red Day, and the ghosts squeal at being disturbed, but Yamato for once can't bring himself to draw away. (All his ghosts are alive)
He pushes through, takes Kakashi-sempai glorious face in his hands and kisses him like he wants to break. Like he wants to shatter. Like he wants to plunge into a grave.
ooo
They translocate back to Kakashi's place, away from grave-dirt and the giant granite stone listing the dead, away from the spirits nest. There are still some ghosts here; sitting on countertops staring with empty sockets, peeking around corners with bloody footprints, but Yamato doesn't bother to care.
Kakashi shoves him against the wall and kisses him, stinging and hard and more than a little mean. His eyes still hold that crazed glaze to them, menacing and eerily supernatural, but Yamato doesn't care about that either; he is just as broken, he knows.
Kakashi pushes his hand up Yamato's shirt, traces the butterfly cage of his ribs with bruising fingers, long and trembling. Yamato assaults his throat, the hidden small hollow at its base. His nips the exposed blade edge of his jaw and feels something like delight claw through his skull in one deep bright burst as Kakashi pulls flush against him, rocks hard, demanding.
They stumble onto Kakashi's bed and fuck, hard and forceful and so suffocating that Yamato gasps for breath against Kakashi's skin, velvet sheathed muscle. He thinks he can see the oxygen between them, thick and glittering and liquid.
Kakashi pushes, shins and hips and chests sliding, palms and fingers dragging against angel-bones, leaving white lines that burn and tingle. Hands curling around hips, lips spit-slick and heady, possessive purple bruises shaped like fingers along pelvic bones.
Yamato shudders, blanks out hard. Jolts back as heat crackles up his spine, bursts fireworks in his head. He runs his tongue down Kakashi-sempai's clavicle, salty sweat burning in his throat.
Kakashi's mouth is open above him, cheekbones filled with mysteries Yamato can taste. His eyes are heavy-lidded but open, and the Sharingan spinsspinspins, blood and black, pulling Yamato out of his head into nothingness that smells of sex and feels like electricity.
He lets his eyes roll, a bone-rattling snarl thrumming through the skin of his neck, shaking fingers curled along all the cracks in his skin.
ooo
When night has draped its skin over Konohagakure, and the last dying bits of Red Day are finally chased away in the Zen covering of darkness, ghosts' cries an echo in shinobi's heads again, Yamato realizes that he is still with Kakashi-sempai. The other man has fallen asleep, skin a shivery silver glow, spangled with scars, some so fine they looked like threads of silk.
Neither of them has ever spent the whole night with one another before. Yamato considers this, just as he considers the way that Kakashi's bed had creaked beneath them, steady as you go.
He was going to call Kakashi's bed Nobu.
At least, maybe he was.
Yamato considers Kakashi, debating between slipping out the window and giving into exhaustion that slogs his limbs down into the sheets. The copy-nin's flops an arm possessively over Yamato's chest with a grunt, and he decides that it would be better manners to stay.
Kakashi's still-raw features look different with sleep, in a matter he can't place. He stares without blinking until the slanting darkness turns from black to navy-periwinkle, drinks in the broken-perfect features until his eyes water, lashes and edges and bitten blue-white-grey lips.
He can remember the hurt, the scratches on stainless steel and the yellow eyes and that dazzlingly horrific smile that spikes across every neck he slits open to this day, mocking.
But he remembers Kakashi-sempai too, remembers Kakashi is beautiful when his head throws back against the pillows, face contorted into something even more terribly, painfully perfect, hips thrust forward, neck a series of angles sharp enough to bleed on.
A jagged smile and a mirthless eye that bled on him, drip drip drip.
The hissing rattles in his ears, a march that spirals his head and seizes his muscles until he turns and sees the garden snake passing on the ledge outside of Kakashi's window.
He watches it for twenty heartbeats, slow and scaled, before realizing that he hasn't yet jumped to his feet and left the building. That could be considered as rude.
The thought makes him turn his head into the pillow and laugh hysterically until the dark of the room pales into grey.
ooo
Fin
ooo