(no subject)
Title: Scar Tissue
Author: JBMcDragon
Genre: Drama
Status: In progress, 9/16-ish
Rating: R for violence and sexual content
Warnings: Het, yaoi, violence, and terrible, terrible angst. Also, very, very long.
Summary: Set during the end of the time-jump.
They returned one teammate fewer. The loss of that teammate changed Kakashi in ways Obito surviving couldn’t have. Kakashi remembers him fondly, speaks to him in dreams, and carries his ghost as a companion.
But his dreams and reality don’t quite match up . . .
Scar Tissue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two
Chapter Nine
Kakashi woke, unable to sleep for the lack of dreams.
Oh, he dreamed. He had the healthy, disjointed, nonsensical dreams other people had. And he had the dreams-that-were-memories that he'd always had. He dreamed about old teammates and new teammates and people he'd never seen before.
But he didn't dream about Obito.
In fact, it had been weeks since he'd even said two words to the man. Weeks since the bar had opened, more than a month since Obito had moved out on his own. Kakashi saw him in the village occasionally, usually in the company of one or another shinobi, but Obito rarely acknowledged Kakashi's presence, and Kakashi wasn't sure he should push. Obito was healing. He was making friends, making a life for himself, putting things back together.
Maybe, if they'd remained together as Genin, they'd have grown apart naturally. Maybe things would have been this way regardless. But something inside him hurt.
He sighed at his bedroom ceiling and rolled to sit on the edge of his futon, rubbing his hands over his face and through his hair before looking at the clock.
Five a.m. Too late to go back to bed. He pulled himself up, slouching toward the bathroom.
A reflection stared back at him; a lean Jounin closer to death than birth, pale skin, one black eye and one red one. The scar that bisected Obito's eye had been joined, over the years, by others. None of them were particularly disfiguring. One put a slight indent in his upper lip. Another caught the lobe of his ear, slicing it neatly in two as if he'd once worn an earring and had lost it unfortunately. It ran, white and clean, along his jaw before dropping off the edge of bone.
They didn't particularly bother him.
The only scar that bothered him these days was Obito's scar, where a Rock ninja had cut through Kakashi's face, taking the eye. Obito, about to die, had asked Rin to carve his eye out and transplant it into Kakashi's socket.
But Obito hadn't died. Now he was walking the village with the use of a cane, body too badly twisted to support him alone. Now he was no longer the boy Kakashi had known, emotions plain on his pale face for the whole world to read.
Now he was an adult, and somehow Kakashi had missed all those years in between. Years where teamwork could have forged them into friends, or driven them apart, the relationship too fraught with anger and frustration.
Now there wasn't a relationship. Not even the one Kakashi had imagined all this time, conversations with a ghost that had given him solace and comfort and--admittedly--irritation.
He hated melodrama. Kakashi shook the thoughts away, stripping off his boxers and T shirt and stepping into the shower, debating as he washed whether it was worth going into the mission office.
In the end he donned ninja blacks and vest, slipped his mask on and his hitae-ate down, then broke into the office and left a note on the desk that took him off the mission roster for personal leave. There was a new Icha Icha book out, though that wasn't what the note said. There were a few new jutsu he wanted to work on, one he wanted to polish, and . . .
And . . .
And then he found himself standing before the bookstore, preparing to break in, and realized . . . this wouldn't help. He fled to Gai's window, chakra mostly holding him in place, a toehold on the sill. He knocked quietly.
And dodged as Gai threw the window open, grinning broadly and nearly naked. "My Eternal Rival! Have you come to challenge me?"
"No," Kakashi said, and ducked past the other man. "Your towel's slipping," he added, averting his gaze quickly.
"You haven't come to see me since Obito acquired his own residence," Gai boomed, striding past Kakashi--towel fixed--and into the kitchen. "Has something happened with the Brave Young Uchiha?"
Kakashi blinked at the label, then just shook his head. "Not that I know of."
"Have you come for breakfast?" Gai beamed at the thought and gestured to the blender.
"What's in there?" Kakashi asked, nearly wincing.
"Peanut butter, quail eggs, orange juice--"
"No."
"But I haven't gotten to the best part!" Gai protested.
Kakashi took a breath to brace himself and asked, "What's the best part?"
Gai smiled brilliantly, light flashing off perfectly white teeth, and hefted tuna fillets off the cutting board. "Sushi!"
Kakashi's stomach threatened to revolt if he so much as thought about the concoction too long. "I'm sorry," he said blandly, "but my religion forbids peanut butter-tuna combinations before eleven o' clock."
Gai's face fell, then scrunched up in rapid expression exercise. "Ohhh, so cool!" he said, and tossed the fillets in the blender. "Well, my Eternal Rival, what brings you to my humble home?"
Kakashi opened his mouth, then stopped and closed it, stuffing both hands in his pockets and leaning back against the wall. "I'm not sure." The admission made Kakashi uncomfortable. He slouched further.
Gai continued as though not knowing why you did something was perfectly normal. It was, Kakashi realized, why he could admit it to the other Jounin.
"Perhaps," Gai shouted above the blender, "you were lonely!"
Kakashi waited until Gai shut the blender off, then said slowly, "Possible." This malaise felt different than that, though. More like a heaviness in his chest that he couldn't explain away.
"It must be difficult, having someone you were so close to come back from the dead, live with you, and then simply leave."
"I wasn't close to Obito," Kakashi said dryly.
Gai poured the concoction into a glass and took a sip. It left a slightly lumpy brown smear over his upper lip. Kakashi managed not to shudder.
"You told me, on a mission once, that you dreamed about Obito," Gai said thoughtfully.
Damn him and his near-perfect memory. Kakashi affected a negligent shrug.
"That seems like a close friendship."
"To a dream," Kakashi pointed out.
Gai studied the contents of his glass. "Did you know," Gai said suddenly, "that the death of an unborn child is one of the hardest for a woman to recover from?"
Kakashi blinked, nonplussed.
"A pregnant woman spends months feeling their child, speaking to them, imagining life with them, using them as a friend and confidante, dreaming of them--" he was starting to get teary. "--envisioning children and grandchildren and the beautiful days of their Youth, and then that wonderful life is ripped from the mother in the Springtime of her Womanhood--" Kakashi had known springtime had *something* to do with it. "--and she is left with nothing but what-might-have-beens." Gai grabbed a tissue and blew his nose, weeping, heartbroken, into the cloth.
Kakashi waited.
After a few minutes, Gai mopped his face and tossed the tissue in the garbage, entirely composed again. "When that happens, everything the mother had imagined is gone and they grieve for what could have been." His head tipped. "It bears a relation to you and Obito."
Kakashi's eyebrows rose. "I'm sad because Obito, my unborn child, is dead?"
Gai frowned, picked up his glass, and stared thoughtfully into it. "No . . ." he said slowly, then took a sip. He licked the mustache off, adjusted the towel still wrapped around his hips in lieu of clothing, and then looked up. "You're mourning the loss of what Obito was to you."
Kakashi stared at him flatly, uncomfortable but refusing to admit it.
"Obito died," Gai said slowly, as if puzzling the words out himself. "And you used his memory to guide you through the Uncertainties of your Youth, to talk to when you didn't have a real person. You even dreamed about him."
Gai paused, thinking, then started again. "Now that he's alive, you no longer have that memory to treasure, and he's not what you had imagined. To make matters worse, you should be glad he's alive, and you probably feel guilt for wishing things were normal again." Gai looked up, thick eyebrows raised expectantly.
Kakashi *hated* it when Gai was insightful. He felt back on the old standard. "Hn."
Gai's eyes widened. His cheeks flushed. "Ohhhhh, you are so cool!" he yelled, waving his arms around, the concoction slopping out of the glass. "So modern!"
**
All in all, things were going fairly well. The bar wasn't making money yet, but that was all right--he had plenty to live on.
"What do you think of the new mural?" he asked Anko, running a damp rag lovingly over the bartop.
Anko sipped from her bottle of water and looked up at the far wall, where a forest scene had been painted over the one way glass with see-through paint. The result was ghostly, like a weakly cast genjutsu or a dream overlaying reality. "I like it."
Obito smiled as if he'd done it himself. "Turns out Ibiki knows this guy who does them for a price, and the guy owned Ibiki a favor, so Ibiki--" he stopped, glancing up to see Anko watching him with bemusement, her dark eyes almost unreadable. "What?" Obito asked uncertainly, lifting a hand to his face. "Have I got something on . . .?"
Anko laughed, soft and easy. "You know, you're one of the only guys I know who didn't proposition me after the third date."
Obito felt his cheeks flush, and suddenly decided his rag was very, very interesting. "I--that is--" he stopped, stomach twisting up into knots of anticipation. "We haven't dated," he mumbled at last. Then, suddenly afraid he'd screwed up somewhere, looked up and blurted, "Have we?"
Anko laughed. "No, but we've hung out an awful lot." She gestured to the empty bar with her bottle. "You let me in here when you're closed."
All in all, things were going fairly well. But 'fairly well' didn't mean perfectly, and on occasion Obito felt those sixteen missing years. Years when another guy would have been learning the social rules, dating, talking to others, messing up and learning what happened when and what girls meant when they did things, and what was a date and what wasn't. He floundered, aware his relationship with Anko wasn't what it could be, seemed to be changing on him suddenly, and afraid he'd be unable to keep up. Afraid he'd screw it up, somehow, in over his head.
"Does everything still work?" Anko asked bluntly, wiggling her black-painted fingernails at Obito's crotch.
"Yes!" he said, embarrassed.
"Are you shy? Or uninterested?" Anko asked the question like it was the most normal subject in the world, her chin propped on one hand.
Obito opened and closed his mouth, busily cleaning one already-clean spot, stuttering through "I"s and "It's just"s.
Anko interrupted, tracing patterns on the wood with her finger. "See, way I figure it, you've been stuck in a cell through some pretty important years. So, it occurred to me the other night that maybe you just haven't asked because you don't know how. Seems you probably don't know how to do a lot of things."
Obito went red with humiliation. He reached for his cane, using it for extra balance. "I'll learn," he said defensively. "I'm a quick study."
"I'm counting on it," Anko nearly purred. She leaned both elbows on the bar, arcing closer. "And if you'd just lean forward a little, I'd happily start your education."
Obito looked up, got an eyeful of breasts pushed up between her biceps, then smiling eyes half-hidden by black hair.
"Unless you're not interested," Anko said again, quietly.
Obito swallowed. It seemed remarkably loud. "I'm interested," he whispered, mouth dry.
Anko's smile was slow, full of something sweet and a little spicy. "Then come here."
*********
Author: JBMcDragon
Genre: Drama
Status: In progress, 9/16-ish
Rating: R for violence and sexual content
Warnings: Het, yaoi, violence, and terrible, terrible angst. Also, very, very long.
Summary: Set during the end of the time-jump.
They returned one teammate fewer. The loss of that teammate changed Kakashi in ways Obito surviving couldn’t have. Kakashi remembers him fondly, speaks to him in dreams, and carries his ghost as a companion.
But his dreams and reality don’t quite match up . . .
Scar Tissue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two
Chapter Nine
Kakashi woke, unable to sleep for the lack of dreams.
Oh, he dreamed. He had the healthy, disjointed, nonsensical dreams other people had. And he had the dreams-that-were-memories that he'd always had. He dreamed about old teammates and new teammates and people he'd never seen before.
But he didn't dream about Obito.
In fact, it had been weeks since he'd even said two words to the man. Weeks since the bar had opened, more than a month since Obito had moved out on his own. Kakashi saw him in the village occasionally, usually in the company of one or another shinobi, but Obito rarely acknowledged Kakashi's presence, and Kakashi wasn't sure he should push. Obito was healing. He was making friends, making a life for himself, putting things back together.
Maybe, if they'd remained together as Genin, they'd have grown apart naturally. Maybe things would have been this way regardless. But something inside him hurt.
He sighed at his bedroom ceiling and rolled to sit on the edge of his futon, rubbing his hands over his face and through his hair before looking at the clock.
Five a.m. Too late to go back to bed. He pulled himself up, slouching toward the bathroom.
A reflection stared back at him; a lean Jounin closer to death than birth, pale skin, one black eye and one red one. The scar that bisected Obito's eye had been joined, over the years, by others. None of them were particularly disfiguring. One put a slight indent in his upper lip. Another caught the lobe of his ear, slicing it neatly in two as if he'd once worn an earring and had lost it unfortunately. It ran, white and clean, along his jaw before dropping off the edge of bone.
They didn't particularly bother him.
The only scar that bothered him these days was Obito's scar, where a Rock ninja had cut through Kakashi's face, taking the eye. Obito, about to die, had asked Rin to carve his eye out and transplant it into Kakashi's socket.
But Obito hadn't died. Now he was walking the village with the use of a cane, body too badly twisted to support him alone. Now he was no longer the boy Kakashi had known, emotions plain on his pale face for the whole world to read.
Now he was an adult, and somehow Kakashi had missed all those years in between. Years where teamwork could have forged them into friends, or driven them apart, the relationship too fraught with anger and frustration.
Now there wasn't a relationship. Not even the one Kakashi had imagined all this time, conversations with a ghost that had given him solace and comfort and--admittedly--irritation.
He hated melodrama. Kakashi shook the thoughts away, stripping off his boxers and T shirt and stepping into the shower, debating as he washed whether it was worth going into the mission office.
In the end he donned ninja blacks and vest, slipped his mask on and his hitae-ate down, then broke into the office and left a note on the desk that took him off the mission roster for personal leave. There was a new Icha Icha book out, though that wasn't what the note said. There were a few new jutsu he wanted to work on, one he wanted to polish, and . . .
And . . .
And then he found himself standing before the bookstore, preparing to break in, and realized . . . this wouldn't help. He fled to Gai's window, chakra mostly holding him in place, a toehold on the sill. He knocked quietly.
And dodged as Gai threw the window open, grinning broadly and nearly naked. "My Eternal Rival! Have you come to challenge me?"
"No," Kakashi said, and ducked past the other man. "Your towel's slipping," he added, averting his gaze quickly.
"You haven't come to see me since Obito acquired his own residence," Gai boomed, striding past Kakashi--towel fixed--and into the kitchen. "Has something happened with the Brave Young Uchiha?"
Kakashi blinked at the label, then just shook his head. "Not that I know of."
"Have you come for breakfast?" Gai beamed at the thought and gestured to the blender.
"What's in there?" Kakashi asked, nearly wincing.
"Peanut butter, quail eggs, orange juice--"
"No."
"But I haven't gotten to the best part!" Gai protested.
Kakashi took a breath to brace himself and asked, "What's the best part?"
Gai smiled brilliantly, light flashing off perfectly white teeth, and hefted tuna fillets off the cutting board. "Sushi!"
Kakashi's stomach threatened to revolt if he so much as thought about the concoction too long. "I'm sorry," he said blandly, "but my religion forbids peanut butter-tuna combinations before eleven o' clock."
Gai's face fell, then scrunched up in rapid expression exercise. "Ohhh, so cool!" he said, and tossed the fillets in the blender. "Well, my Eternal Rival, what brings you to my humble home?"
Kakashi opened his mouth, then stopped and closed it, stuffing both hands in his pockets and leaning back against the wall. "I'm not sure." The admission made Kakashi uncomfortable. He slouched further.
Gai continued as though not knowing why you did something was perfectly normal. It was, Kakashi realized, why he could admit it to the other Jounin.
"Perhaps," Gai shouted above the blender, "you were lonely!"
Kakashi waited until Gai shut the blender off, then said slowly, "Possible." This malaise felt different than that, though. More like a heaviness in his chest that he couldn't explain away.
"It must be difficult, having someone you were so close to come back from the dead, live with you, and then simply leave."
"I wasn't close to Obito," Kakashi said dryly.
Gai poured the concoction into a glass and took a sip. It left a slightly lumpy brown smear over his upper lip. Kakashi managed not to shudder.
"You told me, on a mission once, that you dreamed about Obito," Gai said thoughtfully.
Damn him and his near-perfect memory. Kakashi affected a negligent shrug.
"That seems like a close friendship."
"To a dream," Kakashi pointed out.
Gai studied the contents of his glass. "Did you know," Gai said suddenly, "that the death of an unborn child is one of the hardest for a woman to recover from?"
Kakashi blinked, nonplussed.
"A pregnant woman spends months feeling their child, speaking to them, imagining life with them, using them as a friend and confidante, dreaming of them--" he was starting to get teary. "--envisioning children and grandchildren and the beautiful days of their Youth, and then that wonderful life is ripped from the mother in the Springtime of her Womanhood--" Kakashi had known springtime had *something* to do with it. "--and she is left with nothing but what-might-have-beens." Gai grabbed a tissue and blew his nose, weeping, heartbroken, into the cloth.
Kakashi waited.
After a few minutes, Gai mopped his face and tossed the tissue in the garbage, entirely composed again. "When that happens, everything the mother had imagined is gone and they grieve for what could have been." His head tipped. "It bears a relation to you and Obito."
Kakashi's eyebrows rose. "I'm sad because Obito, my unborn child, is dead?"
Gai frowned, picked up his glass, and stared thoughtfully into it. "No . . ." he said slowly, then took a sip. He licked the mustache off, adjusted the towel still wrapped around his hips in lieu of clothing, and then looked up. "You're mourning the loss of what Obito was to you."
Kakashi stared at him flatly, uncomfortable but refusing to admit it.
"Obito died," Gai said slowly, as if puzzling the words out himself. "And you used his memory to guide you through the Uncertainties of your Youth, to talk to when you didn't have a real person. You even dreamed about him."
Gai paused, thinking, then started again. "Now that he's alive, you no longer have that memory to treasure, and he's not what you had imagined. To make matters worse, you should be glad he's alive, and you probably feel guilt for wishing things were normal again." Gai looked up, thick eyebrows raised expectantly.
Kakashi *hated* it when Gai was insightful. He felt back on the old standard. "Hn."
Gai's eyes widened. His cheeks flushed. "Ohhhhh, you are so cool!" he yelled, waving his arms around, the concoction slopping out of the glass. "So modern!"
**
All in all, things were going fairly well. The bar wasn't making money yet, but that was all right--he had plenty to live on.
"What do you think of the new mural?" he asked Anko, running a damp rag lovingly over the bartop.
Anko sipped from her bottle of water and looked up at the far wall, where a forest scene had been painted over the one way glass with see-through paint. The result was ghostly, like a weakly cast genjutsu or a dream overlaying reality. "I like it."
Obito smiled as if he'd done it himself. "Turns out Ibiki knows this guy who does them for a price, and the guy owned Ibiki a favor, so Ibiki--" he stopped, glancing up to see Anko watching him with bemusement, her dark eyes almost unreadable. "What?" Obito asked uncertainly, lifting a hand to his face. "Have I got something on . . .?"
Anko laughed, soft and easy. "You know, you're one of the only guys I know who didn't proposition me after the third date."
Obito felt his cheeks flush, and suddenly decided his rag was very, very interesting. "I--that is--" he stopped, stomach twisting up into knots of anticipation. "We haven't dated," he mumbled at last. Then, suddenly afraid he'd screwed up somewhere, looked up and blurted, "Have we?"
Anko laughed. "No, but we've hung out an awful lot." She gestured to the empty bar with her bottle. "You let me in here when you're closed."
All in all, things were going fairly well. But 'fairly well' didn't mean perfectly, and on occasion Obito felt those sixteen missing years. Years when another guy would have been learning the social rules, dating, talking to others, messing up and learning what happened when and what girls meant when they did things, and what was a date and what wasn't. He floundered, aware his relationship with Anko wasn't what it could be, seemed to be changing on him suddenly, and afraid he'd be unable to keep up. Afraid he'd screw it up, somehow, in over his head.
"Does everything still work?" Anko asked bluntly, wiggling her black-painted fingernails at Obito's crotch.
"Yes!" he said, embarrassed.
"Are you shy? Or uninterested?" Anko asked the question like it was the most normal subject in the world, her chin propped on one hand.
Obito opened and closed his mouth, busily cleaning one already-clean spot, stuttering through "I"s and "It's just"s.
Anko interrupted, tracing patterns on the wood with her finger. "See, way I figure it, you've been stuck in a cell through some pretty important years. So, it occurred to me the other night that maybe you just haven't asked because you don't know how. Seems you probably don't know how to do a lot of things."
Obito went red with humiliation. He reached for his cane, using it for extra balance. "I'll learn," he said defensively. "I'm a quick study."
"I'm counting on it," Anko nearly purred. She leaned both elbows on the bar, arcing closer. "And if you'd just lean forward a little, I'd happily start your education."
Obito looked up, got an eyeful of breasts pushed up between her biceps, then smiling eyes half-hidden by black hair.
"Unless you're not interested," Anko said again, quietly.
Obito swallowed. It seemed remarkably loud. "I'm interested," he whispered, mouth dry.
Anko's smile was slow, full of something sweet and a little spicy. "Then come here."
*********