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The lush greenery sways and parts as he storms through ferns and knee high grass, slaps away hanging vines like grasping ropes and netting, trying to trip him up and catch him, wind him into the trees forever. Eyes on his skin, making the fine, delicate scales lift in rattling warning, similar to goosebumps but perverted on his unnatural form, a joining of evils.
Kisame lifts one hand and digs a claw into the divots of scar tissue under one eye, mimicked in rows, symmetrical and patterned along his shoulders too. Something gouged them out, when he was young, scarification, but he can't recall what for exactly, and why he feels so off balance and light. Lacking a comforting weight to his steps and the sway of his body.
The eyes shift and he sighs, turns from scratching at his scars to sliding his palm down the bridge of his nose and off his jaw, tugging at sandpaper skin. "I don't need your help, wolf boy." He's certainly not pouting.
Kakashi laughs, high above him, in the trees. Humid air in the stifling heat of the jungle warps and shimmers between them, makes the other man look like a mirage, mask pulled down his face as he watches Kisame struggle with a smile.
It's pretty and full of secrets, a knowing thing, carved with lines of scars that trail in spider silk silver pathways and vanish under black fabric. Maybe they twist and curl all the way down Kakashi's body, to the tips of his clawed toes. His eyes, red and grey respectively, one spinning slow and hypnotic, meet Kisame's, and it makes his stomach fall out into the void below, swallowed up by all the green. Swooping, like stepping off a high ledge.
"Love, you'll have to accept it eventually. You can't find the ocean on your own."
His head tips, lupine, whole body still like a predator. Kisame knows somewhere in his gut (still leagues out of his body with the call of that cliff edge) that Kakashi shares something with someone, half and half combined into a whole, pulled apart at conception or birth or death, perhaps. A sacrifice.
But he knows where the ocean is, and that's more important. "Then point me in the right direction, instead of just following me around and laughing when I trip over fucking roots." It's not angry, perhaps a little frustrated. Sits happy in his throat, a smile pulling at his mouth to match Kakashi's own. He can trust him, he thinks- here, at least, there is nothing driving them to different ends. Kakashi is the focal point for his broken little heart. Stitched him up all tender and practiced with his long pale fingers and kissed away all the blood from his tongue where he cut it open as a child and it never healed right.
He's not sure what would drive them apart, in the first place. There is only the jungle, the promise of the ocean somewhere beyond the green, and Kakashi. His Kakashi, teasing him from up high.
"But you're so cute when you're huffy," Kakashi snickers, then sighs crouches down with his long legs folding like wooden puppet joints, well oiled and angular. "Can you follow me? Or will you wander off again?"
"I can follow you fine, demon," Kisame chuffs, inhuman himself, but there's no malice, and Kakashi smiles again, makes Kisame feel weak in the knees, pulls his stomach right back up and then too far entirely, into his throat where that happiness was taking up all the space.
"You never could outrun me," he adds, not sure why but tasting the truth of it, breathless and wanting, suddenly, considers how he would scale the tree Kakashi watches him from the branches of. Pretty fox-bird too far away to kiss. The need fractures into fondness when Kakashi crooks one clawed finger and turns, skip-steps with a burst of something that lifts Kisame's scales again.
He picks up the pace himself, an attemptedly careful and yet extraordinarily clumsy chase, stumbling and overbalancing as he tries to put more power behind himself, keeping an eye on Kakashi's back between the leaves and branches but still trying to remain aware of earthbound obstacles. He hates trees, he decides, and roots, and green. Leaves, especially, fill him with something like possessive malice, stolen and unfulfilled longing. They keep blocking him from what he wants the most- the ocean, and Kakashi.
Still, somehow, perhaps through luck, or- if he was feeling religious, divine intervention, he doesn't lose Kakashi entirely amidst the forest as he arcs left, a slow circular turn as the greenery starts, almost imperceptibly, to thin. The soft leaves and dirt turn to something grittier under Kisame's feet, sandier, and the path eases for him, his poor centre of gravity less difficult to deal with when not having to contort through barricades constructed by nature herself to prolong his entrapment.
He blinks, and then he reaches the edge of the forest. It feels wrong, somehow, for a brief moment, like he skipped time in there, like reality shuddered and spat him out wrong, but it's washed away by the view that graces his eyes.
The ocean is endless, tinted orange and gold in the setting sun, the slope down from the trees clean white sand turned vibrant by the molten touch. No clouds in the darkening sky, streaked gradients, gentle waves. Much further out they peak with white caps, but by then he'll be deep enough it won't matter, breathing as he was meant to.
Hurriedly he claws at his shirt, peels the black fabric in easy strips, leaves the pants more out of impatience than anything else as he strides forward, kicks off the ridiculous sandals that protected the soles of his feet from treacherous twigs in the loathsome forest.
He pauses at the edge of the water, tide bringing it up to lap at the webbing between his toes, looks to his left. Behind him he's left footprints in the sand, a trail of discarded memories, dictating his passing. The wind will brush them away come morning, he knows, sudden and clear.
Kakashi has left no such marks. He smiles, sad and just as knowing as the cold reality that has settled over Kisame's shoulders. The sharingan bleeds wrong, spins too fast and too slow, the scars on his chin don't twist right and his mole is missing. His lashes too short, his ears not pointed enough.
"How long have I been dead, Kami?"
The God sighs, sympathetic, salt air ruffling silver strands. "I wanted to give you some comfort. There is no pure land, for those like you, but there can be this. I'd hoped you would not realise until you were in the water."
Kisame's throat clicks uncomfortably when he swallows, too dry. Something like sadness wells up inside him, frothing like tidal waves, and he wants to spit it out like a suiton begging to be finished but nothing will come. He knows.
"Your wolf boy is alive," Kami says, kind, Kakashi's voice a soothing balm but not quite good enough. "Samehada is with him. They will continue on- if you dive deep enough, you may see him again in another fragment of existence. Perhaps you'll make it to the pure land in that one."
Empathy must come harshly, to something inhuman. Never was, never will be. Kisame looks out at the horizon, instead, and steps forward, slow, steady. One at a time, he treads deeper, wet sand giving way under his weight.
"Did he know I loved him?"
The God does not answer. Kisame doesn't really need it to, as the water closes over his head. He is lonely, but at least he is home.