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The morning Kakashi turns forty-two, he takes in a lung-splitting breath and doesn’t let it leave until Iruka tells him it’s safe to do so, exactly one year later.
You’re here, he’s told with a warm hand on his cheek forcing the eye contact he dreads in moments like these. Always so insistent with his love, Iruka is, but Kakashi wouldn’t have it any other way. You made it.
A fragile thing inside of him feared that he wouldn’t, is all.
For three-hundred and sixty-five days straight Kakashi worried that the universe might catch a whiff of the acrid smoke coming off the torch he’d been handed some thirty-eight years ago and tell him it’s his turn to go, ready or not. Yet here he stands, alive and mostly well at the age his father never saw, but surely at some point dreamt of.
It feels wrong to be relieved. Unsettling to have aged. As a solider, he’s flecked all over in the blood of those who needlessly lost their lives at his hand—that can’t go unpunished. It shouldn’t.
As a man in love, however, nothing matters more than being able to kiss Iruka’s weathered palm, watch the sun catch on stray silvers in his hair, and smile.
Looking into Iruka’s riverbed eyes, Kakashi means it when he replies, I’m glad.
In a way, it’s funny that Kakashi begins every day walking into a field dedicated to the one thing he’s been outrunning his whole life. To pay his respects, of course, but in retrospect, a younger Kakashi would take in the names of his loved ones for only a few painful moments, eventually closing his eyes to bask in the smell of grass, to feel the grit of stone under his fingertips—to walk away with sensations of death that weren’t saturated with violence.
Even now, he doesn’t quite “pay his respects,” unsure if standing around with his hands buried in his pockets qualifies as that. At best, it’s like grabbing tea with a mum companion.
I’m older than you now, but no less run-down by rage, he thinks defeatedly at his father’s feet. Do shinobi never mellow? Or is it all people?
Predictably, his father has no words of wisdom to impart onto him.
He pictures the White Fang of Konoha standing in front of him at eye-level, because it aches in different ways to picture him as anything else. Freshly forty-three, Kakashi conjures up a version of his father that is happy to see him—his memory is much too worn to access what his father’s smile looked like, but he imagines he can see it in the crinkles around his eyes.
For a moment, he is a son worth living for even in the crushing grip of shame. For a moment, they know each other beyond whispered legends, they know each other as men.
It’s the only thing he dreams of that doesn’t jerk him awake covered in sweat, but still his fist remains clenched.
All his life Kakashi has wanted nothing more than to understand his father, to wear his skin on his shoulders and bear the weight without a word—nothing except, maybe, to never become him.
You may not have had much to live for, Kakashi thinks, old and bitter even when it stings, but I do. I will die as a man unashamed to do good.
And then, because Kakashi is as forlorn as he is angry, he bows his head, shoulders drooping, and whispers apologies until his mouth goes dry.
He spends the day walking through Konoha at a leisurely pace. His knees hurt and so does his back, but the one thing age never weakens is a habit, and his fingers are just as quick as they were when he was twenty, flexing uselessly in his pockets for a kunai at the slightest of movements in the corner of his eye.
If Iruka were next to him, he’d notice and laugh, teasing him about the high-level security threats the squirrels in the trees seemed to pose. And then he’d take Kakashi’s hand in his, squeezing back every time Kakashi couldn’t help the muscle spasm like they were speaking in secret tongues.
They could’ve been, with the way it filled Kakashi with poetry every time.
Alas, Iruka is a working man, and so Kakashi pays a visit to Naruto, who calls him a grandpa, and Sakura, who asks him about his deteriorating bone health so straight-faced Kakashi nearly believes she’s seriously concerned.
Running into Sasuke isn’t planned, but nothing ever is when it comes to Sasuke. Every sighting is as rare as an eclipse, every conversation like shuriken to the ankles. Even blinded and bleeding to death, though, Kakashi doesn’t think he’d ever look at Sasuke and not immediately think anything other than, Oh, good. You’re still here.
Maybe because he’s old, maybe because Sasuke is not, Kakashi says as much to him.
“That makes one of us,” is all Sasuke says back, pale as chalk even as the sun sets. He’s picking at the grass as he stares down the river, a mismatched puzzle of man and child that all of Konoha has yet to truly piece together.
(Well, all but one.)
Kakashi wonders if Sasuke dreads mirrors, as well. If all he can see is the vestiges of everyone he no longer has. What profound heartache must an empty house fuel for someone to wage war over it, for someone to scrounge through severed limbs for a hand to hold?
“What you think of yourself hardly matters,” Kakashi dismisses airily, ignoring how the world’s colours have gone slightly flat. “Thank you for keeping me company.”
“How are you always so annoying?” Sasuke mutters, low like he’s still twelve and badmouthing his sensei behind his back.
His fingertips change course, halting their path of destruction to gently graze the tops of the blades instead. The corner of his mouth lifts up ever so slightly before dropping again, and Kakashi doesn’t know why, but his eyes burn.
Here is a child who turned out okay, despite it all. Who’s only spent so long bloodying his knuckles because it meant he didn’t have to ask to be touched tenderly. Here is a child who sheds his anger like a tear, excising it from his body every time it bubbles up so it doesn’t drown the world out again.
In the gentle wind, he looks young and free.
“I hope I never get old and wrinkly like you,” Sasuke says lightly, but Kakashi catches the small spark of mischief in his eye. It takes everything in him not to reach out to touch it, pluck it out and frame it somewhere busy in his apartment.
Candid to the core, he admits, “I hope you do.”
Sasuke meets his eyes, searching, and then something calm pours over his features one by one, softening them. He looks back to the river and smiles in that small, peculiar way of his.
Like he’s doing him a favour, he finally says, “Happy birthday, Kakashi.”
He’s the only of the three of them to call him by his name. It’s a good thing. Between the two of them, Kakashi never did much of the teaching, anyway.
Kakashi smiles too, letting the last bits of warmth wash over him as the sun dips below the horizon. “Hm. I suppose it is.”
(A younger, less hopeful version of Kakashi had a much more thankless outlook on aging. Iruka was an anchor, yes, but tied with a rope of straw.
One night, tracing the ridge of Kakashi’s nose, he’d murmured, Tell me you love me without saying as much.
Kakashi was no fool—he knew it was only a half-mindless thing, the other half a subtle test. Tell me you know what it means to love past syntax, tell me I lie with a beating heart every night and not just a mask.
And what Kakashi wanted to say was, I would die for you, but really he would’ve died for far less—something Iruka knew intimately about him—so it would only be a disservice to Iruka to say so.
He’d considered saying, I would kill for you, but enough innocent blood has been shed in violent ruses of love. Enough innocent blood has been shed in the name of nothing at all. If there was one thing he didn’t want to do—doesn’t want to do—it’s to forge bonds through lives taken.
So, he’d reflected, and he came up with a surprising truth: I live for you, Iruka. I do.
Iruka had given him a rueful smile in return, gently drawing their faces together. “And if I go?”
“I’ll bring you back.”
So close, Kakashi had heard Iruka’s small intake of breath that never transformed into words. It was only with the heartbroken shine of his eyes that Kakashi realized he was supposed to say, I’ll keep living. For you.)
Lifetimes later, Kakashi welcomes Iruka home with a lingering kiss and the smell of ramen curling around the walls. He hums while doing the dishes, even after nearly dropping one because he thought he heard an out of place thump on the balcony. If there's anything he's learned post-retirement, it's that life after survival requires propulsion, a constant push through lest you get stuck in one instinct forever.
After bathing, he sits on the edge of their bed and holds love in his war-torn hands.
“You’ve lived a very long, very brave life, Kakashi,” Iruka reassures him apropos of nothing, gently drying his hair with a towel. It’s been losing more and more of its shine, lately, which has to mean Kakashi has earned some truly grey hairs now. “One that practically demands you to find peace.”
Kakashi doesn’t know how to do that. He never has. Still, he squeezes Iruka’s hips and smiles up at him, playful. “Is that so? Where do you think I should start, then?”
“Here,” Iruka replies simply, brushing back his hair to kiss his forehead. He pulls back with a smile and looks at Kakashi with those beautiful brown eyes. “Us.”
And Kakashi thinks, Oh. And then, Yes.
(A life.
Chopping vegetables for dinner with trembling fingers.
Taking walks that get slower and slower each year.
Drinking in the seasons cured in little lines on each other’s faces.
A ring, maybe. A cat, just for a change.
Change, just for a change.
Life.
What a lovely thing to look forward to.)
Death comes swiftly.
Not in sleep, but just before. A kunai to his tongue, then pierced through his heart. The person is a mask-wearing stranger, but probably not, from the rage broiling in their eyes.
Movement is impossible, fear-born paralysis finally having its way with him after years and years of training to keep it out. Besides, he doesn't want Iruka to see him like this. He doesn't want him to think he could've stopped it from happening.
It had been wrong to ignore his instincts, but there isn’t much he can do about it now.
Soundless, Kakashi chokes on all the rivers of blood he’s spilled as a not-stranger watches with glee, manic eyes glinting in the moonlight. They only lose their fire when Kakashi manages with great effort to make the field sign for ‘apology.’
It was always going to end this way.
He used to be okay with knowing that. (Then again, he used to wonder if there was ever any good in him to begin with.)
In his last few laboured breaths, he looks only at Iruka. Thinks, I'm sorry, love. Live for me.
Morning doesn’t come.