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Time lost its meaning years or centuries ago, when the world was smaller and the sea was endless, and no one knew what came after the horizon. On a night too cold under stars too bright, with a campfire forged by his own hands, he reached up for the moon in wonder if he could touch it. But his fist closed on air, and no power in the mortal realm would bring him closer.
To him, it was a rainbow.
He grew up being tucked in by fresh horrors as war followed him to sleep. It had gone on so long that he wondered if it would ever end, or if this was their life, now and forever, until the sun burnt out and the stars fell from the sky. Every day was the same. If it wasn’t the same, it was worse. They either woke up together or fewer, each mission taking from them another face and name, remembered solely on a carved out monument erected by their leaders.
The ones who started the war lived. That, he learned, was power.
They were thoughts that found him only in the night, when the world was too slow and quiet to crush him.
His people were few and fewer still as the days went on. They were all the light in the world, a warm patch in a sheet of ice, and he knew that the war found them in their dreams, too. So, he swallowed it down. For their sake, he left those words in his sleeping bag, where they could find him again under the moon.
To him, she was the sun in the spring and the summer breeze. Snow melted with her smile and flowers bloomed with her laugh. When the weather was good, when it was bad, when the sun shone and the rain fell, and whether the sky above was stars or storms, every moment shined. Because of her, he didn’t care. Because of her, it did not matter if time flowed or stopped, if they fought forever or for a moment. She was the centre of the world, and only with her, it was okay to be happy.
She was a medic. Her touch brought life to a wasteland, and second chances to soldiers. Every word she spoke was healing, and every tear she cried vaster than the ocean. She liked books, and knitting. Her favourite colour was purple. She loved the rain but hated being wet.
When she woke up, it was for a better future. For days without war and pain. She fought today to protect tomorrow, because that was fair, and that was right.
They were children. They were child soldiers. But if they fought, and if they won, no one else would have to be. She truly believed in that.
And he believed in her.
But only the dead see the end of war.
Waking up after death was no different from reaching the Pure Lands and being pulled back down to Earth, but he was glad. He thought there might be more to his story than another name on a rock and corpse in the grass. If he was strong, he could change things. If he became Hokage, no more children would be suited up for war. It was Rin’s dream, the one that she gave him, and it kept him company in the dark of the cave.
Time was meaningless, and months passed. Every step he took was preceded by a hundred falls as his body refused to listen. His leg was gone, and so was his arm, and the prosthetics broke beneath his weight. Whenever the foreign cells fell apart across the floor, when tears stung his eyes and he wanted to stop, he would remember his eye. It was gone from its socket, living on with a promise to see the world. He would remember that, and he would get up.
People were waiting for him. Someone missed him. If he died there, they would mourn. They had mourned enough.
But time was meaningless, and he was too late.
Her name was Rin. She was a medic. Her favourite colour was purple, and she liked knitting and books.
Everything made sense when he was a child. If he did his best, he would become strong. If he became strong, he could protect people. If he protected people, he wouldn’t lose them. The war took his parents before he knew their faces, and it tried to end his story before it began. But if he was strong, if he followed the rules and tried his best. If he did that, it would be okay.
In his arms, he held the weight of the world, a body colder than night. The ground flooded with the aftermath of his rampage, and in the pools at his feet, the moon reflected red. He reached down to touch it, but the surface rippled and the illusion warped.
Ah. I get it. This world is no good like this.
No matter how hard they fought, there would be another war. Peace was temporary and nothing lasts forever. There would be more child soldiers. More people would die. And the memorial stone would always have space for another name.
He needed to fix it. He needed to save them. Time meant nothing, and even if it took his whole life, he would make Rin's dream a reality.
Rin told him once that if he loved the present, he could make peace with the past. But he hated today more than yesterday, and he would hate tomorrow even more, because there was no future with her in it.
When she died, he mourned her, but also the person he was with her. The version of him who she called a friend.
For him, it was a circle.
He was a cog in the world’s timepiece, and the days that fell behind him were the same as the ones ahead. If he looked back, a trail of bodies fell in his wake. If he looked forward, he was alone. But the moon hung in the sky, and one day, he would grasp it, even if that meant bathing in the remains of the dead.
If he stood still, it would end. Nothing lasts forever, and the sun doesn’t rise for everyone. The world was flawed like this. He could fix it. He could fix it.
He would fix it.
The red moon hung in the sky, and he pried a beast from the belly of a woman who once meant something. Her scream rang in his ears like cicadas in summer as the weight of her burden crushed beneath its feet the village she adored. It hurt to see her like that, but he remained strong. It was only temporary.
They would meet again in the new world.
It was an opportunity, one taken by his teacher. Minato didn’t understand, and the burn of his chakra was almost as painful as the defeat that followed it. Failure was crushing. It never occurred to him that the ones standing opposite him would be his own people. This was for them, a world where they could sleep peacefully, where the sounds of war were only an echo of their past. A world without pain or loss. Why didn’t they see it? It was so clear, the future they’d all been waiting for. Rin’s future.
On that night, he grasped at the moon, and it broke apart beneath his fingertips.
When he was alone, his hand would trace the lines of history on his face. Left of that, his fingers would press against an empty socket, and he would remember a promise, warm and new. Time was meaningless, and that day circled his mind like yesterday, a fresh hell that opened after sundown. His eye was kept safe by someone he could trust to protect it. They weren’t friends. He didn’t know what they were. That boy grew into a man, and that man was a permanent fixture beside the stone that honoured their dead.
Kakashi was everything he wasn’t—talented and skilful, with a future full of promise. He held the world in his hands, if only he would grasp it. At night, that man—that boy—heaved his memories into the kitchen sink. He scrubbed at his hands to remove their history, the feel of wet and warm, a fast-cooling body wrapped around his arm. A medic hanging there, who liked knitting and purple and books, who dreamed of a future too big for her.
It was too big a burden, too crushing a weight.
Theirs was a world small and divided, where power turned feuds into corpses. They were nations at war with no grasp of what lay beyond the vast open sea. No amount of peace would heal the scars in their hearts and on their bodies, and nothing they could do would fill the hole left behind by those who weren’t there.
If it was like this, he would change it. Because he hated this world and hated himself, all the ways it failed him and every day that he failed it.
Rin’s dream was a mirage he could not grasp with an end he could not reach, one that he would chase until his dying days. Because time no longer mattered, and food had no taste. The nights were too long and the days too hot. Sleep was another chance for the past to find him, and closing his eye brought him one moment closer to death.
He missed her voice and her name, the healing glow of her chakra. He missed their days together and their short-lived team, the one where they fought and bickered, when their days were long and a year lasted a lifetime.
Those days were gone, left behind by the tragedy of war. And if he tried to reach them, his fist on air.
To him, it was a rainbow.