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He stepped on the traitor’s sternum, listening as the popping of dislocating ribs changed to the dull crack of broken bones.
“What would be the use of my death?” The Shadow Mizukage pressed down harder. “You think replacing me would alleviate the suffering of this-”
Abruptly, he had double vision. From his right eye was the broken and the blood, but from the left: Small white flowers, misting rain, a fly masquerading as a bee.
Almost reflexively, an imperceptible shard of kamui opened up, so he could hear the faint whispering that oftentimes accompanied the onslaught of imagery.
“Rain in late spring always sounds like a goodbye. The last showers of the season, the harbingers of summer heat. But I suppose here in the mist, things are a bit different. Here rain—or perhaps just the vague outline of rain—is more of a constant companion.”
Kakashi—for it was Kakashi with his dead eye, Kakashi who kept on unintentionally interrupting his meticulously practiced villain monologues—panned his eye outwards. Out to a line of tall shrubs, all dotted with those tiny flowers. He covered his right eye to better see, hunching over a bit.
“I wish you could hear it, could smell it. The sky tastes like the ocean’s embrace tonight,” murmured Bakashi like the loser he was. It was that damn Icha Icha series, infecting him with its far too flowery language. He needed to kill Jiraiya at some point.
The fly-bee was hit with a droplet but the rain was so light it was halfway to mist, so it just changed trajectories briefly and went to another of the thousand flowers. Kakashi closed his eye and then it was back to reality. Kakashi had found his own illusion of peace, his own lie in this broken world. Laughter dripped from the Shadow Mizukage, high and horrible. The ninja on the ground shivered. Perhaps in the pause he had gained some small modicum of hope. Hope that he wouldn’t die at the Shadow Mizukage’s hands. Hope that was dashed on the rocks along with his skull when he was promptly dropped from the roof of the Mizukage’s office.
There was a bitter taste at the back of his throat that wouldn’t go away.
He hated that Kakashi always whipped out the eye at the most inconvenient moments. Today, though, he had especially awful timing.
When he was Madara in Amegakure, the dark room was replaced with two sad brown eyes, set in a ball of fur, staring at him through the window of a small shop. Its pink tongue poked out briefly, licking the nose.
“Goddamnit Bakashi don't you dare do it. You don't need another dog,” he muttered.
“Lord Madara?” said Konan, a bit concerned.
“Sorry. You were talking about…”
“…Finances.”
“Go on.”
And there were other instances.
Spouting dark and twisted nonsense to Zetsu: a young snail on a blade of grass. Kakashi held his pinky finger up to it; the light brown shell was smaller than his nail.
Slaughtering some genin out for revenge: sunbeams in the far off distance.
Trying to brood peacefully in kamui: the swirl of browns in a bowl of miso. “Can you see the endless stars hidden in the finite?” He spoke too softly for anyone sane to hear. Stirred with a spoon, minute eddies formed and fell in a single breath.
“Shit,” he shouted, chucking a cube into the distance. “Not even in the sanctity of my own home, dimension, will you give me peace?”
Kakashi couldn’t hear him.
He recognized some of the locations Kakashi unwittingly showed him, knew he was on some sort of mission. He knew Kakashi was only ever used as an assassin nowadays, and he knew there was one particular Mizu council member that Konoha had wanted dead for some time. He also knew this particular council member was incredibly paranoid. He was curious if Kakashi could handle it. Perhaps because of this, he found himself following the path of Kakashi’s visual landmarks. Perhaps he wanted to see Kakashi fail.
But then he was back at those little flowers and it was raining again because it always rained in Kiri and he understood what Kakashi meant then. This damp air was the olfactory echo of an old friend and- damn the Sage six ways, now he was doing it too. The flowers in his thoughts wouldn’t go away. They drowned out Madara’s thoughts, The Shadow Mizukage’s thoughts, until all that was left was something he’d left behind in that cave. To see the world through Kakashi’s eyes, which were actually his own eyes but not really anymore—this was just as real as war, just as real as sorrow. Peace. Contentment. Was there really a need for the infinite Tsukuyomi when the smell of soft rain and sharp pollen was here already?
He breathed it all in and sobbed for the first time in a very long while.
He wasn’t good at being good anymore. But neither was he good at being bad. He wanted to be numb, to take pleasure in killing but now there was this horrible feeling in his abdomen that radiated outwards, down veins and into the tips of his fingers. Kakashi hadn’t opened his sharingan in a while and that usually meant combat. He had a bad habit of never showing the eye despair, never true fights. A complete waste of a sharingan, but the point was Kakashi was fighting an opponent Konoha had probably underestimated. The council member Kakashi was going after secretly held several dozen missing nin on retainer.
Kakashi could probably take them on if he was at full power, chakra reserves as meticulously expanded as his were. But increased chakra reserves meant nothing when he’d already spent the day exhausting them with visions of puppies and dogwood trees.
Kakashi should die. He should’ve died long ago, along with the rest of his team. But the thought of Kakashi lying in a puddle of his own blood, alone in the council member’s compound…. He kamuied directly to Kakashi, the eye a honing beacon. Yes, there he was, half delirious with chakra exhaustion, covered in shallow cuts, yet still somehow standing.
He wasn’t wearing any of his masks so he simply turned away from Kakashi, towards the missing nin. They died at his hand and he didn’t feel all that much like a villain, even though he was coated in blood again.
Kakashi was passed out on the floor. A newly made silence permeated the empty compound. He checked Kakashi once more, feeling the steady pulse at his neck. Everything was fine. He needed to leave now.
A hand reached out, grasping at his sleeve.
“Would you stay a while longer, friend?” Kakashi murmured, eyes still closed. “You smell like an old ghost of mine.”
He didn’t want to leave. Under all these names and masks, there was still that damn hope and happiness, a flame that could flicker but never put out entirely. Obito died under that boulder, then died three more times when Rin… but perhaps for tonight he could be Obito once again.
“Alright,” Obito whispered.