Uzumaki

Grind

Kakashi had not always been a man of leisure.

In fact, as a child, he'd had a lot of trouble staying still. He trained, he did missions day and night, and when he could do neither he hung around the mission office like a ghost.

Sleeping was worse. He had avoided it at all costs. If he did sleep, it was on foreign soil; what he did in his own time was best described as brief and feverish lapses into unconsciousness. And when that happened - when he slept - Kakashi was pulled into strange woods of shimmery white plastic, of no mother, no father, and his unmade, unwelcoming bed.

But the reckoning came. Kakashi realised he was a tool, and like a tool, his lethality was all he had - and that no matter how quick he was, how sharp he was, how deep the wounds he cut, he was powerless to ever do anything but lay in the hand of his superiors. Alone, he could not wound.

Now everyone was gone.

The things that Kakashi yearned for flourished in his head, in a dense luscious wood where the only bed was the one they rolled out beside the fire. Laughter. Flickers among the trees of annoying things they'd said or done; ghosts of himself, saying and doing all the wrong things; lunches he'd rejected. Feelings he'd hurt.

These images didn't haunt him. Kakashi was the one haunting the forests of Konoha, the woods of his head. The twist of the knife when Obito shrugged off another comment, muttering, or the way he felt himself seize when Rin grabbed his arm, or when Minato sighed, trying to round them up like unruly dogs: these were proof of life. The pain they caused him was evidence he had lived.

So he lived in those woods, in the gaps between the trunks and the branches, where his life was supposed to have been. When he took the long route to training or mission assignment, that was where he wandered.

As Konoha's humid heat-haze resettled on his last couple days, Kakashi stopped at a stream on his long journey; hanging his clothes on branches and reading with his calves in the water like he was fresh out the academy. The fish nipped at his feet before pulling back suddenly, which was what he imagined to be the aquatic equivalent of wrinkling your nose.

"Ouch. Guess I taste bad."

His journey back to Konoha after reconnaissance in Grass was marked with short stops. After he had sent back the coded intelligence Konoha needed, Kakashi decided to take his time - just a little.

--

"Hey, Rin, do you think Kakashi even knows how to swim?"

Rin was smiling ruefully at Obito, as she always did when he said stupid things like this. He could see the slightly crooked bite of her teeth. His left eye remembers this especially: her smile was warming to the sight. The eye could see distantly how Kakashi was sat on the shore, striking firewood. He remembered listening to this conversation: how he'd so patiently pretended to be deaf. Likewise, all the eye could see was his back.

"Of course he knows how to swim, Obito!" she pouted. "Don't tease him. Not everyone likes swimming with other people around..."

Obito huffed. "Well, maybe it's because Goody Two-Shoes over here doesn't know how to swim, and knows I'd beat him in a heartbeat in a race!"

"Obito..." Rin rolled her eyes.

"Ooh, maybe he has super webbed toes, that's why he never swims. Like he's a fish or something. He's so aqua-dynamic that his legs just spread like big ol' flippers and he just bobs through the ocean. Not like a merman, but, ah, a shark. Yeah. A shark dude, with gills and everything." Obito moved his hands to imitate the motion of gills. "Ah, maybe he doesn't talk because it's a fish mouth? Can fish talk?"