DiSCERN (Naruto Fanfic)

Chapter Nine.

Itsuki stands in the middle of the training ground, and he closes his eyes.

He spends the night with Kakashi beside him as he tries to throw shuriken, but no matter how specific the directions were, Itsuki was getting nowhere in his training.

He can't see the target, less properly gauge how far away it was, how much closer or further each shuriken he throws come. He couldn't readjust his aim, much less understand his own progress, and that makes his training very frustrating and so entirely futile.

So he intertwines his fingers before him, right thumb over left in a prayer, and expands his senses around.

His chakra held together inwards, he takes a deep breath through his nose, and blows out through his mouth. His eyes shut, he sends his chakra streaming to his feet, to the ground.

Stretching as thinly as he can, he pulls them across the grass like a vein of roots.

"What are you doing?"

He's zapped back into reality, and with a longsuffering groan he snaps to the general direction of Kakashi and hisses, "Shhh!"

He tries again.

But his focus is lost and his chakra can't quite coagulate anymore. His chakra feels like water, and the only thing his hands can do is helplessly watch it seep through the cracks of his fingers.

What a waste. He groans, hand in his hair and tugging lightly.

"I'm pathetic," he decides, flopping to the ground, "can't even throw shuriken."

How the mighty have fallen. Prospective top two of the year in shuriken alone, now down in the dumps and worse than a dead last. What a shame.

And to his utter, bone-crushing horror, Kakashi grumbles out to agree. "Yeah, you kinda are," he mutters. "Even Obito can throw better."

Except, he's an Uchiha and still considered above average in his rank?

"You're mean," Itsuki whines, hurt.

"Honesty is a virtue," Kakashi responds easily, like he's practice this hundreds of times.

And yes. He has.

A hurt swells in Itsuki's chest when he remembers-- the last time he saw Kakashi, the last time over there, was in a goddamn manju place down the street from Ichiraku.

Kakashi had called him childish for his sugar intake. Itsuki, the ever amazing person at quarreling he is, short-circuited and his vocabulary shrank to the levels of you're an ugly meanie pants go away. It ended terribly, but they laughed it off.

That had been their last ever conversation.

Half of their greetings in their life were Kakashi pointing out something he did, Itsuki calling him mean, and the former justifying himself with the denotation that he was simply being honest. At some point it became routine. It was so dumb.

Now it's gone.

It feels like the first time again that Itsuki's chest burns, suddenly realizing that he's losing so much. Lost so much.

This isn't the Kakashi he spent years working under, putting back together. This isn't the Kakashi who led him through his first kill and isn't the Kakashi that he nursed through chakra exhausted nights because he was too stubborn to get his puppies to coax him out of nightmares.

This isn't, isn't his Kakashi.

And it hurts.