KakaObiRin...
Got infected with KakaRinObito. Burnt my brain until I wrote it. Promptly forgot to post it here.


Title: False Summer

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: KakaObiRin

Spoilers: Everywhere! Kakashi’s past and memory arc, mostly

Warnings: Implied sex, threesome (oooh, surprise, surprise), underage drinking, plot theories, ghost sex, and dead people (I see them 0_0).

Double Warning: Written under a high stress level, with no beta’ing or revision. I just let the sentences come out how they wanted to. Mostly, this was just a writing exercise to calm myself down.

Triple Warning: I wrote this in one sitting (crazy? Yes! Crazy-crazy!), and I didn’t erase anything. Some of the word choices and sentence structures are going to be weird, because I just let the bunnies have their way and didn’t worry about anything else. So it’s a bit trippy, and probably kinda hard to follow. I don’t have the time to edit it or go over it again; if you all like it enough, I’ll think about a re-do, but it is really just an extraordinarily long drabble. Sorry in advance!


*

It’d been three years since Obito had died (and with a horrific crunch of pulverized bones, blood dribbling down his chin like saliva) ---

---two years since Rin had fallen ill (and had just wilted one day, her tattooed cheeks blossoming sick sores)---

---one year since their Sensei had been declared MIA (and they’d meant dead with that label, dead without a body to prove it)---

---when Kakashi had had the dream.

He’d fallen into bed just as he usually did: after drinking enough to sedate even such a jounin as himself, enough to kill the average man, and stripping off his ANBU guards, not caring enough to get dressed in pajamas because whenever the hangover wore off, he’d be on a mission again, killing and miraculously not dying (he called this miracle horribly unfair; he wanted to die, but that was another thought for another time). He’d fallen into bed---literally, stumbling over the very covers like the drunk he was---and had been almost instantly asleep, offering up whatever was left of his conscious to the darkness behind his shut eyes.

Kakashi lived like a maniac. Killed for the good of the village, drank for the good of everyone dead in his life, and slept because it was the only thing left that felt good to him.

He was too young to be this old. He was sixteen, for chrissake.

Unfortunately, all those who would have reminded him of that…instead of using him and his prowess like napkins; he’d gone on so many missions, now, so many deaths he had no idea how to count them all…all those people who cared enough to rein him in were either dead or dying.

He rarely visited Rin anymore, even though she was the only one left. She didn’t want him to see her like she was, didn’t want him to see how much of herself the sickness and eaten. He honored that, mostly because he didn’t want her to see how much of his humanity his own sickness had gorged itself on. He didn’t have any left to offer her in her last days, even though he’d promised Obito with such passion that he would love her for him.

It turned out that they would all be denied that love.

Until the dream.

Until Kakashi woke up and it was summer.

*

He was confused at first, thrown. Kakashi was a planner, and it always unsettled him when things were out of place. He woke up with everything a-jumble: it was summer, the secret and passionate apex of high summer, instead of the bitter drudge of winter. He was no longer dressed in the svelte, dark material of his ANBU uniform---someone had peeled that second skin off and had redressed him in loose, pinstriped pajamas, the collar undone three buttons down in order to expose the sharp angle of his clavicle and the gleam of the beaded necklace Rin had made him for his eleventh birthday. He was in bed still, but not his bed: this was not his half-crumpled, badly aired excuse for a futon. This bed was western-style and high-posted, the sheets crisp and unimaginably white. He looked dark by comparison.

Kakashi blinked up at the canopy, briefly confused and yet somehow unworried about the fact that he was not in Konoha, in his lumpy bed, in his assassin’s uniform. It should have been supremely worrisome, but it just wasn’t. This place, wherever it was, was tepid and comforting, soothing deep down and stripping away everything unnecessary. Rank was gone. Death was gone. It was simply and wonderfully warm.

He slid out of the bed after testing his feet a few times, curling his toes against the worn wood of the floor. He pushed the gauzy, thick material encasing the four-poster away with one hand, blinking as he was instantly met with a wave of near-blinding sunlight. He promptly closed his left eye---since he had no natural pupil control over the Sharingan, it took longer to adjust to lighting changes---and squinted around him fuzzily.

If his hangover had caught up to him, he would have been curled up on the floor and moaning---thankfully, it’d been lost in the shuffle during whatever jump had been made to bring him to this unfamiliar sunny porch.

There was someone slouched in a lawn chair, reading a book. Their dark head rose with a snap the moment they heard Kakashi’s shuffling steps, and a huge grin split their near-familiar face.

He blinked his natural eye at the man for a moment before his memory triggered:

---fan mon, loser, idiot, overemotional puppy, friend, goggles, dead; oh god, dead---

Uchiha Obito.

His knees weakened, just a bit.

“Kakashi!” Obito yelled in greeting, tossing aside his book without marking his spot. It was instantly inconsequential. “I’ve been waiting for you to come for three years---aren’t you supposed to be the punctual one? Geeze, I was just about to give up on you ever coming by for a visit!”

“O-Obito?” Kakashi stammered despite himself, his unmatched eyes widening slightly as he took in the sight of his three-years-dead friend.

He’d aged. Dead people were not meant to age, even if they were just in dreams. He looked to be about the same age as Kakashi himself was now---sixteen, and lank. He’d grown up enough to look like a man, now, lightly muscular through the upper-torso, lithe enough to still be considered slender. His dark blue t-shirt was loose on him, his sweatpants low-riding, as if only just caught by his jutting hips. Obito’s dark eyes were still too emotional for a boy’s temperament, but they weren’t as big and dewy, masked by orange goggles. His black hair was shaggier, hanging into his face and curling around his neck. The grin was still wide and childish, and haunting in its immutable familiarity. It made Kakashi a little bit dizzy.

“You look…older,” he said guardedly---not following it with the nagging thought that bubbled up hotly: you look older, is this how you would have aged had you not saved my life at the cost of your own?

“Oh?” Obito quirked an eyebrow, looking down at himself. He patted his stomach, laughing a bit. “Oh yeah, this body…I thought it’d be a little easier on the eyes than the ‘real’ me.”

His image softened somehow, just for a split-second, but Kakashi’s Sharingan caught the truth in all its glory: a thirteen-year-old boy, his right side crushed beyond recognition, much less repair, his left eye socket left gaping and ragged because the eye rested in Kakashi’s own head. His skull was smashed so horrifically that it was a sudden wonder that he had stayed alive as long as he had. His dark hair was matted with gore, his right side jutted chips and spikes of shattered bone, and blood was dried to his mouth and chin. It flaked when he smirked and the false self flickered back.

It had only lasted for the barest second, but it still made Kakashi want to vomit.

“Thank you,” he said, hearing the nausea in his voice.

“No prob,” said the teenage Obito, waving him off shortly. “I don’t really want to be remembered that way, anyway, y’know? I’d rather you see me like this. I thought I should age myself a bit, though, just so we could still be equals. I know you, and you’d talk down to a thirteen-year-old shrimp.”

Kakashi let his gaze wander---half to settle his stomach; Sharingan was gracing him with hellish afterimages---and picked apart the landscape bit by bit.

A Zen garden. A large tree with low branches. An open porch, a faint, warm wind, and a blue sky.

“Where are we?” The jounin asked slowly.

“Mm? Oh, here---this is the Uchiha summerhouse. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to take us that didn’t have some kind of negative memory to it, and it’s kinda peaceful here, don’t you think?” Obito flopped back down in his chair, gesturing Kakashi to sit with a short wave. He did not remember the extra chair being there before, but he had a feeling that ‘existence’ and ‘nonexistence’ were soft concepts here. Wherever here actually was; it sure as hell only looked like the Uchiha summerhouse… “My uncle Fugaku used to take me with his family when they went here---you remember them, right? Uncle Fugaku, Aunt Mikoto, and their little brat Whasshisface…”

“Itachi.” Kakashi snorted quietly---ah, yes, Uchiha Itachi, the boy who had spat at him straight in the face for his bastardized Sharingan. He was only eight and already filled with so much hatred. “Right?”

“Yeah, yeah, the little weasel kid! God, I hated babysitting him. He was weird, y’know, real weird. He’d give me the creepiest looks whenever we were in a room alone, and he had this really nasty vengeance streak---I crossed him once, told him to go to bed without TV or somethin’ like that, and I woke up with a dead cat in my bed the next morning. I swear to God it was that creep child.” Obito gave him a deeply purposeful look, an old look, and it held wisdom and warning that jarred Kakashi to his bones. “I’d keep an eye on him if I were you. On him, and that brother of his.”

Kakashi had not mentioned Sasuke, the baby brother.

He’d been born a year after Obito’s death.

“I’ll…do that…” Kakashi said somewhat hopelessly, his stomach turning somersaults at that calculating black gaze. It was colder than anything Obito could have mustered in life, and it set him off-ease in a way that very few things did.

Obito’s smirk returned as if the age had been nothing but a cloud passing over the sun; he leaned back in his chair, tilting precariously on two legs as if daring the gravity he himself had crafted to smack him back down.

“Anyways, anyways…you look good, Kakashi. I mean that.” He chewed on his thumbnail thoughtfully, suddenly a teenager again, and a darkly pensive one at that. “You look like you’ve loosened up some---is it Rin-chan? Oh man, have you slept with her yet? ---Wait, don’t tell me if you have; I think I’d just punch you a good one if you had…I wanted to take her.” Frowning comically, Obito tilted the chair back all the way---it didn’t fall, though, taunting physics. He just hung there as if hung by puppet strings, not because he was some minor god in this half-place. “Maaaaan, dying sucks ass.”

Kakashi looked down at the dango he’d been offered---a plate had appeared when he’d looked away, and Obito was already munching happily away on the sweet---wondering if he could taste it if he took a hesitant bite. Where was this place---limbo? A dream world? Somewhere gray and intangible, or something his lonely, overtired, and drunken mind had created as a cushion against the rest of the story?

He could feel things much better than he would have thought possible: the warm rush of summer wind tugged curious fingers through his shaggy silver hair and at the loose collar of his nightshirt, thick and real. The thin, reed-like skewer that the dango were on felt like wood between his pinched fingers. He could taste the salt on his dry, chapped lips, could feel the palpitations of his heart as he tried to twist the rampaging beat off by force of will---some horribly childlike part of himself didn’t want to seem confused or out of sorts in front of Obito. Still…even his feet on the porch were grounded, heavy enough to be real. It was too real, too intricate to be some kind of drunken dream.

He took a cautious bite from the dango. It was sweet.

Noticing his uncertainty, Obito’s smirk deepened.

“What?” he said calmly, still hanging in the nothingness that meant he was nearly-all-powerful. “I may be dead, but I still remember what dango tastes like. Want anything else? I can make anything. Um---anything I can remember from life, at least.”

“Have you taken Rin here?” Kakashi asked, not derailed by the childish ideal of ultimate power. He knew too much about death and power to think that such skills didn’t have some kind of drawback.

“Nah, not yet,” Obito admitted, shrugging. “She doesn’t want to see me. Not like this at least, but you---you were desperate enough to open up for anything. So here you are, my almost-good buddy, the great genius Hatake Kakashi. I wanted Rin to be here, too, but I can’t access her mind without her permission.” He perked up slightly, righting his chair and clasping his hands on his thin knees. His smile widened, lighting up his dark eyes. “You could, though! Want to bring in her and Sensei and make this a real reunion?”

Kakashi’s expression closed. He stiffened.

In a dead voice, he said: “Rin is dying. Sensei is dead. Don’t mock me, Uchiha.”

Obito flinched as if he’d been struck. His hands tightened over his knees until the knuckles were white, and he stammered out choked questions, his eyes manic and horrified.

“Rin-chan? Rin-chan is dying? Of what? Why? A-and Sensei---Sensei isn’t dead; I’d know if he was dead, I’m dead, remember? He’s---he’s not in the gray places; he’s not dead, Kakashi, I’d know---“

Kakashi set down the dango. “Yes he is. A demon attacked the village two years ago, and he died in sealing it. He left a child behind, a boy. Sealed the demon right in the kid, or so I’ve heard. I doubt the brat will live to adulthood.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter---it was over and done with, unchangeable even in a world like this one. His lips twisted into a wry smirk, and he added: “The kid looks a lot like Sensei---if Sensei were two years old, not potty-trained, and couldn’t speak anything aside from the word ‘ramen’.”

“Sensei isn’t dead! He isn’t! ” Obito howled suddenly. As if this had struck some chord in the fake nature around them, the sky darkened to dusk, and a rumble of thunder rolled ominously in the distance.

“Nothing you can say will change it,” Kakashi said coldly, flippantly. “He’s gone.”

“I was wrong,” snarled Obito venomously. “You haven’t changed a bit! You’re still a cold-hearted, arrogant son of a bitch, and I should regret having died for you---”

Should, but didn’t. They both knew that.

Quietly, Kakashi shifted his red-dark gaze over to the remnants of the garden. It was the only part of the dream that hadn’t been enveloped by the skein of beauty: row after row of dead sunflowers hung their shriveled heads, their stalks gray with age and death. The black petals curled in on the desiccated hearts of the flowers, as if trying to protect whatever was left there of what had been alive and vibrant at one time.

“Why are the flowers dead, Obito?” Kakashi asked, dropping their previous subject matter as if it could have been tossed to the wind like down. He knew he was a son of a bitch. He didn’t need a ghost telling him that.

Obito sighed.

“No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get the sunflowers to grow. They’re always like that---dead and brittle, like they’re trying to remind me where I am or somethin’.” He bowed his head slightly, tucking his chin in as if a little cold. Kakashi couldn’t see how he could be that way; the false summer night was warm and clear, perfect and unmarred if the skeletal sunflowers could be ignored. “Like I could ever forget where I am.”

“Dead,” Kakashi said, though not unfeelingly. He was simply stating it.

“Yeah. Dead.”

“At least you’ll get company, soon. You’ll find Sensei sooner or later, and Rin has maybe a couple weeks left in her at best. And me---I’ll be stopping by any day.” The wry smirk turned cruel. “I live off of borrowed time, after all.”

“No,” Obito said quietly, musingly. “You’re going to live a long life, Kakashi.”

“I had a feeling you’d say that.” Still cruel, still cold, still aching inside. “You ghosts are going to make certain I live through year after year of pain and regret. What friends you are, you fucking, insufferable heroes---“

“Don’t blame me,” said the Uchiha. His dark hair flopped comically as he shrugged. “My body moved on its own. I didn’t mean to save you, and if I’d known you’d bitch this much about it, I would’ve let you die that day.”

Kakashi leaned over, clasping his hands between his knees. It seemed to be the only silent way to stop them from shaking. God, they shook. Wouldn’t stop shaking. Never stopped. Not when Obito had died, not when Sensei had died, not as Rin lay dying and as he made futile attempts to drink himself to death.

“I’m going to see if Rin is sleeping,” he said, hearing the words before he understood what they meant. He got up, walking back to the four-poster bed he’d woken in. It had remade itself---somehow---but was no longer crisp and bright. The sheets were rumpled, and they cast serpentine shadows on themselves. It was still dusky, as per Obito’s control. He probably liked having this much control, he mused---he’d never had had a say in things in life, but death had made him powerful. There was something bitterly ironic to that.

Kakashi unclasped the necklace, with its smooth, heavy glass beads, and let it slither down onto the pillowcase, leaving an indented nest with its weight. The necklace Rin had made him lay on the pillow like a baleful reminder of all that had passed between the three of them.

“C’mon, Rin-chan,” Kakashi whispered. “Your boys want to see you.”

He blinked, and then she was there, curled up in the sheets. Her full face was softened into a kittenish expression as she slept, and Kakashi traced her rectangular tattoos with one shaking thumb. She was real. Real enough for this world, anyway.

Rin was by no means beautiful. When open, her eyes were a murky color that hovered somewhere between dirty green or speckled mud; they sparkled when she laughed, but were, other than that, unmemorable. Her lips were plush, but usually chapped. They didn’t invite kisses with pouts or lip gloss. Her hair was just as mousy brown as her eyes (in the particular lighting that didn’t surface the almost-green that rimmed her pupils), and was usually kept in an ordinary ponytail that brushed the small of her back. In all, she was wonderfully homely, and without the sharp quirk of her chapped lips when she smiled or the warmth of her murky eyes, she was an unremarkable girl.

Her hands were fascinating, though. She had the hands of a healer: smooth-palmed and bereft of a ninja’s padding of calluses. They’d been the first thing to scar when the sickness took hold, and anything that she could have called physically beautiful had died with that.

Rin was beautiful now, even if it was a trick of the lighting or Kakashi’s wonder to see her whole again. The thin white sheets she was curled in were laced with a scattering of petals, tiny spurts of yellow like the softer edges of cooling flames. He didn’t know whose imagination that particular touch had come from---certainly not from Obito, because he could not bring his favorite flower into (sur?)reality, and not from Rin, who still slept, so perhaps it’d come from him, then; some part of him that was reminded of life and sex by flower petals. Yes, it was probably his contribution to the shadowy bedroom, his futile attempt at voicing something in himself that felt a lot like love. He hardly knew how to name it.

In the gloom, the girl, the flowers, and the bed were almost luminescent, fey-like and wonderful. Kakashi drew his fingers over the girl’s warm cheek, full and unmarked by the sickness that left her waking part pocked and sunken-cheeked. Here, like Obito, she was wholly alive, her flesh just as pliant, warm, and real as she’d been in a memory, once upon a time.

Obito, hanging at the edge of the bed, watched him touch her face. His dark eyes were old again, blank as slate. He wasn’t so much jealous as he was inexpressibly lonely. When Kakashi twitched two fingers for him to come closer, he did, ducking inside the veil of the bed’s sanctuary. When Kakashi invited him, it didn’t feel so much like trespassing.

Rin opened her murky eyes slowly, smiling when she saw the silver-haired boy and the black-haired boy standing over her like abstract guardian angels.

“Which one of you is Prince Charming?” Rin asked softly. She sat up in bed, yawning girlishly. Everything she did was dainty, girlish. She was so far away from being anything like the bundles of energy and masculinity she teamed with. They needed her to be that way, in all reality.

“He’s the frog,” Obito clarified, pointing to Kakashi. The jounin snorted.

“It’s good to see you,” Rin said in that same soft, dreamlike voice. She knew she was dying; maybe thought she was dead already, and seeing the ghosts she loved best. That could’ve been something like heaven.

“You too,” said Kakashi. He sat down on the bed---it creaked at the added weight; this was why ninja didn’t like beds with springs---and Rin curled into him instinctively, her cheek against his left shoulder, over the deep blue rank swirl of his ANBU tattoo.

“Together again,” Rin intoned quietly, and sounded like she wanted to cry. In the waking world, she was too sick to muster even that.

“Yeah,” said Kakashi.

…breathe in, breathe out. Kakashi counted three breaths like that, gauging the silence that crept in around their dream bower.

Obito’s lower lip quivered. He hung his head to hide the tears, but they still came.

“I’ve missed you guys,” Obito burst out, sudden tears spilling over his thin, pale cheeks. “Kakashi, we could’ve been friends---almost friends, maybe more than that---and I looked up to you so much; I still do, and even your sonofabitchness can’t change that.” He shook all over, crying with the strength that only a child can muster. “Rin---oh God, Rin, I love you. I never said that when I was alive, and I’m so sorry I didn’t---I cheated us, time cheated us, we all got gypped---“

“Shhh, Obito,” Rin said gently, raising a stilling hand. “We know.”

Kakashi was a little less gentle. He always was. “Shit, Uchiha, don’t cry---and you accuse me of not being able to change!”

“I’m dead,” Obito said, boyishly wiping at his tearing eyes with the back of one hand. “The dead don’t change, Kakashi.”

A pause, long enough for the one living member to count three of his heartbeats.

“Could we distract you?” Rin asked slowly, giving him a sweet little smile to go with that shy-bold statement. “Maybe?”

“It’d have to be a hell of a distraction,” Obito said, a smirk twitching at his lips as he rubbed childishly at his eyes. “I’mreally dead, y’know. Like, crazy-dead. You’d have to pull something to top Mr. Too-Cool-Jounin over there, and I’d---“

Kakashi caught Obito around the waist, tossing him on the petal-strewn bed before he could even yelp his surprise at being manhandled. They sprawled on the bed and blinked up at his like deer, like rabbits, like something sweet and soft that he knew made him the predator---he liked that, though, in some highly masculine and primal way. He liked their murky-dark doe eyes. He liked seeing them startled, bright, satisfied.

“You may have the final call here,” he growled, trying desperately to smother the full-out grin that wanted to split his normally serene face. “But I am still the team leader, and since Sensei isn’t here, we will follow whatever plan I concoct.”

“Yeah?” Obito challenged, a lax and catlike warmth making his eyes feverishly bright. They glittered with a challenge for Kakashi and Kakashi alone; he already had Rin without question, but one could never gauge the thoughts of a jounin who’d only lived chance moments in emotion. Kakashi had felt enough to come to the half-light of Obito’s created world, had felt enough to touch him, but love? Love was a silly notion and a nonsense word. It was more like desperation between the three of them, all dead and dying and heavy with the knowledge that sunflowers, summer, and child’s play were relics.

“Yeah,” Kakashi said tonelessly, and unbuttoned his shirt further. The scars that liberally crisscrossed his chest and abdomen in the waking world were gone, as if erased by holy fingertips dragged through flesh-colored paint. Obito didn’t remember them, so they didn’t exist. Kakashi did remember them, and so did Rin---she’d patched damn near all of those old wounds herself---but Obito did not allow them to affect him here. There was something selfish in that, but it was not a bad sort of selfishness.

Kakashi beckoned Obito to the edge of the bed with a twitch of two lazy fingers; as if the silver-haired boy was the master of the gray zone, he crawled forward. Kakashi, his chin tilted at a defiant angle and his eyes carefully dimmed, took a hold of Obito’s shirt---

---to hit him again, to accuse him of being a last-placed ninja, to save him from the crushing weight of the boulder that had stifled his life so painfully short---

---and jerked him up for a kiss. Obito stiffened at first like a startled cat, but a few movements of rough lips and surprisingly adept tongue and the boy was mush. The hand that was tangled in Kakashi’s undone nightshirt was the only thing keeping him upright. Obito’s naturally pale face was flushed; he arched up on his knees into the hot connection, mewling in the back of his throat (he needed this; some kind of physical touch after these years of nothing but dead sunflowers) and not caring because after death, pride is a paltry token. For the moment, he was very much alive.

“And that,” Kakashi said as he broke the kiss, panting slightly and licking the beads of dango-sweet saliva from his lips. “Is why I am team leader.”

Rin burst into mad giggles, clasping her lovely hands over her mouth and reeling with laughter. Obito spluttered for a moment, trying to deny ten things at once, but another kiss silenced him and sealed off any further discussion on the matter.

Kakashi kissed Obito forcefully, hungrily, because the other boy reciprocated. Obito kissed Rin sweetly, as if afraid to break her because she was a girl. Rin kissed Kakashi’s hands, because she remembered the scars, even if they were magically vanished in the dead place. Kakashi kissed Rin, but it was with the same hunger he tore into Obito with, even if she was a girl.

They forgave him for it. They knew he was broken.

Rin cuddled closer to Obito on the bed, nuzzling her perfect face into his whole right shoulder. She kissed his neck, winking at Kakashi so as to remind him that she had kisses saved up for him, too, if he would toss aside his pride and climb into the sheets and petals with them.

He did.

His team wasn’t supposed to die.

Rin wasn’t supposed to get sick.

Obito---damn him---wasn’t supposed to be a hero.

That was all nightmares. This should’ve been reality.

He knew that.

But it was all fake.

He also knew that.

When he woke the next morning---to a hangover and the profound emptiness of his own life---Umino Iruka, a friend of Rin’s, was pounding at his door. Rin had died sometime during the night, the twelve-year-old had choked out, trembling. She’d died peacefully and soundlessly, gliding away in her sleep. Kakashi knew what she had dreamt of as she’d slipped from the waking world, and the realization that he was finally utterly alone came with enough force to make the young genius weep.

Older, wiser, and even more broken, Kakashi missed the dream with a fierce keenness.

Like everything else, it faded.

*

Comments are greatly appreciated.