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Chapter 12

In her dream, he has yet to die.

"I know nothing," he whispers through cracked and bloodied lips, skin littered with bruises and lacerations and—and burns, Sakura realizes—wrists chained to rock, ankles shackled together with fetters engraved with cryptic symbols.

The lighting is dim inside the cave, with only the faint blue glow of someone's chakra illuminating her father's battered face, the sharp contours of his captors, the subterranean moisture gleaming damply against the walls.

"Lies," one of the men hisses, and delivers a chakra-infused kick to his ribs. Sakura cries out at the hollow snap of bone, the gentle dribble of blood—the sign of a torn lung—but no one hears her, no one sees her, not even herself.

'Hm. Not bad. But not enough blood.'

The dispassionate, disembodied voice echoes through the cavern, ringing both outside and inside Sakura's head. Immediately, a mouthful of blood sprays from her father's lips and his navy shirt darkens further, a giant black stain down his chest.

"You've got half an hour," another one of the captors says, conversationally, as he yanks his kunai out of her father's abdomen. "Before we kill you, I mean. I didn't stab anything vital just now, so I'm afraid death won't be a possible escape yet." He offers a smile brimming with faux apology, then, in a snake-strike movement, slices a foot-long line down his prisoner's forearm.

'More blood,' comes the detached voice as the gleaming white of bone disappears beneath a wash of red. 'Yes. Better.'

Sakura wants to gag but she has no throat, no body. She can only watch in mute horror as her father's limbs shudder violently, beyond his control.

"I know nothing," he repeats: a tiny, broken voice. And then he screams, spine curving weakly inward as his previously uninjured arm becomes nothing more than a bloody, dripping nub, hacked off at the shoulder.

"Hmm. You Leaf nin all think you're so honorable, don't you? So noble," the captor—the same man as before—muses, voice light and pleasant as he stands above Kizashi Haruno's choking, whimpering form, above the puddle of blood and bile seeping across the floor. "So futile." He nudges the trembling figure with his shoe.

"For a Leaf nin, though, I gotta say—you've been holding up pretty well." Casually rolling up his sleeves, the man crouches down before her father's ashen face and crimps his cheeks into another smile. "It's too bad you've forgotten that our specialty lies in...less physical methods."

The smile curdles into something cold and vicious. Reaching out, he touches Kizashi's forehead with two fingers and closes his eyes.

And Kizashi immediately begins to rasp in pain, body convulsing involuntarily. Sakura cannot form words in her mind; just a desperate, continuous plea for this all to stop. The cave develops a faint, red haze, and the edges of the scene begin to dim.

'That's not what a tortured man sounds like. He should be louder. Make him scream.'

And it happens. Even as her vision fades, her father's voice fills the cave, fills her mind, louder and louder, from a groan to a wail to an endless, bone-chilling shriek:

"I'll tell you! I'll tell you! I'll talk! I'll talk I'LL TALK I'LL TALK—"

Sakura wakes and stares into blue and gold eyes, in a black and gray room. Sitting up, she leans over and retches into the wastebin by her bedside, then retches some more, then dry-heaves.

She distantly feels the mattress dip as Kumo hops onto the duvet and attempts to snuggle against her side, but in a sudden, reflexive action, Sakura shoves the cat away.

Mewling softly, Kumo curls up into a ball near the pillow and swishes his tail in the darkness. Sakura tries to muster up the courage, the calm, to reach out a hand and reassure the startled animal, but can do little more than curl her fingers into a death grip around the edge of her sheets and shake.

She cannot lie back down. She cannot close her eyes. She cannot swallow. She just shakes and shakes, sits and sits, girl and cat, waiting for dawn.

As soon as the first tendrils of daylight peek through her bedroom curtains, Sakura peels back the covers and slips out of bed. Her sheets are crumpled from the earlier abuse of her fingers but she ignores them, opting instead to hesitantly scratch Kumo behind his ears as an apology.

Kumo purrs and rubs his head against her hand, leaping off the mattress to trail after her into the kitchen where she quietly refills his water and food bowl. When he follows her to the front door, however, Sakura gently nudges him back inside with a sandaled foot.

"I'll be fine," she whispers to the cat, and steals out into the gloom.

The outside air is fresh and damp with morning dew as she wanders from the village streets and into the forest, the wetness of the grass seeping between her toes and creeping up the hem of her flannel pants. It is still night beneath the trees, and Sakura drifts through the shade as if still dreaming of a destination.

"You're early."

Somehow, Sakura is not surprised to find his languid form posed before the Stone as if planted there, the silver of his hair a comforting countermelody to the wistful gleam of the memorial's polished surface. He eyes her with lazy curiosity.

"I woke up early," Sakura finds herself saying. It feels strange to be talking to him, even though she sees him nearly every week. He has never been prone to pleasantries, has always more of a quiet presence beside her as they stand side by side before the memorial. He has never pried into her life and in return, she has never asked about his: the occasional tear in his flak jacket, the aura of solitude around his shoulders, the unreadable look that drifts across his eyes.

She doesn't know why he would suddenly take an interest in her affairs, this boy whose name she has yet to even learn.

"Mn," he hums noncommittally at her reply and falls quiet, just like that. Together, they stand in silence before the monument, minds drifting far away.

It's not enough.

Sakura still feels that cloud of memories—blood and bones and screaming—stirring nausea in her gut, a painful knot swelling beneath her ribcage, no matter how hard she tries to clear her mind and blank out the visions. Her limbs grow stiff and her skin turns pale and she still cannot stop shivering, but it's not due to the cold and she knows it.

Gently falling to her knees, she reaches a small hand toward the stone. The boy beside her makes no comment at the display, only watches as she finds the name she is looking for within a heartbeat and carefully traces her fingers along the smooth grooves etched across the surface, and then again, and again, until the ache in her stomach begins to numb and the world no longer spins so dizzyingly fast around her.

The morning air is still cool, and Sakura's nightshirt is thin and worn with use since she lacks the funds for new clothing. The breeze sneaks beneath the cotton and slithers playfully up her spine, causing her to shiver and sneeze. She tugs her sleeves lower to cover her wrists and carefully gets back onto her feet, preparing to leave but not quite ready to.

"So, what was the nightmare?"

The question shakes Sakura to the core and she whips around to look at him, eyes wide. "I...I never said anything about—"

He cuts her off with a chuckle. Even when it is at her expense, his laugh is warm and soothing, which throws her even further off-balance .

"First of all, you're early." He crinkles one gray eye at her. "By which I mean that you usually come on Sunday, not Saturday."

He must have deduced that for Sakura, an orphan with few responsibilities, to make such an unplanned trip, something noteworthy had to have transpired.

"Then there's your attire, and the fact that your chakra is spinning out of control. For someone your age, that usually only happens if you've recently engaged in a physical showdown, or if you've just had a nightmare."

Reaching out a gloved hand, he gives her bedhead an unexpected ruffle. "Maa, Sakura-chan. Did you come from a fistfight?"

Sakura concedes defeat.

"I had a nightmare," she whispers, dropping her gaze to the ground. "About my father."

"Aa," he says. He slips his hands back into his pockets.

"He...died."

"Mn." He nods. "Then why are you here?"

"Here?" Sakura echoes. "I...Kaa-san—"

"—Wasn't in your dream." He doesn't look at her, but at the Memorial Stone, an inscrutable glimmer in his eye. "You were not close with your father?"

"I...I guess not."

"Not even close enough for a visit?"

Her breath catches in her throat and her mind is suddenly stuffed with wool and mud and needles, and she doesn't know.

"I can't visit," she says.

"Can't?" The question rings with innocent curiosity. "Oh, don't worry. The cemetery doesn't impose an age restriction on visitors."

"That's not it!" A nameless emotion builds up in Sakura's chest, but she cannot pinpoint why it is there, or how to get rid of it.

"I just can't, alright? We're just," she cannot find the words, "just not close."

The air whistles out of her.

"Just...not anymore."

He spares her a quick glance, then redirects his gaze at the sky. "So what changed?"

Again, the words get stuck in her throat. She doesn't know what to say, doesn't know where to start because, because—

"Because of how he died?" The remark is light but cutting, somehow, and it causes that frozen feeling wedged in her chest to sour and shrivel and morph into anger, red-hot and polluted—how dare he judge her when he doesn't even know her, doesn't even understand the betrayal?—and quick too cool.

But not quick enough.

"Because he's a traitor." She spits out the word like phlegm and it douses the fire in her heart, but it feels like a mistake.

"You're right! Your dad did earn a new title recently." The older boy's eye crinkles into a happy smile. "So, what's changed?"

What's changed? Sakura is speechless.

He chuckles again. "Titles are easily gained and easily lost, you know. I've got quite a few myself. Didn't make me feel much different, though."

"Everything is different." Her voice comes out small and feeble, and she hates herself for it. "It's different."

"Yeah?"

Sakura is silent.

"So, if your dad were to come back tomorrow, miraculously alive, he wouldn't hug you and spoil you anymore like he used to? You wouldn't feel happy to see him again, like you used to?"

"No!" Sakura cries, that poisonous, numbing fury lacing through her veins once more. She isn't sure what she is responding to. She isn't sure it matters.

"I don't care about him anymore." The words come out misshapen and grotesque. Their sharp edges tear at the roof of her mouth and their weight oozes beneath her tongue and chokes her.

"Yes. You 'don't care' so much that you had a nightmare about his death and then wandered into the forest at twilight to see your mom." The boy is smiling again, mocking her, and Sakura fights the desire to strangle him.

"I don't care," she says again, because she is right. That cold cloud of corrupted anger fizzes within her blood and slithers up, up—

"Don't be an idiot."

—up to her neck, her ears, her eyes, burning and acidic—

"You're mad because he wasn't who you thought he was."

—and then it isn't anger anymore.

Sakura stares helplessly at the boy who so bluntly read her heart out loud, and he returns her gaze with a calm gray eye, as if daring her lie again. Daring her to pretend that he didn't just see right through her.

"You've decided to punish him by abandoning his grave but he's dead, kid. You're just hurting yourself."

She sniffles.

And then she's sobbing: big, fat, damning droplets rolling down her cheeks and onto her threadbare nightshirt, the kind of crying that leaves the face blotchy and the nose clogged and the throat cramping long after the tears have turned to hiccups.

It's bewildering, to cry. It doesn't feel like a dam breaking. She had not even been aware that she had pent up feelings vying to be set free; the moisture had simply welled up, suddenly and all at once, and decided to pour out from her eyes. Distantly, she feels her hands cup themselves below her chin in an effort to catch the tears, but the gesture is futile, and she does not even know why she does it.

Something lands softly on her hair, and Sakura looks up through a blurry haze of water to see the boy with one palm awkwardly resting on her head. Sakura grabs his wrist with both of her hands.

"He—he let me down!" she cries to the world and, oh, the pain of such an admission. It comes out tortured and ugly, a guttural wail of a wounded beast.

The hand on her hair rubs little soothing circles into her messy tresses, and Sakura hangs onto that gloved wrist for dear life as she bows her head and waters the earth with the ice once lodged in her heart.

"I know," that calm voice murmurs above her. "That's what parents do."

She cries harder.

The boy doesn't say anything more, just waits for her to recover in her own time, eye fixed on the Memorial Stone as his hand continues to hesitantly pat her head.

"Thank you," she whispers once she has finally found her voice again.

He clears his throat and runs slender fingers through his hair. "Maa, don't worry about it," he chirps, embarrassed laughter suddenly hiding in his voice. "You should probably get back home soon. You're going to catch a cold at this rate."

He doesn't look at her, but he reaches out and rests a hand on her back, allowing the warmth from his palm to seep into her spine and chase away the chill on her skin.

Sakura hiccups. "Do you think he changed? Or was he never who I had thought him to be?"

"Hm. Can't say," he says lightly. "Most likely the latter, though. People don't usually change that fast."

Sakura nods.

"But then again," he adds, "maybe we just got the wrong story, and he had actually done something heroic. Maybe he was exactly the person you thought he was."

"What do you mean? The report said he gave in during...interrogation…" She bites her lip.

"Yup, that's the account," he agrees cheerfully. "Who knows? Maybe he thought the mission would go even worse if he didn't speak. Maybe he was trying to save a team member."

Turning both of them around, he begins to guide Sakura back out of the clearing. "What do you think?"

The long grass tickles her toes and caresses her ankles. "I do not think he was...evil," she says, slowly, when the village finally peeks out from between the trees. "I think...he was just weak."

The words leave her mouth thickly, but the taste they leave behind is not acidic, but bittersweet. A heavy weight slides off her shoulders and dissolves into a passing breeze.

The boy doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. He simply nudges her onto the dirt path and slouches leisurely by the roadside, hands shoved deep into his pockets. "It looks like I won't be seeing you tomorrow, then, right?"

Sakura shakes her head and smiles. Tomorrow, she'll have to pay a visit to the cemetery.

"Cool. Well, I trust you'll know the way home from here? I'm...a bit late to a meeting." He crinkles his eye into what Sakura is beginning to think is his signature smile.

Dismayed at having taken up his whole morning, she immediately attempts to apologize, but the boy just waves her off.

"I'll see you around," he says, and turns away with a lazy wave.

"W-wait!" Sakura calls out without thinking.

He looks back.

"Sorry," she mumbles. "I...may I ask your name?"

And he laughs.

"I guess you can call me Kakashi," he says, and then he vanishes in a swirl of leaves.

Thank you for reading! Do the characters and dialogue feel believable? I hope Kakashi is not wildly out of character here...

Also, I am starting to worry that 'T' might not be the most fitting rating for this story and I should change it to 'M.' To those of you with a lot of fanfiction experience: what would you advise?