Naruto, What Remains

I watched a few episodes of the Naruto dub last week; they were doing a marathon in preparation for the hundreth episode. I saw the lead in to the Chuunin exam, and half of the written test part of it. Whoever they have doing Lee and Gai's voices are fantastic, and that's all I've really got to say about that.

I won't lie, watching the show did bring about a certain nostalgic twinge. I haven't been keeping up with any of the fan communities and I have no idea what's going on in the manga, except that, possibly, Tobi actually is Obito, and he's very evil? I don't know. But thinking about Obito got me thinking about that crazy AU I started writing a million years ago, back over here, that eventually turned into What Remains. You know, the one where Kakashi was standing a little to the left when the rocks came down. Obito lives, but loses his leg. Rin dies. Life continues, as it tends to.

This was a scene from much later on in that series- Obito is 19, Kakashi is 17. (I'd forgotten how much I enjoy completely-broken!Kakashi.) It's still a little rough- my Naruto headvoices don't really talk to me anymore.

And Obito, for the record, remains straight like a really straight thing.
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Kakashi usually stopped by his place after missions; Obito wasn't sure why, since they saw enough of each other every day when Kakashi wasn't on assignment. He got used to his friend showing up on his doorstep at odd hours, sometimes grinning with one eye, sometimes half dead from exhaustion and bleeding.

So it didn't come as a surprise when he heard the door open at two in the morning; he wasn't an active shinobi anymore, but he kept in condition as best he could, and he knew Kakashi was due back. His friend had a spare key, but Obito met him at the door anyway.

"You look like shit," he said bluntly. "How badly are you bleeding?"

Kakashi's Anbu mask hung by its strings from lax fingers; his cloth facemask was stained with blood. "Internally or externally?"

"Your sense of humor still needs work. C'mon, lean on me." They hobbled into the bathroom, where Obito helped Kakashi out of his clthoes. He hissed in sympathy at the bands of bruises that wrapped around Kakashi's chest and abdomen. "What happened?"

"Anbu stuff. Classified." Kakashi leaned against the countertop and let Obito clean him off and bandage him up. His expression was neutral, but his hands were shaking ever so slightly with the effort required to keep up the facade. "It wasn't...I..."

"It's okay." Obito wrapped a spare robe around his friend's thin frame and led him into the kitchen. "It was bad?"

"Yeah. There were kids. I don't..." Kakashi was shivering. "I should- I should go."

He snorted and poured cups of sake for both of them. It probably wasn't a good idea to give an injured man alcohol, but Obito wasn't too concerned with Kakashi's injuries; he'd bounced back from worse. "It's not like I don't have a spare bed with your name on it. Here. Drink."

Kakashi was shaking so hard he nearly spilled his drink, but he swallowed the stuff just fine. Obito poured him another.

"I need to rest. Have to give my report tomorrow, Hokage needs to know what happened...I should go." He drank the second glass too, though, mouth drawn into a thin line. The scars on his face stood out against his pale skin like red ink on fine paper, criss-crossing the blue tracings of veins just beneath the skin.

"If you try to sleep, you'll just have nightmares," Obito said gently. "It's okay. You're home. You don't have to say anything- just stay. You're always welcome here, you know that. Everything's okay."

That earned him a bitter laugh that turned into something like a sob. Kakashi reached for the bottle of sake, but his hands were trembling too hard; the alcohol spilled across the tabletop, dripping onto the floor.

"Shit." Kakashi stared at his hands, all the color completely gone from his face. Since there wasn't much to begin with, it wasn't noticeable- but Obito noticed. He always did, now- no one else would. "I'm sorry, shit, shit, shit, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry oh god I'm sorry I didn't mean-"

"Kakashi!" Kakashi's mismatched eyes- on some level, it still creeped him out, even if he never, ever regretted it- were wide, pupils contracted to pinpoints. Even the sharingan was out of control, spinning wildly in either direction. This was bad; Kakashi hadn't been this broken since they'd lost sensei. Obito summoned his sharingan, and hoped Kakashi wasn't so far gone that he would see it as an attack.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so-"

He grabbed Kakashi's hands, feeling the thin, fragile bones and his friend's racing pulse. "Kakashi, look at me. Look at me." When the litany of apologies finally cut off, he continued. "Breathe. Just breathe, that's all." He stroked the backs of Kakashi's knuckles with his thumb and maintained eye contact, sharingan spinning slowly.

The hysterical pattern to Kakashi's chakra calmed as his breathing steadied. "I'm sorry," he said again, calmly.

"It's okay. It's just a little spill, no big deal. What am I here for, right?" He'd promised Rin, after all. And he'd promised sensei. "Somebody needs to take care of you."

There was something less-sane than usual in the smile Kakashi gave him. "That's not what I'm sorry for."

Obito realized that at some point, Kakashi had shifted his grip so he was the one holding Obito's hands, and just as he was realizing this, Kakashi was leaning forward, and then they were kissing. His mouth tasted like sake and blood and something sour that was probably bile, and it ocurred to him that he shouldn't be letting this happen.

He let Kakashi finish the kiss, though, because he owed his friend that much. "Kakashi...you know I'm not- I do care about you, but I don't-"

"I know. I'm sorry." Kakashi's crooked smile nearly broke his heart. "Thank you for the sake...and for everything. I'll go now."

He moved to leave, but Obito stopped him. "This doesn't change anything." He knew Kakashi, knew that he never took things as well as he appeared to, knew that he was in the sort of mood where he would do something incredibly stupid if he wasn't given a good reason not to. "You hear me? It doesn't change a thing. I'm not losing my best friend over something like this."

"Okay." Sometimes, Kakashi was a terrible liar. Obito wanted to shake him; instead, he kept his hands open at his sides as Kakashi stepped past him towards the door.

"Hey. You're buying me lunch tomorrow."

Kakashi stopped in the doorway. "What?"

Obito tried to look casual, and failed. "You owe me lunch. From last week. You left your wallet at home, and I paid for you. So you owe me lunch, and you can pay me back tomorrow." He lifted his chin stubbornly. If Kakashi thought he could go back to his apartment and, and curl up in a ball and do whatever it was he did when he was too miserable to breathe, he had another think coming. Obito didn't break promises to the dead- and Kakashi was his friend.

"I paid you back for that the next day." Despite his obvious weariness, a note of exhasperation crept into Kakashi's voice.

"Oh. Really?" Obito scratched the back of his head. So much for that. "Well, we should go out to lunch anyway. I haven't seen you in days."

Kakashi actually smiled a little. "Okay," he said again, sounding slightly defeated. "I'll see you tomorrow."

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Maaaaan. Now I'm going back over all my notes and such for Blindsided- some of the unfinished pieces of that story were really, really beautiful. I almost want to write more of it, but I can't bring myself to care about the canon enough to continue any of it. *sigh*