The Spaces In-Between

Mind Blown

Y/N shook her head in disbelief.  No, she must have seen it when she was a kid and just didn't remember it.  She grabbed the box and almost wilted as the date was much later than when her dreams started.  She then grabbed her phone and verified.  No, even the written Manga was well after those days.  With shaking fingers, she then put his name into Google search.  She sat down hard on the recliner as she looked at the very face of the boy who was her best friend.  The details were exact, except in anime flare.  

A link for Narutopedia popped up with a direct link to a page completely dedicated to him.  She started reading feverishly and by the time she was done, she was shaking.  He was real.  He had to be real in some other universe.  She did not understand those kinds of things but it was the only explanation.  She started crying as she realized she had done exactly what he had sworn her to promise not to do, forgot about him.

That night, she started binging the series.  She stopped when she couldn't keep her eyes open a moment longer, then would start it up again.  When she reached the arc about him, she watched everything that he had told her about coming to pass.  She cried hard, remembering how much pain he had felt.  How alone he had been through it all.  How did no one from his world see that he was in deep trauma and PTSD? No, that wasn't entirely true.  Might Guy had noticed.  He had become his best friend.  She had laughed so hard watching their antics together and laughed even harder when she realized her best friend had become a pervert as well.  Reading porn in public?  Really Kakashi!

"Kakashi... I'm so sorry," she whispered as she finished the last video at the end of her vacation.  

He had gone through so much and she had forgotten him.  Her best friend.  She was ashamed of herself for believing that she had made the whole thing up.  She should have known better, the dreams were never like any other dream.  They had always felt as if she was really in that place in-between spaces.  For whatever reason, they had linked up despite being from two different worlds.

She did not understand how the writer had come to know the whole history, but she knew that every bit of it had happened elsewhere.  She questioned within herself if all stories ever written were actually happening somewhere.  She would never have the answer to that but she knew that Naruto's world was real!

That night as she stared up at her ceiling, she could not keep her mind quiet enough to sleep.  She was reliving every moment over and over again.  The show also encroached on her mind and she felt almost smothered.  He had been her friend.  Her mentor.  Her partner in adventures. Her first and last kiss.  Tears rolled out of her eyes and she buried her face into her pillow, sobbing.  She had abandoned him.

***

Kakashi Hatake walked through the village with one hand in his pocket and a copy of Make Out Tactics in his free hand.  He had read the words a million times but he still loved each and every page.  The village was quiet as he made his way back to his solitary apartment.  It was always quiet anymore.  It was an era of peace, a long earned and hard won peace.  As he took the stairs up to his place, he felt his mind drifting back to E/C eyes and H/C hair.  The thought stopped him in his tracks and he stood outside his front door for a long moment before he put the key into the lock and went inside.

He had not thought about Y/N in a very long time.  His life had been one fight after another for so long that he had actually forgotten about her for a while.  It was only recently, now that he was no longer Hokage, and was well retired that his mind returned to her.  He wondered not for the first time what path her life had taken after their last parting.  For a brief while, he had questioned whether or not any of it had actually taken place or if it had been a sweet dream during the some of the darkest hours of his life.  No, it had been real.  He was certain of it with every fiber of his being.  The evils she had endured, that was not the kind of dream a person would have imagined as a way of escape from other evils.