A Hole in One's Heart [Kakashi Hatake]

Chapter 63: I'm Glad You're Not Dead

So sorry about how long it took me to get this chapter out, but for some reason killing Alan off really affected me and I just couldn't bring myself to write for a couple of days. I'm fine now, though, and ready to get back into the full swing of things. It's been a while since the last Kakashi POV chapter, enjoy.

---------------Kakashi's POV---------------

     After I died, I came across my father. We sat there silently after I had finished telling him about my life following his death. The sap popping in the logs in the small campfire was the only sound that cut through the small ring of light as my father contemplated what I had said.

     After what felt like an eternity, Father spoke, "Who would have thought that you and I would both die so young?" He slouched forward slightly, "Though, not as young as your mother."

     I froze; he never talked about my mother. She had died shortly after I had been born, and during his lifetime she was a subject that Father could never bring himself to mention.

     "About my-" I hesitated. I didn't know how to ask what was on my mind.

     "About your mother?" He asked softly, and I nodded, glad that he had finished the thought for me. "She was a strong shinobi, but at the same time kind and caring. Several years before you were born, she became ill, but that didn't slow her down. She refused to lay around waiting for death to take her." Sakumo Hatake stared into the fire intensely. I was surprised that the fire didn't balk at his gaze.

     I smiled, I had never heard much about my mother before and this new information about her intrigued me greatly.

     Silence again covered the small campfire. But this time it was a gentle quiet, a comforting quiet. I sat there pondering what my mother had been like during her life as Father sat there with a sad smile while remembering her.

     "Father," I broke the silence that had settled comfortably over us. There was something that I needed to say. "I had always wanted to ask you something." Sakumo lifted his head and turned to look at me with the fire casting irregular shadows over his face. "I wanted to know why you, the White Fang of the Leaf, willingly chose to ignore the village code, to abandon a crucial mission in order to save your comrades. You knew if you let them die, no one from the village would have condemned you." Flashes of his dead body flowed through my mind. I was seven, barely chunin for a year. So young and alone as I stumbled onto his suicide. His back to me as he laid curled on the floor in the fetal position, and a long horizontal slash across his abdomen; he had committed seppuku. A flash of lightning from the storm outside illuminated the stagnate pool of blood around him and the peaceful look on his face as he sought relief from life. I took a deep breath to try and quell the image that had haunted me for years to stop it from causing me to lose my nerve right now. "You were dishonored and committed suicide. It made me so bitter." I remembered how my small hands clenched in anger as the next flash of lightning lit up the scene for a second time. The moment when I swore to follow all the rules. The first time in my life that I had lost myself to sadness and rage, but not the last.

     "I see," Father looked into the fire in shame at his own death. "It seems you had your fair share of trouble too, huh?"

      "Yeah." Truth be told, I've seen far more than my own fair share of trouble. But, I wasn't complaining; I have had plenty of happy moments in my life that I could cherish and that's more than some could say. "But you know, Father, now I realize that you did what you thought was right. You knew what the consequences would be, yet you chose your friend's lives over the code." Father turned and looked at me, but I just put my head down and closed my eyes with a smile. "And I'm proud of you for it."