empathy (rewritten 2019)

chapter thirty-one

There was closure in death. Closure in sacrifice and abandonment--Kakashi knew when his time came, sitting by the fire and watching the ashes grab for the forever midnight air, ashes taking flight as god offered a gentle hand into the night. And Kakashi, sitting beside this old man, felt the fire as warm and surrounding as this man's fatherly hand on the curve of his shoulder.

"How could I not remember my own son's name?"

Kakashi knew as he stared into this man's eyes, black as his own, older than he could ever know. In their unspoken breaths and smiles and the crackles of the ever-growing fire, Kakashi knew and whispered a last loving goodbye before ashes and old, proud smiles alike were swept away by another butterfly's flight down before and another god's breathing smiles, leaving him alone by the fire to wait for his own kin.

And closure was known well by the young boy by the window, long hair braided by his neck and adorned with petals and lilies and white blossoms. The two stared out the window, unto the grass-stippled plains and the blank white sky, a foreign silence between them.

And he knew this as the man next to him breathed in another waiting breath and said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be there for you." And he left out a breath just the same and tried a smile.

"I know. I forgive you," Neji said, staring at him.

And closure was known in a lifetime of silence and in the boy collapsed before his poor victims and his mother's happy smile as he kneeled, biting back the sobs he'd never wept when he lived, "Tou-san, Kaa-san, please, forgive me."

And he knew closure in a mother's embrace and his father's earthy chuckle as he, voice level of his, said, "Of course we forgive you."

And closure was known by the girl out in the plains field, somewhere beyond red gates and the boats by the harbour, as she lost herself in the grass and the breeze and the lilies singing a bird's morning call. It was known in the scars marking her skin and the new life now breathed in the dead life of hers, smiling bright and honest as a child on the streets with her mother's worried gaze as she said kunoichi? sakura, just, be careful.

And the only pain Sakura could feel in such a field higher than Konoha's mountains could reach was that of sitting beside none, not the mother she loved or the father who called sakura, dancing on my feet again? your old man's losing his moves or the friend who'd become much more.

Keiko was not here, not there to see Sakura's smile now so free and unburdened or the way she laughed so bright or the way she stood as tall as a little girl's honour, and it was the only eternally bitter bite that made Sakura look down, below the field, past the wonders of the world, for a friend who had yet to reach this high.