Getting Lost on the Roads of Life - a KakaSaku Story [CONCLUDED]

Darkness Unravelled

There was darkness - and there was darkness, a living, breathing menace out to end you the moment you let your guard down. And this darkness, it knew him. It remembered him and hated him. It groaned in displeasure when he opened his eyes and made the surroundings respond in kind: a deep gravelly grinding that made his skin crawl and his hair stand on end.

Quite frankly, Kakashi had never been more scared in his life. He could do nothing against the shivering of his limbs, the chattering of his teeth - nothing but feel ashamed of his weakness.

The sheer terror of waking in such darkness, not knowing how much time had passed, not knowing how he had gotten here - only knowing that things had gone wrong, very, very wrong.

Kakashi brought his shaking hand to his eyes, touched his brow. Nothing. I can't see. I can't see anything, am I blind? He couldn't breathe. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't... he was choking.

"And that's how you die?" a taunting voice addressed him. "Pathetic."

Obito? - Kakashi gasped, shocked and surprised, stale air flooding his lungs.

"I always knew you were weak," his friends scoffed. "Weakling Kakashi. Nothing without the Sharingan."

"What do you mean..."

A sudden memory: Of lying on an examination table, of light shining into his eyes. They took my Sharingan. When? Suddenly, everything shifted in his head, tilted, re-adjusted itself, making him doubt any of this was real. He knew this place, didn't he? How many times had he woken up in here, like this, in panic?

"I would never have given you my eye in the first place had I known you'd give up so easily," Obito taunted him. "And maybe I never should have. It was always only a loan - as you well knew. You just chose to get a little too attached to Uchiha fame and powers."

Another memory came to Kakashi, a string of words, flung at him in anger: You bastard! You won't get out of this Genjutsu. No way. You no longer have your Sharingan, we took it away from you. Nobody escapes me. Nobody.

"Get a fucking grip," Kakashi told himself, the sound of his own voice providing an anchor in the black void. He forced himself to move his limbs that felt impossibly heavy and useless. Genjutsu, she had said. He had escaped an ultra strong Genjutsu. That explained it. The panic. The inability to hold on to what was real and what was not. He knew this condition, he had had the bad luck of going through it more than once in his life.

"It's just Genjutsu," Kakashi said into the darkness, listening to how his voice echoed in what seemed to be a large chamber. "Nothing more."

He had lost his Sharingan - but he had gotten himself out of a Genjutsu without it. So... not all was lost. He just had to shake this horrible feeling of absolute despair and the way ahead would open up.

"See?" Obito's teasing voice hit him like ice cold water. Okay, he obviously wasn't quite out of the Genjutsu yet. "That's how you do it. Just a Genjutsu! Keep telling yourself that. Nothing you, the mighty Kakashi, cannot vanquish."

"Shut up, you're not real, you're dead!" Anger was good, it was different from the heavy weight of fear, it proved that he was alive, that blood was flowing through his body.

"Ha! Like you haven't spoken with the dead before."

"That was my dad!" Kakashi bristled.

"And I'm your best friend."

Kakashi couldn't disagree with that. But a dead best friend was not exactly useful, was he? And neither was the other initially dead best friend who had come back from the dead as some kind of scheming alien.