[ Maybe this is a terrible idea.

(It most certainly is a terrible idea.)

Maybe Kakashi shouldn't be doing this at all. Maybe he should be backing up and shutting the door. Maybe he should walk to the nearest mirror, reveal his Sharingan and tell himself to forget, let it all fade into nothing, one big fat nothing, like it never was. Maybe then he can pretend that Barnaby hadn't seen him or known him for what he really is at all, peeled away the parts of him that he holds around himself like armor. Maybe he can offer to do the same for Barnaby, to make it easier for the both of them, so that they both can forget and go on living at the edges of each other's lives as total strangers who never knew each other at all. Who never laughed or cried or screamed or loved.

Or lived.

Because for a moment, they did. Or at least, Kakashi did.

And that's the hardest part of all. How do you forget what it was like to be alive, to not have the weight of too many lives hanging around your throat. To have a reason to live beyond the duty, beyond the promise to live on to memorialize the silence. To give meaning to the loss and the madness, the terrible ways you all end up losing your minds because you've cut out too much of what makes you you in order to survive the long nights and the knowledge of what hides in the shadows.

How do you forget that for a moment, you weren't a shinobi, but just a man who could love and live like anyone else, who could smile and dream like anyone else, who could have a family and loved ones you called your friends like all the people who walk in daylight and sleep through the night and never need to know the weight of a kunai in their hands, or the way her heart felt when you tore it out of her chest, or the way the world ended because you were trash, and could not protect anything that mattered in the end, because your hands were made to end lives, not to keep them going.

How can you forget any of it at all, when trying to forget is what's been slowly driving you insane, when you can't even look him in the eye because you can't bear to see the nothing they reflect, when all that you remember was nothing in the end. One big fat fucking nothing, just a fool's dream, a whisper of what never was, and could never have been. ]