[ There are times when silence speaks louder than words ever can.
You just have to know how to listen to it.
Kakashi had spent his life shrouded by it, silence. Letting it invade the hollowed out parts of him he cut out of himself to make more room for what could never be spoken, except to the ones who could no longer listen because they were in the ground or buried under a fall of rocks. Speaking without saying a word, because silence is dangerous if it escapes your mouth when you don't have the proper vocabulary to support its weight. When silence is what keeps you going in your continued state of existence, living a life that isn't really a life when you do not know how to live for yourself. When you cannot even begin to speak because silence presses down on your tongue every time you try to open your mouth.
After a while of letting it fill you up, you let it become you. Or maybe you become it. A shadow of a shadow, speaking without a sound. Speaking but not saying anything at all, when the words that come out are not words that really matter. Empty sound in empty space and no one ever hears the silence crackling inside you like lightning cracking through the sky in the midst of a storm.
They're all so swept up by the vigor and whirl of the world around them that it's easy to miss.
The thin note that trembles between silence and need.
Kakashi hears it far too clearly if only because he missed it entirely the first time, when it mattered the most. He had Sasuke right where he wanted him, tied up in a tree with nowhere to run but to listen. And maybe if he listened more carefully between all the anger and vitriol and empty threats Sasuke spat out, maybe he might have heard it then, that note. Maybe it would have rung as clear as the sound of Sasuke's thirteen-year-old knuckles rapping against his door at two o'clock in the morning during a great rainstorm, looking up at him with eyes rimmed with red that had nothing to do with Sharingan and everything to do with what made him scream awake one night, all those years ago.
When it had been just the two of them along a river, with nothing but the sky above and ghosts chasing Sasuke through the night.
He can't hurt you right now, he'd said.
Maybe that was the right thing to say at the time, but what he really should've said was this:
I'm here. I'll always be here.
Maybe if he said that then, or at any other point in the intervening time after, Sasuke might've never left.
Maybe they wouldn't be here right now, with tears running down Sasuke's face and an expression that should have never been there at all. Like he's about to fall to pieces because what's inside him is so large that he can't put his hands around it to keep fraying edges stamped down tight. So he puts his hands around himself instead, squeezing his arms close to his chest, as though doing so might somehow protect him from himself. Or from Kakashi seeing whatever ugliness or weakness he thinks he needs to hide.
For a moment all Kakashi sees is that thirteen-year-old boy who knocked on his door late at night when no one else was listening, who sometimes looked at him with eyes that were as haunted as they were lost. He thought that maybe he could have found a way to draw him back onto the right path. To look towards the future and away from the past. An impossible task, when all Kakashi ever saw were the ghosts that walked behind him, and his many yesterdays of failure and loss. It was hard to give Sasuke the guidance he needed when Kakashi himself didn't know how to live the way he wanted Sasuke to live. But that didn't temper his hope that Sasuke could have what he couldn't have for himself.
Could live, the way Kakashi never could.
Kakashi'd failed him more times than he can count, not just in their world, but even here in Luceti, just weeks ago when he left him again after that mistletoe incident. Even after swearing to himself up and down that he'd never leave, never turn his back on Sasuke, he did just that. Disappeared the moment he couldn't fucking handle it anymore. And even though it'd only been for a few minutes before he realized his mistake, that he'd left at all was enough to cement just how much harder he needed to work to make things right. To make this right.
It's not so surprising that Sasuke would have a hard time believing him, when it wasn't so long ago that Kakashi'd left him behind again.
And even though he'd promised that he would never leave again, when Sasuke's entire life has been defined by the most ultimate of betrayals, he knows how difficult it must be to swallow down a pretty mouthful of words shaped like a promise. He'll have to prove himself to Sasuke, again and again, to make the words more than the empty syllables they currently are. To make them count.
His hand gently drops from the top of Sasuke's head to cup his burning face, his thumb wiping away a hot tear before he slowly attempts to pull Sasuke forward, meeting the expected resistance of Sasuke trying to curl back. Kakashi moves forward instead, until he's walled Sasuke in against the couch arm, then reaches out once more to pull Sasuke against his chest, tucking him under his chin as his arms wrap around him the way they did when Sasuke was still small. ]
Ah, that's where you're wrong, Sasuke.
[ The words are quietly murmured, so quietly they're almost a whisper. ]
;_;
You just have to know how to listen to it.
Kakashi had spent his life shrouded by it, silence. Letting it invade the hollowed out parts of him he cut out of himself to make more room for what could never be spoken, except to the ones who could no longer listen because they were in the ground or buried under a fall of rocks. Speaking without saying a word, because silence is dangerous if it escapes your mouth when you don't have the proper vocabulary to support its weight. When silence is what keeps you going in your continued state of existence, living a life that isn't really a life when you do not know how to live for yourself. When you cannot even begin to speak because silence presses down on your tongue every time you try to open your mouth.
After a while of letting it fill you up, you let it become you. Or maybe you become it. A shadow of a shadow, speaking without a sound. Speaking but not saying anything at all, when the words that come out are not words that really matter. Empty sound in empty space and no one ever hears the silence crackling inside you like lightning cracking through the sky in the midst of a storm.
They're all so swept up by the vigor and whirl of the world around them that it's easy to miss.
The thin note that trembles between silence and need.
Kakashi hears it far too clearly if only because he missed it entirely the first time, when it mattered the most. He had Sasuke right where he wanted him, tied up in a tree with nowhere to run but to listen. And maybe if he listened more carefully between all the anger and vitriol and empty threats Sasuke spat out, maybe he might have heard it then, that note. Maybe it would have rung as clear as the sound of Sasuke's thirteen-year-old knuckles rapping against his door at two o'clock in the morning during a great rainstorm, looking up at him with eyes rimmed with red that had nothing to do with Sharingan and everything to do with what made him scream awake one night, all those years ago.
When it had been just the two of them along a river, with nothing but the sky above and ghosts chasing Sasuke through the night.
He can't hurt you right now, he'd said.
Maybe that was the right thing to say at the time, but what he really should've said was this:
I'm here. I'll always be here.
Maybe if he said that then, or at any other point in the intervening time after, Sasuke might've never left.
Maybe they wouldn't be here right now, with tears running down Sasuke's face and an expression that should have never been there at all. Like he's about to fall to pieces because what's inside him is so large that he can't put his hands around it to keep fraying edges stamped down tight. So he puts his hands around himself instead, squeezing his arms close to his chest, as though doing so might somehow protect him from himself. Or from Kakashi seeing whatever ugliness or weakness he thinks he needs to hide.
For a moment all Kakashi sees is that thirteen-year-old boy who knocked on his door late at night when no one else was listening, who sometimes looked at him with eyes that were as haunted as they were lost. He thought that maybe he could have found a way to draw him back onto the right path. To look towards the future and away from the past. An impossible task, when all Kakashi ever saw were the ghosts that walked behind him, and his many yesterdays of failure and loss. It was hard to give Sasuke the guidance he needed when Kakashi himself didn't know how to live the way he wanted Sasuke to live. But that didn't temper his hope that Sasuke could have what he couldn't have for himself.
Could live, the way Kakashi never could.
Kakashi'd failed him more times than he can count, not just in their world, but even here in Luceti, just weeks ago when he left him again after that mistletoe incident. Even after swearing to himself up and down that he'd never leave, never turn his back on Sasuke, he did just that. Disappeared the moment he couldn't fucking handle it anymore. And even though it'd only been for a few minutes before he realized his mistake, that he'd left at all was enough to cement just how much harder he needed to work to make things right. To make this right.
It's not so surprising that Sasuke would have a hard time believing him, when it wasn't so long ago that Kakashi'd left him behind again.
And even though he'd promised that he would never leave again, when Sasuke's entire life has been defined by the most ultimate of betrayals, he knows how difficult it must be to swallow down a pretty mouthful of words shaped like a promise. He'll have to prove himself to Sasuke, again and again, to make the words more than the empty syllables they currently are. To make them count.
His hand gently drops from the top of Sasuke's head to cup his burning face, his thumb wiping away a hot tear before he slowly attempts to pull Sasuke forward, meeting the expected resistance of Sasuke trying to curl back. Kakashi moves forward instead, until he's walled Sasuke in against the couch arm, then reaches out once more to pull Sasuke against his chest, tucking him under his chin as his arms wrap around him the way they did when Sasuke was still small. ]
Ah, that's where you're wrong, Sasuke.
[ The words are quietly murmured, so quietly they're almost a whisper. ]
You're trying right now.