Grief
Grief is a strange thing.
Sometimes, it screams with the unbearable pain and the utter certainty that tomorrow can never come, because there is no way there can be a tomorrow without that which has been lost. It screams until throats are bloody and eyes ache and dry from over-shed tears. It screams until silence rings like a death knell, and it screams until it drowns out every other thought or feeling or thing in the world.
But that is unusual.
Grief is more often quieter. It festers, silent and insidious, until time fades its colours and dulls its blade.
It hides behind brilliant smiles and cheerful laughter. It lurks beneath social brunches and the question marks of engaged curiosity. It lives in the small lines around the eyes, not quite changing the gaze of the survivor, yet not leaving the survivor untouched, either.
Hatake Sakumo was living evidence of the silence of the wound of grief.
Until he no longer was.
When Hatake Kakashi, five years old and full of brilliant smiles and cheerful laughter, found his father's body drowned in blood, he did not weep. He did not scream.
He made no sound at all.
He stood there, looking down at the body that had once belonged to his father, and thought how strange his father's skin looked, coloured all sallow and waxy like a cheap candle or a jar of bacon fat gone solid. The skin was so yellow against the almost-black of blood seeped into tatami; so yellow against the pale silver-blue moonlight that spilled through the windows and glinted on cold steel.
What made Hatake Kakashi such a brilliant ninja was not, as many thought, his inherent talent at doling out casual deaths. Nor was it his ability to slip, unnoticed, into nooks and crannies, silently accumulating information with a precision that master wood block carvers dreamed of. And it was also not his brilliant mind, as sharp as an obsidian knife and even more lethal.
No, what made Hatake Kakashi, aged five years old, a brilliant shinobi was his ability to shut his emotions out of the whole of his being.
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He had learnt, before the age of one year old, the utter, devastating trauma of losing his Most Precious Person.
Hatake Mebuki's smile turned spring rains into flowers. Her kindness warmed glaciers into spring meltwater. Her hands nurtured and guided with a casual ease, and cries of disappointment abounded when she left her teaching position at the Academy to raise the newborn son that was her spitting image, save for the shock of silver hair he had clearly inherited from his father.
Kakashi loved her. He adored her. His whole world revolved around her. He cried when other people tried to hold him, and he burbled with infectious laughter when she carried him. His father, too, drew close to Mebuki like a planet to its star, ever in her orbit, his heart stolen by her effortless generousness as it spilled from every single thing she did, and by her infinite warmth when her storm-grey eyes smiled.
And likewise, her life revolved around her two men, the kind and protective Sakumo and the laughing, burbling baby Kakashi.
And when she died, by illness during a particularly bad winter, Kakashi screamed.
He screamed and screamed, unable to stem the bloodied pain in his soul.
And then... he stopped.
He closed iron doors around his memory of his mother, shutting her into a cold, dark part of his spirit. He pushed the riveted, reinforced iron box deep into the darkest corner of his chest, behind his heart, between two ribs, and then he swallowed the key.
His father wept, because his father may have been a great, great shinobi – but his father was not a genius shinobi.
Kakashi watched his father's eyes grow dark and sad, and even under one year old and barely able to toddle, Kakashi understood that it was because he wore his mother's face. So he cut up one of his black shirts and made a mask to cover up his father's weakness.
His father was a great shinobi.
He did not cry when his father died. He only closed a different pair of iron doors around the memories of his father and thought distantly how strange the skin looked on a dead body.
When someone finally found him, he had been standing, staring, silently for perhaps an hour or two.
He had forgotten why he wore the mask; had forgotten that his mask existed to make his father stronger. But looking at the dead body that had once been filled with his father's spirit, he remembered.
His father was weak, Kakashi realised with the solemn certainty of a child. If his father had been stronger, the grief would not have been able to consume him. But Mebuki's death had emptied Sakumo, leaving only a fragile glass shell, and the rumours and the dishonour of his failure had been enough to shatter the man.
Even in death, Sakumo needed Kakashi's strength. He needed those iron doors that Kakashi was, somehow, able to carry behind his heart and between his ribs. Because somewhere, even though he had regained his honour, he had lost what little had remained of his shinobi strength.
So Kakashi's mask stayed.
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Kakashi threw himself into his studies, allowing his brilliant mind to be consumed by the trivial simplicity of the work provided by the Academy. The simplicity was good: when he got too tired, Kakashi could feel the iron boxes begin to work their way slowly out from between his ribs, somehow crushingly large as they did, but when he was bored, he could feel them pressing on his heart from behind it. Staying busy at the Academy turned out to be the perfect compromise, and the work kept back the iron boxes with the suffocating burdens that they hid within them. It was easy to graduate at the top of his class. It would have been far more difficult for him to not do so.
He would not be like his father.
He would be strong.
He could be, because he was a genius. Everyone said so.
Six years of Obito and Rin and Minato-sensei grated on Kakashi's nerves. They all felt so much. And they couldn't understand, the way that Kakashi did, why the Shinobi Rules existed, or how breaking them turned the strong into the dead with hollow, sallow skin.
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Kakashi did not cry when Obito died, even when he finally, altogether too belatedly, realised that Obito's emotions did not make the other boy weak.
They did not, however, make him strong. He still died. He simply died with the strength to give Kakashi his greatest treasure and the weightiest charge his lips could muster: protect Rin.
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Hatake Kakashi was far too brilliant a shinobi to cry when his hand burst through Rin's chest, naming him the worst kind of failure and the most hateful kind of human in the ink of lifeblood along his arm like a tattoo that could never be washed clean. He almost heard the clang of the iron doors as he felt her heart, twitching like a little bird, and she smiled at him.
It sounded like a condemnation.
But he let the iron doors close before she had even slid free of his deadly hand – before she left, leaving only a body that would turn sallow in death.
Except she smiled just so: and suddenly, abruptly, the box containing the memories of his mother burst through his own chest, tearing him open, and so did his box with his memories of Rin, and then– then–
It was too much. The weight, the horror, the agony... the grief was too much.
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When Kakashi awoke, he found that although he could still feel those iron boxes with their riveted doors behind his heart, between his ribs, they weighed more. They pressed on his heart a little, reminding him with every heartbeat that they were there.
They were waiting.
They were waiting for the opportunity to break open and drown him, crush him, suffocate him, pulverise him.
And he would deserve it.
He, the child prodigy and bearer of so much expectation, was a failure.
Weak.
Pathetic.
Unreliable, a friend-killer, and worst of all, shattered.
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Nightmares dogged him, sending him into cold sweats and broken weeping. The iron boxes would no longer stay completely closed. The doors leaked, poisoning him with grief that he couldn't bear.
But he could, at least, keep them closed sometimes. And it was important to do so, he instructed himself firmly, particularly when he had to interact with others from his class or with Minato-sensei. Because if he didn't, they would see that he wasn't a genius at all: he was a failure.
So he avoided his classmates, only a little at first, afraid that they would see his weakness and his shame.
But the more he avoided the others, the more obvious it became: keeping those iron boxes totally closed, even briefly, proved too impossible for even a genius of Kakashi's calibre. It required too much intense focus to hold those doors closed, and he simply couldn't maintain it.
He withdrew more and more.
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ANBU gave him precisely what he needed to slam those iron doors closed once more.
He wreaked death and destruction like a vengeful god, and every death he paid out kept the doors behind his heart sealed just a little bit tighter.
Cold-Blooded Kakashi was the greatest genius ninja that Konoha had seen in generations.
Minato-sensei pulled Kakashi away from that ruthless, heartless life, but he kept Kakashi busy with guarding his fiery wife. Shockingly, the tactic worked, and the iron boxes stayed closed.
But when the Kyūbi attacked and stole from Kakashi the only connection he had left, he struggled to fit his memories of Minato-sensei and his fiery wife into an iron box of their own.
Grief turned to guilt. And with a little bit of external help, guilt turned to fury.
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It took a hard lesson in humility before Kakashi realised that he had been played like a violin, and that his pitiful inability to control his grief had turned him into a weapon against that man whom he had sworn to serve. He was – yet again – a failure of a shinobi.
Yet, for some reason, rather than accept his resignation from ANBU, Sandaime instead made Kakashi his right hand.
Kakashi swore to himself that he would never lose control of his grief again. And for many, many years, he did not.