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Shaking hands lay the tanto flat on the floor before him, rustling the canvas beneath his knees. Kakashi glances up – that’s new. Usually his PTSD hallucinations are of the people he’s killed, or lost … what a way to consider it. Perhaps now he’s seeing himself because he is about to take his own life, about to place himself among his own ghosts' number.
He has it all planned: first, a fistful of pills for bravery. A tarp laid out on the floor to avoid a mess. Someone will come to look for him in approximately one day when he fails to report back from his mandatory leave. He has not written a note because he has nothing to say to anyone he would wish to write a note to, but what he'd done would be fairly obvious to anyone with eyes: an imperfect imitation of his own father's death. His door is unlocked, all his little traps are disarmed, and he has prepared himself to carve out Obito's eye and destroy it before the end. His death will be as neat as possible. No one will have to even scrub his blood out of the floor before the next tenant moves in- he can be courteous and unobtrusive like that.
For now, Kakashi watches an apparition that looks much like himself loom before him in the dark. He looks like hell, just a slouched ghost lurking in a dark corner of the room. Pale with a single bloodshot eye, a hole where the gifted other should be, rail thin and razor toothed. Kakashi settles his fingers over Obito’s eye in his own head and tries to muster up the echoing voice that had gotten him through every near death experience he’s had to date.
I’ll see the future through you, his friend had said.
It’s so faint, distant. He can remember perfectly the smell of blood and the rumble of shifting earth, but he tonight he can’t quite make himself remember the soft sound of Obito’s voice as he'd died.
"Do it," the Shadow demands of him, hisses and spits over and over. Kakashi's hand clenches over the handle of the short sword once more, trembling fingers stilling once they clasp the handle.
"Do it," he repeats to himself with wavering voice, watching the blood starting to seep from the reflection’s lone eye and and a fresh, gaping hole in his stomach. Kakashi gags, the smell of iron and gore already starting to choke him for the first time in his life. The miasmic stench of death has crept into the room and settled over him like a blanket. He clenches his jaw to keep from screaming, telling himself to shut the fuck up he’s thinking, because someone may hear him if he keeps talking to himself, and if they hear him they may decide check in. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want it. Doesn’t want someone to stop him, doesn’t want someone to tell him to go ahead then, if he’s so determined.
Weak. He lifts the blade and turns it inward, grazes it along the bare skin of his stomach. The edge of it cuts, burns, and the wraith inches closer and kneels before him, a mirror.
"Do it," he coos. His ghostly fingers trail down Kakashi’s flesh arm, cold as ice. The hair raises on the back of his neck and down his arm, his adrenaline begins pumping from the pain. The fingers push at his arm, leaving no indent but the imaginary gesture is forceful enough to shove the blade in a centimeter. A half inch. An inch. It hurts, it hurts so badly, and even the chemicals in his system can’t stop it. He whines, softly. Dead-him murmurs again, gentle, brushes fingers down his face: "Do it."
But, Kakashi thinks. He can't. He can't because it sucks, and because it hurts, and because he doesn’t … he doesn’t want to die. He can't because Kakashi is afraid. They will find him, and they will bury him and he will never see the sky again. He'll have cut his own usefulness short, he'll have failed.
Totally out of control of himself, spinning in freefall so fast he feels like he might shake apart. Choosing to die, the control of it, the perfect stillness of his hand and the blade in his hand and the blade in his gut. The pain sharpens him. Choosing to die. He's here already. He could go either way. Choose to die, choose to live.
He sits there with a blade sunk an inch into his abdomen and he finds that for once, the only person watching him fail is himself. He hates it. Where have his friends gone? Why have they abandoned him now? They must be angry. They sacrificed themselves so that he could live, and he’s ungrateful enough to throw it away like this? Selfish, stupid.
Dead fingers, now rotting, fist themselves in his hair. "Do it," is snarls into his face, breath smelling of cloying rot. Kakashi shudders, and the movement tugs on the blade still lodged in his belly. He whines, bites down on his lip to muffle it. There is so, so much blood, and he pulls the tanto from his gut and tosses it across the room with a snarl. It clatters noisily to the floor, red splattered in its path (so much for no mess and easy clean-up), and dead-him growls right back and takes a swipe at him. The hand passes harmlessly through, and then the apparition disappears.
Gods, it hurts.
Cotton clogs his brain. He’s shaking from the pain, but Kakashi is utterly, blessedly alone. A hand presses to the wound under his ribs, and he hisses.
Standing on trembling, coltish legs, he sheds his blood in a little river all the way to the bathroom. Kakashi stitches himself up mechanically, takes an antibiotic and another handful of painkillers. He turns on the shower to its hottest setting. He steps inside. He watches the blood trail sluggishly down the drain, brain foggy.
Hatake Kakashi has never been able to take his own damn advice. He'll report in for duty tomorrow, and ask for something to do.