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

Thirsty

* Sorry, Corona and the mess it's causing globally didn't let me write at all for several days. But at last, I have a little treat for you... just as my country goes into lockdown. Keep safe and healthy, my dears.

For the entirety of his life, Kakashi had only known casual, open relationships. For soldiers on active duty who knew that death was waiting just around the corner, one of the most important rules was not to get too attached to other people because emotional ties compromised your performance and could even jeopardize your entire team. At the same time, even the most well trained humans had physical and emotional needs that, if not taken care of, could cause equal problems.

In his opinion, Kakashi had always managed the balance between giving to and taking from other people well - perhaps surprisingly so, given his rather messed-up childhood and youth that by the book should have predestined him to become an emotional cripple at best and a full-fledged psychopath at worst. Maybe he was just lucky to have met enough like minded people in his life, people who would share a bed with someone for a night, then went on whatever mission their village sent them on but never formed expectations. The key to harmony was to be kind and respectful, even to those from other villages, and please your partner the way you yourself hoped to be pleased during those fleeting encounters.

This had always been enough. Now it wasn't anymore.

He wanted to love one person only, physically and emotionally with all he had, for the rest of his life.

Fierce, brave, honest, loyal, selfless ... that person was standing in front of him looking both determined and a little spooked, her current vulnerability making her even more desirable than she already was to him.

Praise the day you forgot about her. Do not pursue her further, he had written into his notebook, a big, fat warning in red. It will ruin you.

How clever... but also how futile.

No way it could ever have worked, his desperate little trick to free himself of emotions that were so strong they had the power to ruin him thoroughly indeed. The notebook contained his memories alright - but only the heavy, hopeless ones, all the "it cannot bes" he had been able to come up with during her absence, a potentially powerful deterrent for someone whose life was already so full of responsibilities and difficulties.

He didn't fully understand the mechanism behind the memory loss nor how the recovery worked. But just like the right key could unlock memories shut away by the Mind Sealing Technique, reading certain self-written words triggered the retrieval of those the use of the Sharingan had erased.

Reading his account of their relationship had brought back everything very quickly. One realization dominated: He was in love, head over heels, deeply and thoroughly. And: It ... hurt. The heartache, it was attached to the memory, pulsating inside of him with dull persistency. What he made himself remember was a desperate, sad kind of love, one that struggled feebly against the reality of what seemed insurmountable obstacles, against duties, against complicated webs of ties that existed between teacher and student, between him and so many people in this village.

But even if he had read this at the hospital immediately after losing his memories, read it before realizing in the days that followed the battle against the Oni masks that all that felt good in his life was connected to Sakura, he would not have ended up believing what he had written.

Memories were one thing - feelings another.

He had already realized earlier that when memories came back, they were unstable. They needed to find the right context, the niche they fit into. They needed to be sorted into the string of memories that came before and those that came after - and they needed to arrange themselves into 'important' - and 'less important'.