The Realm Beyond Death (A Paranormal Fanfic)

The Road of Memories

He found himself reciprocating her gesture , "Um...I am Kakashi Hatake, Nice to meet you. Sorry about your garden, really."

She offered him an other smile, which made him a little warm and fuzzy inside, and said,"Nah, It's all good. See?"

She bent down to her knees and gently plucked a ripe fruit from the crawler and motioned it towards him.

"Strawberry?"

He slowly took the fruit from her, and also noticed, that her hands were caked with a bit of mud, patches adorned her clothing and gardening tools lay scattered all around the soil.

"Thank you, do you like gardening?" He asked.

Her choclatey brown orbs lit up instantly. She said, "Yes! My favourite is the strawberry crawlers. I simply love strawberries. My dad says I have a talent for this, but I want to be a medical ninja like my mom when I grow up." She seemed to be the chatty type, and had at some point started fiddeling with the shovel, evening out the land surface around.

Then it clicked, 'She is going to be a shinobi'.

He asked, "So, are you joining the academy this year?" She exhuberantly nodded affermative.

"Well then, see you at the academy Rin, I must get going, my dad just came from his mission. Amazing strawberry though" He said with a small polite smile.

They bid each other goodbye and went their own way.

As he walked through the gates, he knew that this was something special, she was an interesting girl who he wasn't going to forget anytime soon.

Kakashi sighed, wondering how he managed to conjure a beloved memory from back then.

Ever since her death, he had kept the majority of his childhood locked away and stowed in some deep corner of his heart, but as he came to tread in these well waters, those memories seemed to float up and resurface even after nearly two decades.

He leaned over to the left, till the corner of the house was visable.

He gave a humorless chuckle, as he saw the dark patches, indicating they had been dug up and used for something.

The very spot he met Rin Nohara almost twenty years ago.

As he looked around, every corner of the house seemed to have bought up a ghost of the dead past.

In an instant, he remembered everything.

He remembered meeting her in the academy the day after.

He remembered how she was one of the only people he talked with after his father's sucide.

He remembered, years later when they were on the same team, how his newly developed shinobi-rules complex and rough exterior crumbeled near her.

He had no clue as to why, and it scared him.

So, he kept pushing her away, along with the rest of the world. Being the stupid pre-teen he was, he remained ashamed of his father, afraid to give into connections in the fear of turning out like him.

He remembered the first time he actually made he mistake of ignoring his conscience, choosing to abandon her, his teammate, to complete the dumb mission.

It had left him feeling bitter, hollow. Like someone wrenched his heart out and stabbed him.

Luckily, he had obito to beat some sense into him.

'Obito...' Kakashi thought.

To the world, that was just another name in the memorial stone, another deceased Uchiha.