Never Forget

Kakashi's Questions

Chapter 10

                Kakashi Hatake was fed up. He had had enough of being lied to, of being pushed out of the circle, of being on the edge but not in the midst of it. He was tired of his own teammate keeping things from him, promising she would tell him everything.

                Yeah, right.

                I had taken a notebook from a nearby shop and was now attempting to write down everything I knew, in case I somehow forgot it or something happened to me, like amnesia. With a separate page for every section, I scribbled down notes on each Akatsuki member, progress we’d made, progress we still had to make. In the very back, I reserved a section for things that Itachi had told me, because truth be told, he was the guy who knew the most out of all of us.

                Even though I had gotten to know Itachi relatively well throughout the past year, I was slightly surprised to find that the person with the most filled-up page was Kakashi Hatake. Because I’d missed the middle part of his life, I had somehow – wrongly – assumed that I would have more information on, say, one of my friends from Iwagakure. Like Yuki. Or Sasuke.

                I was dead wrong.

                Kakashi Hatake was taking over my life. I knew how he felt at all times, how to imitate him, and basically how to be him in every sense of the word. Except, of course, that I wasn’t actually him.

                Now, all that nonsense about “emotional appeal” or “romantically involved” was exactly its definition: nonsense. However, I did have to admit, rather grudgingly, that I could see where my peers were coming from. After all, Kakashi never talked to anybody as much as he talked to me, and he was seen as “socially awkward” – which was true – except, my friends said, when he was chatting with me. As I hadn’t yet stopped telling everybody, this was quite clearly because we had been teammates long ago, in a completely different era, and we’d been best friends back then. So of course it was natural for him to open up to me more; it had been the same way back when we were younger, too.

                People looked at Kakashi and saw a tall man with a black mask covering his most-likely-handsome features. They saw him as strong and dignified and noble, in every sense of the word. They thought he was cool and awesome because he was composed all the time. Maybe even lazy.

                I looked at him and saw a crying little boy who had just lost his father. When he appeared lazy or unconcerned by what was going around him, in reality he was just as concerned as the next person. When he knelt down to help a teammate up, in his heart he was frantic because what if this person died? When he talked about his old team, he was sad, and I could see it in his posture, his eye(s), and his tensed jaw.

                In my notes, I was able to write – with detail – how to discern one emotion from another in regards to him. After half an hour, I stared at the page and wondered how it was possible to know somebody this well.

                I was relatively certain that with his mask off and his mouth revealed, I would be able to completely read him no matter how hard he tried to hide his emotions. In a way, that was a scary thought.

                A knock came at the door a while later, and I dropped my pen in surprise. “Come in,” I called, tossing the book into my knapsack and hoping whoever it was hadn’t heard that. I tried really hard to mask my emotions when Kakashi pushed open the door. “Oh, hey, Kaka-baka.”

                He gave me a flat look at the nickname and said, “The Kazekage sent me up to tell you that dinner’s ready downstairs. Interesting how the Kazekage himself is sending Jonin on little missions like this, isn’t it?”