Chapter Text
Darkness. Coldness. Emptiness.
That was all the last Hatake knew. He didn't even know his own name anymore, his identity slipping through the cracks of oblivion, like grains of sand carried by an invisible tide. There were no memories to cling to, no past to mourn, no future to dread for. His mind drifted, suspended in an infinite, indifferent void, unmoored from time and space. Kakashi was everywhere and nowhere. Eternity alone cocooned him like a suffocating embrace of warmth in a frozen world of ice and snow.
Loneliness.
Loneliness was all that remained. His sole companion in this infinite abyss. It wrapped itself around him, filling the empty spaces of his soul, offering him solace in a way no human touch ever could. It was a feeling born from the cruel hand of reality, from a world steeped in disgrace and suffering, a reflection of everything he had witnessed and endured.
How long had he existed like this? Days? Years? Centuries?
He couldn't tell. Time had no meaning in here. But then, something began to change. A cold, piercing light flickered at the edge of his awareness, a distant presence intruding upon his eternal solitude. At first, it was barely noticeable, a faint, indifferent glimmer far beyond the horizon of his consciousness. But it grew. Slowly, inexorably. Expanding, intensifying. It reached for him like a cruel whisper in the silence.
Kakashi recoiled. He did not want to return to the coldness, to the harsh truth that awaited him beyond the warmth of oblivion. He didn’t want to remember. The light felt like a cage, a prison of awareness and desperately he clung to the comfort of eternity.
But the light was relentless. It cut through the darkness like a blade, slicing the tranquil silence that had once enveloped him. It tore at the fabric of his being, shredding the delicate peace he had found in the nothingness. And then, it touched him, his consciousness, the fragments of who he once was.
But there was no gentle kindness in that touch, no mercy.
Only pain.
Raw, unbearable pain.
It felt as though he was being ripped apart, shredded into pieces, only to be reassembled and torn apart again. Over and over, a thousand times. Burnt and skinned, but it wouldn't stop. Each iteration more excruciating than the last. His mind screamed, yet no one heard him. His soul wept, filling oceans with his silent tears, yet no one could see them. Utterly alone.
And still, the claws of reality ruthlessly tore him apart, dragging him from the endless void, ripping him from the quiet embrace of eternal darkness.
Dragging him back to life.