"Fantastic! You're really a good leader. You've got me a spy network set up, you know all about the other Spiders for me to summon and you've got this bunch perfectly managed!"
"Thank you. Why haven't you written Kakashi?" Shirokumo asks again.
...
"I... uh..." My eyes dart nervously around the room. I'm looking anywhere, everywhere that Shirokumo isn't. "Just never got around to it?"
"Al. Come on. I know that's a fake excuse. What's the real reason?" He tenderly asks from his web.
"I could say that it's because I'm trying to limit contact with Konoha now that I'm an actual missing nin. I could say that if he gets caught with a letter from me it would hurt his standing with Tsunade. I could say that he might try to use the letter against me. I could say that I'm afraid that he won't reply. None of them are the real reason though. It's not that I'm scared of what might happen to the letter, what really scares me is his response."
I shrink on myself. I'm no longer splayed out across my bed, I've leaned forward and pulled up my legs. I've wrapped my arms around them like I'm holding myself in a vain attempt to comfort me. I'm not the Heart Thief right now, I'm not the Host of the Jiongu, I'm not even a shinobi. I'm a scared lonesome child who is lost.
I force myself to say these next words. The words don't come out at a normal volume, they're barely a whisper. It took every single piece of my willpower to utter them yet they still came out so weakly.
"I don't want to know if he hates me."
"Al there's no way he'd hate you." Shirokumo softly ties to comfort me.
"Really?" I darkly snort out. "The last major contact we had was a letter he gave me. You want to know what it said? It all boiled down to this: you didn't have to leave. Then that letter goes unanswered.
He goes on to watch me progress through the Chunin Exams. He sits there and watches as Lee gives me a beating of a lifetime. He does nothing as my head gets fully rotated and then some because he can't go check on his student or my spying gig is up.
Then what happens next? Does he get a reply from me? No, he get's to watch as I slowly pick apart my own skill set. He got to witness me giving away my own weaknesses, something a shinobi should never do. Could he approach me afterwards and scold me? Could he intervene and teach me better? No, he was forced to do nothing. Again.
Then what? A response? No. Not even then, instead he has to watch not one but both of his wayward students compete in the finals against Leiko. And what do I do? I let her catch me. I let her toy with me, letting her use tactic after tactic.
Hell I let her cut off my head! Yet throughout all of that Kakashi had to sit there and watch it all. He had to feel so powerless. He couldn't save me and that alone must have driven him to the point of insanity."
"So is that the end? Is his suffering over finally? No! That would be too easy! He's drafted to be part of the group to assassinate Orochimaru and the two gennin he's with which happen to be his students! No doubt Tsunade and he thought long and hard about who would attack who and with Kakashi being the best assassin shinobi there of course he'd have to target Orochimaru.
That means that both of his students will have true attempts on their lives coming from two of his friends. But can he tell them? Can he ask his friends to hold back? No, he can't because Orochimaru would notice. So he holds his tongue. His reward is witnessing Sasuke's severed arm wetly fall to the ground."
"Can he help his gennin then? Can he step up and save us? No he can't! He has to go off to fight against Orochimaru because even with all five of them there's still no guarantee that they will win so he has to leave us to Konoha's gennin.
In other words he has to knowingly let our friends attack us with the intent to kill. Do you think that was an easy choice? Do you not think that it caused him any loss of sleep? No, it had to pain him greatly to do nothing. To say nothing. To simply hold his tongue."
"Is this the end of Kakashi's suffering? Is it finally over? Nope! Because once Orochimaru was thrown back into the clearing he got to see Sasuke and I both be outed then he had to watch me – who he knows is actually on Konoha's side the entire time – choose to go back with Orochimaru! And how did I miraculously make that happen? By taking my friends hostage!"
"You truly want to know if he has a reason to hate me? He has plenty. He has every right to hate me. But I don't want to know if he does. He's still family to me, a strange and perverted uncle but family none the less. Does he still feel the same way about me? Does he still want to protect me, to teach me, does he still care for me? Or do those feelings no longer exist? Have they been replaced with hate and loathing? I don't want to find out, not out of some misguided idea or want to avoid the issue but because I don't know if I can stand him abandoning me too."
"Tsunade turn her back on me and with her goes 99% of Konoha. That 1% left over is my friends who also might hate me now and Kakashi. It's possible that he could be the only person in Konoha that cares about me now. I don't know if I can take the news that he sided with Tsunade. I don't know if I'll be able to cope with it.
So I'm not going to find out because it could be the final straw that pushes me into insanity. I'm not coping well. I'm a mess. I have so much stuff to plan for, so many things that I know could happen yet I have no idea if I can change them or if I even should! I simply can't deal with Kakashi right now. I just can't."
"I put on this fake face of confidence. I always act like I know exactly what I'm doing all the time. Even when I get my limbs severed I still play it off like it's no big deal, sometimes I even act like I planned for that to happen, like I let it happen. That face is nothing more than a mask I constantly hide behind. I'm a fragile wreck, a mess, a disaster waiting to happen. I am a timebomb and eventually I'm going to explode. Violently."
"There's so much pressure on me and me alone. There's no one else who knows the full story, no one who knows the true horrors to come. Only me. That means that only I can change them, only I can lessen the impact. Me. Just little old me. One man – one kid against the world's most powerful foes."
"The stress is getting to me. I've changed, don't think I didn't notice it too. Rewind the clock to when I was still in Konoha. I'd never under any circumstances even so much as think about killing someone for their heart. Now though? I've already done it. That ragged man, the tenor, I have no idea who he was. I don't know if he was a criminal or a innocent and frankly it doesn't matter to me. He was the best fit, so I took his life to make mine easier."
"Not to mention my choices with Orochimaru. You could argue that I'm preventing a threat to humanity as a whole by thwarting his plans and eventually killing him but in reality that's not my goal. It isn't a noble and praiseworthy goal like that, it's much simpler. He took from me, he took the most important people in my life from me and I want him to suffer. That's it. There's no exalted reason behind it all, I just want to cause him pain. I want him to feel my agony, to feel my rage. It's... it's consuming me."
"My idiotic and absurd need to hurt him has pushed me straight to his open arms. I've eaten dinner with my family's murderer. I face him every day just to wake up and do it tomorrow because he's the only one willing to train me to one day stand as his equal, as his superior.
But by letting him do this, by letting him be around me something very bad has happened. I've changed. I'm more violent, I resort to brute force too quickly. I pick killing over negotiating simply because it's easier to deal with a dead man than a live one. Now when I lash out it isn't at the ground or trees, it's at people.
I've killed just because I was pissed and someone said something that irked me. Orochimaru is slowly twisting and corrupting me with his mere presence. I'm becoming more and more like him the longer I stay here."
"That's not even the worst part about me staying here. Orochimaru and I get along surprisingly well. As long as he's not trying to force me to do something I'm truly and utterly against we get along well. Really well. I don't even have to act that much around him anymore. It's fucking with my head. I'm supposed to hate that man, and I do. But the worst part about me staying here is that the longer I am here, the longer I'm around Orochimaru, the less hate I feel."
"He picked me. Back when Kakashi, Gai and Asuma tried their assassination and failed he saved me. He knows the Jiongu, he knows that I could have taken that hit and come away relatively okay. At the worst I'd have to pull myself together and I do that all the time during training.
He knows this as an irrefutable fact. Yet when given a choice between me and his next body he picked me. He left his precious next body behind to die to save me. He truly cares about me in his own way.
He's offered to get me things that no one else would even dream of asking for. He listens when I have something to say, he treats me differently than everyone else. The Snake Sannin has a soft spot for me. I don't want to admit it, my very being should be against this, but I think that I'm forming one for him too."
"So not only do I have to deal with what could happen next and if I can change it, not only do I have to wait patiently for the final thing to make the timebomb that is me go off, not only do I have to deal with coming to terms with my own changes and actions.
I get to deal with Orochimaru and what I feel for him because after two more years of this I don't know if I'll still hate him or not! And you want me to add on the stress of finding out if Kakashi hates me? You want me to write to him? No thank you, I have enough shit on my plate for decades. I don't need to add that to the pile."
...
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