«0511» glory.

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LORY. five-hundred eleven words, a last fan standing prompt, titled "trumpet". another single-shot general, romance naruto drabble, featuring hatake kakashi & haruno sakura.

JUKEBOX—

1. fink "looking too closely"


2. jaymes young "i'll be good"


3. hozier "like real people do"

©

 

 

Kakashi had watched his life pass by as shadows on the wall, with little more than chains at his heels and delusions in his head. His bonds served as prison and sanctuary—holding him hostage to his dread, and safe from dangerous things like hope.

Plato was right—reality was a bitter pill to swallow.

His illusions were perfect. Silhouettes painted pictures without pain, without the struggle to connect with a world that lived and breathed and moved. The shadows, it turned out, were merely imitations of all that they could be.

People smiled. They laughed and cried, they helped him soar and broke his heart, all at once.

It was a change from before; from the isolation of his father’s small farm in the mountains. Hatake Sakumo retreated from the world before he was thirty—decided he didn’t need it for what it was.

And there was the fundamental difference between Kakashi and his father.

He soon found that there were angels that walked the streets, even in the bitter November wind. He watched them pass from his perch on a park bench, huddled beneath layers of thin cotton. Packing up his belongings in that little house seemed like an exercise in futility—he’d be back within the week—so he hadn’t bothered.

A week turned into three months.

When a girl stumbled into him and stared up with bright, bright green eyes before apologizing—patting down his damp sweater with small, perfect hands—Kakashi was convinced he had met one of those angels.

When she laughed, he heard trumpets.

The moment he met her concerned gaze, Kakashi was terrified.

This was the other side of the universe. This was what laid beyond the fire that cast his shadows; the reality that his father had rejected.

Love.

At once, he knew why Sakumo had disappeared into the wind so long ago; why his last days were spent in pain and regret; why he died with a smile on his lips, and a name Kakashi had only heard in bedtime stories on his lips.

I fell in love with Icarus, Sakumo would say, and she flew into the sun after giving me you.

He understood why he needed to run, then.

Brushing her off with a soft laugh and a half-hearted joke, Kakashi walked away and didn’t look back. His small farm in the mountains welcomed him as it always did; with silence, security and seclusion. There were no expectations to be held, and no one to hold them.

His heart couldn’t break if it didn’t beat.

In a perfect world, he would’ve known what to do with the precious things on the other side of the fire. He would’ve introduced himself to that girl, and maybe asked why her hair was the most perplexing shade of strawberry blonde he’d ever seen.

He would’ve listened to those trumpets ‘til the day he died.

But he was not meant for hope, and love was not meant for him.

Even knowing this world—filled with mere shadows on the wall—was far from flawless, Kakashi appreciated it for what it was.

Safe.