admit it -milkeuteaa this is what you've been waiting for

"OBITO!"

Obito is buried on a Sunday. There is no body to bury, but the sun blinds her eyes and everything is blurry and dreamlike because of her tears. There aren't many people, not even sensei is here, having been whisked away because of his duties.

"He wanted to be Hokage," Kakashi whispers as they laid down the flowers on the cold stone. Cold heart stone— Obito had been bright and full of life, but the stone. The dirt, the rain— Those were the only things left of her best friend.

"He could've been Hokage, Kakashi," she murmurs. "He could've become Hokage if he lived."

"I'm sorry," he says.

Why bother?

"It's not your fault," she replies on reflex. No, but it is. They had lost him because Team Seven wasn't a compatible team, to begin with. Kakashi and Obi too headstrong, me being too independent and air-headed. It was almost as if they were destined to fail from the start. If Obito and Kakashi had been on different teams... If Minato-sensei had realized that there was something missing from their teamwork...

Could Obito still be alive? Could Obito have lived past thirteen?

Did Obito die because of Kakashi and sensei?

"Ling." She kept walking, anger and indignation welling up in the depths of her stomach. If Kakashi hadn't been so reckless, so egoistic...

"Ling."

"Ling, please." A plea, an entreaty— Please, don't leave me, too. The flowers fall. Roots cut, the pictures of a boy gone. Why were they here? What difference did it make? The weeps of those around, those that watch with empty eyes. They do not bring back the dead.

Those who break the rules are the scum. Those who abandon their comrades are worse than scum.

The lonely boy she loved was dead. What about the lonely boy who didn't die? What about the girl who destroyed the world one lonely boy made another promise to protect? Who would protect those that remained?

Obito... I swore back then... That I'd look after them, didn't I?

She extends her hand backward, fingers uncurled.

A warmth curls around her finger.

"Let's go, Kakashi," she said.

Ling vows that day, that if it was what it took to protect the person that Obito died to save, then she would follow Kakashi to the ends of earth.

She would try, at the very least.

Just as she tries to love the village, even despite all of its failings towards her.

+

The true entirety of it sinks in. Death is a hard thing to comprehend. And it's only the morning after that she realizes Obito is gone. Obito is gone and he will never come back again. And that heaviness settles over her like a blanket, a dark claw that has wrapped around her heart. She can't smile, can't feel, can't talk. And her dorm is too quiet, too small and too filled with memories of another lonely boy keeping her company.

She decides to move out of her lodgings provided back at the academy and rent a place by herself.

Ling goes hunting for lodgings, there aren't many people who would house shinobi in fear of who they are, in fear of the war, but one old lady takes a look at her lost eyes and young features and softens. She leads her to her new apartment and provides the key before giving her a small, but weary smile and leaving.

Ling looks into the empty apartment.

Worn wood and large windows that would provide chill during summers and seal the warmth in winters. She had a single bedroom and a small, used kitchen with renovated stoves that looked out of place with its modern steel and clear-cut edges. There was a large, round table made of the same wood that seemed to be everywhere in the entire building.

This will be home now.

Ling opens the window and feels the breeze ruffle her hair. Pink strands fly as a few green leaves flutter past, and she notices some old, scissor-cut red civilian seals for good luck taped onto the window. Ling decides to leave them and sets a pot of orange irises beside the window.

She only has flowers to bring to her apartment. For the first few weeks, she sleeps on the floor with a worn blanket and no pillows. It was hard and cold, but it's better than the scorn of her parents and the chill of the dorms.

Weeks pass. More flowers make their way into her apartment. They are her companions — perhaps remnants of a time where she had been loved, had been needed in someone's life. Where the sunshine and the laughter were not simply illusions, where she did not have have to think too hard to dream, to remember that joy.

+

"Hello," she says with a smile. The woman in front of her gives a flat look before giving her the application.

The Shinobi mission assignment desk isn't something that most shinobi apply for, but Ling does it because she needs money and she gets in because she's a student of Minato Namikaze. The woman looks at her with a look that screams coward and the older, jaded shinobi call her selfish for throwing her career away.

You have everything, they say. You are a teammate of Kakashi Hatake, you are a pupil of Minato Namikaze. How dare you throw all that away, how dare you avoid the war because of what it has done to you, they sneer.

Ling cries because of their words, but deep down, she knows that this is the only way. She's not Rin, who wants desperately to help those injured and neither is she Kakashi, child genius and able to survive anything in his way.

( She is a child. Shouldn't she be allowed to fear, shouldn't she be allowed to hide? )

Ling didn't become a shinobi for honour or for kicks, she did because it was either this or the flower district or to be married off by a family that never thought of her as good enough.

There are days that Ling thinks she chose wrong.

Because the only difference between whores and kunoichi is that while latter are feared, the former is loved.

Lijah can't remember the last time she was loved.

+

"Kakashi!" she called, one evening as she returned from the plant store, "If you wanted to come in, you could've just knocked. Don't hang out on my roof like a stalker."

Her former teammate dropped down from the roof, nonplussed. Ling gave him what she hoped was her best-unimpressed look, hugging her new teaset to her chest protectively— Kakashi Hatake outside of being ninja-y and a scary child soldier was so dense around things it hurt.

"Hi," she says flatly.

"Hi," He smiles awkwardly, a mere curving of eyes — the type he gives to Gai when he's trying to console the Green Beast of Konoha when Kakashi doesn't want to have a match. "Can I come in?"

"Well, I promised to let you come in if you've finished hide-and-seek, so," she opens the door, "yes, come in."

He dips his head in thanks(?) and shuffled in her door, surprising her by taking the package out of her hands. She raised an eyebrow and followed him in, noting the forest green scarf she had knitted him for his twelfth birthday was wrapped around his neck snugly.

"Where do you want it?" he asks monotonously.

She smiles flatly. "It doesn't matter."

"Ling." Her palm heats from the seal she applied to her skin as she places her now-burning hand on the kettle. The whistle blows fluxes of steam from underneath the lid. Ling wonders if she's trying to redeem Kakashi by trying to feel a sense of physical pain akin to his suffering ( but what if he deserves it? ) to the scrubbed red skin, the veins showing beneath pale wrists.

She rolls her eyes and waves a hand. "Just put them on the counter. You do know where that is, right?"

"I'm not that blind," he replies immediately, quick, childish annoyance clear in his tone. Obediently, he sets the package down. He takes an awkward position beside, looking like he wants to say something but isn't quite sure what to say.

Was she being foolish? Befriending the boy that had killed her best friend?

Or was she being foolish by not reaching out to him like she knows she should be doing?

She says nothing and sets a cup of tea in front of him. "The next time you decide to stalk me, bring me some flowers." Ling turns away again, and begins to ramble away about some TV show and a movie premier Rin had dragged her to about some crappy romance between a prince and an assassin.

"Do you ever get tired of talking?" he asked her when the teacups emptied and Ling was now attempting with stitching another nameless flower onto the tablecloth.

She raises an eyebrow. "If you cared so much, stop camping at my house and go back to your own. It's not like you're homeless or anything."

Kakashi sucks in a cold breath.

People think she's rude and callous. People thinks that she can't filter her words and that she hurts people by accident. He's still, but shaking and the single grey eye filled to the brim with guilt. But people don't know that she does it on purpose. And she isn't guilty, isn't repentant for the way she's ripping him apart, making him take on the burden for something she should hold equal weight for. One eye covered and another forever looking into the past.

But still—

Ling spends the night tossing and turning before getting up resolutely the next morning. She marches up to Gai with a speech about friendship planned and he turns to her with a bright smile.

"Gooooooood morning! Beautiful blossom of Konoha!"

Ling gives him a smile and turns back around. Nope. Not that door. Never that door. She's stuck moping for the next week and terrorizes anyone within a mile radius of her.

"Take this," she throws a grey fleece blanket in Kakashi face the next time she found him skulking around her apartment. "And this." She throws her key into his face too.

He catches both, the piece of shit he is. He gives her a wide-eyed stare, clutching both things in his arm. His eye narrow as he raises his chin. "What makes you I want this?"

Ling juts her own chin out because if they're playing the I'm so much better than you I don't need anything game, she's not about to be outdone. "If you don't want it then throw it out, I don't care," she says with an air of superiority and with a flip of her hair, she's gone, leaving Kakashi to stare into space with a wide eye.

The next time he returns from a mission, she finds herself one cup less, one couch less and up one silver-haired, emotionally stunted genius former teammate in her apartment.

She makes them watch some weird soap opera about icky, gross feelings that night just to spite him. Her small, hardly ever touched TV set finally has its use.