The village got quiet in the days after.
Not respectful-quiet. Not peaceful-quiet.
The kind of quiet you get when everyone's jaw is clenched so hard the sound can't get out.
Roof repairs started before the ashes were fully swept. New tiles flashed pale against old beams like scars that hadn't learned how to match skin. The patrol routes changed—subtle at first, then obvious. You'd turn a corner and there'd be ANBU on a roof that used to be empty, mask angled down like the street itself had become suspicious.
People stopped standing under the Hokage Tower without realizing they'd stopped. The base of it stayed… clear. Not because someone ordered it. Because nobody wanted to be the first person to look up and remember.
The air tasted like incense for two days and then it didn't go away—it just got absorbed into everything. Hair. Fabric. Paper. The inside of your mouth.
I hated it.
So I went somewhere the quiet couldn't follow.
Training grounds don't stay quiet for long. Even when nobody's there, the place holds echoes like bruises—wood posts chewed up by kunai, dirt packed down by a thousand stances, fence rails scarred by overenthusiastic taijutsu. It smelled like sweat that had dried and tried to pretend it wasn't sweat anymore.
It was late enough that the sun had gone syrupy. Orange light dripped through the trees and turned the dust into glitter. Pretty in the way a knife can be pretty.
I picked a post. I stuck a fresh target on it. I started throwing.
Kunai first. Because kunai doesn't care how you feel. Kunai doesn't ask if you slept. It either hits or it doesn't.
Throw.
Thunk.
Pull.
Throw again.
Shuriken next. The wrist flick is supposed to be relaxed. I was not relaxed. The first one hit wide and shaved bark like it was punishing the tree for existing.
Good.
Something should be punished.
Then paper tags.
I slid them between my fingers like cards. Ink already dried. Lines already drawn. Easy little seals—adhesive webs, trip flares, sensory pings. All the "utility" stuff that keeps people alive in hallways and alleyways.
I wasn't doing it to be practical.
I was doing it because my head felt full of fog and if I didn't force my hands into patterns, my brain would start replaying the parts I couldn't control.
The hat.
The coffin.
Konohamaru's voice turning into a sob and everyone in the crowd trying to pretend they didn't hear it.
Naruto's face crumpling like his body had finally run out of pretending.
My fingers moved faster.
Tag.
Chakra spark.
Whump—webbing snapped out and slapped the post in a messy spiral.
It didn't look clean.
So I did it again.
Another tag. Another spark. Another spiral, a little tighter this time.
My chakra pool felt likei—like a cup I kept dipping into even when the bottom was showing. Little sips. Little drains. I could feel it in the back of my skull: the early, polite warning knock of a headache.
I ignored it, because I was good at ignoring things that were going to become problems later.
I pulled out a fresh tag and didn't use a pre-drawn seal this time.
I drew.
Brush tip scratching paper. Lines that should've been smooth coming out too sharp because my hand was tense. A barrier variant—small, localized, meant to catch and redirect a projectile. Something I'd used on civilians during the invasion.
My ink blotted at one corner. I corrected it too hard. The lines got thicker, aggressive, like the seal had an attitude.
I slapped it on the post, backed up, and pushed chakra into it.
The tag flared—
—and for a second the air shimmered like heat haze deciding it wanted to be real.
Then it popped.
Not an explosion. A failure. A sharp little recoil that punched straight back through my chakra like a rubber band snapping against skin.
Pain hit behind my eyes like someone flicked my forehead with a metal ruler.
My breath caught.
I blinked hard. The target swam and doubled. The world tilted half an inch like it was laughing at me.
I clenched my jaw and reached for another tag anyway.
"Okay," a voice said behind me, calm in the way that meant he'd been there long enough to count my breaths. "That's enough."
I didn't turn. Turning meant admitting I'd been seen.
"Kakashi-sensei," I said, aiming for snark and landing somewhere near gravel. "You stalking children again?"
"Only my own," he replied mildly.
That should've been comforting.
It made my chest tighten instead.
I threw a kunai too hard. It hit the post, bit deep, and rang like a bell. The sound felt wrong in the orange light.
My headache throbbed once, sharp now. Nausea lifted its head like a curious snake.
Behind me, Kakashi's chakra felt… muted. Like his usual steady current had been wrapped in cloth. Not gone. Just compressed. Controlled.
He didn't step closer. Didn't touch. Didn't do the "adult comfort" thing.
He simply existed at the edge of the training circle like a door I could choose to walk through or slam.
I hated that it worked.
"I heard," I said, still facing the post, "that Orochimaru can do things."
Silence.
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I forced words out anyway.
"Not like… normal healing." My voice cracked and I made it worse by pushing through it. "I mean the revival. The coffins. Like death is just… a door he kicks open and then laughs about the hinges."
The kunai in my hand trembled. I squeezed until my knuckles hurt.
"I want to know if it's real," I said. "I want to know if there's a way."
Kakashi didn't answer right away.
The wind moved through the trees and brought a faint smell of charcoal from somewhere in the village—someone burning debris, someone trying to erase a day that wouldn't erase.
When Kakashi spoke, his voice was softer.
"Sylvie…"
I spun around too fast. Dizziness surged; my glasses caught the sun and flared. I blinked it away like it was an insult.
"You don't get it," I blurted. "No— you do, you probably do, you're Kakashi, you're like… professionally haunted, but—"
My eyes burned. I wiped at them hard, angry at my own face for betraying me.
"He was teaching me," I said, and the words came out messier than I wanted. "The Third. He was actually—" I swallowed and it hurt. "He was being nice about it. Like I wasn't a problem to solve."
Kakashi's visible eye held mine without flinching.
Which made it worse, because flinching would've been easier to hate.
"Iruka checks on me," I kept going, because once the jar cracks it doesn't care about dignity. "Anko is—Anko is insane, but she looks at me like I'm not made of glass even when she's threatening to… I don't know, feed me to snakes or whatever."
A laugh tried to come out. It came out ugly.
"You and Naruto and Sasuke are my team," I said. "And I don't…" My throat closed and I had to force it open. "I don't have the other stuff. The family stuff. The normal stuff. Every time I think I finally have something, it gets ripped out like the universe is doing inventory and going, 'Nope. Too much. Return to sender.'"
My hands were shaking now. Not the delicate kind. The kind where your muscles are too tired to pretend they're fine.
"I just want to know if there's a way to undo it," I said, and my voice went small without asking permission. "If Orochimaru really can, then why couldn't—"
The word wouldn't come.
The name sat in my throat like a stone.
Kakashi moved.
Not toward me.
Down.
He walked past the edge of the circle and sat on the low wooden bench by the fence like sitting was the only thing keeping the ground from shifting. He patted the spot beside him.
No order. No lecture. Just an invitation that didn't corner me.
I stood there like a feral animal caught in lantern light, trying to decide if kindness was a trap.
Kakashi didn't push.
He just said, quietly, "I want to tell you about my best friends."
That sentence hooked into my brain like a kunai.
My tears paused mid-fall like they were confused.
"Your… friends?" I repeated, because apparently my brain needed to be stupid for a second.
Kakashi's eye curved—not lazy. Not amused. Something careful, like he was handling a blade he didn't want to drop.
I walked over like my legs had been assigned a mission and my dignity hadn't been consulted. I sat beside him. Close enough to feel his heat through fabric. Close enough for my chakra sense to catch the edges of what he was holding back—grief folded tight and neat, like paper cranes stuffed in a drawer.
For a moment, we just listened.
Distant voices.
A dog barking at nothing.
Someone hammering a tile back into place.
Life continuing, rudely.
Kakashi stared out at the field like it was a painting he'd memorized.
"When you're a shinobi," he said, "you learn early that this life takes more than it gives."
I swallowed. My stomach twisted.
"You already know that," he added, and I hated how gentle it was. "You've seen enough."
I didn't answer. If I opened my mouth, more ugly would come out.
"I was in a squad once," he said. "Like you, Naruto, and Sasuke."
My heart did a weird little hiccup. Team structure. Familiar shape. Safe lie.
"You were… Team something?" I asked, because facts are flotation devices.
Kakashi's eye flicked to me. "Something like that."
He took a slow breath.
"There were three of us," he continued. "I thought I understood what 'team' meant. Drills. Missions. Watching each other's backs."
His voice stayed even. His hands didn't shake.
But his chakra shifted—just a dull ache surfacing under the cloth.
"Then I lost them," he said.
It landed without drama. No pause. No softening.
My throat tightened.
"Both?" I whispered.
He nodded once.
No theatrics. Just the plain truth dropped between us like a stone on a bench.
"I blamed myself," he said. "For a long time."
He didn't say why. He didn't say how. He didn't say what it looked like.
Adults sand things down when they talk to kids. Not always to lie. Sometimes to keep the kids from bleeding on the same edges.
My headache faded a fraction, and I realized—suddenly—that I wasn't pushing chakra anymore. My seals sat quiet. My senses sat quiet. Like my body had decided this was the real training.
Kakashi kept going.
"Eventually," he said, "I turned it into something useful."
He looked at the training post. The stuck tags. The kunai buried too deep. The frantic repetition.
"Protecting people," he said. "Doing better. Making sure it doesn't happen again."
His voice tried to shift into "teacher." Light. Instructional.
But he wasn't looking at me like a student.
He was looking at me like a kid on a ledge.
And he was doing the only thing he knew how to do: sit beside the ledge so I didn't jump.
I stared at the dirt. My eyelashes stuck together with tears I hated.
"What were their names?" I asked, because I needed anchors.
Kakashi's jaw tensed. One small motion. Like a lock catching.
"Obito," he said. "And Rin."
The names landed in my chest and stayed there.
Obito. Rin.
They sounded… normal. Like people who should've gotten older and complained about paperwork and laughed about stupid missions over ramen.
Not like ghosts.
"What were they like?" I asked.
Kakashi was silent long enough that I thought he might not answer. Then he exhaled.
"Obito was loud," he said, and a thin blade of something—fondness, pain, both—cut through his chakra. "Always late. Always arguing. Always trying."
My brain, unfairly, pictured Naruto.
"And Rin?" I asked.
His visible eye softened.
"Kind," he said simply.
Just that.
No story. No anecdote. Like adding more would crack the drawer open and let the cranes spill out.
My chest hurt.
I didn't ask how they died. I didn't ask what he did or didn't do. I didn't ask what the guilt looked like when it had a face.
Because I could feel the shape of it anyway.
Grief wasn't a clean wound. It was a training dummy that hit back when you got tired.
Kakashi stood abruptly, like sitting had gotten too dangerous.
"Go home," he said, voice sliding back toward normal. "Eat something. Sleep. And stop trying to train yourself into the ground."
I sniffed hard, wiping my face with my sleeve like a feral animal.
"I'm fine," I lied.
Kakashi's eye crinkled. He didn't call me on it.
"Sure," he said. "And I'm punctual."
He ruffled my hair—gentle, which somehow made it worse—and then he vanished in a blur that made the air feel emptier the second he left.
I stayed on the bench a moment, staring at the post.
Glue-webbing still clung to it in a half-spiral like a thought that never finished forming.
Obito. Rin.
Two names I hadn't known existed five minutes ago, now carved into the inside of my head like a warning and a promise at the same time.
Eventually I stood up. My legs felt a little wobbly. Not from exhaustion.
From the weird, awful relief of being understood without being fixed.
I walked back through the village as dusk turned everything purple. Lanterns blinked on one by one—stubborn little stars pretending the sky wasn't heavy.
I rounded a corner near the main road and heard shouting.
Of course I did.
Naruto's voice was a bright, furious trumpet. "THAT IS NOT HOW YOU DO IT! You just— you just do it!"
Sasuke's voice, cooler, smug in that way that made me want to throw ink at him. "You mean you flail until something works."
"I do NOT flail!" Naruto yelled. "I improvise!"
"You panic."
"It's not panic, it's… instinct!"
I slowed without meaning to.
There they were.
Naruto in the middle of the street, gesturing so wildly he could've been conducting an orchestra of bad decisions, face scrunched up in righteous fury. Sasuke leaned against a post like he'd been born bored, smirk sharp as a paper cut.
They noticed me at the same time.
Sasuke's eyes flicked over my red-rimmed face, my rumpled hair, the way I was holding myself too tight. His smirk didn't vanish, but it shifted. Less mean. More… acknowledging.
Naruto, on the other hand, brightened like I'd turned on a light.
"SYLVIE!" he shouted, waving both arms like he was trying to flag down a plane. "HEY! COME HERE! TELL SASUKE HE'S WRONG!"
Sasuke's smirk sharpened again like he'd been waiting for backup.
The knot in my chest wasn't gone.
But it threaded itself through something else now. Something steadier.
Team.
Not undoing death. Not kicking open doors that shouldn't open. Not chasing Orochimaru's idea of "fixing."
Just… walking forward anyway, with people yelling at you about nonsense, with someone sitting beside you when you couldn't stop shaking.
I adjusted my glasses. Let my mouth do what it was good at.
"I can tell he's wrong from here," I called, and Naruto whooped like I'd handed him a weapon.
Sasuke snorted. "Traitor."
"Accurate," I said, and my voice didn't crack.
Behind them, the sky went darker.
Above us, the Hokage Monument watched in silence, stone faces pretending they weren't missing one steady old man who had held the village together with stubbornness and paper-thin rules.
Naruto kept yelling. Sasuke kept provoking. The lanterns kept lighting up.
And I kept walking toward them.
Because grief hits back.
So you don't stop moving forward.