Chapter 11 is done!

Well, okay. It's probably not completely finished, but it's a heck of a lot better and I feel somewhat confident in its lack of suckitude. If I do any more on it, I'm going to get confused and start taking out the good parts.

Chapter 11
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Even though the house wasn’t very big, Kakashi and Sasuke still rattled around for a few weeks, tried to find places for things and for themselves. They each had a bedroom, and they shared the living room, bathroom, and kitchen. During the construction phase, Sasuke had argued for a week about which bedroom would be his: the one in the northeast corner. But, upon moving in, he decided that Kakashi’s was better and he took it over--when Kakashi had poked his head in, Sasuke had staked his claim with packs of gear on the bed. Kakashi merely sighed and kept unloading crates from the borrowed cart.

For a while, the boxes went round and round on an endless parade through the house as Kakashi or Sasuke changed his mind about what should go where. But everything found a place eventually, and Kakashi and Sasuke now faced the task of carving out niches for themselves.

Sasuke spent almost all of his time in his room. When he wasn’t eating or showering, he was sitting on his bed--or the roof above it--staring into the perpetually dark forest. Kakashi was frequently in the living room, lounging across the couch and thumbing through the same books he‘d been re-reading for years. When he tired of that, he went into the small cleared area in front of the house and made plans to develop a training yard there. The churned up dirt, left over from construction, acquired grass and flowers and plants Kakashi didn’t care to identify.

Sasuke took to yanking up the plants. When Kakashi asked, Sasuke gave him the “you’re an idiot” look. They were weeds, and yards don’t grow weeds. Kakashi questioned the logic in this, seeing as most of the yard was in fact forest. Sasuke refused to stop pulling weeds, and Kakashi decided this vigilante-ism was a tolerable character flaw. Besides, it was ultimately helping his goal of a training yard. Those plants would all get plowed under anyway. Not that Kakashi was in any hurry. He relished the planning.

Creating a training yard required nearly as much thought as that of planning a house. There were so many little details to think on. Kakashi wanted it to be as naturalized as possible; in his travels, he’d seen indoor and outdoor facilities with varying levels of sophistication. He found the obviously artificial ones distasteful. What was the point of training in a space that would never, ever occur in the field? Kakashi wanted a visceral setting, one that punched him in the gut and said “this is real.” He wanted the scents and sounds of nature around him, preferred the roughness of tree bark to the smoothness of a man-made climbing wall and sunlight to the incandescent floodlights of indoor arenas.

This was not to say that he wanted the training ground to resemble solely the forests of Fire country. Kakashi envisioned bits and pieces of foreign landscapes; the sand and rocky scarps of Wind country; the plains bordering Earth country with their six-foot-high grasses and deceptive horizons. He knew there was no way he could replicate the mountains in Snow country, but he gave himself better than fair chances of success with the coastal marshes that led to the Water country archipelago. He also had vague notions of water features--slippery rocks to climb and leap across, water to walk on. The thought alone made his heart pound harder with anticipated excitement. Kakashi wondered briefly if Sasuke had a favorite terrain.

These plans were time and energy consuming, which was, as far as Kakashi was concerned good. There were plenty of other thing he didn’t want to think too hard about, not the least of which was the distinct lack of training he’d been doing lately.

Kakashi was approaching ninja middle-age. Despite no lingering injuries or permanent damage, the hard life he’d lived for nearly three decades was taking its toll. He woke up with stiff joints and odd twinges. These faded away after stretching and working out for a short while, but they kept coming back. Rainy days, much closer together this far into the forest, left Kakashi feeling like he’d completed a particularly challenging mission not long ago.

His body missed the lack of constant exercise training provided. Kakashi told himself it was just readjustment to a lack of adrenaline coursing through him. He felt like he was walking underwater half the time, moving too slowly toward a future he couldn‘t see, even with his Sharingan flaring and wild and calling to the scattering of Uchiha blood in his veins.

Kakashi’s left eye had started hurting again, like back in the early post-transplant days, when he had struggled to integrate it. The eye burned in the socket, seared into his skull and left him much weaker-feeling than he’d like to admit. He tried, very hard, to ignore the un-ignorable parts of his life.

Kakashi felt a certain amount of guilt while trying to keep his head in the sand--just as he hadn’t been training, he hadn’t gotten within throwing distance of the memorial since Sasuke had come to live with him. He hadn’t had time. Or energy. Or something else necessary to do what he had to do, what he felt driven to do. He was recovering whatever it was that had been missing before. The guilt was becoming relentless and the urge to sit atop the memorial stones unremitting. Kakashi was half-surprised at the guilt he’d accrued over the past months, how heavily it weighed on him. It made him sloppy. It was distasteful and oddly disgraceful.

He could have been killed, literally killed, dozens of times over through that carelessness--by slipping up with Sasuke; by hostile nin while he remained only half-aware in his fugue of self-recrimination; or even in accidents that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been preventable. As much as it pained him to admit it, Kakashi couldn’t keep ignoring his dereliction. He needed to go to the monument again.

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I know it's not a very active chapter, but I just couldn't get to where I wanted to go without all this almost-extremely-boring narrative. I suppose it's a transitional chapter. The worst part of re-working this was, quite honestly, telling myself it was okay to chuck out the parts that weren't fitting. I get stuck with that all the time.

I cringe at setting aside what I've already written, but the idea of the story keeps changing. (Seriously. I've got at least three different plots that I could implement at this point...and more if I go back and change things from the beginning.) The heart of this story isn't static, and it's damnably hard to pin down and elucidate what, for now, is only a sort of vague instinct about how things are going to play out--despite me already knowing the plot and knowing what is going to happen, all roads leading to Rome and all that. Even the littlest changes now will affect the main plot points in future.

Ramble, ramble, ramble. Who the heck knows when chapter twelve will be done? I may skip right ahead to thirteen, if twelve proves inconsequential.

Later!

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.