Title: True Tales
Author: Killaurey
Word Count: 500
Rating: T

Written for Day 30 of the 2013 Last Fan Standing Challenge on KakaSaku's Dreamwidth community.

And this is the last prompt for this year! Hopefully this will happen again next year!

Prompt: Rainbow swirls (picture prompt)

No one ever asks about Kakashi's mother.

That doesn't bother him—he doesn't talk about her. He loves her fiercely, deeply, and she's gone.

Before she'd left (ravaged then taken by illness and pain) she'd told him stories. It had been a strange thing to him, a small child who was no child (already a proud shinobi) who'd never had a childhood (always had to be training) to sit on his mother's bed, with her frail arm around his shoulders, and listen to her voice tell him tales.

At first he'd hated it.

But his mother had had so little time left and she'd chosen to give that time to her stories and, even as a child, he'd understood that death was something his precious people could not come back from.

So, for her, he'd stayed and listened and eventually her words had drawn him in. Complex, frightening tales of mysterious lights that weren't dangerous at all—he never understood why, when they sounded so much like enemy jutsu but his mother had sworn they were harmless and, because they'd been her stories, he'd believed her.

She told him of blue's woes and how it sought to be a better, brighter self so that people would find comfort in being blue instead of just being sad. She told him of pink's struggles to find self-worth when everyone, even pink itself, believed it to be naught but a silly, frivolous colour incapable of more. She told him of how pink turned itself sharp and vicious and reached out to show them the true depths of its colours. Green dances, lolling, rolling about, playful; the colour of money, of spring, of new growing things. In his mother's stories, green was the only colour that did not strive for change.

She said it was because green, already, waschange. (They should all try to be green.)

She taught him of orange, bright and merry and dangerous. Orange was wild, untameable colour that sought to out-do everyone else so that no one could say that they did not know orange.

Yellow was cooler and both bright and hard to see in turns. Yellow did what it wanted, when it wanted, in its own time and could never be led. Yellow was friends with pink and orange and green in turns but blue was a rare companion for yellow.

And then there was black, who was equally shunned and embraced because it was only due to black's influence that the colours shone so brightly, so deeply, that they could hurt the eyes of those who looked on them.

Kakashi tells no one of his mother and her stories. They are odd, treasured memories that are too precious to share. He loves her still and hopes that, even though he knows better, that she's with her strange lights rather than cold and buried in the ground with nothing after that.

(But sometimes he wonders if she'd been a seer and, if so, how had she known?)