Breakdown
The other rooms in the facility smell like latex gloves and talcum powder, but hers is always filled with the pungent scent of freshly picked daffodils.
He thinks it's funny that her room smells so nice, because nobody besides Lee ever brings her flowers, and Lee hadn't visited her in nearly a month, and flowers can't survive in the winter anyway.
Sasuke had stayed the night when she was first admitted, but hadn't gone to see her since. Naruto had been coming less and less often, too, only stopping by when Hinata permitted him to do so.
It seemed Kakashi was the only person in the world without something better to do than sit around and watch his student sleep. He knows the nurses are lying to him when they say she is comatose, knows that they're lying when they say the chances of her ever waking up are low.
Sometimes, on nights when he is tired after returning from weeklong missions he shouldn't have survived, he stumbles through her window to sit with her because it's past visiting hours. On those nights, when he is so tired he can barely scale the walls of the hospital to the third floor, he falls asleep the moment his tired bottom hits the chair by her bedside.
He falls asleep with a carefree smile, because he doesn't care that Sakura will never be Sakura again. He falls asleep believing that it's a regular night in a regular hotel on a regular mission with the regular members of team seven sharing a room together.
He falls asleep thinking she'll wake up with him in the morning, thinking she'll greet him with a cup of coffee and one of her cheery signature smiles.
When the sun shines through the window in the morning and he groggily stands up to check on her, he is severely disappointed. He hates himself for being so naïve, but more than that he hates her for not being strong enough to defend herself in the first place.
Without his coffee, he doesn't think straight. After a while when he is done crying—because, yes, the copy-nin does cry—and when he is done kicking and smashing and breaking anything he can find, after his breakdown, he picks up the chair he'd tossed aside in his little fit, and he plops down into it holding his head in his hands and he realizes that no matter what Sakura had done wrong, it was his fault.
It was his fault for not training her to be strong enough. It was his fault for encouraging her to be brave, and for letting her go to Tsunade…Tsunade, the woman who taught her to push herself past her own limits.
There was a time in his life when Kakashi used to think that Arashi Sensei and Gai were the only bad teachers in existence. He thought Arashi had failed to protect Rin and Obito, and failed to train Kakashi to do so in his absence. Most of all, he thought Gai was a fool for teaching Rock Lee techniques that challenged his body so badly.
There was a time in his life when Kakashi used to deny that he had turned out worse than Gai or Arashi, a time when if he heard the villagers slandering the reputations of his students, he would turn a deaf ear and a blind eye and ignore it.
While he watches Sakura lying there, protected by the cool metal railings of the hospital bed, with her skin as colorless as the white sheets she lies covered in, he realizes that the only thing left to do his deny himself the right of denying things.
Kakashi is too old to play pretend games.
He isn't too old, however, to wish upon a shooting star, or to fold a thousand paper cranes for his protégée. He tries to focus on the positive side of things, though everyone who visits Sakura leaves drowning in negativity.
He wishes upon every star he sees, shooting or not, and he folds paper cranes until his hands are so covered in paper-cuts that his fingers look raw and pink, or red and bloody and mangled past the point of identification.
Anko is killed on a mission one night and Kurenai dies trying to take along her corpse, and Kakashi ends up being the one to bring both of them back. Unlike Genma who had witnessed their deaths, Kakashi does not go out to drink after handing in his mission report.
Kakashi makes his way to Sakura's hospital room, shoving past the nurses who see all of the blood and assume he is injured. When he finds her lying there exactly as he'd left her, he grips her hands and he folds them into a prayer, and Kakashi prays to God.
He prays that there will come a day when his friends decide to retire from their duties as shinobi and as kunoichi. He prays that Sakura will wake up and go back to saving lives, and he prays that nobody will have the power to destroy hers again. He prays that the Sound nin who bashed her skull in will end up dying in a gruesome manner, and he prays that Naruto will become Hokage like he'd always wanted.
He prays that Sasuke will walk the path of redemption once more, for Sakura's sake. He prays that the cenotaph will never have another name carved into it, and he prays that the people he's lost aren't really gone.
He prays that he is dreaming, going to wake up any moment like Sakura is bound to.
He falls asleep with more prayers on his tongue, and he thinks he wakes up to words spilling from Sakura's tongue.
"Hey there," She says, as cheery as ever. "Hey! Are you listening to me? Wake up, Kakashi-sensei, wake up!"
He opens his eyes to find hers closed, and her mouth shut. But just when he's about to have another breakdown, about to lose hope and scream at God and scream at himself, he stops.
He stops because her hand is resting on top of his.
And Kakashi doesn't know if he moved it there while he was sleeping, or if she woke up, or if she was really reaching out to him while they both slept.
But he knows (though he doesn't believe) that her hand is colder than the snow outside, and that her room smells like rotting flesh and organs that failed a long time ago. –Organs that gave out just like he had once given up.
In a spur of the moment decision, Kakashi decides that he doesn't want to stop denying things, and that he still isn't ready to give up—not yet, not when there is still so much hope inside of him because she's grabbing him and she's alive and just sleeping.
So he slides his hand out of her grasp and grabs both of her hands instead, folds them into a prayer, and starts over again.
He prays that someday he will be ready to let her go, because he definitely isn't ready today. (And he wasn't ready yesterday or the day before, or two weeks ago.)
Someday, he will be. He'll be ready because he'll be praying, and God has never disappointed him before.
Author's Notes: Funny, how prayers work out sometimes, isn't it? Just another simple, sad oneshot, because I haven't been doing much KakaSaku lately and as a rule I dislike happy endings.