Heavy In Your Arms

I was a heavy heart to carry

But he never let me down

When he had me in his arms

my feet never touched the ground

You learn that the body is nothing but a cage. Bare bone bars and a thick padlock, rusted carefully and dated. The small room is pretty bare. There is no worn in sofa to sink into, no halogen light overhead, no potted plant, whose "he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not petals are crumpled in the throes of death at the foot of the pot. There is only you alone in darkness. You alone with yourself. You're supposed to find the door. You are supposed to find the way out. There is a door, but you have to find it, which is the thing that most people don't understand. And they are content to sit inside themselves, content to merely dream of the whispered about something more. But Kurenai knows. She is ready to leave.

Arrival and departure time, you don't really get to choose, despite it being your body. Which is the even worse thing. Things just happen. Life happens. It happens and happens and keeps happening. And you are the one it happens to. But you have to understand that it won't always happen to you. You have probably convinced yourself as the scorned often do, that Life is a faithful lover. Your throat is the only trampoline upon which its kisses will fall, your palm the only palm in which it's palm finds holy solace. You're sadly mistaken.

We always want a little more time. Just a second, just a minute, just an hour more. As if man is so great that in an hour he make an inevitable deity a flower, uprooted and thrown to the wayside. He's not. But he learns this the hard way. And now it has finally dawned on Kurenai that there is no more time. Not an ounce more, not a second.

That morning when she rose she was fortunate enough to swallow a clock. And it ticks now in her chest, keeping track of losses, exactly in the place where her heart used to be. The long hand tangles up in her veins and ventricles, short hand scratches at her ribs. Hours claw at her lungs. She can barely breathe.

A while ago, this ticking time did away with delusions, and now true pain has sunk its teeth in, and when threatened with being shaken loose, the teeth tighten their monstrous grip making the blood run even more freely. The blood is everywhere. She looks up at Kakashi's face and he looks down at her. Yes. There is no more time.

The blood is everywhere. Sticky on her clothes, and binding them to his. He carries her in his arms. The entire weight of her slippery with the juicy crimson balanced just so in his trembling arms. Behind his shoulders stacks of smoke rise like ghosts into the darkening sky, the faces of the ascending souls gray and grim. The stench of the battlefield stains the air, like the blood that birthed it stains the grass.

It is the sickly, meaty smell of burning flesh, chakra,dead hopes, and the acrid stench of war. The funereal perfume of all of the lives cowed in submission under the curve of Death's mighty scythe. The battle that bathed most of the lands surrounding it in red.

They are the only survivors.

She looks down her leg at the evidence of this, her foot twisted now so that it is hanging on to the ankle with barely a pinky-finger of skin, lies limply. She is reminded of the blood. When she looks up at Kakashi's face, his forehead clumped with sweat and smeared with black, charred flaking flesh where a godfist of chakra blew the hitai-ate to smithereens, she remembers the tang of his moist skin, the way their chemicals mixed together in invisible places when they put their salty selves together. She is reminded of the time. Her arms around his neck, she squeezes gently. The blood, the blood, the blood everywhere. Oh, God it hurts so bad. It must. A gentle squeeze, snaps her eyes tightly shut as a stampede of storm clouds break across their pupils. "Put me down."

There are mountains. There are plains. There are valleys. They are moving slowly, surely. Raggedly Brokenly. Just the two of them. For miles around. There is no one left on Earth it seems. Only the two of them connected by blood, by the touching of organs, by the echoes of kisses, by heart. By this moment. It seems so beautiful, the way the fairytales make it out to be, this kind of solitude. But in the fairytales every shadow doesn't have a mind of its own, every rock doesn't hide an archer armed with poisoned arrows, every moment doesn't count.

Kurenai's vision dances to the rhythm of Kakashi's heart. She can hear it beating through the flak vest, where she rests her heavy head. She wishes to take it in her hands, the comfort of feeling the existence of his life, feel the steady pressure pounding like a drum between her fingers. She wishes there wasn't so much blood.

"Kakashi, put me down. Leave me behind. Save yourself."

"No."

No one understands love. The scientists would like you to believe there is a science to it, but that is only because they are scientists. People who have mastered the ancient, godly art of thinking with their hearts know there is no true explanation for this welcomed madness. No reason why some people never know its embrace, even if they are always calling for it by name, yet others can know nothing but love, though they curse its featureless face and spit in its eyes. It makes a senseless point of coming in the roughest of geometric shapes, in the strangest of places, in the darkest and most desperate of times when you are living asleep, waiting for something, anything to come along and wake you up again.

For Kakashi and Kurenai it came in a spun, half-empty glass body of righteous whiskey on a New Years Eve night. An event of Asuma's or Guy's, none of that matters now. What matters is they sat in a circle like teenagers, hungry eyes smiling, all of them waiting for their turn at chance. And Kurenai had a strange rising feeling in her chest, as if she was climbing out of herself using the rungs of her spine as a ladder to propel outside, and above herself she could see it all. She could see the way Kakashi looked at her as if she were the only woman in the world, the first woman he had ever seen, the last. And she knew even as the bottle spun aimlessly around and around, making a dry noise on the dirty wood floor that it would point to him, tried and true.

He held her hand and led her into the basement. He pulled her near the window where you could smell the firecrackers in the air and see the fireflies lighting like stars on the windshield, constellations they could name after themselves. He didn't kiss her at first. He stood staring, his arms folded around himself as trying to gauge just how wide he should fling apart the windows of his body.

She was a little drunk. She could hear the whoops and cheers of their comrades outside the basement door, urging them on,wanting something to happen. The moon stood nosy into the open window watching unabashedly and she realized she wanted something to happen too. She couldn't get over the way he'd looked at her, as if he wanted to be inside her. Just climb inside her chest and build a home. The hot whiskey churned in her gut and burned her throat. And she wanted so badly to be kissed. By him. Only a kiss. But it was more.

He pulled her close and like a dog she could smell the blood on him. It was a stench she was accustomed, it was the collar of a shinobi forever leashing him to his craft. The smell almost overwhelmed her heightened senses but she didn't pull away because his hands were soft. He looked her in her eyes and didn't close them. He didn't speak. He kissed her and his mouth cut through her like a knife, dissecting her and breaking her down into something more. Something else.

And then she really did feel like a kid again, standing on the bluff in the dead of winter, smooshing her face up into a wrinkly pucker, and waiting for a first something that was sure to change her into someone else. She felt then as if she'd never been kissed before. She pulled away and touched her mouth. She could taste his bloody scent, and every fragment of her felt alive. She looked at him and he looked at her with those dark, dark eyes. And they could see right through each other to every scar, and note, and letter, and bend and bump of the other written clearly across those sheltered hearts. And then she truly did become someone else. She became his.

His steps get slower. She squeezes his neck. He tries to smile. The blood. "Kakashi." she pleads, she warns. "Talk to me" he says, evenly. Even though she is falling apart, cell by cell, hair by hair. The pain. Like a drill. Like a knife. Is visible. Twisting and twisting. Deeper and deeper. She has to fight to suck in a breath. Her heart ticks. The clock beats. Her eyes, the storm clouds break open now, and the rain falls in drowning torrents down her cheeks. A rock has formed in her throat, a large smooth stone that won't be moved.

"Talk to me please."

"Remember that time we tried to find a four leaf clover in that grass on the hill?" she says.

"In the rain." He remembers.

"Yes, and your hair got soaked and then it turned huge. And you looked like a Pomeranian."

"And you lost your shoe in the mud, and I had to carry you all the way home." He sighs. And he smiles, a slow, wonderful sentence of a smile that seems to read on and on, with no room for a period. She's sobbing uncontrollably now. "Please put me down."

Whoever said that love is a blessing obviously did not know the definition of the word blessing. Love is a curse, and it's not in disguise, and you cannot lift it, because if it's love you won't want to. Kakashi and Kurenai were in the summer of their enchantment, and love came like a thief in the night and snatched back from them what it had given.

A mission went awry on an Autumn day when the leaves were so candy apple red and fell from the trees just like apples, heavily and pregnant with the future. The leaves were so red when the messenger hawk dropped the letter in her hands, they made her think of blood. And then all she could think was that Kakashi was not coming back, and against all judgment and the orders of the Hokage she grabbed her kunai and set out for a distant battlefield, even though she should have been in bed, watching junk TV and soaking her swollen feet.

It happened with a calculated boot and a brilliant flash of pain and afterwards Kurenai laid in bed for weeks deflated and punctured, all of the air seeping out of her. And Kakashi beside her. Under the covers he slid his arm around her waist and she pretended as if she did not see the tears on his cheeks when he told her it was not her fault, or hear the jagged break in his voice when he kissed just under her chin and begged 'just let me hold you';because she couldn't tell anyway if he really meant her or rather was talking to the third person they might have been, had the reason for furnishing the spare room not evaporated.

They had only each other. That third person became Kakashi's shadow , the elephant in the room, the sharp look whenever someone asked how things were going and then had to be told what happened. Things changed after that. The love became more ragged, harder and more certain. There was no try again. They had only each other. Only each other, now. The way it was meant to be.

Now her heart seems to be slowing down, the clock beginning to truly tire of ticking. They are moving slower. The blood bright and fresh. She tastes it in her mouth, the way she did that first night they kissed, when like a vampire she became hooked on his flavor. Thirsty for it. A madly, ungodly, unquenchable thirst that she has never managed to satiate. Even now she wishes for more time. A little more. Together. Each other is all they have.

But all the blood. The pain is far away now. It must be. Merely the dust left behind by something horrible, but something attached to time and place and not this slowly dying moment. Kakashi's voice sounds distant as if they are telephone lines apart, separated by miles, and oceans, and lives not their own; even though his soft mouth is right against her ear. "Don't leave me. Don't…..fall asleep. Keep talking." He says. The ground beneath them seems shaky somehow. She is not even sure they are still moving.

Love is the sweetest sin. The sweetest thing is love, but not any old love. Not the love you get out of your mother's suitcase and find when it has fallen open. One that has been hidden for years behind cloth and moth balls. Not a love you can lose in a sea of faces or in a deep pocket. Not a love you forget. Not a love you can see, but never feel, one that talks but never acts on the talking. The best love is the kind of love that is always watching you, so that when you fall itcomes behind you and slips its strong arms under your weak ones and holds you up. Even if its arms are shaking then, it picks you up. It carries you to safety, as far as you need to go until the fear dissolves in you like an effervescent. A love that will carry you to the end of the Earth and never stop walking. A love that will never put you down.

Just that morning he told her. Moments before they were set to embark on this mission. Their first one together. Their last one together, it seems. She woke with the sunlight. With his face near hers, and she caught him looking. He tried to turn away but still she saw it. The expression in his eyes was like something she had seen before, but only once and she couldn't place where. Admiration without being adulation, worship just short of the pagan. A vulnerable and all consuming emotion that ate her alive. 'I love you.' He confessed his face still turned away from hers. 'I love you, I love you, I love you. More than life, more than this forsaken village, more even than pie.' And he looked at her then as if she might slap him. And it brought her to tears and she didn't know exactly why. So that kissing him wasn't enough. And neither was holding him. He had never told her before, she never thought he would. She needed all day and all night to thank him. She needed him to kiss her breathless, kiss her stupid. She needed him forever.

And now they are out of time.

"I love you." She says. Pointedly. To his slowly closing face. Now, she is certain they are not moving. They stand together in a circle of sky and ground and rock. He carries her in his arms.

He slowly slides to the ground, she with him. Never letting go. He sits and bows his head a little. His eyes close and open. Slow. Slower. Slower. She cannot hear the clock. She cannot hear her heart. He lies flat on his back, and the gaping wound in his stomach opens its mouth as if to howl, and shows all of the things it has been hiding in its cheeks. A liver. A stomach. A ropy small intestine. Blood. Blood. Blood.

The sobs rack her body. She can't catch her breath over them. She will splinter like a little ship lost in a storm, she will explode into fractions of herself and be divided amongst the winds. She takes his hand and it feels so cold, but the grooves of empty space there, perfectly match the fingers of his. Perfectly.

"Did I do it?" he asks. A barely audible whisper, almost drowned out by the roaring silence.

"Yes, you did it." She sobs and tries and crinkles her eyes shut and tries to smile in case he can still see her there. In case he can…

He sighs. "Are….y…you safe?...Did….I…..safe….."

"I'm safe." She says. "You carried me to safety."

He smiles. His hand tightens in hers. She is his and that is all she has ever wanted to be. Only each other, that's all they have. A blessing and a curse. A love. The tears rolls down her cheeks and kiss his face. She stands him up, and hand in hand together they find the door waiting expectantly in the curve of the wall. The knob turns easy, she opens it for him and as he slips through it she doesn't let go of his hand. Never letting go, though the cage stands quiet and empty, the padlock fallen away, the door swinging on its hinges.