All at once he knew. He was the vector. He was the sun on his shoulders and the earth beneath his feet. This is all he knew. He lost track of the borders defining his form. He was not himself but the space around him. He was blind and without a face. He felt that he was drifting away, dissolving. He was at once spread over all of creation and condensed to the head of a pin. The world came unfastened and open. The film of darkness was perforated by light, riddled with fire. He wheeled with the swirling abyss. He was drunk with the beauty of the void. It scorched his veins with a pleasure he could not differentiate from pain.

He concentrated to keep contained the overflow of his bedazzled senses. He remembered. He was muscle. He was blood. He recalled a lifetime as though it were a dream. Then, he fixed his gaze on an object at parallax with the palpitating sky. He reached with his mind s eye and, though it was impossibly far away, he touched it. He wished to switch places with it and to his astonishment he did. Time stopped. With a deafening howl, the possibilities of the past and the future came crashing down around him. The world collapsed into a single wavering point.

He heard, for the first time in his life, the unnatural sound of complete silence. There, in the space between everything, was peace; there was balance. He tasted the heartbreaking power and glory of the presence of the almighty. It was too much. It brought tears - thick and bitter and crimson - to his aching eye. He was convinced his soul would rend in two. But, he was not sure he could bring himself to look away - until he felt something calling him. It pulled him from his core and he fell back to himself at such dizzying speed that his stomach soured with vertigo.

Suddenly, the rules of physics as he remembered them reasserted themselves. The weight of gravity was too much for him bear. His head swam. He staggered and collided with the ground. The air was ablaze and his body had forgotten how to move, how to breathe. He was weary in his very bones. But, he could not sleep - not yet. Someone important was waiting for him.

"Kakashi," he whispered urgently. "Kakashi, look at me."

He did. And it occurred to him that Iruka's concerned eyes and his kind smile were the most devastatingly gorgeous things he had ever seen.