The last of the lanterns had vanished into the high, grey vault of the sky, their lights swallowed by distance and the diffuse morning cloud cover until they were indistinguishable from the faint, hopeful stars that would appear later.
A collective, shuddering sigh seemed to pass through the crowd, the formal structure of the ceremony giving way to the raw, unstructured reality of its aftermath. People began to move again, but with a leaden slowness, as if the act of remembrance had physically weighted them.
Miwa did not move with the dispersing crowd. She turned to Renjiro, her dark eyes fixed on him with a gentle but unyielding focus.
"So," she said, her voice low enough that only he could hear it over the quiet murmurs and shuffling feet.
"When exactly will you talk to me?"
Renjiro's internal sigh was a vast, weary thing.
'She really isn't going to let this go, is she?'
He couldn't blame her. In the jagged, broken landscape of his life, Miwa was one of the few constant, stable formations. She had been the one to bring him, a shell-shocked, silent child, from the ruins of Uzushiogakure to the strange, bustling sanctuary of Konoha.
That sense of responsibility—a fierce, protective, almost maternal drive—had never left her. He was her charge, her legacy, and the profound, dangerous secret he carried was a wall between them that she could no longer ignore.
He met her gaze.
"In a few days," he said, the words feeling inadequate. "I need… time. To console others. To process… Hiro."
Even as he said it, he realised how it sounded—as if his grief was a task to be completed before he could attend to her concerns. But Miwa, who understood the harsh grammar of shinobi life better than most, didn't take offence. She saw the raw pain behind the clinical words, the way his jaw tightened around his friend's name.
She simply nodded, a single, decisive dip of her chin. "Alright. A few days. I'll be waiting."
There was no threat in the words, only a promise of unwavering presence. She reached out, gave his arm a brief, firm squeeze—a touch that conveyed more than any speech—then turned and melted into the stream of people heading away from the cemetery, leaving Renjiro standing alone amidst the slowly emptying field of sorrow.
He stood still for a moment, allowing the chill, damp air to seep into his bones. Then he began to scan the crowd.
Faces blurred into a mosaic of grief—pale skin, dark clothing, eyes downcast or red-rimmed. Hair colours: brown, black, the occasional stark blonde. He was looking for a specific, vibrant hue, a flame in the grey landscape. And then he saw it: a flash of brilliant, unmistakable red, like a wound of life in the monochrome scene.
He moved towards it, his path a quiet weaving through clusters of mourners who spoke in hushed tones or embraced in silent comfort.
There, beneath the gnarled limbs of one such tree, he found them. 'Kushina, Minato, Sama, Kakashi, and Rin.'
They formed a small, closed circle of shared loss, an island of more intimate pain within the sea of public mourning. The sight of them hit Renjiro with a fresh wave of that day's accumulated heaviness.
Nearly all of them bore the physical marks of their grief. Sama's face was pale and splotchy, her eyes swollen nearly shut, a handkerchief clutched in a white-knuckled fist.
Rin's usually kind face was ravaged, her eyes puffy, and her lips trembling as she listened to something Kakashi was saying softly. Even Kushina, the pillar of fiery strength, had traces of tears on her cheeks, her eyes rimmed with red.
Minato appeared the most composed, but the strain was evident in the tightness around his mouth and the faint shadows beneath his eyes—a leader's calm masking a sensei's profound failure.
Renjiro felt a bitter twist in his chest. As someone of Uchiha blood, he had no right to judge anyone for visible grief. His own emotional cataclysm had literally mutated his eyes. He had paid for his tears in power and permanent scarring.
His approach was quiet, but Kushina sensed him first. She looked up, her expression softening with a mixture of sadness and welcome.
"Renjiro."
He nodded to her, then offered a respectful, sombre dip of his head to Minato.
"Minato."
But his attention was pulled to the centre of the group's interaction. Kakashi, who had been standing with an unnerving stillness, was addressing Sama.
His left eye was covered by his hitai-ate, pulled down low—a detail that screamed of Obito's gift. With a movement that was both stiff and strangely gentle, Kakashi pulled out a small, framed photograph and held it out to Sama.
"…he would have wanted you to have that," Kakashi said, his voice utterly flat, stripped of all affect, as if the act of speaking the words required all his energy, leaving none for tone.
Sama's breath hitched. She reached out with trembling hands and took it.
Renjiro arrived at the edge of their circle just as the object changed hands. His eyes fell upon it, and the world constricted.
It was Hiro's memorial portrait. The same cheeky, irreverent grin that had punctuated a thousand stupid jokes and defiant stands was frozen behind glass.
The smile was so alive, so Hiro, that it seemed a cruel joke for it to be encased in this funerary object. Renjiro's throat closed with a sudden, painful tightness.
For a week, he had functioned by building walls around the memory, by focusing on the mechanics of other things. Now, faced with that familiar, cocky smile—a smile he had seen across missions, in strategy meetings, aimed at him in moments of shared, silent understanding—the walls crumbled.
He had to pause, physically steadying himself, forcing a slow breath through his nostrils to keep the dam from breaking entirely here, in front of them all.
Kakashi's visible eye, dark and hollow, flicked to Renjiro for a fraction of a second, acknowledging his presence with a minuscule nod. Then, having completed his duty, he seemed to retreat even further into himself.
"We should go," he said to Rin, his voice still that unsettling monotone.
Rin, tears streaming anew, looked from Sama's devastated face to Kakashi's empty one, then nodded mutely.
She offered a small, broken smile to Minato and Kushina, then followed as Kakashi turned and walked away without another word, his small form looking both too young and terribly old.
A heavy silence descended on the four who remained. The wind sighed through the bare cherry branches overhead with a soft sough.
Kushina was the first to speak, her voice warmer now, directed at Renjiro. "I'm glad you came."
Renjiro managed another nod, his gaze still fixed on Sama, who was staring at the portrait in her hands as if it were both a treasure and a hot coal. He hadn't seen Sama in three years.
The war had pulled them to different fronts. She looked older; the softness of her late teens hardened into the angles of a young woman who had seen too much.
Without overthinking it, driven by an impulse that felt both awkward and utterly necessary, Renjiro stepped forward. He didn't envelop her in a full embrace—they weren't that close, and the formality of their long separation held him back.
Instead, he stepped to her side and wrapped an arm around her shoulders in a firm, sideways hug. It was a gesture of solidarity, of shared membership in a terrible club.
"It will be fine," he said quietly, the words a bare whisper near her ear. They were a lie, of course. Nothing about this would ever be fine again. But they were the required words, the meaningless balm offered because there was nothing else to give.
He knew, with a certainty that twisted in his gut, that Hiro had meant more to Sama than to anyone else, even himself. Theirs hadn't been a casual fling.
They had been dating for nearly two years before the war even began, a serious, steady relationship that had been a quiet anchor for both of them in the chaos of shinobi life.
Hiro's death wasn't just the loss of a comrade or a friend for her; it was the annihilation of a future imagined, of private jokes and shared dreams, of a love that had been growing in the stolen moments between deployments.
Her grief was a deeper, more intimate canyon than his own, and his own pain felt almost presumptuous in the face of it.
Sama didn't pull away. She leaned into his side hug, just slightly, a minute acceptance of the offered comfort. She didn't speak. She just continued to stare at Hiro's smiling face, her own tears falling silently onto the glass, obscuring the image before she wiped them away with a clumsy, furious swipe of her sleeve.
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