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There’s a gurgle, then a snap, then silence.
Kakashi studies the situation blearily through his one uncovered eye. For a half-second his mind stalls out, struggling to fit all the pieces together. He weighs his options. It only takes him a split second before he’s surging forward into action.
Silently, Kakashi reaches into his weapons pouch and draws out a senbon. Prodigy, they’ve called him. Genius. He was the Academy’s youngest ever graduate, and the youngest ever to hold the rank Chuunin. After Minato assigned him to the ANBU, he’d become the youngest ever captain in a record breakingly short period of time.
And now he isn’t. ANBU, that is, not that he’s old.
Well, hold on. Is Kakashi still young? That gives Kakashi pause. He’s outlived most of his closest friends now by a factor of two. Maybe he’s not young anymore either. Maybe he’s not anything. He brings the senbon needle up to his face to study it before nodding grimly. For what he’s planning, it’ll work fine.
With one hand he grips the senbon about a quarter of the way down, like he’s holding a pen, and with his other he gingerly pulls the stem out of his bong. He sets the rest of the bong down outside the tub he’s been soaking in with a minimum amount of care, and uses the senbon to trace carefully along the inside of the bowl. Thick black resin gathers along the tip and on the sides, and Kakashi scrapes the tacky substance off the needle with his fingernails and rolls it into a ball between his fingers. It stains his fingertips dark brown, and the underside of his fingernails black, but Kakashi can’t find it in himself to care.
He does this a few times before he’s satisfied with the size of the tar-like lump and presses it back into the bowl. There isn’t really a noticeable difference in the bowl’s stained black color, even after Kakashi’s cleaned out about a marble’s worth of resin. It’s almost impressively dirty, but nothing’s impressed Kakashi for a long time.
Kakashi replaces the bowl and drops the ruined senbon uncaringly onto the bathroom floor. Dispassionately, he turns a bleary eye to his blackened fingers. He inhales slightly. They smell like burnt weed and depression. He dunks his hand into the cooling bath water before he can think too hard about that, and scrubs his fingertips roughly against his upper thigh. It should be gross, he knows, to pollute water he’s currently soaking in, but he’s way past caring about that now. He hadn’t been able to motivate himself to get clean before he’d slid into the tub earlier, so the water had been already cloudy with the grime from his body before now. He doesn’t wash as often as he should.
He regards the bong consideringly before shrugging and pressing it to his face over his mask. The resin hisses evilly when he lights it, before the sound of the gurgling bong water drowns it out. The smoke tastes like butane and desperation, and it burns his lungs even filtered through his mask, but he holds it in his chest without coughing. Kakashi counts to ten slowly and then exhales, and watches the smoke as it curls around the one working ceiling light in the bathroom. He sinks down a little further under the water, bending his knees.
Smoking resin always feels like hitting rock bottom. It really fucking sucks. He’s known, for the last couple of days, that he was running low on weed. He made note of his dwindling supply every time he packed a bowl, assuring himself he wouldn’t let it get to this. Kakashi knew he was kidding himself, though. He hates the ordeal of buying more weed so much. Kakashi hits rock bottom about twice a month.
He raises the bong to his lips again, still reclined back in the tub. Some of the bong water splashes back and soaks into his mask about a quarter inch below his lips, and he barely even registers any disgust. It’s not much murkier than the water he’s currently soaking in. Kakashi is a lot of things, but he isn’t a hypocrite.
Kakashi hits the bong anyway. It’s still awful.
He really should have bought more weed. It’s not like he didn’t know he was gonna need it. He got the paperwork for this assignment weeks ago.
Tomorrow, he’s meeting his genin team.
When Sarutobi first pulled him off ANBU to become a jonin sensei, Kakashi had thought he’d found a loophole, and that by failing and refusing to train every team the Hokage threw at him he couldn’t be forced into a role he didn’t want, but he also technically wasn’t in contempt of his orders. Kakashi exhales a thin stream of smoke, upsetting the hazy layer already hanging around the ceiling and watches the air currents curl through while he contemplates his situation. He’d hardly spared a thought as to why Hiruzen would allow Kakashi to toy with him like that, because he’d just thought he’d pulled one over on the old man. He’d been arrogant. He’d underestimated the Sandaime, and now he was going to pay for it.
Kakashi knows, whether he likes it or not, that this genin team is going to be his. This genin team with Minato’s son, and the last Uchiha boy, was always going to be his. Even if he fails them tomorrow, he knows they’d most likely only get reassigned to him the next year.
“Fuck,” Kakashi croaks to himself on an inhale as he takes another hit.
A flare of a familiar chakra signal cuts through the sluggish miasma of Kakashi’s thoughts, almost surprising him with its proximity. Stoned or no, it shouldn’t be possible for anyone to get this close to Kakashi’s apartment without him knowing about it, least of all Might Gai.
Gai is a good shinobi, he’s one of the only people Kakashi would trust to have his back in a fight, but stealth is not his strong suit. Gai doesn’t put much value on strategy or battle tactics. His strategy is to be stronger and faster than his opponent. His tactic is to hit harder. These are things Kakashi really likes about him, actually, because it makes avoiding him and his idiotic challenges when the two of them are not on a mission that much easier.
Kakashi sets down his bong and sits up a little, increasing the chakra flow to his ears and nose, reaching outwards with his senses to figure out what it is exactly that Gai thinks he’s doing.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Kakashi feels brief moment of panic shoot through his body before he suppresses his chakra signature and holds his breath. The sound is like someone trying to break down his door and it shakes his entire apartment. The bath water ripples around Kakashi’s naked body. A bit of plaster dust sprinkles down from a crack in the ceiling. In the living room, Kakashi hears something crash and shatter, probably one of the many unwashed cups or bowls he’s left around.
Kakashi winces and covers his ears, immediately regretting having just increasing their chakra flow. He wonders absently what the hell he was thinking. Gai’s always been about as subtle as he looks.
“Rival! Are you home!” Gai bellows, voice boisterous and joyful and so loud that it still manages to hurt Kakashi’s ears even through his hands.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
More plaster sprinkled down from the ceiling. The electricity to the overhead light flickers threateningly. Kakashi reaches an absent minded hand down to steady his bong.
Kakashi would be concerned about receiving noise complaints from the entire block, if cared about that sort of thing. Or if there was anyone in the village who wasn’t completely terrified of him.
“Kakashi! I know you’re in there! Stop being too cool and come open the door!”
Obviously, Might Gai doesn’t count.
“Rival! You’ve been avoiding my challenges for months! You must be afraid you’ll fall short after my incredible training! But there’s no need to hide, Kakashi! I know you are still a most worthy adversary! My fated opponent! Ha Ha Ha!”
Kakashi rolls his eyes. Gai laughs like he’s saying individual words, like he’s reading lines out loud from a cheesy comic book. It sounds nothing like his real laugh, which Kakashi has only heard in person a couple of times, on long missions together when they were younger, after Gai finally settled down enough to relax around him. His real laugh was a warm chuckle that lives in his chest. Kakashi had thought it was nice.
Kakashi violently derails that train of thought. Of course that’s not Gai’s real laugh. Everything Gai does is all part of the lame overblown character he puts on, like the leg warmers, and the good-guy pose, and all the other dumb shit he does. It’s a very carefully cultivated image for someone who clearly doesn’t spare a thought for what anyone else in the village thinks about him.
BANG! BANG!
“Come on, Kakashi! Just one challenge, tonight! Before you have your new adorable students to distract you! I won’t take no for an answer!” Gai bellows, pitching his cheerful voice somehow even louder, like he thinks the maybe the problem is Kakashi not being able to hear him. A few streets over, some dogs start to bark.
Kakashi definitely doesn’t care what anybody thinks about him either, but he does kind of wish Gai would stop yelling his name.
“Mmmm,” Gai hums, this time in a slightly lowered voice, “Could it be that my rival is challenging my skills of detection?”
Kakashi’s visible eye widens.
“Kakashi! I accept your challenge!” Gai yells, voice triumphant. Kakashi sits frozen with shock and disbelief, “Dynamic entry!”
BOOM! CRASH!
Kakashi’s still sluggish from the weed and he only barely presses his hands together in the tiger seal in time to activate a chameleon jutsu, just in time to hear Gai kick his front door off its hinges. Even with his brain feeling like it’s wrapped up in bubble wrap, Kakashi is confident enough in his own skill to be sure he’ll escape Gai’s notice, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a huge pain in his ass.
Kakashi stands silently and steps out of the tub without causing so much as a ripple to disturb the water. He’s lucky that Gai has chosen a challenge that Kakashi is uniquely suited to beat him in. On any other shinobi, Gai’s signature obliviousness would be absolutely crippling, but Gai isn’t like any other shinobi. There’s no element of surprise with speed and reflexes like his.
As things stand currently, Kakashi doubts he would be able to get a single hit off on Gai with as fucked up as he is. Kakashi shivers a little from the cold bathroom air and then looks wryly down at himself, reassessing. He’s still wet from the bath, and besides his eyepatch and loose white mask, he’s still completely fucking naked. If Gai broke down his door and found him like this, Gai’s prudishness and embarrassment might trip him up long enough to let Kakashi get a few hits in. But that still probably wouldn’t negate the fact that Kakashi’s high off his ass right now. He’d still probably lose in a fight.
But Kakashi doesn’t have to fight, he just has to wait him out until Gai leaves. He sighs silently and rolls his eyes, just wanting to get this whole thing over with.
Gai, however, doesn’t seem to be moving at all.
“Hmm.” Gai hums thoughtfully again, after a long silence. This time his voice is so low that Kakashi thinks it might be genuine.
Curiosity gets the better of him and Kakashi slips silently under the crack of the bathroom door to see Gai standing unmoving in Kakashi’s ruined doorway, flicking his eyes methodically around the room, as if composing a thorough report. His impressive eyebrows are furrowed and his face is stony in a way that Kakashi has only rarely seen, but he recognizes as Gai’s serious face.
He’s only ever see Gai get like this when faced with an enemy he doesn’t think he can beat, and Gai is pretty arrogant, so it’s not a look that has ever been pointed at Kakashi. This can’t be about the challenge Gai believes Kakashi issued, but Kakashi can’t detect any other danger that would slow Gai like this. So few things ever do.
Suddenly unsure, Kakashi takes a second pass at his apartment and tries to see it through Gai’s eyes. There hasn’t been anyone but him in here for years, so he’s unaccustomed to thinking about how it looks. Kakashi takes stock.
The entire floor is coated with a sticky and gritty layer of grime and dirt, where it’s visible under take away food wrappers, water bottles, and loose rusted weapons that he’d been meaning to either clean or throw away. There are plates and bowls and cups with entire ecosystems of fungus left anywhere they would balance, and a pile of dirty masks and binders in front of the door to his bedroom that he tells himself need to go to the laundromat, but keeps picking up and wearing again instead. There are mission reports that are over 6 months overdue on his coffee table that Kakashi has been using as coasters. Only about a third of the bulbs in the light fixtures haven’t burned out.
Kakashi breathes in silently through his nose. The air smells like some light body odor, a little like rotting food, and a lot like weed. It’s a little gross, sure, but he can’t find anything wrong enough to explain the set of Gai’s jaw. Unless Kakashi’s apartment itself is the problem?
Kakashi maybe wishes he were a little less high as he feels the stinging discomfort of embarrassment trying to sink a hook in him. He grits his teeth, forcefully crumbling his feelings of shame into more resigned annoyance. If Gai is just shocked to see how Kakashi lives, he shouldn’t be. That Kakashi is a disgusting, man-shaped husk when he’s not acting as a well-calibrated machine of death for his village is not something that he’s ever tried to hide.
“Mmm!” Gai’s hum gets significantly louder. Kakashi’s head snaps around to see what he’s looking at now so fast he nearly pulls a muscle. Gai sounds excited.
Gai turn his focus to a houseplant Kakashi keeps in the corner of his living room. It’s the only thing in Kakashi’s shitty apartment that still looks kind of okay, and it must thrive on neglect, because Kakashi can’t remember off the top of his head when the last time he watered it was, but it’s leaves have stayed waxy, wide and vibrantly green. Kakashi watches him grin take two triumphant steps forward, and then freeze again. He can’t imagine what Gai might be thinking, but the knowing twinkle gleaming brightly in Gai’s eye fills him with dread.
“What a twist! It appears my rival isn’t home after all!” Gai declames, pivoting on the ball of his foot away from the plant in the corner and throwing his arms up dramatically while scrunching up his whole face.
Kakashi watches, unimpressed, as Gai fights another smug, shit eating smile, and loses. Like an overgrown child, Gai peeks obviously with one eye after a moment to steal a glance at the plant in the corner.
Kakashi’s eye twitches. He thinks I’m the houseplant.
Kakashi doesn’t even remember how he got the plant in the first place, but he has sort of liked having it. He sends it a mental apology for failing to protect it from Gai’s misplaced exuberance, and emotionally prepares himself to watch it get absolutely pulverized.
Better you than me, old friend.
And then, horrifyingly, the air in the apartment starts to move. Kakashi breathes in sharply in surprise. Gai’s chakra is pulsing, and even without using his Sharingan, Kakashi can see how his chakra pathways have started to glow.
He’s opening the gates. Kakashi thinks, mouth going dry. That’s definitely overkill.
The wind is really whipping around now, tearing through the apartment and picking up the lighter garbage and dust into a small cyclone centered on Gai. Airborne dirt particles graze against Kakashi’s naked body, carving shallow grooves in a way that’s nearly painful, and Kakashi just has the sense to hold up a hand to shield his eye when Gai yells .
“Since I failed my rival’s challenge, I’ll clean his entire apartment before he turns up again! If I fail that, I’ll clean every apartment in this complex by morning!”
Kakashi feels his eye twitch again. The logic behind that doesn’t even make sense.
And then Gai screams again as he rips open straight to the 5th gate, and then he disappears. Kakashi’s eye widens and darts around the apartment, searching. In and of itself, Gai vanishing isn’t a huge surprise, since past about the 3rd gate, it can be tough for even Kakashi to track Gai’s movement without using his Sharingan. The air has started settling around him, though, and he can feel Gai’s chakra signature retreating back into the village. For about the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes, Kakashi wishes he was more sober than he is.
For a second, Kakashi is alone in his silent apartment.
Kakashi lets out a long breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and slumps his shoulders, not bothering to dispel the chameleon jutsu despite it’s drain on his already limited chakra. He brings one hand up to rub his eye with a groan, and drags it down his face to stares blearily at the Gai sized hole in his wall where his front door used to be, and then across the room where the actual door currently is, resting at a jaunty angle on a pile of garbage beneath a dent in the opposite wall.
Kakashi scratches the back of his neck, resigned.
Maybe I can wedge it back in the doorway and deal with it later?
That thought barely has time to form in his addled mind when he feels the wall of Gai’s chakra hurtling back towards him again like a tsunami. Unbidden, Kakashi’s body moves on auto-pilot, focusing chakra to the soles of his feet and leaping to a particularly well shadowed and structurally reinforced corner of his living room ceiling, body tensed for a fight.
With a roar like the sound of a jet engine and wind speeds to match, Gai tears back into the apartment. The cloud of dust and debris he kicks up in his entrance provides decent cover, and that, coupled with his speed, has Kakashi struggling to track his movement. Kakashi closes his eye and listens to the sounds of chaos and Gai’s periodic grunts of effort as he feels the winds caused by his motion brush against him. He doesn’t fully understand what’s happening right now, and doesn’t want to deal with trying to figure it out.
It’s just Gai. Annoying, stupid, overbearing, loud Gai, and Kakashi understanding what he does is the exception rather than the rule, but Kakashi trusts him. He trusts him to back Kakashi up in a fight, and he trusts him to survive it. It’s the highest form of trust Kakashi has to offer. So Kakashi keeps resting his eye.
He trusts Gai to be in his apartment, even if he didn’t want to let him in here.
A handful of seconds pass, and Kakashi stops feeling the sting of dirt hitting against his skin. He cracks a lazy eye open to check on Gai’s progress. The dust and debris are all gone, and a neat row of fat black garbage bags appears next to the hole where his door used to be. All his windows are open, his collection of overdue mission reports are stacked neatly on his coffee table, weighted down by a fat and rather put upon looking tortoise, and his dishware has all been relocated to a well engineered tower in his kitchen sink.
Kakashi blinks, vaguely impressed, and catches a glimpse of Gai pausing momentarily to plug in a vacuum. Kakashi doesn’t own a vacuum. His dogs hate the sound, and honestly so does he. Gai must have brought it with him, he thinks.
He lets himself smirk as he studies Gai, who is still crackling with the energy from opening the fifth gate. He has bandanas tied down creatively to cover his lower face and hair, and a battalion of dirty once-white dusting rags standing proudly out from his body at a ninety degree angle from where they’re tucked neatly into the belt at his waist. It kind of looks like half of a hideous tutu, and Kakashi has to suppress a giggle thinking that, paired with his leg warmers and his spandex suit, Gai is looking more than a little like a ballerina in a very alternative dance company.
Has Gai ever done ballet? Kakashi lets his mind wander. It wouldn’t surprise him to learn that he had. He doubts even the greatest ballerina in the world could hold a candle to Gai’s strength, flexibility, and physical control. Pairing that with Gai’s complete disregard of society’s opinions on what’s masculine and what’s feminine, there’s really no doubt in Kakashi’s mind that Gai would consider mastery of dance a fantastic training opportunity. Kakashi bites down a second giggle, picturing in his mind’s eye a concert hall full of women with high, tight buns in their hair and bird like bones under pastel leotards, weeping openly that they’ll never dance as beautifully as big, loud, goofy-looking Might Gai.
It’s such a funny mental image, Kakashi lets himself imagine ways he could incept the idea into Gai’s thick head to make it happen on the off-chance Gai hadn’t considered it before, when he catches himself. The picture in his head shifts almost like a prophetic vision to one of Gai standing before him in an eye-watering pea green tutu, thrusting a second, matching tutu into Kakashi’s protesting hands.
“Rival! I challenge you to see who can dance most beautifully!”
In the eye of Kakashi’s imagination, Rin, Obito, and Minato have been inexplicably revived, just to laugh at him. He barely suppresses a full body shudder. Gai can never know.
Kakashi doesn’t care about Gai’s challenges or his insistence on continuing with their childhood rivalry, he hadn’t cared even when he was a kid, but that doesn’t mean he wants to lose, either.
The vacuum clicks on with its signature off-putting growl, and then Gai flickers out of sight again. Kakashi barely has time to scrunch up his face, because barely a second passes and then the sound is gone, and the vacuum is put away, cord coiled neatly around it, lined up against the wall next to the garbage bags.
Every part of Kakashi still wishes this weren’t happening, but he does admit the place is starting to look a little nicer. He’d forgotten he had a rug. The colors of the rug and the sofa and the grain of the wood floors seem to become more and more vibrant the longer he stares at them.
A gurgle draws Kakashi’s attention, and he raises his eyebrows at hearing the distinctive sound of the water draining out from his bathtub. It alarms him a little that Gai was able to leave the room undetected, Kakashi must be higher than he realized. He almost laughs, shaking his head, when he notices that his bong has now joined the jenga tower of dirty dishes at the sink.
Kakashi can hear what sounds like what must be some very vigorous scrubbing, and the sharp smell of artificial lemon tickles his nose and threatens to make him sneeze. Kakashi tamps down on that urge and then rolls his eye imploringly skyward, resenting the fact that Gai’s draw to all things loud bright and gaudy extends to scents.
This time, Kakashi feels it when Gai re-enters the room, so he isn’t taken off guard when he appears again suddenly, seemingly out of thin air, standing in front of Kakashi’s kitchen sink. At some point, since the last time Kakashi caught sight of him, he’s pulled on a pair of robins-egg-blue rubber gloves that come up all the way over his elbows. Kakashi gets a beat to really take the whole look in only because Gai’s chosen to pause and strike a pose.
“Yosh!” Gai grunts, too-loud voice full of exuberance and determination. He sets his shoulders and balls his hands into fists, like he’s ready for a fight.
Kakashi rolls his eye again, and then Gai turns on the water and his arms become a blue-green blur. Every second or so he flickers, and the construction of the dishes is slowly demolished, the kitchenware being tucked away, Kakashi assumes, into cabinets that they only belong in in theory. Kakashi can’t remember the last time he bothered.
Gai leaves the bong for last, and Kakashi almost giggles yet again when he sees the curious way Gai stops to regard it, turning it over curiously in his hands until the stem falls out. Kakashi feels his heart give an involuntary stutter, but he should have known better than to doubt Gai’s reflexes. Gai catches it in one hand thoughtlessly before it falls more than a few inches, and then he turns it over too, studying the bowl with a serious expression, going as far as to bring it up close to his eye to look at it more closely. His face splits into a grin so wide and brilliant that Kakashi thinks he can actually hear it sparkle.
Gai reaches for a single chopstick and one of the rags he has tied around his waist. Kakashi blinks once, and the bong sits spotless, gleaming on the counter, looking brand new Kakashi just stares. Gai steps back, resting his hands on his hips and looking around Kakashi’s apartment, looking pleased with himself, still crackling with energy, and then he’s gone again.
Kakashi takes a deep breath, alone again, and looks around his apartment. It’s spotless. Gai must have taken the bags of garbage and the cleaning supplies with him when he left. Aside from the gaping splintered hole where it’s open to the elements, and the poor lighting, it looks like it could be the apartment of a functional adult.
Kakashi feels something weird in his chest that he doesn’t care to name.
“Stupid Gai,” he mumbles, and then he feels a prickle on the back of his neck, and he stops.
Gai’s coming back. As soon as Kakashi has that thought, he’s watching, vaguely horrified, as Gai drops three bulging grocery bags onto his counter. Gai opens Kakashi’s refrigerator, revealing it’s two six packs of beer and half-empty jar of expired mayonnaise. Kakashi doesn’t even blink this time, but suddenly it’s teeming with food. The door shuts.
Kakashi hears rather than sees the sound of cabinets opening and closing, and then there’s a pot sitting on his range and a rice cooker plugged in next to it on his counter. He doesn’t own either of those things. Kakashi feels numb. He still doesn’t try to watch Gai move, but he hears more cabinets open and close, along with the slide of a drawer, and a rapid thump of frantic chopping. The next second there’s a hiss of cooking and a wet wooden chopping board resting in his drying rack. Both the board and the rack are new additions.
Kakashi just stares. The smell of homemade curry reaches his nose and Kakashi closes his eye, feeling overwhelmed. His face feels hot, and his skin feels too tight for his body, and he just wants Gai to go home . He’s stoned and he’s tired and he just wants to be left alone to be pathetic and depressed in private. With everything Kakashi has given up in his life, surely he deserves that much.
Gai’s gone now, actually, but Kakashi knows better now than to trust it. He keeps his eye closed and doesn’t move a single muscle. He knows his luck is never that good. When he feels a gust of wind on his face and hears the flurry of motion that means Gai’s come back a third time, he just feels resigned.
Kakashi hears a flurry of banging, and closes his eye more tightly, refusing to look at what’s happening now. I just have to wait him out. If I wait long enough, eventually he’ll leave, Kakashi thinks.
If I wait even longer, eventually I’ll die, his brain supplies, helpfully.
Not for the first time, Kakashi finds himself wishing it was possible to kill yourself without committing suicide. It’s only his sense of duty, his dedication to the leaf that stays his hand. He isn’t selfish enough to senselessly take his own life, not when his life belongs to Konoha. If Kakashi is nothing else, he is loyal to his village, and Kakashi has been nothing else for over ten years.
Everything in Kakashi’s life that he’d ever wanted to hold on to, Konoha had happily took from him without question. Only when he’d had nothing but his own life left to give, had she seemed to learn restraint. No matter how many times he begged her to take it.
As ANBU captain, he’d made a point of taking on only the most dangerous missions for himself, throwing himself carelessly against all of Konoha’s strongest enemies. In the end, it wasn’t even worth it. The suicidal way he threw himself into missions didn’t get him killed. It just got him kicked out of ANBU.
“Hmmm,” Gai’s hum pulls Kakashi sharply out of the familiar hole of despair his thoughts had fallen into. Kakashi’s eye flies opens before he’s able to catch himself.
He has a front door again, he notices, listlessly, before turning a tired eye back down to see what it is Gai’s thinking about now.
Gai’s standing in the middle of the living room, holding a box of lightbulbs under one arm and a single light bulb in the other hand, looking at Kakashi’s high ceiling like it’s an enemy he needs to strategize again. He still all but stinks of raw power, chakra sparking visibly up around him even as he stands completely still, and Kakashi feels dumbfounded watching him. He’s seen Gai jump and clear entire mountains with one jump, and now the guy can’t figure out how to change a light bulb two feet out of his reach.
“Hm!” Gai’s eyes gleam, and his face from baffled to triumphant.
Gai shifts the box of lightbulbs further up under his arm and unceremoniously stuffs the loose bulb into an armpit. Kakashi wonders, exasperated, if Gai only just now remembered he was a ninja as he watches him run through a bunch of hand signs in rapid succession, almost too fast for Kakashi to follow.
Almost
Kakashi’s eye widens incredulously as he realizes what Gai’s about to do a second before the pop and then his apartment is filled with thick spirals of white smoke. The smoke disperses quickly, revealing a large familiar red tortoise.
“Gai, it took you long enough--” Ningame starts, and then he cuts himself off to look around and take stock of his surroundings. His wrinkled, scaley face screws up in confusion.
“What--” he starts, and he’s cut off again by Gai clambering onto his shell to stand on his back.
“Sorry, Ningame,” Gai says in his boisterous, straightforward voice, already replacing the burnt out bulbs in the fixture, not sounding very sorry at all, “I just needed to borrow your back!”
Kakashi watches the ninja tortoise’s eye twitch while Gai tries to coax him into standing beneath the remaining fixture, and has to clamp down on a yet another hysterical urge to giggle. It’s just so stupid, and so delightful, and so Gai. The pair of them are absurdly funny together, and almost painfully cute. Kakashi catches himself squinting and touches his cheek realizing, with surprise, that he’s grinning. It takes him by surprise how much the scene that the pair of them make cheers him up.
“Thank you, most loyal friend,” Gai’s voice booms, after the two of them have finished with the lights, “I couldn’t have done this without you!” At that Gai throws the tortoise a thumbs up, and grins so wide Kakashi thinks he could count all of Gai’s molars, if he wanted.
Ningame looks embarrassed.
“So humiliating... summoned for home improvement…” Kakashi thinks he hears him mumbling as Gai dispels him in a puff of smoke.
Gai looks around himself as smoke clears, inspecting his handiwork and making sure everything is in order, and then he takes a beat to just stand proudly in the center of the room with his hands on his hips.
“Ha Ha Ha!” his shoulders shake animatedly again with the cartoony laugh that’s part of his good guy character, “As promised, I cleaned my rivals whole apartment before he turned back up!”
Kakashi shakes his head and rolls his eye again, soft smile still lingering on his face, and watches as Gai makes his way to Kakashi’s newly reinstalled front door. He’s still moving quickly, but the fact that Kakashi can actually track the motion with his eye lets Kakashi know Gai is stalling, taking his time. He reaches the door and puts one hand on the door knob before he pauses, his shoulders stiffening.
“Kakashi,” Gai says without turning around. His voice is low and serious, a complete contrast from anything Kakashi has heard from him so far tonight, “You aren’t alone anymore. It’s time for you to start letting people back in.”
Kakashi feels like he’s just been doused with freezing water. His mind races, and suddenly he can’t breathe. He feels a sick.
“Good luck tomorrow, Rival.” Gai whispers.
And then he’s gone.
Kakashi releases the camouflage jutsu and the chakra he’s been holding in his feet with the same exhale and collapses in a tired heap on the floor, shaking. He feels exposed and vulnerable. It doesn’t surprise him necessarily that Gai knew he was there, he’d known the whole time that Gai knew, but for Gai to give voice to the fiction? Kakashi doesn’t know what to do with that. If Gai is was trying to make it clear that him cleaning up Kakashi’s apartment wasn’t part of his weird, self-defined training rules, then Kakashi doesn’t know how to classify it. Thinking about what it means makes something in his bones ache, so Kakashi lays motionless, face down clean floor, and tries not to think at all.
He sucks in deep breaths and tries to stem his oncoming panic attack. He can smell the curry simmering in the kitchen. It smells fresh, and good, and unmistakably homemade, and the combination of everything curls his stomach. He pushes himself to his feet and pads into the kitchen, switching off every light as he goes. When he gets to the stove he stares at the it without really seeing for a full 10 seconds, and doesn’t move. When the rice cooker beeps cheerfully, he flinches, and then he unplugs it. Without looking, he mechanically switches off the burner underneath the curry.
He’s just tired.
Kakashi walks across his kitchen with jerky movements, like a cat with tape stuck to his paws. He opens his fridge and looks inside. The shelves are scrubbed clean, and filled to bursting with healthier food than Kakashi has bought for himself. Each shelf is helpfully labled with Gai’s careful, blocky handwriting on a strip of bright yellow tape. Kakashi’s stomach feels weirdly hollow. He can’t imagine actually letting himself eat any of this. He bends his knees to crouch down and shoves a hand into the back, behind all the new food and pulls out one of his six packs of beer. He starts heading towards his bedroom without bothering to shut the refrigerator door, when he sees that Gai had put sheets and blankets onto his mattress on the floor. Gai made up his bed
When had he done that?
Kakashi changes direction mid-stride to head for the living room. On his way past his bookshelf, he reaches out a hand to grab a book at random. It doesn’t matter which one, since they’re all basically the same. They’re all fucked up and awful. Kakashi has the whole set.
They were a parting gift from members of his ANBU team, a gesture that had touched Kakashi as much as it had taken him by surprise. However much Kakashi has tried to shield himself from the pain it could cause, his heart is soft, and he grew attached to his ANBU teammates regardless of how distantly he held them. He’d never imagined, though, that any of them cared about him in return beyond acknowledging him as a highly skilled shinobi, and he’d been embarrassingly grateful to have something from them when he was first discharged. He’d read each of the books they’d gifted to him cover to cover diligently like it was his mission to do so. At this point he’s read them all more times than he can count.
He’s beginning to suspect they intended the gift to be a joke, a stupid prank on a captain they’d been too scared to fuck with when he’d been their leader. The silent, masked killers of the ANBU are not necessarily known for their sense of humor, but Kakashi thinks it’s pretty funny anyway. Kakashi’s life has always felt like a bad joke, but this is the first time he’s ever felt like he was in on it and he’s learned that he likes that a lot more. He likes the stares he gets when he reads his awful books out in public, likes seeing full-on Jonin look at him like they’re fighting the urge to clutch at their pearls.
Kakashi prys open a beer on the side of the coffee table and collapses into his couch, opening the book somewhere in the middle. He drains half the bottle in one pull and tries to let himself be absorbed by the hero’s plight of fielding dates with two different busty women at once. He drains the rest of his beer as he thumbs his way through the unrealistic dramatic dialog towards the resolution by threesome he knows is only a few chapters away, and he pauses grab another one.
He sees the remote he can never find where Gai left it sitting helpfully out on his coffee table, and switches his TV on on a whim and flips through the channels aimlessly. There’s a monster movie that he thinks he’s seen before that’s only about half way through on one of the channels, and he stops there, before opening his second beer and falling back into the couch to get back to his book.
He works his way through the rest of the beers like that, switching his attention back and forth between the book and the movie until he passes out, still naked, right there on the couch.
The sunlight from his west-facing living room window that wakes him the next day let Kakashi know that he’s slept well past noon. His eye is glued together painfully with sleep, and his mouth tastes like ass, and so he lies perfectly still on the couch for a minute and picks sleep out of his eye with his thumb nail and tries to pretend he’s still sleeping. Kakashi slowly opens his eye to look at his apartment. It’s spotless except for the graveyard of bottles off the side of the couch, and the TV is still on. Kakashi groans.
Today’s the day he meets his fucking genin team. He’s not looking forward to it.
Kakashi pulls himself to his feet and feels the dual unpleasant sensations of his vision blotting out and his stomach turning over. I guess I should eat something , he thinks, as he lets his feet carry him towards his kitchen.
The clean kitchen in the light of day is even less recognizable than it was the night before. Kakashi hasn’t seen his counters in god knows how long. Kakashi stands frozen, feeling groggy and frustrated and a little out of place, when the sparkle of his bong catches his eye. I’m too sober for this, he thinks, reaching for it.
He grabs his grinder out of one of the drawers in one hand and the knife Gai left out on the new drying rack in the other, and then he scrapes keef into the bowl with the knife until it’s about half-way full. Kakashi replaces it in his clean bong and looks around for a second to see where Gai put his lighter before shrugging and giving up. He uses a small fire jutsu to get the bowl lit and brings the bong to his face, not even bothering to put water in and hitting it dry.
He lets the familiar feeling of peace settle in him and closes his eye for a second, holding the harsh smoke in his lungs until he physically can’t anymore. He feels a little more prepared to now to deal with whatever today might throw at him.
Kakashi grabs the pot of cold curry off the counter and a spoon and heads into his bedroom to see what Gai did with all his dirty laundry. He’s not surprised when he finds clean uniforms, masks, and binders all folded neatly in his chest of drawers. His leaf forehead protector is sitting cheerfully right on top, tie neatly folded under itself, next to a sticky note next to it that says “Do Your Best!”
He sits on the bed, hard, and stares at it for what feels like thirty minutes, spooning cold curry into his mouth, not thinking about anything. When he scrapes the bottom of the pot with his spoon, he stands up silently and puts all his clothes on as robotically as he can. He folds up the sticky note Gai left him and puts it in his pocket without letting himself think about what it means. When he walks out his room, he leaves the empty pot of curry sitting on the middle of his bed.
Kakashi goes back to the kitchen and tries to scrape out a little more keef before he leaves. He gets enough for about one small hit, so he holds it in his lungs as long as he can before letting it out on a sigh. His brain feels a little like a bruised apple.
Might as well get this over with. I’m not going to get any more ready than this.
Kakashi heads out of his apartment, not bothering to lock up. He doesn’t bother checking the time either; he already knows he’s running late, but what is anybody really going to do about it. Kakashi reaches the door of the classroom, and pauses for a moment to listen to his future genin team bicker through a crack in the door.
His current genin team, Kakashi supposes, as soon as he opens that door. What the fuck.
He takes a deep breath in and out, and takes a beat to observe how they interact with each other before they know that he’s there. The girl who Kakashi doesn’t know much about yet is bickering with Minato’s son about something, which doesn’t bode well for their future this year with Kakashi, if they’re already struggling to gel as a team. All in all, they don’t seem very impressive, but Kakashi remembers Gai at that age not being very impressive either, and look how he turned out.
Kakashi is unconsciously touching his hand to the folded note in his pocket, and he pulls it away like he’s being burned. He’s can’t let himself start thinking about Gai right now, or he’ll have to actually think about everything Gai said and did yesterday and fit that into a context Kakashi isn’t equipped to manage. Kakashi will lay it all out and let himself puzzle through it someday, maybe, when it’s not so daunting and he has more space in his head for it. Later. Not right now.
Kakashi can freely admit Gai was definitely right about one thing, though. His little students are pretty adorable.
Kakashi shrugs to himself. Now or never, he thinks. He takes a deep breath and then fixes his expression into what he hopes is a kid-friendly smile. He puts one hand into his pocket to hold onto Gai’s note again as he nudges the door open. He’s not thinking about it.
“Yo,” he says, making his voice light, pushing open the classroom door the rest of the way and raising one of his hands in a casual, friendly wave.
Something soft lands in his hair with a thud.