Work Text:
In another world, Kakashi thinks as his hands scramble around Gai’s wrists, maybe this would be gentler, better, maybe he could convince himself that he deserves it, deserves Gai, sprawled under him, stretched out languidly and smiling. Gai smiles. So often. At him. Gai smiles, and it twists something inside of him around and around, tighter and tighter, which could feel suffocating, which could feel like a trap, like a cage, but does not. Probably because it is Gai, and Gai has always been something else, something better than the rest of this world smeared in hazy shades of blood around them, around him.
In another world, maybe it would be better, gentler, but Gai would still be exactly the same, Kakashi has no doubt because Gai is the best, truest thing in this world. Oh, he’d take away the Gates. He’d take away the Gates. All knowledge of them, all concept of them. He would dash them to the ground and grind them under his heel with no remorse and no regret. In the world where Kakashi could love Gai properly, where all of his attempts didn’t feel like last resorts, like fumbled attempts at vindication, he’d destroy the Gates or take them on himself. There’d be no need for them. Gai could burn with love alone.
Gai presses a tender kiss to Kakashi’s mask, and it sends shudders through him like a ribbon of metal shredding his insides. Kakashi squeezes his eyes closed and tries not to think about it, how it feels, what it means. Gai does it again, just the lightest kiss, soft and warm and dry against the fabric that he never lifts away because Gai has always respected him and his boundaries enough to wait, to let Kakashi decide if he will bare his face, if he will meet kisses head on so to speak or if he will continue to hide from them as he hides from so many things. Gai kisses soft like snowfall and first rains and the beams of the sun through a window in the very early morning. Gai kisses like a promise that Kakashi would like to curl into, would like to give up, give in and accept.
Gai’s lips are on his mask, kissing, caressing, over and over, even as his fingers twitch slightly in Kakashi’s grasp, matching the way his hips rock up against the weight over him. They fall into this, oh so many times. They fall into this, and Kakashi wonders, always, if this will be the last chance, the last time he can skate his fingers over the planes of Gai’s cheek, the last time he can breathe in his scent and rock into him and be. You’d think the threat of imminent demise, of last chances, would spur him on to quickness, to fiery passion and occasionally it does, but Kakashi almost prefers this, this slow churning in his gut, this painstaking undoing for the both of them.
“Rival,” Gai murmurs against his mask, and it is not just that word that he means, at least not the word as anyone else defines it. They have built their own definition, their own language for all of this over the years. “Rival,” Gai says again and lifts his hand free of Kakashi’s grip, which was never strong at all, to cup Kakashi’s cheek and kiss him through the mask again.
There is something dark and cavernous in the pit of Kakashi’s body that arches and growls and hungers sometimes, but when Gai touches him, it turns to the frantic beating of bird wings, a thousand white crane feathers brushing from his sternum to his abdomen, filling his lungs, tickling his heart, threatening to flood his mouth. He pulls his mask down so he will not choke on them. He pulls his mask down and gulps air even though Gai stops kissing, as always.
What does one do to earn the attention of an honorable man? Kakashi doesn’t know because he’s certain he’s never done anything that would earn what he has been given. As a child, he was cruel. As a teenager, he was avoidant and broken and lost. As a man, he has been neglectful, stubborn, dismissive. Some of these things are forgivable, though he has never asked forgiveness.
Sometimes, he wonders whether Gai’s memory, strange and ethereal and shifting, recalls any of those slights at all. Perhaps they bleed out of him, cleansed by the fire of the Gates that Kakashi hates. Maybe they are just battered down by the fact that Gai knows, in some way, how Kakashi feels even when Kakashi cannot say it, even when he cannot show it in any normal way.
“Hey,” Kakashi has been known to say, apropos of nothing, standing with his hands loosely in his pockets, not looking at Gai at all. “Hey, let’s have a challenge.”
And Gai will look at him like he has given him the greatest gift in all the world, which makes Kakashi feel three feet small because he could be better, he could give better than this. He tells himself that and yet does nothing about it.
Mask down, gulping air, feeling like the feathers will invade his mouth and his nostrils and everything inside of him, fill him up with something light and white and pure for once, Kakashi just looks at Gai, who is still, who is so quiet for once, who is sprawled out under him, solid as a mountain through his entire body, watching with something so close to reverence it’s all Kakashi can do to not glance away, to not pull his mask back on, to not evaporate. He feels like a ghost sometimes, like some strange spirit who will be forced into doing favors for the living if he’s seen. Gai has caught him many times, Gai who asks for nothing save that Kakashi live.
Gai’s knuckles brush his cheek and Kakashi’s instinct to flee subsides into something else, something dangerously like comfort. “Which challenge is this?” Gai asks, and his tone is not light, drags out of his throat, husky, stormy, a dense fog that Kakashi would like to wade through, hide in.
“None,” Kakashi says before he thinks better of it because he should have a pretense to hide behind, he always has a pretense to hide behind. It makes the world a little safer. It makes this a little safer. I challenge you to let me kiss you. I challenge you to see who can take the other’s clothes off more provocatively. I challenge you to hold me. I challenge you to let me find myself inside of you again. I challenge. I challenge. These are the ones that Kakashi asks for, and these are the ones they never count because they do not exist in the light of day. They do not exist when Kakashi finally stops touching Gai’s skin.
“None, Rival?” Gai asks quirks one of his magnificent eyebrows.
Sometimes, Kakashi wishes he could go back in time and punch himself for every unkind thing he might have ever said about Gai’s appearance and punch anyone else who said anything about it in his presence. There would be quite a lot of punching, but he’s pretty good at that. Gai is a gorgeous man to Kakashi’s eyes, which can be suspect, but also, especially, to his heart, which is potentially even more suspect but still the only one he has to go on.
Well. And Gai’s, he supposes. He has Gai’s too in a way that makes the feeling of swirling feathers rise again, makes him look away, makes his entire body clench, a tensing that Gai senses and responds to by lifting his hands away, by waiting because Gai is the most honorable man Kakashi thinks has ever existed. Perhaps to make up for the lack of it in him.
“No challenges,” Kakashi whispers and forces himself to face Gai, to be present, to be seen no matter what it may cost him later. “No challenges. No games. No pretense.” The words are as difficult to choke out as white feathers, but they leave something glittering and resplendent in their wake; it’s not freedom, exactly, because Kakashi doesn’t think he will ever be free, will always be beholden to something whether that’s a promise or a feeling or a regret, something, but it’s. He does feel lighter, and it does feel easier to catch Gai’s face in his hands and lean down, face to face, lips to lips, unencumbered, and kiss him.
It is tender. It is almost, maybe, like something gentle and otherworldly. For a moment.