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They don’t live together. They have their various apartments, in separate apartment blocks even, and yet—time and time again—Kakashi finds himself eating with his genin teammates, sometimes even collapsing in the same bed like they did when they were much younger. They’re at his side in everything he does, just as they’ve always been.
Technically, they’re adults now, well into their careers and in the prime of their youth. Life isn’t meant to get better than this. This is their height; the best part of their lives.
And Kakashi’s exhausted.
It’d be different if Minato was still around, but he’s not and there’s no point thinking about such things. It usually just leads to Kakashi haunting the memorial stone like a shade of the past, and his teammates finding him and dragging home. It’s an event that usually leaves everyone in tears and wrung-out.
You’d think it would get easier to live with grief, but Kakashi’s just learnt how to hide it better.
Heaving a sigh, Kakashi considers the fact he needs to get up. The sun had dawned hours ago and yet, he’s not quite mustered up the energy required to get out of bed. He’s exhausted, the tiredness bone-deep, from missions and living the same thing over and over. Still, there are things he needs to do—a report to write, his flak jacket to wash, and he lost a whole brace of shuriken in a fight so he’ll need to go out and buy more too. Then, of course, there’s his daily training and conditioning that he needs to do, especially considering that he’d finished a mission yesterday and needs to start recovering so he can be sent out soon.
He doesn’t get up.
The world settles on his shoulders, locking shackles around his limbs, and Kakashi is chained—to his duty, to his village, to this life. He wishes, abstractly, that things could be different, that there were no missions waiting for him, that things were good.
Wishes are futile, though, and the world isn’t about to change no matter how much Minato had believed in people. Kakashi can only keep doing his duty, wants to even though it exhausts him these days.
Finally, Kakashi gets out of bed. Alone, he allows himself to wince at the aches that reverberate through his body, bruises and cuts that he’s left for too long. Theoretically, he needs to be checked-over in the hospital, but Kakashi has never paid attention to such things and doesn’t plan to start now. The hospital is always hell on his senses and he doesn’t have the energy for that currently.
It’s just after he’s gotten changed, hair still limp and hanging in his eyes, that there’s a knock on the door.
A glance at the clock tells him it’s only just past one in the afternoon. Who could be at the door?
In the end, it turns out that Kakashi doesn’t need to bother opening it, as it swings open by itself, revealing Rin with her lockpicks and Obito standing behind her with a worried smile pinned to his face.
They enter and, despite his exhaustion, Kakashi finds himself smiling. It’s hard not to, when faced with his teammates. He doesn’t know where he’d be without them, and is a better person when around them. But… he regrets, a little, that his missions have taken him from their sides so often lately.
“Got home from a mission?” Rin asks, hands open at her sides; lockpicks mysteriously vanished once more.
Kakashi hums, and rubs a hand over his eyes. “We had something on, didn’t we?” he asks. It’s not out of character for them to come to his house, uninvited, but it’s usually not like this, though Kakashi can’t quite put a finger on why it feels differently.
“Training,” Obito calls, as he disappears into the bedroom. “Don’t worry about it!”
There’s no time for Kakashi to consider that as Rin’s hands begin to glow green. Kakashi holds still for the scan, leaning into Rin when she hovers at his side. This is as far from the hospital as it’s possible to get. He’s home, in a place he knows well, and with his closest friends.
Soon enough, Rin stops channelling chakra. “I’ve healed some of the worst cuts,” she informs him, “and encouraged healing elsewhere. You’ll need some downtime, though, if you want to recover properly.” She frowns as she speaks. She knows just as well as Kakashi does that there is little downtime between missions, especially for ninjas of Kakashi’s calibre—and those like him; masked ninjas who work in the shadows.
Rin herds him over to the couch and, amused, Kakashi lets it happen. Within a few minutes, he finds himself with a bowl of food that he’s… fairly certain hadn’t been in his kitchen. It’s warm in his hands, however, so either Rin bought food with her or cooked something up quickly. Both options are possible.
Kakashi blinks and the food is gone, the bowl empty once more. Warmth clings to the porcelain faintly, but the lapse in time has Kakashi concerned. It’s… not unusual, exactly, but he rarely has moments like this these days. It’d been more familiar, when he was younger, and everything was harder.
“Kakashi?” Obito’s voice has Kakashi lifting his head, as Rin carefully extracts the bowl from his hand.
Humming, Kakashi falls against his teammate as Obito sits next to him on the couch, body warm and comforting. “Yeah?” he manages, near-slurring the word. The warmth envelops him and his eyelids droop. He’s tired.
A hand cards through his hair, but Kakashi isn’t aware enough to determine if it’s Rin or Obito’s based on the callouses, and can’t be bothered opening his eyes to figure it out either. He just lets the tension fade from his body some more, dripping downwards to the floor.
Time slips past, blurring around the edges. Kakashi isn’t aware of much—just his teammates, nearby, at his sides, and the murmur of gentle conversation.
Eventually, Kakashi manages to pull himself together a bit more, adjusting to sit straighter and open his eyes properly. Obito sits on one side of him, Rin on the other, and they’re both gazing at him, concerned.
“Kakashi…” Rin trails off, hand reaching out, only to drop, suddenly. Kakashi licks his dry lips, and tilts his head in question. He wonders what they’re going to say, already knows; dreads it.
No one speaks, for a heartbeat, and then, Obito says, “What can we do to help?”
It’s been years, at least a decade, since Kakashi was a child and refused to ask for help. But as both his teammates know all too well, when things get hard, asking for help becomes a challenge. And yet, Obito and Rin are here, are asking, and Kakashi wants to let down his walls and talk. He wants to tell them about the exhaustion they see already; about the tiredness tugging at him; how it’s not just this mission but all of them, together, accumulating more exhaustion as he completes each one.
And, well, it’s Obito and Rin so he does.
Time slips away and Kakashi talks until his throat is hoarse and then talks some more. Rin hands him a glass of water and Obito rubs his eyes, and Kakashi smiles at them and almost finds it easy to do so.
“You need to stop,” Obito says, wiping tears away from his face, and his voice is fierce. He’s always been the most emotional of the three of them. “Just- Quit, or something.”
“But Konoha-”
“But nothing,” Rin says, and her voice is solid steel. “You can serve Konoha in other ways, and running yourself into the ground does Konoha no good in the long run. Kakashi, you’re one of our best and deserve to be treated as such.”
Kakashi inhales and his exhale is steady. Rather than responding straight away, he imagines it—imagines leaving ANBU and being a part of the normal jōnin forces. He thinks he’d like it. He has friends, of course, in the normal forces, and there’s Rin and Obito too.
“Okay,” Kakashi says, and the ground beneath him is stable. “Okay.”
Obito and Rin grin at him, and Kakashi smiles back. Without them, Kakashi doesn’t know where he’d be, but he’s better for them.
He really couldn’t ask for better life partners.