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Kakashi found the kids exactly where he’d hoped they wouldn’t be – Gai’s apartment. Gai had been put up in one of the tenement buildings hastily erected in the period between Pein’s attack and the war, which meant the structure was one strong gust of wind away from falling apart, but still – better than being out in the cold. They were huddled outside their sensei’s bedroom door, gesticulating furiously at one another, some kind of argument being conducted in angry whispers and through gritted teeth that was steadily growing both louder and more heated. Kakashi could guess what it was about.
He slipped in lightly through the open window just in time to hear Tenten snap, “– you think I don’t?”
Neji’s eyes flashed dangerously, and Lee’s jaw was set in a mulish grit, but before any of them could reply, Kakashi made his presence known with a muted chakra flare. The fact that they hadn’t even noticed him approach was a testament to how out of sorts they were. Gai wouldn’t approve – he accepted nothing less than excellence from his pupils at all times. Not that they needed a reprimand from him to know that; the flush colouring their cheeks was indicator enough of their chagrin as they shuffled away from each other like kids caught tracking mud into the house, mumbling their greetings and refusing to look at each other.
Kakashi sighed and tipped his head towards the kitchen, “Shall we?”
The ‘kitchen’, as they had generously taken to calling it, was the corner of the room farthest from the bedroom, occupied by a single gas burner propped up on the floor. In the limited space allotted for each flat, that meant it was a whole two paces away from where Gai was resting, but the kids still dutifully made the trek, looking at him with expectant eyes and pursed lips. There was a telltale redness around Lee’s eyes and in the bitten-bloody meat of Tenten’s lips that told him everything he needed to know. A nervous energy animated them, and even Neji, usually so self-possessed, was caught in its grasp. It was Lee who spoke first, hurriedly whispering, “Are you coming from the hospital? Is there an update?”
Kakashi swallowed back a wince. Lee’s own miraculous recovery at the hands of Lady Tsunade meant he was the member of Team Gai having the most difficulty accepting that Gai’s injuries were permanent, stubbornly clinging to the hope that some new medical technology would unearth itself and Gai would magically regain use of his lower body. He shook his head. “No, I was just dropping by to check in,” he studied them. “What happened?”
He could guess, but he wanted to hear it from them.
After a silent back-and-forth on who would be saddled with the unpleasant duty of fessing up, Neji finally stepped forward and, choosing his words carefully, reported, “There was a – incident, of sorts. Everything is under control,” he hurried to add, “but the aftermath was – somewhat… difficult.”
Translation: Gai pushed himself too hard, got hurt, and then lashed out when the kids tried to help. Great. Exactly what he’d been afraid of.
He gave in to the impulse to rub at the bridge of his nose. The migraine that had stubbornly set up house in his left temple for long enough that it was probably entitled to squatter’s rights flared up in a bright burst of pain. “Guys, we’ve talked about this.”
Tenten bristled. “What do you want us to do? He’s our sensei – he needs us. We’re not just going to sit back and do nothing, like you!”
The last part fell heavily through the air like a stone falling, gravity accelerating its velocity. Neji’s subtle foot stomp and Lee’s hissed Tenten punctuated the silence, but Kakashi didn’t say anything – just let it fester – raising an eyebrow and holding her gaze till finally she looked away, blinking rapidly and swiping at her eyes. “That was – yeah, sorry. I didn’t…”
He let loose the exhale that was building in a gust of air and let the tension he was carrying in his muscles flood out with it. A tired smile in Tenten’s direction let her know all was forgiven, “I know, it’s fine,” and when she continued to look miserable, added a squeeze to her shoulder for good measure. “Really, it is. This is difficult for all of us, I know that – but especially for Gai.”
He pinned each of them with a long look till they were squirming, guilty and uncomfortable, and only relented when Lee’s bottom lip started to quiver. With a muffled swear, he dug the heels of his hand into his eyesockets hard enough for stars to dance behind his closed lids – the migraine, unfortunately, didn’t budge – and started over. “Listen – you’re good kids, but we can’t keep having this conversation.” He brought his hands back down only to be met with stony averted faces, “I know you’re just trying to help, and I’m not asking you not to do that. I’m not asking you to sit back and do nothing,” Tenten flinched, “but I need you to understand that you cannot fix this. Nobody can.”
A sniffle from Lee was his only answer. He forged on, “Right now, he’s in pain. He’s hurt and ashamed, and he doesn’t want you to see him this way.”
“He has nothing to be ashamed of,” Neji cut in, sharp as a scythe, eyes narrowed at Kakashi in a burning glare.
“He doesn’t,” Kakashi agreed gently, “but shame doesn’t work like that.”
Silence settled into the cracks between them, sealing them into their own little world, caught in their own private tragedy. How many hundreds of people were crammed into this rickety building? How many families trying to stretch their rations to feed every hungry mouth? How many injured lying alone, dying alone, with no one to hold their hand or wipe their brow?
Growing up meant realizing that your suffering was just…ordinary. There was a comfort in that – it meant you weren’t alone in your pain, no matter what it tried to convince you.
The kids had hunched into themselves, folding into small, crumpled shapes right in front of his eyes. Lee had lost the battle against his tears entirely and was crying quietly. Neji wasn’t far behind, breaths coming in a shaky staccato. For her part, Tenten just looked exhausted, like she was all cried out. He’d watched these kids grow up, known them longer than even his own students – had helped Tenten with her sealing, coached Neji on ninjutsu for his jounin evaluation, encouraged Lee through the boy’s own fraught rehabilitation. Somehow, they’d never looked younger than they did in this moment.
It made something wretched and barbed catch on the unprotected flesh of his lungs, scratching bloody gouges and curling tight till he forgot to breathe.
“C’mere,” he murmured, extending an arm, and with a choked sob, Lee barrelled into him, followed not far behind by Tenten. Neji, ever reticent, hovered just out of reach, weeping quietly, fists pressed to his eyes. Kakashi let him be – he remembered all too well what it was to feel yourself like a broken bone, fragile and brittle and wont to shatter at the first kind touch.
He let the kids cry into his uniform blues, stroked Tenten’s shuddering back, rested a cheek against Lee’s head – he was so tall now, when did that happen? – and murmured, “It’s alright. Everything will be alright. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but it will be.”
Gai was alive, after all, he reminded himself. And where there was life, there was the stubborn, human drive to live.
And there was no one more stubborn than Maito Gai.
Team Gai would be fine, but right now, Kakashi had to steer them out of the rough seas and make sure they didn’t break themselves apart on the crags.
“He’s a proud man,” he murmured when the kids had pulled away, wiping at tear-blotched cheeks and wrangling hiccuping breaths under control, “You three know that better than anyone. It’s not – this is not easy for him, to be witnessed at his lowest. Even by you guys. Especially by you guys. Nobody wants their kids to see them weak and helpless.” He held up a hand when they moved to protest, “You don’t think that – I know. But I need you to trust me when I say that when you push and hover and try to help, it just makes things worse. Let’s not make this harder on him than it has to be, okay?”
“What would you have us do then?” Neji snapped.
“Be patient with him. Pain…it changes people, and,” Kakashi swallowed, forced himself to continue, “maybe Gai will never be the same again, in fact, he probably won’t, and as difficult as that is to hear, I promise you it’s harder for him. So just – give him some space, yeah? Go train, rest, see your friends. You can always come back later and tell him about your day – not like he’s going anywhere.”
His joke was not well-received – shame, Gai would’ve liked it. Instead, Neji rolled his eyes while Lee’s immediately began to water again, but there, beneath Tenten’s unimpressed stare, he detected the slightest uptick of her lip, quickly suppressed. Still, it released the pressure enough for the sombreness to drain away like a valve being opened, or a blister being lanced, and the kids began – slowly, reluctantly – to move towards the door.
Kakashi herded them along the five square feet of Gai’s apartment and saw them out, extracting promises from each of them that they wouldn’t be back for at least 72 hours. But just as they finally cleared the door, Lee turned back around, clearly torn, his big eyes fixed imploringly on him. “I don’t – is this really – it’s Gai-sensei .”
It was a helpless repetition of what Tenten had said earlier, but coming from Lee – the boy who worshipped the ground Gai walked on, who owed him everything and spent every second of every day trying to live up to the faith Gai showed in him when nobody else did – it hit like the slow seeping of poison. How much it must hurt him to walk away from his sensei now, in his hour of need, when Gai had been with him every step of the way, when Lee had needed him most. What a betrayal it must feel like.
Lee’s hair was silky under his palm when he put his hand on the boy’s head, providing what he hoped was a comforting weight. “He loves you,” Kakashi said lowly, “Never doubt that. But there are some things you just can’t do for him that I can. Let me do them.” Trust me to do them.
Three very different sets of eyes scanned his face, but they all felt the same – like the sun shining through a window, like a warrior sizing up an opponent. Like Gai. Strange, the echoes people leave in each other’s lives.
Did his students peer out at the world with his eyes, he wondered. What did they see?
Something passed between Team Gai, the kind of silent communication that only existed between genin teammates – a language all your own, born of a bond so deep you could never outrun it.
His right eye throbbed – a phantom pain. Ghosts of the past made flesh.
“Will – will you tell him…” Lee started, lost and young and uncertain, and petered off – the feeling in his chest too big to put to words. Kakashi understood it nonetheless.
“I will,” he promised, and the boy nodded gratefully before succumbing to Neji’s gentle tug on his hand and allowing himself to be led away, out into the beckoning world.
The room was dark and humid when Kakashi stepped inside, curtains pulled tight against the evening sun. It was surprisingly clean – someone had made the effort to tidy up – but not up to Gai’s usually meticulous standards, and Kakashi made a mental note to give the place a going over later Plastic pill bottles, empty cups, and disposable plates with half-eaten food cluttered the surface of the stack of crates serving as a nightstand. The air was tinged with the sour smell of sweat and unwashed sheets and closed windows.
A deep orange glow permeated the small space, the dispersed glow of the setting sun seeping through the thin curtains provided enough illumination to see the lump on the bed. Gai was lying on his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, not even attempting to feign sleep. He didn’t so much as twitch as Kakashi approached, didn’t bother acknowledging his presence even when he drew back the sheets and slipped in beside him, just kept breathing – a steady metronome of oxygen and carbon dioxide, the muscle memory of a taijutsu master. Breath is the foundation of strength, Kakashi remembered Gai crowing more times than he could count. All that control, all that mastery, trapped in a body that couldn’t, wouldn’t respond.
“I sent the kids away,” Kakashi said lightly, making himself comfortable on his back too. Gai had probably heard every word exchanged, the walls were thinner than the finest cotton. There was no response.
The ceiling was the ugly grey of concrete – unpainted, corners cut everywhere they possibly could be to save on costs, on time. A rush job. Everything was a fucking rush job these days.
“I went to see Kurenai the other day, did I tell you? They’re both doing okay – her and Mirai. She’s starting to recognise people, I think, smiled at me when I held her. Right before she pissed on me, so – net zero, I guess?”
Mirai was a happy baby, burbling and easy-going, a warm milk-smelling weight in your arms. It might do Gai some good to spend time with her, remind himself the world was more than ruin and atrophy. Maybe Kurenai could come visit, or they could go to her. The wheelchair sat in the corner of the room, taking up the lion’s share of floorspace and collecting dust. Gai had been steadily refusing to even look at it, much less use it, with all Kakashi and the kids’ pleas falling on deaf ears.
God, he was so fucking tired. The mattress felt like heaven underneath him, and the longer he lay there, the more he wanted to just go to sleep. He, Lady Tsunade, and Shizune had tried to implement a shift system where two of them were awake at any given time while the other crashed on the one servicable sofa they had managed to dig up from the rubble and squirreled away into an unused conference room, but, inevitably, something would come up and the schedule would get thrown out the window. Time was measured between crises now, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept more than three hours at a time. He forced himself to keep talking.
“It’s cherry blossom season – Naruto and some of the other kids want to have a festival, says it’ll help morale. You should come too, get some fresh air…”
The longer he kept going – spinning out the kind of inane stories Gai normally loved and the trite gossip he hated – the more a crackling tension filled the room, angry and resentful. Kakashi ignored it, babbled on about who was cheating on whom and Aoba’s latest fling, while it ballooned out. Spreading, spreading, spreading – and then, pop.
“Just ask,” Gai cut him off as he rehashed, in painstaking detail, Anko’s rant about the food in the Mess. His voice was curt and restrained, something darker simmering under the surface that he was trying not to let out.
“Ask what?”
The scoff that he let out was ugly – a sound nobody would expect of Gai. “Don’t play coy,” he sneered, “You want to know what happened, don’t you? So you can sigh and shake your head and give me a lecture like everyone else? You want to know how I couldn’t even get myself out of bed? How my own students had to find me, collapsed on the floor like a lame dog? How I screamed and shouted and told them to get out, to not touch me, that I never wanted to see their faces again? You – you - ”
And then, like an avalanche, great juddering sobs were tumbling out of Gai. “I just wanted to look out the window, Rival,” he wept, “I can’t even go to the window by myself anymore.”
Kakashi fumbled for Gai’s hand and gripped it tight while the other man cried. He fed him no platitudes, no words of comfort or reassurance – they would all ring hollow in the face of his monumental grief anyway.
How many times had Gai done this for him, borne the weight of his pain, shouldered it with him, even if only for a second, halving the burden? Kakashi could do the same for him – be his lifeboat in a sinking ship for once.
“I said – the most terrible things,” Gai whispered, once the storm had passed and his tears abated. He sounded emptied out – like he had been scraped hollow. Kakashi squeezed his hand.
“You’re – hurt. It’s…they understand.”
The exhale Gai released shook with something mournful and vulnerable, and when he spoke, it was the helpless admission of a man baring the darkest depths of his heart, “I wish I’d died that day.” It spilled out of him, an arterial gush, a truth too long suppressed, “I was prepared to die, I wanted to die. There would have been honour in that at least. There is no honour in this – this wasting away, becoming a – a husk of who I used to be.”
Kakashi closed his eyes, tasted the blood in his mouth, fought it down. Sakumo’s face flashed before him. It was blurred by time and warped by memory – a chalk outline of a crime scene rather than a man, that was what his father had become in Kakashi’s mind.
“Do you remember,” he said, instead of the hundred thousand other things that crowded the tip of his tongue, “when we were kids and we’d race snails in the garden?”
The mattress shifted as Gai turned his head to look at him before returning his gaze to the ceiling. “That was a long time ago.”
He could still remember the warmth of his father’s hand in his, the vibration of his laugh. Sometimes, he still listened for it, as if it would drift down with the wind. “Not that long.”
Dust motes danced in the still air, glinting gold in the fading light.
“The springtime of my youth is over, Kakashi. Everything I trained for, everything I sacrificed – the blood and sweat and tears – everything I am, it’s gone. I will never be a shinobi again.”
Once, there had been a boy who raced snails with his friend in a garden. The garden was gone now, the snails too. But the boy was still here. And so was his friend.
Kakashi didn’t know how to be anything but a shinobi. But once, he had. Once, he had sat on the grass with his friend and watched snails and laughed and been, for a brief shining moment, not a weapon, but a boy with his whole life ahead of him.
Maybe he and Gai could remember together what it was to be human.
“The funny thing about spring, my friend,” he said, hoarse with the remnants of childhood, “is that it always comes around again.”
Gai stared at him, something incredulous colouring his appraisal, before – like it had been startled out of him – he began to laugh. Slow at first, creaky; a sound unsure if it was what the person making it had intended to reach for, before it gained confidence, well-loved muscles kicking in. A lifetime of laughter, taking the reins until Gai’s familiar laugh was booming off the walls.
“Ah, I always forget, Rival,” Gai said, once his mirth had subsided, a smile playing on his lips, small and wistful but undeniably real, “how good you are with your words when you want to be.”
Kakashi snorted, feeling strangely abashed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Sweet-talking Tenzo into paying for my meals doesn’t make me good with words – a mute Academy student could do it.”
The two of them had gravitated toward each other sometime while they talked, cheeks pillowed on the mattress, faces drawing closer – a pair of inverted commas in the dimming sun.
Gai was studying him, curious and intent. “No,” he said slowly, each word measured out with thought, “You are.”
There was a finality to his words, a weighty ruling, as if they meant much more than what they appeared to.
“Well,” Kakashi demurred, uncomfortably aware that some alchemy had just transpired within Gai that he wasn’t privy to, some epiphany had dawned, “I learned from the best.”
If eloquence was a virtue Kakashi possessed, it was only a pale imitation of the fount that sprang in Gai.
Gai snorted. “Yeah. Jiraiya.” And then they were snickering again, pain leeching out of the air till it felt like they could breathe again.
“Kakashi,” Gai spoke after a while, breaking the comfortable silence that had made a home between them. His eyes were bright in the darkening room. “You will make a good Hokage.”
Kakashi stilled. He hadn’t told Gai yet, didn’t know how to bring it up. It wasn’t official yet, no announcement had been made, but at this point it was something of an open secret. Anyone with eyes and a half-functioning brain could see that Tsunade wasn’t much longer for the hat and who her favoured successor was, but it still felt – unreal. A fever dream.
He’d made his peace with it. Or at least he thought he had, as much as he was able anyway. But staring into Gai’s solemn eyes, filled with a tender pride and unshaking faith, something in him settled. The part of him that whispered thief for stealing a life, a mantle not meant for him, finally quieted.
The urge to look away, to deflect, ate away at him, but the gravity of Gai’s quiet conviction didn’t allow it – a trust so complete it wouldn’t let itself be made light of. And in the end, all Kakashi could do was knock their foreheads together and murmur, “Thank you, Rival.”
Under the arbour of their brows, something a little sad, a little rueful, twisted at the line of Gai’s mouth, “You probably shouldn’t call me that anymore.” He huffed out a laugh, the kind that a person made when they didn’t want to cry, “Not like I can give you a good run on much of anything the way I am.”
Kakashi thumbed at Gai’s cheekbone and ignored the sound of his heart breaking. “Don’t say that – Eternal Rivals remember?”
It was a refrain Gai would repeat often during Kakashi’s darkest moments – when he sought death behind every door and in every enemy blade, when loneliness seemed easy and his heart too full of ghosts. A reminder, that they shared a bond that couldn’t be severed, not by sharp words or distance or time, perhaps not even by death. Eternal Rivals.
This would not be what broke them, Kakashi wouldn’t let it
Gai laughed wetly. “You can’t use my own lines against me, you sly bastard.” But he reached up to grasp him by the back of his head, fingers buried in the thick of his hair, and Kakashi knew that he understood.
With a sniffle, Gai let his hand fall away and shifted onto his back once more, a grunt of pain leaving him. “Tell me something,” he commanded gruffly.
Kakashi thought of the way Lady Tsunade’s hands shook so badly from the nerve damage some days that she couldn’t even hold a pen.
He thought of a few nights ago, finding Sasuke crying in the dark and holding him all through to daybreak, keeping still through the pounding fists and poisoned barbs and the warm seep of tears because it was irrefutable proof he was alive, he was here.
He thought of the little tea shop he and Rin used to go to, a lifetime ago. It had survived wars and recessions, demon attacks and invasions, only to be brought down by Pein, in its place nothing but collapsed debris and splintered beams. He’d happened across where it had stood and felt very much like he was eleven again. What was it all for? was all he could think as he stood there, My God, what was it all for?
He turned to look at the ceiling. It was still grey. He closed his eyes. “Construction's coming along in the West Quarters…”