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The training ground was empty, which was, in Gai’s opinion, an affront to the very concept of Youth.
Morning in Konoha was soft in a way that always caught him off guard. The war had ended months ago, but some part of Gai still expected the dawn to come in sharp, like a thrown kunai. Instead, mist pooled in the low dips of the field. The air smelled of damp earth and distant miso. The Hokage Monument watched over everything, stone faces catching the first thin bands of gold.
Perfect conditions for a private revolution.
Gai’s palms were already raw.
He drove his knuckles into the packed dirt, dropped his chest, pushed back up. Again. Again. Breath in, breath out, the rhythm pounding through him like drumbeats.
“ONE HUNDRED!” he bellowed at the sky, voice cracking heroically. “For the glorious future of defeating my eternal rival!”
There was no eternal rival in sight.
He kept going anyways.
Sweat dripped off his chin, dark spots in the dust. Bandages around his hands bled through in spots where the skin had given up, but pain was only proof that he was alive; only proof that he was doing something.
He could see the ambush from yesterday every time he closed his eyes. The flash of steel, the split-second blank where his attention had flickered, the way Kakashi had flowed in without hesitating to cover the angle he’d missed--
“UNACCEPTABLE!” Gai shouted, and dropped for another set. This time on his fingertips. This time lower. This time better.
He was halfway through that set - arms shaking, lungs burning, heart singing - when something hissed faintly through the air.
Thnk. Thnk. Thnk.
Gai froze with his fist a breath above the ground and snapped his head up.
Three kunai had appeared in the distant practice post. Perfect vertical line. Dead center.
They hadn’t been there before.
Gai scrambled upright so fast his vision went white, then green, then back again. “WHO GOES THERE?” he demanded. “SHOW YOURSELF, COWARDLY--”
“Namikaze Minato” said a mild voice.
Gai spun.
Minato was standing at the edge of the field, hands in his pockets, expression politely curious - like he had just wandered onto the scene and absolutely had not just thrown three kunai from half a field away without even lifting his hands.
The breeze toyed with his hair, tugged at his flak vest. The special tri-pronged kunai holster at his thigh glinted once in the rising light.
“Good morning, Gai kun,” he said.
There was a familiar brightness around his eyes that Gai, in his more deranged moments, liked to think was pleased and not just sunrise in disguise. Minato always looked a little too awake when Gai was in the room, like he’d found an extra mission parameter he hadn’t expected but was absolutely willing to run.
Gai straightened in a whipcrack. “Minato sensei!” he shouted, far louder than necessary. “You are EARLY! Radiantly, fantastically early!”
“Am I?” Minato tipped his head, as if listening for something only he could hear. “I thought I was late.”
Gai cast a desperate glance at the clock tower beyond the trees. 05:09. Team meeting was at six. Gai had specifically calculated forty five minutes for disgrace in private.
“You are NOT late!” he blurted. “I am simply--” he flung one arm toward the field, nearly losing his balance “--already engaged in the refinement of the furnace of Youth! So that when my eternal rival arrives--”
“Kakashi’s still asleep” Minato said. “Obito and Rin too. I checked.”
He said it like most people said “I took a walk,” but there was a wry undercurrent there. Of course Minato had checked. Of course he’d swept over his squad before dawn like a quietly worried weather front.
His gaze slid back to Gai. “I didn’t bother checking for you” he added, not unkindly. “I knew you’d be out here beating the sunrise to death.”
Gai deflated. “Ah.”
Of course they were asleep. Normal people were asleep. Even abnormal people like Kakashi were probably asleep, or at least awake inside somewhere, being insufferably calm.
Obito and Rin. Minato’s original team. The legendary Team Minato, who had gone into the war and come back out of it with all their limbs and a mountain of stories.
Minato’s smile ticked sideways, softening. “Don’t stop on my account” he said. “What were you working on?”
“Hand conditioning” Gai said at once, puffing out his chest. “To strengthen the foundation of my strikes and--”
Minato’s gaze flicked down to the churned patch of dirt. “Knuckles” he observed. “On packed ground. You’ve already broken the skin.”
Gai glanced at his hands. There was a small smear of red on the pale bandages. Barely anything.
“Youthful sacrifice--” he started.
“How many sets?” Minato asked. The gentle tone didn’t change, but there was a thread of command in it, the same one ANBU obeyed without thinking. It never crushed; it just reshaped the air, invited you to step into it.
Gai’s back snapped straighter. “Three so far!” he replied. “Each of one hundred! I was going to do six, because yesterday I dropped my guard for half a second when we were ambushed, and that is UN--”
“Ah.” Minato said.
Just that. Ah. As if Gai had announced there would be rain later. But Gai caught the way his eyes softened, the fleeting fondness there, as if this, too, was something Minato had expected from him and secretly approved of even as he grimaced at the methodology.
He walked past Gai to the post, plucked his three kunai out with unhurried efficiency, and walked back.
“Walk with me” he said.
Gai’s stomach clenched. That was the tone Minato used when he was about to be extremely kind and extremely terrifying at the same time.
They circled the perimeter of the field. Grass whispered under their sandals. Dew soaked the hems of Gai’s green legwarmers. Konoha breathed around them - merchants beginning to set up stalls, distant dog barks, someone on the main road shouting about fresh tofu and cabbages. The war had left scars, but mornings like this pretended, very convincingly, that peace was permanent.
“You fought well yesterday” Minato said eventually.
Gai nearly tripped over his own feet. “I - no, sensei,” he blurted. “I failed to intercept the second wave! If Kakashi hadn’t-- if my eternal rival hadn’t--”
“Kakashi should have been where he was” Minato said. “That’s why I put him there.”
“But--!”
“Rin’s barrier held. Obito cleared the right flank. The civilians got through the pass. None of my squad died.” Minato’s voice didn’t rise, but it firmed. There was pride in it, quiet and unmistakable. “I’m putting that in my report as a success.”
Gai stared, horrified. “But I--!”
Words crashed up against his teeth. But I was slow; but my father would never have; but a true shinobi would have--
Minato glanced sideways at him. His eyes were very blue in the thin light, but there was nothing cold in them. Just too much seeing, and something warmer behind it - like he was cataloguing Gai’s panic the same way he catalogued enemy formations: not as a flaw, but as information to work with.
“Gai kun” he asked quietly, “when you say ‘I failed,’ what are you comparing yourself to?”
Gai opened his mouth.
You, he thought helplessly. Father. Everyone.
He closed it again.
Minato didn’t push. He just waited, patient as tree roots, like he did when Obito was flailing his way through a strategy question because he knew the boy would get there if given enough silence.
Gai swallowed around the lump in his throat.
“I’m a chūnin” he said finally, voice a little hoarse. “My father - Duy - he never made it past genin. But he opened the Eight Gates. He held back an entire elite squad on his own. He…” Gai’s hands curled uselessly. “He died doing it. Because he was their only line.”
He fixed his eyes on the fence line so he wouldn’t have to see Minato’s face when he said it.
“I have a rank” he went on. “I have a team. I have youth and thick eyebrows and time. I cannot be one second too slow. If I am, then - then - there is no excuse.”
“Hm” Minato said.
They walked a few more paces. A bird exploded out of a nearby bush, startled into flight by nothing at all.
“Your father died a hero” Minato said at last.
Gai’s throat tried to close. He forced it open. “Yes” he managed. “People say that now. They didn’t before.”
“I know” Minato said. “I read the mission file. And the one before that. And the one before that, where they told him he wasn’t needed.”
Gai stopped walking. The world stopped with him.
There were multiple files?
Minato had…read them?
Minato’s mouth softened. “I asked for them” he added, almost offhand. “When I requested you for my squad.”
Gai’s brain tripped. “You -you requested--”
“Of course” Minato said, like it was obvious. “I wanted to know what kind of man raised someone who still shouts about hard work in a village full of exhausted Jōnin.”
Heat spiked behind Gai’s eyes.
“Gai kun” Minato said, turning to face him fully, “I need you to be very clear on something.”
He didn’t raise his voice, but the air seemed to lean in.
“You are not your father” he said. “Your job is not to die holding a line alone. Your job, right now, is to stand in a formation with three other shinobi and make sure there isn’t a line like that in the first place.”
Gai flinched as if struck. “But if I’m not…at least as strong--”
“‘At least as dead’” Minato cut in.
Gai snapped his mouth shut, face flushing hot.
“That’s what you mean” Minato said, no accusation in it - only a terrible, gentle accuracy. “You mean: if you don’t bleed as much as he did, you’re not worthy to stand where he stood.”
“That’s not--” Gai began, then broke off. “I would never insult my father like that!”
“I didn’t say you were insulting him” Minato said. “I said you were hurting yourself with the story you’re telling about him.”
The words caught under Gai’s ribs and lodged there.
“When my students first saw the Hiraishin on a mission” Minato said suddenly, like the topic had changed, “they thought the point was that I was fast.”
Gai blinked. “You are fast” he blurted. “You’re the fastest in the village! Perhaps the fastest in the WORLD! Your speed is a flame of hope in the--”
“Yes” Minato said, amused. “But that’s not why I developed it.”
He drew one of his kunai. The seal along the hilt caught the light, ink-black against metal.
“I got tired of watching people die because I couldn’t cross the distance between us in time” he said. “So I cheated. I made the distance smaller.”
He threw the kunai in a lazy little arc. It flashed once, then bit into the far post with a neat thunk.
The air bent.
Gai didn’t see Minato move. For a heartbeat he was simply gone, and then he was there, hand resting on the kunai hilt, leaning against the post like he’d always been there.
“I am not perfect” Minato said from across the field. “I just refused to accept the original rules.”
He vanished again, reappearing at Gai’s shoulder with a crackle that raised the hairs on Gai’s arms.
“If you blinked” Minato said mildly, “you missed the point.”
Gai’s heart was pounding again, but not from exertion this time.
“What you did yesterday” Minato went on, “was exactly what I asked you to do. You intercepted the first wave. You forced them to reveal their backup. You gave Kakashi and Obito the angles they needed. You kept Rin from being flanked while she held the barrier. When you did drop your guard - not an unforgivable sin, by the way - you recovered in time to stop the leftmost attacker from hitting the civilians.”
“That was luck” Gai muttered. “Unworthy, accidental luck.”
Minato shrugged. “Luck is allowed. We’ll even put it in the report.”
He hesitated, then added, more deliberately, “I was watching you, you know.”
Gai blinked. “Me?”
“Who else is loud enough to see from three different angles?” Minato said. “You were where I needed you. You bought the rest of us time. That matters.”
Gai wanted to believe him. Some stubborn part of him refused.
“But I could have been faster” he insisted. “If I had trained harder, if I had pushed past my limit the day before, or the week before, or--”
“Gai kun.”
Minato’s voice cut cleanly through the spiral.
“I like perfectionists” he said. “They make good shinobi. They obsess over their blind spots. They stay up late planning contingencies. They ask questions. They adjust. They keep trying.”
His mouth tugged sideways. “They also” he added, “tend to move the goalposts every time they get close to them. And grade themselves on a scale no one else in the mission is aware of.”
Gai’s ears burned. “I--I just don’t want to let anyone down,” he said, and suddenly it was much harder to look at Minato. “Not you. Not my teammates. Not my father. Not the village. Not my eyebrows. They have come to expect greatness.”
Minato huffed out a small, startled laugh. “Your eyebrows are already proud of you” he said. “Trust me.”
Gai choked on a confused noise.
“That drive you have” Minato went on, more serious again, “the way you throw a hundred percent at whatever’s in front of you? That’s one of the reasons I wanted you with us. This team…tends toward the cerebral. It’s useful to have someone whose first instinct is ‘move’ instead of ‘overthink for three hours.’”
“You–you like that about me?” Gai said, stunned.
“Yes” Minato said, without hesitation. “I like that you mean it, even when it’s messy.”
He tipped his head.
“The flaw” he said, “is not that you want to give everything. The flaw is deciding that if you can’t personally prevent every possible harm, you are worth less.”
He held Gai’s gaze.
“That way” he said softly, “lies the kind of ‘heroism’ that leaves your teammates standing in front of a stone and wondering if you ever understood how much they needed you alive.”
Gai’s stomach lurched. He thought of the stone memorial that existed in another world - one that, mercifully, didn’t in this verse. He thought of how easily it could have. Obito, under a rock. Rin, under water. Kakashi, under the weight of it.
He thought of his father’s name, chiseled alone.
Minato looked away first, as if granting him a small mercy, and turned back toward the field.
“Do you know what my teacher told me” he said, “when I nearly burned myself out trying to be everywhere at once?”
Gai shook his head, almost afraid to break the moment.
“‘If you insist on being the only one holding the rope’” Minato quoted, “‘then when you fall, you take us all with you.’”
“Jiraiya sama said that?” Gai asked faintly.
“In significantly more obscene language” Minato admitted. “I cleaned it up for youth consumption.”
He stepped closer, close enough that Gai could see the faint scar along his jaw, the tired at the edges of his eyes that no amount of sleep seemed to chase away.
“You joined my squad because you wanted to learn” Minato said. “So here’s your lesson today: the shinobi way is not about never making mistakes. It’s about deciding what you’re going to protect, and then collaborating with people who refuse to let you do it alone.”
He tilted his head.
“Your father’s way was one line” he said. “Yours doesn’t have to be.”
Gai’s eyes stung. Gai did not cry. Gai refused to cry. He made a heroic, youthful effort not to cry.
“What if I don’t know how to…be less?” he blurted. “My flames of Youth burn at MAXIMUM at all times! If I am not pushing, then - I don’t know what to do with myself. If I’m not going beyond, then I’m--”
“Terrified you’ll become ‘nice but useless’” Minato finished, like plucking a shuriken out of the air.
Gai stared.
“How--”
“I watched you on the first mission” Minato said. “You apologized twice for breathing too loudly. You thanked me for assigning you watch as if I’d given you a medal. You spent your entire first rest period doing squats in the dark where you thought I wouldn’t see.”
Gai’s face went volcanic. “Rest is - rest is--”
“Rest” Minato said, “is how you get to do it again tomorrow.”
He pointed at the small red smear in the dirt where Gai’s knuckles had been.
“This” he said, “is not how you honor your father. This is how you make sure someone else has to write a report about you.”
Gai stared at the stain. It looked pitiful now. He had bled so much more than that in training. On missions. It was nothing. But also - it was a piece of him the ground had, and the ground would not say thank you.
“Here’s what we’re going to do” Minato said, tone shifting back toward practical. “You will not do three more sets of knuckle push-ups. You will do one. On grass. Then you will stretch properly, eat something, and we’ll run tactical review together. I want to know what you saw yesterday.”
Gai’s head snapped up. “You–you want my ANALYSIS?” he yelped. “Minato sensei! The Yellow Flash of Konoha desires my humble observations? My heart--!”
“Yes” Minato said, amused. “You were on the front line. You see angles Kakashi doesn’t. That’s the point of having more than one set of eyes.”
He added, almost as an afterthought, “You’re not just here as extra muscle, Gai kun. I trust your judgment.”
The sentence hit harder than any punch.
“And if my analysis is…flawed?” Gai asked, swallowing. “If it is un-youthful? If it DISAPPOINTS YOUR BRILLIANT EXPECTATIONS--”
“Then we adjust it” Minato said. “That’s what training is. Not punishment for existing. Instruction.”
Gai’s shoulders slumped with a strange, reluctant relief.
“But I did drop my guard” he said, one last time, because the thought had its claws in him.
“Yes” Minato said. “And then you picked it back up.”
He smiled, a small, sharp thing.
“Perfectionism wants you to freeze the moment you slipped and stare at it forever” he said. “The shinobi way says: move.”
“You make it sound…simple” Gai whispered.
“It isn’t” Minato said. “Not for me either.”
Gai blinked at him. “But you’re--”
“Very good at pretending” Minato said softly. “Ask Rin how often I rework mission plans at three in the morning. Ask Obito how many times I ‘just happened’ to be near an alley he might pick a fight in. Ask Kakashi how many drafts of his first ANBU report I edited because he insisted they all had to be perfect.”
He tipped his face toward the sky, toward the Monument, toward a future that Gai could now imagine him surviving to see.
“I don’t want you to be like me” he said. “I want you to be alive. Preferably long enough to make Kakashi’s hair go fully grey out of sheer exasperation.”
Gai choked on a startled laugh. “It is already trying, sensei,” he said faintly. “Yesterday, when I challenged him to one thousand push-ups--”
“Exactly.” Minato clapped once, like sealing the moment. “Come on. Show me the hand conditioning you were doing. Then we’ll fix it.”
They walked back to the center of the field.
Gai dropped down onto the softer patch of grass Minato indicated, lowering himself into push-up position. Minato crouched beside him, one hand light on his shoulder to adjust his posture.
“Less weight on the joints” Minato said. “More distribution along the palm. You can build strength without shredding yourself.”
“But then it won’t be HARD ENOUGH” Gai protested, scandalized.
Minato raised a brow. “Are you here to collect suffering” he asked, “or results?”
Gai opened his mouth, closed it, and lowered himself. The adjustment felt…strange. Easier on his skin, harder on his pride. He pushed up anyway.
“There you go” Minato said quietly. “Same effort. Less waste. That’s the part of you I like, Gai kun. The effort. We’re just going to aim it a little better.”
Gai’s ears went hot.
“Again” Minato said.
Gai did.
Over the next twenty minutes, they dismantled his routine with the same methodical care Minato used on enemy formations.
“Why this many reps?”
“Because it hurts!” Gai declared.
“Try ‘because it helps’” Minato said dryly.
“Why this order?”
“Because that’s how I’ve always done it! Since I was six and my father said--”
“Try this instead” Minato said, rearranging the sequence to put the most intense sets after proper warm-up instead of before.
He didn’t mock the intensity. He just redirected it, like water around a stone. After the third correction, Gai realized with a jolt that Minato wasn’t trying to shrink him. He was trying to make more room for him.
By the time the clock tower chimed six, Gai’s muscles were pleasantly warm instead of screaming, his knuckles intact, and his head buzzing with new angles: of his body, of the ambush, of what “strong” might actually mean.
“Sensei?” Gai said quietly.
Minato looked up.
“If I…drop my guard again” Gai said, staring fiercely at his own fists, “on a mission, and someone else has to fill in - will you still…consider it a success? If everyone comes home?”
“I will consider it a success” Minato said, “if we complete the objective, minimize harm, and learn something for next time. Including how to make sure no one’s guard has to be up every second.”
Gai let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding since the first kunai flew yesterday.
“And if I don’t meet my own standards?” he asked, barely above a whisper.
“Then” he said, “you revise your standards. Or you learn where they came from. But you do not use them as a weapon against yourself. That would be a waste of a very promising shinobi.”
Gai’s chest did something embarrassing. “Promising” he repeated, a little helplessly.
Minato’s mouth curved properly now, warmth breaking through. “You make the whole squad better when you go all in” he said. “Even when we have to drag you back from overdoing it. I’m not in the habit of keeping people around who don’t pull their weight.”
That…helped. More than Gai could say.
“Obviously” Minato added lightly. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”
There was a shout from the path.
“Minato sensei! Gai! You started without us?”
Obito, bright and loud, waving both arms. Rin, laughing, trying to get him to stop running ahead. Kakashi trailing behind, hands in his pockets, eye half-lidded in a way that said he was absolutely awake and absolutely judging all of them.
“Minato sensei” Rin called, “you didn’t make Gai do Hiraishin sprints, did you? We agreed that was inhumane.”
“How’s the formation review looking?” Kakashi asked suspiciously. “Please tell me we’re not doing three hours of Gai talking about youth again.”
“Gai kun was showing me a new routine” Minato called back, voice smoothing into its usual easy warmth. “We’re going to steal parts for all of you.”
Kakashi gave Gai a slow, baleful assessment. “I knew you’d be bad for my life” he said.
Gai straightened, the burn in his shoulders suddenly something he was proud to carry.
“You simply fear the fires of YOUTH, eternal rival!” he proclaimed, fist on his chest. “But worry not! I, Maito Gai, will lead us all to new and sustainable heights of--”
“Please don’t say ‘sustainable heights of youth’” Kakashi said. “That sounds like a pamphlet.”
Minato clapped his hands once. “Formation C” he ordered. “Then breakfast.”
“Breakfast?” Obito yelped. “Since when do we get breakfast?”
“Since today” Minato said. “Apparently, it’s part of our new sustainable training program.”
He glanced at Gai, just for a heartbeat. The corner of his mouth tipped up, conspiratorial.
“And Gai kun’s earned it,” he added. “He’s been up working harder than all of you combined.”
Obito groaned. “Don’t praise him, Minato sensei, he’ll get WORSE.”
“THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WORSE WHEN IT COMES TO YOUTH!” Gai declared, incandescent.
Minato’s laughter - real and open and fond - cut through the morning air.
Gai felt something in his chest loosen, just a little. The old idea of heroism - alone, bleeding, glorious and short - shifted to make room for something else: four shadows on a training field. A sensei who rewrote rules instead of obeying them to death. A squad that expected him, not to die spectacularly, but to show up again tomorrow and be overwhelmingly, inconveniently, gloriously himself.
He dropped into position at Rin’s left, Kakashi on the right, Obito loud and bright up ahead. Behind them, Minato’s presence was a steady warmth at his back, a reminder that he did not have to hold the rope alone.
When the signal came, Gai moved.
Not perfectly.
But with intention.
With a team.
With the shinobi way Minato had offered him: not as a punishment to survive, but as a path to walk, one imperfect, very loud, very alive step at a time - cheered on, quietly and unmistakably, by the man who’d chosen him for exactly that.