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Gai woke to the muted echo of distant fireworks and the soft, irregular clanging of bells from somewhere over the rooftops, and for a moment he lay very still, watching the pale winter light seep in around the edges of the shoji like a hesitant visitor who wasn’t sure it was welcome yet. The air in the room had that particular chill of early January in Konoha, dry and thin, the kind that made his breath show faintly when he exhaled and set old aches humming in his joints before he even moved.
He could taste last night’s smoke in the back of his throat; he could hear, distantly, the village stretching itself into the first morning of the year with the clatter of shutters and the high, excited voices of children who had stayed up too late and were determined to wring more out of the holiday than their parents thought wise. Somewhere, someone shouted “Happy New Year!” with the unrestrained enthusiasm of the young, and somewhere else, someone groaned and told them to keep it down.
New Year’s morning, he thought, and the words settled in his chest with their familiar mix of weight and lightness. A beginning. A continuation. A line on the calendar that people pretended separated one life from another, as if the self were so obedient to ink and paper. Then, a breath later, as natural and unavoidable as the next heartbeat: his birthday.
He did not flinch from the thought, exactly, but he did not reach for it either. It sat between his ribs like a stone that had been rounded by years of water running past it—smoothed, but still a presence. For a second he let himself drift, not quite awake, back toward the memory of last night’s threshold between years: the warmth of a room that smelled of simmering broth and citrus peel, the muffled booms of firecrackers over the village, Kakashi’s shoulder solid against his in the narrow frame of the open window as they watched sparks fall like brief stars. There had been a clock somewhere, its ticking nearly lost under the sound of distant celebrations. There had been the low, amused murmur of Kakashi’s voice counting down the last few seconds of the old year even though they were both old enough that the exact moment hardly mattered anymore. There had been the comfortable press of Kakashi's hand closing over his where it rested on the sill when midnight rolled over them.
And there had been, as there always was, the way Kakashi had leaned slightly into him, lips brushing his temple in a gesture so habitual now that it no longer startled him, and a quiet, uncomplicated, “Happy New Year, Gai. And happy birthday,” spoken as if the second wish were not an add-on but part of the same sentence, stitched to it from the beginning.
He had laughed then, because laughter still rose to meet his own name more quickly than any other emotion, and said something about youth renewing itself with every sunrise, about beginnings and resolve and the importance of strong calves in an uncertain world. Kakashi had made a soft sound that might have been a snort and might have been fondness and had not let go of his hand until the fireworks began to fade and his eyes had gone soft and distant in the reflection of the glass.
Now, in the washed-out quiet of morning, the other half of the futon was empty. The blankets were rumpled, a hollow still faintly warm where Kakashi had been, but there was no lanky form sprawled diagonally in defiance of shared space, no mess of silver hair. Gai turned his head and looked at that emptiness for a moment, waiting to see if any sharp emotion rose in him—alarm, disappointment, loneliness—but what came was only a small, unsurprised smile.
Of course he is gone, he thought, without resentment. Kakashi had never learned how to stay in bed once his mind decided there were things to be done, and over the years that list of things had grown longer in ways that had nothing to do with missions and everything to do with the quiet, domestic track their lives now ran alongside their work.
Sometimes he disappeared because the ninken demanded a walk at an unreasonable hour; sometimes because there were reports he’d put off that suddenly insisted on being written; sometimes because he’d remembered, all at once, that he’d promised to pick something up from a shop before the holiday closures and could not bear to break that promise even if the person waiting would have forgiven him.
Today, Gai thought, it was probably none of those things. Kakashi was not subtle in the ways most people tried to be; his subtleties ran in stranger directions. If he had left the bed early on the morning of Gai’s birthday, it was almost certainly because there was some scheme afoot that Gai was not supposed to see until it was ready. Rather than concern him, the thought warmed him from the inside, like good sake.
He moved his legs experimentally beneath the blanket and felt the familiar, uneven response: one foot answering sluggishly, the other answering not at all, sensation stuttering out somewhere vague and frustrating. The damage had long since become something he understood in the way he understood the weather. There were days of relative ease, when his body seemed to remember what it had been and offered approximate cooperation; there were days when pain or stiffness or simple exhaustion narrowed his options. Today felt like something in between. He could work with that.
With the practiced motions of someone who had repeated them until they were as ingrained as kata, he pushed back the covers and shifted his weight to pull himself into the waiting chair beside the futon. The metal was cool under his hands, the wheels squeaking faintly until he thumbed the latch that loosened them. There was pain, bright and sharp along his lower back when he pivoted and then spreading out into something duller, but it was pain he had accepted as part of the cost for the fact that he had any mornings at all. Once he was settled, he sat for a breath, fingertips resting lightly on the rim of the wheel, letting his body register the new configuration.
The room smelled faintly of smoke and the citrus peel Kakashi liked to dry on the heater to use later in tea. A streak of light fell across the floorboards at an angle he rarely saw; usually he woke before the sun had climbed that far. He turned the chair toward the window and rolled forward, stopping just close enough that he could lean his forearms on the sill when he pushed the pane open.
Konoha on the first morning of the year always looked slightly dazed to him, as if the village had drunk too much and was halfway between regret and defiance. The streets were not empty, but they were less busy than usual; here and there he could see people still in festival clothes under their coats, hair hastily tied back, faces split by yawns. Paper streamers in red and white fluttered between doorways, some of them already starting to sag. A few leftover sparklers and small rockets lay spent in the gutters, their thin sticks pointing accusingly at nothing in particular. From somewhere near the market district drifted the smell of broth and grilled mochi.
He let his gaze roam over it all, the way it always did when he took in this view: the rooftops, the stubborn trees, the distant curve of the Hokage Rock with its stone faces catching the pale light differently depending on the season. It was a view he knew well, a view he had thought, once, he would never see again.
That memory brushed against the morning and turned the light a little sharper, even without his permission. He made room for it because pretending it wasn’t there had never worked; the Eighth Gate might not be burning in his veins anymore, but its shadow still lived under his skin.
Another year, he thought, and almost said it out loud. Another year I did not expect to have. Another year that begins with me.
That last thought still felt strange when it surfaced, even after all this time. Other people had told him from childhood that his birthday was “special” because it fell on the first of January, that he was “lucky” to share a day with such a big celebration. When he was very young and the world was simple and large and full of unexamined assumptions, he had believed them automatically. The first time he understood that the New Year’s festivities would happen with exactly the same intensity whether he existed or not, that the fireworks and bells and toasts were not, in fact, in his honor because nothing in the world worked quite that way, the knowledge had landed with an odd little hollow feeling. No one had been unkind about it. It was just that people had food to cook, prayers to make, children to herd, hangovers to nurse. His own date was… folded in. Not forgotten, exactly, but rarely at the center of anything.
It had been easier, as he grew into himself and into his philosophy of youth, to declare that he preferred it that way. That making a fuss over one day when there were so many others had never suited him. That he celebrated his existence every morning with a run and a breath and a vow, not with candles on a cake or carefully wrapped packages. And there was truth in that; he believed deeply that greatness was built out of ordinary days, that it was wasteful to hold joy in reserve for circled numbers on a calendar when every sunrise offered a chance to be better.
But there was truth, too, in how his chest had tightened the first time someone outside his immediate circle had stopped him on the street and said, with the same ease they said akemashite omedetō, “Happy birthday, Gai-san.”
The simple acknowledgment that this date, among all the others, had a different meaning because of him. The knowledge that they only knew that because someone had reminded them.
He lifted his gaze to the calendar on the opposite wall, the one Kakashi pretended was for mission tracking and Gai pretended not to know about in any detail. It hung slightly crooked, which annoyed him less than it might have once; Kakashi’s idea of “straight” had always been approximate at best. The month printed at the top was new and clean, the squares below it unmarked except for today’s, where a neat line of Kakashi’s handwriting in black ink sat beside the printed number: Gai. New Year.
He smiled, his throat feeling unaccountably tight. There was no exclamation mark. Kakashi was allergic to them in writing. The restraint somehow made it more intimate. He rolled toward it and lifted a hand, touching his fingertips lightly to the paper just below his name.
“A man should not wish to be a special day,” his father had told him once when he was a teenager, bouncing on the balls of his feet and half-joking, half-serious about wanting a celebration to match his spirit. They had been in the courtyard, sparring until the sunset turned their shadows into long, swinging lines on the packed earth. “A man should wish to make any day he touches better for having had him in it. Dates are tools, Gai. They are not destinies.”
He had taken that to heart with the same absolutism with which he took everything Dai said. It had shaped his relationship to the calendar as surely as it had shaped his training. He looked at it now and thought, not for the first time, that there was room between those two things—that it was possible to feel that every day mattered and still allow one to be marked in heavier ink.
“Today is a day like any other,” he murmured to the empty room, hearing how the words did not move quite as smoothly through his chest as they had when he was younger. “And also… it is mine.”
The admission sat there, not quite spoken with full force, but present enough that he could feel the weight shift inside him. He let it. It did not hurt as much as he had expected.
The kitchen smelled good when he rolled in, which was his first clue that Kakashi had been thoughtful before leaving. Gai’s own attempts at cooking tended toward the enthusiastic and the catastrophic; Kakashi had once joked that his true kekkei genkai was the ability to make rice both undercooked and burned at the same time. On the stove, a pot sat covered, still faintly warm under his fingertips when he touched the lid. Next to it, one of their mugs had been turned upside down over a folded scrap of paper, as if it were trying to keep the message from evaporating.
He flipped the mug, picked up the note, and recognized Kakashi’s handwriting immediately: precise, slightly slanted, like someone who wanted to be neat but had lived too long with gloves and hastily scribbled mission reports.
Soup. Eat some before you escape. I’ll be back later. Don’t pretend the date doesn’t matter. —K.
Underneath, in smaller letters, as if it were an afterthought and therefore the most important line on the page:
Happy birthday, Gai.
He huffed a laugh, feeling warmth spread through his chest that had very little to do with the steam when he lifted the lid. The soup was miso-based, thickened with vegetables cut into roughly similar sizes and small cubes of tofu. There were slices of sweet potato in it, because Kakashi had long ago discovered that Gai would eat an alarming quantity of anything that combined protein and carbohydrates in one bowl and had quietly leaned into that.
Gai ladled some into a bowl, balanced it carefully on the tray attached to his chair, and rolled back toward the window so he could eat while watching the village shake itself fully awake. He went slowly, partly because his leg was complaining more loudly now that his attention wasn’t focused on moving, and partly because the act of eating something someone else had made with him in mind felt, today, like a deliberate practice instead of a thoughtless habit. Kakashi had never been a grand-gesture person; his love lived in these small, practical details: in soup on a stove, in a bent calendar, in the way he always sat on the side of the bed that faced the door as if his body still believed he needed to be between danger and someone else.
By the time the bowl was empty and rinsed and left in the sink, the date on the calendar felt a little less like a stone and a little more like a steady weight, something he could build around.
He dressed properly—layers under his usual green, heavier socks, the scarf that Kakashi had claimed was “too bright, even for you” and then bought anyway after seeing him look at it twice in the market. The wool was scratchy but warm around his neck. He strapped the brace onto his weaker leg with careful, efficient motions, more for support than movement, and then made his way out into the corridor and down the ramp Tenzo had build a few years back.
The street met him with a flurry of greetings almost immediately. “Akemashite omedetō, Gai-san!” called the woman who ran the corner grocery, bowing from behind a stack of neatly arranged mandarins. “You’re up early, even today.”
“New Year waits for no one!” he replied, grinning back at her. “And neither does youth.”
She shook her head, smiling. “My back strongly disagrees,” she said, then added, as if it were part of the same breath, “Happy birthday as well.”
The words landed somewhere behind his sternum with a little thud. He inclined his head, a bit more formally. “Thank you.”
A pair of academy students trotted past, scarves flapping, shouting something about their fortunes from the shrine. One of them skidded to a halt when he saw Gai and waved so hard he nearly lost his mitten.
“Gai-sensei!” he yelled. “My mom says you helped her pass her chūnin exam when she was my age! Happy New Year! And, um—happy birthday, too!”
“I merely shouted encouragingly from the sidelines,” Gai called back, laughing. “Your mother did all the work.”
A little farther along, an older man with a worn forehead protector lifted a hand in greeting. “Gai-san,” he said. “Glad to see you out. Heard it’s your day. Congratulations on another year.”
Gai thanked him, feeling the repetition of the sentiment pile up inside him like pebbles in a jar. It occurred to him, belatedly, that there was no way all these people had remembered on their own. The little flare of realization—of Kakashi’s invisible hand in the background of his morning, nudging memory, quietly insisting that the date be acknowledged—made him feel ridiculously close to tears for a second. He swallowed them down with a practiced motion that was less about denial now and more about timing. There would be a better moment for that kind of softness than the middle of the street.
The training ground where he had promised to meet Lee was still marked by last night’s festivities; someone had set off a barrage of small rockets there, and their spent shells lay scattered like a field of plucked feathers. The air smelled faintly of gunpowder and cold earth. Lee was already there, of course, running laps in a jacket left unzipped despite the chill, his breath coming out in great clouds, his eyes wide and bright as he spotted Gai’s green shape at the edge of the field.
“Gai-sensei!” he shouted, veering toward him so suddenly that Metal, who had been trying to keep pace, nearly crashed into his back. “Happy New Year! Happy birthday! You look as radiant as ever! No—more radiant! You are as if the year itself were manifesting as a person!”
“That is a great deal of responsibility to place on these shoulders,” Gai said, loud enough that his amusement softened the words. “If the year stumbles, will they blame my posture?”
“Never!” Lee declared, skidding to a halt beside the chair and bending down so that their faces were almost level. There was moisture already gathered at the corners of his eyes, but whether from exertion or sentiment, Gai could not tell. With Lee, the two were rarely separate. “You carry all of our resolve into the year, Gai-sensei! How could that be anything but glorious?”
Metal hovered just behind him, bouncing lightly on his toes in a way that reminded Gai so achingly of a younger Lee that he had to blink. “Happy birthday, Gai-sensei,” the boy said, voice more restrained than his father’s but no less sincere. “Tenten-sensei said we should say that before making you do anything strenuous.”
“I am certain Tenten said precisely that,” Gai said dryly, seeing in his mind’s eye the way she would have frowned and crossed her arms and muttered about “you two idiots who refuse to act your age.” Warmth threatened again at the thought of her somewhere in the village right now, perhaps pretending not to be anxious about the passing of time in her own way.
“We brought something!” Lee blurted, apparently unable to contain himself any longer. He fumbled with his pack and produced, with a flourish, a neatly tied furoshiki bundle. “It is not much,” he added, already sniffling, “but we wanted to—no, we needed to—no, we were compelled by the flames of youth to—”
“It’s dango,” Metal put in, with the merciful directness of someone raised in a household where dramatics were the background radiation and therefore easier to ignore. “Your favorite kind. Tenten said we should bring sugar so you don’t burn off all your calories in training before your… other celebration.”
Gai took the bundle, careful with the cloth and the hands that offered it. The warmth of the skewers seeped into his palms. “You have my eternal gratitude,” he said, and meant it with a depth that he knew they heard, because Lee immediately burst into loud, undignified tears and Metal’s eyes went wide and shiny even as he tried to stand straighter.
They trained, because that was what they knew how to do together, the way some families knew how to sit around a table and talk without needing anything else. Gai coached from the edge of the field, chair angled just so that he could see the lines of their bodies as they moved, calling out corrections and encouragement in a voice that carried easily over the empty ground. There were moments when his muscles twitched with the remembered desire to join them, to feel the air rushing past his face, to push his heart to the edge of its capacity, to balance on one foot at the top of a kick and trust that the other would be there to catch him. Those desires had not left him; he doubted they ever would. But they sat now alongside another, equally strong: the desire to watch these young men and the others like them grow into themselves, to see how they would carry forward the things he had learned at such cost.
As Metal moved through a sequence of strikes, Gai’s mind flickered unbidden to a memory he rarely indulged in detail: the searing heat of the final Gate, the way the world had gone white at the edges, the sound of his own pulse roaring in his ears like a tidal wave, the dim, strangely peaceful certainty that this was it, that his body was burning up in the purest expression of everything he had ever believed about youth and resolve and sacrifice. He remembered, too, the surprise of waking later with lungs that still pulled in air and a heart that still beat and legs that did not answer the way they used to.
Birthdays after that had tasted different. Every year that he lived past the age he’d expected to die at felt like stolen time, like an extra lap on a track he’d already finished. For a while he had almost refused to acknowledge them at all, not out of denial but out of a superstitious feeling that if he counted too carefully, the universe might notice and correct its oversight. It had been Kakashi who had quietly pulled those dates back onto the map, who had insisted that if the world tried to treat Gai’s continued existence as an accident, they would simply be louder about it.
“Gai-sensei?” Lee’s voice cut into his thoughts, threaded with concern. “Are you all right?”
Gai realized belatedly that his hand had clenched on the wheel, knuckles gone white. He deliberately loosened his grip, exhaled slowly, and offered the both of them a reassuring smile. “Merely indulging in a moment of nostalgic reflection,” he said. “An older man’s vice. My apologies. Your form was excellent, Metal.”
Metal flushed with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. “It still slips on the transition,” he admitted. “The way you do it, Gai-sensei, it looks like you’re not even thinking about it.”
“I was thinking about many things when I first learned it,” Gai said, and felt the truth of that all the way down to his bones. “The trick is to train until the body can carry some of them for you. You will get there.”
During a break, when they were sitting under a bare-branched tree sharing the dango and letting their breath even out in the cold air, Lee turned to him with a sudden seriousness that made Gai’s stomach do a small, anticipatory flip.
“Gai-sensei,” he said, voice lower now. “Can I ask you something? About your birthday?”
Gai had half-expected this and yet felt the question land in him with surprising force. He took a moment to chew and swallow, to feel the sweetness on his tongue, before he nodded. “You may always ask me anything, Lee.”
“Do you…” Lee hesitated, hands twisting around the empty skewer until the bamboo creaked. “Do you like it? That it’s today, I mean. That it’s the first day of the year.” He rushed on, as if afraid Gai would answer too quickly. “Because everyone is busy with New Year and there are traditions and visits and shrine trips and sometimes I worry that your day gets lost in all of that and that you just accept it because you are always so generous with your own importance and I—” He cut himself off, eyes shining. “You deserve a day that is just for you.”
Metal made a faint sound of protest at being left out of the worry, then fell silent when Gai’s gaze moved to him as well, steady and kind.
It would have been easy, reflexive, to laugh it off. To throw out one of his usual lines about every day being equally valuable, about not needing special attention, about youth being a constant celebration. Those lines were true, in a broad, philosophical sense. But they were not the whole truth, and for once, sitting here with the weight of the date pressed gently but insistently against his ribs and the memory of Kakashi’s handwriting on the calendar, he found that he did not want to hand his students only the tidy parts.
“When I was younger,” he said slowly, turning the skewer between his fingers, “it troubled me a little.” He saw Lee’s expression crumple and lifted his free hand quickly. “Only a little,” he repeated, and could not help the small smile that tugged at his mouth. “Not because I did not feel celebrated. My father always remembered. Later, other people did too. But because on this day, there is already so much else happening. Everyone is thinking about the year ahead, about their own lives, their own families. It felt…” he searched for a word that was honest but not cruel to his younger self, “…presumptuous, perhaps, to ask for space in that. Easier to say that I did not need it.”
Lee drew in a sharp breath. Metal’s shoulders hunched slightly, as if they were bracing together against something.
“And now?” Metal asked quietly.
Gai looked out over the field, at the trampled snow and the faint ghosts of last night’s rocket trails still etched in the sky. “Now,” he said, “I think I was half right. I do not need a day that is only for me. The village will not stop because I was born on a particular date; nor should it. But I was also wrong to think that allowing others to mark it with me would be some kind of selfishness.” He glanced back at them, meeting their eyes in turn. “I have learned that letting people be kind to you can be its own kind of courage.”
“That sounds like something Kakashi-sensei would say,” Metal blurted, then flushed. “Um. No offense, Gai-sensei.”
“None taken,” Gai said, laughter spilling out of him, loosening something that had been tight since he’d woken. “He has his moments of wisdom, when he is not hiding behind bad literature.”
Lee swiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand, sniffing loudly. “We will make sure people are kind to you,” he declared, with the reckless certainty of someone who had not yet learned how little control you sometimes had over who stayed and who left. “Every year. Even if they are busy. Even if you try to escape. We will drag kindness to your door if we have to.”
Gai’s heart did something painful and enormous in his chest. He reached out and clasped Lee’s forearm, feeling the solid muscle there, the strength that he had helped forge. “It appears you already have,” he said softly.
By the time they parted, after more drills and more laughter and one ill-advised attempt by Lee to start a “birthday push-up chain” that Tenten, arriving late with a bag of manju and a harried expression, had shut down with a well-aimed kunai landing between his hands, the sun had crept past its zenith. The light had softened into that early winter afternoon quality that made everything look both sharper and more fragile. Gai’s arms ached pleasantly from pushing the chair, his back less pleasantly from the strain of the brace, but his mind felt oddly clear, as if the conversations of the morning had cleared a space for something he had been carrying without noticing.
He did not go straight home. Instead, he let his wheels find their way along familiar streets, letting the village seep into him the way it always did when he gave it time. Children darted past in new clothes, their hats askew; an elderly pair sat on a bench sharing a thermos of tea, the steam curling up between them like a visible conversation; a cluster of genin argued over the relative merits of different training regimens, all of which Gai approved of in concept and none of which he believed they would stick to past the second week of the year. At one point he caught sight of Genma and Ebisu outside a dango shop, deep in discussion; they spotted him at the same moment and waved, and Genma cupped his hands around his mouth to shout, “Don’t eat too much, we’ve got cake later!” before Ebisu elbowed him sharply and added, “Happy birthday, Gai!” in a more normal tone.
Cake later, Gai thought, and felt amusement and affection and a faint flutter of nerves mingle in his stomach. So there would be a gathering of some sort, as there had been for several years now—a tradition Kakashi pretended was a nuisance and Gai pretended had sprung spontaneously from their friends’ initiative, even though it was obvious to anyone with eyes and half a brain that Kakashi orchestrated it with the same care he used to bring to tactical plans. The knowledge didn’t cheapen it. If anything, it made each year feel more deliberate, more chosen. Kakashi had never been good at doing things simply because they were expected.
He found himself, almost without realizing, at the base of a small hill on the edge of the village, the one that curved up toward a shrine that looked out over the trees and rooftops. The path was steeper than most, but it was paved and clear, and he had climbed it enough times in the last few years that his arms knew the rhythm of the push. Halfway up he paused, catching his breath, and looked back.
From here the village looked almost like a diagram of itself, all its noise and complexity flattened by distance. The Hokage Rock was more visible, each carved face bearing its own story, its own set of expectations. Gai’s gaze lingered for a moment on the familiar shock of hair on one of them, on the lazy set of the eyes captured in stone even as responsibility had straightened the man beneath them. It was still strange, sometimes, to reconcile the boy he had once declared his rival with the Hokage and then former Hokage who now shared his futon and his kitchen and his quietly plotted birthdays.
At the top, the shrine was quiet, the air colder. A few people came and went, offering coins and claps and bowed heads, but no one stayed long. Gai rolled up the last of the path, stopped a little way from the offering box, and bowed his head. He did not have a well-rehearsed prayer; he never had. His relationship with whatever listened at a shrine had always been practical.
He thanked, first, because it felt ungrateful not to, even if he had tried to avoid believing that survival was a favor he owed anyone but his comrades and himself. He asked, second, because he had learned that there was no harm in articulating hopes even if the world did not rearrange itself to suit them.
Keep them safe, he thought, and did not bother specifying who them was; the list was too long, and the ones at its center were obvious. Let me be of use. Let this year be one in which I do not waste what was given back to me. If there is room, he added, almost wryly, let me learn how to stand still without feeling as if I am failing.
On impulse, he added, quieter still: and if it is not too much, let me learn how to accept being celebrated without flinching.
When he opened his eyes again, the shrine looked exactly the same. He had not expected anything else. The change, he knew, would have to come from his own willingness to let the day be what it wanted to be instead of forcing it into his old story about himself.
By the time he wheeled back into their apartment, the light outside had begun to thin toward evening. The room was lit by the low, amber glow of the lamp in the corner and the faint spill of sunset through the window. It smelled different now: less of last night’s smoke, more of something warm and spicy and unfamiliar on the stove.
“Kakashi?” he called, even though he already suspected.
“In here,” came the answer from the other room, accompanied by the soft thump of a book being set down and the rustle of fabric.
Kakashi emerged a moment later, mask up, hair somehow even more untidy than it had been that morning, apron tied haphazardly over his clothes. There was flour on one sleeve. Gai’s heart did a small, affectionate somersault at the sight; there were few things more endearing to him than the sight of Hatake Kakashi engaging in domestic tasks with the same grave focus he had once reserved for assassination missions.
“You have been busy,” Gai observed, as Kakashi walked over and braced one hand casually on the back of the chair, leaning just enough of his weight there that Gai could feel the warmth through the metal frame.
“I had help,” Kakashi said. His eyes crinkled in a smile. “Genma and Ebisu dropped off the cake before they went to set things up. I am merely pretending I did it all so you will be suitably impressed.”
“Ah,” Gai said, eyes widening. “A fiendish plan.”
“The fiendish part is me agreeing to host a gathering of that many people in our living room,” Kakashi replied. “We’ll see if the floor holds.”
Gai laughed, but it was gentler than his usual bark, colored by something softer. “You did not need to do anything,” he said, and heard how it landed in his own ears—not quite protest, not quite habit.
Kakashi’s hand squeezed briefly on the chair. “I know,” he said simply. “That’s why I wanted to.”
They were quiet for a moment, the silence between them as familiar now as any shared joke. It was in that silence that Gai felt, with surprising clarity, how different this birthday felt from the ones before—not because of any external change, but because of the way he himself was meeting it. The morning’s conversations, the calendar, the shrine, the simple fact of having allowed himself to admit that the day did, in fact, mean something to him beyond the abstract, had all conspired to shift something subtle but real.
“There is one thing that is different this year,” Kakashi said, as if tracking the same thought along a parallel line. “About tonight.”
“Oh?” Gai turned his head to look at him fully.
Kakashi’s expression went a little wry. “In previous years,” he said, “I have… perhaps… overcompensated.”
“Overcompensated,” Gai repeated, amused.
Kakashi shrugged. “You spent so long pretending your birthday was nothing that I reacted by inviting half the village to prove you wrong. It was… excessive.”
“I enjoyed those parties,” Gai said, genuinely. The noise, the chaos, the way people had spilled out onto the balcony and argument had broken out over who had lost which ridiculous bet in their youth—it had been overwhelming sometimes, but in ways that had made him feel less erased, not more.
“I know,” Kakashi said. “But I also know you, Gai. You like noise, but you also like… space. You won’t ask for it. So this time I told our friends that if they wanted to shout at you and give you presents, they could do it earlier in the day.” He gestured vaguely. “Which they did, judging by the messages I’ve been getting from Lee about ‘the most moving training session of all time.’”
“He is very enthusiastic,” Gai murmured, a little overwhelmed by how easily the day’s moments fit into this explanation.
Kakashi huffed. “That’s one word for it. In any case,” he continued, more soberly now, “tonight it will just be us. And… something I’ve been working on. If that’s all right.”
For a second Gai could not quite speak. The idea that Kakashi had not simply defaulted to their established pattern but had thought about what might actually meet him where he was this year, had adjusted the tradition instead of assuming it needed to stay the same or be abandoned—that hit him harder than any grand gesture could have. It felt, in some quiet way, like an acknowledgment of the complexity he himself had finally admitted: that this day was both ordinary and not, that he wanted to be lost in the crowd and seen, that he carried a philosophy of youth and a history of almost dying.
“It is more than all right,” he managed, at last. His voice came out rough. “It is… thoughtful.”
Kakashi’s eyes softened. “Careful,” he said lightly. “If you accuse me of being thoughtful too often, I’ll have to start living up to it.”
He disappeared briefly into the bedroom and returned with a flat, rectangular object wrapped in brown paper. It was not heavy, but he carried it with an odd degree of care, fingers steady on the edges as he set it down on the low table in front of Gai.
“I’m not very good at this,” he said. “Genma tried to help. Then I banned him from the apartment.”
“That was wise,” Gai said automatically, even as his pulse sped up. “He has… strong opinions about gifts.”
“He tried to convince me to get you a punching bag shaped like my face,” Kakashi confirmed. “I told him you would not need a bag for that.”
Gai laughed, and the sound steadied him enough to reach for the paper. He unwrapped it slowly, not out of reluctance but because there was something ritualistic about the crinkle and fold, about making space for the sense of anticipation.
Underneath was a book. A photo album, to be precise—the sturdy kind with thick pages and corner mounts. On the front, embossed in gold, was a simple title: Gai. The lack of embellishment made his throat tighten in a way he did not entirely understand.
He looked up at Kakashi, who had taken a seat on the floor opposite him, one knee drawn up, arms resting on it. “You have compiled evidence against me,” Gai said, attempting to lighten the moment. “Is this a record of my crimes?”
“Of a sort,” Kakashi said quietly. “Open it.”
He did. The first page held a single photograph, centered and slightly faded at the edges: a younger version of himself and a younger version of Kakashi, both in their jōnin flak vests, standing side by side in front of Training Ground Three. Gai had one arm flung around Kakashi’s shoulders, grinning at the camera with unrestrained joy; Kakashi’s visible eye was half-closed in exasperation, but the corner of it crinkled in a way that gave him away. Someone—likely Asuma—had caught them between poses, mid-laugh and mid-protest. Underneath, in a neat line of handwriting that was not Kakashi’s (Kurenai’s, Gai realized belatedly), were the words: “Idiots. 20-something.”
The next page was divided into four smaller photos. One of Lee, grinning with all the ferocity of a boy who had just passed his genin exam, Gai’s hand resting proud and warm on his shoulder. One of Gai standing in front of a hospital room, eyes red-rimmed but smile unshaken, a tiny, newborn Metal in his arms. One of a group of academy students surrounding him, all of them mid-jump in some ridiculous pose he recognized as his own influence. One of him and Mirai playing shogi at a low table, both of them concentrating fiercely while Kakashi’s hand, visible only from the wrist down at the edge of the frame, hovered uncertainly over a captured piece on his own board.
Each page that followed was like that: snapshots of his life that other people had taken and, apparently, shared over the years. There were candid shots he hadn’t known existed: him asleep on a bench after an all-night mission, a jacket draped over him; him in the stands at a chūnin exam, shouting encouragement so loudly that the people in front of him were half turning to shush him even as they smiled; him at the academy, chalk dust on his hands, a diagram of Gate activation scrawled behind him on the board while a roomful of children watched with wide eyes. There were pictures taken after the war, too: him in a wheelchair for the first time, Lee kneeling in front of him with a fierce, tearful expression as if making a vow; him at a festival, Metal perched on the arm of his chair, both of them holding candied apples; him and Kakashi sitting side by side on a bench under the trees, not posing but caught in some moment of quiet conversation, their shoulders touching.
Underneath many of the photos were little notes, written in different hands.
“Thanks for yelling at me not to give up during basic training. – G.”
“He visits the Memorial Stone even when no one else does. – anonymous.”
“Gai-san’s pep talk before the mission probably saved my life. – H. (You said it wasn’t a big deal. It was.)”
“I only passed my exam because you believed I could. – Tenten.”
“You let me cry and didn’t look away. – Lee.”
“He taught me that youth is not about age. – M.”
Gai turned the pages slowly, his hands trembling a little now despite his best efforts. The room blurred and sharpened and blurred again at the edges as his eyes filled. He was distantly aware of his breath hitching, of the way his chest felt both too tight and strangely, frighteningly open. It was one thing to know, in an abstract sense, that he had tried to live according to his ideals; it was another to see the proof of it laid out like this, to see the way his existence had threaded through other people’s lives, leaving marks that they, in turn, had been willing to mark back.
“I asked them,” Kakashi said, after a while, his voice low and steady. “Over the last year. Whenever I ran into someone you’d… collided with. I told them I was making something for you and asked if they had a photo, or a memory they could write down. Some of them sent more than I could fit. Some just said, ‘Tell him I said thanks,’ and walked away before I could get their names.” He shrugged, the gesture a little stiff. “It’s not everyone. It couldn’t be. But it’s… some of the ways you exist in other people’s stories. The ways you refuse to admit you matter.”
Gai swallowed hard. “Kakashi,” he said, and the name came out almost like a plea.
Kakashi’s eye remained on his face, soft and unflinching. “You always say every day is important,” he continued. “That no day should matter more than another. I agree. But I also think there’s something to be said for stopping once in a while and looking back at how far you’ve already run. You don’t do that often. So I thought… maybe today, of all days, we could make you sit still long enough to see yourself.”
There was no deflecting that with a joke. No denying it without insulting the care that had gone into assembling this strange, beautiful dossier of his life. Gai closed the album carefully, one hand resting on the cover to ground himself.
“All these years,” he said slowly, “I have been grateful for the extra time I have been given. For the mornings I did not expect to see. I have tried to honor that by moving forward, by not dwelling.” He looked up, eyes hot. “But I see now that refusing to look back was its own kind of… fear.”
Kakashi’s gaze did not waver. “You are allowed to see yourself,” he said. “You are allowed to let this day be about you, just a little. The world won’t crumble. Your youth won’t evaporate because you admit you’ve done something with it.”
Gai laughed then, helpless and wet and rough, because the alternative was to sob, and he suspected that if he started he might not stop for some time. A tear spilled over anyway, hot against the line of his cheek. He swiped at it, then let his hand fall, because it felt foolish to hide when there was so much evidence in the room of him doing exactly this in front of other people for years.
“When I was a boy,” he said, voice thick, “someone told me that I was lucky to have my birthday on this day. That the whole country celebrated with me. Later I realized that was not quite true.” He smiled, shaky and real. “Today it feels… a little truer.”
Kakashi’s hand came to rest over his on the album cover, fingers curling around his knuckles. “The year begins with you, Gai,” he said quietly. “Whether the village knows it or not.”
Gai let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped for decades. He turned his hand under Kakashi’s, lacing their fingers together, and squeezed.
“Then,” he said, “let us make it a good one.”
They sat like that for a long time—no fireworks, no crowd, no shouting, just the two of them and the slow turning of pages as, later, they opened the album again and went through it one photograph at a time. Gai spoke, sometimes, telling stories about the moments captured there; sometimes he fell silent and simply looked, letting the memories wash over him. Kakashi listened, filling in details when his own recollections intersected, occasionally offering a dry commentary that made Gai laugh loud and sudden, startling the quiet back into a more comfortable shape.
The evening passed, and with it the first day of the year, in a way that felt both ordinary and profound. Outside, the village went on with its own rituals: visits and prayers and half-hearted resolutions. Inside, Gai found that he did not mind, for once, that his birthday shared space with all of that. The knowledge that most people would wake tomorrow thinking only of the turning of the year did not sting. He had his own proof, now, that this date meant something because he was in it—not to the world at large, perhaps, but to the people whose lives his had brushed against, to the man sitting across from him, to himself.
When, later, Kakashi leaned over the back of the chair to press a kiss to the top of his head and murmured a soft reiteration of the morning’s wishes—“Happy New Year, Gai. Happy birthday.”—Gai closed his eyes and let the words settle in him without flinching, without deflection, without rushing past them toward the next thing. He breathed in, breathed out, felt the familiar ache in his leg and the less familiar lightness in his chest, and thought, with a clarity that surprised him: this day is like any other in its potential, and that is exactly what makes it worth marking.
He had always believed that youth was not a number but a choice, renewed each day in the way you met the world. Perhaps, he thought now, smiling as Kakashi’s fingers squeezed his shoulder, that choice could include allowing one day a year to be, simply and unapologetically, about the fact that he was still here to make it.