Translation

The pain doesn’t leave his body for what felt like years. He isn’t sure what hurts worse: when the slow burn of pain is moving through his nerves at the speed of torturous enemy poison or the moments when it contracts into tiny pinpoints that stab.

The stabbing, he decides as he looks up at the chipping paint along the ceiling’s edge, reminds him of sex. The burn is the afterglow.

Gai watches carefully for signs of real recovery, both from the desk and in bed wide awake when he should be getting some sleep of his own. Tsunade, thank Kami for Jiraiya and Naruto finding her in a timely manner, treated him as soon as she could. Kakashi keeps getting lucky as far as he’s concerned, staying alive when most other would have died. That’s the only reason Gai knows he doesn’t want to die like he says he does.

He’s not in the bedroom when Kakashi does wake up, but Kakashi still knows he’s not in the right apartment. The smell is different. There’s curry in the air, and something else sweet that might be hot chocolate. He preaches constantly about the addictive properties of coffee, but he found his own addiction in liquid cocoa that’s just as bad as Kakashi’s addiction to pain. Gai’s is just less detrimental More telling, though. Gai tends to drink it heavily when he’s worried and the chocolate nearly overpowers the curry.

As if he should be surprised. Of course Gai is worried about him. Gai worries about everything under the sun, but his favorite topic is Kakashi. He doesn’t feel bad about making him worry, though. Gai would fall apart without someone to fret over. He’d have to worry about himself otherwise.

“Gai,” he croaks out through an extremely dry throat. He sounds like a cancer survivor. He doubts Gai could have heard him; it sounds like the radio and the TV are on at the same time, playing jazz and the soundtrack to a restless world. The evening news reporters are on muffle between the half propped open door and the scratch of saxophones. They’re whispering the war in Rain. And they’re loud. Whispers weren’t supposed to be so loud, Kakashi lamented as his hand tightened on the kunai. He knew he shouldn’t have been holding the kunai like that, because he could feel the silver edge of the weapon biting into his skin. He didn’t care though. Three days. . .those whispers shouldn’t have been so goddamned loud.

“I heard he hung himself,” Raidou said quietly.

Wrong, Kakashi thought. He put a katana through his stomach and pulled out his own intestines. I saw him do it.

“Serves him right,” scoffed Genma. Kakashi barely knew him but he definitely hated him now. His blood crawled with a completely foreign emotion, so unlike the ones he felt watching his father’s ritualistic suicide. So shocked he vomited until he thought his insides would fall out through his mouth. “After what he did to Konoha he deserved to die.”

The kunai dugs deeper into Kakashi’s palm.

“The Mizukage is holding us responsible for the fate of the hostages,” Asuma chimed in fearfully. “He’s demanding blood money.”

A collective shiver ran through the group. War lingered just on the edge of their minds. Kakashi vaguely remembered hearing the rumors that war was just on the horizon. He wasn’t sure if it made a difference to him, but he did know that it shouldn’t have happened. How could he have messed up so badly? How could he ruin so many things at once?

“See,” Genma reaffirmed. “He caused us enough trouble.”

No one saw Kakashi coming until it was far too late. He was, after all, the son of Sakumo.

Genma gasped in belated alarm as a kunai already warm with blood pressed against his jugular. He somehow ended up on his knees with his arms twisted behind his back in a small but deadly clutch. Pain ricocheted down his spinal cord as Kakashi put a swift knee to an extremely sensitive area. Asuma moved in to help, but the press of the blade a little further against Genma’s throat halted that transaction. The others could barely move. Kakashi jeered on the inside. It’s no wonder they just graduated from the academy.

“Don’t talk about him like that,” Kakashi growled in a voice far too menacing for an eight-year old. “I’ll kill you.” Even if his dad did mess up, even if were right. He felt Genma swallow against the blade and got the barest sense of grim satisfaction from it. He’d never wanted to hurt someone so badly in his entire life. He wanted to see how Genma would feel if his vocal cords were ripped out and had the epiphany of finally understanding what people mean when they say they lose their temper. It was odd, exhausting, and slightly liberating. “Understand?”

Genma whimpered meekly, which Kakashi took as a sign of acquiescence. He let go, but not without leaving a shallow cut on the side of his neck, just as a reminder. As Genma crumpled to the floor, Kakashi noted that he’d made himself something to be feared and that’s he’d quite possibly lost all hopes for making amends for being not quite normal.

He is, after all, the son of Sakumo.

What would his father think of him now? He doesn’t actually give a fuck, but he does think about the turn his life has taken. About how his father would have taken to Kakashi waking up in Gai’s bed mostly undressed. How and why they aren’t the same.

Gingerly, not wanting to overdue it quite yet, Kakashi swings his legs over the edge of the bed and wriggles his toes against the cream colored carpet. He waits a minute, letting limbs adjust to his weight slowly. He doesn’t really need to, or want to really to feel okay, but Gai is just on the other side of the wall and suspiciously in-tune with Kakashi when he’s in a bad place. He calls again, softly, hoping that he won’t hear. Because he’s in a bad place. He’s been in a bad place for years.

“Kashi?” Gai calls out and Kakashi hears his footsteps coming down the short hallway, heavy because he’s home and not on a mission where he has to worry about hiding. He doesn’t follow up with an “are you awake?” or a “did you say something?” He heard.

His form fills the doorway, tall, dark-skinned and dark-eyed and dressed in the pale green yukata with a brown tie he wears at home, feet bare. Some people, the girls especially, seem to think that Gai wears the jumpsuit and leg warmers all the time, like an actual second skin. Kakashi thinks that if one of them ever saw him, standing in the door all hopeful eyes and toffee skin exposed as the neckline widens with every movement he makes, then they wouldn’t giggle like he’s something funny to look at. If Gai makes him laugh, it’s because Gai knows what he finds funny.

Kakashi has to hand it to him. No one handles him better than Gai. He might even go so far as to say he understands, but that’s taking them to a place he’s not ready to go. Kakashi and Gai are good at pretending, after all.

“Gai,” he croaks out in response, rolling his shoulders so that his stiff joints crack a little. Gai pads across the room and crouches directly in front of him. Kakashi thinks that’s a little unnecessary considering he was nothing more than a kid in their eyes. He’s knew that. He was already sickening of the weird looks he got from people in the missions office. They were curious, but always cautious, oh so very cautious, confused and awed. They didn’t know what to make of his presence. But since he was there and they had to do something with him, they immediately went for the D-rank pile of missions, most likely wondering if there weren’t any E-rank missions they could give him until he grew tall enough to make it past an adult’s waist. He looked like a genin imposter standing next to teammates twice his age.

And his teammates, they didn’t like him at all. They didn’t understand how he could be better than they are so soon. They didn’t understand how he was able to go longer and faster and harder without complaining. They didn’t understand how strange it felt to look up at everyone and everything all the time.

Kakashi’s neck hurt from looking up so much. He’s always been a little boy looking up at daddy- Obito’s words, not his. One of the last things he ever heard him say besides, “don’t mess it up, Kakashi-kun. Don’t. . . .mess with the healing process,” he hears Gai saying, probing at Kakashi’s chakra with his own. His is strong and steady, Kakashi’s frail and lethargic. “You’re still on the mend, you know.”

He wriggles his toes again, realizing that they’re more than a little bit on the numb side. Most of his limbs are numbed, the result of the fatigued crawl of chakra through his network. The more he wriggles them, the more feeling returns to his feet in the sharp pinpricks of the dead coming back to life.

They are eye level, he and Gai, a menagerie of brown and grey and black and red all come together. Kakashi has always been of the firm opinion that Gai has beautiful eyes. It’s not because they’re exceptionally colored or unique or even capable of capturing attention from across a room. They’re simple and steady and when they’re alone, not filled with any kind of god-awful pity or the deeper than mere admiration glances she tosses at him. He tried his best to dodge those. The giggles were part of it, too, and the blush that spreads across Rin’s face whenever, on rare occasion, he says her name. The way the Fourth looked at him made him uncomfortable too and the way he called him Kakashi-kun puts knots in his stomach.

After two years with his team he still doesn’t understand what the Third had in mind when he put Kakashi with a bunch of genin. The principle, that he understand. They were all afraid he’d lose it, just like his father and mother. They were all afraid that something had gone wrong and that they were somehow responsible for fixing him.

That’s what Kakashi didn’t understand. When the mechanics are broken down, their intentions don’t align with the probability. They were trying to fix something that no longer existed, like trying to put air back together after you’ve exhaled. Oxygen and carbon dioxide. He made it a point to take in more than he let out, so that eventually people forgot about the old Kakashi. He didn’t like that Kakashi, the one who was the spitting image of his father. He’s never going to be like that. He didn’t want that face, that name, that association. He vowed not to make the same mistakes.

Rin didn’t see that. Rin saw adventure, excitement, mystery, and all that other romantic crap that girls talk about. The Fourth did, though. He looked right through the mask and saw all of the things he wasn’t supposed to see. Then he smiled as if telling him to let out a bigger breath of air. Because the truth is, it’s a little hard to breathe through cloth. It rustles as Gai drops from a crouch into a kneel. Kakashi is taller now. He doesn’t like that, so he lets his knees give out and slides down on front of Gai on the floor, the rest of his limbs coming alive again with the sudden movement.

Gai doesn’t have time to say no before Kakashi presses his lips to his. It would be light, chaste if Kakashi were capable of such innocuousness. This is anything but chaste. “Kakashi,” he chastises as he pulls back, wishing they don’t have to go there but living with the otherwise as Kakashi follows the movement, still pretending innocence. From there, all he can do is be gentle for as long as possible and hope Kakashi will follow along. Pale, shaking hands slip inside his yukata as Gai unties the belt for him. It falls to the ground behind him, the edges still touching his toes.

Kakashi doesn’t care about getting his own tank top off. That’s inconsequential. He cares more about the pants he’s having trouble finding the waist line of through half-numb, half seizing muscles. Somewhere along the line Gai takes pity on him and helps ease them down his waist. He trails kisses that he can’t actually feel down his neck and Kakashi runs hands down the toffee colored skin that silly little girls seem to laugh at, confident that there have been times when he could feel the scar Gai has just under his shoulder blade. Right now he only knows it’s there because Gai hisses as he passes over it, just like he always does.

Quickly, too quickly, Gai is inside of him and Kakashi is the one hissing. He knew it would hurt. That was the point. He wasn’t anticipating that it would hurt quite that much, but every once in a while life handed him a pleasant surprise.

He was down on his hands and knees, leaves crunching beneath sweaty palms. There was a searing pain in his ass, so bad effectively made him go numb. Blood trickled down his thighs; he felt the hot, stickiness of it drying as quickly as it fell. He felt, heard his skin tearing from the wide, thick, horribly uncomfortable intrusion.

Kakashi had no idea what his name was. His mind runs through all the letters of the alphabet but comes up with nothing familiar. He’s twenty, twenty-five, thirty, Kakashi can’t remember that either. He’s old enough to be called a child molester, but that’s not fair. Kakashi asked for the dick thrusting roughly in and out of him so hard that he had to run away from it. He thought of his mother instead of the nameless ANBU, realized that he barely remembered her face, thought of Obito’s empty eye socket and partially crushed skull and realized that that man had no reason to care about whether or not Kakashi got anything out of it besides a sore back or a disease. Because something went wrong, like it always did, the mechanics out of whack. The only semen on the forest floor belonged to the man behind him.

It’s the best he felt in a long time.

When he cums, back bent awkwardly against the bed with Gai’s chest hovering inches from his, its in unison with the paroxysms of his muscles. As everything seizes up at once and Gai peppers little kisses on his shoulder in an apology he didn’t ask for but makes Gai feel like a saint, Kakashi realizes that he’s crying from his eye, the tears silent, but steady.

If Gai notices the hot liquid on his neck, he pretends not to.


TBC