Running Nowhere

Written in honor of Kakashi on his birthday.
Beta'd by Plot Afficianado.


“That’s decidedly unhealthy,” Gai informed him as he plopped down on the couch, next to an irate ANBU who sent him a glare that would have killed a lesser man. Kakashi could only send him a sympathetic look and shrug. He had no words. None that would work, anyway.

The door not quite slammed on his way out.

“Like I said,” Gai continued blithely, waving goodbye to the man he’d scared off. “The way you have sex. It’s not good for you.”

Kakashi affixed his friend, a term that was debatable at the moment, with the flattest stare he could manage in the wake of the pain between his legs and the headache he could predict would arrive shortly. He didn’t feel like having this argument again.

“Felt pretty good before you barged in and ordered us to, what was it?” He leaned against the door, listening to his partner’s footsteps recede down the hallway. “Call a ‘cease-fuck’?”

“Got your attention, didn’t I?” Gai smiled disarmingly, putting Kakashi on alert. Seemingly, Gai was doing nothing more than reveling in his cleverness. Kakashi supposed, act aside, that he ought to let him have it. It was only every once in a blue moon that Gai managed to be truly clever, and not the pithy kind of clever he threw out in order to catch up with Kakashi’s wit. He ought to let him have a moment.

Of course, Kakashi had given up on “ought to.” His principles involved following his instincts, especially because he was only allowed certain instincts – kill, maim, slay, tear – in ANBU. So Kakashi said whatever he felt, did whatever he wanted on his own time. Especially on his own time after a three day long mission behind a porcelain mask. Kakashi wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. He was horny, hornier than he’d been when he’d started, and ready to come down from the high. Gai ought to respect his ritual instead of breaking in and interrupting, but noooooooo. Gai wanted to have a fight.

“You made him bite my dick in surprise, but yeah, I’m fine.”

Gai’s eyes widened in concern. “I did? Are you in pain?”

Kakashi raised his eyebrows. That wasn’t in line the last five minutes. But that was Gai: He never did exactly what Kakashi expected of him the third time around. Other nights, there might have been a smirk on his lips, a smirk that Kakashi taught him how to do and when. That was how they kept going, their thin balance of give and take and of knowing only that they could count on each other and not how or when. So he didn’t tell Gai that pain was an understatement or that his entire lower body was in a slow burn, because that might invoke Sympathy and Sincerest Apologies. He just shrugged, hoping to leave well enough alone.

Gai jumped to his feet, fists clenched in a gesture that meant he was either about to literally try to knock Kakashi’s sense, which he’d lost somewhere down the road, back into him, or launch into a proclamation of his Sincerest Apologies. Normally, he would have tolerated either sentiment, just because violence and declarations made them friends in the first place, and Kakashi liked nostalgia on certain occasions. Normally. Tonight, the ache in his groin propelled him across the room and into Gai’s personal space. He wasn’t waiting to find out what kind of mood his friend was in tonight.

“Don’t,” Kakashi ordered as he clamped his hand over Gai’s mouth. “Unless you want to help me finish, you need to go so that I can jack off in peace.”

Lips moved under his hand. Kakashi attempted to ignore the feeling the movement sent skittering through his nerve endings. He pulled his hand away, grey eye narrowed to warn Gai against saying something stupid. Gai never meant to say stupid things, but the fact remained that he usually did. “What’s that?” Kakashi asked, without wanting to know.

“I said,” Gai repeated, as Kakashi stepped back, putting some distance between them, “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d just quit.”

And they were back, interlude of familiarity cut short by the point he came to make. Tonight, Gai didn’t believe in “ought” either.

Kakashi’s eye glinted dangerously, jaw tightening. “I’m not,” he said in the don’t fuck with me voice that’s made him a terror in inner-circles, “in the mood for this, Gai.”

Gai stared back levelly. Gai never had been afraid of him. “I know what you’re in the mood for,” he said, not flinching when Kakashi closed the gap he’d opened. “But he’s gone now, and you didn’t even know his name. What was his name, Kakashi?”

That wasn’t fair. No one in ANBU knew a real name. “Does it matter?” he challenged. They were toe to toe, nearly chest to chest, and Kakashi could smell Gai. Spicy and sweet, familiar and far away.

“To who?” Gai questioned, the edge in his voice sharp. Because they both knew that he cared. Gai cared three years ago when he declined the invitation to the Torture and Interrogation Squad and Kakashi accepted, and he still cared now. He cared enough to break into Kakashi’s apartment in the middle of the night and get another man out of his bed, just to prove some goddamned point. “You could have come over. You know you can.”

“The past is the past,” Kakashi said immediately. Like he always did. “Let’s leave it there, okay?”

“You only keep saying that,” Gai objected, steeling his resolve even more by tilting his head in a show of defiance, “because neither of us believes it.” He stepped even closer, bringing them flush and tempting Kakashi in a way he really didn’t want to be tempted. Gai couldn’t do his kind of after mission sex, he’s already proven that. Gai wanted to stay the night. Kakashi wanted room to breathe and fall apart after he let go of the all the pent up adrenaline, the excess energy humming through his veins. Gai didn’t understand that the first time around. Kakashi had to kick him out, yelling, screaming, hitting and barely shutting the door before he collapsed on the floor.

“Let it go,” Kakashi murmured, clenching his fist to keep it at his side instead of in Gai’s hair where he wanted it to be.

“What was his name, Kakashi?”

“Let it go, Gai,” he said louder. Gai’s hand was less than an inch away from the waistline of the sweatpants he’d hastily thrown on. “Let it go and leave me alone.”

Gai shook his head, tossing the spicy-sweet scent of whatever he’d eaten around Kakashi’s head. It was dizzying. “You’re always alone. It’s not any better for you now than it was then.” He slipped his knee between Kakashi’s legs. Cloth brushed against his erection in a way that made him hiss. Before he knew which way was up, Gai’s leg hooked behind his knee and let gravity take them both down to the floor. Hard to the floor.

“What’s his name?” Gai said above him, pinning his arms above his head by the wrists. It reminded Kakashi of the first time they had sex, only in reverse.

“Get off,” Kakashi ground out, pushing up only to find that the motion rubbed his clothed erection against Gai’s thigh. He bit down a groan. Gai wasn’t right. Gai hadn’t been right for the past three years.

“What’s his name, Kakashi?” Gai ground out just as harshly. The last time Kakashi heard Gai talk like that, the dark-haired man, boy really, had been slitting a man’s throat shortly after saving his life. Shortly after that he gave Kakashi a thumbs-up and declared they’d be rivals until the day one of them died, because, as Gai put it just before Kakashi passed out, “this isn’t the day.”

They were boys then. They were men now. And there was Gai, still trying to pull him back from something.

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know!” Kakashi finally shouted, sick of Gai hovering over him without touching him the way he wanted to be touched, the way he was being touched before Gai scared whoever the hell’d been blowing him out the door, leaving only Gai in the tight sleep shirt he’d come over in, frustratingly close to his naked torso. “I don’t know what his name was, Gai, okay?” He arched his back, attempting to press closer to the finely muscled body above him. He remembered Gai’s body, more vividly now than in any of the passing thoughts he had each time he said no to one of Gai’s invitations to find him after a mission. God, he wanted to say yes to those invitations. God, he was saying yes now, wasn’t he, rubbing against his ex-boyfriend like this? “Just get off. Fuck me or get off.”

He realized how desperate he sounded, but he didn’t care. Neither of them sounded much like themselves, with Gai grinding out his words through his teeth instead of shouting them through the rooftops. So he let himself whimper when Gai shifted his knee enough that the press was no longer painful. He arched, the slow burn morphing into a racing heat, like the adrenaline in his body right after a kill.

“If I give you what you want,” Gai said warningly, dropped his weight to his elbows and finally, finally giving Kakashi the contact he wanted. “I’m not leaving afterwards like what’s-his-face and all the other guys you let into your bed. I’m going to be here in the morning.”

Kakashi had forgotten that there was a reason Gai had to be wrong.

He squirmed again, which turned out to be quite counterproductive but felt soooo good that he did it again, and again and again until he couldn’t remember why Gai was wrong for voicing his concern time after time.

Honestly, he ought to know his ANBU partner’s name. It wasn’t even that he forgot. He just didn’t know, didn’t bother to ask after the masks came off, before teeth gnashed. He never asked any of the men he let fuck him for their names, preferring anonymity. Then it was over once they were gone. He didn’t have to let them see what comes after.

Kakashi explained himself a few months after he threw Gai out of his apartment, explained why the Kakashi that Gai dated wasn’t, couldn’t be, the same Kakashi after a mission. Gai had nodded, pulled down his mask and kissed him, which Kakashi says he allowed but in retrospective knew he had no choice in the matter.

“It’s not what you’re doing,” Gai went on, lips still touching his. “It’s who you’re doing it with. God forbid one day, Kakashi, god forbid one day you have a real breakdown all alone in your apartment and there’s no one there to bring you back.” He kissed him again, chastely, and then backed up, towards the door. “The way you have sex, it’s not good for you. And I’m scared for you,” he said in the quiet voice he’d used in their curious fifteen-year-old fumbling, the last syllable disappearing through the door with him.

To this day, Kakashi still wasn’t sure where Gai had meant for the emphasis to land.

Gai took in a sharp breath, the same one he made the first time Kakashi slipped a hand between his legs. Kakashi felt Gai’s bulge against his, pushing up and into it, loving and hating the friction that drove him crazy.

“You’re gonna stay, then?” Kakashi panted out between breaths, wondering why he bothered to ask. He was there now, wasn’t he? Gai was always there, the morning after or in the middle of the night, being a nuisance to make sure Kakashi came back, and hoping that he wouldn’t go there alone again.

Really, he’d always been there. Kakashi had just been too busy running into someone else that he didn’t notice he wasn’t being chased. You can’t run from something that doesn’t leave.

“Yes,” Gai said, as steadily as he could while getting a friction fuck on the living room floor of the apartment he spent whole nights outside of, waiting to hear something go bad inside. “I’m going to stay.”

Nodding, or giving in, whichever sounded better in hindsight, Kakashi let his head fall to the side and changed the angle of his hips for better contact. Gai was hot through the cloth. “Okay, then,” he said, not bothering to hold back the groan that came when Gai rubbed harder. “Okay.”

Kakashi closed his eyes as a shudder ran down his spine, not seeing the relieved smile on his friend’s lips. “Okay,” Gai said softly, releasing Kakashi’s wrists. Hands free, Kakashi threaded one sweaty palm through Gai’s dark hair, the other down his spinal cord, coming to rest at the small of his back. Gai’s hand moved to Kakashi’s face, pulling the mask down unceremoniously. They’d already had that ceremony. He was no stranger to Kakashi’s angled chin or feather light jaw line, both of which he kissed before moving on to the lips he missed.

If Kakashi remembered correctly, Gai was the last person he kissed. Kakashi hadn’t mixed sex with kissing since Gai offered to take the place of the older men he’d been letting screw him, and he hadn’t renewed the practice when the first time had gone awry. Gai, though, Gai might have been kissing the last couple of years. He certainly wasn’t having trouble finding each and every place in his mouth that made him sigh into it, wishing they were both a tad bit more naked and a great deal sweatier. But that was luck. Gai couldn’t have remembered. They were fourteen the first time they went for the tongue. And Gai couldn’t have remembered the first time they tried necking, how sensitive the juncture of his neck and shoulder was, or even at fifteen the first time Gai bit there, drawing blood.

He hissed at the feel of Gai’s teeth and lips, lips then teeth, on his neck, hands making their way up and under Gai’s shirt. He found sweat there, letting his hands slide over the planes of his broad back. Every sloppy, slick kiss to his neck pushed him a bit too close to the edge and every bite made him want more of his lips. He was close to cumming, had been close to cumming before they even started. He knew he wasn’t going to last much longer if Gai kept moving down his body like that, flicking his tongue out as he went.

Gai went to work around his navel, briefly dipping in and out. Kakashi sucked in air through his teeth when Gai dragged his mouth even lower, playing with the hipbones exposed as his pants were tugged down just like his mask, hastily and casually, like this was a normal thing they did despite the fact that they hadn’t been together in three years.

Kakashi mentally berated himself for still counting years, and concentrated instead on the breath on his cock, now twitching from the temperature change. Gai just breathed down there for a minute, all hot and cold air and frustration. Terribly good frustration.

“Gai,” he exhaled, watching him through his lidded grey eye. He wasn’t begging. Kakashi did not beg.

Gai thought it was close enough.

His head nearly slammed back into the floor when Gai took his cock, all of his cock, into his mouth at once. Right then and there he knew that Gai had been doing more than kissing during their time apart, and he was going to have to talk to him later about that piece of missing information. But not now. Right now, all Kakashi could get out was Gai’s name and not even that came out right. It was broken up and ragged, moments of it nothing but air with no sound attached and the rest of it close to a whimper. It would have been humiliating if Gai hadn’t chosen that moment to slide up his erection, using his teeth, and then down again.

Kakashi’s voice caught in his throat as he came.

And fuck if Gai didn’t swallow.

Hands going into spasms in Gai’s hair and on his shoulder, Kakashi milked the sensation of hot, wet mouth for all it was worth while Gai milked him, hands roaming his torso without holding him down, letting him buck into his throat.

One of them moaned, Kakashi wasn’t sure who.

Gai crawled back up when Kakashi’s orgasm finished, kissing his temple instead of his lips. Kakashi felt Gai’s neglected and still clothed erection at the juncture of his thigh. “Should I?” he mumbled through uncooperative lips, tugging at his pants to finish the question.

“No.” Gai watched Kakashi’s eye glaze over slightly, trying hard to focus before he went under and started mumbling the same nonsensical words about the smell and taste of blood that Gai usually heard through the door. “I’m fine, Kakashi.”

Kakashi nodded, whispering something that sounded vaguely like “in the morning.”

***

When Kakashi wakes up in the morning and asks how he got from the floor to his bed, Gai will say that he sleep-walked and that he did not, would not under any circumstance, carry him to bed.

Kakashi will not believe him, but he’ll throw the covers back anyway and tell him to get his ass off the couch before the arm gives him a crick in the neck.

It’s not like Gai was going to leave, so why the hell not?


Fin