Work Text:
On the morning that he found out he was in love, Kakashi woke up to the sunshine pouring in through his window, ambled into the bathroom, and hacked up a single red chrysanthemum into the sink.
He stared at it for a long time. He knew what it meant, obviously. There was only one reason why a man who hadn’t previously eaten a floral arrangement could be spitting out whole flowers. Besides which, he read more than enough trashy romance novels to be familiar with the trope. He'd actually picked up a really good fuck-or-die story last year that featured it heavily in the B plot—lots of drama, confused identities, the works. In the end, the secondary lead realized that the mysterious stranger she'd fallen ass over tits for was actually her childhood friend and secret crush all along. There was a beautifully heartfelt confession ending with really very good descriptions of cunnilingus.
Kakashi picked up the bloom, turning it around in his fingers beneath the bathroom lights.
In real life, hanahaki was rarely fatal. Most of the casualties were from health complications—asthma was a big one, and in a few awful cases, severe pollen allergy. No one in their right mind would choose to die over confessing their love to someone. Rejection was scary, sure, but it wasn’t that scary.
Of course, Kakashi thought, looking at his maskless reflection pale and unfamiliar in the mirror, there were plenty of people who weren’t in their right minds. And depressed people were twice as likely to present hanahaki symptoms, or so the flyers at the hospital said.
The broad, thin-lipped mouth that reminded him so much of his father’s twisted into a grimace. Then Kakashi pulled the hem of his undershirt back up over his face, rendering it familiar and comfortable again. He smiled at himself. This was a simple problem with a simple solution: he’d just confess.
Easy. He just had to figure out whom to confess to.
Kakashi arrived in the jonin lounge with the afternoon sun at his back, carrying his second cup of coffee with him. He didn’t drink the lounge coffee. He didn’t trust it. Call it paranoia or call it experience; he brought his own cup.
Kakashi considered himself a very well adjusted jonin, by the standards of his generation. And by his generation, he really meant the veterans about ten years older than him, with whom he’d served as a preteen. Most of them had lost important people during the third war, and few of them had really recovered from it. Kakashi, by comparison to that grim group of colleagues, was actually doing quite alright. Just because the rest of the kids in his graduating class didn’t quite understand…
Anyway, he was doing fine. He had work friends. He knew Asuma and Kurenai well enough to hang out with them during the second phase of the chuunin exams a few weeks ago. He was still on good terms with the ANBU team he’d captained, after everything, and they went out for drinks occasionally. Shopkeepers liked him. He’d even survived getting genin, after dreading it for years.
Kakashi had gone about his morning routine with the hanahaki conundrum on his mind, mixing instant coffee and wandering from room to room, picking up loose laundry. It didn’t seem likely that he would be the type to fall in love like that, so madly and deeply that it was killing him from the inside. He kept it mellow. Laidback, even.
If he was in love with someone, wouldn’t he know?
He knew a lot of people. Mentally, he went through his rolodex of possible confessees.
Kurenai? That would be tragic enough to work. She’d been hung up on Asuma for years, barely dating anyone else even while he was away serving on the royal guard at the capital. Kakashi hadn’t really thought he liked women in that way, but he supposed it would be reasonable—she was very beautiful, any way you sliced it.
There he had paused in front of the bookshelf, contemplating a title he hadn’t read yet with half his attention. On the other hand, maybe it was Asuma? Asuma had rugged good looks and a gruff charisma that you could hardly blame anyone for falling for. And it would be equally tragic, given the way he obviously reciprocated Kurenai’s devotion.
Alright, easy enough to solve this. He’d just confess to both and see if one stuck.
So here he was, in the jonin lounge, dropping into the seat in the window across from Asuma and Kurenai. It had been nice hanging out with them during the chuunin exams. Nice to talk to some other first-time sensei. They’d had a good time humble-bragging about their kids and trying to one-up each other with work stories. Maybe it really was one of them.
“Oh!” Kurenai said, turning to him, “Kakashi! How are you?”
“Hmm,” Kakashi considered this question briefly. “Been worse.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you have,” Asuma said. He smiled in a way that hinted at pity, but Kakashi didn’t particularly care if people pitied him, so long as they listened to him when he gave orders. Asuma always listened. Asuma had always taken Kakashi seriously, even when Kakashi hadn't returned the courtesy.
It was funny. Kakashi had gone to school with Asuma for a year, but he never felt he really knew the man until he came back from the capital, chain-smoking and just a little too worldly for the small town that grew him, showing glimpses of a steel core that had lain buried through most of his childhood. If anything, it was Kakashi who had underestimated Asuma all those years.
He was good for Kurenai. Kurenai had a gentle strength that brought out the best in people. She was patient, when she needed to be, and held her opinions with a steely resolve that sometimes dismayed those who knew her less well. She deserved a man who wouldn't hold her back.
It would really be a shame to come between them, Kakashi thought; or at least it would have been if he had any chance with them at all. As it stood, the worst-case scenario was probably some awkward laughs and gentle let-downs, and then all would be right with the world again.
Kakashi looked firmly at the wall to the right, at the window he’d come in through, and shrugged vaguely with his coffee cup in hand. “So listen, it was nice spending time with you both last month. It made me think about how you’ve always been good friends to me, even when I was ungrateful for it.”
Both of them stared at him wide eyed.
Kakashi rubbed the back of his neck, trying not to be embarrassed about this. It was just verbal affirmation, right? He gave positive feedback to his students sometimes, this wasn’t any different.
“Anyway,” he said, without looking at them, “Kurenai, I love you. You’re a good sensei and a good friend. I’m lucky to know you.”
“Oh…” Kurenai said. “Kakashi…”
He touched his chest and cleared his throat, testing. The short cough turned into a longer one, which he quickly hid behind his hand. He tasted something floral on the back of his palette, and grimaced. He dropped his hand, tonguing a single loose petal into his cheek.
“Asuma, you as well,” he said. “You have integrity, and you inspire respect. I love you.”
Ugh, that felt like setting his own dislocated shoulder. When he glanced over at them, Kurenai was clasping her hands in front of her mouth, and Asuma’s cigarette was starting to slide out of his slack lips. He caught it with an uncharacteristic fumble and shoved it back in his mouth, leaving his hand there as if to hide his face.
Kakashi sighed. The itch in his throat wasn’t any better. So much for that theory. He stood up, turned away, and took a sip of his coffee to soothe the scratch.
“That was all,” he said, pulling his mask back up. “See you around.”
He was halfway out the window when Kurenai called after him. He paused, despite his reluctance, and looked back.
She was smiling at him, big and sparkling. “I never thought—I’m just so glad to hear—”
“I wasn’t even sure if you liked us,” broke in Asuma. “I’d resigned myself to never knowing. Maybe you’d say something if you were bleeding out on the battlefield. ‘Hey, Asuma, after all these years I should really tell you that you’re almost tolerable—’”
Kakashi hummed. “I think that’d be leaving it a little late, don’t you?”
Asuma frowned. “Yeah, but—”
Kurenai made some kind of gesture at Asuma behind her back. “Are you doing some kind of emotional honesty challenge with Gai?” she asked, still beaming.
His heart gave an uncomfortable twist, but he just returned her smile. “Ah, no,” he said. “Gai isn’t really in the mood for challenges right now, as you can imagine.”
“...Oh.” Kurenai’s face dropped. “No. Of course.”
“So. This challenge is just for me,” Kakashi said, lightly, and then left the way he’d come: through the third floor window, without warning, coffee cup clutched in his hand.
If one was to consult the mental rolodex, there was, of course, the obvious next option.
Natural that Kurenai would bring him up. Any time Kakashi was a topic on offer, Gai was only a bullet point behind. And if you didn’t think to include him, he’d just include himself.
Gai, who had supported Kakashi, protected Kakashi, and vouched for Kakashi all these years, while Kakashi struggled to keep his head above water. Gai, who had made himself irrevocably a part of Kakashi’s life, no matter how little Kakashi had wanted it at first. Impossible not to consider it. Especially because he was 90% sure that Gai had been harboring deeper feelings about him for most of the last ten years, if not longer. Ten percent wiggle room to account for the possibility that Kakashi was a deluded egotist reading too much into Gai's natural exuberance and loyalty, seeing signs where there were none.
But he thought not.
If one was going by order of proximity, Kakashi ought to have already gone and said the words to him. Anyone who knew his current situation would have asked about it immediately; the two of them were almost inseparably a unit in the eyes of the village. It would be expected.
But he couldn't, not to Gai. It would be too cruel. Kakashi couldn't play with his feelings like that, just to check a box, because Gai would believe him.
Kakashi dropped into the seat next to Tenzo in the commissary at the ANBU barracks. It was homey. Familiar. The lack of overhead lighting made it impossible as always to tell what was floating in the soup.
"Senpai," Tenzo sighed, "you know you're not supposed to be here."
"Don't be like that," Kakashi said. "Aren't you happy to see me?"
"This building is strictly for ANBU personnel," Tenzo said. "How did you even get in?"
"How cold, Tenzo. And when I'm just coming here to tell you that I love you?"
Tenzo gave him a very dry look. "Are you dying, Senpai?"
"Yes," Kakashi said, fluttering his lashes sadly.
Tenzo snorted, smiled to himself, and shoved the last dumpling across the tabletop towards Kakashi. "Well alright," he said, "I love you too."
Kakashi took the dumpling, tugged his mask away just enough, and dropped it into his mouth. Yum. "This is why you're my favorite Kohai," he said, once he'd swallowed. And then he started coughing.
Wet petals and broken stems scratched and caught at his windpipe. Tenzo leant over and banged him in the back a couple times, with a worried expression.
"Don't eat so fast," Tenzo chastised him. "I'm not looking and I don't care. You can just eat like a normal person."
Kakashi cleared his throat one more time and surreptitiously removed the blossom of a red chrysanthemum from his tongue.
"You know me," he said, "I have to do things the hard way."
He didn't think it was likely, but it also wasn't very hard, so—Kakashi took his morning walk out to the cenotaph where all his first friends were memorialized and spent an hour telling them that he loved them.
"Sensei," he said, "I love you. No? Thank god, that would be too strange. I know your son."
"Rin," he said, "I love you. Sorry, though, I don't think that did it. Well, you probably already knew how I loved you. You were always smarter than I was, in that way."
"Obito, I love you," he said. And then he swallowed thickly, surprised by how much it cost him to say that. "I really should have told you before you were gone, but I don't think I even knew it, then."
For a moment, he let his head drop, thinking hard.
Then the itch of petals in his throat started up again, and he spat out vibrant petals with a rough sigh.
"Alright," he said, "since I'm here already, who else..."
Kakashi got through professing his love to two more members of his former ANBU squad (one living, one dead) with no results, before hesitating on the final one. He had really been hoping it would be someone else—confessing your love to a woman who had just lost her fiancé was garish even by soap opera standards.
When Kakashi found her, she was walking the market like it was an enemy fortress, with a bag on her shoulder full of cabbage. Yugao was easily visible anywhere in the village that she went, with her long purple hair swaying loose behind her. Even out of her ANBU armor, she cut an intimidating figure with her high posture and long strides. She'd been on bereavement leave since the conclusion of Orochimaru's invasion, which was a thing now, apparently. Kakashi didn't remember anyone offering it to him when he lost Minato-Sensei. But then, well, would he have taken it if they did?
Of course not. What would he have done with leave, stand twice as long in front of the cenotaph? He'd have caught pneumonia for sure.
"Yo, Yugao," he said, lifting a hand to wave at her from the other side of the fruit stand. "Got a second?"
She lifted her head from the spring gourd she was scrutinizing and blinked at him. Then she softened a little around her brittle edges. "Captain," she said, "one moment."
They ended up standing together in the shade across the street, shopping bags around their feet, as she meticulously sorted coins into her little change purse with a thousand pockets.
"How are you holding up?" Kakashi asked, as he watched the shoppers come and go at a stall with bright red strawberries spilling out of their baskets.
"...You know how it is," Yugao said, quietly. "Some days it's like nothing changed at all, and some days he’s all I can think about."
"I know," Kakashi said.
There was a quiet clink, clink of coins falling into pockets.
"I wanted to tell you..." Kakashi started, and then paused. He thought about the years that they had worked together, how he had watched her blossom into a deadly and confident soldier, how she had emulated and, in some ways, ultimately surpassed him. How young she had seemed to him when she joined Team Ro, eighteen and already five years older than he had been when he joined ANBU. So determined, and so serious, and so mortal.
He thought about her white flowers on the cenotaph, and Hayate, whom she had adored.
"You wanted to tell me that you love me?" she suggested.
Kakashi whipped around to stare at her and found her smirking at him. First gently, and then wider as she realized she'd truly caught him off guard.
"Tenzo told me," she said, and then shook her head with laughter. "He said you're probably trying to make up for lost time, after a big scare like that. Losing a Hokage again, seeing Itachi grown up, fighting him..." She looked away, smile fading. "If Gai hadn't been there, they tell me I'd be mourning two men instead of one. You never know how many days you have left."
"Yes," Kakashi said, finding his throat unexpectedly hoarse. “I was lucky to have him.” He coughed. He tasted pollen.
Yugao tucked away her purse. "It's good. You should tell the people that you love how much you love them, while you can. You're very brave, Captain, and I've always admired you, but if you’ll pardon me for saying so, you've never been good at loving people on time. I'm proud of you for doing it now."
There was a horrible sinking sensation sucking at Kakashi's insides as he stood there, hands in pockets, and took the praise. It was as if his heart was being pulled down into a heavy depth where the weight of everything he wasn't threatened to crush it like paste.
Yugao turned to him, crossed her arms, and smiled again.
"So go ahead," she said. "Say it."
Kakashi swallowed. "I love you," he said, and meant it.
He didn't need the scratch of stems and leaves against his lungs to tell him it only made him feel worse.
Kakashi checked into the hospital.
Contrary to popular belief, Kakashi was a good patient. A friendship with Rin in his formative years had instilled in him the seriousness of letting medics have their way, and he was grateful to the work that had gone into patching him up over the years—not just sewing his severed bits back into place, but hooking him up to the IV and guarding his body while he recovered from chakra exhaustion.
With Tsunade back in the village, now, the hospital was a hive of energy. Her presence invigorated the whole institution, and so it took Kakashi a while to be seen by someone in all the hubbub. Eventually his patience paid off.
"Really?" said his usual doctor, pausing with his stethoscope pressed to Kakashi's chest. "Hanahaki? You?"
Kakashi gave him a mildly scathing look. "Unless I'm suddenly starting to hallucinate flowers in my windpipe, yes."
"...No, I shouldn't be surprised," the doctor said, after a moment, "you have a romantic disposition, underneath everything."
"Thanks," Kakashi said, dryly. "Can I have a prognosis now, please?"
The doctor paused and squinted into the middle distance, listening to Kakashi's somewhat rattled breathing. He gently pushed Kakashi's mouth open with a tongue-depressor and peered into the opening. Then he stood back.
"In fact, I think this is a side effect of stress from the Mangekyo Sharingan," his doctor said. "I don't mean that you're hallucinating. I mean that what happened to you was an enormous stress on your chakra network, as well as your soul."
Kakashi touched his chest, where the wheezing effort of his lungs was now noticeable even to himself.
His doctor turned away, dropping the tongue-depressor in a bin. "Hanahaki is a bit like a cancer of the chakra network. The way that damaged skin is more likely to form melanoma, a damaged chakra network is more likely to respond to emotional distress by manifesting matter from your own reserves. What you went through with Itachi primed your body to go into overdrive at the first sign of further emotional stress."
Kakashi said nothing. He was glaring down at his chest as if it had betrayed him on purpose.
"So who's the source of all this?" his doctor asked. "If it's a matter of Village Security, we're going to need to get IntelOps involved."
"What makes you think it's anything like that?" Kakashi said. Mentally he paged back through the foreign nin he had interacted with positively in the past year. Lots of foreign jonin sensei were in town for the chuunin exam, but he hadn't really struck up a connection with any of them. Really, he'd been too preoccupied with Gai—
Kakashi absently coughed and spat a pink flower into the bin that his doctor held out for him.
"You came to me," his doctor said, "which means you didn't just sort it out the usual way. If it's not someone you can safely confess to, then it's either a matter of politics, local politics, or chivalry. And I've never thought of you as the chivalrous type."
"Ah," Kakashi said, and smiled, "I'm wounded."
"Whoever it is," his doctor said, unimpressed, "you're going to need to spit it out pretty soon. Based on this timeline, and the state of your throat, you've probably only got a week before you start having serious health complications. It's going to keep you out of the field, too."
Kakashi startled. "What? Why?"
"First of all," his doctor ticked off a gloved finger, "have you tried running and fighting with pneumonia before? Try a lung full of plant matter. Second of all, each time you pull on your chakra network, it's going to get worse. If you try one of your big flashy jutsu like this, you're going to find yourself immediately struggling to breathe."
For the first time, Kakashi felt less than sanguine about his future with this illness.
"I don't... know," he said, eventually. "Who it is."
His doctor raised a brow. "You don't know."
"I'm not..." Kakashi fished for words. "I'm not pining for anyone. I haven't been looking at photographs and sighing, or any of the things people normally do when they start coughing up flowers."
"Hm. Those are scenes just in stories, though," his doctor said. "Fear of loss or rejection are the most common sources of malignant hanahaki. I know people usually think of it as an issue with romance, but it doesn't have to be."
Kakashi considered what this might mean for him. Of course, no one ever said it had to be romantic love, did they? Sure, it was the popular trope in novels, but fiction was always more salacious than reality.
His doctor shrugged, pulling off his latex gloves one finger at a time. "Any kind of withheld love can do it. Philosophers say it's something to do with the human craving for affection, but the science is still unclear. The best thing you can do is start expressing yourself."
Kakashi grimaced.
"Yes, I know," his doctor said. "How awful for you."
Kakashi stepped out of the examination room, quietly pulling the door closed, and turned to leave—only to find himself stranded in the path of one Might Gai as he barreled down the hallway with a smaller figure hung about his shoulders. Doctors and nurses dove out of his path, the medical carts rattled, and overall, the hospital cleared a path for him to directly bear down on Kakashi, who stood frozen in the hall.
In a last-minute rescue of the situation, Gai skidded to a stop a few feet away, wobbled under his extra weight, and gaped at him.
"Ka—!" belatedly, Gai remembered the sleeping boy on his back and dropped into a still very loud whisper. "Kakashi!"
Kakashi took a step back. "Gai," he said, and smiled at him. "Lee pushed himself too hard again, I see."
The boy slung over Gai's back, with his arms dangling over Gai's shoulders, looked exhausted. No amount of jostling had woken him, and his face had a sunken, drawn quality to it. His bangs were clumped with sweat. Gai turned his face to regard his young charge, and his expression became unbearably tender.
Kakashi looked away.
"I keep telling him to save his strength for the surgery," Gai said, in a voice that was both exasperated and fond. Kakashi knew it well—it was usually directed at him. “It’s only a week away.”
"Yes. He's a very bad patient," Kakashi said. "I wonder where he picked that up from..."
"A few modest pushups in the hospital never hurt anyone," Gai defended, "it's practically physical therapy!"
"No," Kakashi said, not for the first time. "Physical therapy is when the doctor tells you to do pushups. In your case, they're explicitly begging you not to."
Gai scoffed, and then adjusted the snoozing weight with a little hupp.
Kakashi watched him, picking apart every inch of the scene like an archeologist tagging an excavation for archival. The length of Gai's lashes as he blinked, the olive tone of his skin washed out in the hospital lights, his shoulders broad and full under his jumpsuit. Lee, listless and pale, draped over him like a shroud. Kakashi’s closed eyelid flickered under his forehead plate, his sharingan itching to record the way Gai felt almost too big to be contained in a mere hospital hallway.
He thought about it for a moment. The words were on the tip of his tongue.
Then he shook his head, turned away, and called over his shoulder, "I'll send flowers."
“Expressing” himself was not a skill Kakashi had ever trained in, but a fit of asthmatic bronchitis in the field was a dire enough prospect that he was willing to try. He started making a list of people to profess love to.
Genma and Raido—reliable comrades, good men, good friends, and while Kakashi didn’t go out of his way to spend time with them, he admired their steadfastness.
Anko—for all her strangeness, he liked her. She’d suffered in a uniquely cruel way with the betrayal of her shishou, and yet she’d never become cruel. She had a good heart, underneath it all.
Ibiki—well, that was another one that could have been something more if it had taken (though it hadn’t, unfortunately). Kakashi valued loyalty, and Ibiki had it in spades.
At this point, he found that he was stretching it, but ah, might as well try. All the love confessions so far had been taken in good humor, if not without some suspicion. He caught Iruka as well, enjoyed making his eyes bug out, and then moved on to some of the other chuunin he had commanded over the years.
All the while, the raggedness of his breathing increased little by little by little. The thickness in his throat, like unshed tears, and the scratchy unpleasantness of his voice all conspired to remind him that his time was slowly trickling away, and that soon he wouldn’t be able to hide what was happening to him from the world at large. He woke up hacking desperately, eyes watering, spitting the spider-like blossoms onto his floor. In the daylight he coughed frequently, hiding petals and leaves and whole flowers against his cheek, insisting that he’d just picked up a bit of hay fever.
Still, he felt like he was getting better at this. It was just like training, he supposed—eventually you stopped sweating and shaking every time, and started gaining speed on the ones running in front of you. He’d watched Gai do it for enough years, he was familiar with the process.
After a couple days, he ran out of adults and reluctantly faced the fact that the only names left on his list were his own genin team. A team, by the way, who were currently in one of their worst states of tension ever, after trying to kill each other on a hospital rooftop last week.
No one was cleared for missions, and Kakashi hadn’t scheduled them for any group training since the aforementioned Attempted Rooftop Manslaughter incident. So he would just have to find them wherever they were and pull them aside as needed.
First Sakura. She was his favorite, so the praise should come more easily.
“Hey,” he said, sitting down across from her at the table where she was reading a girls’ magazine. The cover promised such topics as “VAMPIRE LOVE” and “FRIENDS OR FRENEMIES?”.
“Oh!” Sakura flushed and snapped the magazine closed, conspicuously covering the text with one hand. “Sensei! What’s up?”
“How’s the vampire comic?” he asked, smiling sunnily at her. “Looks risqué.”
“It’s fine!” she squeaked. “Did you have something you wanted to talk to me about?”
Kakashi rested his chin in his hand. “You’re a great student, you know that?” he asked.
“I—oh,” Sakura stammered. “Um, thank you?”
“When I first met you, you were self-absorbed and arrogant,” he went on, “and you were content to be mediocre at anything that didn’t come naturally to you.”
“O…oh,” Sakura said.
“But you’ve really grown up,” Kakashi said. “You’re brave, compassionate, and resilient. And more than that, you work hard to become the person you want to be. And I love you.”
“Oh—Kakashi-sensei!” she burst out. She flung herself over the table to wrap him in a hug that he only barely stopped himself from dodging. Her arms squeezed him tight, and her face dug into his chest. She was practically lying on the table top, ankles kicking in the air, like a child.
A pang of something hit him in the throat and in the heart, and it wasn’t like flowers at all.
“Aw, hey,” he said, after a moment of gathering himself. “No big deal. I just wanted to tell you.”
She squeezed him once and then drew back, crawling back awkwardly into her previous seat. She fixed her clothes self-consciously, pulling on wrinkles that didn’t really exist. “It means a lot,” she said. Her fingers scrubbed at her seams. “And I know if it means a lot to me, it’ll mean even more to the boys. You’ll tell Naruto too, won’t you? And… and Sasuke, if he’ll listen…”
Kakashi looked at his student, nervously combing through her bright hair with her fingers—worrying so much about her comrades that she couldn’t even take a moment to stand in her own little spotlight with him—and mentally resigned himself to the next few hours of boys.
“Yes, Sakura,” he said, “I’ll tell them too.”
In the path below the park where Sakura had been reading, Kakashi stopped and doubled over, hacking and scraping up seven pale pink chrysanthemums, one after another after another. He was shaking by the time he was done, sweat beading on his cold forehead.
He spat one final petal onto the ground, and then he scuffed up dirt with his foot to cover the evidence.
Over the years, Kakashi had gotten quite used to seeing Gai suddenly pop up in any place without warning. And yet, in the last two years, the frequency of such ambushes had lessened—and then in the last several weeks, ceased entirely. It was therefore with genuine surprise that Kakashi leapt out of the way at the last moment, resorting to a back handspring to avoid being tackled to the ground by his lifelong rival on his way to Naruto’s little apartment.
Gai rolled to his feet without hesitation, more than used to being dodged. As he drew himself back up, Kakashi catalogued the changes in his face—the sunlight flattered him far more than the dim fluorescence of the hospital, but Kakashi could still pick out the tightness in his skin, the lack of restful sleep, a spot where he’d nicked himself shaving.
“Your dive was a bit stiff,” Kakashi said, settling into a slouch. “Been sleeping in the bedside chair again?”
Gai brushed off his shoulder. “Lee had a difficult night, but the nurses have put him on a painkiller now, so he should sleep quite soundly.” Perfection restored, he turned his blinding grin back on Kakashi. "Soooo?" he said.
"So what?" Kakashi said.
Gai skittered a little closer, sideways, like a small animal approaching a cat. Kakashi tracked him warily.
"So," Gai said, "is it my turn?"
Kakashi's mind went blank.
"I heard from Kurenai," Gai said, with delight, as if he was sharing a secret. "About your self challenge! To see you embracing emotional honesty and celebrating the tender bond between comrades truly brings me joy in this dark time! Well, I'm ready! Hit me with it!"
Kakashi stared at him. But not really at him. Mostly through him.
"Nope," he said, and turned on his heel. "Bye."
“I love you,” Kakashi said, pushing the big basket of leafy greens into Naruto’s hands.
The boy looked down at them with a visible grimace, and then did a double take up at him. “Sorry, what was that, Kakashi-sensei?”
“I love you,” he said again. “You’re a good kid, even if you give me grey hairs most of the time.”
“Your hair is already grey,” Naruto said automatically. And then the realization seemed to dawn over him, twisting his face in confusion and uncertainty. “Are you trying to borrow money from me? Because Pervy Sage cleaned me out already, I’m broke. He said he was gonna pay me back, but then he just kept saying that it was coming out of my share of the hotel room!”
Kakashi mentally left himself a note to talk to Jiraiya about fiscal responsibility, on top of all the other kinds of responsibility that he lacked. He'd just got done chiding him about teaching the rasengan. “I’m not trying to borrow money, Naruto, I’ve got plenty of my own.”
“So you…” Naruto looked down at the basket of bok choi and celery and several other leafy, healthy things, similar to those which Kakashi had foisted on him in the past. “So you…”
Kakashi softened. “Yes,” he said, “I love you.”
Naruto looked hard at the basket, as if it contained grave and dire news. He was frowning. His fingers tightened; the woven reeds creaked.
“Is it like…” Naruto said, “...like the way dads feel…?”
Kakashi drew back as instinctively as if he’d been burned. He suddenly felt the yawning absence of Minato-sensei in both their lives, as if a frigid wind had whipped the space between their two crumbling cliff edges, unconnected in a place where there should have been connection. It was a thought he’d fought to put out of his mind for a long time, and to be caught by it now so suddenly was painful.
Naruto flinched. He bent his head, eyes pinched tight. “It’s stupid, forget it. Dads are dads and teachers are teachers, I know it’s not the same.”
“...I do think of you first and foremost as my student,” Kakashi said, picking his words with utmost care. “But if you wanted to think of me as a kind of family, also, I think we would be cousins, maybe. Or brothers.”
Naruto’s head snapped up. His wide blue eyes could not have looked more young, more terrified, more hopeful.
“But people don’t have to be related to you to love you,” Kakashi said, gently. “I’m fortunate that’s true, because I’m an orphan too. And most of my surviving cousins are assholes.”
Naruto startled so hard he dropped the basket—Kakashi lunged forward to catch it, lifting it away to the counter where it would be safe from any more accidental-on-purpose mishaps.
“Kakashi-sensei!! You’re an orphan??”
“Mm. It happens to some people.” Still turned away, he reached into the knife block and pulled out several very dull kitchen knives until he found one moderately acceptable. “After my father died, I was lucky to have a sensei who cared about me. And a good team.”
“How did your—”
“Come on,” Kakashi interrupted, “if you’re so broke, I know you can’t afford Ichiraku. Let’s sauté some bok choi, you’ll see it’s not so bad if you cook it right.”
Gai was waiting for him outside the bookshop on the way home, not so much lurking as bouncing on his toes impatiently like a child waiting for a birthday present. It was extremely obvious he was expecting Kakashi to say something to him as he passed.
“Hey Gai,” Kakashi said, without stopping.
Gai called after him, but Kakashi kept going. It was just like old times.
“I have something important to tell you,” Kakashi said, dropping a hand on Sasuke’s head to muss his hair. “I love you.”
“Ugh,” Sasuke replied. He was visibly repulsed, face twisting up as if he’d seen an Aburame publicly empty their pores of beetles.
“I know, I know,” Kakashi said, “it’s awful being loved, isn’t it.”
“Get off me,” Sasuke said, swiping at Kakashi’s hand until it retreated. All the signs of his previous hospitalization had faded to nothing, but there was a harried, thin look to him that hadn’t been there before Itachi’s reappearance.
Kakashi obligingly drew his hands back and held them up, empty.
“You don’t love me,” Sasuke snapped, furiously finger-combing his hair back into place. “You just don’t want me to do anything counter to your goals, so you’re trying to bribe me with affection. It won’t work. I don’t want affection from you, or anyone.”
Kakashi rocked back on his heels, thinking this over. He had a sort of instinctual understanding of Sasuke, hard to put into words, which came from watching boys like him crash and burn out in ANBU over the years. From watching Itachi, though he’d never tell Sasuke that.
“It is awful being loved,” Kakashi said, after a moment. “Because if someone loves you, then they can be taken away from you. And the moment you admit that you love them in return, you’ve made yourself an open wound that anyone can reach into, at any time, and cut another part of you out.”
“What would you know about it,” Sasuke gritted out.
“Do you remember how I said, I’ve already lost everyone I loved?” Kakashi kept his tone light.
"And so what?" Sasuke snapped. "You don't understand revenge, and you don't understand anything about me."
"I know how worried you were about Naruto, when Itachi was looking for him," Kakashi said. "You ran all the way to a village you'd never visited before, straight from my bedroom. You think I don't understand what that felt like?"
"I only cared about fighting Itachi," Sasuke snarled. "And I was too weak to even do that, just like you were. Just like everyone here was! No one can stand up to him, and no one can stop him, we're all just—" his fists clenched, shaking at his sides, as his molars ground against each other. "—Just living at his whim, because he hasn't decided we're worth killing yet. But he could, he could come back any time he wants! And I wouldn't be able to stop him, because I'm not strong enough!"
By the end of this he was yelling, overcome with rage and the thing behind the rage, which was fear.
Kakashi stood there for a second, watching. Then he got down on his knees, and although Sasuke wasn't quite as short as he had been six months ago, Kakashi reached out and drew him into an embrace. The small body trembled, as tightly tense as a rope pulled between two weights.
"I'm your sensei, and I should have been able to protect you," Kakashi said. "That's on me."
"I don't need you to protect me," Sasuke managed, although his voice was thick and broken. "I'm an avenger. I don't need protection. That's the whole point."
"I'm going to get stronger too," Kakashi said, ignoring him. "There are things I can do with this eye that Itachi has no idea about. I'll train just as hard as you, and we'll protect Naruto together. Okay?"
He sat back, his arms open between them, his hands on Sasuke's shoulders. Sasuke's eyes were watery and his forehead was furiously pinched. And he was still standing there. Not running.
Gently, Kakashi folded Sasuke back into his embrace, and the real miracle was that Sasuke allowed it.
"I know it's scary," Kakashi said, his chin tucked over Sasuke's shoulder. "Letting someone you love walk free in the world, where anything could happen. I know."
Kakashi paused, just a step past where Gai was waiting conspicuously behind a lamppost. It would’ve been easy to keep walking—Gai had obviously started to expect it—but he abruptly found that he did have something he needed to say to Gai after all. Something itching at the back of his throat.
“Burial or cremation?” he asked.
He kept looking ahead. Whatever fumbling gesture Gai made, Kakashi didn’t see it.
“Well?” he prompted. “Burial or cremation?”
“What are you talking about?” Gai demanded. “Kakashi, I know you’re given to gallows humor, but that is a supremely unfunny joke!”
“I just want to know,” Kakashi said, contemplating the gleam of the scattered stars with a cough building up in his lungs. He held it back through sheer force of will, hands balling into fists at his sides. “How are you going to do it, if Lee dies? If there’s going to be a body, I need to make arrangements.”
“Kakashi…” Gai said uneasily.
“But you’ll probably just open the eighth gate, right?” Kakashi went on. “Take some impossible mission, burn yourself into ash in the field. After all, we always knew you were going to die that way someday. Why ruin a good thing?
A hand settled on his shoulder, warm and broad and painfully familiar. He stood there, looking straight ahead, feeling so brittle that he was sure any sudden motion from that hand would crack him into a thousand pieces.
The thickness of the scratch in his throat was almost unbearable this time, dragging at his esophagus on the way out, and he raised a hand to press over his mouth, choking on it. His eyes watered.
“Kakashi,” Gai said, in a gentle tone that few people had ever heard from him. “It’s going to be alright. Neither of us is going to die. I’m a hundred percent—no, a thousand percent confident, everything will turn out okay.”
Kakashi tipped his head back, glancing over his shoulder at the man whose tired face was so full of encouragement and care. The lamplight streaming over him made his slightly disheveled hair—something he would never allow under normal circumstances—a halo of gold light.
"Sure," Kakashi said. His voice was hoarse. "Sure."
The end of the projected week drew nearer. Kakashi's trash was now full of white chrysanthemums, spilling over the edges so that even his garbage became a spectacular vase of funeral flowers. As if his apartment was the scene of a wake.
As he was scraping the bottom of the barrel on people that he liked enough to even attempt professing to, it finally happened. The newly inaugurated Tsunade summoned him into her office and explained what he already suspected—the village was low on manpower right now, and there were still missions that needed running. And if they didn’t run some of these high-profile missions asap, it was going to look very bad for Konoha.
“I saw something in your file about a cold,” said Tsunade, distractedly flipping through an apparently endless heap of paperwork. “Or lung trouble or something. Are you over it now? I don’t want to send you out if you’re dying, but—”
“Aw, I love you too,” said Kakashi, casually. “I’m fine. Not contagious.”
Tsunade gave him a sharp look, but she was too harried to press him on it. And Kakashi had a duty.
After forcing himself to cough up everything he could into the bathroom sink, he determined that he still had the lung capacity to run at a steady pace without suffocating, as long as he stopped and cleared out his windpipe occasionally. And it was unlikely that he'd need to perform any jutsu. After all, it was just an escort mission for a cousin of the Daimyo, no one would be stupid enough to attack an aristocrat with a jonin right there. Not even bandits were that stupid.
Well. He was kind of correct, as it turned out. No one tried to endanger Lord Ondori, but the venerable Lord Ondori did a pretty good job of endangering himself.
"Please, Ondori-sama," Kakashi said, keeping his tone polite even as his muscles strained against the weight of a middle-aged man with a sedentary lifestyle. "Don't wander off the path."
The edge of the ravine had crumbled away under the lord's feet, almost as soon as he had rushed out to the river edge in pursuit of his rare botanical specimen. As Kakashi had caught him with a hasty earth-release bridge thrown out over the ravine, the man had just managed to snatch a Once-blooming Snowdrop Pearl from the ledge before it crumbled. Now he was holding it up, thrilled, turning it over and over in the sunlight, even as Kakashi struggled to haul him back up onto the path.
It was only a few feet up from where Lord Ondori had landed when the bridge had shot out to catch him, but he was not athletic and in any case, he was much too preoccupied with his find to be of much assistance.
Kakashi finally got him back over the ledge, and then promptly turned around and retched chrysanthemums behind the traveling wagon. It hurt. It hurt with every breath, every ragged cough, he was packed full of life that wanted to kill him, a mindless thing struggling to be born. He was starting to find strings of bloody spit across the petals, the endless grind scraping his throat raw.
Finally, he looked up with bleary eyes to find the Lord Ondori crouching down in front of him, watching with fascination. Kakashi slapped a hand over his mouth, but the lord wasn't even looking at him—in fact, the lord was looking at his mess of fragile white illness, even reaching into the bloodied pile to examine one of the white heads.
"Remarkable!" he said, plucking a single petal, curved like the dry leg of a spider. "A real live case of hanahaki, right here, in my own traveling party!"
Kakashi felt a numb kind of despair at the thought of being an object of aristocratic gossip for the rest of his life.
"These are wonderful specimens," Lord Ondori said, "would you mind if I took a few for my collection? I have some pompoms and anemones, but these are truly the imperial standard of chrysanthemums. I’d like to compare them to an earth-born cousin, if I can find any of similar quality to compare against!"
"None with any blood on them, please," Kakashi managed. "And don't tell anyone who produced them."
"Oh," the lord said, a bit put out. "If you insist. I'll just catalogue them as coming from an anonymous donor."
And then the lord stood, and—to Kakashi's genuine surprise—offered a hand down to help. After a moment of hesitation, Kakashi accepted it.
"I can see you're a private man," Lord Ondori said, "so I won't pry! But it's very exciting to see a case of hanahaki progress this far. You must be engaged in a very tragic romance indeed."
Kakashi didn't bother disputing it. What could he say? His mouth was full of a green, cold taste, like old matcha.
"I had always thought of ninja as very cold," Lord Ondori mused, spinning the stem of his specimen idly between his fingers. "But I suppose that underneath that dour exterior, there is a heart as warm and fragile as any other man's."
He spun the flower again, and in that oddly pompous voice that aristocrats used to proclaim poetry on every possible occasion, said:
"A dress of Imperial white,
to lay upon my breast;
come, lay, sleep,
on the bed where you will visit me,
to mourn."
He stood there for a moment, looking satisfied, and then tucked the blossom into his sleeve.
"Of course," he said, "the metaphor would work better if you were a woman. But the imagery is quite striking, isn't it? A lonely maiden, dead before she could become a bride, loved only too late! How sad. What a pity."
"Yes," Kakashi said, hoarsely. "It is."
Kakashi arrived back in Konoha wobbly and weak from the lack of oxygen, pausing to lean bodily against the gate posts and pant open mouthed while the chuunin stared at him in horror. He hacked, bent forward and spat white-white-white onto the dirt path.
“I’ll radio ahead for a stretcher from the hospital,” one of the chuunin said.
Kakashi pulled himself up, dragging his mask back over his wet mouth. “No need,” he said. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“I’m not worried about how it looks,” the chuunin said, doubtfully, “I’m worried about how it sounds.”
He managed to avoid the stretcher, but an escort of nervous chuunin still answered the radio summons and dogged his heels until he was finally checked in and settled in an uncomfortable waiting room chair. The hospital was bustling, bustling, even more so than his last visit. It took him a while to realize why, but then he caught sight of Tsunade flashing through the frame of a long hallway, her jacket exchanged for a surgeon's coat, her hair up in a knot on the back of her head, snapping latex gloves over her hands as she strode past. And then he understood.
Like a sleepwalker drawn to the sounds of singing beyond a window, Kakashi rose and followed her. At the end of the hall was an operating theater, and when she threw open the doors for a moment he could see a team of nurses all in their scrubs. The gurney was laid out in front of them, with just a hint of the slight figure resting on it, already anesthetized. Dark hair splayed out on a pristine white sheet. Just this side of living, just this side of a shroud.
The door swung shut, closing off that world from the place where Kakashi stood. He turned, and faced Gai, who was folded up against the wall a few feet away, face buried in his hands.
He was such a big man. So powerfully built, and with a personality that could fill a city block all by itself. His fingers were crooked from years of being broken against rock and wood and steel. When he was happy, it spilled over like waves crashing on the shore.
The amount of space he took up on the linoleum floor, knees to chest, was less than he'd taken as a small child, not yet able to run the mile at the academy entrance exam. His slow, measured breathing was quiet, only visible in the way his shoulders rose and fell.
"Hey," Kakashi said.
Gai lifted his face, blinked, and hastily wiped his eyes. "Kakashi!" he said, like he always did. Like he couldn't believe his luck in finding that Kakashi, too, existed in the same place as him, wherever that might be.
Kakashi went and slid down to sit against the wall beside Gai. Their shoulders bumped... and then settled in a gentle press.
"I have a mission," Gai said, in answer to the question Kakashi hadn't asked. "I've put it off as long as I can, but I need to go. They say he'll be in surgery for up to twelve hours, and it’s not like I’m any use to him out here. I can't see it through. I can't stay."
They sat there for a while, in silence, while Gai gathered himself up. Eventually, Gai took a deep breath, slapped his knees, and shifted to look at Kakashi for the first time. His eyes narrowed.
"What's wrong with you?" Gai said. "You look terrible."
Kakashi laughed a little. It scratched. "Getting over something. It's fine. I can still work."
"Hmm," Gai said, doubtfully. But he knew just as well the severity of obligation, and the dire straits their village was currently in. "If only I had the time, I'd make you a warming soup, with lots of turmeric! And ginger, you look like you could use some ginger."
Kakashi breathed out another burst of soft laughter, barely audible. "Yeah, I probably could."
"Alas," Gai sighed, "duty calls. When I get back—"
"You'll have more important things to worry about," Kakashi cut in, firmly.
Gai hesitated, unwilling to admit the possibility yet unable to deny it. His mouth pinched.
Kakashi looked away. "You know. When we were younger, I never imagined there would come a time when you weren't there to make soup for me, whether I liked it or not."
"It's only a few days," Gai chastised him. "And then everything will be back to normal! Better, even! You'll see!"
Kakashi had known Gai nearly all his life—known his father, known his goals, known his triumphs and his failures. Gai was the type who worked so hard to believe things that sometimes he made them true, just by believing in them. Kakashi had never had that talent. Delusion to him was delusion, and nothing more.
Kakashi propped his cheek up on his palm. "Watching you and Lee..." he said, "I can see how much he means to you. I know that there's a part of you that lives in him, now, a part of you that I can't touch. I said some very arrogant things to you, back at the chuunin exams. I regret them now more than ever."
"Oh," Gai said. His mouth twitched down, smoothed, and then he lifted his chin. "Well. Passionate hearts sometimes overspill!"
Kakashi knew that he was smiling helplessly, watching as Gai graciously offered the truest forgiveness he knew how to. The arc of his nose, the high sharpness of his cheekbones, stood out so rich and vibrant against such a wearying background. Kakashi was going to lose him. Nothing could be that good, and stay.
"I love you," he said. And then froze.
Gai gaped at him, then leapt to his feet, thrilled. "At last!" he shouted, pumping his fist. "At last! My turn! Yes!" He spun around like he couldn't hold the excitement inside himself without moving. "You really made me wait, you bastard! Finally!"
Kakashi's heart was thumping, wild and panicked. Behind his unmoved expression, there was burning, tingling pressure in his throat. Tessellations of raw chakra pushed at the inside of his lungs, distended his esophagus, swelled and collapsed. He’d gotten so used to saying it—it had just slipped out—
Kakashi watched him throw his celebratory kicks and air punches and tried not to imagine his motion all stilled forever, laid flat in a coffin, surrounded by white petals.
“Last but not least, eh?” Gai said, jerking a thumb towards himself. “Might Gai always makes the list!”
"Yeah," Kakashi said, his voice distant from himself. "Right. Gotta complete the set."
"I knew you wouldn't really leave me out," Gai went on saying, "but boy! You sure cut it close!"
Kakashi swallowed. He felt like a liar, like trash, making Gai so happy with just a glimmer of his attention. Just like always, Kakashi offered him the dregs of what he deserved, and Gai took them without complaint. Was it any wonder Gai threw himself into everything wholeheartedly, even his own death, when receiving anything from this life was like squeezing blood from a stone?
"Hey," he said. "I'll stay with him. Lee, I mean. If you want."
Gai stopped his little victory dance mid-step. He reached down and snatched up Kakashi's hands, clutching them tightly. "Really? Kakashi, my rival, would you do that?"
"Sure," Kakashi said, and curved his eye to show that it was nothing.
It was sad how much that seemed to brighten Gai. He asked for so little, just for Kakashi to tell him that he was as good as any of the others, when really he was so much more. He was the dawn and the spring and the promise of tomorrow. He was inestimable. Priceless.
"Right!" Gai said, and struck a pose, "I feel ready now, knowing I can leave things in your capable hands. I'll see you in a day. Two, tops! Onward, to victory!"
His footsteps rang out in the hall long after he was gone. Kakashi waited until he was well out of sight, then allowed himself to finally collapse from the burgeoning chakra exhaustion. His head dropped back against the wall as darkness welled up to swallow him.
He roused himself, several times, to ask a passing nurse for news. They didn’t have any. The surgery was ongoing. The results were as yet undecided.
Someone brought him a hospital blanket, scratchy and worn and absolutely necessary in the chill of the hall. They dropped it on him as he dozed, and kept walking before he could drag his eyes open or croak out a thank you. A pillow appeared about an hour later.
No one tried to move him. He was as out of the way as he could manage, no impediment to bustling feet or rattling carts. His gaze, when he could keep it focused, was fixed on the closed surgery door.
The pain in his lungs was easing.
Some way into the night, he spat up the last of the loose, heavy leaves, crawling to a trash can down the hall and laying limply slung over it in the aftermath, breathing hard. There was a lightness, a clean ease to his breathing, that he knew he really, really didn’t deserve.
"Hey, kid, wake up."
Kakashi opened his bleary eye and squinted up at a figure that resolved into Tsunade, tall and handsome and kicking him a little bit with her shoe.
“Lord Fifth,” he said, and then remembered where he was.
"Shizune told me you were keeping watch for Gai," she told him, “Figured I’d come out and let you know before I went home and slept for a day. It’s over.”
“It’s over?” Kakashi sat bolt upright.
She looked at him with tired eyes, a crooked smile growing on her lips. “The kid made it. He’s a tough little bastard. Fourteen hours on the table and a couple close calls with blood clots, but it’s over now.”
“He’s…” Kakashi struggled to understand. “He lived?”
Her gaze took him in with a kind of pity that itched, because it seemed to understand him far better than he wanted to be understood. “Yes,” she said. “He lived. Vitals all strong. I wouldn’t worry too much about him from this point on—as long as he takes his medicine regularly and on time, his chakra network should recover entirely in a few months. Really, the bones were the biggest factor—I had to get someone else to do the actual surgery for me, since I…”
She grimaced. Kakashi nodded in understanding.
“Anyway,” she said, with a sigh, “you can tell Gai his boy is gonna make it. And if he wants to, he’ll be able to fight again someday. You tell him.”
“I will,” Kakashi said. His heart was in his throat.
Tsunade stopped a few steps down the hall and turned back to him. “Oh,” she said, “and go see your damn doctor, kid. You look like hell.”
Kakashi did see his doctor. Then he went home, wrote a note to Gai, and ran another mission.
It was several days before he was back in Konoha again.
The sun seemed so bright and fragile on the flowers in Kurenai’s little garden. No chrysanthemums, thankfully. Lots of daisies and marigolds, though, and bees moving between the little yellow faces, and drops of water from her watering can clinging to the leaves. Unnoticed, Kakashi watched it all from across the street, unsure of how to begin.
Gai looked better. His olive skin rich and bright, hair perfect and shiny. He was laughing in the sunshine, holding a bag of potting soil for Kurenai, who had pulled on a broad-brimmed hat to shield her fair skin.
She'd been a good friend to Gai for a long time, and at times Kakashi envied their easy camaraderie, the hours they'd spent together without him that could never be recovered. But at other times, like these, he was just relieved that there were other people who loved Gai the way that Gai deserved and weren't afraid to show it.
Gai, Gai, Gai - boisterous and determined and stubborn, with his heart on his sleeve, ready to die for anything.
Kakashi couldn’t help but be realistic about his chances. He’d had a stay of execution, that was all. Gai was always going to die—well, they all were, eventually, but Gai especially. Burning, comet-like, a star consumed entirely in its own blazing trail of light, Gai would attain perfection for one brief moment and then be gone forever. All that would be left were ashes across the wind, not even a body to bury. It was the legacy of boys who had nothing else to give except their blood and teeth and lives, a legacy that Gai had gifted to Lee now with all the tenderness of his own long-lost father.
He would be gone someday. And the lack of flowers in Kakashi’s throat told him that it mattered more to him than he’d ever wanted to admit.
Kakashi pushed off the brick and crossed the street, stepping into the sun. Kurenai craned her head back to see him; Gai squinted and shaded his eyes, before breaking out into a grin. They called to him happily, urging him over to see the raised beds, worms in the wet soil, unopened buds. He gave each its due, following their fingers.
“Ahh,” Kurenai sighed, eventually, getting up from her squat with a creak of knees. Bad sign for her career, creaking knees at her age. Still, she seemed happy. “I’m going inside to get a drink, do you boys want any?”
“No, thank you—” Kakashi started to say, but Gai cut him off.
“Ginseng tea,” he said, very seriously. “He needs ginseng.”
“Alright,” Kurenai said, pulling off her gardening gloves. “Tea it is. Back in a moment.”
Once she was gone, Kakashi shook his head and turned to Gai. “I’m fine now, really. I don’t need your home remedies.”
“All the same, it’s good for your chakra network,” Gai said, thumping Kakashi on the chest with his knuckles. “You don’t take care of yourself, rival! I was hardly distracted for a month and you let yourself catch some kind of flu!”
Something tough and thick and hot welled up in Kakashi’s throat. It hurt. But he knew what it was.
“Hey,” he said. “I love you.”
Gai scoffed good-naturedly, and thumped him again. “I know! You completed the set!” he said. “You’re always late with these things, I think you do it just to piss me off!”
The sun gleamed on his fine black hair, his white teeth flashing in a grin that said I can’t stand you, and you’re my favorite, and please don’t go, I’m not ready yet.
There was no telling how long this would last. But he couldn’t let Gai go to his grave thinking he was only enough, when more than anything, it was his love that had sustained Kakashi through a decade of learning how to return that love in any meager way. If it hadn’t been for Gai’s fearless example, Kakashi could never have come this far.
Kakashi swallowed down the lump in his throat. “No. I mean you especially.” He took Gai’s hand in his own and held it to his chest, pressing the shape of fingers against cotton and cotton and skin. “It’s not the same as the way I love Kurenai, or my ANBU team, or Sakura and the boys. It’s not completing the set, it’s a whole other set entirely. I’m in love with you. I just thought you should know.”
Gai stared at him. He went white. He drew back like an undertow, reeling, and crashed into Kakashi all at once like a wave, banging his free fist against Kakashi’s chest and shoulder. “—You!” he said, inarticulately, streaming tears. “You’re always late with these things!”
“I know.” Kakashi smiled helplessly. “Sorry.”
When Kurenai returned, she found Gai bawling into Kakashi’s shoulder, squeezing him so tight it nearly lifted him off the concrete. She stopped on the step, a pair of cups in her hands, and stared at them with wide eyes.
“Is everything alright?” she asked, uncertainly.
“Yeah,” Kakashi said, with his arm hooked awkwardly around Gai’s sobbing back. “Yeah, I think—It will be. It’s just been a really long month.”