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Tsunade retires.
The Council tries to stop her and she laughs in their faces. It is not a good day for them.
So: Tsunade retires, making the first postwar situation to solve the fact that there is no Hokage.
Naturally the village turns to Kakashi again.
Kakashi, who has already died once for this village, is a little torn. On one hand, Gai has just flung open the eight gates for this village, wholehearted self-sacrifice that he survived only by the grace of the gods and Naruto. Service to the village is engraved into Kakashi's soul. The village is the heart of his allegiance and his hopes for the future. He owes no less than what Gai was so willing to give.
On the other hand, Gai just flung open the eight gates for this village, wholehearted self-sacrifice that he survived only by the grace of the gods and Naruto.
He goes to talk to Kurenai.
"I told them you'd do it," he tells her.
She stares at him. She looks pointedly down at the baby latched onto her nipple. Kakashi has been here for over an hour and pretty much all of that time has been spent watching Kurenai tearfully coax Mirai into doing what Kakashi had assumed babies just naturally did, coaxing not required. At several points, Kurenai's voice had dropped into a terrifying low, quiet voice he had never heard from her before. At least once he's pretty sure she'd muttered, "If Asuma wasn't already dead, I swear to the gods..."
"I'm a little busy," she says, with impressive restraint. The one-handed genjutsu she shoots at him without shifting the baby even minutely adds the emphatic fuck you he should have expected.
Kakashi lets the surprisingly graphic genjutsu linger a few seconds longer than he usually would out of respect for her work, and also slightly to butter her up.
"Come on," he says cajolingly after he dispels it. He has never attempted that tone of voice before, so the results are kind of a mixed bag. Kurenai looks at him skeptically. He rapidly changes tactics. "You would be an inspiration to all the young kunoichi wondering if they can have a family and their careers."
She laughs in his face. This is not a good day for Kakashi. "Send any of them to me if they ask," Kurenai says. "I'll give it to them straight. The answer is no."
Kakashi assumes that is both in reference to the Hokage thing and the 'can you have it all?' question.
"If only there was someone with first-hand experience to make the needed changes in policy to make it possible," Kakashi says. He's a ninja, he's not above playing dirty.
He rejoices inwardly and a little guiltily when she hesitates.
"I'll do whatever you need me to do in exchange. I'd have to, if you were Hokage," Kakashi says, attempting the cajoling tone again. It comes out a little better this time, but Kurenai just rolls her eyes.
"Don't think I won't take you up on that," Kurenai warns. "Be prepared for stinky baby diapers and coffee runs."
Kakashi does not cheer. He is a professional. He was killing men with his bare hands when he was six years old. "Noted," he says, maybe a little too quickly.
"Oh, and therapy," Kurenai says, clearly having warmed to the idea. "I'm mandating regular therapy sessions that you have to attend."
"Uh," Kakashi says. "No."
"Yes."
"No."
"Yes."
"No."
Kurenai straightens her spine and sets her shoulders. "Yes," she says firmly, tit out and baby securely in arm, meeting Kakashi's eyes with steely resolve. "Because I am your Hokage and I say so."
Kakashi sulks. He set himself up for this.
Gai screams if anyone touches him, and screams even more when the medic nin have to treat his burns. It can only be done in short bursts of healing every several hours. By the second week, Gai's voice is ruined and his screams don't even sound human. Tenten and Lee are at his side constantly until Tsunade forces them to take shifts instead, but they always attend his healing sessions together, side-by-side, faces white and hands clasped tightly together. His patience and notoriously outrageous joie de vivre is reduced and stretched thin. It is painful to see.
But he is alive. Kakashi attends every session alongside Gai's team, grateful to bear witness to Gai's aliveness. Tsunade doesn't make him go home, which Tenten complains about.
"Some people just can't be helped until they help themselves," Tsunade tells her, but when Tenten and Lee are gone, she says to Kakashi: "Don't think I'm above inflicting bodily harm to make you rest."
"I'm telling the Hokage on you," Kakashi says.
"Try it, brat," Tsunade says with a sharp, dangerous grin. "Let's see if the Rokudaime is stupid enough to annoy her strongest ally against the Council."
She has a point, so Kakashi compromises by stealing someone's sleeping bag and naps intermittently throughout the day on the floor at the foot of Gai's hospital bed.
"Like a dog," Sakura comments.
Naruto perks up. "Dogs! I love dogs! Hey, Kaka-sensei, you should summon your ninken and you could sleep in a dog pile. Literally!" He looks delighted by his own joke and waves his arm and his other half-Kyuubi-regenerated other arm around in excitement. The bones haven't been fully regrown yet so there's a lot of flopping around that makes Kakashi a little queasy.
"Sit down, dobe," Sasuke says, but quietly and without heat, a self-contained weapon of destruction tucked into a corner so he won't frighten the civilian staff.
Naruto scowls at him. "Only a monster hates dogs," he says. Sakura punches him through a wall. Sasuke actually smiles a little.
Lee looks a little worried about Naruto. Tenten looks long-suffering.
Gai stirs. He is rarely conscious outside of the sessions, so Lee and Tenten are at his bedside immediately and Sasuke and Sakura retreat from the room to give them space. They'll probably collect Naruto while they're at it.
When Gai finally awakens, blinking blearily up at the three of them, he says in his ruined voice, "It hurts. I am so tired. Please, make it stop."
Lee bursts into tears and runs out of the room. Kakashi doesn't blame him. He reels in his own shock. Gai has never so much as hinted at ever wanting to give up before. He has never been brought so low.
"Please," Gai says. He looks at Tenten. "Please."
Tenten chokes out a miserable, "Sensei," but that is all she manages before she's stumbling out too.
Kakashi has never seen Gai try to exploit emotional vulnerability before either. He feels a dull sense of surprise that intensifies when Gai painstakingly turns his eyes to meet Kakashi's.
"Rival," Gai says, calm in the cruelty of his own hurt, "I was supposed to die."
"But you didn't," Kakashi says. He grips the railing of the hospital bed so hard it squeaks in protest. "You lived. You're alive."
Tension hangs heavy in the air between them.
"I wish I were dead," Gai says, in a soft, detached tone.
Kakashi lets go of the railing. He steps back.
There is a vase of daisies on the side table. Two windows. Four chairs and a small fold out desk that the kids sometimes use to play cards on. Several machines that are connected to Gai with wires, and an IV bag dripping its way into Gai's arm.
Kakashi reaches out a hand, tips the vase over, and he and Gai watch as it falls, shatters on the ground, splashing water and bright yellow and white and green everywhere.
Silence rings in the room in the wake of brokenness. Outside, the noise from the hospital staff grows chaotic and confused.
Almost methodically, Kakashi picks up a chair and throws it through a window. Shatter. Plinkplinkplink. Screaming from outside. He breaks another chair over his knees and uses one of its legs to beat the foldable table into pieces. It splinters when he tries to break the second window with it. He punches a hand through one of the unbroken walls, infuriated when it hurts.
In the eye of the storm, untouched, Gai watches him with dark, unreadable eyes.
"You will die old and wrinkled, weak and ailing, but loved and beloved," Kakashi says like a curse. Gai flinches like it is. "You will regret saying that to me, and on your deathbed I will hear your apology for it. Mark my words, Rival. I will never hear you say that again."
And then he exits the room via the broken window.
"Okay," his assigned therapist says thoughtfully. "Can we dig into that a little more?"
When Kakashi returns to the hospital, Gai has been moved to another room but Kakashi's stolen sleeping bag is folded neatly in the corner. An invoice for property damage compensation has been laid pointedly on top.
Kakashi curls up on the floor at the foot of Gai's hospital bed and goes to sleep.
They don't talk about it. Kakashi pays the invoice. Sakura gives him a lecture about splinters and glass shards. Kurenai occasionally sends messengers his way to make him babysit Mirai or report to her just so he can listen to her complain about the amount of work she has to do. She makes assigns him a horrifying amount of paperwork to do, but it is significantly less horrifying than the stacks in her office. He wisely decides to keep his complaints to himself.
Gai heals enough that there are actually stretches of time where he is not in pain. He doesn't ask where Kakashi goes every week at the same time. He heals and is healed; the screaming subsides into a whimper.
Kakashi rediscovers feelings and his childhood and fights it every step of the way.
"My father has nothing to do with my fear of intimacy," Kakashi says.
"Okay," his therapist says.
"People die," Kakashi says, strangely defensive, some instinct pushing him to explain himself. "He didn't die because I loved him and needed him to be there for me."
The therapist is quiet for a moment. "But you did love him and need him to be there for you?"
"No," Kakashi says, but tears well up stingingly in his eyes. "I didn't. I've survived this far without him, haven't I?"
"You have," the therapist agrees.
"I forgave him," Kakashi says. "When I died. I wasn't angry."
"Okay," says the therapist. "But what was there to be angry about?"
Lee brings in a new table reinforced with metal.
"You break one table," Kakashi says. Tenten glares at him, aggressively asks for twos.
"Go fish," Sasuke says.
"Ha!" Tenten says after drawing her card. She slaps down her pair, smirking. Sasuke sulks.
Naruto squints at his cards. "Wait," he says. "Are you guys cheating?"
Sai says, smiling, "Only an idiot would ask that."
Sakura and Lee are talking softly in the corner. Kakashi sharpens his hearing.
"—but it's time," Sakura is saying.
"You don't think it's too early? Maybe he should recover more first—"
"Healing requires tending to both body and spirit," Sakura says firmly. "And in his case more than most, the two are connected. I've already discussed it with Tsunade. Trust me, Lee. Physical therapy is the next step and he should take it now."
Lee is quiet for a moment. "I do trust you," he says finally. "I just feel so..."
"Helpless," Sakura says understandingly. She puts her hand on his shoulder. "I know. But you'll be there for him."
"Of course," Lee says.
Kakashi realizes Gai is watching him. He meets Gai's gaze unflinchingly, entranced almost. He misses the rest of what Sakura and Lee are saying, but suddenly they are shooing them all out.
"I want to stay," Kakashi says.
"No," Sakura says, right as Gai says, "He can stay."
Lee looks uneasy. "Sensei—"
"I want him to stay," Gai says. When Kakashi meets his eyes, there is a spark there that he hasn't seen in a while. Gai tilts his chin a little in grim challenge. "Let him stay."
It is horrible to watch. Gai's grunts are better characterized as a determined grinding of teeth against howls of pain. Kakashi can read it in his body, in his shallow but rapid breathing, the tears that run unchecked down his face.
He is gone before the first great tremblings of Gai's body give way to weakness. As Lee lurches forward to catch the man who gave him everything he could, Kakashi is outside vomiting into the grass.
"Failure is not an option," Kakashi says.
The therapist pauses, then carefully says: "What if it is?"
Kakashi recoils. "Failure is not an option," he repeats firmly.
"Okay," the therapist says.
Gai is asleep when Kakashi returns, or pretending to be asleep. Kakashi watches him breathe, his mind crowded with words that too heavy in his mind.
Failure is not an option.
What if it is?
I was supposed to die.
Naruto apparently has too much time on his hands, because he decides to put together what he calls the Ninja Go Fish Extravaganza!!! Kakashi can actually hear the exclamation marks when he says it. He decides to hold it in Gai's room over Sakura's protests.
"Don't be so uptight, Sakura!" Naruto protests. "It's just a little bit of fun! We all need to let off some steam."
"I'm not uptight," Sakura says. She glares at Kakashi. "Right?"
Kakashi knows how to pick his battles. "Right," he says. Sakura gives Naruto a triumphant look.
"I already made flyers," Naruto says blithely. "Sorry, but the energy in this room is just getting too depressing, believe it. Not that that's bad, it's just kind of a drag, yanno?"
Kakashi does know. Gai must too, because he agrees to let it happen in his hospital room. It goes on for five days, Naruto having somehow dragged what looks like every shinobi in Konoha into it, and ends with Ino standing on the tables screaming and cackling, making it rain over everyone present with a deck of cards. Someone sets off a confetti popper behind her. Unexpectedly, the most likely culprit is Hinata.
"I'm the queen of the fishes, bitches!" Ino crows and launches into an impromptu air guitar performance. It's a good thing that table has metal reinforcements. That probably negates at least some of Kakashi's bad karma.
Neither Kakashi nor Gai participate and no one asks them to. They sit off to the side eating Gai's ice chips as the future of their village celebrates having survived. The springtime of their youth has just begun to blossom and they are learning to thrive.
Kakashi never thought he would survive. Actually, technically he didn't. It is just some capricious joke of the gods that both he and Gai have faced death so many times, stepped into it willingly, and somehow it spat them back out. Kakashi has some idea how to deal with the full stop, blink-and-you-miss-it line between life and death. What he doesn't know what to do with is this slow death he and Gai now face, this long road of prolonged humiliation.
"Maybe I never told you," Kakashi says, absolutely certain that he hasn't, "but I'm glad that you didn't die. However you might feel, that's what is true for me."
"Oh," Gai says, and nothing else.
They watch Naruto present Ino with the prize: a twenty-pack of coupons for 15% off any bowl of Ichiraku ramen. Ino tackles Naruto. Kakashi's not sure if it's because she's happy or unhappy about it. He can't decipher the high-pitched shrieking.
"I think I didn't tell you either, Kakashi," Gai says. "I'm glad you came back."
"Huh," Kakashi says.
Naruto is barred from the hospital for two weeks. He and Ino sneak Kakashi bowls from Ichiraku through the window. Lee brings curry which Kakashi is not allowed to let Gai eat. This is probably an advanced form of torture. Kakashi is forced to trade a promise to make curry for Gai in the future if he lets Kakashi give the curry to Tenten instead.
"You can cook, Rival?" Gai exclaims, surprised out of his unexpected petulance.
"Yes," Kakashi says. He can't, but he's willing to figure out how.
Gai studies his face for a long moment. "I would very much like to try your cooking," he says.
"Good," Kakashi says. He knows he is being monosyllabic to the point of being curt. He'll get better at this in time, now that he hopefully has it.
"Good," Gai agrees, his voice a little wry, but he is smiling.
Kakashi starts attending Gai's physical therapy sessions again. It is still bad and Tsunade also says she thinks that Gai's leg will never fully recover. Kakashi sticks it through. He does have to make a couple emergency exits early on, but he always returns.
He is glad that Gai has Lee and Tenten to lean on, both of whom have proved themselves to be made of sterner stuff than Kakashi. When he starts showing up regularly, they cautiously ease him into their schedule for making sure someone is always there to help hold Gai up when he needs it.
Kakashi would give anything to give Gai his leg back, even his life. There's no way to make that exchange, which is unfortunate or maybe fortunate, depending on how you look at it.
"Now you're getting it," the therapist says, delighted.
Kurenai puts Kakashi in charge of organizing babysitting rosters, training regimens and career counseling for kunoichi looking to return to the workforce, and support groups for new mothers.
"Um," Kakashi says delicately.
"I don't have anyone else qualified and available to do it that I trust as much as I trust you," Kurenai says, bouncing Mirai on one knee as she scrawls something on a piece of parchment. "Didn't you run the field command for one of the fronts of the last war? You'll do fine."
"I don't think I'm going to be what the women expect," Kakashi tries.
Kurenai glares at him. "Would you rather do this?"
"No," Kakashi admits.
"Then you've got your mission," Kurenai says. "Also, can you get me some coffee from downstairs? And bring me some more diapers. Oh, and—"
This new world needs a new kind of strength than the kind Kakashi thought he needed. Maybe what he needs now is not only another way to measure strength and success, but a change in his mission parameters.
Maybe he can make a space for himself in this new world, one that hurts less. Maybe even one that doesn't hurt at all.
Kakashi talks Gai into moving in with him into a wide, spacious house close to the Sarutobi residence, where Kurenai still lives. The house is fitted to be wheelchair accessible and kid-friendly besides. Gai wheels himself up the ramp, eyes damp with tears. There's curry hot and ready on the stove in the kitchen. It's pretty damn good, if Kakashi says so himself.
Kakashi invited Tenten and Lee over, as well as Team Seven. Somehow means that means that Team Eight, Team Ten, and the Sand Trio are in their house. Yamato arrives ten minutes early to warn them. Kurenai arrives with Mirai forty minutes late. It's a good thing Lee brought extra curry.
Gai weeps over it during dinner. Temari looks terrified, which Kakashi thinks is hilarious.
After dinner, Gai and Kakashi sit on the couch while Lee and Sakura wash the dishes and the others gather around the low table to chat. Naruto pulls out a deck of cards. Kakashi does not have a good feeling about this.
Gai says, "On my deathbed, was it?"
"And not a moment before," Kakashi confirms.
Gai smiles, gentle and steady. "I'd better stick close to you until then. I wouldn't want to miss my chance to apologize as I'd like to."
"Yeah," Kakashi says. "Better not go anywhere without me."
"And if I do?" Gai teases, eyes glinting with humor.
Kakashi pretends to think about it. "Well," he says, "I guess I'll just have to go with you."
Gai flips his hand over on the couch, wiggles his fingers in invitation. Kakashi lets out a slow breath, allowing himself a careful caress of the ruined canvas of Gai's skin from inner elbow to palm before he slots their hands together. Gai links their fingers, humming contentedly under his breath.
"I guess so," Gai says agreeably. He turns his eyes back to the scene before him. Tenten is attempting to explain the rules of Go Fish to Gaara. There is a deep crease forming between Gaara's eyebrows which bodes well for nobody.
Kakashi wants to touch the soft inside of Gai's wrist, feel his pulse beat heady against his fingertips, but the urgency of that feeling fades with the warmth of Gai's hand in his, the unconscious pressure of Gai's grip which gets stronger every day, the callouses sliding against Kakashi's skin.
There will be time enough for that later. For now, he will not let go.