Chapter Text
In part the tendency to connect the idea of truth with the idea of honesty is a form of anxiety. We are calmed by answerable questions, and the question, "Have I been honest?" has an answer.
-- Louise Glück, "Against Sincerity"
When he was 33 he felt finished.
-- Frederick Busch, “Melville’s Mail”
The second post-war kage summit is held in Suna, and it is a luxurious affair. Kakashi's suite of rooms in the Kazekage’s residence is equipped with an impressive mini-bar, a refrigerator of delicacies, an actual small fountain with fish in it and a bedside stack of romance novels. Kakashi is pretty sure the Wind Daimyo is footing the bill for all this-- for reasons that will eventually become great political complications-- but in the meantime he enjoys his food and his books.
In accordance with Suna custom, the sessions are held in the morning and in the evening with a break during the midday when the desert day is hottest. There’s no official prohibition against foreign shinobi wandering around during the break, but it’s common courtesy to not travel without a Suna escort, so during the midday break on the second day Kakashi and his modest ANBU contingent retire to their rooms.
Kakashi is in his sitting room reading one of the provided books-- a torrid romance about a runaway princess and a gruff but kindly pirate-- when someone knocks at the door. One of his ANBU sticks her head through a connecting door, but Kakashi stands and waves her off. He’s been wearing his usual jounin blacks beneath his robes of office, but it was too hot even inside their rooms, so when he opens the door to his suite he's wearing grey training pants and his sleeveless black undershirt.
He finds Gaara there, also in informal clothes, with no escort.
"Kazekage-sama," says Kakashi, bowing faintly.
Gaara nods. "Hokage-sama. Are you free for a visit?"
Kakashi steps aside. "Yes, I've been enjoying the books you provided. Please come in."
They settle in the sitting room, and Kakashi pours them glasses of water. Gaara points at the romance novel resting open against the arm of Kakashi's chair. "Temari picked them out. Shikamaru says you read them for sexual pleasure."
Kakashi coughs on his water. He clears his throat and says, “Naruto said to tell you hello.”
Gaara nods. "How is he?"
"Good," says Kakashi. He doesn’t know precisely what constitutes doing well, or what details are pertinent to describing married life, but he describes Naruto’s new home in the Hyuga compound and his robust mission roster. He says that Naruto seems very happy, and then they sit in silence for several minutes. It would be awkward, perhaps, but Kakashi has been friends with weirdos his whole life, so his threshold for eccentricity is pretty high, and he likes quiet in general.
When it becomes clear that Gaara doesn’t expect him to keep talking, Kakashi leans his head back. He has just started thinking about his pirate romance novel when Gaara says, "Will you marry?”
It's a question Kakashi is used to deflecting from all of the elderly women of the village and also from Naruto-- so he smiles beneath the mask and shrugs a shoulder. "There's no one in Konoha who deserves to be subjected to my matrimony."
Gaara nods thoughtfully.
"Will you?" asks Kakashi.
"I've had a few offers, but I feel the same as you." His brow creases. "Do you have a lover?"
It’s a personal question, and not one Kakashi would be likely to answer from even his most important people, but in Gaara's stoic manner it seems less impolite than it is. And Kakashi likes Gaara. He likes Gaara's story and his composure and his oddness and his resolve-- and most of all he likes Gaara's attachment to Naruto. By now pretty much everyone likes Naruto, but Gaara seems to be moved by Naruto's goodness like Kakashi is moved by it, and that speaks well of him. Gaara has made a whole life out of being interested in other people’s investments in other people; the inquiry feels more generic and less invasive.
So Kakashi shrugs diffidently and says, "Not really. The office keeps me pretty busy. And I…" He makes a vague motion with his hand. Gaara watches him calmly, but Kakashi has no way and no intention of clarifying. Sometimes he wants to be in a relationship, but he does not want to be in a relationship. That's what a life of relative solitude does to you. It's simpler to just never put himself in the position of needing to explain that to someone.
"Do you?" Kakashi says.
Gaara shakes his head. "Everyone around me is either family or a subordinate." He pauses then adds, "Or someone I can just barely keep myself from killing."
Kakashi smiles. "Yeah, I've been to the Wind capital."
Gaara cocks his head thoughtfully. "Would you sleep with someone if there were an otherwise unattached non-subordinate available? Someone of your rank who would not require marriage?"
Kakashi huffs a laugh. "Listen, Gaara,” he says. He figures they are way past the point of formal diplomacy, speaking, in fact, as friends would speak. “I really don't think you should try to take your cues from my life decisions."
Gaara's face shifts minutely. In the years ahead-- as they meet in different places, sometimes just in passing, sometimes for whole prolonged visits, scattered moments of contact like stars in a cloudy sky-- Kakashi will come to recognize an array of emotions in that calm face. Irony, lust, irritation.
This one is amusement, with something else.
He says, "That's not what I'm doing."
--
When one ninja touches another ninja, it is a psychologically complicated affair. It would take so little to do fatal harm. The most common pairings are between shinobi and civilian because the shinobi is in little danger and the civilian is untrained in recognizing the danger that is there.
When one kage touches another kage, the risk is ten times magnified. One breathes not just for oneself. Whole cities could fall. The other man or woman could kill you, could replace you with a double, and your village would suffer; the nation or whole network of nations could suffer. It’s possible that the Yondaime Kazekage died at Orochimaru’s hands in just that way-- a young widower accepting liaisonship from his lecherous ally-- and that story could have ended with Suna and Konoha drawn into the dark maw of Otogakure. As Naruto says, war comes from love.
So when Gaara sighs and lowers his gaze as Kakashi's long fingers circle his forearms, and every time Kakashi’s eyes fall closed at the feel of Gaara’s mouth on his shoulder-- every time they do that-- it is a tremendous act of faith.
--
Kakashi watches Gaara for a long moment.
Gaara looks back steadily before dropping his gaze to Kakashi’s bare shoulder-- not evasively but curiously, eyes wandering over his ANBU tattoo, his hand at rest on the arm of the chair, the waist of his grey pants, the casual sling of his long legs.
It’s not the first time Kakashi’s been hit on by a head of state, but Gaara’s frank assessment is weirdly more flattering than the typical leer, even though his expression doesn’t betray any investment or appreciation. Perhaps because it’s not the typical situation. Rather, here is a man in his prime pragmatically seeking companionship from his very small circle of peers. A 20-year-old tensai world leader looking to get laid in ways he won't feel bad about.
Kakashi at 20 was doing much the same, and Kakashi at 33 is not much different.
It occurs to Kakashi that he and the Kazekage might have a great deal in common beyond their station-- both of them odd, well-meaning but solitary, deadly, dark, driven (saved) by duty.
In just the last few years, Gaara has lost Shukaku as a defining principle, and Kakashi has lost Obito. They would be adrift if it weren’t for their ethic-- their respective ethics, which were the same: to care for their important people. He imagines they both feel something of their insufficiency on that front. Kakashi doesn’t know quite what to do in the space of that dynamic, but he feels something. Interest. He is used to having a thousand secrets, but Gaara seems to know them all already or else be uninterested in them. Somehow Kakashi knows that Gaara would let him have sex with his mask on and not feel sad about it; not ever ask Kakashi to take it off and make him say no, or yes.
“Why?” Kakashi asks.
“For the reasons I’ve outlined,” Gaara replies. After a moment of steadily returning the other man’s gaze, he shrugs, and again there is that subdued shade of humor. “And Temari says I have daddy issues.”
Kakashi laughs. He reaches up to rub at an eyebrow, then peers at Gaara from beneath the screen of his fingers. “This seems politically complicated,” he says.
“Not really,” Gaara says, “There’s already a strong bond between Suna and Konoha. There is nothing that would make me move against Naruto’s home again.” Gaara glances away, as though he weren’t swearing a kind of fealty to Kakashi’s village. “Everyone already knows it. The other kages know it, the Wind Daimyo knows it.”
“What if it ended poorly?”
Gaara looks back at Kakashi’s face. “On what grounds?”
Kakashi laughs again, softly, and then it’s his turn to look away. This is where the benefit of experience comes into play. There are a thousand ways for human relationships to end poorly, and most of them are nobody’s fault.
“Regardless,” Gaara corrects, “Neither of us is the sort to privilege personal grievances above our villages’ welfare.”
Kakashi raises an eyebrow. “Are you sure of that?”
For all their affinities and shared friends, for everything he may have heard, Gaara doesn’t really know anything about Kakashi.
“I am sure of that,” Gaara says.
Suddenly Kakashi remembers watching Gaara in Iron Country years ago, at the very beginning of the Fourth War, as he told Naruto that he might need to let Sasuke go if he wanted to be Hokage. That he might have to let Sasuke come to harm. Not only the acknowledgment of all those compromises that real people have to make but also the heaviness and quiet sympathy with which Gaara acknowledged it.
He is a hundred shades darker than Naruto, but he has extended himself with great deliberateness towards other people, and Kakashi is curious, he admits, to know how passion operates in a man like that.
“I’ll be right back,” Kakashi says finally. “I have to go say something shocking to my ANBU.”
--
Kakashi has what he considers a shinobi’s natural dislike of attention, but in fact he has been a ninja celebrity his whole life.
Until he enjoys the bittersweet anonymity of ANBU as a teenager, he literally does not go on a single mission in which no one mentions the White Fang. This is exacerbated, he realizes later, by the fact that he is a sulky, reclusive genius. The harms of his upbringing are evident. He is constantly reminding people of his narrative. By the time he leaves ANBU and takes up the public mantle of tall, indolent, eccentric Hatake Kakashi, he is a veteran of being noticed.
He embraces it until he becomes Hokage, when once again the currents of popular understanding sweep his life out of his hands.
People call him Kakashi-sama or Hokage-sama or Sixth, and it unsettles him more than it should. There is an underlying sense of urgency, suddenly; he is too old, and he has the sense that soon it will be too late. He will not have children; he is not reliably very good at friendship. He is disappearing into history.
He watches the same old elisions occur as his face is inscribed on a cliff in Konoha: some features made large, some smoothed out of existence.
--
Kakashi is a little worried that if left to his own devices, Gaara will lay out a verbal menu of sexual activities, and while Kakashi is far from a traditionalist, he likes a little romance. So he leads by saying, “Can I give you a blowjob?” He shrugs a shoulder. “Trial run.”
Gaara nods, and then Kakashi wanders into the master bedroom of his suite, hands in his pockets, Gaara following behind him. The younger man has the foresight to bring both glasses of water with him, which Kakashi finds endearing. It speaks to his pragmatism and his focus.
Blowing Gaara will require Kakashi to take off his mask, but he feels strangely fine about it. The whole event already seems kind of outlandish. He should be less inclined to divulge the secrets of his face to a foreign shinobi than to a countryman, but it feels both inevitable and commensurate with the risks they are already taking and therefore inconsequential. And he finds himself wanting to do specifically that for Gaara: to reward him for letting Kakashi that close.
For all the opulence of the amenities, the bedroom itself is small; as a general rule, shinobi prefer simple, unadorned sleeping spaces because they afford fewer places to hide. But the bed is large and low in the traditional style, covered with soft sheets a thin, blue coverlet that Kakashi tucked in with rigid corners this morning. Kakashi opened the window earlier for the breeze, but now he pulls it shut and draws the shade, bathing the room in a dull orange glow.
He assumes that Gaara’s ANBU guard are positioned at various posts on the building, possibly in nearby rooms, in case of incidents-- but if Kakashi were a real threat, they would be too little, too late.
Kakashi pulls his undershirt over his head, drawing it off with the attached mask; he folds it and sets it neatly on the narrow desk beneath the window, then looks over at Gaara, who is placing the glasses of water on the bedside table.
Gaara looks up and pauses. Then he says neutrally, “You’re handsome.”
"Uh, thank you," Kakashi says. He feels his eyebrows gathering. As if from a great distance, he can feel a part of himself pulling cautiously back.
"I assumed your face would be badly scarred." Gaara wanders over to Kakashi, brow furrowed. He raises a hand to touch Kakashi’s jaw. “Why do you wear it?”
Gaara has never shied away from sharing his life story-- not to genin in a foreign shinobi village and not even in front of the gathered army of the entire Allied Shinobi Forces-- but that isn't Kakashi's style.
"I don't think about it," he says. He doesn't clarify whether the it is the mask or the reason.
Gaara gazes frankly up at him, still touching his jaw-- not gaping nor affecting nonchalance as most people do, but with the same neutral curiosity with which he perused Kakashi in the sitting room minutes earlier.
Gaara is also worth looking at. Without the Sharingan, Kakashi knows that beneath his mask he just looks like a normal guy with a scar and white, unmanageable hair, but everything about Gaara is striking. The blood-red tattoo on his forehead; the dark-rimmed, pupil-less turquoise eyes; the dark red hair falling neatly over his dusky skin. He looks extreme, and you wouldn’t naturally associate him with the temperance and moderation he brings to kage meetings.
Still without inflection, Gaara asks, "Do you like to be kissed?"
The corner of Kakashi’s mouth twists. Dimly, he wonders if Gaara's stoicism will cease to be disarming. He is trained as a shinobi to anticipate another’s behavior, to gauge his own faculties and reactions, to anticipate the future, and so Kakashi does it, even though he knows it is the world’s worst habit where relationships are concerned.
"Maybe," he says. It's evasive, but forthrightly so. He finds his hands raising to settle at Gaara’s waist. He runs his thumbs along the line of Gaara’s ribs. "Do you?"
Gaara slides a finger over the curve of Kakashi's cheek. A tiny line creases itself between his eyes as he looks at Kakashi's mouth. "Yes."
--
Gaara, Kakashi will find, likes to be surrounded-- he likes to be touched in any respect, but most of all to be held against the wall, against the bed; loomed over; even while on top of Kakashi to have Kakashi’s arms locked around his shoulders and his back, pulling him down as Kakashi thrusts up. The harms of his upbringing are evident. He likes to have Kakashi near his face when they make love, even suffocatingly close, breathing the same hot air.
Kakashi, for his part, likes it a little rough.
He supposes that must also extend from his childhood in some way. He likes to feel used, to feel made use of-- which could be an extension of his ethic as a shinobi, but it runs deeper in him than it does in Gaara. At any event, those experiences have been hard to come by. They are generally only available in encounters with strangers, which are risky, especially when you are a highly recognizable ninja celebrity, or in relationships in which the permissions of intimacy have tempered the civility between partners-- and Kakashi has found those complicated in other ways.
--
As Kakashi goes down on him, Gaara watches him with an expression of muted wonder.
Gaara conducts himself with diplomatic politeness, with premier gentleness, allowing himself to touch Kakashi but not grabbing and not making sudden movements. Later, of course, they will find other tempos, Gaara rough in the heat of the moment, especially once he learns that’s what Kakashi wants-- but their first time together he comes with a quick, soft exhalation of breath, a vague tremble in his palm as he presses gently at Kakashi’s shoulder, possibly fighting the urge to clutch at the other man.
Kakashi keeps him in his mouth as his stomach muscles contract, keeps moving until he thinks the soft pad of his tongue might be too much-- then he pulls away and looks up at Gaara.
Gaara's face and chest are flushed a tawny rose, and he stares back from half-lidded blue-green eyes, propped up on an elbow against the bed. His chest lifts and falls as he works to slow his breathing. In a way he is very familiar, and in a way he is completely unrecognizable.
Kakashi leans lazily against Gaara’s thigh. “Sabaku no Gaara,” he says, mouth quirking.
Gaara snorts. There’s a note of derision in the sound, but it’s softened by the relaxed lines of his face. He reaches out and flicks at the white hair falling over Kakashi’s forehead. “Sharingan no Kakashi.”