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Kakashi slips back into Konoha an hour before sunrise, the full moon painting the walls around the village bone white. Kakashi is tired. He should be used to it now, after a lifetime spent the way he's spent his. What he's still getting used to is admitting it to himself. Kakashi is tired, and for once, he lets himself acknowledge it. He lets himself look forward to the end of a mission.
Naruto has been Hokage now for two and a half years. It's been enough time for Kakashi to pretend to retire, then actually retire, then get bored of retirement and start taking B- and C-rank missions. B-rank missions are even more boring in peacetime, he's found.
Still, Kakashi is spry for his age; all of thirty-seven this year, and sitting around his apartment at loose ends has never been good for his sanity.
Another milestone, he thinks, is admitting to himself that maybe he deserves good things. Maybe he deserves to do things for himself that preserve his sanity.
Wonder of wonders.
Gai would cry tears of pride, if he could hear Kakashi now.
Just for old time's sake, Kakashi slips past the guards at the gate, easy as anything. He shunshins behind the two guards, both of them Chuunin. Eighteen and Sixteen, if Kakashi remembers correctly. He remembers waving to them eight days ago when he left for his mission, remembers telling them that just because Naruto's brought peace to the Leaf that doesn't mean they can slack off. He listens to their conversation for a minute or so, waiting.
Kakashi has spent a lifetime waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He can feel it in his bones when the moment comes; fingers twitching as if to reach for a shuriken.
“Man, at least pretend to stay awake,” the younger of the two complains. Her back is to Kakashi’s little shadowy corner, and she pushes at the other Chuunin’s shoulder as she says it. “Konohamaru is our morning relief, if he catches you he will snitch to Yamato-taichou.”
Kakashi’s heart thuds once, almost painfully. It’s a leftover mechanical reaction to his body insinctively trying to blink the sharingan to life. It makes his chakra circulation funny (the technical term from Sakura, if he remembers correctly), but even with the sudden influx of it in the air, neither of the guards even blink in his direction.
“Konohamaru is half asleep when he shows up in the mornings,” the sleepy chuunin says. “No one has to know.”
“I don’t know…”
“Sleeping on guard duty is a time-honored tradition,” he says. “The only way we’ll get in trouble is if like, I don’t know. Hatake-sama walks through the gate and finds us.”
“Wouldn’t that be a shame,” Kakashi replies conversationally. “He’s not due back for another six hours, at least.”
“Exactly,” the sleepy chuunin says.
The girl, meanwhile, has spun around in her seat and is staring at him with huge, bulging eyes. He tries to look more unassuming, but he supposes that’s a tough ask for a jonin lurking in the shadows. There’s a couple of seconds of terror-filled silence, where she gapes at Kakashi and the other chuunin buries his head in his hands. Then, all at once, he shoots up out of his chair.
“Hatake-sama!” he gasps. “You’re back early!”
“Oh? Must have lost track of the days.”
“We’re sorry!” the two of them shout in unison. Both have scrambled up and are bowing at him, a full ninety degrees. Kakashi crosses his arms and tries not to feel sheepish. “Please don’t tell Taichou we’ve been slacking!”
“Slacking only makes more work for you in the longrun,” Kakashi says. Under his mask, he smiles, unable to help himself. He imagines the outraged look on Naruto’s face if he were to say something so seemingly hypocritical. “He should know that from experience.”
“It won’t happen again!”
“Terrorizing the youth, I see!” A booming voice calls from within the village. Tension he didn’t even know he had leaks out of his shoulders. “An admirable goal!”
“Gai-san!”
“I was just making them sweat a little,” Kakashi says, not turning away from the two Chuunin. From the laugh that booms into the silence, he knows Gai heard him. To the two chuunin, he says, “It wasn’t all that long ago that guard-duty was a life-or-death assignment, you know. It’d do you well to remember. It only takes once to cause a catastrophe.”
“Yes, Hatake-sama,” they both say, chagrined.
An arm slips around his shoulders, warm and sweat-damp from a predawn workout. The sweat on his skin is fresh, it has the sharp, clean tang of a workout completed not ten minutes prior, before it has time to settle into a funk. Kakashi smiles under his mask again.
“Konohamaru is around the corner,” Gai tells the kids, consipiratorially.
The kids nod at him and spring into action. Kakashi rolls his eyes.
“I thought I told you two before I left to drop the -sama, too,” Kakashi says.
Neither of them responds, but he can feel the air turn sour with their fear. He rolls his eyes again, knowing it’s a lost cause. Most of the younger generation grew up with Kakashi as their Hogake, and even though he hated it then, too, he never could convince a single soul to drop the formalities. If he couldn’t as the Rokudaime, he sure as hell won’t be able to as a regular semi-retired jonin.
Gai’s arm squeezes around his shoulder, turning them back to the village proper. He’s got his cane, today, and it thunks in the dirt path as they amble along. In a smooth, long-practiced movement, he slides to Kakashi’s left. He flickers his eye--eyes to him. THey both falter for a moment, but then Gai laughs uproariously, as if they’re both in on this great joke. And hell, maybe they are. Kakashi doesn’t laugh, but he does consider it.
“You’re in a good mood.”
“Of course I am!” Gai says. “My esteemed rival has returned from his dangerous mission outside the village!”
“It was just a B-rank.”
“As if that makes a mission any less dangerous!”
He waves his cane in the air for a moment, as if for emphasis, leaning more of his weight into Kakashi’s shoulder to compensate. Kakashi hums. He thinks of the many dozens of supposedly B-ranked missions he’s been on in his life where his teams were seriously injured.
“Shikamaru and Yamato are revamping the whole mission-ranking system,” Kakashi tells him instead. “It’s supposed to be much more accurate these days. Less chance of stumbling on an S-ranked catastrophe.”
He holds out his mission scroll as if proof. Gai eyes it warily, but both of his hands are occupied, so he can’t snatch it out of Kakashi’s hands. His palm slides against Kakashi’s shoulder, high enough that the side of his thumb grazes against Kakashi’s skin. He ignores the way he sizzles at the touch.
“Remarkable as ever, Rival! So the B-rank mission was just a cover for a different type of mission!”
Kakashi shrugs. He pats the pocket in his flak vest, holding tightly wound scroll with his S-rank mission hidden in a seal. Gai laughs and, Kakashi lets him. He tilts his chin, just a bit, trying to catch just a bit more of the sound on his face, as if he were a sunflower tilting inexorably towards the sunrise.
Gai’s home is closest, so it’s no surprise that they two of them end up there. Gai is sweating again by the time they reach the engawa, leaning away from Kakashi and more heavily on his cane in the last thirty meter stretch. Kakashi pretends not to notice the way he trembles as he stares at the three short wooden steps.
Kakashi swallows. He’s spent his entire life, it feels like, cataloguing the way Gai’s face moves, trying to figure him out. For a long time, he thought he’d had it. He’s not so sure anymore. Especially when it comes to his legs.
“I can go in first. To get your chair.”
Gai shakes his head, pulling away from Kakashi so that he can settle both hands on the top of his cane.
“I can do it,” he says, determined as always.
“I know you can. But is it better for you if you don’t?”
Gai sucks on his front teeth. His brows wrinkle: either confusion or agitation. Kakashi can never really tell them apart. He blinks.
For a second, Gai deflates. His expression crumples, something that’s only happened a handful of times in their lives. The sky is a dull pink behind him, early morning light leaking around their ankles, and Kakashi thinks it would be awful to ruin such a beautiful morning by making Gai cry.
Instead, Gai smiles. Wide, and full of teeth, he beams and shakes his head.
“I’ve missed you, my most Esteemed Rival,” he says, just like that, honest as anything.
Kakashi’s heart thumps again. Chakra swirls behind his eye with no outlet, and he tries not to think about why he wants to wake up a sharingan that isn’t in his head anymore. Tries instead, to commit the moment to memory the old fashioned way, by letting his heart squeeze itself into knots.
“It was only a week.” His voice sounds a little strangled, but Gai is too busy wiping manly, happy tears out of his eyes, and hopefully doesn’t notice. “We’ve both gone on months-long missions before.”
“I missed you then, too, of course.”
Kakashi chokes again. Gai looks at him for a long time, and he can’t do anything but look back. Kakashi doesn’t have a script for this. He doesn’t know what to say. Of course he missed Gai, this time. But he spent a long part of his life too wrapped up in his own grief to miss him, before.
“I’d like your help, Kakashi,” Gai says when they stare at each other for so long he wonders if they’ve started an unspoken blinking contest. “And tomorrow, you’ll watch me climb the steps up and down at least four hundred times to show you my progress!”
“Gai.”
“Six times!”
Kakashi laughs. It still catches him by surprise these days. He holds out a hand then, as Gai reaches out for him, he thinks up a better idea.
In the blink of an eye, he tosses Gai over a shoulder and shunshins into the main room, settling him on the couch in record time. Gai laughs at him, grabbing onto his shoulder as he starts to pull away.
“A massive hypocrite you are, Dearest Rival!” he shouts, too much glee in his voice to be truly annoyed. Kakashi grins, even as the room tilts from using up his chakra too fast. “Sakura has told you to watch your chakra usage!”
“I know, I know.”
He lets himself be chastised, lets himself get pulled onto Gai’s faded green couch along beside him. Sweat is beading on Kakashi’s temple from the simple display.
It’s less annoying now, after years of working around his own unsteady chakra, but he still has times when he misjudges a jutsu and expends too much too fast, a symptom of the constand chakra drain from the sharingan disappearing from his meridians so suddenly. Sakura thinks it’s something he’ll always have to keep an eye on.
Life is a funny thing, he muses. Once upon a time, that news would have been devastating to him. But, once upon a time, he watched Gai collapse in a flame of glory, every gate split and bleeding energy, chakra, and lifeblood into the earth below them. It had been a miracle that he lived, nevermind that he could move first his torso, then his arms, then his legs. That his body still gives him trouble, still betrays him on days seemingly out of nowhere, must have been as devastating, if not moreso to someone like Gai.
“Kakshi?”
“Hmmm?”
Kakashi blinks, turning back to look at Gai. Gai raises an eyebrow at him, which means that he’s asked Kakashi something and thinks Kakashi wasn’t listening.
“The romance is dead,” Gai laments, throwing a hand across his brow and collapsing backwards into the couch. The couch, more of a futon at this point with how worn down it is, groans as he sinks into a slightly more horizontal position. Kakashi flushes. “Not even a single ‘How are you, Gai? How is physical therapy today?’ If this is the thanks I get for--”
“I know how your physical therapy went,” Kakashi says. Gai blinks up at him. Kakashi flushes even more. “You’re smiling. You smell like sweat, but the kind that comes from a good workout. The happy kind. You’re using your cane today. You asked me to help you up the stairs because you wanted to have a good day tomorrow. It went well, Gai. I knew that.”
When Gai blushes, he does it with his whole body. Kakashi wouldn’t expect him to blush in any other manner. Gai is an all-in type of person, after all. Same as Kakashi. So when his face goes beet red, Kakashi knows that the color extends all the way down to his navel. Not that he’s thinking about that right now.
“The happy kind of sweat,” Gai repeats. He bites his lip, showing off his canines as he smiles. “Does unhappy sweat smell different?”
“Very,” Kakashi replies instantly. He wrinkles his nose. Through the mask, the movement isn’t too noticeable, but it gets another delighted laugh out of Gai, which is why he does it in the first place, so he’s counting it as a point in his favor. “Frustrated sweat is the worst, I think.”
Gai hums at him. He sits up, just far enough to reach out to Kakashi, tug at his wrist. Once, twice, three times, in an unspoken question. Kakashi replies in the affirmative by letting himself get pulled, up and over, until he’s laying half atop Gai. Gai smiles up at him, pleased as anything.
“What’s the best type of sweat?”
He hooks a finger at the hem of Kakashi’s mask. When he slips it down, he leaves his hand at the base of Kakashi’s neck. Kakashi grins at him, all teeth.
“Sex sweat, of course.”
“So the pervert accusations are true!” Gai shouts, pretending at offense, and Kakashi laughs again.
He can’t help but lean down the last little bit of space between them and press his smiling mouth to Gai’s cheek. Gai hums again, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. Their noses drag together, and Kakashi breathes in the smell of him. Sweat, the happy kind, and the lemongrass shampoo he must have used this morning. The sharp eucalyptus of the salves Sakura uses after his physical therapy.
It all smells like home.
Gai kisses him, first a press of his own over-wide grin against Kakashi’s, and then a real, proper kiss.
“I missed you too, you know,” Kakashi whispers into the space between them.
“I know you did,” Gai answers, and presses his lips to the beauty mark on his chin. “Of course I know that.”
The sun rises properly while they make out like teenagers on Gai’s old couch, until both of their stomachs growl loudly enough to break the mood, and Kakashi gets up to make breakfast.
Kakashi is tired. He lets himself admit it to himself, but more importantly, he lets himself admit just how good it is to be home.