Staring at the Sun
Devo
___________________________________________________________________
He'd be lying if he said he wasn't a fucked up person.
If he said he
knew who the hell he was half the time, then he was being generous. The truth
was, the real big truth of it was, that Kakashi was a liar. "I'm not at all who
you think I am."
He never got why people laughed when he said that. Was
he being terribly cute? He never quite trusted people who claimed they liked
him, either. Something about it all just struck him as disingenious; people
tried too hard to prove things which he knew to be basically untrue. He knew
this, because he thought this and ate this and breathed this, every waking
moment since he can remember when.
He was a hypocrite surrounded by
phonies; but at least he was in good company.
It was fortunate, or
perhaps unfortunate, that very few people had lived to remember a Kakashi who
wasn't the way they said he was: over-all infuriating, always late, always full
of excuses, always snickering gleefully at the prospect of certain death. Always
making faces behind his mask, he'd add; because if that wasn't irony, he wasn't
sure what was.
"Keep doing that," his father was fond of telling him.
"one day it'll freeze that way." Or, less serious. "You disgrace the beautiful
Hatake lineage with those looks."
Kakashi had never put much stock in the
beauty of his lineage--and even at that young age, he was thinking words like
lineage, and progeny, and esteem. "Men don't need to be beautiful," he'd argued.
"What's outside isn't important. That's just what others see."
He'd
looked thoughtful a moment, then said "If there wasn't an outside, Kakashi, what
would keep the insides hidden?"
A week to the day on which he'd said
those words, Kakashi's father committed seppuku in their kitchen. Disemboweled
himself, spilling his insides outside. He'd done it late at night, so the blood
had quite enough time to clot and grow sticky. Kakashi thought it looked like
plum-paste, and at first he wasn't sure that wasn't what it was. That he hadn't
just dropped a jar of something, and forgotten to clean it up. But then, there
he was, still lying there, all sort of crumpled up.
The neighbors him
scream that morning--long and loud--and came and took him from the
house.
They'd cleaned the old man up, and laid him out. Scrubbed the
floor as best they could, lit incense, and led Kakashi back to say his
goodbyes.
The clear crisp light picked out every detail in the room,
frank, unforgiving. It was supposed to be a beautiful day.
Kakashi
squeezed his eyes shut, and refused to look. "I don't want to see. That's not my
father..."
Maybe they saw the way he simmered, the way he shook, because
they were quick to fetch a square of black muslin, and fold it just so over the
body's face. "Please. Say goodbye to him...so his soul may find some
peace."
Kakashi, on that day, clenched his tiny fists, and condemned his
loving father to hell, as such a hell even existed.
Someone had the frame
of mind to grab him up, turn him away with shielding hands and protective arms.
"He's just a child. He doesn't realize what he's saying. The shock will wear
off, eventually. Give him
time."
_____________________________________________________________________
Kakashi
entered Konoha academy in his fifth year.
He had vague memories of an
inheritance, and provisions made, everything taken care of over his head, behind
his back. It wasn't important where he stayed; wherever it was, they made sure
he was comfortable and had everything he needed. Maybe he was spoiled. He didn't
care. When he made the announcement, nobody argued. His uncle simply nodded and
made the arrangements, told him what a mature lad he was.
That very same
year, on the very first day of his attendance, he began wearing the mask. The
adults must've thought he'd gone crazy, but they humored him. They all figured
it was a passing phase, and that once the kid fulfilled whatever conditions he'd
set for himself, he'd give it up.
It took at least three days for the
anxious whispering to start. "I wonder what he looks like under there." "I
wonder what he's hiding." "The Hatake progeny? He must be handsome..."
It
was then that Kakashi discovered, looks _were_ important. To girls.
To
the other boys, one in particular, things were another story. "Yeah? Well _I_
could care less. You must think you're something special, hah?" Round-faced
little rooster of a brat, black hair and very little concept of personal space.
He had the audacity to laugh. Right in Kakashi's face.
Said, in no
uncertain terms. "I'm more special than you, I'll tell you what!"
Kakashi
was taken aback--mostly by his breath--but partly, he'd admit, by the kid's
attitude.
Three days in, and already apparent as the class screw-up. Uchiha
in name only.
"So, prove it," Kakashi said.
"Oh, I will. One day,
I'm totally gonna kick your ass."
He was, Kakashi remembered, a brilliant
nuisance; but he never did totally kick Kakashi's ass, or his anything. "Quit
being so immature," he'd say. "Think of the mission."
Kakashi wonders, if
he hadn't died, what would've become of the six-years-old threat. He wonders if
his ass would even've been worth kicking, at that
point.
______________________________________________________________
He'd
be lying if he said he learnt anything from Obito's death. Right away, at least.
He'd be lying if he said that was when he took it in his head to change, for
good. To be better. That was the unbearable lightness of being Kakashi. He just
didn't learn. He went, and he did, and he looked back with enough prescience to
regret; but that was it.
Sometimes he'd get to thinking those days were
behind him. When he was feeling too philosophical for his own good, he'd divide
his life in two parts: before and after. As he grew older, his before got
bigger, and his after shrunk; a sort of karmic doppler effect. He'd once tried
to explain this to Asuma. "Because the closer they get to you, the tighter the
soundwaves stack."
This'd gotten Asuma's stock response, "Man, too many
late nights. Not good for a person's sanity."
At age twenty-years,
fresh-faced and smiling behind a yard of black fabric, Kakashi was old enough to
drink, and young enough to think he knew better.
If he'd had a point to
prove with the mask, he'd long since forgotten. It'd gone from phase to
compulsion, and become something people carefully never mentioned, or spoke
about, or noticed.
And he could play right along. Pretend that he wasn't,
for all intents and purposes, missing three quarters of his face. He could smile
at jokes, purse his lips thoughtfully, frown hard, and mock those who deserved
it.
"What changed?" Hayate asked him one day, down at the local tea-spot
where they'd sometimes meet. "I don't recall you ever being like
this."
"Ah, funny thing," Kakashi sighed, discretely rolling his mask
down to the dip of his chin, and sipping his tea. "One day I got lost on the
road of life."
Hayate gave him a terrible dead stare, (the kind that
usually ended in heads rolling) and said: "Consider carrying a map, then." He
drank with an ominous air, terrible and serious and polite. "If you're late to
one more briefing, I'm afraid I'll have to take measures."
Kakashi
snorted into his sencha, perfectly splattering it across his nose and face, then
wiping it away with his sleeve. He couldn't explain why he laughed. It wasn't
the incongruity of Hayate. It was the fact that he reminded him of someone.
"Pardon me, vice captain? Take measures?"
"What he means," said Genma,
looming calmly over Kakashi's shoulder. As if he hadn't just appeared from
nowhere. "Is that he'll kick your ass."
Hayate gave a curt nod.
"Definitely."
Kakashi sobered quickly and said, "Better men have tried
and failed."
"That sounds like a challenge," Hayate said, bit of a
half-smile creeping past the edge of his cup. "You know I'm incapable of
refusing a challenge."
All right. Kakashi would be lying, again, if he
said he weren't still just a bit of a jerk. "I'm not usually in the habit of
fighting my own team-mates, but since you've so graciously extended the
invitation..." here he stood, one flick setting his mask in place. Appearances,
he thought, it'd just be strange otherwise.
Genma shuffled to the side,
hands dropping from his pockets to hang ready. "Oi, oi, he didn't mean
here."
Hayate hadn't moved; not so much as even a muscle, not so much as
a tic. His teacup poised at his lip, he said softly "He's right. Allow me to
finish my tea first."
They fought that afternoon, in the dusty heat of
the practice yard.
Hayate was first to go down, and he lay in the orange
dirt, pale and panting on all fours, face streaked with rust-colored sweat. It
would have been victory by default, since Kakashi's final palm-strike had never
connected; but when Genma stepped in to declare it, Hayate let out a
yell.
"Kiii-AAAIIIYYY!" Like that, he twisted up from the ground, eyes
white with rage, and whipped his lanky self around like a Saracen
blade.
Kakashi sprang quickly out of the way, shedding his hitai-ate as
he did; and in the time it took for his eye to focus, there were three of
Hayate, then five, fanning out and springing at him from five equidistant
points.
And that was when Kakashi decided to get serious. That very
moment, unfortunately too late.
"I'm fairly impressed," he snarled,
having snagged the central-most Hayate in an reverse elbow lock. He felt joints
grate, and muscles shiver in pain. Hayate's back radiated warmth like a
heartbeat, and sweat made his skin slick.
Kakashi twisted harder, pulling
him up fast, and testing. Hayate gave an angry grunt, and planted his feet.
Kakashi gave his ankle a gentle toe-prod, just to make sure, and said. "Your
chakra control is excellent. You almost had me fooled for a
minute."
Hayate let out a long, deep breath, and went limp; his chakra
level dipped, like water draining from a deer-scare. Kakashi let him
go.
"That was your second mistake," Hayate sighed, flopping into a loose
forward roll and vanishing with a distinct pop.
"And this is your last,"
he said, as the ground came rushing up.
Kakashi lay flat on his face,
pillowed in a cloud of gently drifting dust, coughing and trying to knock the
wind _back_ into himself. The inside of Hayate's leg brused Kakashi's arm--his
long shadow straddled Kakashi's rounded huddled one--and Kakashi reached for it.
Hayate slipped from his grasp like a phantom, took several definitive and
measured steps, then planted his foot in the smallest of Kakashi's back.
Hard.
A crane crushing a frog for its dinner.
Above him, Genma
shrugged his head to the side, and declared Hayate the
winner.
___________________________________________________________________
"Well,"
Genma reflected later, over the hospital cot. "That is what I said he'd
do."
Kakashi had just winced, and laid there with his backside bare
beneath a large icepack. "Would you call that irony?"
Genma flicked his
toothpick a few times, like a cat playing with some string, eyes lazily
following the movement. "No. Irony would've been him kicking you in the teeth.
Something counterintuitive like that."
"Subtle," said Kakashi. "I believe
you just called me a butt-head."
"I believe you deserved
it."
Kakashi frowned darkly, for the benefit of no-one. "Just whose side
are you on?"
The door creaked guiltily open, then, and a dour faced nurse
led an even more dour faced Hayate into the room.
He glanced around
quickly, his eyes just skiiiiddding over Kakashi's naked rear.
Kakashi
waved at him, cheer and dead-pan. "Hey, eyes up here, please."
The nurse
murmured something then left. Hayate raised a hand to his mouth, and nervously
cleared his throat. "How is your...um..."
"Oh, my ass?" Kakashi said,
casual as you please. "Sore, but not as much as my pride."
Hayate
furrowed his brow delicately, and scrutinized the floor; shadows pooled beneath
his eyes when he did this. He looked, at once, both dangerous and far far too
breakable. "I apologize. That was...ah...rather unsportsman-like of
me."
"Funny as hell, though." Genma muttered around his
toothpick.
"Genma-senpai!" Hayate growled. "Shouldn't you be setting a
better example?"
Genma shrugged. "S'pose so."
Hayate's voice
dropped an even lower octave. "No wonder I've started down the path to
delinquency. I should quit you. I really should."
"Relax, Hayate-kun. You
lost your temper. It happens."
And then Hayate said it. The thing that
one should never ever say to Genma, or around him, or to any of his friends, or
anyone who might conceivably get it back to him. "No. I'm not like
you."
There was a small audible crack in the room, a sound not unlike
what a more romantic sort would describe as Genma's heart breaking. But
actually, it was his toothpick, bitten in two.
Hayate's eyes went wide,
and his voice went small. "I'm...sorry. I shouldn't have said
that."
Genma drew a shaky breath; and wasn't it convenient how everyone
in the room seemed to forget about Kakashi, laying there with his trousers down
around his hips.
"It's okay," said Genma. "It's fine." He let out his
breath, and plastered over the hurt with a vague smile.
Hayate reached
for the doorknob, said: "I'm sorry, I'll go now," and with great formality, let
himself
out.
_______________________________________________________________
Word
of Kakashi's 'injury' spread fast. He was out of the hospital before supper, and
already he had well-wishers. So many of them. Such a wealth of consideration, he
was frankly overwhelmed.
"Hey, how's yer ass? Heard you took a real
pounding today!"
Kakashi smiled a very forced smile that no-one could
see, and waved to each concerned party in passing. "It's fine, thank you! How's
yours?" He forsaw a night of very heavy drinking ahead.
The old Kakashi
would've gotten angry. The before him would've sulked. He'd have gone after
Hayate and said spiteful horrible things, things he'd end up regretting later;
he knew. The before him hadn't been very good at keeping friends.
"The
thing you need to understand about Hayate," said Genma. "Is that he can't stand
to lose. It infuriates him."
Kakashi sank back against a nearby wall,
under the shade of green awning, and tried to ignore the clammy cling of his
sweat soaked mask. "Nobody likes to lose."
"Yeah, well. Some of us take
it better than others."
"Hmm. Like you, for example?" Kakashi touched his
chin, and eyed Genma speculatively a while. "You strike me as a fairly confident
person. Let's fight."
Genma tilted his head this way and that, like he
was honestly thinking about it; blinking long unaffected lashes, hands clasped
behind his back, open stanced. "No thanks."
"You're not even a little
curious as to who'd win?"
"Can't say I am."
"You're not the least
bit threatened by me?"
Genma blinked again, still standing there with his
feet apart, hips slightly cocked. "Should I be?"
"What'd happen if
attacked you, right now?" Kakashi shifted his weight, and Genma didn't so much
as twitch.
"Bad idea, telegraphing your moves like that."
"Ah,
you're right." He eyed the man again, up and down. He was getting bored of this.
"Shall we fuck, then?"
"Okay."
One of these days Kakashi, someone
once told him, that mouth of yours is gonna get you in trouble.
Genma did
not waste a move. He grabbed Kakashi by his vest collar, spun him into the
narrow alleyway, and kissed him up against the wall, mouth over mask.
Slam-kissed him, body to body, shoving a thigh between his legs, pinning and
pressing. And just when he would've gotten a reaction, whether Kakashi had any
say in the matter or not, he stopped.
"Called your bluff?" Genma
whispered.
Kakashi arched his shoulder up off the wall, shoving back a
bit. "You licked my mask. You licked _cloth_."
One last kiss, on the
cheek this time, and Genma skipped back a few steps; quite satisfied of himself,
and the fact that Kakashi wouldn't retaliate. Another second's consideration,
leaning back a bit with his hand in his pocket, then Genma turned and walked
back out onto the street. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said. "Don't forget to
bring that report.
Kakashi took a deep damp breath, adjusted his fly, and
tore down his mask. Stupidly, he called out, "Yeah, okay," and slid slowly down
the wall; scraping his back as he
went.
____________________________________________________________________
Kakashi
was no stranger to sex. Which was not to say he and sex were the bossomest of
companions...but he'd had it. He'd managed not to make a _complete_ prat of
himself. Most of his partners seemed to enjoy what he did. If the moans and
scratches were any guage. Which was not to say that this was an altogether
frequent thing.
But he could say, with confidence, that he and sex were
on at least familiar terms.
Familiar, the way he was with his right hand,
and on alternating days, his left. Both hands were reserved for special
occasions, and a pillow was when he couldn't be arsed for either.
And
when even that proved too much of a bother, there was his good old pal alcohol.
Sake. Nihonshu. And a bath hot enough to kill whatever dying scraps of libido
remained.
Maybe he had been bluffing. Maybe he hadn't. Same difference as
far as his body was concerned. It wasn't Genma, and it wasn't personal, he told
himself. It wasn't his gender, or his sex. It wasn't the fact of his cock, or
his walk, but just the fact that he looked and smelled nice, and felt nice, and
kissed Kakashi like he could've meant it.
He could tell, already, that
alcohol wasn't going to cut it that night.
He got off twice in pretty
short succession, crouched on his bare wooded floor, with the bedframe at his
back, whimpering and biting into his wrist. First time, it was two fingers and a
thumb, short quick strokes base to head, and he was picturing Genma on his
belly, ass in the air just like _he'd_ been at the hospital. Kakashi rutted him
like a wild dog, and Genma thrust back, shaking and gasping and clawing the
sheets, hair plastered sweatily to his face. He came hard that time, too quick.
Not the way he'd have done things, if given his druthers.
So there was
the second time, second long excruciating time, fucking into his lubed fist and
rocking back against the bedframe 'til he thought the wall might give. That
time, it was Hayate's frowning lips, wrapped indecorously round the head of his
cock. Hayate drooled, and his face got red and sweaty, and picturing him
afterwards, he'd be hard as hell, thick and heavy, and ever so slightly
curved.
Kakashi supposed he'd have to let Hayate fuck him, if it came to
that. He'd have to flip the glum serious Hayate onto his back, stand his cock on
end, and rock down on it, he'd fuck and be fucked, and Hayate's face would screw
up in a most undignified manner, teeth bared, shocked eyes. Kakashi wondered if
he'd growl, or maybe just wheeze, and how hard would he thrust with that compact
blade of a body? Would he rather be on top? Would he use just his hips? Or his
whole body?
Second time. He came arched way back, grinding his heel up
against his arse-hole, straining his thighs, drooling, panting like a dying
thing.
And he wondered why he was so
alone.
______________________________________________________________
"You're
a mess," Hayate told him, exchanging old blood-soaked cloth for
fresh.
Kakashi grinned redly at him, before remembering he still wore his
mask, and in that case all Hayate saw were his eyes--one grey, one red-- rolling
slowly back in their sockets. "Not looking so hot yourself,
sunshine."
"Please, would you stop talking, and concentrate on not
dying?"
"Can't stand to lose," Kakashi said, hating the way his breath
gurgled in and out of his throat. Especially when he laughed. What was going on
down there anyway? So much blood. A lot of it was his, he could
tell.
Hayate's eyes got big, white as they were the day he'd put his zori
to Kakashi's rear. "This isn't funny."
"Maybe...not from where you're
sitting," Kakashi grunted. "But from down here, trust me, it's fucking
hilarious. One big cosmic...joke."
Hayate grabbed the com-link from his
ear and shook it, slammed it against the ground a few times for good measure.
"Oh please, please don't do this right now...damn it. Damn it damn it damn it."
he panted.
For some reason, Kakashi found this hilarious too. Even when
he was screaming and cursing and hacking off enemy limbs, Hayate never dropped
the polite speech. Everything he said came out as "If you'd please go fuck
yourself," and "I humbly invite you to drop dead." Someone had gone to a lot of
trouble in raising him right.
"Please work. If you'd please just WORK,
god-damn it!" Hayate shook it again, then shouted into the mouthpiece. "Unit B!
Can you hear me! UNIT B! We have men down! Please come in.
Somebody."
There was a long dreadful stretch of silence, Hayate trembled
convulsively, com-set rattling in his hand. "All right. All right..." he
sniffed, wheezing and hoarse, and hunched over. And his speech got very plain
all the sudden, eerily calm and simple. "I will get you out of this,
Kakashi-senpai. I owe you that much."
Kakashi couldn't be sure, but he
thought he might've wet his trousers, hard to say; could've been blood. "I think
I've pissed myself," he said. "This is so embarrassing."
"It's okay,"
said Hayate. His lower lip trembled. "It doesn't matter."
"Hey," Kakashi
felt his hand move, felt dozens of small cuts ground full of sand, dirt, flecks
of treebark. He never felt himself lift it up though, just saw it floating
across his line of sight and scrabbling at Hayate's blood slicked arm. "Hey.
Don't...go to pieces on me. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Okay."
Hayate carried
him about twenty yards, on his back, into the midst of a fresh fire-fight. With
literal fire.
Kakashi remembered lots of jostling and shouting, and very
serious people saying things like: "What the hell happened? Your com went
dead."
It all seemed so very unreal. Like something he was watching on
television. Everything was flat, just one never-ending, two dimensional plane.
Sky, trees, dirt and orange licking flame, all compressed into a narrow band and
knocked ever so slightly askew. The only thing that wasn't flat, the only thing
with any weight or substance, was Hayate.
"Don't move," he said. I hope
you wouldn't move, please. "I'll stay with you. Just don't move."
Kakashi
lay there and lay there for a long time, staring at the acid white disk of a
sun, eyes wide open, and thinking: "This is it."
This is it. This is
really it.
It's happening. It's going to happen now. Any minute now. The
spreading warmth had already turned to numbness, and his ears had started
ringing, and things were compressing much faster now. Too fast. He wasn't sure
he liked this picture anymore.
"I'm...I'm gonna die," he
slurred.
"No. No, you're not. No, you're
not--"
_________________________________________________________________
All
he'd ever heard people talk about was the sense of overwhelming _peace_ and
well-being, and oneness with the universe. Made Kakashi wonder if he'd done
something wrong.
All he'd felt was blank, stark, big terror. Terror and
cold and numbness, and whiteness.
"I was supposed to feel at peace," he
rasped, hoarse from all the tubes they'd shoved down his throat.
The
chair next to his bed creaked, and Kakashi carefully rolled his right eye in
that direction. "What a cheat," he sniffed, plucking a bit of pilling from his
blanket.
Genma smirked at him, and said "That's death for you," an
appropriately vague pause and then, "except that you didn't die.
Exactly."
"I didn't? Thanks. I wasn't so sure there for a
minute."
"You're getting better at sarcasm."
"I wasn't being
sarcastic," Kakashi sighed.
Kakashi spent an unmemorable week in the
hospital, and pretty much slept through it. Hayate visited a few times, as Genma
reported, but never when he was awake. "Because he wasn't sure what to
say."
"How is he, though?"
"He checked himself out two days ago.
But...I don't think he's well enough to be walking around," said Genma, flicking
a glance at the bed-rail, then the bed-tray. His lashes, in the light, seemed
sharp enough to cut glass. "Raidou says he saw his bandages. Said they looked
pretty bad...so...I don't know."
Kakashi turned his head towards the
window, looked out. He kept expecting to see that same acid white disc of a sun
he'd seen before, but found only dense gray haze; warm and static and smelling
like sharp wet earth. The window was open. He wanted it kept that way. "It's my
fault. I used it too much, exhausted my chakra."
"That doesn't matter
now. It's not about fault," Genma sighed and sank lower in his chair. "Like I
told you, Hayate can't accept losing." He blinked down at his lap, and his whole
body seemed to go quiet. His face went soft, and the toothpick drooped from his
lip, and his hands lay folded loosely between his knees.
Nothing to do
but watch him; so that was what Kakashi did. "What do you think he might
do?"
"What would _you_ do, if you were him?"
Kakashi turned his
head again, and looked at the bud-vase on his window-sill, at the single pale
blue flower, petals venous and sharply translucent in the warm mercury haze. A
soft rumble of thunder, the humid purr of a sleeping cat, a giant. "I'd take
another mission," he said. "Right away."
Genma caught the edge of his
lower lip with a tooth, skewer now shifted to the side, eyes cast towards the
ceiling. "That's what I thought," he said. "I have people keeping an eye on him,
just in case he tries anything. He's going to hate me for it...but...what else
can I do?"
"Hate you. For not wanting him to die?"
Genma turned
his head, spat the toothpick into the wastebasket by the far wall, then took
several deep measured breaths. The line of his jaw hardened and shifted, etching
maturity into the plane of his cheek. "He's seventeen, Kakashi. Did you know
that?"
Kakashi shifted closer to the bed-rails, stuck his hand through,
and let it hang there, out in space. "Obito was twelve," he said. "Rin was
fifteen."
Genma shifted again, leaning carefully forward, over the
bed-rail, resting his cheek on the hard plastic, letting his hands fall to
mattress level.
Kakashi touched his wrist, scabbed knuckles against
smooth skin. "Every time a person you love dies, a part of you dies with them,"
he said. "Something I've been wondering for a while. If enough loved ones die,
if all of them die, and you've got no-one, then all of you dies as well. And if
all of you dies, what happens...do you become a different person?"
"I
don't know. Maybe," Genma closed his eyes. "Do you want to be a different
person?"
"That's the thing," said Kakashi. "I'm not so sure any
more."
_______________________________________________________________________
If
he were filming the story of his life, Kakashi supposed this part would be the
epilogue. The point at which all the loose little threads tied neatly together,
and the camera panned slowly out over the village and closed on a nice shot of
him sitting on some rooftop at night. There'd be a bit of music, a brief coda
maybe, then credits.
Little bit short as life-stories or pictures went,
he thought, but not a bad place to end it. It left things open at
least.
What the audience wouldn't see, was him sitting on the ledge for
about twenty dead-eyed, slack-jawed minutes, skipping stones off of the gutter.
When he got bored of that, he kicked gravel and slung himself down the
fire-landing, out into the alleyway. Coming round a tight turn, he wandered out
onto a narrow, tree-lined back-avenue and followed it to where it spilled back
into the village proper.
Calm at this time of night. Under the red and
orange glow of paper lanterns, shopkeepers stood out by their front doors,
smoking, arguing across to one-another, sweeping the day's dust into the
street.
Kakashi grabbed dinner at the local noodle joint, then spent
thirty minutes arguing with Gai over something he couldn't be bothered to
remember; it only mattered that he won, and that he'd never let Gai live it
down. Funny thing, he reflected. He supposed he and Gai were friends. He wasn't
quite sure when that had happened, save that it was unmomentous, and at the same
time huge. Maybe he was getting better.
It wasn't until he'd finally
headed home for the night, until most of the streetlights, and lanterns had gone
out, that he saw him. Hayate, sitting crouched at the edge of his apartment's
front stoop, reassuringly miserable as ever.
Kakashi stopped at the
perimeter of his walkway, and Hayate stood. "Um..." he muttered uncomfortably,
rubbing at his bottom lip.
Whatever it was he was about to say, Kakashi
never let him finish; he marched right up there and grabbed him, and held on for
a very long time. He hadn't exactly rehearsed this all, he hadn't ever planned
to sweep anyone off their feet. That would never be him. Hayate hugged back,
awkwardly, like this whole human contact business was something new to him; then
he stood on his toes, and mashed his lips against Kakashi's. Or just about where
he thought they'd be.
"It's not attached, you know," Kakashi reminded
him, peeling his mask down just far enough. In this light, the distance between
twenty and seventeen seemed that much wider. A gaping chasm, yawning beneath his
feet. Was this okay?
Hayate leaned back a bit, hands on shoulders, to
look at him. "I know," he said. "It's just...I felt you'd seem...more naked
without it."
A very long pause. Kakashi blinked at him, and he blinked
back. Then Kakashi said. "I see."
They both laughed a bit nervously then
kissed again, and both tripped backwards against the doorframe, each letting out
a grunt of pain and grabbing to push away or pull closer or whatever. And when
they finally sorted themselves out, Hayate was panting, and his lips were wet.
He carefully straightened his hitai-ate, and his hair, then wiped his mouth on
his sleeve.
Kakashi's left knee gave like a cooked noodle, just then,
half spilling him to the pavement before Hayate launched forward and caught him,
fetched him to the side, then corrected and sort of wobbled him
upright.
"Are you all right?" Hayate asked, shy and shell-shocked. His
shoulders moved with every breath, bowing in and out, like he'd just run a race;
like he was still running it.
Kakashi, no less shell-shocked, blinked at
him and said. "Are--are you?"
Hayate smiled. "No," he said, laughing a
little. "No, I'm not. I'm really not okay." His face seemed at war with itself,
like his insides wanted to come out, like something wanted to
break.
Kakashi hovered over him again, and carefully pulled him away from
the doorframe, forward into his good shoulder. "Well, admitting it's a step in
the right direction. Can I walk you home?"
Hayate nodded anxiously, and
with a small stumble, the two of them linked hands, and limped off down the dark
sidewalk.
__________________________________________________________________
Well,
he'd be lying if he said he'd just walked Hayate home and never done anything
more. That was the unbearable lightness of not knowing any
better.
_____________________________________________________________________
...
cross the street from your storefront cemetery
hear me hailing from
inside and realize
I am the conscience clear
in pain or
ecstacy
we were all weaned my dear
upon the same
fatigue
staring at the sun
oh my own
voice
cannot save me now
standing in the sea
it's
just
one more breath
and then
down I
go
your mouth is open wide
the lover is
inside
and all the tumults done
collided with the
sign
you're staring at the sun
you're standing in the
sea
your body's over me
note the trees
because
the dirt is temporary
more to mine than fact
face
name and monetary
beat the skins and let
the
loose lips kiss you clean
quietly pour out like
light
like light, like answering the sun
you're staring
at the sun
you're standing in the sea
your mouth is open
wide
you're trying hard to breathe
the water's at your
neck
there's lightning in your teeth
your body's over
me
(be what you will
and then thrown down your
life
oh it's a damned fine game
and we can play all
night)
you're staring at the sun
you're standing in the
sea
your mouth is open wide
you're trying hard to
breathe
the water's at your neck
there's lightning in your
teeth
your body's over me
T.V. on the Radio--staring
at the
sun
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