Chapter Text
Kakashi hates seeing Gai in the hospital.
(Kakashi also hates himself, almost all people, most places, and many things, usually in that order, but he might hate seeing Gai in the hospital the most.)
It’s jarring to see him in white, swathed in white, whites and pinks and reds and not a speck of green in sight. It’s also jarring to see him still.
For most people, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ is a pithy phrase, a smartassed quip.
For Gai, it’s a life philosophy.
God, the man is absolutely ridiculous.
When he leans against the walls of hospital corridors, medical personnel giving him a wide berth as they come and go, he tells himself that he does not care whether Gai lives or dies.
The opposite is true. He never visits when Gai is conscious in the vain hope that the man will cave to the weak punishment, that he might decide to not be so stubbornly heroic and reckless with his own life.
That, and he doesn’t know if he can pretend to be all right with this side of his friend — the side that would do such thorough damage to himself, and grin afterwards.
He always fully intends to ignore Gai when he comes knocking after he is discharged.
He ought to rest. He ought to leave Kakashi alone.
The only thing as terrifying as almost losing Gai is letting Gai see how terrified he had been. How terrified he still is. Because Gai hasn’t changed at all. Gai will never change, no matter how many month-long stints he spends in the hospital, no matter how many times he charges head-first into lethal danger and comes out on the other side with only shreds of himself. Gai will always put others first.
Faced with the kind of moral conundrums that have occupied philosophers for millennia, he would choose his own death.
He would choose to let Kakashi grieve him.
It is at this point of his thought process when Kakashi usually opens the door to tell Gai to fuck off and get lost and other rude, pushing-others-away things that come so easily to him.
That requires, of course, actually coming face-to-face with the man — his stupid hair and his stupid teeth, his stupid earnestness and his stupid ability to appear healthy as a horse a month after breaking pretty much every single bone in his body.
They are beyond the point where Kakashi needs to pretend that he doesn’t care.
(They are beyond the point where Kakashi can.)
“I’ll get my keys.”
He swallows the poison that he’d been intending to spew and closes the door. It burns him from the inside, and he shuts his eyes against the pain. He gives himself five seconds to remember what Gai had looked like in the hospital, his skin almost as pale as the bedsheets, doctors and nurses shaking their heads at the damage he’d done to himself.
Then he scowls the memories away, plunging them beneath the icy depths of his mind, and opens the door.
He listens to Gai’s prattling with less than half an ear.
The setting sun fills the streets with a blurry golden glow, like a sepia photograph. Unbidden, Kakashi remembers the first time Gai had sent himself to the hospital.
(Muscle damage. Shattered knee. Shredded tendons. Pretty much every kind of trauma. Two weeks, five days, and about eighteen hours.)
“You’re not your father,” Kakashi had hissed, as if his words could slip between Gai’s ribs and nick his heart sharply enough to make him listen. To make him hurt.
“I know.” Gai hadn’t smiled. Just looked at him with big, dark eyes that could have swallowed him whole. “I’m not your father, either.”
Kakashi cannot enjoy the drivel on the television. Perhaps ‘enjoy’ is too strong a verb. Even in the best of circumstances, Fearless, like other brainless reality shows, merely gives his mind a short respite.
These are not the best of circumstances.
Whenever Gai takes a sip of his beer, he can see the chafing on the other man’s wrists from the heavy-duty shackles they use to keep him from killing himself through sheer bullheadedness.
An idiot on the screen grins from ear to ear after nearly offing himself. Kakashi imagines him in green. Then he imagines that the beer can is Gai’s neck. It crumples satisfyingly in his grip, and he wishes he had another empty can. He wishes he wasn’t so angry.
(One would think that, with his extensive experience, Kakashi would deal okay with being the one who stays when others leave.)
Now the can is his own neck, and he cannot let go. That’s his problem, his shrink informs him, during his mandated sessions — letting go.
A minute passes, or maybe an hour. Somehow, he remembers to breathe. Gai pries his fingers from the ruin of metal in his hand. He is gentle — so unbearably gentle that Kakashi wants to scream, but he can feel the anger slipping from him as suddenly as it had erupted.
If Kakashi were anyone other than himself, he might ask Gai to promise not to do this again. Not to be another participant in the parade of people-who-leave-Kakashi.
If Gai were anyone other than himself, Kakashi wouldn’t have to.
But they are who they are, and Kakashi doesn’t know which he would find the more devastating answer — yes or no.