Title: Out of sight
Pairing: Kakashi/Gai (established relationship)
Rating: M (for later chapters)
Timeline: post canon
Summary: After Kakashi loses his memory, he has to deal with the life and the boyfriend he can't remember.
Warning: WIP
Notes: I don't know if this story will survive here, since there'll be some graphic content later on. This is a story I've been working on for a while and it's about a few millimeters from being finished, so I'll give it another shot.
As they had promised, the dogs brought him to the village in less than a day. The big, dark one half carried him through the impressive gates and to the little watch post inside. "There we are," the ugly little pug announced, and subsequently shouted to the two dozing men on watch, "A little help here!"
He passed out then and there.
"If this was caused by a blow to the head," the blond young man said, scratching his chin, "then maybe we just have to whack him again and-," he brought his fist down onto the palm of his hand, presumably to illustrate his plan, "boom –he'll remember!"
"That's a great idea, Hokage-sama. I can see why they made you head of the village."
He looked over to the corner where the second boy reclined against the wall, arms folded, eyes trained on the tiled floor.
The girl sitting perched on the side of the bed he had woken up in chose this moment to address him in a gentle, it's-going-to-be-alright- tone of voice, "Don't mind them, Kakashi-sensei. Your amnesia was most likely caused by your head injury. Usually the memory loss isn't permanent."
Behind her, the two boys were bickering like children, but there was something eerie, surreal about it. The blond one – they'd told him their names, but the information was lost to him now, hidden in the foggy depths of his mind – wore a long, white coat adorned with red writing that proclaimed him the seventh Hokage, and he, Kakashi, as he'd been told multiple times, knew what the title meant.
The boy was the strongest shinobi of his hidden village, Konoha, the village hidden in the leaves in the Land of Fire. Kakashi knew what shinobi were and how many hidden villages there were in the world. He could even name them, but ever since the moment he'd woken up, surrounded by eight very strange and worried-looking dogs, and covered in blood, he hadn't been able to recall his own name; hadn't been able to remember anything about himself.
The three youths, all of them under twenty, he was sure, had been there when he woke up the second time, in a hospital bed.
He was a ninja who'd been injured on his mission, they said. The dogs had already told them what had happened. They were his students, they said. The girl was a medic and had proceeded to examine him. He was to spend the night in hospital, she decided. In the morning, she would consult "Tsunade-sama".
During all of this, the three kept exchanging meaningful glances.
Then they told him that he should try to get some rest.
And try he did.
When he woke up, a blond woman with enormous breasts was standing at his bedside, holding a clipboard and staring at him. He blinked; she kept staring.
"Ah… have we met?" he asked, unnerved.
"Can you tell me your name?"
He thought for a moment. Her eyes narrowed; it made him feel as if a target was painted on his forehead and she was taking aim.
"Kakashi," he said.
She jotted something down on her clipboard.
"Do you know your last name?"
He racked his brain, but recalling the events of the previous night didn't yield an answer to that question. "I don't think I was told."
Again, she took notes. "What exactly do you remember, Kakashi?"
By the time Tsunade left, Kakashi felt downright miserable. She was holding back information, he was sure of it. He'd had the same feeling about Sakura – Tsunade had told him the names of his students, to spare him the embarrassment of having to ask them again, or maybe to spare them – she hadn't been as good at hiding her concern as Tsunade, it was all in the way she didn't give in to the obvious urge to chew on her lip.
Kakashi let himself sink into his pillow and tried to come to terms with his situation. So far, he wasn't in any kind of danger, even his head had stopped hurting. There had been a deep cut just above his hairline. When he'd woken up out in the fields, he'd been bloody, in pain and quite terrified.
Konoha was a safe haven for him, though; people here knew him and seemed to care about him. Still, he was a shinobi, which meant he was a soldier, a killer, and out there, someone had tried to kill him. He didn't know what had happened to them; he hadn't seen a dead body anywhere near where he'd woken up, but then he hadn't exactly gone looking for one. The dogs, he remembered, had been in quite a hurry to get him away from there and to Konoha, but that might have been because of his injury.
As he thought of the injury, Kakashi tentatively touched the spot where the bleeding gash had been. Nothing. Just a little bump that ached faintly when he applied a carefully measured amount of pressure. Medical ninjutsu, he thought. Molded correctly, chakra could heal incredibly fast, he knew although he couldn't recall where or when he'd learned this.
Feeling spooked, Kakashi looked around the room, looked for escape routes. Doing that calmed him down. There were enough ways out of the room; he wasn't restrained and no matter how much he strained, he couldn't hear or see any sign that he was under special surveillance. It seemed like he could just get up and walk out whenever he pleased.
Well, if he escaped the hospital, he'd still be in a village full of ninja.
Tsunade and Sakura came back after he'd been served lunch by the most kindly harmless looking nurse he'd ever seen – not that he had much to compare her with, but still, she made him feel a little ridiculous for being so paranoid.
He sat up in bed and wondered how exactly you greeted people you – supposedly – had known for a long time, but couldn't remember at all.
The two of them didn't wait for him to come to a conclusion, though. Tsunade marched in, sat down on his bed, almost on him, too, and proceeded to shine a light in his eye, while Sakura asked him the catalog of questions he'd probably answered a hundred times already.
When they were done, he looked at them looking at each and sighed, "what?"
"This isn't how posttraumatic amnesia usually manifests itself. Your condition might be more complicated than we thought." Tsunade was being matter-of-fact and direct and Kakashi was grateful for that at least.
"Meaning I won't get my memories back?"
"We don't know that." Sakura was quick to take on the role of the optimist in the conversation; here she was declaring the cracked glass half full.
"But," Kakashi prompted and Sakura had the decency to deflate just a little.
"That's just it, we don't know," Tsunade continued for her. "We don't know if your amnesia was caused by your head injury or by a jutsu. Either way, there is really nothing we can do for you here."
"So, either my memories come back or they don't." It wasn't all that hard to digest, mostly because Kakashi really had no idea what he had lost. There might have been precious moments that he would have wanted to cherish forever, but how was he to miss something he couldn't remember having?
All he felt was blank.
It was decided that Hatake Kakashi, Konoha jounin, aged 32, would stay in hospital a little while longer. Meanwhile, he did his best to find out more about himself.
In the afternoon, when his students came to check up on him, Kakashi asked them to tell him everything they knew about him.
Apparently, it wasn't much.
"Kakashi-sensei is just a mysterious person!" Naruto said, crossing his arms defensively. "Up until a year ago I'd never even seen your face."
"Everything's mysterious to you," Sasuke said under his breath, back in his corner.
"Okay, so you don't know anything about my parents or any other relatives or what happened to my eye or…" The list went on, but there wasn't any point in dwelling on the questions they couldn't answer. Time to try another approach. "What do you know about me? Anything?"
He looked around – at Sakura, who sat cross-legged in a chair next to his bed, an expression of doubt on her face. Clearly, she had thought of a few thinks she could say already, but something was holding her back. He wondered if she knew any of her teacher's dirty secrets, whatever they might be.
Naruto's face on the other hand was completely scrunched up in thought; he looked like smoke could come out of his ears at any second.
As for Sasuke… Kakashi's gaze lingered on the dark-haired boy, who stood in the same spot in the same position as he had the night before. Draped in a shroud of silence, Sasuke never raised his eyes from the floor. Out of the three, he was the only one who wore the regular blue Konoha shinobi uniform, identical to the one Kakashi himself had worn when he'd woken up in the field.
"Ah, you owe me money! We went to Ichiraku's last week and you said you'd treat me, but then you pretended that you'd forgotten your wallet in your other vest!" Naruto pointed at him accusingly.
"Naruto!" Sakura glared daggers at her teammate.
"But it's true!"
"Idiot," Sasuke said to the floor.
Kakashi watched them and felt strangely excluded. He could guess that this was a familiar scene and wondered if they were playing it up to jog his memory. Weren't they too old for these kinds of antics? Was this the point where he would normally chime in?
Like the night before, the three were giving him a strange vibe. Childish but also something else. Naruto laughed self-consciously and the sound fell flat in the small hospital room. Sakura looked away. Sasuke turned back into stone.
Kakashi broke the silence before it could smother them all. "If I'm supposed to go home the day after tomorrow, it might help to know where that is."
He had intended it as nothing more than a small opener for a short explanation from the teenagers – and also a way to change the topic from the whole owing money business – but suddenly the room was filled with a different kind of silence.
"Mega-brows-sensei," Naruto said faintly "We totally forgot about him!"
Kakashi couldn't decide what was more disturbing – the fact that he apparently lived with another man, or the fact that said man was nicknamed "Mega-brows-sensei". He still couldn't believe that they hadn't thought of telling him that he had a boyfriend.
"I think we just repressed it because it's kind of gross," Naruto said; at least he tried to sound apologetic.
Sakura was having none of it, though. With lightening speed she shot out of her chair and boxed her teammate's ear hard. "Shut up," she hissed, as she drew her arm back for another punch. "They love each other, you bigot!"
"Ow! It's not because they're two men; it's because it's with SUPER-BROWS-SENSEI!"
A look of reluctant understanding crossed her face, and Sakura's fist wavered.
In his corner, Sasuke sighed.
Kakashi felt slightly freaked out.
"Gai is currently on a mission with his team; they'll probably come back tomorrow. I thought it best to keep you here till then… Oh, don't look so miserable, you two have been together for years. When you were made General in the war, you insisted on having him in your division. He'll take good care of you," Tsunade had said, and if she'd been suppressing a grin at the time, she'd been doing a fairly decent job. Kakashi had barely been able to tell.
He was eating an impressively tasteless bowl of udon when all of a sudden the door was ripped open and a strange, green person stormed into the room, shouting, "KAKASHI!" and flailing like a man possessed.
In the second it took Kakashi to drop his chopsticks in shock, the man reached him and started feeling him up. "Are you okay," he asked; his hands wandering from Kakashi's shoulders, down his arms before finally slipping around his waist.
"Ack, " Kakashi said. It was the most eloquent response to the assault he could muster, while staring into those big, shiny eyes – or better yet at the huge, black brows that loomed above them. Something clicked in his brain then. "Mega-brows-sensei," he gasped, struggling to shake off those big hands.
The look of confused hurt in Gai's eyes was something Kakashi wouldn't forget any time soon.
