Finding Forever

a collection of themes


november 3; my pillow won't tell me where he has gone; team gai


The twenty-seventh of November and the first of January are the two days a year that Tenten and Neji do not spend together.

On the twenty-seventh of November, each November, every November, without fail, Neji haunts the Memorial. He kneels seiza before the stone where they carved the characters 'Rock Lee'. He lights incense and leaves curry and a piece of green paper, folded to resemble a turtle.

And then he sits and reads the bloodstained and battered notebook he removed from his best friend's beautifully broken body. Neji will never know if his corpse robbing is a sick thing, or fortunate, or simply one of those shinobi oddities. Should he have this tiny journal, storing it safely in a locked drawer, only to retrieve once a year?

Or should he have consigned it to the fire with Lee's corpse?

His fingers trace each line of text. His lips do not move as he reads.

It hurts, to watch his best friend grow up through this book. He has stored not only Gai's numerous words of wisdom, but also his own thoughts and musings and desires. Some of them as are profound as, "Tenten is a little afraid of herself, I think," while others are as inane as, "Ichiraku-san's spiciest curry doesn't seem so spicy any longer."

Neji never makes it much further than halfway through before he must bow his head and close his eyes. He regrets the careless cruelties, the thousand coldnesses, the way he treated his team-mate in that first year-- but it isn't regret that hurts so much.

He cannot immediately name a thing he wouldn't give up in order to have his team reunited again.

He wishes he could hear his best friend's voice again. The words on the page are not enough, especially when he reaches the middle, where the blood has pooled the thickest. On four specific pages, the four pages Neji wants to read the most, the brown smudges are so thick that he can catch only scattered characters.

Neji stays there until sundown of 28 November.


Tenten, on the other hand, retreats to the back of her private forge and opens a locked box. From it she removes various articles of clothing. Almost all of the clothes are green. Half of them are spandex. Some bloody, some clean.

Her hands tremble as she smoothes the cloth, running it through fingers that twitch and jerk. Her shoulders shake, and tears blur her vision.

The clothing's scent-- the scent of his skin, of soap, of blood-- is always overpowering. It is as if the scent stores itself in the box, just waiting for a means of escape, and then explodes into the air when the box opens.

There is always a shaky, rattling sob.

Sometimes it's hard to stand up. If she falls, she stays there.

Sometimes she cries.

Every time, she remembers. She remembers him. She loved Lee. Maybe not the kind of love that makes you get married or have sex, but she loved him.

She always hoped to spend the rest of her life with all her boys, not just one. Marriage had never been in the picture she had of her life-- and it was partly because of that.

All her boys (Gai-sensei hadn't been a boy, of course, and at the time of his death, neither had Lee, but somehow, she had always thought of them all that way).

All.

Not just one.

So she inhales his scent, remembers the bandages and the bowl cut and the smile--

And she doesn't leave the forge until her throat and head hurt. When the grief becomes enough physical pain, when her voice is raw from crying, when her eyes are bleary and red, she packs the clothing away neatly. A tiny skeleton key turns in the lock, the box makes a clicking sound, and then she lifts it into its safe place, closes the cabinet door, and locks that too.

Then she goes home and does not wait for Neji. Instead, she looks through photo albums of all Lee's past birthday parties. She tries to get through even one album without crying, but it never happens. Her record is three-quarters of the way through their first book, but today she doesn't even make three pages.

After the photo albums have been read and cried over in that sweetly painful ritual, she watches their equivalent of home videos. They never really recorded things with video cameras. Looking at things in colour was never really Gai's style, Tenten generally forgot, Neji always found the idea of artificial eyes unsettling, and Lee... Well, Lee tended to get so caught up in whatever was happening that video cameras just didn't register.

So the footage they do have is scattered. Moments here and there, when somebody remembered and Neji didn't get pissy about it. Even so, the flickering colours and shoddy camera work are always entrancing to her. She can watch the old tapes and DVDs for an hour or two.

And then she sits back and tries to list every successful mission or survivable failure they've had.

It's always harder than you'd think.


At twenty-three fifty-nine every thirty-first of December, Tenten bundles up in warm clothing, grabs a knife and a roll of duct tape, and prepares to ignore all the New Year celebrations. As soon as midnight arrives, she walks out the door, locking everything up behind her, leaving Neji to sleep until five.

The walk to Gai-sensei's old apartment is never very far, though with people out and about (hurrying to or from New Years' parties, usually) it always takes longer than it should. She wishes people a happy New Year, bows and smiles and vocally hopes they have good luck this year. They always look a little sadly at her; she ignores it-- what they think of her grief is their problem. She's still functioning, and that's what matters, right?

Right.

She stores all the hurt and sadness and homesickness-for-people-who-aren't-there-anymore up. She pushes it down and ignores it or tells it to wait until the birthdays arrive.

This day used to be his day, so now it's hers. And nobody, nobody, nobody is going to take that away from her.

She unlocks the door to his old apartment. The nearly astronomical ANBU salary that Gai pulled for she doesn't remember how long enabled him to buy the apartment. He'd had it fully paid off since just after she became his genin-gakusei.

She and Neji own the apartment now.

It takes Tenten several tries to open the door, as usual. Her fingers always tremble with the cold keys and the freezing metal, and the key on the third lock always, always jams. She'd oil it, but Gai swore he would, as soon as they got back from whatever mission they'd pulled. Since he never got around to it, she figures she should let it slide, too.

Aside from that sticky lock, she keeps the place well tended. It's like her own personal burial vault, or a museum. Museum is probably a better word.

The heat clicks on (she knows it isn't practical to keep this place up like somebody actually uses it, but she can't not, because this was his place) and she unpacks all the linens out of their cardboard boxes.

She pulls the mattress onto his bed frame. On go the dark green sheets, the green plaid comforter, the green blanket with white fur lining. She even makes the bed with hospital corners. She doesn't even do those for her own bed, to Neji's eternal irritation.

After that, she heads into the living room. She turns on the television and the DVD player (it took them so long, Tenten remembers, to convince Gai-sensei to buy one. He'd been reluctant because he wasn't sure 'his' movies would be on DVD) and makes sure everything is hooked up correctly. She's pretty sure it is, because it always is, but you never know, right?

Right.

After that, she cocoons herself in green blankets, pops in the DVDs and watches black and white movies for a few hours. Gai owns twelve DVDs, each one burned with as many movies will fit. Of those twelve, a single disc consists of "talkie" movies, and not even half a disc has movies made with Technicolor. Almost all of his movies are black and white silent films.

Tenten gave him a Humphrey Bogart DVD-set. He thanked her enthusiastically, but she doesn't have to look to find the cases: they're in their collector's edition jacket, which is still in its shrink-wrap.

Kakashi makes a point of showing up eventually. They always arrange to meet at eight, but he usually shows up around twelve or twelve-thirty. It's almost always an hour before she actually expects him, and it's usually around the time she gets to fixing curry and preparing to request that Ninkame visit.

They talk for a few moments, but it is stilted and odd:

"Sorry I'm late. I saw a rat on my way here; you know how unlucky that is."

"Hatake-san, it's the Year of the Rat."

He says nothing to that, so she merely sighs and acknowledges that of course, Hatake-san, seeing the year's zodiac animal on the first day of the year is a sign unlucky enough to change your course for.

They're always quiet for a while. After she's chopped enough meat for the curry and sets the sharp knives aside, he says, "I never actually hated him, you know."

She replies, voice mild, "You never cared much, either, I know."

He doesn't say anything to that, because in his mind, he deserves it. Because he's Kakashi. And also because it's true-- he cared, because he and Gai were actually ifriends/i in a weird way, but he never dared to show it. But mostly, it's because he's Kakashi.

It's a load of bullshit, but hey, this is Gai's day. Well, was Gai's day.

After a little more stilted conversation ("You still miss him?" "I'll be fine."), he leaves.

She eats her curry alone, watching the silent films. She fills a bowl for him and leaves it untouched.

When the marathon ends, she requests again that Ninkame visit. She has no right to summon him, nor any right to expect him to answer. But in memory of Gai, she calls out to the tortoise, and in memory of Gai, he comes.

They talk. The subjects do not matter. Sometimes she cries. He is patient with her, but it is always clear: he has no obligation to her, no ireal/i reason to stay. He is here in memory of a friend, a valiant and fallen man. Her grief is none of his concern.

She does not go home until midnight. Before she does, she packs everything back up and wishes her sensei a happy birthday.

(because you were here, i feel this way)


Stopping here because I have to.

Also, I keep promising never to write another Gai or Lee death-fic, and, ahahaha, HERE I AM DOING IT AGAIN.

I have no willpower.