A frigid wind shot past, sending Gai into a convulsion of shivers. But they were finally here; the Jashin district, known well for its Christian upbringings and multitude of steeples. Here, they would finally pay their respects.
Their parents' tombstones turned out to be closer than either had originally thought, so they ended up stalling for time. Neither wanted to face what was to come next.
It was summer, a time wherein tight-rolled jeans and a song preaching take on me was a huge hit in the 'States. Gai figured that was the reason Kakashi wanted this was just that; he wanted to warn Gai against something, himself most likely. And by the end of the conversation Gai would sigh and say he loved him anyway.
Yet when he had timidly approached, asking Gai, "Can I tell you the truth?", he couldn't help but melt at the level of uncertainty that echoed back. He knew Kakashi had never been one to swallow his pride, and the once-in-a-blue-moon exception had come around just for him. Despite the fact he was dreading the probably horrific truth of the cause of this - Kakashi's 'misbehavior', the gangs, the drugs - he still loved him (Wow; it just kept getting easier to say!) and wanted to help as much as possible.
He had replied, "I don't know. Can you?"
Someone once said, the truth can set you free, and Gai planned to abide by those unwritten rules.
They made the walk to the other side of the cemetery in utter silence, hands cupping and fingers twitching every now-and-then. Consequently, they blocked out the future possible heartbreak, the before unuttered truth to think to themselves; He's there... he's there... The gentle pound of a pulse upon another, the wild rise of heat to one's face...
It was too cold to be summer, but here they were, providing the heat themselves.
They stopped before a smaller, crackling stone, and Gai noticed it was one of those discount markers that poorer families used to mark their dead. It made him feel sad, in a way, and that was only intensified after a moment when Kakashi squeezed his hand, then carefully slipped it away.
He was quiet a moment, trying to find his voice.
"Sit down," Kakashi said, finally. "This will take a while."
The ground was mildly damp from the previous day's rainfall.
Kakashi swallowed, the motion obvious in the summer-style clothing they wore despite unseasonable cloudiness and temperature. There was no doubt in their mind it would, ironically, clear up.
He took a deap breath.
"When I was five," he began, "my parents brought me up in your typical, struggling-to-make-ends-meet household. My mom's side of the family always said she had been crazy to fall for a gang member, so they did the 'obvious' thing and dumped her."
"And your father gave up the good old days to help take care of you?" Gai pointed out, raising his eyebrows in surprise. Kakashi smiled, crookedly.
"Yeah," he mumbled, scratching his neck awkwardly. "One of those romancey stories you never hear anywhere real except Japan. Anyway," he continued, "I... became a sort of stickler for the rules, trying to give my parents as little to worry about as possible. We didn't live here, though... We lived in Suna, a little town up in Hokkaido."
Gai laughed. "Country?"
Kakashi shrugged. "More or less." He mumbled something and looked at the ground. Gai leaned in.
"What was that?"
"I said, this'll go faster if you stop..."
"Oh. Sorry."
This time, Kakashi cleared his throat. Gai decided it best to heed his warning; if he interrupted again, Kakashi would have a hard time coming up with some nervous gesture he hadn't used already.
"It was a little town, anyway. They'd never heard of the Fang, though they had gangs. Only, not really gangs so much as small groups of friends - troublemakers, rogue class clowns - that went around bothering people. The worst they ever did was scare the chickens shitless. I never associated with them because I had been raised believing that was as bad as the world got."
He took a long, shaky breath.
"And then I met Obito."
Obito. Gai squinted, but he couldn't manage to make out the kanji on the tombstone. He scowled, mostly at the lazy people who had manufactured such an object. Just because a tombstone cost less didn't mean it had to be so damn easy to ruin.
But if this had all happened in Hokkaido... what was he doing in Konoha?
Kakashi stared ahead, transfixed. Gai realized he was seeing something. Remembering.
"I... he was so kind to me," he murmured. "He was fifteen at the time, an entire decade older. But he was so kind. Sweetest kid in the whole damn world."
"Please," Gai begged. "Tell me. What happened?"
"What happened?" Kakashi looked at him, startled, as if suddenly recalling he was there.
"Obito was a bit of a delinquent. A little more than everyone else, but not like they have us in the city. Obito was country-bad, which is really different. He got people angry and almost everyone hated him - including me - but looking back, we were a prideful bunch of bastards without much, and we hated him for taking all we had for the time - pride," he said, bitterly. "But he had his values. He cared for everyone, no matter who or what they were, and believed people who abandoned others for their own gain were trash; he had a point.
"But Obito, as good as he was, was really mixed up in drugs. I was never really sure what to think of that, so I tried to avoid him when he was high."
He was quiet. A very, very long time.
"I must not have realized," he said, out of the blue, "he was high that day."
The rest was more horrific than Gai could have possibly imagined.
There was a little girl, a little older than Kakashi, a little younger than Obito, who had always wanted to hang out with them. But Rin was a sickly kid, and she couldn't chase them long before getting tired. They took advantage of that a lot, running across the empty stretch of wheat-yellowed field to lose her, and she'd go crying back to her mother, who'd scoff after the boys. Didn't they know she was sick?
They did, they did, but they were boys, and they didn't care.
It was on that day that Obito, stoned as hell, decided to let Rin play with them.
Kakashi had scowled at him, but he reassured the boy a third his age he had a plan to lose her, and he quieted down.
They lead her through the thicker expanse of trees and proceeded to play around the woodland bits. Kakashi found he actually liked playing with Rin; he found her sickly manner delicate and cute rather than irritating or a set back. In the beginnings of his five-year-old crush, however, he didn't foresee the quick end of it.
They came across a cave, a large boulder off to the side, hidden in thick brambles. Obito broke one off and brandished his newfound staff.
"Let's explore!" he proclaimed, and they set in, letting Rin wander ahead.
"Wha-?" Kakashi began when a sweet, dusty-smelling hand was pulled over his mouth, and Obito shushed him. Yes, he saw it now; the red veins, bleeding through a sea of white...
Obito held the opposite fingers to his mouth, shushing him, silent shake of unsaid snickers wracking his body.
"Come on," he mouthed.
They left the cave and Kakashi hung back, watching Obito prance like a madman to the gigantic stone that obscured a foot of the entrance, the rest of its mass clearly big enough to block the rest of the cave's entrance. Light enough for a pothead to move, but heavy enough for a little girl with health issues to be nearly helpless against.
By the time Rin realized what was happening, it was almost too late.
She shrieked and moaned to be let out, gasping and sobbing uncontrollably. Kakashi felt cold, oh so very, very cold, as he turned to Obito, stricken.
"Let her out!" he demanded. The teenager rolled his eyes and slumped against the stone.
"Not now," he mumbled. "Head..."
Kakashi felt like sobbing. Rin was scaring him, with those banshee cries. Maybe someone would hear them? Yeah. Hear them...
Her cries grew softer and Obito stretched.
"Tha's better," he yawned. "Oh, relax, kid. She's just okie. Okay? Okie dokie." He giggled in such a way that made Kakashi think he'd gone mad. "We'll get her tomorrow. She'll live."
And Kakashi took his word for it.
"I was blamed for it. And why shouldn't I? When they found her, it was just like I'd worried. My mother was horrified, Obito beside himself with disgust. My father, in a rage, told us to pack our bags. We were going back to Konoha. Obito didn't have a whole lot to stay for and no one was willing to defend him, and, after an argument, my parents agreed reluctantly that they'd take him.
"Everything went wrong from there. Obito finished his schooling then ran like the devil was headed for him and Mom got sick. But all she could talk about was, 'I hope Obito is safe. Is he safe, Sakumo?' She barely noticed I was there until the last couple days. But a lot of weird stuff seems to come back to you when you're dying."
Kakashi shrugged. He would know; for a while there, it was like he almost was.
"He died. We found his body a day after. Drugs, I guess... It's a lot to deal with. After all that we moved again, back to the district my dad grew up in. That was when those boys started trailing me, because they had known the Fang or heard about the Fang, so they needed someone to take their revenge on or try to conquer. At that point, I was done. It hurt, so I stopped caring. I let go. All my fault. All done. To hell with it."
For a long time they sat there, still and stiff. No amount of words could possibly take any of that back. It seemed all too elaborate to be true. Gai got the feeling he was in denial for thinking that himself.
He exhaled the longest, slowest breath he had since meeting Kakashi, and that was saying a lot. Kakashi withdrew a quivering breath. What people usually meant, Gai had found, was that by molding themselves "beyond caring", people were really just gathering the hurt, focusing it all in one feeble hiding place until there was no room left, and it either burst all at once or leaked through, slowly and painfully.
"Yeah but... why? Drugs I understand a little, but that's not all gangs do. People die, whether it's on purpose or not. Is that how-?"
"You don't understand," Kakashi parroted, softly. "It's not just a thing of hurting. It's about what I did. That kind of thing will always stay with you, no matter how hard you try to forget. And I started to think, well, maybe hurting people is all I'm good at. Maybe I might as well keep with that, since there's nothing else I'm worthy of..." His voice faltered.
"Well, I'm not going to lie to you," Gai said acridly, "it was your fault."
Kakashi flinched, then averted his eyes. This was it. He would lose Gai because he let him in and he'd run off, just like Obito.
"But..."
But was always good.
"If you can beat yourself up like this - focus on repent, repent, repent, refuse yourself a happy life-"
"I'm not that gallant," Kakashi meant to cut in, bitingly, but Gai plowed on.
"-I think, wherever they are, they forgive you. And maybe Obito, too." He smiled wide. "You've shown you're sorry. It's only fair for them to."
Kakashi's eyes were as wide as saucers. "So you - then we - you're not disgusted?"
"Yes, but not for the reason you think." Gai threw an arm over Kakashi's shoulders.
After a while, he said, "You're a good guy, Kakashi."
He smirked in reply. "You're cool too, Gai."
They looked at each other, just smiling like dopes, one teary-eyed with his knees scrunched against his chest, the other relaxed, the calm one. It was the last time they'd be like that together; it was their last time being the old Kakashi and Gai.
"You okay? I mean, will you be?" Gai mumbled, and suddenly they weren't old friends. They were lovers again.
Kakashi tilted his head to the sky, lips turned up coyly at something unseen. A sign only he could see.
"I think," he said, "I'm on my way."
The End
Listen to me rant? Or pretend to. Thanks.
Okay. So I've been planning Gai's big speech a while, and I feel like it came out... bleh. Another thing; there's an epilogue - like, barely a hundred words - and if you want to see it, I'll post it, but then that's it. No sequel. And it's a Harry-Potter type ending, like one of those "lol dees ees vut happens". It doesn't get too specific, but it's offensive and a last laugh kind of thing.
I bet you expected me to do a "SOB SOB I KNEW A KID NAMED OBITO WHO DIED" story, right? Well, I originally planned to take this idea from the movie The Flatliners - remember, how he indirectly killed that kid when he fell out of a tree? Well, later on I came up with the sickly and the cave idea instead, but writing this chapter I decided I wanted to be different. It's fan-fiction for a reason; besides, I bet we're all tired of the same-old same-old.
