Part VII | Chapter 6
Gohama with clear honest eyes and a shy small smile as she shared her hope brought him strength. Kakashi had drunk it in on that afternoon after her first battle and he drank it in now, all of it, desperately in his memory's gaze.
It kept him afloat when the despair hit the hardest, right at the end of the battle when a sudden silent stillness spread through the field only to erupt again with chaos, when he stood before the rows of his dead shinobi, metal tags shining under the sun at their chests, after a meeting, when the command tent emptied out and it was just him alone, the distant murmur of awake soldiers, and the strategy spread out through maps in front of him on the table.
Kakashi pressed the heels of his hands onto his aching eyes as his elbows supported him on the table. He could feel himself drown, the cold dark sea of the absurdity of war, the absurdity that rose and smothered, always emptied everything with it, the absurdity born out of pain and despair.
There were other things lapping at his feet, he could feel the shivers rising up his legs as they slithered. Zabuza, Haku, Inaku. All adding to the absurdity of everything, there was nothing more absurd than dead coming back to life, nothing more enraging and depraved, a crime against the order of nature herself.
But somehow it did good too. Gohama had said it was good and painful. At the time, Kakashi could only see the pain piercing through his lungs and cracking at his ribs. Gohama had helped pull away the veil of absurdity covering Inaku's forgiveness that had only stabbed at the sore wound of his guilt. It wasn't absurd at all, even if slightly mad, it was freeing.
Gohama's presence in his life had erased some of the lines, faded some of the colours of the image of Inaku as nothing but a target Kakashi had clung to for so long. Now that image was gone, dissolved into nothing but a silent muted whisper blown out into the wind.
Inaku was so painfully a person of his own, and a good person too. There was nothing like witnessing a father's love on a man's face to see all of his humanity, the depth of his personhood. Inaku's ripped target-mask had hurt as tearing the scorched skin on a burn, an unbearable pain, but without it there could be no healing.
He wasn't the only one, his tattered hand from the raikiri was branded with so much blood. It opened the terrifying door for any shinobi, a door Kakashi had tried to keep closed since his first kill and had reinforced with steel bars during his long years in ANBU.
It was cracking now, as it always cracked from time to time, the screams ringing through the wood and the thin gap above the floor. Kakashi could hear the hinges creek eerily as the door slid, a fissure of darkness and light spilling onto the floor, but he still had his foot against it, his shoulder pressed onto the wood.
It wasn't the right time to meet what he had closed off. Not now, not in years. Once he was retired Kakashi would remember all those true faces and forget all those code names and see the people he had tried to hide under the mask of target.
Kakashi had always endured through masks, the ones he painted and pinned onto himself and the ones he shrouded over the things around him.
But he didn't want that anymore, because in Gohama Kakashi had found not only guilt, regret and grief, but also a pulsating warm flame of forgiveness, of love, and with every new day it seemed only to grow.
Gai, Team Seven, Gohama, they had helped yank him out of where he had stuck himself for so long, the roots too curled around him and piercing in so deep, the earth too heavy and soaked in red, Kakashi thought all of that was him. Perhaps it had been him, but now he could be something else, something better, with his eyes finally set on the clear blue sky.
His eye opened to watch the metal plate laid out on the table. Gohama's hope gleamed as her smile through the lines carved in the metal, showing him the hidden reasons they were fighting. Kakashi could find meaning in the hitai-ate and he could find meaning in the sacrifice everyone was willing to make.
The Alliance had come together from the worst of reasons, but it was good. Kakashi had found hope in it during the preparations for the war, and now Gohama helped him scavenge for the goodness in the rot of battle.
The future, she had said, they were fighting for the future. And that was a wonderful thing Kakashi had always shunned away from his life, hours spent in front of the Memorial Stone and clinging to the joy of the past and the grief, to all his lifeless and empty regrets, because he had never let them bloom into something good in the present.
Kakashi didn't want that for his life anymore, he didn't want the masks and he didn't want empty regrets.
Kakashi had come to this war to die, a resigned weight at the bottom of his stomach. Not the Third War, not ANBU and not Pain had taken him, but a coldness in his bones had told him this war was it and if he was lucky he would take the fucking masked bastard with him.
He was still ready to give his life up to help the Alliance win, but seeing Gohama's hope had ignited the fire to fight. It was no longer just the future of the world, a blurry undefined purpose that he was fighting for, it was his comrade's future, Gohama's future, and fascinatingly enough his own future.
His future… his future. For the first time Kakashi thought of it with a throbbing eager heart.
"Kakashi, my friend…"
His eye drifted from the random spot in front of him to Gai, his hand extending a cup to him. "Is this coffee?"
"It attempts to be."
With a grunt that Gai would recognise as a gesture of gratitude, Kakashi wrapped his fingers around the warm cup and brought it to his lips.
"So, do you want to talk?" Gai started as he sat on the table and to keep a little distance Kakashi leaned back on his chair.
"You were in the meeting."
Gai shook his head but kept the kindness in his eyes. "You know that's not what I'm asking about."
"There are more important things to worry about than that."
"And still you were worrying about it just now, Kakashi. You get this look. A good youthful look, much better than when Gohama made us believe she was dead."
A sting of pain shot through his chest and the bitterness of the coffee burned his tongue. Gai said it so bluntly, as if it was the most normal inconsequential thing, when he had seen how not inconsequential it had been to Kakashi. The words always wedged around his throat and his mind, and he stumbled before he could spill it, as if saying and thinking would make it happen again.
"When you contain that sort of power being dead is a safety. And a freedom." Kakashi explained as his gaze watched the light reflect on the ink black surface of the coffee. "I can see that Gohama desperately needed it, that it was good for her," Again that image of her hopeful smile, so full of life stirred in his mind. How could Kakashi ever resent what had made it to bloom? "but…"
"But you still don't understand why Gohama couldn't tell you she was alive."
He peeked at Gai without raising his head. "Is it selfish?"
"Of course not, Kakashi." Gai answered as his hand clasped around Kakashi's shoulder. "Ask her why. Ask her everything you want to ask. Sometimes it can be that simple."
"It's not the time to put that on her." He didn't even know if there ever was going to be a time like that.
"You talk like your love for her is a burden."
How? How could Gai just say things like that so simply, when Kakashi melted into an embarrassed teenage boy just from hearing it, his cheeks burning with a blush. "We're in the middle of a war."
"All the more reason. Love gives strength, purpose, even relief. There's a reason the campsites are full of people making love."
A disgusted shudder racked his back and Kakashi hid his face in his hands. "Ugh, Gai." He groaned like a petulant child, it was completely justified, no one should ever have to endure hearing that from Maito Gai's mouth. "Don't say things like that."
"They may not be in love, but they can pretend they are. You, my friend, don't need to pretend."
Kakashi pulled himself back from the table, arms crossed, as he leaned back on the chair. "I don't even know what you're trying to get me to do."
"You probably don't remember the nights when you got so drunk you couldn't even walk, Kakashi, but I remember. Do you know what you said to me, Kakashi?" Gai stood up, both his hands falling on his shoulders and shaking him so he would meet his eyes. "'I should have told Gohama, she should have known', and now she can."
It hadn't been a possibility as he first saw her on the command tent, the ghost of her fingertip over his mole telling him that Gohama was there, resurrected back to them, when he was still grieving her, a hole still bleeding from her loss.
It hadn't been a possibility when she had still been alive and Kakashi sure of it. Not even when Kakashi realised Hansuke's eyes were bloodshot from crying and Gohama looked at him with too much sadness. Not even when out of impulse Kakashi had ordered her to accompany him in his surveillance duty and they had taken the first steps of mending their relationship, his nape resting on her shoulder as he slept, weightless and contented.
But then Gohama had looked at him with those eyes, her head resting on his thighs, her hand warm against his face, her chakra seeping inside his own pathways. It had felt like love, the way Gohama saw him, but Kakashi wasn't sure if it had been his eyes deluding themselves, his wishful heart pining for impossible things and veiling reality with what it wanted to see.
Even now as it fluttered and forced his lips to turn into a lovesick smile at the memory of it, Kakashi didn't know. Memories were even more diluted with what the heart wanted to see.
'Father understood what you mean to me and Father's glad for it.' Gohama's words had roared through his mind for the past days, springing on him with a jolt and driving him into a rabbit hole of so many contradicting thoughts and emotions.
It wasn't just forgiveness that Inaku had given him, he had offered Kakashi something far more precious than that, so precious he didn't think his broken hands could ever hold her.
His memory of a few hours ago was still vivid, of Gohama standing on that tent, so uncertain and shy, entirely too different and the same of how she had always been with him. And then, those same eyes that talked of love as the shyness fell away.
When Gohama had asked what she could do for him, his mind had stumbled through so many scenarios from endearing to obscene and all he could feel was that want, so bottomless and encompassing. Gai wasn't lying when he talked of the effects of war and Kakashi wasn't immune to that instinct when faced with death, but his want for Gohama was so much more than that, Kakashi wasn't sure what it meant, what it implied.
Kakashi knew the word that translated it, but he didn't know how to make it real in life. His love had always unfolded in his shinobi duty and sacrifice, Kakashi didn't know what to do with this love. Maybe it wasn't that different, maybe it was like working with a partner on a mission, maybe he could learn how to do it right.
Before, his want hadn't been enough to shape a possibility, but now Gohama looked at him and Kakashi saw love. Just as her hope, the love he saw had the power to build things, to make them bloom, to kindle them with reality.
Now here it was, a possibility, a future, throbbing in his heart, so painful and so good. A sudden dream that disrupted all his plans of loneliness and self-pity, born only from himself, branching out of all the things that had been grafted into his life. This was something Kakashi dreamed for himself.
Others had always decided most of life. It didn't bother him as perhaps it should, Konoha had always been the love of his life and his devotion had thrived naturally and in truth. Kakashi let himself be led because he saw in it as a fitting life for himself. Good things had come from submitting to the roles demanded of him.
Only on that fatal mission when he chose to follow Obito and later when he chose to follow Gohama to Buki had Kakashi decided for himself and the only thing he regretted of those choices was not making them sooner.
With Obito, Rin, Minato-sensei, Father, Kakashi had no way of correcting his lateness. With Gohama, for a few dark months he had thought that the regrets so unbearably into him had also been written in time. That impossibility had given him the freedom to open fully to all the what-ifs that would never happen.
Against all the laws in the world and all the law of his life, Gohama had returned and all those regrets didn't need to stay regrets anymore.
And who knew how long they had now? The war was as much a pro as it was a con. If he waited for the right moment it might never happen. Kakashi didn't want to be late this time.
There was an anticipating flutter in his stomach from knowing they would have a moment together that didn't concern the war and now it churned with the prickle of fear too. How could he be so scared when faced with something he had always craved in his life, a chance at mending his regrets, a chance at loving as he wanted to love, openly and fully?
Kakashi had had months of grieving to think of all the things he wished he had said to Gohama, had spent this past week cramping thoughts of her into the little spaces between the worries of war, but the connection between his mind and his mouth had always been a complicated one. Gohama just needed to look up at him with her green eyes to make him stutter over everything in his life.
He chuckled and brushed his fingers through his hair. Kakashi had never thought he would be this person, never, not even while reading novels written in sap and smut. The person that had a division under his command, his responsibility, his shoulders heavy and hands full of death and suffering, and would still find space for the crazy flurry of being in love in the middle of a war. How could his heart hold both anguish and joy?
Kyura Gohama.
That woman… The things she did to him, the things she could do to him. With him. For him. Of him. Any prepositions could fit in there, all the spectrum of human existence, and things seemed the only word abstract enough to encompass everything and mark it into a phrase.
Who would have thought?
Gohama gulped through the gurgling in her throat, her swollen eyes frantically watching the blood she knew was no longer there, as her hands scrapped against each other, the freezing stream of water stabbing through her back and gliding down her arms, but it still wasn't enough to wipe away the sticky red of blood.
The nails were always the worst place, the blood slithering through the gap and wedging where the water couldn't get. Gohama scrapped them on her stomach and chest, but the darkened layer was always there where she couldn't reach it.
There was so much anger in her and under all that so much despair. She didn't even know if her shoulders were shaking from the crying or the freezing cold of the water on her skin.
Fucking Ichiro. Fucking Ichiro and his blood stuck to the creases of her hands, stuck deep inside her flesh and even if she scrapped herself raw it would always be there, each layer stacked on top of each other, like rings in the trunk of a tree.
He was imprinted to the back of her eyes, no water, cold or boiling, could ever wash away the blood still oozing from the hole in his throat, red soaking into the white linen, a puddle on the ground, and those blank dead eyes, so similar to how he watched her while alive, with that hollowness.
Another image that wretched at her heart, like Daiki as he died on the battlefield, like that drop of blood falling from Kakashi's sharingan down the side of his pale nose. Like all those despairing faces, their skin warped into raw wide horror, their lines creased deep into their flesh, animalistic as they quivered with the most basic instinct of their nature, as they tore pleas from their lungs.
All of them melted into one expression, one icon with no uniqueness, no dignity, no honour. Women, men, old, young, they were all the same, all just one, as they begged her not to kill them. They hadn't moved her frozen will, her steel cold heart lacquered into a mask and the sharpness of a shuriken, but they had still branded deep, simmering inside her and ready to stir up once the lacquer cracked, the metal dulled.
Had it even cracked? Gohama could still feel the smooth cold mask against the skin of her face, the smothering weight of it, unmovable, tattooed into her, even as her fingers scrapped at it and found nothing but wielding flesh.
Her wrinkled fingertips dug into the scar on her shoulder, letting go could make her fall and she was terrified of falling into Shuriken again, as it rested on a corner of her being, a muted smothered memory, ready to stir back to life and reality, to engulf her again.
Gohama couldn't forget that she had come back from Shuriken, the mask burnt into nothing and her shape free from the deadly star-like role. She couldn't forget that since the past months she had always come back from these destructive bouts of anguish and guilt, always stronger from conquering them, always more hopeful that she would not erase herself in them again.
Gohama, she was Gohama, with her own life and her own dreams. Gohama. But her own name was meaningless in her tongue.
"Gohama."
Her heart jolted in her chest, called back by Kakashi, his low voice sounding above the spray of water and flooding in meaning.
Gohama trapped a sob in her chest, her teeth biting down on her lips because it made no sense that she would find even more tears when Kakashi was there, on the other side of the plastic partition, his safe chakra embracing her senses, an anchor that Gohama could hold onto, as she already had so many times before.
Her forehead leaned against the metal pipe of the shower a long breathless sigh washing up her lungs. Her wet hair stuck to her eyes and cheeks as she watched the partition and imagined his shape from how his lightning chakra tingled in her skin. It was better than the water, it was better than her nails and her fingers, in how Kakashi's chakra rested around her senses, in how he called her back to herself.
"He killed himself." Gohama started, her voice rough on her battered throat. "He lost his legs and he killed himself. A puncture wound to his carotid with a pen, the pen I had brought him so he could write a letter.
"What right did he have of killing himself when he knew I would come back? What right did he have of forcing me to see him dead with the pen I brought for him? He has a mother and he stole himself from her. He wrote a note, 'Tell mother I died as a shinobi', as if it matters… as if it makes it hurt any less…"
Gohama's heart would never stop trembling with the visceral cries of Daiki's mother as she cradled the letter of her dead son.
But somehow it felt different, even if it hurt the same, somehow there was something different about a shinobi dying in a war by suicide and in action. Gohama's mind tried to pinpoint why but it couldn't, and still it was there, it was there with Ichiro and it would be there with her.
"And what right do I have to be mad at a broken suffering man that lost his legs in a war? I should have known, he was always so hollow, I should have known. I shouldn't have left the pen there."
"Gohama, he was a shinobi, he didn't need a pen. It's not your fault, and you probably already know that. Try to feel it too. It's not your fault, Gohama."
"I like that those white clones don't bleed." Her fingers curled into themselves. "I can't get the blood off. I can never get the blood off."
Her eyes closed as her head tilted back, the water falling on her face like small pointed pebbles, but still it would never wash away the image of despair and pulsing death. And it shouldn't.
"I killed so many people, Kakashi…" Gohama whispered, her tired voice no more than a breath over the running water. "I don't remember most of them… the scroll, most of the names mean nothing to me. If it wasn't for my own handwriting I would think it wasn't even me that wrote them… After stealing their lives, the least I could do was remember them…
"Were you disgusted when you saw so many names?"
Kakashi let out a dry bitter chuckle. "You know how much blood I have in my hands. It could fill dozens of those scrolls."
"It's different."
"Why? Because they were orders? Because it was my duty?" Kakashi asked, a cutting edge to his voice that made her chest pinch.
"Because you're protecting your people."
"I tried deluding myself with that. I'm still the one that kills them. Do you know what people call me, Gohama? Coldblooded Kakashi, Friend-killer Kakashi. I wish I could say they weren't earned."
Gohama turned off the faucet, the last drops plinking as they hit the floor and then there was only a restless silence on the cold her air them, no more murmur of water to smother her flashing thoughts, to stifle the self-loathing in Kakashi.
Her feet moved through the wet wooden boards, as they creaked under her, stiff icy arms around her stomach even it wasn't enough to soothe her deep-seated coldness. She left her safe hidden cubicle for the one beside her only to find a maskless moonlit face staring back at her. With a sudden jerk in her chest, her feet stopped and Kakashi never wavered, nearing her with a towel in his hands and resting it around her shoulders.
Her eyes were transfixed on his soft human features as he adjusted the towel around her, his hands brushing up and down her arms and her back to warm her skin. His face was so close to her, she could see the detail of every twist and dip on the ragged scar running down his eye and cheek.
"You're freezing." Kakashi commented while he continued his efforts at warming her up, and all her eyes could see was the movement of his lips as they shaped the words.
"Your mask is gone."
The corner of his lip raised slightly and her heart fluttered. They didn't know Kakashi, they had never tried to see under the masks. Even his eyes expressed a bottomless swirl of things if they just cared to look a little deeper, if they just searched past the menace of the sharingan and the drop of his eyelids. There were times when he became unguarded, small flashes of sudden openness anyone could see if they just looked.
But they didn't, and Kakashi didn't want them to look, he had made it so that people forgot there was a man under the mask, there was a man under the Icha Icha and a man under the power of the sharingan.
And here he was, unfolding himself before her, so true and so beautiful. So lovable. Gohama's love surged into her skin in a wave of affection, her want so feverish it frightened her. Her hand rose to his face, but she allowed only her fingertips to rest shyly on the edge of his jaw.
"They could call you every curse name in the world and it wouldn't matter to me. I know you, Kakashi."
"You do know me…" Kakashi said with a tender smile in his eyes washing away whatever edge had been in them before. His warm gloveless hand embraced her own, still letting the back of her cold fingers press to the skin of his face. "It always makes me wonder how you can look at me with those soft-hearted eyes."
Her heart wrenched as she saw the blood still stuck to her nails against the pale skin of his face and suddenly her hands were dripping and there was a drop of blood falling down the side of his nose. Her eyes clenched shut as if that meant she wouldn't see it.
"Why do you keep coming back for me, Kakashi?"
"You can't still be asking that." Kakashi commented and she could hear the gentle smile in his voice. "Now, where are your clothes?"
"You shouldn't have come then, you shouldn't be here now."
"I brought this with the towel, one of the nurses gave them to me." Kakashi reached somewhere around her back, his other cradling her shoulders softly before presenting her with thin scrubs. "Take the pants. And here."
As he said it, Kakashi grabbed the hem of his sweater and pulled it over his head. Gohama tried not to stare at the arch of his body, the muscles flexing behind the fitted undershirt, and his corded bare arms.
"I said the same thing to you once. Remember?" Kakashi asked while he gently pushed the sweater over her head and helped her find her way through the baggy sleeves. "On the cenotaph when I was avoiding you and mourning Obito's death anniversary and you cared. I said you shouldn't be there, but I still wanted you there."
The sweater was warm with his body heat and wrapped around her with his smell. Kakashi turned slightly to the side as she put on the pants, worried over her modesty as if she hadn't just left the shower completely naked to meet him before he covered her with the towel.
"And I didn't deserve it then, probably still don't deserve you now, as you probably don't deserve me. Who cares, Gohama? I don't, not anymore. Relationships aren't about who deserves who, life isn't about who deserves what. If we don't deserve the bad that happened in our lives, why do we have to deserve the good?"
It was too much and her eyes dropped to his naked neck. Gohama could hear Kisamaru's voice as he said it so bluntly, 'Kakashi loves you'. She was afraid of confirming it if she just looked up to his eyes, and she craved it with a fire she had never felt before.
"It doesn't matter if you don't deserve me. I also doesn't matter if you do."
Kakashi wasn't just settling for his eyes or his gestures, with so much care in his movements as he used the towel to dry her dripping hair, the tugs tingling in her scalp. Every word of his, the fondness in his tone, so annoyingly piercing, so wonderfully open, held it as well.
Her stubborn gaze settled on his mouth and Gohama didn't even try to look away as she realised it. "Since when have you become so good at this?"
Kakashi gave her a charming smirk. "I had a lot of time to think of all the things I could have said to you."
He said it with levity but Gohama knew the obsessive grief hiding behind the charm. This was the man that spent two decades in front of a Memorial, this was the man that measured his life through regrets, this was the man that held every loss as a shattered missing piece of himself.
"I make you miserable."
"Of course not, Gohama, where did you get that from? You… you give me hope, Gohama."
Gohama shook her head, a prickle of self-loathing clashing through her heart, stirring that anguish that Kakashi helped settle down, that anger, that sense of injustice over the chaos of the world. What did it matter that she dreamt of a quiet life without fresh blood in her hands, Kisamaru had said it, there was a cursed seal in her and it slithered to them, to him, because Gohama's life wasn't only her own.
"Seiryu isn't talking to me because I'll do anything to keep him away from Akatsuki."
His eyes fell and without his mask Gohama could see the raise of his jaw joint as he clenched his teeth. Kakashi didn't need any elaboration, he knew.
"I'm a mess because a man I knew for a few days killed himself. How would you be if it was me? I already forced you to grieve me for months, how can I force that onto you for the rest of your life?"
"Gohama…" Kakashi whispered with so much sorrow.
"I won't give anything I can't give to anyone. My life for the world? I could give it every day. But my life doesn't belong just to me… and that's not a bad thing. I used to think people not expecting anything from me was freedom, but what kind of freedom is that? It's fruitless, it's empty… people should expect things from me, good things, they should demand them."
Gohama stumbled back in her feet, her knees suddenly weak under all that weight, under all the wrenching regret over the two paths she had yet to choose. Tears prickled behind her eyes and she closed them, not wanting Kakashi to see her breaking because of this, her head leaning back against the partition.
Kakashi was right in front of her, without his mask, and Gohama couldn't pretend she didn't know what he was telling her… and Kisamaru's voice kept ringing in her head 'Kakashi loves you' 'Kakashi loves you' 'Kakashi loves you'…
She thought she had chosen already, her heart and her mind made up into the most fruitful choice, the choice that spared the most lives. Any certainty of before had crumbled so easily into nothing. Had it even been certainty when it was so fickle?
"What should I do, Kakashi? I have no idea what to do…"
"I can't decide for you, Gohama, even when I'm painfully tempted to."
Where did he find all that strength not to resent her, not to ask anything of her? Did he not know the power he had over her? With one simple demand, he could sway her will. It wasn't just love in her for him, it wasn't just trust, it was surrender.
"You can help me see things clearly. What would you do?"
His face twisted into a miserable anguish. "Don't ask me that…" His words were nothing but a soundless rasp in his throat.
Kakashi would kill himself, of course he would, and he probably wouldn't even doubt as she was. Just the thought voiced in her mind made all of her tremble.
"What do you want me to do?"
Kakashi shook his head. "No, not us, not Buki, not the world, what do you want, Gohama, really want?"
It spurred in her mind alone, no other thought to obscure the simplicity of it.
"I don't want to die."
A tear slipped past Kakashi's waterline, and her awed eyes watched as it glided down his cheek and fell past the edge of his jaw.
The sight was so unexpected all Gohama could muster was a surprised whispered, "Kakashi…"
His name only seemed to make him cry more. His face crushed in anguish, so violent, with none of the sorrow of before, only a raw frightening agony, that bunched his eyebrows together, and twisted his lips into a grimace, showing the sharpness of his clenched shut teeth.
Her hand rose to his jaw, trying to hold together all his pieces through that simple touch, but Kakashi was still breaking right before her, and her own heart mirrored the helplessness she saw craved into his face.
"This is embarrassing." Kakashi gurgled out as he tried to wipe the tears, but they wouldn't stop falling. "I'm sorry."
Both her hands held onto his face, trying to mark the words as she spoke them. "Don't apologise for crying. It's okay, Kakashi, you can cry all you want."
Gohama stepped closer to him and Kakashi didn't hesitate before wrapping his strong arms around her back and pressing her to him, his face hidden in the crook of her neck. Her hand soothed down his hair, feet straining to reach the ground, but he seemed unbothered by her weight, as he tried to still his shaking shoulders and muffle his cries on the fabric of his shirt.
Gohama wanted to show him that he could cry in front of her, that he didn't need to hide behind the nonchalant walk and eye-crinkle, the blank masked face and that careless way of being that tried to cover how much burning care simmered inside him. How could she show it? Shinobi were taught to hide their emotions, to bury all the trauma under poisonous endurance, and Kakashi had always been the best of shinobi. All Gohama knew how to do was hold him back just as tightly.
Kakashi tried to compose himself as well as he could, wiping his eyes and controlling the dry sobs, before finally pulling away from the safe hidden nook on her shoulder and gently letting her down. He didn't meet her eyes, as he adjusted the collar of his shirt on her shoulders and smoothed the sleeves against her arms.
"I wish I could make promises." Kakashi whispered, his voice rough from the salt in his throat. "I wish I could hide you away."
His gaze finally lifted to hers, bloodshot and swollen, and there was no mistaking it from tiredness or a sudden wake up. His eyes seemed to carry all the misery in the world.
Gohama stumbled slightly, bile rising up her chest and stinging so painfully she couldn't breathe, her chest was being carved from inside out. Not even the sight of Ichiro's bloodied body and the pen she had brought him on the pool that had spread onto the ground had unearthed her so violently.
Blood was familiar, blood was expected, but Kakashi's bloodshot eyes from crying because of her was foreign and yet so painfully real. Her mind flashed with images of those same eyes around Konoha when she hadn't been there, those same eyes staring into a pool of red against the white snow, those same eyes staring at the handle of her tanto buried in her chest in the middle of a battlefield.
Why did she always need to choose between duties, between debts, between loves? A terrified part of her could already taste the bitter regret from the wrong choice. Gohama envied the times when she had thought fleeing Buki on Yukine's back had been the worst choice of her life, before that night with Kakashi on that same house, before a future day where they would stand beside each other on a ruined battlefield.
The first choice hadn't been hers, it had been Buki's, the Yukikage's, but now the choice was hers and it mirrored the crossroad of twelve years ago. She had come to war because she had run away then. Now the same tie of her life extended from a village to the world.
But there was a different red thread that tied her to Kakashi. Her eyes had never seen it this sharp, this aching and tight, this old.
"You're always there, Kakashi. In all the defining moments of my life, you're always there."
The massacre, when she had first arrived to Konoha, Dazai's mission with an uncovered truth and the uncovered truth on the border between Fire and Hot Waters, Uncle's death, the night she erased herself and made the worst possible choice, the day when she died in a Snow's stream, and now the stretch of this war.
Her eyes watched him with a sudden smothering awe. "I don't think I've ever noticed that."
His chakra flared, the lightning tingled up her skin and made her fine hairs stand on end. With each breath, his ribcage expanded and the lines of his torso tensed against the fabric. Her hand hovered above his stomach, wanting to feel the lightning prickling up her arm, tempted to draw it out with her own, really needing to touch him just to touch him.
"Gohama," Her eyes raised to his only to find a thrilling intensity in them as he watched her. "what did you mean when you said Inaku knew what I mean to you?"
The sudden heavy question made a jolt rack through her chest, the jump to her heart picking up a fast dizzying pace. "That you don't need to feel guilty with me."
"Gohama, not that, you know what I'm asking." Kakashi explained in the softest of voices. "What do I mean to you?"
Her voice was muted against the roar in her ears, the roar in her chest as every heartbeat hammered against it. "Does it matter?"
His eyebrows pinched together. "Of course it matters. How could it not matter?"
"Kakashi…"
"You know what you mean to me, Gohama." Kakashi wavered in his steps before choosing to near her. Gohama could only stay still as his uncertain hand rose to her cheek, he cradled her with his rough calloused hand in the gentlest of holds. "Tell me you know."
She didn't need Kisamaru to voice it, she didn't need anyone else to make it real through words, not even Kakashi. His open vulnerable face paralysed her, there was no veiling what Kakashi had unveiled himself. His touch, his eyes… they held more than any word ever could.
"I know."
"And tell me what I mean to you."
Her hand rose to his, pressing his palm fuller against her cheek. "Can't you see it?"
"Sometimes you look at me and… and I don't know if I'm imagining things."
"You're not imagining things." His eyes gleamed at her words, they saw more than them there, they saw the future. Gohama carefully pulled his hand away from her and took a step back. "Kakashi, don't look at me like that…"
"Why not?"
"Because I tried to kill you, because a week ago you thought I was dead, because we're in the middle of a war and you were just crying because of me? There are so many reasons… too many reasons for any sane person."
"I remember you saying that sometimes madness isn't such a bad thing."
"About faith in the afterlife not you. You've suffered from too much of my madness already, Kakashi."
"You've also suffered from mine, Gohama. I avoided you for two years."
"Is that supposed to reassure me?"
"Yes, because I got over that madness, the same way you got over yours."
"But I did it once, Kakashi, I did it once. I completely crushed your trust, the vulnerability you entrusted me… I disrespected and hurt you in a way that… that…"
Her words couldn't rise past her chest, with every breath Gohama tried to take the prickling trapped them tighter, harsher. Gohama held onto her chest as if that would ever help guide the air down where she needed it and loosen the knot around her ribs, so she wouldn't fall past the edge.
Kakashi's hands held onto her shoulders with strong solid fingers and she slumped against his chest, ear pressed to his ribs right above his heart so she could drink in the steady rhythm of it, the steady in and outs of his breaths, so simple, so real as they pressed back into her. He wrapped her in his warmth and Gohama let herself fall into it, into the feel of his life flowing through his pathways and his veins, her own body finding in how he engulfed her a ground where to stand and to mimic.
It was so much easier not to fall past the edge with him there. Kakashi held onto her with those skilful careful hands of his and didn't let her fall. He folded himself all around her, so safe and so warm, and if only she could just let go and stay like this forever, if only the world was nothing but his arms, was nothing but him and them.
But it wasn't, the world was more than Kakashi and Gohama as they were now, even they were more than themselves as they were now. They were their past together and their past apart, they were the future, a vague nebulous thing where they threw themselves at but was no less real, was no less present.
"Gohama… we've talked about this."
"I thought I'd killed you. No amount of talking is ever going to be enough…" This was their past and it would always shape their future.
"I'm not asking you to get over that now, maybe not ever, even if I really want you to, Gohama. But I am just asking you not to see everything, not to see us, through that only lens, because I don't. There are so many other lenses to look through."
His arms slid away from her back and held onto her cheeks, a silent request as he touched her and slowly guided her to look up at him.
"Remember that time when you abandoned me, ran away with our enemy and almost died? It may have been the cruellest thing you ever did to me, but I know you did it to keep me safe. This war, how you fight to protect my soldiers, our division, the chakra dome tags you keep making and sharing—"
Gohama shook her head, eyes falling away from his trusting ones, as an uncomfortable prickle lighted in her. "Okay, it's enough."
"Not nearly enough. You help at the medical post and care enough about the injured shinobi that we're here in the showers now, you held a dying ki—"
Her hand lifted to press against his mouth and stop the current of his words. "Are you trying to seduce me with praise?"
His chapped lips imprinted on her palm as they turn into a smirk, his hot breath burning through her skin. It had been an impulse gesture but now Gohama wanted his lips on her palm forever, on her throat, her chest, her stomach and back, her inner thighs, her cheeks and her mouth.
"Still not good at taking compliments, I see." Kakashi spoke all too cheeky against her hand and to get back at him and his enticing mouth, Gohama let her fingers brush down his lips as she let her hand fall away.
"I'm just doing what I have to do, there's nothing praiseworthy about that."
"Is it just what you have to do, Gohama? You didn't have to personally give Daiki's mother his letter, but you did. You also don't need to help at the medical post or share your own fuinjutsu with every hidden village. You didn't have to worry about easing me when we were facing your father, your dead father. You don't have to…" His words bumped against his throat and he swallowed before saying, "kill yourself for us."
His thumb brushed through her cheek. "You're no longer the grieving girl that reduced herself and her love to the duty to her village."
His words burned and twisted with a lump in Gohama's throat, so similar and still so different from the one that accompanied her tearing pieces. This lump meant her pieces were mending, it was the stinging from healing, it was the burn of consolation.
"I'm safe with you, Gohama. I even feel safe enough to cry."
"Safe-ish, you said it was embarrassing and hid against my neck."
"Which is why I want more. I want more than this thing when I can be with you like I never am with anyone else and talk about things I never talk about, and then the next day we're back to not knowing how to be with each other. I want us to make something of us.
"So I'm asking you, Gohama," His fingers tucked the wet strands stuck to her cheek and temple behind her ear. "what do you want?"
Just as when he had asked her the same question before, it rose to her mind unbidden, with snippets of memories and dreams. Kakashi on the engawa with Icha Icha on his lap and Buki's sun gleaming in his eyelashes, his eyes looking down at her with that tenderness of his, face bare and vulnerable, her head resting on his naked chest, his fingers gliding down her back and a spring breeze smelling of grass and flowers whispering through the slid open doors, raising goose bumps on his flushed skin.
But how could she tell him that, when Gohama had crushed it in her hands?
"Even if it makes me bawl my eyes out again, tell me what you want, not what you think I deserve or you deserve, Gohama. Don't worry about anything else, it's me. You can tell me, Gohama, you can be completely honest, I want you to be honest with me."
"I want you, I want an us. Those slivers of a life together that we had in Buki and that I completely destroyed."
Kakashi shook his head softly. "No guilt."
A bookshelf full of books and scrolls, ninken hair pasted to their furniture, pressing her cheek to Kakashi's back as he cooked, bickering over the stupidest things, cleaning dirt under her nails and never blood, chatting their ears out over a cup of sake, preparing two bento boxes with leftovers in a hurry, grumbling at him under her breath, while Kakashi took his time enjoying small sips of his morning tea, sneaking away from his burning arms on a hot summer night, whispering 'I'm home' as she leaned down to where he was sitting, fingers brushing his hair back, to kiss his forehead and Kakashi answering with a soft smile and low 'Welcome home'.
"To hold onto those slivers and build something bigger and deeper, better. A routine, a future, and a… a home…"
His expression opened up in awe as he said, "We want the same thing."
"Kakashi…" Gohama breathed out as she swayed back on her feet. "I need you to think this thoroughly and seriously."
"Gohama, do you seriously think I didn't overthink this already? I overthought it after Buki, I overthought it after I thought I'd lost you and I overthought it since you came back. I know what I want and I know that this is possible, this is good."
"But aren't you scared…?"
Kakashi's lips turned in a charming smile. "Terrified, but I'm tired of letting my guilt rule me, my regrets, my fears, finding excuses on who deserves and doesn't deserve things, on some ridiculous curse I know I don't have. I'm tired of being a coward."
"Kakashi… that's really good. I'm so glad that you're trying not to let the guilt and regret hold you back from things. I'm so glad that you're healing. But…"
"But because it's with you, it's suddenly different." Kakashi finished her faulty implied logic. "Gohama, you're the main reason why I trying all this, there's no buts, this is good and stupidly hard, so... help me."
"I want to help you, Kakashi, to be there for you always, but I don't know how, and I'm scared I'll never learn how. I'm scared I'll hurt you again, that I won't be able to see things clearly, to do things right. I'm scared I'll ruin everything, I'll ruin the sliver of a possibility of mending this… So scared I didn't even what to try. I'm not good at these things, Kakashi... at relationships... at being reliable."
"The way I see it it's like we're fighting together on the battlefield, we're better the more we work together, you fill my blanks, I fill your blanks. When things aren't working out we regroup and talk strategy. We both know how to do that, we just need to adapt it."
"It's not that simple."
"Probably not." Kakashi admitted with a shrug as if that didn't matter, and instead of annoying her, it reassured her, because he was still so steady, almost smug, against the uncertainty of it.
"Will you tell me, then, if I'm ruining things? If I'm hurting you? Promise me you'll tell me, Kakashi."
"Of course, and I want you to the same thing with me."
It was starting to get easier to believe they could do things right, to believe she could be enough for them. It wasn't just Kakashi's steadiness that reassured her, but this sudden bewildering honesty and openness that he was demanding for them, that he wanted them to lay at the base of their relationship, whatever type they settled for.
His expression was all charming and smug, as if Kakashi could read in her eyes what she was thinking. "Anything else that might hold you back from me?"
"Hansuke." There was a sudden instant of confusion as he looked at her, before Kakashi recoiled as if she had hit him in the stomach. Of course, she had to ruin it. "Not like that, I…" Gohama turned her face away from him, her heart still heavy with the guilt and the heartbreak, the shame. "I broke his heart."
"And your heart?" Kakashi asked gently, as his fingers brushed away the hair covering her profile.
"What I felt for him changed, I already knew I didn't want to be with him and that I saw no future in a relationship between us."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"I thought I'd already mourned it, but… it's always different when we actually see each other again and it's hard…" Gohama watched him carefully through the corner of her eyes as she spoke the heavy words, "There's some feelings lingering…"
His fingers fell away from her hair but his face was a smooth mask with no emotion. "But you're still going to be… in each other's lives, right?"
"After giving each other space and time, I want to… Hansuke is still one of the most important people in my life. But failed relationships push people apart…"
"Was it because of me?"
"It was never a matter of choosing between him and you. I never even let you be a choice. A relationship with him wasn't something I wanted for my life. We still wouldn't be together if this… talk never happened. But Hansuke thinks it was, he thinks we already had something in Konoha, or at least in his pain he thought that. And…"
"Us suddenly getting together would confirm it." Kakashi stated with a blank even voice and an even more blank face.
"I've never seen him like that…" The way Hansuke had curled into himself trying to control that bitterness of jealousy, that hurt. "I don't want to hurt him even more."
"I shouldn't be pushing you into this."
It made it more painful that he was maskless and was choosing to hide from her, it made it even more painful that minutes before he had been so open, his heart showing though his expression.
Kakashi had shut down so quickly and it was stirring all that doubt they had been working through just now, those insecurities, that bitter sense of inadequacy that had a deeper dangerous root in her self-loathing. Her stomach was cold with lead but her heart still looked at him with so much love.
She couldn't doubt herself now, she couldn't doubt them when Kakashi needed it. He had carried them all this way, it was almost ridiculous how little she had done, but at least she wouldn't waver now.
Wasn't this what they wanted, really wanted? Gohama's doubt couldn't reach Kakashi desire for this, not when he looked at her with that tenderness of his, that love, not when he fought against his habits, pulling down his masks, fighting his traumas, fighting his fear of vulnerability, of giving himself to someone only for them to be ripped away by death with a piece of him.
Those crazy dreams had Kakashi in them, as Kisamaru had so fittingly put it, and now they weren't so crazy anymore, maybe now that he dreamed them with her and made everything bloom with such reality, such colour. Gohama could see them, they were right in front of her, so reachable, so touchable, she could just extend her hand and touch him.
"Kakashi, maybe we should regroup." Gohama commented with some lightness, appropriating the metaphor he had used before.
His eyes fell slightly and at least it wasn't that aloofness. "It's just that… Hansuke is my friend and you're… I also don't want to hurt him, hurt you."
Gohama could see the insecurities storming behind his eyes and if she didn't try to quell them now they would only grow.
"You're not hurting me, Kakashi, you're not pushing me into anything." Gohama leaned closer to him, her hand resting over his chest. "I want us to happen, I want a relationship with you, but… I… I also don't think I'm ready to be fully in it and I want to be whole in it."
"I'm also not ready."
The way Kakashi said it, so sure of himself, with so much honesty. Her eyes narrowed at him. "Did you already think that?"
"Maa..." Kakashi offered her a charming smile, only a slight quiver of dread in his eyes. "are you going to be mad if I say yes?"
A bubble of amused absurdity rose in her chest with a laugh and Gohama threw her head back before whining, "Then what was the point of this, Kakashi?" A light hit to his chest with her fist accompanying his name.
His burning fingers caught her wrist and held her hand where she had hit him. "To make things between us clear. Who do you take me for, Gohama? We're still at war and I don't want to rush things between us, but I want us to be open about them."
"I don't know, you're acting all weird, talking like a character from some sappy romance. Next thing I know, we'd be walking towards the sunset together."
His the corner of his lip fell into a lopsided smile and why did Kakashi always have to be so charming when she was exasperated at him? "I think it's too soon for sunset walks."
"You think? Because I'm sure and now that's all I can think about." Her cheeks heated up in an embarrassed blush at her oversharing when they weren't on that step yet. She tried to pull her hand away from that damn lightening hold of his, but he only tightened it. "That was too much information."
"It wasn't. I want us to be true with each other. And you should want that too, I remember some talks of how truth should be above everything and the base of everything. You used to be all about truth, Hama."
Gohama groaned as she let her forehead fall to his collarbone, because Kakashi was right and she loved that he cared about it, that he demanded it of her, demanded it of them.
"You make me sound much more pretentious than I am."
"You are pretentious. Especially with that heiress air you sometimes have. When you first entered that command tent I'd thought you'd come out of a myth. So alive, so beautiful."
"Don't."
His face dropped close to hers, his lips brushing her ear as he whispered, "I know you secretly like them."
His breath on her sensitive skin made trill light up in her stomach, her want tingle in her skin. Gohama wrapped her arms around his middle, falling into his warmth, into his chakra, and somehow there wasn't a hint of guilt in her for it. Gohama tried to hug him even closer, it seemed she could never be close enough, before pulling back as the craving in her for him only grew.
"All this talk and we're still in a weird impasse." Gohama commented with a small chuckle.
"I like this impasse much better than what we had before. At least now we know where we stand."
"I really want to do things right, Kakashi. But I don't know how…"
"We can find out together."
This wasn't just Kakashi's steadiness in the middle of a storm, the endurance even through the belief that the clouds wouldn't dissolve in the sky and the wind wouldn't gentle, learnt after years of an hard life, years as a shinobi. It was a sort of easiness, a sort of trust and hope, as if he already knew things would be good in the end, as if he had all his trust in them, in them together.
Kakashi, her beautiful, broken, enduring Kakashi, he was thriving, he was blooming as Gohama had never seen it before. How stupidly strong was he? How stupidly contradicting? A few moments before he was crying out of desperation for the cruel way of the world, a few hours before he was heavy with weariness from carrying a division in his shoulders, and still he found the strength to thrive, the hope. His life-long masks down for her.
Gohama shook her head, her love bubbling in her as a sudden awe, a sudden lightness that bloomed out of him and that he shared with her. Her feet paced back and she leaned against the plastic partition with a wide dumbstruck smile. "Who even are you?"
Kakashi smirked and it hit right at the flutters in her stomach, as he followed her steps, caging her against his body and the partition. "I could ask you the same thing."
His hand rested on her hip, daring thumb slipping inside his sweater to graze the skin over her sharp bone with a burning path. Gohama answered with her hand, as she laid it on his shoulder, her thumb brushing up his exposed throat, fingers playing with the hairs falling over his neck.
"Are you a clone trying to seduce me and steal me away?"
"Oh, Gohama, the day I actually try to seduce you I won't need to steal you away."
Gohama watched her finger as it traced the shape of his jaw and the soft crease around his mouth, his stumble prickling her, before touching his beauty spot.
"I find your bare face very seductive, Kakashi." Her tone was more emotional than teasing, revealing what her heart was bursting with. "Your vulnerability, your strength. How you weren't afraid of asking me if I want you, of taking the step we needed to take."
His other hand held to her hip and he leaned into her. "Ah, but I was afraid… you're a very frightening thing in my life, Kyura Gohama." His forehead pressed to hers as he sighed and closed his eyes. "I don't want to hide behind masks anymore, I don't want to regret things I could have done."
Gohama could read all the history and the trauma in Kakashi's eyes, but also the new hope blooming in him. Even if he used his mask, his eyes were still his most telling feature, the one that seemed to sip from deep inside him, even Obito's sharingan was so much Kakashi.
A sudden intrusive memory that didn't belong there surged in her mind, of another man with that same red eye, one stolen out of boy's corpse, stolen from Obito. It was another worry that hovered between them, left unsaid, but this one Kakashi wouldn't try to breach.
Her hand rose thumb tracing the scar running down his sharingan. "Is this okay?"
Kakashi closed his eyes as he whispered, "Yes."
Kakashi was all lean strong muscle and powerful chakra, but when her hands were on him he felt so incredibly fragile, his paleness like porcelain, his scars like scratches reflecting on the surface, and she was scared she would shatter him again.
Gohama was terrified of the violence boiling inside of her for him.
Her fingertip glided down the side of his nose, the drop of blood long gone from his skin, and yet in her eyes it was still branded to him, would never wash away.
Kakashi leaned into her, his hand slithering up her back, rough fingertips burning through her spine. A gasp left through her lips as it curled right in her lower belly, and down, down with that violent ache. How could a touch so small could send a wave so fierce through her?
His eyes opened to watch her and they only ignited the burning in her skin. His other large hand spanned over her ribcage, thumb tracing the line of her rib as she arched into him, her fingers pressing down on his shoulders as she fought against another gasp.
She hadn't had sex for a year, hadn't been touched like this for a year, and everything in her hyper sensitive to everything in him. His damn lightning hands, his damn free chakra tingling through all of her. There was that violence, there was that hunger to drown in him and eclipse everything but him.
Gohama needed him to fuck her right there against that shower stall.
"Wait, Kakashi…" Her voice left as a pitiful whimper. Kakashi stilled, his intent eyes fixed on her face, his warm breath fanning across her cheek, not helping as she tried to pull her mind together.
"My restraint is… very weak today… and today was ruthless. I don't want this to be about venting… I still remember those stupid words I said to you that time. I don't want to hurt you again… I really don't want to hurt you again."
"It's okay." Kakashi whispered as his hand left her ribs to hold onto her own, bringing it to his mouth so he could kiss the back of her fingers. "I also don't want us to rush things."
It had taken some convincing for Gohama to accept sleeping in his tent, even when she had been sleeping on a tree branch. Kakashi had been genuinely angry that she hadn't asked anyone for a place in a tent, not even him, but she had dismissed it with a shrug, explaining that after her past year she was used to it and there was no need to bother anyone.
Kakashi stopped their run through the trees to make sure Gohama knew any request from her would never be a bother to him. He wasn't certain she was convinced, but at least had managed to pull a promise out of her to tell him if she needed anything.
Gohama was worried about the rumours. She didn't like how their division implied him in her reputation, if she slept in his tent, it would only worsen. Kakashi also knew of the rumours but he hadn't cared before, no respect should be that fickle that it swayed over the taicho's supposed romantic life. He didn't like how sometimes the shinobi talked of Gohama, but, after all the vicious talk in Konoha surrounding her defection and his stay in Buki, Kakashi had learnt how to desensitise himself to it.
It was entirely different now, as she stood right in front of him, the hurt so painfully clear in her elusive eyes as she had talked of it, the shame. He recognised it only now, but Kakashi had seen it before, veiled under Gohama's distant air as she took her meals alone on the mess tent.
An anger, even resentment, so much harsher than what had bristled through him during those first months in Konoha stirred through him, igniting his resolve.
Kakashi had been ready to throw Gohama over his shoulder and only let her go once they were inside his tent. He had threatened it and she had only stared at him with a completely unimpressed glare. Her little yelp as he did just that had been too charming but she gave up on her revolt sooner than he had wanted, quickly resigning herself to teasing him and patting his butt.
Kakashi had let her down once they reached the campsite, his fingers brushing to her hair with the excuse of combing the damp messy strands, and had walked through the campsite with no worry over who saw them together going for his taicho tent. There was still the unresolved sore spot of Hansuke, poking at his guilt and insecurities, but Gohama was his priority now.
His need for her to sleep next to him hadn't been just because Kakashi craved her company, her presence, after the yearlong absence and memory of her warm body an arm's length away from him, the month-long absence of her life as a hole in him.
Kakashi didn't want her to be alone, the day had been ruthless and she had broken down. Even if Gohama looked and sounded better as they made their way to the campsite, her smile real and easy, her eyes lively, Kakashi would never again dismiss her mental state.
Gohama wasn't the same person as in Buki, as in Konoha, but things didn't change miraculously and permanently, and as he rubbed her shoulder carefully and her eyes opened with a jerk to watch him, Kakashi was grateful she let him be there for her now.
"Now this brings some memories." Kakashi commented lightly as he kneeled at the side of her bedroll, offering his canteen. He still didn't like that she had forced him to stay on his cot and taken her space on the ground, when he had wanted it to be the other way around.
Gohama watched him intently, her mind frantic behind her swaying pupils, her chakra still buzzing between them. "I'm sorry." Gohama rasped out as she closed her eyes.
"Don't apologise." Kakashi told her softly as he continued to brush her arm in what he hoped was a soothing way. In Buki, he would have pulled his hand away from her arm after waking her from the nightmare, and he wouldn't have asked, "Do you want to tell me?"
"No." Her eyes lifted to his, dark in the low light but he could see them shining with a challenge, no amusement behind them, just starkness. "I dreamed I killed you."
"Are you trying to scare me away, Kyura Gohama?"
"It's true."
"I believe it, doesn't mean I'm scared. Do you think that's new for me? Do you think I never dreamed I killed you, Gohama?"
Gohama stared at him for a long time, thinking, pondering and he held her gaze. "I've dreamed that too. I was the one to lead your hand to my heart. Like Father did, like…" Gohama hesitated, but the silence was enough for Kakashi to know whom she wasn't saying, for Gohama to know he knew.
"Rin." There was disgust in her eyes, but he couldn't know if it was for saying it, for dreaming it or for Rin, maybe it was all of them.
It wasn't the blow Gohama and Kakashi had expected from hearing her voice what his unconscious mind had already tied together so many times in his nightmares. Maybe before it would have, but not anymore.
"You still can't beat me, Hama. I killed your parents, do you seriously think I never dreamed you killed me? Since the first time I saw you in Konoha."
The sharpness in her eyes fell into defeat, as she saw that his resolve hadn't even wavered. Still her pride roared behind her eyes, and she asked with a lighter tone. "What does that say about us?"
"That if things work out, we'll only ruin a family."
Gohama was silent for a moment before erupting in laughter, not bitter or dismayed, but genuine, a mirthful sound that bubbled in his chest and pulled laugh from his lungs as well. She pushed his shoulder and he let himself fall onto the bedroll, his shoulders still shaking with chuckles, as he let his head fall to the side to watch her.
"Are you calmer now?" Kakashi asked as she quieted down.
Her head fell to so she could face him and Gohama brushed the strands of hair that fell over her eyes. "I am. It's… it's nice. Not waking up alone…" The guilt was there as she said it, less bitter and more sheepish, as if she was saying something forbidden. "Thank you."
Kakashi brushed away the small hairs that were stuck to her forehead, not ready to go back to his cot. Gohama seemed to feel the same, her fingers tracing the swirl of his ANBU tattoo, her eyes watching him with uncertainty and a flicker of guilt. "Is it too much to ask?"
The delight spread through his smile and Kakashi couldn't stop himself from leaning his forehead against hers in affection. "I'm glad you did. I want it too."
Kakashi slid halfway inside her bedroll, pulling the blanket from his cot to cover both. Gohama had already closed her eyes, laying on her side facing him, as he settled. He took the freedom of scooting closer to her, his cheek propped on his fist as he looked down at her.
He was free to look at her, to drink in every detail without it being stolen glances as she trained in her childhood home backyard, or openly staring with a sense of trespassing while Gohama sat across from him on the engawa, relishing in her smugness. Or now from across the mess tent, from across the campsite and the battlefield. He relished in every stolen sliver of Gohama afraid that once he stopped looking she would disappear again.
Here she was again, her chest raising and falling with every small breath of life. He opened his sharingan to watch the beat of her heart and the flow of her chakra. Her expression softened, there was no severity in her shoulders, no bottomless shadow of grief in her eyes.
His fingertip hovered above her cheek before he had the courage to touch her, but once he did Gohama wasn't bothered. Kakashi followed the edge of her jaw, the raise of her nose and arch of her cheek. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth and he could clearly see the twitch of her lips as she tried not to smile.
Kakashi let his thumb hover her lips, his eyes fascinated with the shape of them. He finally let his pad brush lightly over her bottom lip, her warm breath in his finger made his own lips tingle with anticipation.
"I regretted not kissing you that day when I thought you had died." Her eyes opened at his words, but Gohama didn't look up at him. Even Kakashi hadn't been expecting sharing that. Now the damage was done and he didn't mind pushing. "Should I have kissed you, Gohama?"
"No, you shouldn't have." Gohama said as she looked up at him. "I would have kissed you back, I wanted to kiss you myself, but I was at my lowest… like in Buki… and I… I didn't want it to be anything like that."
"Are you at your lowest now?" His fingers brushed down the side of her throat, dragging a small shiver from her, and he did it again before letting them rest on her fast pulse point. "Are you, Gohama?" Kakashi asked again and both of them already knew the answer.
"No, but…"
When she didn't continued, Kakashi leaned in closer and repeated with a teasing edge to his voice. "But…"
He searched her face for any real resistance, but Gohama's eyes were closed, her dark eyelashes curled above her pale skin, and her lips parted. Kakashi let his lips press feather lightly over hers, and glided them over the corner of her mouth, the edge of her jaw up to her ear. Gohama's hand wrapped tighter around his arm, her breath hitching in her throat. He kissed her cheek then and her nose.
His thumb swiped up her sensitive throat again and another small shiver broke through her. Kakashi loved feeling how responsive Gohama was to his touch, real and soft right beside him, her cheeks pink with blood, her pulse lively under his fingers, her breath brushing the skin of his unmasked face.
"You really are alive."
Her face flinched with guilt and his guts twisted. This wasn't what he had wanted from his thoughtless comment.
Kakashi brushed his mouth over hers again. Gohama followed him as he pulled back before opening her eyes to watch him carefully, her teeth clamped on her lower lip. Did she not know what that image did to him?
"Are you sure?"
One thing was holding each other and small touches to their cheeks, but kissing was the end of the step they had started that night, kissing was marking the start of a path both of them wanted to make.
Kakashi smiled, his knuckles tracing the edge of her cheek. "I'm sure."
They met each other halfway, a little hesitantly as they relearned the feeling of each other's lips, the small inflection their movements, the intent and hesitation. Gohama's lips were so soft as he pressed his mouth firmer against hers, his fingers curling around her nape, and she followed him and overtook him, raising the intensity herself.
His tongue brushed the seam of her mouth and Gohama parted her lips for him with no hesitation, her fingers dragged down his scalp as she pushed herself closer to him. Kakashi clung onto her back, not letting his fingers drift under her shirt this time, and she onto his arm and hair, but they never strayed past the line that led into something more.
For the first time since he was a teenager Kakashi was kissing just to kiss, with no interlude to something else, no worry over where it was leading him, no rush to get to the purpose of it. He could kiss her for the entire night, their affection showing in their movements, everything about her soft and sweet, as she kissed him.
It made him warm, and it made him feel in place, more warm and in place than he should ever feel in a war, more warm and in place than he could ever deserve in his lifetime. But there was no guilt this time and nothing to stop him from falling fully into Gohama.
Kakashi let his lips wander down her chin to her neck. Her heartbeat was hammering, Kakashi could feel lively raise of the skin against his lips. He had a thirst for it now, ever since resting his thumb over the beat of her heart with the fear that it would stop trembling through her veins. He had once regretted not having relished in it a little longer.
Gohama gasped as his tongue touched her skin and he sucked gently. His lips curled in a satisfied smiled as her grip on his hair tightened. She used that advantage to tug at it painfully in a warning not to get carried away and he followed it, but not before scraping his teeth down her throat.
This time she dragged his head back, straining his neck backwards. It enticed him a little too much than he wanted for tonight, and that surprised him because it wasn't something he was used to. Kakashi peeked down at her face, cheeks flushed and lips glistering, and a challenge burning through her green eyes.
Kakashi tugged at her hold and Gohama let go, and he lowered his lips to her forehead. "So fierce." Kakashi whispered against her skin and when he pulled back to look at her, his mouth spread in a self-satisfied smile at what he saw. "And so soft-hearted."
"Careful, last time you said that to me we ended up sleeping together."
Kakashi settled next to her on the bedroll with a chuckle, his mind inevitably falling onto the memories of their only night together.
They had decided that there would be no sex. Kakashi was relieved that they were on the same page when it came to that, wanting to do things right, not fall into bed thoughtlessly as they had before. They would enjoy the little time they had, but without rushing, without taking a leap when they were not ready for it.
"You remember it." He commented softly as his head fell to the side to watch her.
"Of course." Gohama said even more softly, a tender smile in her lips.
"I knew you liked my compliments."
Her cheeks burned in an endearing blush as her eyes drifted down, long lashes sharp against her skin. A sudden blaze of affection burned through his heart and this time Kakashi didn't have to ignore it.
He leaned into her, pressing one last languid kiss to her lips, before wrapping his arms around Gohama and pulling her into his chest. Gohama just watched him, a soft content smile in her half-lidded eyes and her hand resting on his jaw, thumb playing with his stumble.
The tiredness of the day was finally settling in his muscles, making his lids and body heavy, but Kakashi didn't want to close his eyes just yet, he didn't want to lose the sight Gohama with her beautiful loving eyes, so relaxed and fitting in his arms, he didn't want to lose the elation and the love he felt fluttering in his chest. Kakashi had never felt anything quite like this before, so intoxicating and reassuring at the same time.
"I've also dreamed of this." Gohama confessed sleepily.
"I've also dreamed of this too."