Title: Arms and the Boy
Rating: G
Pairing: none
Word Count: 327
Summary: Kakashi and Gai watch Gai's first genin team and ponder the meaning of age.
Note: Written ages ago as a birthday present for Shroud, who asked for Kakashi and Gai with the keyword 'old'. Just recently found, revised, and titled; the title is of course a reference to Wilfred Owen's poem Arms and the Boy, which itself alludes to the first line of the Aeneid. I think Gai would rather like Virgil, but Kakashi would read Owen.

"Do they ever make you feel old?" Kakashi wonders, slouching against the bench and watching the kids running laps around the road below. Usually Gai would be down there with them--hell, he'd be leading them--but they're just back from a three-day mission that ended with Kakashi's left arm in a cast and Gai's right Achilles tendon carefully reconnected, and even Gai can behave himself when the medics yell loud enough.

"The kids?" Gai's grown used to Kakashi's non sequiturs, over the years; he's so full of them himself that it takes no trouble to follow the broken thread of their conversation. "Of course not." He flashes that blinding grin he picked up sometime around their second year in ANBU, and adds, "If anything, their youthful energy is inspiring!"

Kakashi snorts softly, stretching his right arm out over the back of the bench and leaning his head back. For a moment he looks as if he's fallen asleep, or died. His chest rises and falls so slightly that the movement's nearly invisible, and the sheer fabric of his mask never flutters with his breath. But his voice isn't so low that Gai can't hear it. "They've got their whole lives ahead of them. And they don't know how short it's going to be."

"They'll live to be old as Sandaime-sama," Gai says firmly. "Only in body, of course. Their spirits shall remain as fresh and pure and youthful as they are today, and--" he prods Kakashi in the side with a blunt, calloused finger, "we're going to see them do it."

The pale-haired young man's mask crinkles in a tired smile. "You think we're going to live that long?"

"That long, yes," Gai assures him. He doesn't need to say the rest: that the reason he believes so firmly in Youthful Spirits and Boundless Energy, the reason Kakashi drags himself from mission to mission like a dying man, is that in spirit, they're both already old.