My Love Is Consumption

Konoha unfurled with the dawn, stretching as it woke. Gai took his run around the village at a leisurely pace of 15 km per hour, waving hello at the bakers and teachers and other early risers as he went. It was on his second lap, coming around the curve past the hospital, that he found himself almost trampling one of the youthful flowers of the Medical Corps on her way out of the building.

“Doctor Nohara!” he said, hastily bounding up from where his last minute handspring out of the way had landed him on the sidewalk, at her feet. He brushed some lawn clippings off his jumpsuit. “Are you okay?”

“Perfectly fine,” said Nohara Rin, with one of her well-meaning little smirks. A dimple showed on one side of her face. “You didn’t have to do that, I would have dodged.”

“Nonsense,” Gai said, firmly. “In apology for this inauspicious start to the day, I will do three more laps running backwards!”

Nohara Rin clicked her tongue. “Good morning, Gai-kun,” she said, meaningfully. Ah, he’d forgotten. “Please don’t. It’s my fault, I wasn’t watching where I was going either.”

"Good morning, Nohara-san," Gai said. He spoke clearly and distinctly but, it had to be said, at a much lower volume than usual.

Rin put her hands out, face bright and eyebrows raised expectantly until Gai put his hands out too and allowed her to inspect them for abrasions. He was a bit embarrassed to have her treating him like a child who had fallen on a playground, but this was Kakashi’s cherished teammate, so he tolerated it. He had a vague memory of her doing this before, when they had been children. She was always conscientious, a watchful and sometimes stifling companion. She’d been a year or two older than him—well of course, she still was. But he supposed it mattered more when you were a child.

"Please don't do anything silly like run around backwards," said Rin, as she healed a really very small cut. "It's my fault too, I wasn't watching where I was going."

The green chakra light faded, and Gai retrieved his hands as quickly as he could politely manage. “Are you departing from the night shift?” he asked.

Rin smiled easily, not at all like someone who had worked through the night until morning. “Yes, it’s the night shift for me, this week. Someone has to make sure the place keeps running when Tsunade-hime is on vacation.”

Tsunade-hime, yes. Of course. And why not? She’d always been Tsunade-hime. The chief surgeon of the hospital, and Rin's mentor.

“It must be hard to be away from your husband…” Gai said, with a flickering of unease even as he said it. He was glad he had taken his hands back. They had begun to sweat.

Her eyes crinkled shut, a picture of indulgent femininity. “I know Obito misses me. So I try not to take too long!”

“…Rin…” Gai said. That uneasy feeling climbed his chest. “Obito and I… well, we’ve been spending a lot of time together recently, and…” He tried to scrape up the words to express how Obito’s attention felt new and meaningful in a way that shouldn’t have been new, since they had known each other for longer than Gai could honestly remember—he really wasn’t sure when they had met—but Rin cut him off, before he could sort the thought out.

“Oh that’s wonderful!” she said, clapping her hands together. “I’m always trying to get him to play nice with you boys.”

“Yes, um,” Gai said. The words play nice did something messy to his insides. “Yes we’ve been… yes. Well! I’m happy to help in the ongoing efforts.”

“And I’m happy you’re happy,” she said, smiling at him.

There was an odd silence, while Gai waited for her to say something else—anything else—but she only kept smiling at him, like a wind-up toy that had run out. Her head tilted slightly to the side, her eyes crinkled closed, beaming. It felt like she ought to say something, only he wasn’t sure what. They’d known each other for a long time, too, but he hadn’t spent much time with her since…

He shook it off. “Have a splendid day, Rin,” he said. “I will tell your husband hello for you when I train with him today.”

She came back to life, clapping her hands together with a suddenness that almost sent Gai lurching back. “Oh! Thank you so much, Gai-kun. You’re such a charmer!”

His minor episode of clumsiness aside, Gai finished his morning routine as he always did—hauling this and that around the shops, mostly for strength training but also for the occasional free cut of wagyu at the butcher or some such—and then back home for a brisk shower. 

Kakashi rolled over in bed when Gai came back through the bedroom to kick him awake. He looked absolutely pathetic in the mornings, knocked out like someone had taken a hammer to his head the night before. Gai was perpetually delighted by this. The man drooled. Better an undignified peaceful sleep, though, than a wracked and wretched night of panicked, half-strangled cries—

Gai paused. No, that wasn’t right. Kakashi always slept well. What would Kakashi have nightmares about?

Unsettled, Gai drew back from where he’d been about to lovingly pile-drive his rival. Kakashi’s face, with its long scar and little black beauty mark, was the same as always. There were no nightmares. But it felt important, somehow, that there had been.

Gai drew back, and then went to get dressed. He’d just let Kakashi sleep in a bit, as a treat. After all, the only thing he ever accomplished in waking Kakashi up like this was getting the man to roll over and fall back asleep as soon as Gai left. 

–

Somehow Gai had ended up with a standing appointment to help Uchiha Obito work on his taijutsu. How exactly this had happened remained a bit of a mystery to him. Obito never asked his peers for anything, especially not something that would require him to admit his skill was lacking in some respect. Age mellowed even the harshest personalities, Gai supposed, but Obito’s was an especially prickly one…

Gai knew what his life should be like. He knew with confidence how the day should go, who he should speak to, and how he should feel about all of it. And yet, suddenly, Obito was strange to him. Like something that didn’t quite fit, like noticing a painting on a wall that you had thought until this moment was bare.

The park where Gai waited for him was a lovely place, even in winter. The evergreens exposed between bare bones, deep color filling the shadows… He wasn’t sure why he was thinking so much of winter, lately. The early summer was vibrant all around him, balmy and perfect, the kind of day that you dream of in February. And yet the ghost of a chill was in the back of his mind. 

He felt the sunlight on his neck and the backs of his hands as he poured himself through the Pieces of Eight kata, and tried not to dwell on insubstantial concerns.

“Hey, Gai!” Obito called, jogging through the park to the place where Gai was working his way through his flexibility exercise. 

Gai breathed out once deeply into the stretch, and then opened his eyes as he released it. He found Obito watching him very intently. “You’re early, my friend!” he said, and lowered his arms. 

There was something about Obito now that always gave Gai pause. His jonin blues suited him, but in an odd way, as if Gai constantly expected to find him wearing something else. The band of his hitai-ate pulled down over his missing eye, his scarred cheek and his short brown hair—Gai always felt himself caught up in it, as if it was something he wouldn’t be able to see again. Like it was rare, precious even. Maybe it was the same thing that made Obito look at him like that, lately. 

“Yeah, well,” Obito said, “I was just messing around anyway, I’m not gonna be late just for the sake of being late like Kakashi is. Can you believe him? I was gone for six months and I swear he stole half my personality.”

Right. Obito had been… gone. That was—that was a long time ago, and yet it felt very recent, in a way. As if Kakashi had only stopped mourning last week, even though it had been some dozen years since Obito had arrived with heroic panache in the midst of their Village's greatest need.

Gai shook his head, feeling as if he needed to clear it. 

“I wouldn’t string you along like that,” Obito went on, in that tone that said he was still annoyed about Kakashi somehow. “I respect your time, you know?”

“I,” Gai stammered, “you do?”

“Yeah, of course.” Obito said it in a slightly stiff, embarrassed way, looking in the opposite direction. Then he reached for his collar and shrugged off his light jacket, all business. “So you were showing me Cloud Style.”

“…Right!” Gai said. He set his heels against the ground and lifted his hands in a practiced catcher’s pose.  “First things first, let me see what you remember of your form.”

Obito grinned. He looked so boyish, his smile wide with just a hint of daring in it, falling into a stance that Gai couldn’t help but think suited him. The Cloud Village style he’d observed on his last mission had a blink-and-you-miss-it style of combat, a bouncy energy that Gai felt in his gut was meant for Obito.

“You’ve really studied everything haven’t you,” Obito said, and placed a precise heel-kick in Gai’s waiting palms.

“Anything I can get my hands on!” Gai answered, a little flushed. “Adjust your shoulders lower, your balance is going the wrong way. If you try to leap from that kick, you’ll just land on your back.”

There was a flash of the Old Obito—his nose wrinkled in annoyance, or (as Gai suspected) embarrassment. But he swallowed it, adjusted, and kicked again. Although it wasn’t hard work, Gai found himself breathless anyway. It was strangely exciting to be granted a small window into that soft space behind the bluster, where the ego was tender. 

When they were schoolchildren together, Gai barely knew Obito existed. They were classmates once, he supposed—but Gai hadn’t bothered much with anyone but Kakashi back then. His father was his only real champion; kids his own age were annoyed with him, mostly. Some of them crueler than others. For his own peace of mind, Gai thought of the other students as more of a vague, judgmental mob at the edge of his focus, strangers whose “constructive” criticisms he considered only as far as they seemed genuinely helpful. Usually they were not.

The truth was, after the chunin exams, when Obito finally managed to get on Gai’s radar, Gai didn’t like him. Obito with his nasty attitude, always seeming to get between Gai and Kakashi—Obito became “Rival of my Rival,” at best and “that guy who always insults my face” at worst. What was the point in thinking about someone like that?

Lately, though, Obito had been looking at him. And complimenting him, sometimes. Gai wasn’t sure what he had done differently to earn it.

Obito tried the kick a third time, his lips pursed in concentration. “Close,” Gai said. He straightened up, leaving Obito's foot hanging in the air. Obito wobbled for a moment, off-balance, before returning to the ready position.

Gai stepped into Obito’s stance, peering over it with one hand tapping his mouth. In order to get the full picture, he had to get a bit closer. This was something he did quite often with his students, but it felt different, like this. Probably a matter of scale; Obito was easily as large as him. He stepped back out and circled.

“Do you mind if I reposition you?” he asked, when he was standing at Obito’s back.

“Position me all you want,” Obito said, brightly.

“Um,” Gai said. He wasn’t sure why exactly that made him feel like his stomach was hatching butterflies. He did this all the time. Again, mostly with his students, but…

He pressed one palm to Obito’s shoulder and one to his lower back. “Okay,” he said, “start the motion of the kick, as if you were going to follow through, then hold at the extension.”

The ripple of tensing muscles ended in Obito leaning back, balanced, with Gai’s hands barely redirecting him.

“Yes,” Gai said, “That’s better!”

Obito tipped his head back, and abruptly all his weight was leaning into Gai’s palms as he grinned. He was glowing, in the sunlight, and Gai thought—he looks like someone who has never been happy before.

“You wanna go through the rest of it with me?” Obito asked.

In that moment, Gai couldn’t have refused him a thing.

Gai went easy on him, more leading him through the process of a bout than really fighting him. He let the kick land against a forearm block, and watched as Obito leapt off of it. Twisting through the air, a man who had taken a step up into the sky, the shadow shape of Obito’s ankles split the sun, and then he landed on his palms, executing the move almost perfectly. There was a bit of a wobble as he tried to transition his weight into a crouch. He was grinning. His one remaining eye was open and bright.

Watching as Obito blossomed with each opportunity to execute a perfect form, it made Gai wonder. Had he really been such an unhappy child? Was that where the attitude came from, that just this moment of perfectly simple pleasure could make him look like a new man?

“Once more, in earnest this time,” Gai told him. “Be prepared.”

Perhaps the confidence got ahead of Obito. The first kick went well, but the landing was worse, and when he came back to hammer down on Gai’s defenses, he was sloppy about setting up the next kick. Gai caught his ankle and flipped him into the grass, ending the exercise. Obito’s eye widened, his jaw tightened—but before the hackles could raise, Gai smiled.

 “A splendid display, Obito!” Gai said, and favored him with a thumbs up. “Well done!”

Obito blinked, and then returned the praise with an almost shy smile. “Uh, thanks,” he said. He pushed up onto his elbows, bashfully brushing grass off the back of his head. “You’re really. Something. I should have been working harder when we were kids, I could be throwing punches like you by now.”

“It’s not over until it’s over!” Gai said, and offered a hand up.

“Oh?” Obito said. His fingers met, clasped, pulled. An edge of something played around his lips, and then he was sliding through Gai, knocking Gai over as his own weight tumbled him. Obito breezed away, as light as air, while Gai spat grass.  

“Hey!” Gai squawked, “No sharingan!”

“Ohh?” Obito said. He pressed a finger to his lips and considered the sky innocently. “I don’t remember anyone saying that.”

Gai flushed so fast and hard he thought his ears might be on fire. “What!” he said. “We’re having taijutsu practice! It’s obvious!”

He could tell Obito was suppressing laughter; the line of his lips wobbled before he straightened himself out. “So sad! Are you really a sore loser, Gai-chan?”

It was so—so different from how Obito acted around other people. Different from how he'd acted with Gai, in the hazy distant past. Gone was the stiff and slightly embarrassed demeanor. Gone was the perpetual chip on the shoulder. This Obito was easy, carefree, light as sun on the grass. He clapped his hands together and beamed.

“Come on,” he said, “play with me.”

Gai swallowed, feeling oddly as if he was being invited to touch something precious and fragile. He pushed up, climbing to his feet. “If you’re not holding back,” he warned, “I won’t either.”

“I’m sure I’ll manage somehow,” Obito said, and launched himself like a throwing knife.

–

When he was eighteen, Gai spent a month in the Fire Capitol.

He'd been sent to support a mission he didn't really understand—his squad leader had tried to explain it to him, but it was very political and the details kept sliding out of his brain. He understood his role, at least. He was to talk to no one important, and do nothing stupid, and if everything went very wrong he would be told to start punching. In the meantime, Gai spent a lot of time wandering around by himself. The rest of his squad had their own duties, and clearly saw him as something of a meathead. He didn't waste time trying to change their opinions.

He liked the Capitol. The architecture was old and beautiful, and the streets bustled late into the night, far past when the people of Konoha would have closed their shutters and gone to bed. He watched street performances, and listened to the chatter of a dozen languages. He smiled at strangers, and sometimes they even smiled back.

Eventually he'd found himself in a bathhouse. 

Before that trip, he had known deep down that among all the things wrong with him, his heart was wrong too. “Why can’t you just be normal,” he’d been asked, a hundred times if it had been once, by peers and elders and teachers and even Kakashi, with that little pinch of disgust and exhaustion between the brows. His voice was too loud, his vocabulary was too flowery, he couldn’t seem to tell when people were only being polite. Why shouldn’t his heart be wrong too? No one had ever understood him but his father, and now his father was gone too. Gai was one of a kind, a fish among birds, and that’s just how it was always going to be.

And then he’d felt the tap of fingers along his shoulder, in the jasmine-smelling fog of the sauna, and he’d discovered that the sick swooping feeling he got in his gut when other boys touched him too much wasn’t just a him problem. In fact, the man pushing him into the locker room seemed to know instinctively how to reach inside him and soothe that craving he’d never dared acknowledge before. It burned him clean and free, killed his deepest hungers, leaving only uncomplicated desire. In the aftermath, as he’d sagged against the wall, breathing hard, the man had lit a cigarette and smiled up at him.

“First time?” he’d said.

Gai wasn’t entirely sure what it was the first time of, but he nodded.

“Lucky me,” the man said. His eyes glittered green in an otherwise unassuming square face. He had a mischievous smile that took years off him. “You in town long?”

Gai, vaguely aware that he shouldn’t share mission parameters with strangers, no matter how wonderfully hot and soft their mouth had been, said, “I don’t know…?” 

“You’re gonna be real popular here, if you stick around,” the man said. He laughed a little bit, resting his cheek on the edge of the bench. “Bring the property value up, with a body like that. You look like a movie star.”

Gai, who had never been called handsome by anyone, almost cried on the spot. But he was terrified of putting off this new person—these new people, yet unintroduced—and so he swallowed it down and held still and acted like these men wanted him to act. He said as little as possible, followed cues where he could discern them, and tried to be… likable.

For a month, it worked. He'd gone to the bathhouse as often as he could manage, in the few weeks before the mission was over. He'd learned how to touch a man, how to kiss away the rough tug of his calluses. And then one day the mission was over, without any punching at all. He'd gone back to Konoha with a new sense of confidence. He'd swum among the fish for a season.

But when he tried to keep doing it, every time, it all fell apart. 

Gai liked the bathhouse, he liked sex, but he was hungry even when he was being touched. And when he did manage to grab hold of romance, he wanted it too much; he wanted too much time and attention and company on his runs and dinner in the evenings and he wanted to be told he was handsome and he wanted to be told he was fun and charming and likable and he wanted, more than anything, to be desired. When he revealed even a sliver of his wanting, the men he liked drew back with a look of pity. If he ever let on how desperate he was, he’d surely be found disgusting. 

Sitting on the grassy floor of the park next to Obito, who had starfished out and was chewing on a handful of lemony wood-sorrel flowers, Gai felt disgusting again. Obito had a wife! A very lovely kind-hearted and patient wife who was probably very pretty if you liked that sort of thing (women) and who had been Gai’s comrade since childhood. It was cruel of him to even entertain the idea of wanting Obito.

“This is nice,” Obito said, spitting flower petals like an afterthought. “I mean, I’d get bored if I tried to lay here forever, but it’s still nice.”

“Yes,” Gai said, a bit distracted. “I suppose it’s worth slowing down occasionally to appreciate the beauty of nature.”

Obito rolled over on his side and propped his head up, looking at Gai. “That was pensive. I didn’t know you had a pensive setting. You good, man?” 

“You were nasty to me when we were children,” Gai said. He didn’t know why he’d said it; the past was the past. It just popped out, like yolk spilling from an egg.

Obito’s face twisted. His scars made the effect especially striking, the left side of his face curling into a spiral of aching lines that disappeared under his hairline. “Yeah,” he said. “I was uh. Jealous.”

“Of what?” Gai retorted, agog.

“Well.” Obito fiddled with some of the wildflowers, twisting blossoms off the cloven leaves. “You know what it’s like, to want someone to pay attention to you so bad it makes you do stupid shit.”

Gai bristled. “I do not!”

Obito raised his eyebrow and popped a blossom into his mouth. “Oh, so you’ve never, I don't know, dived off a cliff to impress Kakashi and then had to be fished out a mile downriver.”

Red-faced and annoyed, Gai said, “It was a gesture of youthful verve and ambition!”

Obito snickered into his hand. Then he sat up, ending up quite close to Gai in the process, and flashed a couple of flowers caught between his fingers. “I’m sorry I was such a dick to you. I’m trying to do better this time.” He leaned in a bit closer, his weight electric and heavy in the air around him, and tapped Gai on the mouth with his floral-smelling fingertips. A shiver of dread and longing raced up Gai’s spine. 

“Say ‘ah’,” Obito told him.

Helpless to resist, Gai opened his mouth and allowed Obito to place a tiny yellow flower on his tongue. Obito grinned. Lemon-bright nectar burst between Gai’s teeth. The grass-stained fingers still hung between them, like an unfinished thing. For a moment, it seemed—

The earth rattled, and the air burst with the cold dark smell of winter, and Obito snatched himself back. He glared up at the sky, the red of his eye swirling ruby-bright.

“Fuck,” he said. “Why won’t he just give up?”

Gai had already scrambled up off his knees. “Obito,” he said sharply. “What’s happening?”

Obito glanced at him, and there was an unfamiliar—a familiar—a look of cold fury in his one remaining eye.

“Sleep,” he said, and Gai’s world dissolved. 

 –

Maito Gai rose with the sun, regardless of the season. 

Come winter, summer, rain or shine, Gai woke with determination in the pale light of dawn streaming through his east-facing window. In spring, he admired the new green leaves on the maple across the road, and in autumn, he admired the burnished red. Even the winter was beautiful, in its way. No man more bravely faced the coming day, regardless of its challenges. 

And yet. The morning was… heavy. Below his window, the wet blue light of dawn drifted over the village. Dew lay like cold sweat on the leaves, the grass, the lids of bins. His heart twisted, although he wasn’t sure why.

It was a perfect morning. Why shouldn’t it be?

"Yes," Rocky says. "Again, what is Grace complaining about?"

I screw up my face at the ceiling. "Does your species have a cloth-mother-wire-mother situation?"

Rocky makes an interested chirp. "Not know concept. Puppet show," he orders, and when I tilt my head back I see him bonking his carapace against the wall meaningfully.

"I don't know how I would puppet show a psychological experiment," I start to say, and then before I even finish I've already proved myself wrong. "Okay, okay, hold on."

On the floor between us I set down my quilt, a bit of wire scrap from a previous puppet show, and the little Grace action figure Rocky made for me after he found out the last one went home with the Beetles. This one has a little removable helmet for when we talk about EVA procedures.

"So in the sixties, scientists were trying to figure out how needs are prioritized in the instinctual part of the brain."

"Yes yes, humans have two brains, smart one dumb one," Rocky says. "Rocky has five brains all smart."

"It's all one brain, Rock. It's just got components."

Rocky knocks impatiently at the xenonite, so I get on with it.

"They took a baby primate--close evolutionary relative of humans--" I take the little Grace, "and gave it the option to seek out either a soft monkey-shaped figure with no food," I wad a corner of the comforter up into a little scoop that vaguely resembles a lap, "or a hard wiry figure with food." The wire bundle goes opposite the comforter on the floor. "You'd think the baby would go for the food, right? It's hungry, the food is right there. But it goes for the soft thing instead."

Mini-Grace tap-tap-taps over to the comforter corner and drops into the scoop.

"This definitely not Eridian behavior," Rocky tells me. "Significance?"

"Interrogative," I say automatically. "Well, basically, what it shows is that our branch of the evolutionary tree has needs that aren't as obvious as food. Cloth-mother is giving the baby something it needs, and the baby is prioritizing that. Probably because it's usually true that if you just find someone soft to cling to, they'll eventually feed you."

"Rocky see implication," Rocky says. "Rocky not soft. Rocky feed Grace, but Grace leave Rocky for soft anyway."

"What!" I bolt upright from where I was fiddling with the mini-me. "Rocky that's not what I meant!"

Rocky does something I've learned to identify as a huff, which involves some delicate but passive aggressive floor tapping.

"Grace can't help stupid wet brain," Rocky says. "Leave Rocky for first [unintelligible] it sees."

What is that, some kind of Eridian animal we haven't talked about? Does he think I'm gonna leave him for a space-octopus?

"Rockyyyyy," I say, stretching out on the floor towards his enclosure. "I'm just a little touch starved! I still love you man, I just need like... a weighted blanket. Or a deep tissue massage."

Rocky hums thoughtfully, and then relents. "Future Erid habitat fix this," he says. "Easy make soft thing for holding Grace. Right now, harder."

I sigh. "Yeah. That's what I was thinking."

"What weighted blanket made of?" Rocky asks. "Weave fabric very heavy?"

"I think there's usually sand sewn into the pockets," I muse. "We don't have sand, obviously. Or any other kind of tiny heavy particles, for that matter."

"Heavy fabric maybe possible," Rocky says. "Rocky test some materials."

"Aw, thanks," I say. "Just don't crush me in the process, please."

"Other thing," Rocky says. "Someone squeeze Grace muscles until blood flow increases. Need hands for this."

Boy, I would kill for a massage. I would beg like a dog, honestly. Imagining what it would feel like to have a pair of thumbs dig into my neck right now...

I notice that I'm pinching my upper trapezius between my palm and fingers, without really thinking about it. It feels good, but the bad news is that it just makes me feel more needy. All the other muscles in that area are sitting up and bullying me for attention. Metaphorically speaking.