#chuckled

i was gonna bite into you and drain you of blood but okay

@godmist

He startles when the velvet voice unfurls behind him. He swivels around on his bar stool to find himself face-to-face with the man himself, Zabuza Momochi -- Demon of the Hidden Mist is quite the right name for him, Gai thinks, considering how he's slunk up to Gai without him quite noticing. Of course if asked, he would claim he'd just happened to have his guard down on a recovery day, that Tanaki's Udon was the safest place a shinobi could find themselves, and that he had been deeply immersed in the warming aroma of the nourishing broth.

Beady eyes stare back at him, waiting for a response.

"Momochi-san," Gai opens, polite and loud in the way only Gai could be. "I need clarifications. Are you simply paying me just to challenge Kakashi -- not to win the challenge nor to make sure that he truly sleeps?"

Because this is very, very easy, and it is either an oddly creative strategy to coerce Gai into a dubious plot that he knows very little about, or Zabuza really, really cares for Kakashi. And if he's been reading things right, there is a narrative Gai has more or less pieced together, thanks to the astute "observational skills" he's applied to his rival.

Kakashi had started stealthily taking weekend trips right after his mission to Kiri. Two, two and a half days max that he'd slip away, and Gai knew from his own experience that jonin-sensei hardly ever took their own missions, especially not when the genin team was still so fresh. Then he'd found Zabuza Momochi one day, brought him to Konoha, and the trips stopped.

And here the legendary swordsman is, living in Konoha, looking for Maito Gai, asking him to get Kakashi to sleep. Gai's been trying to do the same thing for years! Though, as far as he knows, an hour is a little bit of a low bar to set, even for Kakashi.

A ruse, or a pivotal moment of shared concern, albeit expressed in a rather odd way?