Progress
Characters: Still the same- Kakashi and Sasuke.
Summary: Slowly, very slowly, Kakashi's and Sasuke's relationship progresses into something else.
Kakashi had to be dreaming. A nightmare, he was sure. There was Sasuke standing in a blotched and singed apron in his kitchen, trying to end the toaster's life with any means necessary. Some half-burnt eggs were lying on a plate on the table, a glass of traditional tea and fresh orange juice beside it. Kakashi rubbed his eyes and, after the image of Sasuke maiming his kitchen hadn't disappeared, went back to his bed.
"Just some more minutes," he promised himself while he pulled the blanket over his head.
-
When Kakashi woke for the second time this day, Sasuke was gloomily standing in the doorway of his bedroom. He was clothed completely in black and his eyes promised death and destruction to everyone who mentioned the many band aids on his fingers.
"I tried to make breakfast," Sasuke gritted out. Kakashi groaned quietly and got up. The kitchen was tidied up but nearly half the eggs were missing and a huge bit of bred was found in the basket, burned to coal.
"How about we've some of these donuts from the café down the street?" Kakashi suggested and scratched the back of his head sleepily. Sasuke moved like the shadow of some tormented soul while he put on his shoes and waited for Kakashi to get properly clothed.
"But there's one positive point about the whole thing," Kakashi said cheerfully, or as cheerful as he could get this early in the morning, while they made their way down the street. "You won't try to do that again, right?" He thought he heard Sasuke murmur something along the lines of, "I'll find something else." and tried to decide if now was the right time to break out in cold sweet.
-
When Kakashi woke up one week later, Sasuke was standing at the foot of his bed, clothed in black again but this time there seemed an upward quirk to his lips. Kakashi was a bit alarmed that his internal radar would let Sasuke wander this close without ringing any alarm bells. But after Sasuke had dragged him out of bed and to the door of the living room opening into the garden, he just stared.
"What the hell?" Kakashi asked, brain still slow from sleep.
The garden was tidied up. The small pool to Kakashi's right was clean and he caught a glimpse of golden fish darting through the clear water. Green grass covered the whole ground, carefully cut and intercepted now and then with colourful flowers and white stones. Most of the trees had lost the dead leaves from under their branches and were looking freshly cut and watered. The high wall around the Hatake mansion had obviously been scrubbed but even Sasuke couldn't erase the older patches of dirt.
Kakashi was still asking himself how Sasuke had managed that in one night when the Uchiha handed him a cup of freshly mixed tea.
-
The surprises continued, like freshly painted walls in- and outdoors, cleaned-up kitchens and new tatami mats for the living room. Kakashi stopped asking 'How?' after the first three weeks and started to ask 'Why?'. Sasuke always mumbled something about repayment and then shuffled off to make some more tea. He still tried to get a peek of Kakashi's face which Kakashi of course didn't let happen. There was his reputation to hold up, after all.
-
Green, Kakashi decided, wasn't Sasuke's colour. He was more the dark blue or black type, even an angry red if it came to it, but green definitely didn't suit the Uchiha. Kakashi thought about telling Sasuke that he didn't look as good in his green yukata as he might think but decided against it.
Tapping the back of his feet against the wall he was sitting on, he watched the festival carry on, fanning himself with the colourful fan he had won earlier. He himself wore a black yukata with a black belt and a white facemask. Sasuke had commented that none of his dark blue masks really went with the yukata and had given him the white mask together with the white eye patch Kakashi was wearing over his Sharingan right now.
Kakashi silently wondered why Sasuke had chosen the green yukata for himself if he was such an expert with colours.
And thinking of the devil, Sasuke appeared out of the crowd, a load of toys under one arm and a grilled fish on a stick in the other hand. He didn't look too agitated which was a pleasant surprise, seeing as Kakashi had to practically drag him to the festival by his legs. Maybe Sasuke had chosen the green yukata to look as unflattering as possible and attract as little girls as he could manage, Kakashi wondered.
"I ran into thirteen girls who wanted to invite me for tea, twenty who wanted to go dancing with me and twelve gave me toys," Sasuke recounted flatly and dumped the load of toys in a nearby dumpster. "What are you doing here?" he asked with mild interest while he gnawed on his fish.
"Lost one of my sandals," Kakashi answered cheerfully. Sasuke glanced at Kakashi's bare left foot, lifted an eyebrow at him and continued to nibble on his fish.
"Gai saw me and nearly had a heart attack because, I quote, "He would have sooner expected his great-grandmother to crawl out from under her rock to attend this festival than me.", then challenged me to who could win more prices," Kakashi finally explained after five minutes of being silently stared at by Sasuke. "I think I will let him win." He slumped a bit lower and continued to fan himself. Sasuke plopped down on the wall beside him and scanned the crowd for any familiar or unfamiliar females which had zeroed in on him.
"I could get you another sandal or do you want to jump home on one leg?" Sasuke offered after he had thrown the stick the fish had been on in the aforementioned wastebasket. It landed in it with an accuracy which was normal for a shinobi of Sasukes' level but had some passing by genins gaping at him.
"Another sandal would be nice but I think I'll manage home with only one tonight," Kakashi brushed him off, bracing himself with one arm back on the narrow wall and staring up at the starlit sky. Only some pale grey clouds were dusted here and there but Kakashi had heard that a heavy rain was about to cross the mountains in the east and start autumn season a bit early. Sasuke got up from his place by his side and he glanced at the youth who vanished with a curt, "Stay here!" in the crowd. Only minutes later Sasuke was back again, caring two sticks of dried fish and a single, white sandal.
"That should fit," the Uchiha informed him as he gave Kakashi one of the dried fish sticks and bent down to slid the sandal on Kakashi's left foot. Kakashi wiggled his foot experimentally and decided that it wasn't too bad. "Thanks."
-
There had some things in common, Kakashi decided. Both had been cut off from their families at an early age, even if Sasuke had Itachi to channel his grief and hate at. They both had the Sharingan and they both had mastered the Chidori. Before certain loudmouthed team mates had opened their eyes to what was truly important, they had both been cold-blooded bastards. Said loudmouthed team mates had each practically died at their hands, even if Naruto had survived thanks to Kyuubi and Sasuke's death intent had been very present and very focused. Kakashi hadn't wanted Obito to die.
His nose twitched and so Kakashi swung his feet over the edge of the roof as he sat up and peered down.
And Sasuke was really, really horrible in the kitchen, he added to his mental list. Grey steam rose out of the open kitchen window and Kakashi could hear Sasuke silently cursing. Another trip to the restaurant down the street was in order, it seemed.
-
After days with temperatures fit for autumn, this day had reached degrees reserved for summer. Kakashi and Sasuke had both shed any dark clothes and put on white muscle shirts and shorts they had been about to burry in their closets.
"It's far too hot to move," Kakashi said but continued to fan himself nonetheless. He watched with an eye only cracked open a thin slit as Sasuke sidled into his room, black hair clinging to his neck. The mattress dipped a bit when Sasuke plopped down on the edge of it.
Kakashi's eye closed.
His headband was missing and instead a cool cloth had been thrown over his sharingan, as white as the facemask Kakashi had put on today.
"Think tomorrow will be as hot?" Sasuke asked and leaned down to take the fan from Kakashi's unresisting hand.
"Mhm, who knows?" Kakashi replied, relaxing further into the mattress. He was about to doze off when Sasuke put his hands on the mattress on either side of his head, dark stare trying to burn holes into his mask.
"What's behind it? Why are you hiding your face?" Sasuke breathed, his dark bangs brushing Kakashi's face who didn't even open his eyes.
"Reputation?" he suggested sleepily. "To be honest, it's more for amusement than anything else. Another thing to let the people wonder about."
"No scars? No hideous deformations you have to hide since your childhood?" Sasuke wondered aloud, a sensitive amount of suspicion laden into his tone.
"Would you call a knocked out teeth a deformation?" Kakashi mumbled and rolled onto his side and away from Sasuke, making the Uchiha remove his left hand from the mattress since he didn't want it to get squished under Kakashi's weight. There was a light tug on his mask.
"Then let me see," Sasuke demanded, bending over Kakashi to be able to see his eyes. Kakashi didn't give him an answer but also didn't stop him from baring one inch of the lower half of his face after another.
The skin under the mask was a shade lighter than the rest of Kakashi's face, a testament to Kakashi even wearing his masks on the hottest of days. As he had said, one tooth, to the left of the front upper teeth, had been knocked out, something Sasuke could see when Kakashi parted his mouth slightly to sigh deeply. But otherwise there was only the faint scar of the sharingan eye trailing down over Kakashi's left cheek. The white cloth pooled around Kakashi's neck and Sasuke leaned down to look more intensely at the space where a tooth was missing. He yelped in surprise when one twist of the silver-haired shinobi sprawled him beside Kakashi on the bed. Kakashi's eye had slipped back open.
"Now I'm allowed to know one of your secrets," Kakashi said and for the first time in ever Sasuke didn't just see the shadows of his grin pulling at cloth but saw the original. He wondered who had seen it before him.
"Ok, ask," Sasuke said, sounding annoyed.
-
"Kakashi, I have great respect for you, but I'm afraid you and Sasuke are becoming too close," Tsunade said over a desk only looking as half-full as was normal.
Kakashi just stared her with his bored gaze, hands in his pockets.
The Hokage went on, "So it was decided that Sasuke will get assigned his own apartment, with enough security measures, of course."
Kakashi nodded. After having waited for any other reaction for some seconds, a twitch of his eye, anything, Tsunade dismissed him.
-
When Kakashi had returned home after that very brief meeting with Tsunade, Sasuke had already been catered off to his three-room apartment in a modest part of town. He had left a shopping list on the kitchen table and Kakashi stared at it for a long time.
"So, life goes on…" Kakashi muttered to himself, tugging off his jounin-vest. It joined his sandals at the front door on the floor. Tomorrow he had an assignment with some nurse to look at his arm again and assign some new medicine if needed.
Instead of changing out of his clothes and taking a shower befitting for the end of a day full of running and sweating, Kakashi fell into bed, threw his headband and facemask on the floor and buried his face in the pillow. Tomorrow he should go and ask for a mission after that check-up at the hospital, he decided. This time they wouldn't dare to turn him down with excuses that he wasn't fit for missions yet. And he wouldn't let himself be turned down like the previous attempts this month. After all, there was nobody at home any longer he could look forward to.
-
It was raining. Like somebody had decided that now was a good idea to introduce Leaf country to monsoons. Kakashi tapped his kunai against his upper thigh, thoughtful, and watched raindrops gather at the pointed tip of leaves and then fall. He and the other three shinobi were all in position but they had to wait another twelve minutes before they could attack according to time table.
-
The mission had gone well, only one shuriken to Kakashi's shoulder and another in the side of a female hunter-nin in training. They had reported back and then gone on their separated ways.
His sharingan was aching again and Kakashi tried to lessen the pain by staring straight in the spray of the shower. The wound in his shoulder wasn't too deep so he had decided that he could let it bleed some before bandaging it up. Water, coloured brown and red, swirled down his legs.
Just as he was rolling his forehead against the cool tiles of the shower to ward off a headache, Sasuke slid into the narrow shower stall behind him and slipped a hand between his head and the wall to stop Kakashi rubbing his skin raw.
"Shouldn't you be in your apartment?" Kakashi asked, rapidly blinking at Sasuke who just smoothed back his silver hair and then stared in fascination as it sprung right back.
"Yes," Sasuke shrugged nonchalantly. "But you know: No risk, no fun. That ANBU is a fool anyway. He probably won't even notice that it's my shadow clone sleeping there under his watchful eye.
"And you are loosing too much blood." He turned the knobs until the cold water stopped raining down at them and then they only stood there, staring at each other. Kakashi noticed that they were about the same high but it was hard to say with both their respectively spiky hair. And maybe Sasuke was right about the blood-loss, he felt a bit disorientated and woozy.
A hand touched his upper arm, his left one, where his ANBU tattoo swirled over lean muscles.
"You are cold," Sasuke informed him, ducking out of the shower stall to get towels.
"You want to stay here for the night?" Kakashi asked while they rubbed themselves dry. He hadn't changed anything in Sasuke's room, had just folded the futon and put it back in its cupboard.
When a towel landed on his head by way of an answer, Kakashi looked up, one hand pressing against pressure points in his shoulder which would slow down the blood flow a big deal.
Sasuke grasped the ends of the towel hanging down around Kakashi's face and leaned in close. "If you don't mind," he said with one of the seldom smiles he showed these days. Then he quickly rubbed Kakashi's hair dry, set about bandaging up his arm and even took a comb to the jungle of Kakashi's hair.
Kakashi could still hear him pottering around the kitchen after he had crawled into bed, a grey sleeping yukata snaked around his form. He fell asleep to the sound of a cupboard closing and water starting to run. For the first time since being ordered to live alone, he slept well.
-