The dose isn't lethal.

Kakashi knows this because he's used the small field medical kit he always carries in the pouch on his hip. Just as they taught him back at the academy, he took out one specially prepped q-tip and carefully swiped it over the scratch on his cheek. Then he watched the white tip slowly turn a light blue.

The color told him that he was exposed to a slow-working neurotoxin, a rare, somewhat outdated poison called andoku. It's a substance extracted from a certain species of anglerfish. One that's almost extinct by now, which is why the poison isn't used much anymore. Since its antidote is about as easy to come by as the poison itself, Kakashi isn't carrying any with him. The nearest cure would be in Konoha's hospital, about 63 kilometers west of his current position.

He won't be able to make it in his state, with the fever already spreading down from his flushed cheeks. Better to ride out the effects where he is, alone, hidden in the thick underbrush of a forest, curled on his side, arms wrapped around his knees like a kid scared of the monsters under his bed.

He's cold. There'll be chills, numbness in his extremities and possibly hallucinations, if Kakashi remembers correctly. He's not quite sure anymore. There were thousands of toxins in the dog-eared pages of his textbooks; there were pictures of festering wounds and corpses with yellow and purple faces. Shinzo-sensei used to walk up and down in front of the blackboard, wrists crossed behind his back like some kind of prisoner, just waiting to catch students daydreaming. "Don't pay attention here and you'll end up like this!" he'd say, jabbing his gnarled index finger at a random photo in the book, at some poor bastard whose tongue had swollen to five times its size, who looked like someone had stuffed his mouth full of raw meat.

Kakashi shudders and breaks into a cold sweat.

Running into that grizzled old geezer of a missing nin, just his luck.

He's been watching ants crawl over the crushed leaves on the ground. He's been admiring the light bouncing off their large, fluorescent bodies. Three segments and six skittering legs, they move in endless shifting lines. Hallucinating's not that bad, it turns out.

Kakashi takes deep, slow breaths. He's got a strange feeling. All of a sudden, the back of his neck is prickling as if he himself is being watched.

"Kakashi."

He looks up and there's his mom in full uniform, sitting under a sparkly pine tree.

"You don't look so good. Maybe you should send your ninken to go get help," she says conversationally. There's that tender look on her face, the one Kakashi thought he'd never see again.

He swallows, his mind reeling. This isn't real; it's the poison wreaking havoc in his brain, Kakashi knows that, but… it's hard. When he sees his mother sitting there, dappled with sunlight, her eyes holding that soft expression she wore whenever she looked at him, when he'd step into her room and say "I'm back" and there she'd be, looking at him just like that, Kakashi simply cannot pretend she isn't right there.

It's the wrong way to react, but then no one's followed him, no one's looking for him and who is he hurting?

"I have…" he says. His tongue is a fat snail, climbing the words like rocks in its path. The Pakkun in his memory is glowing purple. There was a Boss, you look like shit before he sprouted wings and flew away. Kakashi is aware that his mind cannot be trusted right now, so he amends, "I think."

"I'm not really here, you know." She cocks her head just so, and smiles with her eyes closed. You have your mother's smile, his dad used to say, happily in the beginning, tonelessly in the end, in a rag of a voice wrung out by time.

"I know." It hurts a little bit to acknowledge it, a quick paper cut pain. Kakashi is surprised; he's not as numb as he thought he was.

"But it's good to see you anyway." Still that tender look. Kakashi remembers his mother's hand stroking his cheek, the softness of her fingertips. He thought all those memories had long since turned to dust. Apparently not.

"It's good to see you too, Mom." He's stupid to give in that easily, he knows that. He should avert his eye and count to ten; he should blink rapidly and take another deep breath, or simply squeeze his eye shut, something.

Instead he smiles as it hits him right in the gut, how much he misses her. Time doesn't heal wounds at all, he realizes; you just get used to them, learn to work around them, to live with them until at some point you forget they're there, but one reckless movement, one false step, and the pain is there to remind you all over again.

You were the first one, he thinks as he studies her face, you taught me that people die, no matter how much I don't want them to.

"I'm sorry," she says, answering him as if she is right there inside his mind, which of course she is.

"Mom…"

"It's okay." She smiles again and he marvels at the way her hair catches the light. "Someone's coming for you, right? They'll be here any minute; you just have to hold on for a little while." There's nothing more reassuring in the world than her smile, her voice, her bright hazel eyes. "I'll keep you company… It'll be okay." Something settles in Kakashi, something he hadn't even known had been unsettled.

"I'm not scared. You don't have to—"

"I know. You're tough. You're my son after all." She narrows her eyes at him. "But I'm your mother, that means I get to worry about you."

Kakashi would have laughed if he could have mustered it. A wheeze, high-pitched and fading is all he can manage. It reminds him of her on her bad days, her last days. He swallows and when she realizes that there won't be a reply, she continues.

"Hey, did your father ever tell you how he met me?"

Kakashi nods. He remembers white curtains stirring in a breeze and his father's heavy hand on his shoulder.

"I saved his life! Dragged him out of a poison cloud by his cheesy ponytail and carried him home." His mother's laughter floats in the air like soap bubbles. "I guess I was his knight in shining armor! Needless to say, he was a goner after that." When she winks, Kakashi wants to smile, but the corners of his mouth are trapped beneath the fabric of his mask. She doesn't seem to notice though.

"But he was terrible at wooing me," she continues, wrinkling her nose. "He never even managed to say ʻI like youʼ or ask me out on a date. Instead he'd blush and stammer like a schoolgirl. It was so funny. The legendary White Fang would be standing in my hospital room with a bouquet of flowers, mumbling about how he'd just happened to be in the neighborhood so he'd thought he'd drop by. In the end I had to confront him." She pauses to study him. There's meaning in her eyes, in the set of her mouth. Kakashi wonders if he's been found wanting. "Hopefully you don't take after your father in that regard," she says.

"Mom… I…" He coughs around the apology sticking in his throat.

"Kakashi…" Soft but insistent, her voice flows into the chambers of his heart. "Someone's coming for you, right? To save you?"

"I think so…" He's terrified all of a sudden, that, if he blinks, she will be gone. He keeps his eyes open against the burn.

"There's someone you can rely on, no matter what happens, right?"

"Yeah…" His vision goes blurry.

"Then you have to know that—" The rest of it is lost to the blood roaring between his ears, to the darkness that lunges at him from behind his eyes. He falls.

And keeps falling.

"Kakashi!" A voice, so loud, so familiar rings in his ears. "Kakashi!"

"Mom?" he croaks. His eye is crusted shut. It takes a lot of effort to blink and when he does the world is too bright for him to bear.

"Mom?! Who're you calling Mom?" Too close, too painful. Someone is shaking Kakashi's shoulders, making his head loll as if his neck was just skin and strings of rubber. "It's me! Your Eternal Rival, Maito Gai! I've come to your rescue!"

He swims into Kakashi's field of vision, big, green, eyebrows like furry caterpillars. Before Kakashi even knows it, the fabric of his mask shifts with his lips into a smile.

"Gai…"

Gai slips his arm around the back of Kakashi's neck and lifts him. With his other hand he reaches behind himself and produces a flask. "Here, drink this!" He helps Kakashi, putting the cool flask to Kakashi's burning lips, tilting it until water soaks Kakashi's mask and dribbles into his mouth.

It takes Kakashi a moment to really get his bearings. He swallows, coughs, sputters a little. Then he notices the smell. Sharp, rubbery, overlaying Gai's musky scent is the unmistakable stench of singed spandex.

He studies Gai's face, looking for the other telltale signs. A film of sweat, a hint of blue around his lips, fast breathing. It's not as obvious as it used to be, but that just means that Gai has had more practice.

"Did you—"

"You had me worried, Kakashi,"Gai interrupts before he can finish his question and Kakashi finds himself pulled more snugly against Gai's chest. He breathes in deeply. Gai's smell, the spandex, layers of forest and distant fires.

As he closes his eye to shut out the boiling sun, to let the antidote do its work, he hears her voice again far away inside of him;

then you have to know that—

you can't let them slip away.

end.