The hospital room was quiet in a way that made Maito Gai's skin itch.
He hated quiet. Quiet was where the doubts lived. Quiet was where the adrenaline faded and left you with nothing but the ache in your knees and the ringing in your ears. Usually, he filled the silence with shouting, with poses, with the sheer, overwhelming force of his own existence.
Tonight, he couldn't.
Rock Lee lay in the bed, wrapped in white.
Not the green of spring. Not the orange of the setting sun. Just stark, clinical white.
His leg was in a cast that looked heavy enough to anchor a ship. His arm was splinted. His face, usually contorted in fierce determination or weeping joy, was slack.
Gai sat in the hard plastic chair, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped so tight the leather of his gloves creaked.
The Green Beast was turned off.
There was no audience here. No Kakashi to rival, no Tenten to scold, no Neji to impress. There was just a man in a flak jacket staring at a boy who had broken himself into pieces because he believed every word that man had said.
I told him to do it, Gai thought. The thought was a stone in his throat. I gave him permission.
He reached out, careful, and brushed a lock of black hair off Lee's forehead.
The hair was glossy, thick, cut in a bowl that people laughed at until they saw what the boy underneath it could do. The eyebrows were heavy, dark slashes across a pale face. The bone structure—the jaw, the set of the cheekbones—was undeniable.
Everyone said they looked alike because Lee copied him. Because Lee idolized him. Because they were a matching set of eccentrics in a village of cool killers.
Gai traced the line of Lee's jaw with a thumb that trembled, just once.
They looked alike because biology didn't care about secrets.
The room blurred. The antiseptic smell of the hospital faded, replaced by the scent of old smoke and cheap perfume.
The past was a different village.
It was before the Fox. Before the Fourth died. Before Gai had decided that if he yelled loud enough about Youth, nobody would ask him about anything else.
Back then, he was just Gai. The Eternal Genin's son. The guy who couldn't mold chakra to save his life but could kick a tree in half.
He was also loud. Flamboyant. A self-proclaimed "Lady's Man."
He spent his weekends in bars he didn't like, laughing too hard at jokes he didn't find funny, draped over women who thought he was a harmless clown. He bought drinks. He winked. He played the part of the hyper-masculine suitor so aggressively that no one looked twice at the way his eyes lingered on the wrong people.
It was a cover. A thick, noisy blanket thrown over a truth that Konoha didn't have time for.
Shinobi were tools. Tools reproduced to make more tools. Tools didn't have complications like preference.
So he performed.
She had been a friend. A chūnin from a squad that ran border patrol. Tough, kind, with a laugh like dry leaves. She knew him. She knew the noise was armor. She didn't know what it was guarding, but she knew it was there.
One night, the performance had felt too thin. The pressure of being Maito Gai, the Handsome Devil had cracked. He needed to prove—to the village, to his father's ghost, to himself—that he was normal. That he worked the way a man was supposed to work.
It had been awkward. It had been kind. It had been a desperate attempt to fix something that wasn't broken, just different.
He hadn't loved her. Not like that. But he had cared for her.
Then the sky turned red.
The Nine-Tails hit the village like a natural disaster with teeth.
Gai remembered the heat. The screaming. The way the air pressure dropped when the Beast charged a Tailed Beast Bomb. He remembered being ordered back by the younger generation—Kakashi, Asuma, Kurenai—while the older generation went to die.
He hadn't been able to save her.
She was just… gone. A name on a stone. A casualty report in a stack of hundreds.
But the baby had lived.
Gai had stood in the orphanage nursery a week later, staring down into the crib.
The nurses called it a tragedy. Poor thing, they whispered. No chakra network to speak of. Malformed coils. He'll never be a ninja. He's a civilian in a warrior's village.
Gai looked at the baby.
He saw the thick limbs. The dense muscle attachments, even in an infant. The heavy brow.
He saw a body built to endure pressure that would snap a normal shinobi in half.
He recognized it because he lived in one just like it.
It wasn't a defect. It was a trade-off. The boy had traded magic for iron. He was built for the Eight Gates. He was built to burn.
He's mine, Gai had realized, the truth hitting him harder than any punch. He's my blood.
But Gai was a jōnin who lived on missions that killed people. He was a man who hid behind a mask of green spandex and shouting because he was terrified of being seen. He was a father who couldn't raise a child without teaching him how to die.
So he had made a choice.
He stepped back. He let the village raise the boy. He waited.
He waited until the boy was old enough to be called a failure. Old enough to be mocked. Old enough to need a hero.
Then he stepped in. Not as a father.
As a Sensei.
Because a father protects you from the fire. A Sensei teaches you how to walk into it.
The monitor beeped, pulling Gai back to the white room.
Lee's chest rose and fell, hitched slightly by the pain even in sleep.
Gai slumped back in the chair. He looked old. The lines around his eyes weren't from smiling now; they were from squinting into the dark, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He had taught Lee everything. The Gouken. The Lotus. The philosophy of the self-rule.
He had taught him that effort could beat genius.
And then he had watched genius crush effort into the dirt floor of an arena while a crowd cheered.
"I lied to you," Gai whispered to the sleeping boy.
He reached out and rested his hand on Lee's head again. The hair was coarse, strong.
"I told you that you could beat the world if you just worked hard enough. I didn't tell you that the world fights back dirty."
Lee shifted, a small sound of discomfort escaping his throat.
Gai's heart twisted.
He saw the resemblance so clearly now it hurt. It wasn't just the eyebrows. It was the stubbornness. The refusal to stay down. The way Lee looked at him with total, blinding trust.
Gai had let him open the Gates. He had given the order. Go. Destroy your body. Burn your future. Make me proud.
And Lee had done it.
"You are stronger than I ever was," Gai murmured. His voice was thick, wet. "I hid. I put on a mask and shouted until people stopped looking at me. You..."
He stroked the boy's hair, gentle as a breeze.
"You stood in front of everyone, stripped of ninjutsu, stripped of genjutsu, and you told them this is who I am."
Gai leaned forward, resting his forehead against the metal rail of the bed.
"You are my son," he whispered into the sterile silence. "And I am so sorry."
Lee slept on.
Gai stayed. He would stay until the sun came up. He would stay until Lee woke up. He would stay until the legs healed or didn't heal.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, took a deep breath, and composed his face.
When Lee woke up, the Green Beast would be there. The smile would be bright. The thumbs-up would be steady.
But for tonight, in the dark, the mask stayed off.