A/N: Beta'd by Nubi-chan (BeautifulSilverSilence), who was the one to request GaaKashi pr0nz. Huh... seems like she's the one to request ALL my smut. And I wondered why I love her so. XD

First Time For Everything

His face firmly buried between the covers of his ever-present Make-Out Paradise, Kakashi sauntered down the street casually, looking for all the world as though he were out for a pleasant stroll in the balmy evening air, taking the opportunity to enjoy some fresh air and warm sunset light along with his porn.

The last bit was true. Clean air was good for the lungs.

The 'casual' part? Not so much.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was in Iwa, which had traditionally hated Konoha and everything it stood for ever since the Yellow Flash had slaughtered two-hundred of their shinobi in one battle, a crippling blow that Iwa was still struggling to recover from. Or maybe it was that he was on his fashionably late way to mingle with a huge crowd of foreign jounin-sensei from all over the Elemental Countries, each and every one of them bridling with the pride that their students were going to win the chuunin exam (which of course meant somebody else's students would lose).

Jounin in crowds were bad; foreign jounin in crowds were dangerous; tense and easily-slighted foreign jounin in crowds was asking for somebody to die. Exactly why anybody in Iwa had thought it would be a good idea to host a jounin banquet two nights before the final exam was beyond Kakashi. He vaguely recalled hearing something about fostering goodwill and strengthening inter-village relations, but chapter eighteen had always been particularly engrossing, no matter how many time he'd read it.

Not bothering to lower the book, Kakashi turned a corner and navigated his way up the steps to the banquet hall. He offered a slight wave to the guards outside the hall, murmuring, "Yo," but made no attempt at eye contact or even interest.

Kakashi was well aware that his mane of platinum hair was deeply evocative of the infamous White Fang, but he didn't need to identify himself as a Hatake with the sight of his trademark mask. Tensions were high enough at any chuunin exam without sparking fights over his parentage or his own personal infamy.

Entering the hall, Kakashi lifted his eye from the book for long enough to scan the crowd for Gai or Asuma. Neither jumped out at him immediately, so the Copy Ninja quickly concealed his face behind the book once more. Both men tended to identify themselves quite quickly, after all, with Asuma being an incorrigible chain smoker and Gai being just so... green. If they weren't within seeing distance, then Kakashi wasn't safe enough to identify himself in order to find them.

Already the other jounin were beginning to eye him. Not good.

A Konoha-nin alone in this gathering was in trouble. The Sharingan Kakashi alone in this company was just asking for a diplomatic incident entirely contrary to the so-called "goodwill" that Iwa was attempting to promote.

Kakashi had to find a companion that was halfway friendly to Konoha, and fast.

Why, hello, he thought, zeroing in on the small, dark-eyed, ginger-haired boy lurking in an empty corner of the hall. Salvation, thy name is, somehow... Gaara.

Friendly, Gaara was not. But Suna and Konoha did have to maintain a united image at this chuunin exam in order to support their truce, so recently violated and then reforged. Any perceived weakness in the alliance could be taken advantage of by the other Hidden Villages, who had to be doubting the claims of both Suna and Konoha that their villages hadn't been weakened by the disastrous Sand-Sound-Leaf exam. (Which was a lie, of course; they had both lost too many good ninja for comfort, but it would be fatal to admit that.)

Affecting an air of nonchalance, Kakashi eye-smiled in satisfaction and wandered over to Gaara, looking purposeful. He could literally feel the other jounin withdraw their intense scrutiny as he secured the company of an ally, and an incredibly dangerous one at that. Ninja did not make the rank of jounin by acting suicidally, which was what provoking both the Copy Ninja and Gaara of the Desert at the same time would be classified as. The redhead looked up as he approached, feeling the shift in attention around him.

"Fancy seeing you here, Gaara-san," Kakashi greeted, allowing him the honorable in light of the boy's heritage, reputation, and actual immense strength. "Jounin and sensei already. My, my, that's impressive."

"Hatake-san," Gaara allowed, nodding his head slightly. "You have entered your students in the exam?"

For a moment, Kakashi wondered why the boy bothered to make such an unnecessary observation. Nonetheless, he eye-smiled ruefully. "Just one, actually," he sighed. "But I'm quite confident that the team she's been placed on is bonded strongly enough to make it through the exam."

"I only have one student, as well," the sand-nin confided. "She's with my siblings' students. One each." He looked just slightly distressed. "I don't know the other two. They are... not receptive to me."

"Ahh, well," Kakashi laughed, "I don't dare presume to mentor Kiba or Shino. I think having my guidance ignored in such a manner would be quite an embarrassing experience." Inwardly, he was trying to figure out just what was wrong with Gaara. First unnecessary chitchat, and now emotional insecurity? It was unbefitting of a jounin, and terribly out of character.

From what Kakashi remembered of the jinchuuriki, he looked downright agreeable, his calm ease translating into something near friendly. Gone was the wild-eyed child-monster of the Konoha Invasion, replaced by this jounin, who was collected, open, almost good-natured...

Kakashi's gaze landed on Gaara's empty glass, a quarter inch of amber liquid swirling in the bottom. Six drink coasters sat on the small table nearby.

...and completely drunk, from the looks of things.

"Shit," the Copy Nin murmured, into the pages of his porn.

An expression of undeniable puzzlement on his face, Gaara slanted a glance at Kakashi. Well, that just proved it, then. Kid had to be drunk off his ass to display that kind of confusion in the company of about a hundred foreign jounin, some outright enemies of Suna. At least he was sober enough to notice the soft invective.

Kakashi crinkled his eye at Gaara in reassurance. "How old are you, now? Making jounin at your age has got to be something impressive, na?"

"Fifteen," the redhead replied, looking just the slightest bit... pleased. Huh. Funny how Kakashi could read so many emotions in just the slight nuances of Gaara's face, little adjustments of his eyelids and lips and forehead and browline. "It was tiring." Suddenly, with some bursting of an inner dam-- perhaps at the realisation that Kakashi was actually listening to him-- Gaara just kept on talking. "The council almost didn't give me the title. I didn't... I didn't earn anything. It was all Matsuri. She's a good student, good ninja-- she'll be good one day, very good. But the council had to send genin to the exam and I had a good student and I needed the rank to qualify as an official sensei so Matsuri could get into the exam, so, so... so they did it."

Gaara swallowed, looking simultaneously frustrated and helplessly amused. "So now I'm a jounin and they know I'm good, they always knew I was good, but they just never wanted to say it and give me the rank and the power, because I don't need any more of that, they don't want me to have any more power. But they needed a jounin-sensei, and it was me. Otherwise they never would have given me the rank. They don't want that. They don't like me."

His expression mournful, Gaara looked around vaguely for something to occupy himself with, seeming at odds with himself for a moment, before lifting the glass in his hand and draining it. Kakashi winced; he'd been hoping to get that last finger of alcohol away from Gaara, who really didn't need any more.

"Maa, but jounin at fifteen is quite something," he pointed out. Mentally, Kakashi tallied up the number of times he'd heard Gaara use the word "good" in the last few moments. It was an affectionate and painfully vague word for anything, let alone to be used so loosely by one of the most precise ninja Kakashi had ever met. And now Gaara was starting to look like he was on the verge of a real drunken ramble, which boded nothing but ill.

The redhead sighed in evident frustration. "I'm always quite something. Have always been," he corrected himself, frowning a little at his own slip. "They don't like that. I'm too much... something. The council... the council is..."

"Unfair?" Kakashi supplied helpfully. The longer he could keep this conversation going to foster the appearance of sobriety in Gaara, the longer he had to plot a surreptitious escape.

"Unfair," Gaara declared firmly, with obvious annoyance. Then he frowned, something of a glare sharpening his eyes. "No. That is not what I intended to say, Kakashi-san."

"Ah, my bad." Gai, where are you? For once, couldn't you be the loudest and most obvious person in the room? "Tell me, Gaara-san, have you tried the water, yet? I hear it comes straight from the rain barrels at this time of year."

Gaara looked at his glass, found it empty, and then searched for a place to set it. "Yes," he said, putting the glass down on the nearby table with all his drink coasters. It was painfully evident that he intended to place it in the centre of one such coaster... and he failed miserably, setting the glass down with a firm chink halfway off the paper.

Kakashi winced. Holy fuck. At this point, it was starting to look like he was just lucky that Gaara could still formulate a proper sentence.

"Ah?" he said leadingly. "Was that what you had, there?"

"...No," Gaara said unsteadily, eying the glass with suspicion. He picked it up and adjusted it slightly, still trying to centre it on the coaster, to no great success. "The table's broken, Kakashi-san."

"Not the water?" asked Kakashi with feigned disbelief. He ignored Gaara's last comment, hoping the boy would take the hint and stop with the damn glass. "My, but the drinks must be good to draw a sand-nin away from such good water."

"Yes. No. They aren't. I haven't had... I just..." Gaara glowered at the table, which (in his drunken mind) was proving contrary to his efforts to stack the remaining coasters neatly. "It's not good water," he asserted finally, stubbornly fumbling to pick up one of the little paper circles. "It tastes wrong."

"I think that might have been whiskey," Kakashi said gently, reaching over to take the last coaster from the table before Gaara could make his struggle to pick it up any more obvious.

"No," the sand-nin frowned. His eyes followed Kakashi's fingers as the Copy Ninja idly shredded the paper into thin, even strips. "I asked for water."

"They drink their whiskey well watered in Iwa. Maybe your order was misunderstood."

"I just wanted water," Gaara said in frustration. "Not whiskey. Not anything. I am not inebriated."

Suddenly, the boy froze. Kakashi saw his lips move silently, repeating 'inebriated' as Gaara realised how difficult it had been to navigate the word.

Gaara started to shake his head. "I am not," he said slowly, "inebriated. I haven't been drunk. Drinking. The water is bad, and I don't like it, and it's making me sick, and this damn table is broken!" Glowering, Gaara reached out and shoved the table hard, nearly missing and stumbling a step to recover. Out of the corner of his eye, the leaf-nin saw several jounin glance their way and then quickly avert their eyes, evidently mistaking Gaara's expression for that of rage directed at Kakashi.

"You don't by any chance mean sick as in nauseous?" inquired the older man hesitantly, peering over the Make-Out Paradise to examine Gaara fully. "Need to vomit," he elaborated, at Gaara's incomprehension.

The boy shook his head miserably. "Kakashi-san, I'm not drunk," he whispered, moving a step closer. "I'm not. I can't be. You don't-- I can't be. I'm not allowed to be. It would be-- bad. Very bad. They'll be angry. They don't trust me. I can't be drunk, I can't lose control, I can't-- I could never-- I am not drunk. I can't be. I can't."

Kakashi's single eye widened as Gaara's expression started to border on terrified. Not only was this terribly inopportune in their current location, but he also abruptly understood the real depth of the boy's personal plight. He'd made a mistake-- admittedly a very bad mistake, but one born of real inexperience-- and now stood to lose both his rank and the remainder of what little trust Suna's council had in their jinchuuriki. And, all of a sudden, Kakashi had the feeling that the flashes of emotion he had been seeing were closer to the real Gaara than the glacial persona he wore most of the time, the few fragments that remained of what could have been a perfectly nice boy, before he'd been shattered and honed into a raging killer.

The plan that had been formulating in Kakashi's mind, which involved calling over either Gai, Asuma, or one of Gaara's comrades, was suddenly no longer an option.

"Gaara-kun," he said gently, laying a hand on the boy's shoulder and pressing him back just a few inches. "You are very drunk. I am going to get you out of here right now, and you can stay in my lodgings until it wears off. All right? Okay. Just stay calm and you'll do fine."

If Gaara noticed the change in suffixes, he gave no note of it. He was far too distracted by the hand Kakashi had touched him with, which still rested on his shoulder. Eyes wide and very green in their black rings-- another painful glimpse of a child beneath that leather-tough Sand Armour-- he stared from the gloved hand to Kakashi's face. Swallowing, Gaara nodded. After a moment of struggling for the right look, he also managed to harden his mouth and tighten his jaw into a properly grim expression.

Kakashi nodded approvingly.

"Ah, you should certainly come and meet my cute students," the Copy Ninja said more loudly, eye-smiling hugely as he withdrew his hand. "I think they'd be properly inspired to meet a jounin of their own age. You aren't with anybody here, are you, Gaara-san?"

Gaara shook his head after a moment, following closely as Kakashi started for the door. Good boy, not trusting his mouth.

"Well, it doesn't appear that I am, either," said Kakashi, nodding genially to a trio of Mist jounin as they strolled past. "I'm sure we won't be missed. Honestly, I'm not much for parties."

Gaara remained silent all the way out the door. His shoulders were tight, his back painfully stiff; even his gait was clipped from the extent of the self-control Gaara was exercising to walk evenly. Kakashi silently blessed the jinchuuriki's cold reputation, as it meant such tension and silence was pretty much par for the course. In any other jounin, it might have screamed of intensely keyed-up nerves.

They were around the corner from the banquet hall before Gaara stumbled. "The floor is broken," he blurted helplessly, weaving just slightly in an effort to regain his lost balance. "Kakashi-san, I-- I'm not drunk."

"Yes, you really are," the older ninja murmured. With a sigh, he transferred his book to one hand-- not that he'd turned a page in the last ten minutes-- and gripped Gaara's elbow with the other hand. As he touched the jinchuuriki's arm, Kakashi became very aware of Gaara's movements, of the wrought-up tension in the boy's muscles, the dangerous power lurking in his every bone. This was, after all, the very ninja who had once trailed Sasuke to the precipice of a plateau in the middle of a mountain range and flat-out invited him to a death match for the fun of it.

But, Kakashi reminded himself, this was also the ninja whose name Naruto had viciously defended when he'd heard Kiba slandering the sand-nin in the aftermath of the Konoha Invasion. Kakashi had been startled by such vigorous defence of an enemy, enough so that he'd made a point of asking Naruto about it later.

"He's got enough to fight against," Naruto had said quietly, hugging his knees to his chest as he stared out the window of his apartment, watching the sun set over Konoha. "I won't let one more person make life hard for Gaara if I can take that burden instead. Nobody else ever did that for him."

Gaara was shivering under Kakashi's touch. His footsteps wavered slightly every now and again, enough so that Kakashi didn't trust him to Body Flickering. Thankfully, the darkened streets were starting to cool quickly, as evenings often did in Rock Country, and most of the village was inside already, preparing for the final stages of the chuunin exam in some form or another. Kakashi chose to travel the side streets, away from the all-night taverns and eateries, and they met nobody.

"Cold?"

The sand-nin shook his head. "Hot," he whispered, licking his lips. His gaze skittered up to Kakashi and then away, seemingly uncertain of where to focus. "You're reading pornography."

"Hm. So I am," Kakashi observed, as though he himself had just noticed.

"Kankurou reads that," Gaara continued. "He got it in Konoha. He thinks I don't know. I don't know... I don't know what... why. I don't know why." Unable to articulate the precise sentiment, Gaara scowled in frustration.

"Why what?"

"What's it for?" demanded the redhead, looking so perfectly cross at the illogic of it all that Kakashi had to stifle a laugh even as Gaara tottered dangerously, nearly running into a stack of crates that Kakashi had to quickly steer him around.

"Absolutely nothing," he said with a smile. "Would you like to borrow it?"

Gaara's lips pursed. He was seriously contemplating the offer, evidently with some difficulty.

"But why?"

"It's a damn fine read, for one," Kakashi explained. "Here we are, Gaara-kun. No, this door here. There we go." He unlocked the door with a pulse of chakra into the seal over the jamb, then pushed it open, guiding the younger ninja inside firmly.

"What for?"

"Let's get you some water."

"Cold," Gaara insisted, running a dazed hand through his own hair.

"Is warmish okay?" asked Kakashi. Without waiting for an answer, he handed Gaara the half-finished glass of water that was still sitting out on the counter where he'd left it before heading out to the banquet, pausing only to pull down his mask and take an obliging sip of his own to prove the drink wasn't poisoned. It hadn't even had time to adopt the flat, mineral taste of room temperature water.

Gaara gulped the water thirstily, holding the glass in two hands, child-like. When he had finished, he looked up at Kakashi with hazy eyes, blinking slowly. Already, the older ninja had pulled his mask back up. "What's it like?"

"What's what like?" Gently, Kakashi took the glass back, as Gaara seemed likely to forget he was even holding it.

"Porn."

The silver-haired man actually had to pause and think about it for a moment. "Very nice," he said eventually, eye-smiling with a leering nuance that Gaara would miss entirely.

The boy looked upset. "Oh. I... oh."

"Hmm?"

"I never get nice things," Gaara told Kakashi quietly. He looked blankly around the kitchen of the little apartment Kakashi had been loaned for the duration of the exams, still unable to focus on anything. "I don't like it. It's not... it's not good. It's very... it's..."

"Lonely?"

Gaara nodded, swallowing. "I'm tired," he told Kakashi plaintively, clearly still upset.

"Ahh, you can't go to sleep," Kakashi reminded him, mentally making plans just in case Gaara passed out. That would be... unpleasant.

The redhead's expression crumpled further at the reminder of his burden. Something in his eyes was wounded and raw. "I'm tired of being lonely," he clarified, staring down at his hands.

Kakashi stared at the boy, who was swaying on the spot, clearly lost in some private world of his own. It was not a pleasant place, evidently devoid of any scrap of hope or light at all.

Such places often were. Kakashi knew that from experience.

...Oh.

Oh, dear.

He hadn't been expecting this at all-- but he should've been expecting it. After all, hadn't Kakashi seen this before, in Naruto and Sasuke, and in himself, so many years ago? And had he learned nothing in all that time, that he'd let the grief-broken children of past days slip away through his fingers, Sasuke gone to a madman and Naruto away somewhere far off, and Kakashi himself lost to a madness he'd been lucky to climb from?

Now-- now he could see it, could see the battered person in Gaara's broken shell trying to claw his way up the rocky slope of humanity, bleeding and screaming and sobbing to drag his way free out of insanity's dark sinkhole, burdened every inch of the way by a strangling loneliness that sank more than skin deep, more than bone deep, down to the very insides of a person's mind and just wouldn't let go. Now he could see everything that Gaara was and had been and was trying to be, crawling every inch of the way with broken feet and torn fingernails with a desperate strength of will that was trying to hold out for just one more step-- and now just one more-- and just another... and another...

"Gaara," said Kakashi quietly. He approached the boy slowly and laid gentle hands on his shoulders. Gaara looked up at him wearily, his gaze ancient and battered and dead.

The words that came to his tongue were painful, bitter with the knowledge that he should have said them to Naruto and never had; sour with the awareness that he was trying to make up for it with Gaara, this boy who wasn't his student and wasn't his responsibility and wasn't his at all. "I'm sorry. I... I'm sorry they did this to you. I'm sorry there was never anybody there. I'm sorry you had to live so many years as you did."

Gaara was looking straight at Kakashi, but he wasn't seeing him. Whether from the alcohol or the emotional wear, he just wasn't focusing on the here or the now. Despite Kakashi's words and touch, Gaara was still lost in that awful dark place of his own mind.

"Come here," said Kakashi, just a touch gruffly, as he steered the younger jounin out of the kitchen and down the hall, into the den at the back of the apartment. Gaara started to shiver even more violently as Kakashi physically moved him by the shoulders, which meant that at least some part of him was still connected to the world. "Shhh. It's okay. Come here."

Gaara didn't move as Kakashi undid the buckles of the leather harness strapped around his chest, letting the gourd drop heavily to the floor. As it fell, his shoulders sank even farther, maybe at relief of the weight. Kakashi too relaxed slightly when the deadly Sand did nothing more threatening than lay on the floor and look like a gourd.

Kakashi sat down on the couch with his back against the arm, took a moment to settle himself, and then gently pulled Gaara down into his lap. The sand-nin made a soft sound of confusion as he was tugged to lean back against Kakashi, his sluggish limbs arranged into the cradle of the older man's body. Wrapped safely into an embrace of tightly-muscled arms and steady warmth, Gaara gave up trying to make sense of the action. With a tiny moan, he dropped his head back against Kakashi's chest, ear pressed to the man's heartbeat, and shivered harder.

Kakashi looked down at the mane of shaggy red hair nestled against his chest. He could feel the real fragility of Gaara's skinny limbs beneath so many concealing layers of fishnet and leather, the frenetic beat of his heart thudding against ribs that were probably lean enough to count through the skin. And underneath the underneath, he could see another boy from times long past, white-haired and lean-shanked with intensive jounin training, halfway mad with grief as he lay in the hospital bed in the aftermath of the demon fox's attack, tucked beneath the arm of his dead sensei's sensei, and listened dully to a story about love and life and unrealistic endings that were as happy as Jiraya could make them for a fourteen year-old Kakashi.

There was no doubt in anybody's mind that Gaara of the Desert was a powerful and dangerous ninja. But just when had they all forgotten that he was just a child of fifteen?

When he'd made his first kill? When he'd made genin? Chuunin? Jounin? When he'd been born a jinchuuriki?

With a sigh, Kakashi brushed his knuckles over a pale cheek and murmured into the shock of red hair, "Now you're going to sit still and stay right here, because I'm going to tell you a story, Gaara, and it will have a happy ending, and you are damn well going to like it."