Chapter 1: The Clone Clause
The Seventh Hokage was asleep on a stack of irrigation reports, and Hinata had been watching him for three full minutes from the doorway before Shikamaru noticed her.
"Don't," Shikamaru said, without looking up from his own desk in the corner. "If you wake him he'll apologize, and then he'll start reading again, and then we'll be here until midnight, and I promised Temari I'd be home before the moon came up. Just leave him. It's the most productive he's been all day."
The office smelled like ink, cold tea and instant ramen. Through the big round window behind the desk, the sun was going down over the Hokage Rock, and the last of it lit the fourth face from the left, the one with the spiky hair, the one carved in stone and smiling. The real one was face down, mouth open, one hand still holding a brush that had bled a long black line across a request from the Land of Rivers about a dam.
He had a crease on his cheek from the edge of a scroll. His hair, which had never once in his life obeyed anyone, was flattened on one side.
Hinata loved him so much it was occasionally inconvenient.
"How long has he been like this?" she asked quietly.
"Today? Twenty minutes. This week?" Shikamaru finally looked up, as tired as Naruto. "Three all-nighters since Sunday. The Kumo trade thing, and then that idiot from the daimyo's court who argued about road tolls for six hours. I've tried. I've told him to delegate. You know what he does when I tell him to delegate?"
"He makes more clones," Hinata said.
"He makes more clones." Shikamaru rubbed his face with both hands. "Last night there were nine of him in here. And when he dispels them all at the end of the day, he gets nine days' worth of exhaustion in one go and then he falls over. Like this." He gestured at the desk with his brush. "It's a drag."
Hinata came all the way into the room. She was wearing the lavender kimono with the pale cranes along the sleeves, the one she'd worn exactly once because of a border incident. She set the small package she was carrying on the corner of Shikamaru's desk. Inside, wrapped in cloth, were two cinnamon rolls from the bakery on the main street, still faintly warm.
"For Temari," she said. "To say sorry."
Shikamaru looked at the package. He looked at her. His eyes narrowed in the way they did when he had seen a few moves ahead on a shogi board and didn't like where the game was going.
"Sorry for what?"
"I need to borrow my husband," Hinata said. "From now until Monday morning."
Shikamaru was silent for a long moment. Across the room, the Seventh Hokage snored once, wetly, into the Land of Rivers.
Then Shikamaru reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a folded sheet of paper and held it out to her. It had the Hokage's seal on it and a signature at the bottom that sprawled across half the page.
"Leave order," he said. "Mandatory. Two nights. He signed it on Tuesday. I put it in a stack with forty other things and he didn't read it." His mouth twitched. "I was going to spring it on him tomorrow. You saved me the trouble."
Hinata took the paper and pressed it to her chest. "Shikamaru-kun."
"Don't thank me. Take him away. Somewhere without a messenger post." He went back to his scroll. "And Hinata. If he tries to leave a clone here, I'm telling you right now: I'll know. I'll know, and I'll burn it."
Naruto woke up in stages, the way he always did. First his nose, which caught cinnamon. Then his ears, which caught her voice saying his name, soft and amused. Then his eyes, which opened on lavender silk and the pale curve of her wrist and, beyond that, her face, bent close to his, her long dark hair falling over one shoulder.
"Hinata," he said, and then, because his brain was still catching up: "Am I dead?"
"No."
"Are you sure? It smells like cinnamon. You're here. You look really pretty. That's a lot of good stuff all at once, it seems suspicious."
She laughed, the small one she did behind her hand, and something in his chest that had been clenched all week unclenched by a whole notch. "You fell asleep on the Land of Rivers."
He sat up so fast the brush flew off the desk. "The dam! I was doing the dam. Shikamaru, did I sign the dam?"
"You signed the dam on your face," Shikamaru said from the corner. "It's very official. Go home."
Naruto touched his cheek. His fingers came away inky. He looked at them in dismay, and then he looked at the stacks on his desk, and at the window where the sun was nearly gone, and she watched him do the math, the way he did every night now. Three hours if I'm fast. Two if I make clones. I'll be home by midnight. I'll be home by one.
"Naruto-kun," she said.
"I know, I know. I'll be home soon, I swear. Just let me finish the dam, and there's a thing from Suna that Gaara wanted by tomorrow, and..."
She held up the leave order.
He squinted at it. He read it. He read it again. His eyebrows went up and stayed there.
"I signed this?"
"On Tuesday," Shikamaru said. "Mandatory. Your own seal. You can't overrule yourself. Well. You could. But you'd look like an idiot."
"I always look like an idiot!"
"You'd look like a bigger idiot," Shikamaru said. "Go home, Naruto."
Naruto looked at the paper and then at her, and there was a second where she watched him actually want it, nakedly, the way he used to want things before he learned to hide it. Then he looked at the desk, and his jaw set.
"Okay," he said. "Okay! Yeah. Two nights. I can do that. Just let me..."
He brought his hands together in front of him, fingers crossed in a sign she'd seen him make ten thousand times. There was a soft pop and a puff of white smoke, and suddenly there were two Hokages in the room, the second one already sitting down at the desk and picking up the brush.
"Cover for me," Naruto said to himself.
"Got it, boss," Naruto said back, and picked up the Land of Rivers.
Hinata didn't say anything. She didn't need to. She closed her eyes for one breath, and when she opened them the veins at her temples had risen and her pale eyes had gone sharp and strange and luminous, and she was looking at the clone not as a man but as what it was: a thread of bright chakra spun out of her husband, so thick and gold it hurt to look at directly, still connected to him at the center of his chest. Still feeding off him. Still pulling him, tired as he was, back into that chair.
"Naruto-kun," she said again, very gently.
He looked at her face. He knew that look. Everyone in Konoha knew that look; most of them had only seen it from the other side of a sparring ring, and they'd lost.
"It's just the one," he said weakly.
"Dispel it."
"Hinata."
"I married one of you," she said. "Not two. Not nine. One. Dispel it."
In the corner, Shikamaru had very quietly picked up the package of cinnamon rolls and was holding it against his chest like a shield.
Naruto looked at the clone. The clone looked at Naruto. The clone, she noticed, was already looking a little guilty, which was how she knew it was really him.
"She's right, boss," the clone said.
"Traitor," Naruto said, and the clone grinned at him and vanished in a puff of smoke.
The memories hit him the way they always did when he dispelled, all at once, the thirty seconds the clone had spent reading the dam proposal flooding back into his head. It wasn't much. But it landed on top of everything else, three nights of no sleep and a six-hour argument about road tolls, and she saw it land. His knees went. She was there before he hit the floor, one arm around his waist, his weight against her side, warm and heavy and smelling of ink and old tea and him.
"Okay," he mumbled into her hair. "Okay. Maybe I'm a little tired."
"I know."
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere without a messenger post," she said, and over his shoulder, Shikamaru gave her a single, solemn nod, like a general watching the last of his troops get out.
The inn was two hours north of the village, in the folded green hills where the Naka River ran shallow and fast over white stones, and the last part of the road was so steep and narrow that the cart couldn't make it. They walked. Naruto fell asleep twice on the cart before that, and both times she sat very still with her fingers in his hair and watched the stars come out over the trees and didn't think about anything at all, which was its own kind of luxury.
By the time they climbed the last stone steps, he was awake again and had gotten his second wind, and was walking backward up the path in front of her, talking with his hands.
"How did you even find this place? I've been everywhere. I've been to the moon, Hinata."
"Hanabi found it. She came here on a mission once and said it was the only place in the Land of Fire where nobody had ever heard of the Hokage."
"That's crazy. Everybody's heard of me."
The inn was old and small, dark wood and paper screens and a single lantern by the gate, and the woman who ran it was older and smaller, and she bowed to them both and called Naruto "young man" and showed them to a room at the very end of the building with a private outdoor bath carved into the hillside and steaming gently under the moon. She did not, Hinata noticed, seem to have any idea who he was. Naruto noticed too. He kept looking at her with delighted wonder, like a man who had walked out from under a mountain.
When the door slid shut, the room went quiet. Just the river, and the hiss of the hot spring.
Naruto stood in the middle of the tatami and looked around, and then he looked at her, and some of the bright busy noise went out of him and something quieter came in.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"I'm sorry," he said. "For this week. For a lot of weeks. I keep saying I'll be home by midnight."
"You keep saying it," Hinata agreed.
"I keep meaning it."
"I know you do." She came across the room to him. Up close she could see the ink was still on his cheek, a faint grey smudge across one of the three whisker marks, and she licked her thumb and rubbed it away, and he let her, standing very still with his eyes half shut. "That's the part that makes me want to hit you with a Gentle Fist."
"You'd win."
"I always win."
He laughed, low and tired and real, and caught her hand against his face and turned his head and kissed the inside of her wrist, right over the pulse. He held it there. She felt his breath. Her whole body went warm from that one spot outward, slow as tea in winter, and she remembered, not with her head but somewhere lower and older, that it had been a long time. Weeks. Months, maybe, since they'd had a night that wasn't one of them asleep before the other got home.
"Hinata," he said against her skin, and his voice had dropped into a register she hadn't heard in a while.
Outside, something flapped.
They both turned. On the railing of the outdoor bath, silhouetted against the moon, sat a messenger hawk with a scroll tied to its leg and an expression of profound professional apology.
Naruto groaned. It came from the bottom of his soul. "No. No, no. Hanabi said no one knew..."
Hinata was already across the room. She untied the scroll before the hawk could so much as blink, broke the seal and read it by moonlight while Naruto made small wounded noises behind her.
It was Shikamaru's handwriting. Two lines.
If you're reading this, Naruto, go back inside. That's an order from your advisor. You signed it. If you're reading this, Hinata: he's all yours. Nobody's sending anything else. I'll make sure of it.
She folded it. She tied a single thread from her sleeve around the hawk's leg, a lavender one, which meant received in the old Hyuga code, and she sent it off into the dark.
Then she turned around.
"What did it say?" Naruto asked. "Is it bad? It's bad, right? It's Kumo. It's always Kumo."
"It's not Kumo," Hinata said. She reached behind herself and found the knot of her obi, and she watched his face as he realized what she was doing, watched all that sunny restless worry go still and dark-eyed and focused in a way that she had last seen when he was facing down an enemy no one else in the world could beat. "It says you're not needed until Monday."
The obi came loose. The silk whispered to the floor.
"Not by anyone," she said, "but me."