Chapter 1: Signing Event
The Sixth Hokage of the Hidden Leaf had dog-eared your book.
You saw it from across the shop. You'd been signing for three hours by then, long enough that your hand had cramped into the shape of your pen name, and the line had finally thinned to a few stragglers: a chunin who wanted it signed to her sister, an elderly man who wanted it signed to himself and winked at you, a burly jonin, mortified, who wanted it signed to "a friend." You'd stopped looking up between customers. And then you did look up, because the shop had gone quiet in a way bookshops don't go quiet, and there he was.
Leaning on the end of the new-releases shelf like it was something he did every day. White Hokage robe over the dark flak vest, the hat tipped back off his head and hanging between his shoulders by its cord. Silver hair sticking up in every direction, as if it had been styled once in a strong wind and had kept the memory. The mask, of course. Dark cloth from the bridge of his nose down, and above it one heavy-lidded gray eye and one eye crossed by a long pale scar, both of them reading.
Reading your book. Your book. Icha Icha: Make-Out Armistice, first in the beloved series since the death of its legendary author, the poster behind you said, with your face very small in one corner and the Toad Sage's very large. And the cover was soft in his hand the way covers only get when they've been opened and closed a lot, and the corner of a page near the middle had been folded down. More than one page. You counted at least six. A little forest of creases, and every one of them, as far as you could tell, in the same chapter.
He turned a page. He didn't look up.
"Lady Hokage," murmured the bookshop owner to no one, and then, catching himself, "Lord Hokage," and bowed so low he nearly hit the register.
"Mm," said Kakashi Hatake. "Don't mind me."
He turned another page.
You signed the old man's copy. You signed the chunin's sister's copy. You were aware, the entire time, of a pressure in the room like a held breath, every customer in the shop pretending to browse while watching the most powerful ninja in the village read the filthiest chapter of your book in public with the bored, absorbed expression of a man doing a crossword.
When the last customer left, he closed it, and came over, and set it on the table in front of you.
"Yo," he said.
You had faced down a lot of things in your life. You'd done four years in the Intelligence Division during the war, deep in the basement under Torture and Interrogation, breaking enemy ciphers with a pot of cold tea and a headache that never quite left. You had read Ibiki Morino's handwriting. You had once, on a dare, corrected a typo in a report written by Tsunade. You had sent this very man, in coded orders, to places you weren't sure he'd come back from, though he had never known your name.
You picked up your pen. "Would you like it signed?"
"Hm? Oh. No." His visible eye curved into a crescent. You realized, with a lurch, that he was smiling under the mask. "I have a question. About chapter twelve."
Of course he did.
Chapter twelve was the one everyone had questions about. Your editor had questions. Your mother had called you in tears with questions. Chapter twelve was the one where Akane, a Mist kunoichi sent to kill the masked jonin Raiden during the ceasefire talks, gets him alone in a tea house during a thunderstorm, binds his wrists to a support beam with ninja wire, and then does not kill him at all. For eleven extremely specific pages.
"I'm happy to discuss my craft," you said, with great dignity.
"Great." He flipped the book open to the first dog-ear. He'd made notes in the margin. In red ink. Small, neat, extremely legible handwriting, with arrows. "So. Page two-oh-one. She binds his wrists with wire. Above his head. To the beam." He tapped it. "One-handed."
"Yes."
"While maintaining a Hidden Mist technique."
"She's very good."
"While unbuckling his flak vest. With the other hand." He looked at you over the book. "Have you ever unbuckled a flak vest one-handed?"
"Have you ever been tied to a beam by a Mist kunoichi?"
The eye curved again. "Not that I'll put in a report."
You had to look at the table for a second.
"There are three buckles," Kakashi went on, as if you weren't dying, "on the standard Leaf-issue vest. Four if he's wearing the old model, and he would be, because Raiden's a veteran, it says so on page sixty. They're stiff. They're designed not to come undone in combat." He turned to the next dog-ear. "And then on two-oh-six she's kissing him. Through the mask. And the mask is still on, and he can feel her mouth through the fabric, which, fine, but then on two-oh-seven she's biting his lower lip, which requires that the mask be off, but nobody ever takes the mask off. I checked. Twice."
"It's implied."
"It's a continuity error."
"It's a metaphor."
"For what?"
"For the porousness of the boundaries between enemies during wartime," you said, which was a lie you'd told an interviewer from the Konoha Gazette last week, and you watched his eyebrow go up on the side without the scar.
"Mm," he said. "I don't think so."
He flipped to the last dog-ear, and here the red ink was densest, crowding the margin and spilling over onto the next page. You couldn't read it upside down. You badly wanted to read it upside down.
"And this part," he said, and put his finger on a paragraph you knew by heart, because you'd written it at three in the morning in a single shaking draft and never changed a word. "This position. With the beam, and the wire, and her knee, and his wrists still bound. I'm not saying it's impossible." He paused. "I'm saying I'd have to see it."
The bookshop owner, who had been very quietly rearranging the same stack of travel guides for five minutes, dropped all of them.
You put the pen down. You laced your fingers on the table. You were twenty-nine years old, an adult professional woman, a published author and a veteran of the Fourth Great Ninja War, and you were not going to let a man in a mask make you blush in your own signing.
"Lord Sixth," you said. "Are you asking me for a demonstration?"
He looked at you for a long, unhurried moment. Up close, you could see the faint dark line where the mask met his skin, and a fleck of red ink on his knuckle, and the way his lashes were the same silver as his hair.
"Well," he said. "It's for accuracy. Jiraiya-sama always said the research was the most important part."
"Jiraiya-sama did his research by peeping on the women's baths."
"Yes. And look how good the books were."
You laughed. You didn't mean to. It just came out of you, sudden and loud in the quiet shop, and his eye curved into that crescent again, and something low in your stomach turned over like a key in a lock.
"Kakashi-san!" The shop door banged open and a dark-haired woman in a kimono came in at a fast walk, a stack of scrolls in her arms and a small pig at her heels. Shizune, you thought. The Hokage's aide. She looked like a woman who'd been running all over the village. "There you are! The Land of Wind delegation has been waiting for forty minutes! The council is going to kill you. They said so. They used the word 'kill.'"
"Ah," said Kakashi. "Is that today?"
"It's been today all day!"
He sighed, very put-upon, and picked his book up off the table, and tucked it into a pocket of his vest the way another man might tuck away his wallet. He tipped his head at you.
"Training field past the east gate," he said, low, under Shizune's scolding. "Tomorrow. Sunset. Bring wire."
Then he was gone. Not out the door. Just gone, in a swirl of leaves that settled across your signing table and your stack of unsold books and your hand, still lying open on the wood where it had been, as if it were waiting for something.
You didn't sleep much.
You told yourself it was the cramp in your hand. You told yourself it was professional curiosity. You lay in your narrow bed in your narrow apartment above the dango shop and stared at the ceiling and thought about three buckles, four on the old model, and about red ink, and about the fact that he'd checked. Twice.
At two in the morning you got up and pulled your own copy off the shelf and opened it to page two-oh-one and read the whole chapter again, by lamplight, with your heart doing something stupid. It was good. You'd always known it was good. But you'd written it alone, for nobody, in the year after the war when you couldn't sleep, and you had never once pictured anyone in particular reading it.
Now you couldn't picture anyone else.
At sunset the next day, you walked out through the east gate with a spool of ninja wire in your pocket and your hair pinned up the way Akane wore hers in the book, which you told yourself was a coincidence.
The training field was empty. Long grass gone gold in the low light. A row of old wooden posts at the far end, scarred by a generation of kunai. Clouds stacking up purple over the forest to the west, the air heavy with the green, metallic smell that came before a summer storm.
He wasn't there.
You waited. The sun touched the treeline. The first fat drop of rain hit the dust beside your sandal. You thought, of course. Of course. Everyone in the village knew Kakashi Hatake was never on time for anything. You'd known it for years. You'd made fun of it in your own coded war dispatches.
Then the air behind you moved, and a hand closed lightly around your wrist, and a voice right at your ear, warm and lazy and much too close, said:
"Sorry I'm late. I got lost on the road of life."
And something cool and thin and very familiar slid, gently, all the way around your wrist.
Ninja wire.
His.