Chapter 2: Research Methods
It was a loose loop. You could tell by the weight of it, the way it lay on the skin of your wrist without biting. A courtesy, not a capture. He was standing so close behind you that you could feel the warmth of him through the back of your shirt, and he wasn't touching you anywhere else at all.
"Page two-oh-one," Kakashi said, in that same lazy voice. "Show me."
So you did.
Four years in Intelligence teaches you a lot of things, and most of them are about paper. But the Division had made everybody do the wire course, even the cipher clerks, on the theory that if the enemy ever got down to the basement you should be able to strangle somebody with the binding off a scroll. You'd been top of your class. You'd never told anyone that, because it didn't come up at parties.
You turned your wrist inside his loop, caught the slack between two fingers, and pulled. The wire went taut around his own hand. You stepped into him and pivoted, and he let you, you were almost sure he let you, and then he was backed up against the nearest of the old wooden posts, rain starting to spatter the gold grass around your feet, and you were looping the wire twice around his wrists and once around the post above his head, one-handed, the way Akane did it, and knotting it with your teeth.
He looked down at you. The rain was darkening his hair, plastering it to his forehead. His visible eye was very wide and very bright.
"Huh," he said.
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm taking notes." He tugged, experimentally, and the post creaked. "That's a Mist knot. Where'd you learn a Mist knot?"
"I read a lot." You put your free hand flat on his chest, over the vest. Through the canvas you could feel his heart going fast and hard, much faster than his voice. "Three buckles?"
"Four. Old model."
You found the first buckle by touch. It was stiff, exactly as he'd said; you had to work your thumb under the clasp and lever it, and it came open with a snap that made both of you flinch. The second one was easier. The third you fought with for so long that he started, very quietly, to laugh, his chest shaking under your palm.
"Continuity error," he murmured.
"Shut up."
"Raiden would be dead by now. Akane would've been caught. They'd have both been court-martialed."
"Shut up," you said again, and gave up on the buckle, and fisted your hand in the front of his mask instead, and kissed him through it.
The cloth was soaked from the rain, cool and slightly rough. Under it his mouth was warm, and you felt the exact moment it opened against yours, felt the soft startled breath he let out into the fabric. You'd written that. Page two-oh-six. You'd written it as a fantasy, the way you'd write a dragon, and it turned out to be true, every word, the heat coming through the wet weave and the shape of his lower lip and the low sound in his throat when you pressed closer.
The wire creaked. He'd pulled against it without meaning to.
You drew back an inch. His eye was half-closed. There was a flush across the top of his cheekbones, above the mask, that hadn't been there before.
"You can stop this," he said, rough. "Anytime. It's your wire."
"Do you want me to?"
"No." Not lazy at all now. "No. I really don't."
Thunder rolled across the field, close, close enough to feel in your feet. The rain came down properly all at once, a gray sheet that flattened the grass and soaked you to the skin in seconds.
Kakashi flexed his wrists once, and the wire you'd knotted with your teeth parted like a cobweb.
You stared at him. He looked at the two dangling ends with mild interest.
"I could've done that the whole time," he said apologetically.
"I know."
"It's just, the Hokage really can't get tied to a post by—"
"I know, Kakashi."
His eye curved. Then he took your hand, and you were running.
There was an old equipment shed at the edge of the field, half-hidden in the trees, the kind of place they kept practice dummies and broken targets and stacks of straw-stuffed mats that smelled of dust and summer. He got the door open with a kick and pulled you in and shut it behind you, and then you were standing in the dark, both of you dripping, both of you breathing hard, while the rain hammered on the tin roof like a drumline.
You couldn't see him. There was one small window, high up and gray with rain, and it let in barely enough light to make out the shape of him, a darker dark against the dark.
"I've wanted to ask you something since the bookshop," he said.
"Chapter twelve?"
"Not chapter twelve." A pause. His voice, when it came again, was quieter. "Do you want to touch my face?"
Your heart stopped. You knew, the way everybody in the village knew, that nobody had seen it. Not his students. Not his rival. Not the Fifth Hokage. There were rumors, a whole cottage industry of rumors: buck teeth, fish lips, a mouth sewn shut, a face so handsome it caused accidents.
"Yes," you said. "If you want me to."
You heard the soft whisper of cloth. Then his hands found yours in the dark, and lifted them, and set them on his face.
Bare skin. Warm, and a little rough along the jaw where he hadn't shaved. You moved your fingertips slowly, learning him like braille. A straight nose. A long, clean line of jaw. The edge of the scar, running down through his eyebrow and across his cheek. And then his mouth, a full lower lip, a thin upper one curved up at the corner like he was trying not to smile. On his chin, just below and to the left of his mouth, your thumb found a tiny raised spot. A mole.
"Huh," you said.
"What?"
"Nothing. You have a mole."
He laughed, a real laugh, warm and surprised, and you felt it under your fingertips. Then he turned his head and kissed your palm.
"Don't look," he said into it. "Not yet. Just this."
So you didn't look. You kissed him in the dark instead, his bare mouth on yours for the first time, and it was nothing like through the mask, it was hot and slow and devastating, his hand sliding up into your wet hair and pulling the pins out one by one until it fell. You found the last buckle of his vest without trying and it came open like it had been waiting. He shrugged the vest off. Then his shirt, peeled wet over his head. You put your hands on him and felt the hard, scarred warmth of his chest and stomach, the old raised line of a wound below his ribs, a body that had been through two wars and had kept going.
"Now," he murmured, his mouth against your throat, "let's check your research."
He undressed you slowly, which in the dark was its own kind of torment. Every button. Every knot. His mouth following his hands down your skin, over your collarbone, the curve of your breast, his tongue tracing your nipple until your knees went loose and you grabbed his shoulders. He lowered you onto the stacked practice mats like there was no hurry in the world. He kissed down your stomach. He settled between your thighs and you felt his breath on you, and his hands holding your hips steady, and then his mouth, unmasked, the thing the whole village had wondered about, and it was very, very good.
He was patient. He was thorough. He was, it turned out, a man who paid attention. He learned every sound you made and what caused it, and when you started shaking he held you down with one arm across your hips and kept going, slow and relentless, until you came with your hand over your own mouth and his name muffled behind it and the rain roaring overhead.
When you could breathe again he was kissing the inside of your knee.
"Page two-oh-nine," he said. "Accurate. I'll revise my notes."
"You're unbearable."
"I'm thorough." He came up over you, his weight braced on his forearms, and you felt him hard against your thigh. In the gray light from the window you could just make out the outline of his face, the line of his jaw. "Tell me what you want."
"Page two-eleven," you said. "The beam."
He went very still. Then he laughed again, low, and you felt it everywhere.
"I said I'd need to see it."
There was a support beam in the middle of the shed, rough timber, holding up the roof. He lifted you against it like you weighed nothing, your back to the wood and your legs around his waist, and you guided him into you, and both of you made the same sound at the same time.
For a long moment he didn't move. He held you there with his forehead pressed to yours, breathing.
"Okay," he said unsteadily. "Okay. I take it back. It's possible."
Then he moved, and it stopped being a joke.
It was deep and slow at first, every stroke drawn out, his hands under your thighs holding you open, the beam biting into your shoulder blades in a way you'd feel tomorrow and wouldn't mind. You hooked your knee higher, exactly the way Akane had in the book, and the angle changed, and he groaned into your neck and lost his rhythm. You pulled his hair. He bit your shoulder, gently, then not so gently. Thunder cracked right overhead and a flash of white light came through the window, and for half a second you saw him, really saw him, his head bowed against yours with his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth open on your name, and then it was dark again.
You didn't tell him you'd seen. You held on.
He came with his face pressed into your shoulder, shuddering, a long low sound you felt in your bones, and you went over again with him, clenched around him, your nails dug into his back.
Afterward he carried you back to the mats and laid you down and lay beside you, and pulled his Hokage robe off the floor and spread it over both of you, and you listened to the rain soften on the roof.
"That was," he said eventually, "very good research."
"Thank you."
"Jiraiya-sama would have been proud."
"Please don't talk about Jiraiya-sama right now."
You felt him smile against your hair. You fell asleep like that, with his arm across your waist and his bare face against the back of your neck, and you didn't even try to stay awake to see it.
When you woke it was morning, and the shed was full of gold light, and he was gone.
The robe was still on you. Your clothes were folded on a crate, mostly dry. And on top of them was your own book, the copy you'd had in your pocket, open to page two-oh-seven, where somebody had crossed out the word "impossible" in his neat red margin note and written, under it:
Revised. Possible. Further study required.
You were still staring at it, smiling like an idiot, when someone knocked on the shed door.
You scrambled for the robe. The door opened a crack. A tall figure in black and gray armor stood there, face hidden behind a porcelain cat mask.
"The Hokage requests your presence in his office," said the ANBU. "Immediately." A pause, flat as stone. "He says it is a matter of village security."