Chapter 3: Revisions
The Hokage's office smelled of ink and old paper and, faintly, of somebody's cold tea, and it was so full of documents that you had to step over a stack of them to get through the door. Scrolls on every shelf. Folders on every chair. A tower of unsigned treaties on the corner of the desk, leaning at an angle that looked structurally unsound.
Behind the desk, the Sixth Hokage sat with his feet up, reading.
He was masked again. Fully dressed. Robe on, hat on the hook, flak vest buckled all the way up, every one of the four buckles, as if to make a point. The book in his hands was yours. He didn't look up when you came in.
Beside the desk stood Shizune, a clipboard clamped to her chest and the little pig Tonton tucked under one arm, wearing the expression of a woman who had been awake for most of the last three years.
"This is her?" Shizune said.
"This is her," said Kakashi, turning a page.
Shizune looked at you. She looked at the book. She looked at Kakashi. She looked at the ceiling, as if hoping it would fall on her.
"You pulled me out of the Sand trade meeting," she said, "for this."
"It's a matter of village security."
"It's a romance novel."
"It's a romance novel," said Kakashi, "that contains, on page two-oh-one, a detailed and accurate description of a Mist binding knot that is only taught in the advanced wire course run by the Intelligence Division." He finally lowered the book, and looked at you over the top of it. His visible eye was perfectly bland. "Under classified training protocols. Which are, I'm told, still in force."
You opened your mouth. You closed it.
"So I asked myself," he went on, "how a civilian novelist knows a classified knot. And then I asked Ibiki. And Ibiki said, oh, her, and laughed, which I didn't know he could do." He set the book down on the desk, very precisely, square to the edge. "Four years in the Cipher Section under T&I. Top of the wire course. Signed all your internal decrypts with a little drawing of a frog." The eye curved. "You wrote my orders, during the war. Some of them. I remember the frog."
The office was very quiet. Out the big round window behind him the whole village spread out under the morning sun, the rooftops, the Hokage faces on the cliff, the red-and-white of the tower.
"I didn't think you'd ever see them," you said. "The frogs. They were just for me."
"I saw them." His voice had gone softer. "Every time. Whatever it was, wherever they were sending me, there'd be a little frog at the bottom of the page. I used to wonder who was drawing it." A pause. "It helped. I don't know why. It just did."
Shizune tucked her clipboard under her other arm, next to the pig.
"Okay," she said. "I'm going back to the trade meeting. Lord Sixth, the Sand delegation leaves at noon. You will be there. If you're not there I'm writing to Lady Tsunade and telling her exactly where you were last night." She walked past you to the door, and paused, and said without looking at you, "The book's good, by the way. Lady Tsunade lent me her copy. Chapter twelve's a lot." Tonton oinked, in what sounded like agreement, and the door shut behind them.
You stood there. Kakashi sat there. The treaty tower creaked.
"So," you said. "Am I under arrest?"
"Hm. Depends."
"On what?"
He swung his feet down off the desk and got up, slowly, and came around it, and stopped in front of you. Not close. Not touching. In the daylight he looked more tired than he had in the shop, faint shadows under his eyes, and also more nervous, which you'd never have guessed from a distance. His hands were in his pockets. You could see them flexing.
"I left," he said. "This morning. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make it look like that. Shizune found me at dawn. There was a border thing." He rubbed the back of his neck. "And I didn't want you to wake up and see me. Not in the light. Not yet. I panicked a little."
"You panicked."
"I'm told I do that." He looked at the floor. "I've read every Icha Icha book something like forty times," he said. "Did you know that? Not because of the, you know." A vague gesture. "Well. A little because of that. But mostly because Jiraiya-sama wrote them, and Jiraiya-sama taught my teacher, and in those books everybody gets a happy ending. Everyone. Nobody dies on page two hundred. Nobody's best friend comes back as the enemy. Nobody gets left behind." He swallowed. "Everyone I've ever loved is on the memorial stone. In those books, nobody is."
You thought about the basement under T&I. The decrypts. The casualty lists that came through your hands an hour before anyone else in the village saw them, the names you'd decoded letter by letter while you drank cold tea and drew frogs at the bottom of the page so you wouldn't scream.
"That's why I write them," you said quietly. "Happy endings. After the war I couldn't sleep. So I'd write until I could. And everybody lived."
He looked up.
"Akane doesn't kill him," you said. "In chapter twelve. She was supposed to. That was the whole plot. Her orders, the ceasefire, all of it. And I sat there at three in the morning and I just couldn't do it. I wanted somebody to get the ending."
Kakashi was very still. Then he took his hands out of his pockets, and reached up, and hooked one finger into the top of his mask, and pulled it down.
You'd felt it in the dark. You'd seen a flash of it in the lightning. It wasn't the same.
He was beautiful. Not in the way the rumors had promised, nothing so simple. He had a long, clean face with a strong jaw and a straight nose, and a mouth that looked like it had spent a lot of time being serious and was trying something new. The scar ran down through his left eyebrow and over his cheek, pale against his skin. The mole sat just below the corner of his lips, exactly where your thumb had found it. He looked younger without the mask, and older too, more tired and more open, like a house with the shutters thrown back.
He was blushing. Kakashi of the Sharingan, the Copy Ninja, the Sixth Hokage of the Hidden Leaf, standing in his office in broad daylight with his face bare, blushing like a man on a first date.
"Well," he said. "That's it. That's the face."
You stepped forward and put your hand on his cheek. He leaned into it.
"I liked it in the dark," you said. "I like it better now."
He kissed you. It was gentle, and very slow, and he kept his eyes open the whole time, and so did you.
His apartment, that night, was not what you'd expected. Small. Tidy. A single potted plant on the windowsill that he introduced, completely seriously, as Mr. Ukki, and two old framed photographs beside it that he touched briefly on his way past, the way you'd touch a doorframe for luck. Shelves of books, a lot of them yours, or Jiraiya's, worn soft as cloth.
He'd left the lamp on. He'd done it on purpose. He told you so.
"I want to see you," he said, standing at the foot of the bed with his hands at his sides, bare-faced, his shirt already gone. "And I want you to see me. If that's okay."
"Yes," you said. "Come here."
It was different in the light. Slower. He undressed you as if he were reading you, one page at a time, and you did the same to him, and you could see everything now: the long pale scars, the old burn on his shoulder, the way his breath caught when your hand slid down his stomach and closed around him. He was hard and hot in your hand. He let his head fall back and made a sound you would be thinking about for the rest of your life.
He laid you down on his narrow bed and kissed you everywhere, unhurried, mouth and throat and breasts and the soft skin inside your wrists where the wire had been, and when you pulled him up over you, he stopped, braced on his arms, and looked at you.
"Okay?"
"More than okay." You hooked your leg around him. "Don't make me write it down."
He laughed, and pushed into you, and the laugh broke apart into something else.
You watched his face the whole time. That was the thing. You could see everything: every flicker, the way his brows drew together when you clenched around him, the way his lips parted when you rolled your hips up to meet him, the moment his composure, all that famous bored cool, came apart completely. He moved deep and slow, his forehead dropping to rest against yours. His hand slid between you and found you and stayed, patient, until you were gasping. When you came you held his face in both hands and looked right at him, and he looked back, and he said your name, your real name, not your pen name, like a man saying it for the first time.
He followed you a moment later, shaking, his face pressed into your neck, and then he lifted it again, deliberately, so you could see.
Afterward, he lay with his head on your stomach and his bare face turned toward the window, and you ran your fingers through his hair, and Mr. Ukki watched over you both from the sill.
"Your publisher wants the next book," he said. "In three months."
"How do you know that?"
"I'm the Hokage. I know everything." A pause. "Also I read your mail. Just the one letter. It was on your table this morning."
"Kakashi."
"I'd like to read it first," he said. "The next one. Before anyone else. Every chapter. I'll be your editor. I have very good handwriting. Red pen. Lots of arrows."
You smiled at the ceiling. "You'll find continuity errors."
"Oh, definitely." He turned his head, and kissed the soft skin of your belly, and looked up at you with both eyes curved into crescents, his whole bare face smiling. "That's why we'll need to do so much research."
Outside, the village lights were coming on, one by one, across the rooftops. Somewhere down in the street, very faintly, a shop bell rang. You thought about chapter one of a book you hadn't started yet. A kunoichi. A cipher. A man who was always late.
You thought, for once, you already knew how it ended.