Chapter 1: Day One: Sukea Checks In
REQUEST FOR LEAVE OF ABSENCE. Applicant: Hatake Kakashi, Sixth Hokage. Duration: three days. Purpose: inspection of regional hot-spring infrastructure. Reviewed by: Hatake Kakashi. Approved by: Hatake Kakashi. Seal of the Hokage, applied slightly crooked.
You don't see that paper until much later. On the first day, all you see is a man at your front gate in a wide-brimmed hat, round sunglasses and a very fake beard.
It's raining, the soft grey drizzle that hangs over Yukemura half the year and gives the town its name. Steam rises off the river. Steam rises off the bathhouses. Steam rises, honestly, off everything, and through it this man comes slouching up the stone path with a travel bag over one shoulder and a camera around his neck. He moves as though the path is mildly inconvenient. His hands are in his pockets.
You know that slouch. Everyone who served in the Fourth Great Ninja War knows that slouch.
"Good evening," he says, stopping at your counter. His voice is pitched a little higher than it should be and he's doing something odd with the vowels. "I'd like a room. Something quiet. I'm a photographer, I'm here to take pictures of the, ah." He glances around. "Steam."
You look at the beard. You look at the hat. Above the sunglasses, a shock of silver hair is very clearly escaping in three directions.
"Name?" you say.
"Sukea."
"Just Sukea?"
"It's a professional name." He leans on the counter. "Like an artist."
You open the ledger. You write SUKEA in large, careful letters. Then, underneath, smaller, you write: (Lord Sixth). You turn the ledger around so he can see it.
There's a long pause.
"I don't know who that is," he says.
"He's about your height. Same hair. Same terrible posture. He also smells like ink and dog, which you do, a little." You fold your arms. "And he can't do a civilian voice to save his life. I patched him up in a field tent outside the Valley of the End two and a half years ago, and he read me the third chapter of an extremely inappropriate novel while I was pulling shrapnel out of his shoulder."
The man pushes his sunglasses down his nose. Beneath them, one dark grey eye regards you with deep and mournful resignation. The other has a scar running straight through it, top to bottom, the one you remember from the war. The Sharingan that used to live there is gone now. Everyone knows that story too.
"Ah," says the Sixth Hokage. "The medic who threatened to put my book in the fire."
"You remember."
"You said it was a crime against literature."
"It was. It still is." You glance at his bag. A corner of bright orange is poking out of the side pocket. "You brought one."
"I brought three." He sighs, a long weary exhalation through the fake beard. "Look. I'm sure there's a protocol for this. You're probably supposed to send a bird to the village. Someone will come in a very official vest and drag me back to a desk with forty thousand pieces of paper on it, and I'll spend the next six months approving road repairs in the Land of Rice Fields."
"Probably."
"I've been Hokage for twenty-two months," he says, quieter. "I haven't had a full night's sleep in twenty-one of them. My last day off was the day before the war started." He takes off the hat. The rest of his hair springs up as if relieved. Under the beard, he's wearing his usual dark mask, which you suppose makes sense; you're not sure anyone on earth has ever seen Kakashi Hatake without it. "Three days. That's all. Nobody knows I'm here. I'll pay double. I'll be very quiet. I'll even put the book away during meals."
You consider him. The rain patters on the roof. Down the hall, your one other guest, an elderly salt merchant named Mr. Ogino, is snoring loud enough to rattle the paper screens.
You think about the field tent. About how, even with shrapnel in his shoulder and a fever climbing, he'd made you laugh three times. About how, when you'd finished, he'd looked at the next stretcher over, at a Sand chunin who wasn't going to make it, and sat with him until the end without a word.
You think about how tired he looks, even now, even pretending.
"Triple," you say.
He blinks. "Triple?"
"Triple rate. You chop wood in the mornings, because my woodcutter broke his wrist. And if anyone from the Leaf comes looking, I'm telling them you held me hostage."
The visible strip of his face creases. It takes you a second to realize he's smiling under the mask.
"That seems fair," says Kakashi.
The Hotaru Inn has six rooms, one outdoor spring, one indoor bath, a kitchen that's older than your grandmother was when she died, and a cat named Captain who hates everyone. You give Kakashi the corner room on the second floor, the one with the window over the river, because it's the quietest. You do not do this because it's also the nicest. You are very clear with yourself on that point.
He comes down to dinner in a borrowed indigo yukata with the beard gone and the mask firmly in place. Mr. Ogino squints at him over his rice bowl and asks if he's in theater. Kakashi says yes, he plays mostly villains, and Mr. Ogino nods sagely and goes back to his pickles.
You bring out the main course and set it down in front of him. Kakashi looks at the plate.
It's saury. Salt-grilled, skin crisp and blistered, a wedge of lemon and a mound of grated daikon on the side. Next to it, a bowl of miso soup with eggplant.
He goes very still.
"How," he says.
"You told me. In the tent." You set down a dish of pickled plums. "You were delirious. You said if you died you wanted your last meal to be salt-grilled saury and eggplant miso soup and absolutely nothing fried, and then you told me you hated sweets and asked if I was single."
"I did not."
"You did. I said no. You said 'pity' and passed out."
There's a long silence. Mr. Ogino, sensing drama, has stopped chewing.
"Was it true?" Kakashi asks. "The no?"
You look at him. One dark eye, steady and unreadable, over the edge of the mask.
"Eat your fish, Lord Sukea," you say. "Before it gets cold."
You don't stay to watch him eat. Everybody knows nobody ever sees Kakashi Hatake eat; it's practically village legend. But when you come back ten minutes later to clear the table the plate is clean down to the bones, the soup bowl empty, and he's leaning back on his hands, looking out at the rain with his eyes half-closed and an expression on what you can see of his face that you've never seen there before.
He looks, for the first time since he walked up your path, like a man who isn't waiting for something to go wrong.
"Good?" you ask.
"Better than the tent." He tilts his head to look up at you. "Better than the dream I had about it in the tent, actually."
You pick up his tray. Your face is warm. It's the steam.
"Breakfast is at seven," you tell him. "Woodpile's behind the kitchen. Axe is in the shed. Don't use a jutsu, the neighbors will talk."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
At six the next morning, you wake to a sound like a very large and very fast woodpecker.
You pull on a robe and go to the kitchen window, and there behind the inn in the grey dawn is the Sixth Hokage of the Hidden Leaf, in borrowed sandals and a yukata tied up at the knees, splitting logs.
He isn't using a jutsu. Technically. He's just very, very fast. He sets a log on the block, the axe moves, the halves fall, and another log is already in place before they've finished landing. The woodpile, which yesterday came up to your knee, is now taller than the shed.
He looks up and sees you in the window. He lifts a hand in a lazy wave. With the other hand, without looking, he splits another log.
You open the window. "I said no jutsu."
"This isn't a jutsu." He sounds wounded. "This is just good technique."
"There's enough wood there for the winter."
"You said mornings." He shrugs. "You didn't say how many logs."
You stare at him. He stares back. Somewhere behind you, the kettle starts to whistle, and Captain the cat, sitting on the windowsill, turns his back on both of you in disgust.
You should be annoyed. You are, a little. But you're also standing there in your robe with your hair a mess, trying very hard not to laugh, and the Sixth Hokage is grinning at you under his mask in a way you can tell even through the fabric, and the sun is coming up over the mountains and turning the steam on the river gold.
Then a small brown pug lands on the woodpile with a soft thump, sniffs the air, and looks at Kakashi with the deep weariness of a dog who has seen too much.
"Boss," says Pakkun. "We've got a problem. Your advisor with the ponytail is already asking questions."