Chapter 2: Day Two: The Bamboo Fence
Captain the cat decides he likes Kakashi on the second morning, which you take as a personal betrayal.
Captain doesn't like anyone. Captain bit the district magistrate. Captain once held a traveling monk hostage in the indoor bath for forty minutes. But you come back from the market with the day's fish to find the Sixth Hokage asleep on the engawa in a patch of weak sunlight, book open on his chest, and eleven pounds of orange tabby curled in the crook of his arm, purring like a cart going downhill.
"Traitor," you tell the cat.
Captain opens one eye and closes it again.
Kakashi doesn't open his eyes at all. "He has excellent judgment."
"He has fleas."
"Then we have a lot in common." He turns a page of the book without looking. "Pakkun's gone back to keep an eye on things."
You sit down on the step beside him with the fish basket in your lap. Over breakfast, between bites he took somehow while you were looking at the rice pot, he'd explained the situation. He hadn't just forged the leave papers. He'd left a shadow clone behind his desk at the Hokage's office, signing documents and nodding in meetings and generally being as unhelpful as the original. Nobody in the village would know the difference until the clone ran out of chakra.
"How long does it last?" you'd asked.
"I made it as strong as I could," he'd said. "Three days. Maybe a little less if someone makes it do arithmetic."
And now, according to Pakkun, Shikamaru Nara had noticed that the Hokage was signing every single form put in front of him, without reading any of them, without complaint, without once trying to sneak out the window.
"He's suspicious," Kakashi says now, still not opening his eyes. "Apparently I'm too productive."
"How terrible for you."
"It's a real problem. I've built a reputation." He scratches Captain under the chin. The cat goes boneless. "He'll figure it out by tomorrow night. Shikamaru always does. He'll do the math on the clone, check the rosters, notice I asked the archive for a map of the hot-spring districts last month." A sigh. "I should have been subtler about the map."
"You should have been subtler about a lot of things. You came in a fake beard."
"It was a good beard."
"It was glued on crooked."
He opens one eye, finally, and looks at you. The sunlight catches in the silver of his hair. "So I have until tomorrow night."
"So you have until tomorrow night."
"Then I'd like to spend today," he says, "doing absolutely nothing useful. Will you show me the town?"
Yukemura isn't much of a town. It's one long street that follows the river, lined with bathhouses and souvenir shops and inns, and at the end of it a small shrine with a red gate and a bell rope worn smooth by a century of hands. You've lived here four years. You still haven't seen everything, because you never stop working.
You walk it with him that afternoon like a tourist.
He's an excellent tourist. He has the camera, of course, and he takes his role as Sukea the photographer with complete seriousness, stopping to frame the steam rising off a gutter or a stray dog asleep on a barrel. He buys roasted chestnuts and eats them somehow without lowering his mask, which you watch closely and still can't figure out. He gets into a long and passionate discussion with the old woman at the pickle stall about the correct salt content of umeboshi. He wins.
Outside the Tabata bathhouse, Mrs. Tabata herself is sweeping her step, which is a lie, because Mrs. Tabata has never swept anything in her life. She sweeps when there's news to collect. She stops dead when she sees you, and her eyes travel from your face to the tall masked stranger beside you and back again, slow as a tax inspector.
"Well," she says. "Who's this?"
"A guest," you say firmly.
"Her fiancé," says Kakashi at the same moment, and bows.
Mrs. Tabata's broom clatters on the stones. You grab his sleeve and drag him three doors down before she can recover, and he lets you, shoulders shaking.
"Why," you hiss.
"She was going to make something up anyway." He sounds entirely unbothered. "I gave her a better story. Now the whole valley will know by dinner, and nobody will think twice about a strange man staying at your inn. It's called cover, it's very standard."
"You're the Hokage. You don't need cover. You need a muzzle."
"I have one," he says, and taps his mask.
At the shrine, he rings the bell and claps twice and bows his head for a long time. You don't ask what he prays for. You think you might know. You saw his face at the memorial stone once, on a visit to the village before you moved away.
When he straightens up, he lifts the camera and points it at you.
"Don't," you say.
"Too late." Click.
"I look terrible. I haven't brushed my hair since the fish market."
"You look like someone who lives here." He lowers the camera and looks at you over it, his eye soft. "That's rare, for people like us. Most of the people I served with still look like they're waiting for orders."
You look away, at the red gate, at the river. "I quit, you know. After the war. I just stopped. Lady Tsunade wanted me back at the hospital and I told her I was going to run an inn, and she threw a sake cup at my head."
"Did she hit you?"
"She never misses. I still have a dent." You touch your temple. "I'd lost so many in that tent. People I'd trained with. People I didn't even know the names of. And I just kept thinking, if I'm going to spend my life taking care of people, I want it to be people who come to me because they're tired. Not because they're dying."
Kakashi is quiet for a while.
"That's a good reason," he says finally.
"You don't think I ran away?"
"I think you came somewhere that needed you, and stayed." He tucks the camera back under his arm and puts his hands in his pockets. "I could learn from that."
The outdoor spring at the Hotaru Inn is divided by a bamboo fence your grandfather built fifty years ago, men's side and women's side, tall enough that nobody can see over and old enough that everybody can hear through.
At eleven that night, you slide into the hot water on the women's side and sink to your chin and close your eyes, and from the other side of the fence, Kakashi's voice says, "Ah. Good evening."
You nearly drown.
"How did you know it was me?" you say, when you've stopped coughing.
"Three people sleep under this roof tonight. Mr. Ogino goes to bed at eight, and I'm over here." A lazy splash. "Also, you hum when you get in. Very quietly. Like a kettle."
"I do not."
"It's an off-key kettle."
You sink back down into the water, your face burning, and decide it's the heat. Above you the sky has cleared for the first time in days. The stars are out, sharp and cold, and the steam drifts up into them in long pale ribbons. Somewhere down by the river an owl calls. On the other side of the fence, you hear him sigh, very softly. Not the theatrical sigh he uses for comedy. A real one.
"I haven't done this in years," he says. "Just sat somewhere. Without a mission. Without a report due."
"How long since you had a whole day like today?"
He thinks about it. "I don't think I've ever had one."
The water laps against the stones. You lean back until your head rests against the bamboo. On the other side, very faintly, you feel it creak, and you realize he's leaning against it too, right behind you. There's maybe an inch of old bamboo between your shoulders and his.
"Why did you take the hat?" you ask. "Everyone knows you didn't want it."
"Somebody had to. Naruto wasn't ready. Lady Tsunade was done. And I was..." He pauses. "Available. I'm good at being available. There's no one at home waiting for me to come back from the office, so I might as well stay at the office."
The way he says it, so lightly, makes your chest ache.
"Can I tell you something?" he says.
"You're going to anyway."
"I am, yes." He shifts against the fence. "In the tent. When I asked if you were single."
You go very still in the water.
"I wasn't that delirious," says Kakashi Hatake. "I'd been fighting for three days. Everyone I saw was either giving me orders or asking for them, or dying, or looking at me like I was the one who was supposed to stop them dying. And then you came in and told me to shut up and hold still and called my book garbage. You looked at me like I was a regular idiot with a hole in his shoulder." The fence creaks again, softly. "It was the best I'd felt in weeks. I've thought about it more than is probably healthy."
You can't speak. The water is very hot. Your heart is very loud.
"I didn't come here for the hot springs," he says, very quietly. "I came because I asked around for two years until I found out where you'd gone. And then I sat at my desk for six months, forging those papers in my head, before I had the nerve to actually do it."
The owl calls again. Somewhere in the inn, a screen door slides.
"Kakashi," you say. It's the first time you've used his name. You hear him draw in a breath.
"Tomorrow's my last day," he says. "Before I go, there's something I want to..."
From the front of the inn, through the dark, comes the sound of the gate being thrown open so hard it bangs against the wall. Then wheels, rattling on the stone path at tremendous speed. Then a voice, booming, delighted, loud enough to wake the dead and certainly Mr. Ogino.
"KAKASHI! MY ETERNAL RIVAL! I HAVE COME TO SAVE YOU FROM YOURSELF!"
On the other side of the bamboo fence, the Sixth Hokage slides slowly under the water until he's entirely submerged.