Chapter 3: Day Three: Under the Mask
Might Guy eats four bowls of rice at breakfast, drinks an entire pot of tea, and challenges Mr. Ogino to an arm-wrestling match, which he loses on purpose so gracefully that Mr. Ogino goes back to his room glowing with pride. Then he turns his wheelchair to face the table and looks at Kakashi with his enormous eyebrows drawn down into a single heroic line.
"You," he says, "are a fool."
Kakashi, who has been reading the same page of his book for ten minutes, doesn't look up. "Good morning to you too, Guy."
"Do not good-morning me! I raced here through the night on these wheels." Guy slaps the armrests. "Shikamaru worked it out at sundown. He saw your clone sign a request to rename the Hokage Monument after a brand of soy sauce, and he knew. He's sending a retrieval team at first light. They'll be here by this evening."
You set down the teapot. "This evening?"
"This evening!" Guy turns to you and his face transforms, all the thunder gone, beaming. "And you must be the medic! The one with the fish and the terrible opinions about literature. I have heard so much about you."
Kakashi closes the book. "Guy."
"For two years!"
"Guy."
"He talks about you in his sleep, did you know? We had a training camp last spring, very rigorous, I shared a tent with him. 'Saury,' he says. 'She remembered the saury.'" Guy clasps his hands. "It's beautiful. It's the springtime of youth, late but blooming!"
You look at Kakashi. Kakashi is looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man calculating whether he can fit through the smoke hole.
"I never told you about the saury," you say slowly. "She remembered the saury? That didn't happen until the night before last."
Guy freezes.
Kakashi's visible eye closes, slowly, in profound defeat.
"Ah," says Guy. "Well. He may have sent me a very small letter by summoning. Or seven." He puts both hands on his wheels. "I believe I'll go and inspect your woodpile. It looks enormous. I must see it at once."
He's out the door in a cloud of dust before either of you can stop him.
The silence in the dining room stretches. Captain the cat jumps onto the table, sniffs Kakashi's empty bowl, and settles down on top of his book.
"Seven letters," you say.
"In my defense," says Kakashi, "they were very short."
"In two days."
"Some of them were about the woodpile."
You stare at him. He stares back, unrepentant, the tips of his ears just visible under that wild silver hair and very clearly pink. And you start to laugh. You can't help it. You put your face in your hands at your own breakfast table and laugh until your eyes water, and after a moment you hear him laughing too, quietly, through the mask, and when you look up, he's watching you like you're the stars over the hot spring.
"So," you say, wiping your eyes. "This evening."
"This evening." He nudges Captain off his book, gently. "I'd like to spend the day with you. If you'll let me. Not as Sukea."
You give him the day.
You don't do anything special with it. That's the point. You change the linens in the empty rooms and he helps, badly, folding sheets with ninja-sharp corners and then forgetting which room they go in. You scrub the indoor bath and he sits on the edge reading aloud from his book in a grave, dramatic voice, doing all the characters, until you throw a sponge at his head and he catches it without looking. You make lunch together. You learn he can't cook anything that isn't fish. He learns you can't stand the sight of a crooked knife block.
At some point in the afternoon, Guy goes to sleep in his wheelchair in the garden with Captain on his chest and a straw hat over his face. Kakashi drapes a blanket over him without a word. You watch him tuck the edge in carefully around Guy's ruined leg, and you think: this is who he is, under all of it. Under the hat and the mask and the legend. A man who notices when someone is cold.
The sun goes down early in the valley. By five, the light is gold and failing, the steam on the river turning pink. You're standing on the little wooden footbridge behind the inn, the one your grandmother used to call the thinking bridge, when you hear footsteps on the path. Kakashi stops beside you and leans his forearms on the railing.
"They're at the top of the valley," he says. "Pakkun says ten minutes. Shikamaru brought the whole team, and he's brought a stack of paperwork so tall that Chōji is carrying it."
"Sounds like a lot of road repairs."
"Sounds like a lot of road repairs." He sighs. The water chuckles under the bridge. "I don't want to go."
"I know."
"No," he says. "I mean it. I've never not wanted to go back before. There's always been a reason. A mission, a student, a war. A desk. Something that needed me more than I needed anything." He turns his head and looks at you, steady, serious, all the laziness gone out of him. "I'm not good at wanting things for myself. I lost the habit early. But I want this. The fish and the woodpile and your terrible cat, and you telling me to hold still. I want to come back here. I want to come back to you."
The river runs on. Somewhere up the valley, a bird starts singing its evening song.
"In the tent," you say, and your voice isn't as steady as you want it to be. "When you asked if I was single."
He waits.
"I lied."
He blinks. "You..."
"I wasn't seeing anyone. I just didn't think the Copy Ninja could possibly be serious, with a fever of a hundred and three and a book called Icha Icha Tactics open on his chest." You swallow. "And then you passed out. And then the war ended, and I came here, and I spent two years thinking I'd imagined the whole thing. And then you walked up my path in a crooked beard."
"It was a good beard," he says softly.
"It was a terrible beard." You turn to face him. "Ask me again."
He doesn't move for a moment. Then he straightens up from the railing and looks down at you, the last of the light catching the scar over his left eye.
"Are you single?" asks the Sixth Hokage.
"Not if you don't want me to be."
His hand comes up. You think he's going to touch your face. Instead, slowly, with one finger hooked over the top edge, he pulls down his mask.
You'd wondered. Everyone who's ever met him has wondered. The whole Leaf Village has a betting tradition about it going back twenty years. Later you'll try to explain it to someone and give up, because some things are private, and because no description could do it justice anyway. You'll only say that you understand, now, why he keeps it covered. Nobody in the village would ever get any work done.
What you notice, in the moment, is that he's nervous. His mouth is pressed into a thin line and there's a small mole at the corner of it, just to the left of his chin, and he's watching your face for a reaction like a man waiting for a verdict.
"Well?" he says. "Do I pass inspection?"
You reach up and put your hand on his bare cheek, and you feel him lean into it.
"Hold still," you say.
He laughs, very low, and you kiss him.
It's a soft kiss. Soft and slow and a little clumsy at the start, because you're both smiling too much. Then his hand slides into your hair, and yours fists in the front of his borrowed yukata, and it stops being clumsy and becomes something you'll be thinking about for weeks. He kisses like he does everything when he actually cares: unhurried, thorough, completely focused. When you finally break apart, he rests his forehead against yours and doesn't pull his mask back up, and you stand like that on the thinking bridge while the stars come out over the steam.
"Lord Sixth."
You both jump. Shikamaru Nara is standing at the end of the bridge in his flak vest, hands in his pockets, looking at the two of you with the expression of a man who has seen every possible kind of trouble and is deeply tired of this one. Behind him, at a polite distance, a large, cheerful man is carrying an enormous stack of scrolls. Behind him, Guy is in his wheelchair, giving you two enthusiastic thumbs up.
Kakashi's mask is back in place before you've finished turning around. You didn't even see him move.
"Shikamaru," he says pleasantly. "You're early."
"You're late. By three days." Shikamaru sighs, long and heavy. "This is such a drag. The Kazekage wants to know why you approved a soy sauce monument. I told him it was a test of his sense of humor."
"Did he pass?"
"He sent back a sand sculpture of a soy sauce bottle. I'm told that means yes." Shikamaru looks at you, and his sharp eyes flick from your face to Kakashi's to the inch of space between your shoulders, and something in his weary expression softens. Very slightly. "Ten minutes, Lord Sixth. I'll be at the gate."
He walks away. Chōji follows with the scrolls. Guy rolls after them, singing.
Kakashi turns back to you. He takes something from inside his yukata, a folded piece of paper, a little crumpled from his pocket, and presses it into your hand.
"I'll come back," he says. "Soon. I'll bring the paperwork if I have to." He hesitates. Then, quickly, he tugs the mask down just long enough to kiss you once more, a brief warm press, and tugs it up again. "Don't let Captain sleep in my room."
Then he's gone, a flicker of silver in the dusk, and you're alone on the bridge with the river and the stars and a piece of paper.
You unfold it.
REQUEST FOR LEAVE OF ABSENCE. Applicant: Hatake Kakashi, Sixth Hokage. Duration: one weekend in every three, indefinitely. Destination: the Hotaru Inn, Yukemura. Purpose: personal. Reviewed by: Hatake Kakashi.
At the bottom, next to Approved by, there's a blank line, a brush, and a small, neat note in his handwriting.
That one's yours. Sign it, and I'll forge everything else.