Balance

They had shown up at the training grounds at the earliest time possible, but now there was a mix-up. Their allotted three hour time period had been postponed in lieu of a subpoena handed out by the desk jockeys from the mission agency. Now they were unable to use the grounds until nearly nine. When they first heard this news, passed on to them by Gai (the most enthusiastic of the sparring group who regardless of their six am meeting time always showed up an hour early) everyone groaned and swore, rubbed the backs of their necks and wandered in constrained circles around the closed gates. To spar in the early hours of the morning was their custom because it left the rest of the day free. Many of them had other engagements to make, missions to start, team mates to meet up with, and genin to train. Some, like Kakashi who was oddly free these days, enjoyed wandering the morning market place, watching the people around them with a certain detached curiosity that comes when you travel from place to place, doing mission after mission and never planning to stay. There was a certain superiority in it too. No matter how many stares they drew as oddly dressed shinobi, they knew that soon they'd hold an audience at the local ramen bars from these same people, leaving them breathless, spellbound.

"Did you hear?" they would whisper. "So-and-so saved an entire village from death. Amazing. Simply amazing." Yes, they'd say to their civilian friends, yes, they were right there. That man with the scruffy beard and cigarette sitting at that bar stool was a hero. And the woman? The one with the red eyes? I sold her that pair of zori sandals, the one's she was wearing when she walked back through the village gates after that mission in Kawi no Kuni.

But now their sparring period was delayed, and all these small pleasures were lost.

It was Anko who pulled them together again. Loud, in your face, Anko. Standing affront the gate she clapped her hands together and called out their names, as if she were a mother, or their teacher, or even the Hokage herself. Kakashi, she called. Gai, Asuma, Kunerai, Yamato. Her voice was clear and loud, and from the forest behind her a flock of birds took flight. The group saw a woman, her body lean and compact. It was a young body, narrow at the shoulders, wide at the hips, almost curvy enough to be called plump. Only the face told otherwise. It was sharp and feminine, with almond shaped eyes and smooth pinewood skin.

"Now listen," she said, when the five of them had gathered around her. "You can stand around here like a bunch of idiots, moping and whining about how a bunch of no-brain genins took our training time, or you can go and try and do something productive for the next three hours and meet back here at nine o clock. I'm sure there's something to be done in town at six in the morning. Now stop crying and go home."

And that was that.

She slung her bag over her shoulder and walked briskly to the path that lead back to the heart of Konohagakure's market place. Kakashi, whisking out his orange book, started to follow her but she stopped and smiled back at him.

"I'm busy, eh Hatake. Errands to run and such," she said, and he knew she wanted the morning alone.

He fell back and watched her, the quick-sure gait down the dirt path and the circle of space she always seemed to carry with her. She'd been a mess when he met her, and she still walked as if every moment she was to be attacked, every muscle curled and sprung, her shoulders stiff and walk tense.

Gai placed his hand on his shoulder from behind him.

"A quick fight, my eternal rival?" he asked.

Kakashi shook his head. Gai had just turned twenty-seven. He could practice all morning and perform missions flawlessly in the afternoon. He never grew tired. His stamina was incredible.

"Come now, Kakashi," Gai insisted. "Anko won't mind, as long as you still have a little bit of fight left in you for your spar at nine."

"She'll mind if she notices I fought you before her," Kakashi said drolly. "Go on," he added. "Ask Asuma or Yamato."

The two had emerged from the forest now, and he noted that Asuma was long gone with Kunerai and Yamato had disappeared the moment Anko had finished her little speech. But Kakashi was in no mood to fight, so he quickly bid Gai adieu and wandered off down a diagonal pathway that lead towards the market. Kakashi could see the center square, and on the other side of the merchant stands he spotted Asuma disappearing into another alleyway. Kunerai, as always, was in tow. Both had been awkwardly inseparable since sleeping together a few years back and now they were in an uneasy relationship. From the distance he could see Asuma coughing and noticed a cigarette still hung from his lips. He had never had problems breathing in the past and Kakashi was surprised he had just noticed this about his friend now.

Sighing, Kakashi sat down a bench, the unpleasant smell of freshly caught fish wavering in the air, and took out his book again. He leaned back, flipping through the pages and wondered where Anko had gone. She was unhappy, that much was clear, and she had been unhappy for several months. Yet whenever Kakashi tried to talk with her about it, she gave him a quick, evasive smile and changed the subject. And he couldn't guess, had never been able to guess (but could only assume) the precise source of her sadness. The things he expected to distress her never did and the things that did upset her she kept hidden deep away, hiding things with an unnerving smile.

It had always been so. He remembered the first night he spent with her, over seven years ago, the night she'd told him that for years, growing up, she'd dreamed of becoming a kabuki dancer. A silly childhood dream, she told him. Nothing but something dreamt out of a storybook.

"Why didn't you?" he wanted to know. That morning he'd seen her practicing her taijutsu, the steps of her kata so precise and graceful, and her face so full of determination that he knew she had talent even before he knew her name. She could have been a kabuki dancer, if she wanted. Her face was full of expression; her body perfect. "Why didn't you?" he finally asked out loud.

She lifted one leg slowly. They were lying on a futon mat on the floor of his apartment, and next to her was the low set table covered in empty bottles of sake. He watched her leg rise, slowly, perfectly controlled, until it was a silhouetted against the stark walls of his bare apartment. Her toes wiggled childishly, pointing straight to the ceiling. Her leg however, stayed perfectly still, delicate, yet strong and finely sculpted.

"I didn't have the legs for it," she said. She rotated her leg, examining it as if it belonged to someone else.

"I don't believe that," he said.

She smirked. "You're right. Don't believe that. There's nothing wrong with my legs. I just wanted you to have a good look at them. The truth is my parents died when I was really young. It was by the charity of the Third that I ever made something out of my life, and he decided that I was to be a great ninja, just like my parents were."

Such cheek. Even when she was recalling something as tragic as her parents death.

She pulled her knee in then, so that the silhouette of her leg looked briefly like a wing. Then she swung it down, and across his waist, until with one smooth movement she was straddled across him.

"I used to go to shows at the theatre with when I was little," she said. "I loved the way the dancers moved across the stage, their faces scary and happy and crying, all at the same time. I wanted to be like them. To have that much fun. But then my parents died and I stopped going the theatre and I started going to the academy instead."

He could imagine her, six years old and attending classes at the ninja academy, day dreaming about the next show at the kabuki theatre but never going, but always wishing. He felt terribly saddened by her story, especially with what happened next regarding her ill-mannered apprenticeship. But she never talked about that. No. Never. When he met her, at fifteen, she was a loud, obnoxious chunin, and for some strange reason, he liked her the moment they'd met. She would talk and all he had to do was listen. Now, from somewhere in the sadness his affection for her grew deeper.

"I'm sorry," was all he could say to her. She looked down at him.

"Don't be," she said. "I'm not, anymore."

He reached up and stroked his fingers across her forehead, where she was frowning.

"What are you thinking about then?" he asked.

Her mood changed, and she smiled.

"You'll think I'm crazy."

"I already do think that."

She playfully slapped him across the face and crossed her arms.

"You'll think I'm perverted."

"Good. I am too. Tell me."

"All right." She clasped her hands behind her hand and arched back, so that her breasts lifted and rose. He dropped his hands and ran them along the bony fan of her ribcage. "I was wondering," she said, her eyes half closed. "I wondering if it's possible for two people to have sex while standing on their hands." She opened her eyes and smiled. "You see," she added when she noticed a wry smile on his normally stoic face. "What did I say? Perverted and crazy."

Kakashi blinked.

"It would require immense balance," was all he could think to say. "And stamina."

"It would," she agreed, still grinning. "And you'd have to be either crazy or perverted to try it."

"Which we both are."

Though slightly drunk, Kakashi smiled and Anko went into a handstand almost immediately, her lithe body lifting into the air. He did the same, so that they faced each other, only inches apart. He nearly fell over right then and there, her inverted face, altered by gravity, plump and pink from exertion being a rather amusing sight. Then he felt the rough sole of her foot as it ran down his calf to the back of his thigh. He looked up and saw her narrow body tapering into the far point of her toes. Then her legs opened in a graceful V, where they lowered very slowly and caught him lightly by the waist.

"I don't know if this is going to work," he said, feeling himself lurch closer to her, caught in the delicate embrace of her thighs. They looked at each other, eye to eye, and it seemed to him he had never seen another person so clearly. Something about their inverted pose removed all distractions. Anko had large eyes, and they glowed with an intensity and quickness that sometimes reminded him of a snake. Even from a distance her eyes were all he saw; they changed and grew even larger, and the darkness of her pupils seemed to draw him closer, then closer still, the most intimate knowledge of her he had ever had.

"It will," she said cheekily. "I'm sure."

But it didn't. They started laughing, drunk, simultaneously it seemed to Kakashi, though later Anko insisted he was the one to begin. Either way, once they started they couldn't stop, and they had ended up falling, gracefully of course, because shinobi were nothing but grace. They didn't try again for several weeks. Then the posture felt more familiar and they didn't laugh and they weren't drunk, but it was still difficult, the most difficult think Kakashi had ever attempted. It was like something right out of his Icha Icha novels, except reality made the act one-hundred times more difficult. That time it was Anko who moved too quickly and lost her balance.

"Still," she said later. "I'm sure it's not impossible. Fuck, it's just something that will take some work, that's all. Some time..." She spoke as if they had all the time together in the world, although with both of them being shinobi, Kakashi knew that time was limited.

"Maybe you should move in here," he said sometime later. He tried to make it sound very casual, for he had observed her independence and didn't want her to be frightened away. From any angle, he knew he was already starting to fall for her. "It would give us more opportunities." He ran ahand through his hair. "To practice."

She had laughed and asked him if he liked the idea of being domesticated, living with a woman and having her do all his laundry for him. He blushed and tried to pass the gesture off, but as time went on, it seemed more and more all she did was spend time at his apartment, until one day he realized she was paying rent but hadn't actually slept in her apartment for two months. But she kept paying the rent regardless, because it gave her somewhere to go, she insisted. In case something between them happened. He tried to tell her nothing between was going to happen, but Anko shook her head and kept paying the rent for her one room apartment across town.

The sun had grown stronger, and Kakashi stretched his arms against the back of the bench, closed his eyes, and imagined that small rays of light pierced like healing needles to his bones. He was tired. They had been sparring in a small group at six in the morning for the past five years, and he was growing tired of the repetition. Several times he had mentioned to Anko that perhaps they should just not go, but her answer was always the same: she glared at him and put a hand on her hip and told him that if he didn't they wouldn't have sex for a month.

"We're not old," she said once. "We're not old enough to retire. Besides," she said, not meaning to be cruel. "It was for you we started this."

Well, it was true, that part. Sometime in their late teens it had become clear to both of them that they were equally restless and found it difficult to relax. The missions in the ANBU weren't long enough, or maybe they were too long. Nothing was a challenge, and as squad captain, he felt himself growing agitated with everyone and everything. The restlessness that had entered him grew into an obsession. He exercised rigorously, morning and night. He arrived home before Anko and waited, some wild position trembling in his mind. Come, he'd say as soon as her key was in the lock. He took her hand and led her to the futon, without giving her a chance to rest or shower or even take off her coat. Come—he'd open a page of his Icha Icha novels and point to a paragraph—let's try this. He became obsessed with the thought of making love in a headstand. When Anko, exhausted from a day dealing with the likes of her fellow office lackeys at the academy, slipped or fell, he lost his temper. He knew it was irrational, but he felt as though everything depended on it, suddenly, that if they could not achieve this thing together then everything else would be lost.

"We have to do something about this," Anko said, finally. They were lying breathless on the mats in his sitting room and Kakashi was turned away from her, his arms hugged close to his body. In his state of mind those days, he thought this meant she was going to leave him.

"Kakashi," she said, touching his shoulder with her calloused palm. All day while he was out on assassination assignments with his squad, she sat in the academy with Ibiki, filing paper work and working on exams. She didn't understand. How unfilled he was. How stressed he was. "Kakashi, you have to get your life black. Quit the ANBU. Stop accepting so many mission files. Stop trying to have sex with me every five minutes." She laughed at the last part, but Kakashi said nothing. "Here," she said, sitting up, pulling on a white cotton robe. "This is what I think…"

And so it had begun, their morning sparring sessions. Over the years the members had changed, grown younger, or older, dead or alive. But always, at the center of it all, were he and Anko. During those three precious hours in the morning, they gave each other the permission to beat the living shit out of each other, regardless of the day ahead of them. Naturally, Maito Gai joined. He was eager to find himself in a match against Kakashi. Through word of mouth, Sarutobi Asuma and Yuhi Kurenai joined as well. Tenzou, or Yamato as he preferred to be called, a former squad member during Kakashi's ANBU days showed up on occasion also.

But now he was tired of it. He no longer needed to spar in order to tire himself out. He was growing older. He was twenty-six years old. Nearly twenty-seven. A near relic in shinobi terms. But it was Anko who now need to continue it. Eight months ago she had received an inquisition into her performance as an examination proctor and her job was on the line. She was deemed too unstable to go on any high ranking missions, and so while she was being audited, she had done nothing but spar and supervise academy children play will dulled kunai blades.

When they had started the sparring group, all of them had been bright-eyed and eager. But Gai's twenty-seventh birthday, a week in the passing, had forced Kakashi to look around. He had noticed the lines beneath Kurenai's eyes, the wheeze in Asuma's breath, and sometimes he swore even Tenzou looked a little stiff. Yet Anko showed no signs of stopping.

The rattling of carts woke him from his pleasant drowsing in the sun and he looked up. It was nearly nine. Kakashi stood up from his bench, stretched, and leisurely began to walk back to the training grounds. He was known for being fashionable late, so he figured there was no point in hurrying.

By the time he arrived, Anko and the others were already matched up. Kunerai fought Tenzou, Asuma fought Gai and Anko stood at a slight distance from the others, waiting.

He walked over to her and put a casual hand on her shoulder.

"You're late," she announced.

"Are you ready?"

"You're late," she repeated again.

Normally his lateness didn't bother her. But there was a strange look in her eyes and Kakashi's expression softened.

"Are you sure you want to fight?" he asked, thinking, even as he spoke, that it was a mistake to say this. The look in her eyes disappeared and she turned her face towards him. There was a knack she had of making herself go expressionless. He'd seen it countless times when she talked about her former sensei, or when she mentioned her former teammates (all dead, all eleven of them, all interchangeable and never around for long). She'd get this smile on her lips, but the eyes, if you looked closely enough were unreadable. She was like that now. As if his presence made her uncomfortable; as if she was talking of the dead or unspeakable. Hers was a face capable of assuming any expression, but for the moment it revealed nothing, nothing at all.

"Of course I want to fight. Don't be stupid, baka." She smiled. That small smile. Her eyes were black. Empty. "Shouldn't you be in stance? I don't want to hit an opponent who isn't ready."

There was always an instant where Kakashi, poised with a jutsu on the tip of his fingers, just waiting to be performed, felt he could not go through with it. He had felt this way even in the beginning when he still actually enjoyed fighting, learning new techniques and gaining his moniker of the Copy-Shinobi. When he was younger, he used to enjoy learning these techniques, expanding his repertoire. Lately however, he had felt nothing but an ache whenever he went to make the hand movements. This was no longer interesting. He was tired. He knew too many techniques. It seemed the spars going on around him were nothing but blurs. They disappeared. He didn't know where Anko was. And then he did. His hands stretched out, forming sign after sign, and suddenly an explosion, a flash of dirt or fire, of wind, and then she was gone again. Once he finished, he darted off into his next hiding place. The trees seemed good. Deeper into the forest, where the trunks were massive and the branches hundreds of feet off the ground.

He lost track of her chakra, and of everyone elses, and for a moment, couldn't smell the distinctive scent of honey and jasmine that drifted from her hair.

Then, he looked up. She stood high above him, on a branch arching beyond the skylines. The canopy of foliage darkened her silhouette and he could barely see the expression on her shadowed face. He had never seen her fall from a tree branch, let alone anything in his whole life. But a fall this far would surely kill someone, so he was careful not to force her off the limb with a brutal attack. This wasn't meant to hurt anyone, after all.

Now Anko, agile and smiling, walked alongside to the underside of the branch. She waved down at him. Soon, Anko wound make hand signs, pull a knife from her coat, summon a snake…do something. Soon, very slowly, she might lick her lips and leap from the underside of the branch, her feet connecting with the trunk of the tree, and she would run towards him, restarting their spar from this lulled interlude. He had seen it so many times, Anko gazing out to the sky as if nothing was wrong, as if this pause in their fight was something to be expected; a break if you will. She would tease him. Lure him into a false sense of security. Then, she would strike.

A lone shuriken came striking down, hitting the ground by his feet, but the aim was purposely faulty. He had seen her do this a thousand times. Throw one shuriken, then, half a dozen. But the other half dozen didn't come, and he was forced to look up, expecting a barrage of blades, but finding nothing but dead air. Something was different. Anko was not gazing straight out into the forest sky. Instead, she was looking straight at Kakashi, something she had never done, not once in all the times he had fought with her. He looked back. Her wide eyes were steady on his, even as she moved her foot an imperceptible degree down and over. His breath quickened. He felt the hard dirt floor of the forest beneath his thin-soled shoes. If she were to fall—but she never fell, not Anko. Still, she was staring at him, her gaze no longer expressionless. The intensity of her look reminded him of all the times they had tried to have sex upside down.

Once they had done it, only once. Hands clasped behind his head, he had stayed as still as possible while Anko twined herself around him like a vine. He had felt himself letting go, he had felt himself falling, and he had opened his eyes to find her staring at him. They were so close that he could see only her eyes, and he had stared into them, steadied himself even as his body moved, judging the movements of her pleasure in the minute contractions of her pupils, the flutter of her eyelashes.

Now their eyes connected in just that way, despite the space of air between them, and her intentions were revealed. Kakashi knew it before she moved her hands into an unfamiliar hand sign. From beneath him, the earth exploded and he felt himself falling into the caving rubble. She lifted her foot from the underside of the branch. Unchecked, her dive would be straight down into the ground below. Or to him, if he could catch her. He struggled in a panic to free himself from the earth tomb she had formed around him, and with desperation, began to form hand signs of his own.

She lifted her other foot.

The moment came; the balance shifted, and she was plummeting to him like something shot from the sky. He exchanged places with a log, freeing himself from the earth beneath him, and stepped forward, breaking the jutsu. Dimly, he heard gasps and shrieks from people coming up behind him, of Gai, of Asuma, their shouts of search completely ignored during the whole five minute ordeal that had been occurring right before his very eyes. But his eyes never left Anko, her agile body shaped like a Chinese character against the green parchment sky of leafs, her eyes dark with concentration, fear, and, he had time to think, a certain pleasure in what they were attempting to attain. It was her eyes he focused on, lifting his arms to her, hoping that the years of the past could balance them both against this moment.