Tomorrow, Kakashi knows, he is going to sell Sasuke.

He lowers his book when the key turns in the lock, and reminds himself that it's for the best. Obviously that's a rationalisation, but the worst part is how he also believes it.

When the door closes again, when Sasuke's dispensing with his shoes and jacket in the hallway, Kakashi's gaze has returned to the page. It wouldn't do to let Sasuke know he looked up.

At least, it wouldn't do to let Sasuke know any other night. Tonight…

Tonight he stares idly at the page and believes his own lies about the greater good and not having any real choice. That belief is the worst part because it makes it so implacably clear that there is no excuse, can be no excuse, for doing what he's going to do, to this boy who's arguably – Itachi likes to argue – the only person Kakashi's ever loved.

"Hey."

He lets the book fall into his lap then, meets Sasuke's eyes and matches his smirk. "Hey."

Itachi's wrong about that, wrong for once – for twice, because Itachi, unspeaking and unshakeable, still believes Sasuke will one day forgive them – since Kakashi hates himself far too much to love anyone so much his own smudged reflection as Sasuke.

The idea that Sasuke might love him is ludicrous, and too terrible to contemplate.

All the same his shoulders roll back as Sasuke steps into the room, relax into the posture of a man at home. It's all the welcome Sasuke needs to pass Kakashi by and help himself to Kakashi's liquor.

The scarecrow prince, they call him, after Kakashi bequeathed the old moniker on him. Hand-me-down insult to go with his hand-me-down clothes and hand-me-down abusers. The point is that unlike Kakashi, he still moves like a real prince – like Itachi, though they'd both deny it – like he's taking effortless possession of the room by entering it.

"I saved some rice," Kakashi offers, carefully blank.

Sasuke smiles at him knowingly, trying to be subtle about it and failing badly. It's the bright smile, the one that burns, sits like a brand on his lips. It was a long time before he knew Sasuke's face could still look so soft, around the intensity.

"So it was all right," Kakashi says. Normally he'd stop there, remain the hunter in the eternal cat-and-mouse game they're playing out, but what does it matter tonight... This is the last night in a long time, likely forever, that he'll be able to reach out for Sasuke and catch him, close his fingers around flesh instead of memory and air.

"Mmh," Sasuke mumbles. Maybe in reply, maybe in response to Kakashi's hands slipping underneath his shirt to find his hips. Sasuke's all angle and edge, with bones like knives sheathed just underneath his skin. Kakashi rests his face against the back of Sasuke's head, nudges Sasuke's hair away with his nose so he can lick up the nape of his neck.

The skin is a faded blue under his tongue. Kakashi never leaves marks, but Orochimaru likes to.

Sasuke says mmh again, more strained now, when Kakashi moves his hands, encircles Sasuke's waist with his arms. Leans his face forward, until his chin is resting against the mark where Sasuke's neck meets shoulder, the – let us be honest, this once – the slave brand.

He wants to say – he almost says –

Sasuke turns in his arms, hands light on Kakashi's arms and his mouth hard on Kakashi's.

It is all right, then. His hands fold around Sasuke's thighs, lifting him up onto the counter. It's easy because Sasuke's cooperating, and also because Sasuke's tiny for his age in addition to being acutely too young for him.

"Come to bed," he says, having kissed Sasuke's mouth and Sasuke's throat, his hands hot against Sasuke's stomach.

"It's late," Sasuke agrees.

"Yes," Kakashi says, though it's barely half past nine. "You should have come sooner."

"I had to look in on Sakura. You know that."

"You have such a devoted little sweetheart," Kakashi mutters, dragging his lips along Sasuke's jaw. The mockery is automatic, comforting. "I'm surprised her parents let her associate with a delinquent like you."

Sasuke's toes curl across his spine, kneading, needy. "They've liked me since they realised I'm – of the lavender persuasion."

It's both funny and entirely predictable that he doesn't say: since they realised I'm the exorcist who saved their daughter from a demon. Sakura won't have told them that, and they're not the kind of parents who know anything without being told.

Kakashi hasn't spoken more than fifty words to Sakura, but she's so clearly the sort of girl to have been raised by parents who'd express themselves that way, 'someone of the lavender persuasion', 'a follower of Oscar Wilde'. She's as useless to Sasuke as Kakashi himself, just another human manacle. He snorts, "That's not usually how I hear it."

Sasuke snorts too. "Well I'm not going to try anything with her, am I."

"I do hope not."

Sasuke's mouth quirks at the corner, a half-breed smile. His fingers go to Kakashi's buttons.

"Hey," Kakashi says, in place of everything he can't say, and pulls him off the counter and towards the bedroom.

Sasuke's a quiet lover, undemonstrative and difficult to please for a teenager. It wasn't always like this, but that's not a thought Kakashi can permit himself to have. So Sasuke is a quiet lover, undemonstrative and difficult to please for a teenager. It's about the breathing and the sighs, about the strength with which his fingers clutch. Kakashi knows.

From the very beginning, when Sasuke climbs into Kakashi's lap and then pulls Kakashi down over him, he looks straight into Kakashi's eyes. His pupils are blown wide open, eyes like black holes.

Kakashi has never wanted so deep inside someone.

And that too is inexcusable, because Kakashi is, he knows he is, a form a self harm. He's what Sasuke does when Sasuke hates himself too much to stand it

And Sasuke is so very broken, bones sticking out in all directions, all edge and angle and break, and if Kakashi could have loved him, if Kakashi could have – well, if Kakashi had managed to become a person who was able to look himself in the mirror, maybe things would be different.

Afterwards Sasuke untangles their hands to go fetch the rice, which he eats cold in bed. For a stupid second Kakashi wishes Sasuke wasn't the tidiest eater he's ever seen, so that it would be indulgent to let him.

It's very quiet now, for a long time. They speak so much through their shared silences.

Then when the bowl and chop sticks have been put away, there's the most remarkable sign of trust: Sasuke fishes under the bed for his school bag. Mundane education isn't of great import in the exorcist community, and so it's just easier to outsource, to send their children to any regular school. And Sasuke's never cared about mundanes – except for the damn girl – but he's certainly always cared about being the best at anything he does.

Kakashi toys with the idea of simply resuming his four hundred and seventy fourth reread of Come Come Paradise, but in the end looks at Sasuke's fingers, curled around the library book in the way that means he enjoys it.

"Ah," Kakashi mutters, catching sight of the faded title. "And in the end we were all just human, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness."

He read the book four times through, senior year, for that one line.

It's not a challenge when Sasuke says, "I don't know that I believe in love." They're beyond challenges with each other.

Kakashi stretches out on his side. "I used to say the same thing all the time."

"But not anymore." Sasuke doesn't allow the question mark in his inflection, but it's there all the same, in the slope of his shoulder.

"Wasn't any point. People just set about trying to prove you wrong."

"Hmm," Sasuke says, eyes on the book again even though it's closed, and it dawns on Kakashi that he hadn't wanted that but maybe Sasuke does.

He starts pushing the school bag off the bed, slowly so Sasuke could easily interfere. Slowly, because an unwary movement might shatter his universe. "Do you have a test?"

"Not in a while."

"And yet you're studying." Kakashi snorts, shakes his head. "Well, I suppose I already knew you were an – arse licker."

Sasuke's responding snort turns into a smirk. "Lucky for you." These cheap, practiced rejoinders have the solidity of things that don't matter very much, of the grim and greasy, the grounding.

"Mmh," Kakashi says, the sound muffled against Sasuke's hip.

Sasuke doesn't usually allow himself vulnerability, not verbally, but he asks now, "Did you want to go to university?"

"I did," Kakashi says, words thoughtful and slow, spaced out around the subtext. "Go to university, that is. You know that." He graduated summa cum laude from a famous seat of learning, which Sasuke knows perfectly well. He's never lied to Sasuke, though he's never told him the whole truth either. "It wasn't important to me."

"You're such an arsehole." Sasuke was never able to keep it secret, that university is everything to him now, was so completely incapable of it that it didn't even occur to Kakashi until much later that he might have tried.

That's what his dreams have been shorn down to, leads in the margins of library tombs. Exorcist royalty, dreaming of a dorm room with a lock, of books that might hint how to unravel Orochimaru's slave brand. It's so absurd that Kakashi could laugh, Kakashi who hasn't laughed in years and isn't sure his mouth would accommodate the sound.

"Yes," he says, helplessly honest faced with the slope of Sasuke's stomach.

Sasuke sighs, rolling onto his side. His fingers skim over Kakashi's face, catch in his hair. He touches Kakashi with thoughtless and proprietary ease, like Kakashi might touch his dog. There was a time when his touch would have been reverent, trembling with more meaning than it could readily sustain, but Kakashi ruined that like he ruined everything else. "And you? All day…"

"I got a phone call."

He has got several phone calls, because Minato Namikaze has never been a subtle or patient man, and Kakashi has owed him too much for too long to simply ignore him now.

Sasuke never asks about Kakashi's work, any more than Kakashi asks about his, but he has the right to by now and must be beginning at least to understand that.

This time, Kakashi wishes he would ask, so he could just answer, so he didn't have to say –

"I should," he starts, finds himself gratefully distracted by Sasuke leaning over to kiss below his ear. "I need to ask something."

"Okay."

"But not now."

"Okay," Sasuke says again, a greater measure of trust than Kakashi had first expected he was capable of giving, much less to Kakashi.

When Kakashi first saw him again, after – well, after Sasuke's world had gone to pieces – offered him a ride away from the pouring rain, Sasuke told him in no uncertain terms to go to hell.

When they ran into each other in Orochimaru's building, he seemed particularly, viciously pleased about that decision.

It was much later, after weeks and weeks of stolen glances and odd sentences and Kakashi taking to sometimes smoking in the patches of sun between Sasuke's school and Orochimaru's compound, that Sasuke got in his car.

There had been another demon attack that day, and maybe that mattered, but all in all Kakashi thinks not.

"Your mum," he says now, with a hesitant softness which is false but necessary in order to keep the word from being an incision, sliding his arms around Sasuke's back. Sasuke has good skin, smooth and pale, very little scarring apart from the mark on his shoulder. Kakashi mouths it, the dark lines of Orochimaru's ownership and the shadows beneath of Itachi's betrayal, and Kakashi's, and yes, even Mikoto's. He waits until Sasuke's stopped gasping before he continues, "How is she?"

Sasuke won't say.

"You know," Kakashi continues, "I could…"

Sasuke stills over him, mouth partially open. Stills like an animal discovering the hunter. "It's not like that." Then he laughs, a short filthy bark of actually unhinged laughter. "You won't do shit."

"I didn't mean like that," Kakashi agrees, ignoring the outburst like he ignores every glimpse of unfiltered Sasuke slipping through the convenient lies that they're all right and might one day be fine, dragging his hands up Sasuke's naked back, spreading them across his shoulder blades.

Sasuke's face is gone from view, pressed against his chest. "It doesn't matter. Anyway it's all right. It's not so bad. He just really wants to put that fucking snake in and – it's not so bad."

Kakashi, who started out thinking he'd have to build up to it, has stopped thinking even that he should ask.

Really, who was he pretending for? He was never going to ask.

There are things that you have to do, he remembers reading to Naruto, from Naruto's favourite book, back in the days when people still pretended Kakashi had any childhood left, and sometimes stuck him with the younger kids, even though you don't dare to. Because otherwise you're not a person at all, just a piece of filth.

Well, Kakashi's filth. He's made his peace with that.

"I suppose Manda does tint a little lavender, in the right light," he says. Then he spends a long time in silence, stroking Sasuke's shoulders while Sasuke breathes.

After it's evened out, his breathing, Kakashi holds him and lets him sleep for six or seven hours before rolling him over, because he always thinks too much at night. He kisses down from the base of Sasuke's throat, is at his sternum when Sasuke's eyes blink open. Sasuke sighs, too sleepy for speech, spreads his legs.

In the morning, by the time Kakashi's avoided four calls, Sasuke wakes up with his nose in Kakashi's armpit and makes a face but still straddles him, because he always gets horny in the mornings.

The fifth call comes in the kitchen, where Kakashi's drinking coffee – only a little Irish – and Sasuke eats that funny old-man breakfast he likes, oatmeal and green tea and some disgusting cereal with nuts.

"Yes," Kakashi says, because he has to.

There must be something about his tone, because Sasuke looks up at him with his eyes entirely unreadable.

Minato Namikaze's voice has gone past strained and returned to implacability, the voice of orders. The time for asking is almost over.

"Today," Kakashi says. The word has lain on his tongue for three weeks and it's better to say it now, when it can still sound like his decision.

He turns to Sasuke, who's still looking at him but also still eating, wary but quite calm. The phone feels like a weapon in his hand, like a weapon used to feel before it began to feel like part of his hand.

"Let's go for a drive."

"Okay," Sasuke says. He's young enough, in Kakashi's kitchen, to lick his mouth clean of milk, and another time it wouldn't have made Kakashi feel so gross, or so hopelessly in love.

"Let's go."

"Okay," Sasuke says again, catching on to the hurry.

It's unfair, probably, Kakashi should let him come prepared, but this is no longer a safe place.

Without protest Sasuke tugs on his hoodie and follows him, remains apparently unalarmed by the glimpsed Kevlar and garrotte wire as Kakashi puts on his work clothes. He might assume that should they be used, they'd be used for his protection. It's not necessarily untrue. "Should I?"

"No," Kakashi says. This too is betrayal, but it'll be simpler if Sasuke's not armed beyond what he always carries.

Seven miles away, in the underheated confines of Kakashi's car, Sasuke says, "This is what you needed to ask."

"Yes," Kakashi says, and then has to correct himself. "To say."

This is when alarm comes, tension creeping up Sasuke's spine and freezing his face, so that looking at him is like looking at someone deep under water, on the far side of thick ice.

"You know Minato Namikaze?"

"Yes," Sasuke says, rather impatiently. Fair enough: everyone knows the shifter spokesperson, and Sasuke hasn't just read the papers or seen him on television. Sasuke has eaten breakfast at his table, too, once upon a time.

Kakashi, who's talked and talked, built walls and labyrinths of words until he could finally get himself lost, finds himself mute again. He was mute, for a time, a year almost, back when the world had changed: when his parents had just died. But that was ten years ago, more.

"Are you in trouble with him?" Sasuke asks carefully, searchingly. Like he's up on the ice now, but it's thin and could break underfoot.

"That's just what I'm avoiding," he says lightly. And then there's nothing light left, for all the words are light, a cliché with all the meaning worn away, "I owe him."

"What does he want?"

Kakashi slants a look at him then, has been keeping an eye on him in the rear view mirror but owes him something more direct now. "He's been looking for you."

Sasuke blinks, a slow deliberate movement. "What does the hell does he want with me? Orochimaru doesn't –"

"It's not about Orochimaru." Outside the window there are houses, finer now, ten miles worth of finer than their starting point. "It's about a mate bond."

Sasuke blinks again, quicker now. "I don't understand." Doesn't want to understand, more like.

Kakashi shrugs, starts reciting Wikipedia in his bright news anchor voice: "Shifters form mate bonds. If their mate dies, or they don't get to consummate the bond, they die. Usually it's with another shifter, but they can bond with humans too. Or, as it happens, with exorcists."

"Minato Namikaze is going to die if he doesn't fuck me?" His eyebrow is up, his mouth arch. This is how he speaks to Orochimaru, trying and entirely failing to cover actually insane hatred with sarcasm, with words. It takes a lot of love, Orochimaru once said, to hate someone this much.

"He has a son who will."

"That's bullshit. Konohamaru's not even twelve yet, there's no fucking way he's matesick, what the hell are you –"

"Naruto," Kakashi cuts him off. "And in retrospect it's so bloody obvious, so don't pretend."

He remembers being a teenager, and having no excuse, for anything. Letting Sasuke down again and again, until he'd soiled them both so badly there was no way to make amends, to even try – and then seeing that shifter kid, Minato's older kid – the lovechild, the bastard – with his entire heart in his eyes, and knowing he was going to choose Sasuke over the entire world. That's when Kakashi stopped thinking about inexcusable and started thinking about unforgiveable.

For a moment, in the present, Sasuke stills again, but it's an entirely different stillness. If there's violence, this is when it will come, and for a long, long second Kakashi thinks it will. Sasuke's a very good fighter, was a very good fighter even before Kakashi taught him anything.

Or tried to, at any rate. Kakashi never did manage to teach him anything worthwhile: could never push Sasuke as hard as he should, around the guilt. So he winds up telling him too much instead, after the useless training sessions, and then Sasuke pushes himself. Kakashi has no excuse for that either, because Sasuke pushes harder than is safe, by far, and Kakashi's too ashamed, too useless, to stop him.

Bu in the end they've never been physical with each other, not in that way, and they aren't now: Sasuke doesn't attack.

Sasuke does kick open the car door and throw himself out.

Kakashi's hand shoots out, grabs him around the throat. The sudden real danger activates the self-defence release built into Sasuke's seal, the one that Sasuke's been known to jump off highrises to trigger, but it's not enough, not for this. Kakashi pumps hostile magic into him, electrocuting him into limpness before dumping him back in the car seat.

"You'll do what you're told," he says to Sasuke, which is a completely absurd thing to say. "I did something to Minato Namikaze once. Took something from him. I owe him this."

"You owe him me?"

"I owe him his son's life."

"I understand," Sasuke says.

"Anyway," Kakashi goes on, like he's some Chekov character stuck in a painfully parallel dialogue, "it's no worse than being Orochimaru's prize hostage. You like Naruto."

"I understand perfectly."

"He's matesick now, he'll be dying soon. I guess you know he's been up north, in the thick of it. Apparently the whole mess started before he went, but he was sure he could ride it out – well, you know what he's like, the little fool."

"What I understand," Sasuke says in a rather terrible voice that Kakashi's never heard from him before, hadn't fully realised he was capable of, "is that you're planning to pay your debts by handing me over to be shared by your animal friends."

"That –"

But they're at the gates, security tapping at their window. For a stupid second, for an actually insane moment that burns something inside him, he thinks how he could no longer take Sasuke away from here.

He didn't know he'd considered it.

In any case with the gates locking behind them and six guards around the car it's a moot point. There is nothing to be done except step out into the light.

Apparently Sasuke has reached the same conclusion, because nobody has to reach for him. Kakashi and the guards exchange greetings, and Sasuke stands stiff and silent, started at but not directly addressed. The scarecrow prince, the Uchiha boy bartered away in exchange for peace and progress, distractingly beautiful even in his dirty sleep clothes.

"This way," Genma says, and with Sasuke a hands-breadth away and utterly unreachable, Kakashi follows him into the building.