Note: Thank you all for reading - no lengthy blathering notes this time!

Chapter 10 - Sweet Dreams

Kakashi bowed to the Hokage and followed Biwako-san rather unsteadily out of the living room. He was glad that she was carrying Naruto as he felt he might have dropped the basket he felt so weak and shaky.

He felt rather embarrassed at his behaviour with Jiraiya-sama, but it hadn't been nearly as humiliating as he had expected something like that would have been. Kakashi had never let go of his emotional control like that before, and he supposed it must have been because he was so exhausted that he didn't really care that Jiraiya-sama, one of the Legendary Sannin, had seen him in such a vulnerable state.

He trailed slowly after Biwako-san as she led him down the corridor to his bedroom and placed the baby on the floor near the corner of the room. Naruto was still asleep, and Kakashi expected Biwako to leave although he didn't really want her to. He needed something. He wasn't sure what it was exactly, but he didn't want to be alone just then and her presence was a comfort to him.

He hovered by the door trying to ignore the temptation to use the door frame to support his swaying body, and Biwako-san turned to him and smiled a bit, coming over to where he stood.

"Kakashi-kun, I really think you should try to get some sleep if you can, you look exhausted."

Kakashi nodded but couldn't find the strength to move his body, which had somehow, without his permission, propped itself against the door frame. He felt silly, but Biwako-san came over and helped him. She seemed to understand what was wrong, that he was just too tired to move without falling down, and she helped him over to sit on the futon and then offered to help him get undressed for bed.

He agreed reluctantly, but strangely he did not really mind. Her touch was gentle and he felt it warming him.

It was nice to receive attention, he thought. The only physical touches Kakashi had known, besides fighting of course, were his father's occasional pats on the head and the one time he had hurt himself training and his father had given him a piggyback ride home, Minato-sensei's occasional hair-ruffles or shoulder-squeezes and Rin's gentle touch when she healed him. Her touch had always been different to the other medics who mostly healed with the minimum of physical contact, and he wondered if it was because she had loved him. He hadn't known his mother, and once he had started training as a ninja his father had touched him infrequently, and had never given him a hug.

Jiraiya had hugged him earlier, but Kakashi felt his touch was different to Biwako-san's. He imagined that her touch was 'motherly', and he liked it. She made him feel special, as though she wanted to be with him for who he was himself, not just for his skills as a shinobi.

But who was he, Kakashi wondered, if you took away that set of shinobi skills? He was nothing else, but he badly wanted to be. The more time he spent in the midst of a family the more he wanted to be something more than just the sum of his jutsu and knowledge.

He knew it was strange for a fourteen-year-old boy to crave motherly affection when most boys his age tried to run from their parents' touch out of embarrassment, like Asuma did, but he didn't really mind. Kakashi knew that he had not lived a normal life, even by shinobi standards, and Biwako-san had told him that it was not wrong to want something for himself, or to do something simply because he enjoyed it. Minato-sensei had tried to tell him that years ago, but Kakashi knew he had been too stubborn to listen. He had sought only to do things which would increase his usefulness as a tool of Konoha and to eliminate all superfluous activities. He had always felt that his enjoyment of cooking had been borderline unacceptable, but because he had loved it so much he had reasoned it into acceptability by persuading himself that a good ninja has to eat properly. He knew now that he had been wrong and although it was difficult he decided to try to enjoy things for their own sake,instead of analysing their use to the Village.

While Kakashi enjoyed the luxury of Biwako-san's attention as she gently untied the sash on his kimono before removing it from his body and hanging it up carefully, and then coming back to help him off with the plain robe worn beneath it, he did not let her take his mask off. He couldn't show her his face. He didn't know why, and at one point while she was hanging up his clothes he almost pulled it off himself, and even put his fingers under the bottom of it to lift it over his head, but his nerve failed him.

She came back with a soft silk yukata which she gently helped him into, her fingers brushing against his skin ever so slightly as she pulled the shoulders of the robe into place. In that moment, which Kakashi would treasure for years to come, he felt so safe, so comfortable in the presence of another human being that he almost wished she would hold him in her arms and give him the comfort he needed. He knew she would hold him if he only reached out to give her a sign, as she was kind and didn't want to embarrass him or make him uncomfortable. But he couldn't reach out to her. Not yet, but one day he would be able to. Just as one day he would take off his mask and eat his dinner in front of everyone. Kakashi knew that there was no logical reason why he couldn't do these things now, but equally he just knew that he couldn't. It would be too personal, and impossible to go back from, and as much as he wanted it he just couldn't do it.

Kakashi knew that Biwako-san had been listening outside the living room door, and if he knew, it followed that Jiraiya-sama knew as well. He had sensed her there, but the unexpected mention of the mission he had tried so hard to put behind him had made him forget everything else as he had broken down completely.

He knew he would never have allowed that to happen if he hadn't been so utterly exhausted, but he felt oddly quite relieved that it had happened.

And he felt strangely glad that Biwako-san had overheard the whole thing, as he realised that he had wanted her to know how he felt but was not able to tell her directly. This way she knew without him having to tell her why he couldn't open up to her, and he was relieved that she seemed to understand.

As though she knew what he was thinking, which she couldn't possibly, Biwako-san finished tucking the sheets up under his chin and said softly

"You know I was by the door, don't you?"

She looked a bit guilty so to make her feel better and because it was the truth, Kakashi answered gently:

"Yes, but I don't mind."

Biwako-san looked at his face for a moment, their eyes meeting in silent understanding, and then she said softly "May I?" and gestured with her arms in a hugging motion.

Kakashi realised that he didn't mind what she did, as he trusted her almost completely, so he nodded, and she moved closer to him to sit on the futon beside his head, and lifted his head and shoulders gently onto her lap. She lifted him so gently that Kakashi thought she touched him as though he might break. Her warmth beneath his shoulders and upper back felt nice, and when she stroked his hair he felt as though he might die of pleasure. He closed his eyes and leaned into Biwako-san's hand, allowing his tense body to finally relax.

As he relaxed and let go, Kakashi felt the great ball of indescribable something that had gathered in his chest earlier begin to expand again, and it seemed as though something might explode. Jiraiya had stopped him before he had been able to really cry enough, he realised, and his chest felt tight and painful to such an extent that he began to panic a little. It felt the way it had in the cinema when he had that panic attack, but Kakashi felt he almost didn't mind if that happened here as he felt so safe in Biwako-san's arms. Here nothing could hurt him. He could break down here and not be judged.

Tthere was so much inside of him that still needed to be expressed. As he had let go with Jiraiya he had thought about that terrible mission which haunted his dreams, and the horrible fates of the children before him who had been caught trying to do what he had done. Those awful stories had been all the Palace staff had talked about when Kakashi had first arrived. How his predecessor had been killed. How a boy from the Hidden Lock Village had been killed. And they had gone into such detail. It was only after Kakashi had actually met the Key Daimyo that he really believed the tales and it wasn't until after the night he had killed the man that he understood their full horror.

It wasn't for himself that Kakashi had cried. He was a shinobi, an ANBU agent, at the very top of his profession, trained to kill and to withstand pain in all its forms. What the Key Daimyo had done to him had been the single most painful experience of Kakashi's whole ten years as a shinobi. He could only imagine what that would have been like for a civilian boy, untrained in the deep meditation and mind-diversion techniques that shinobi used to withstand torture.

His breathing sped up and he felt his breaths becoming shallow although he tried hard to breathe more slowly and deeply.

He hadn't even thought about his lost team mates, his father or his sensei, and the grief and guilt he could feel in his heart over their deaths was something he had never really let out, and it burned.

Just as Kakashi was about to give in to it all, Naruto let out a small, whimpering cry which called to him like a siren, and was sufficiently distracting that he forgot his difficulty with breathing and tried to get up.

Biwako-san pressed a gentle but firm hand to his chest to indicate that he shouldn't move, and she gave his hair a final stroke then went to see to Naruto.

Kakashi could tell that he wanted changing, but he wasn't sure if he was actually able to identify the baby's cries or whether it was his sensitive nose which alerted him. He couldn't really smell anything when Naruto started to cry but he wondered if it was a subconscious scent his nose was picking up which was beyond his level of awareness, but that his brain somehow interpreted.

He craned his neck anxiously to see as Biwako-san changed Naruto and then, as she seemed to know that Kakashi felt anxious to be close to him, she brought Naruto over to the bed and placed him in Kakashi's arms. Then she resumed her seat on the futon, lifting Kakashi to prop him up against her own body so that he could sit up without effort.

He held Naruto closely, trying to transmit all the love he felt through his touch, pressing the baby against his chest to feel the warmth of that small but solid body against his own. With Biwako-san behind him and Naruto held in front, Kakashi felt like he was the centre of a human sandwich, and while the feeling was rather strange he decided it was a feeling he liked. He had never been the centre of anything before, and had remembered when he was young looking in from the periphery at other children his own age with their parents. He knew of course that in years he was still young - still a child, in fact - but he didn't feel that way. Jiraiya-sama had given him something to look forward to, and he had promised to give him something pleasant he could look back on, so he really could not complain. Kakashi had always found hope where it seemed none existed, and now he had so much more than he had ever had before. He didn't want to forget the past by any means, or to diminish its memory, but at the moment all he had to look back on was sadness. If he had something happy to call to memory in hard times, Kakashi knew he could make it through. When he finally went to join Minato-sensei, Obito, RIn and his father he would be an old man with laughter lines around his eyes and a lifetime of good memories to tell them all about. If there was such a thing as an afterlife, and Kakashi really wasn't sure, he wanted to meet his mother for the first time and to be able to tell her that he had been happy.

Naruto was really getting active these days, Biwako thought, watching the baby push down with his strong little legs, and Kakashi alter his hold so that Naruto could push down onto the bed as though he were standing. Naruto loved to be raised into the air and 'whooshed' down again, and even more than that he loved to be thrown several feet up to be caught gently in Kakashi's expert hands.

Biwako watched Kakashi do this several times with great amusement, because he did it in complete silence with none of the usual noises that people make with babies. She had noticed too that when he spoke to Naruto it was as though he were speaking to an adult, not to a baby at all. She had commented on this, and he had looked puzzled, having apparently never observed an adult interact with a baby before. She had described it to him by saying that most people speak to a baby in a similar way to the way they speak to animals, but he hadn't understood that either. The only animals he had spoken to were his summoned ninken, and he generally spoke to them either as he would to an adult human or occasionally in their own language as a few of them did not know human speech.

He was a strange boy, but Biwako found Kakashi ever more endearing the more time she spent with him. He would look with wonder at the simplest of everyday things, yet would speak about complex jutsu and chakra theories as though they were as obvious as breathing.

Biwako recalled showing Kakashi how to darn a sock, and to how to make the repair flat so that it did not chafe, and he had watched intently with his sharingan, and then performed the darn perfectly on his first attempt, examining it with wonder when he had finished.

She loved this child, she realised. His short life had been so hard and painful, and yet he was really such a sweet soul that she couldn't help but fall for him over and over again.

And now he had not only let her help him change for bed, but seemed content to lie comfortably back in her arms, letting her stroke his unbelievably soft hair, and she could barely believe it. He had come so far in such a short time, considering the starting point when she had taken him in.

She kept forgetting that he was a deadly killer, but it would come to her at odd moments, just like now, when she realised he probably had several ways that he could kill her without even moving as she sat behind him on the futon.

Of course, with her husband being the Hokage and her son Asuma being a chunin she was used to being around shinobi, but neither her son nor her husband was a specialised assassin. They knew jutsu which were of use in an open fight or on the battlefield, or which could be used for defence. She could name practically all of Hiruzen's techniques, even though he was known as The Professor for his encyclopedic knowledge of Konoha's techniques. But Kakashi was a truly frightening child. Hiruzen had told her that he had been specialised as an elite assassin since he had become a chunin at the age of six, and had used his size and innocence to his advantage to get close to targets who would have been too wary to allow an older shinobi near. He was silent and quick, and knew techniques meant to end life as swiftly as possible, rather than to slow down or incapacitate an enemy. There was a big difference between the type of shinobi Kakashi was and the type her husband and son were.

She could never imagine Asuma being able to carry out Kakashi's mission to assassinate a feudal lord. She knew the basic details of the story Jiraiya had referred to so knew what had gone on and what Kakashi had done. Asuma, as much as she loved him, would not have had the emotional intelligence to handle it, and Biwako was glad for that. She didn't know what she would do if he were ever asked to do something as repulsive as that. But besides that, even as Asuma's mother she knew that he did not have the skills to act the part of a staff member or the knowledge to kill in one swift, clean move and to escape undetected. Asuma was skilled in straight-up fighting, but he would make a hopeless ANBU agent and he knew it. It was a completely different game.

But it wasn't Kakashi's fault, Biwako told herself as she kept on absently stroking his hair. She felt she could see the weight of those he had killed reflected in Kakashi's eyes. Although she knew this was a fanciful notion, he seemed to take it all very heavily and she respected the fact that he wasn't cold-hearted, even as a killer.

Just as Biwako thought Kakashi had fallen asleep he tipped his head back to look up at her, and whispered that Naruto had fallen asleep. Gently getting up, she took the baby and laid him in his cot, then returned to her spot on the bed.

"Naruto is getting so big now" she said softly, resuming her stroking of Kakashi's hair. "He's really a lot more alert now, it fantastic to see him doing so well."

"He's changed so much in only three months", Kakashi's voice was low and quiet. "I don't know how long I will be away with Jiraiya-sama, but I will miss so much of his development, even if we're only gone for a few months."

He was silent for a moment and Biwako didn't really know what to say so she waited.

"I don't know if I can leave him." His voice was even quieter now, barely a whisper. "I know you'll take better care of him than I can, but I will miss him."

"Kakashi, it is always hard to let a child go, but we all have to do it eventually, and it doesn't get much easier, even when they are fully grown. If you don't do this, or you'll miss out on so much. Enjoy what's left of your own youth Kakashi, and catch up with Naruto when he's older. Wouldn't you rather be a brother to him than a father anyhow? That way he might actually listen to what you have to say!" Biwako chuckled a little, recalling how her own kids had tried their best to go against their father's advice.

"Go and gain your own wisdom first, live your own life and when you come back, Naruto will be waiting for you and you can teach him everything you know about life as well as ninjutsu."

Biwako smiled and leaned in to kiss Kakashi's silver mop.

"You're asleep, aren't you?" she murmured into his hair. The lack of a response confirmed it but she continued to caress Kakashi's head for a while, hoping he could find it in himself to leave Naruto with her. It didn't seem to be an issue of trust that might stop him, but more his own great love for the baby and a real, parent-like need to be there for each step in 'his' child's journey.

She stayed still for a few more minutes before kissing Kakashi's head once more to hopefully give him the chance to fall asleep more deeply before she tried to move. She then carefully slipped out from beneath Kakashi's skinny little shoulders and took the baby with her as she left him in peace, silently hoping that he would sleep soundly.