.

I saw that you were perfect, and I

love you. Then I saw that you were not

perfect and I loved you even more.

"So. Talk to Hiwa lately?"

Genma shifts, settling his elbow on his pillow and propping his head on it. The sheets fall down to his hips at the movement, and Genma feels a sort of mild satisfaction at the way Kakashi's eye traces down his naked torso. "Have you?"

"Perhaps."

Genma squints. "Did you fuck me just to get gossip out of me?"

"No need. I already have the gossip."

"Uh-huh."

"Mah, can't I just want you for your muscles and pretty face like everybody else?"

"... fine. I'll bite. What did Hiwa say to you?"

Because she's said not a single thing to Genma, and it's starting to eat away at him. Which is his own fault. But so many days spent talking to her, getting to know her, just being around her, and he's felt her absence like a ghost in his house.

When he's in the jonin lounge and he hears the coffee maker go on, he expects it'll be her. He sees a figure lounged under a tree reading and it takes him off guard when he realizes they lack the mane of dark brown hair and sharp hazel eyes. If he looks to his right, the side she always stood on, it surprises him when he finds somebody else walking on it, chatting away with him.

He misses her.

He has no right to, none at all, but he does and it fucking aches.

"Oh, you know. It's a bit of a blur—so much that it's hard for me to remember, exactly. But I think it went something like 'once we got back to the village, the first time he saw me, he just… pulled all the way back' and 'am I a doormat for not hating him?' Oh, and my personal favourite: 'He told me he wasn't going anywhere, and then he just walked away'," Kakashi says, complete with a slightly higher voice. He shrugs. "There were some tears, too."

With a sigh, Genma drags a hand down his face.

Each quote is an ice cube in his gut, and that last one chills his insides like a snap freeze.

Kakashi hums. "Don't tell me you thought you could just pull away from her without making a mess."

"Can you at least try and sound like you aren't having fun with this?"

"Fine." In a tone cold enough to freeze a volcano, Kakashi says, "You're making an ass of yourself. Somebody who cares about you is hurting and confused because you've decided protecting yourself is more important than her feelings, even if you think you're doing it to help her."

Genma sits up fully and stares at Kakashi.

Kakashi lets his book fall away for a few seconds to smile at Genma.

To figure out which of the two ranges Kakashi actually falls on, Genma would pay any amount of money because he doesn't know what to make of this dichotomy. It's not unlike Kakashi—jumping from one extreme to another is on-brand enough, considering Kakashi would eat nails before letting anybody get a proper gauge on how he feels.

Which is a sentiment Genma has no room to judge on, at this point.

But it's not helping the already frustrating situation that Genma's gotten himself into, thanks to his own stupidity.

"No matter what you do, you should work fast," Kakashi says, back to cheery. "Chop chop. No time like the present. Seize the day."

First, it was Raidou. Then it was Izumo and Kotetsu, needling him at lunch a few days ago. Then it was Gai, having caught wind of the situation and peppering him with questions during training.

And now it's Hatake Kakashi, the absolute last person who should ever be giving relationship advice.

Not that any of them are wrong. They're not. But they don't understand. None of them have a fucking clue what they're talking about, except maybe Raidou and now, definitely Kakashi. The only one who was there, and the only one, Genma suspects, that might have some idea of what his current situation is like.

So, as tempted as Genma is to just keep telling people to shove off, he can't help but wonder if it's time for him to take the fucking hint. Time to quit being a hypocrite—he was the one who said he wanted to be friends, with their arrangement. As it is, he's acting like a shitty almost-whatever-the-fuck-that-was—he's definitely being a shitty friend, too. Which he knew but had hoped to ignore.

Hard to ignore the consequences when they're thrown in your face.

Because he could put up with the ache in his chest of not having Hiwa around, but he can't deal with knowing he's given her that same ache, too.

A bit annoyed and ready to have his room to himself, Genma says, "You sound like Gai, right now."

And right on cue, Kakashi disappears out of the bed in a puff of smoke.

Hiwa already has her book over her face and a groan on her lips, fully aware of what's about to come, when somebody slams their hand down on her door. Around the peach and apricot scented candle flickering on her table, she can smell ink and fresh linens, along with a hint of sweat.

"You brat!" Jiraiya says, his voice muffled through the door. "What about 'meet me at two' did you not understand?"

Hiwa looks to where Rei was situated half on the rug and half off—as much as she could fit on the rug, with the table in the way—and finds the spot empty and her slider wide open.

Her head falls back onto the couch.

Great. Right when Hiwa would have loved to have her giant murder wolf kicking around (because Jiraiya hasn't wormed his way out of Rei's shit book quite yet), Rei has to go and ditch her.

Some days she wonders if she has a cat stuck inside a wolf's body for a ninken partner.

"I know you're in there! Open the damn door, or I'll open it for you!"

"Kami, do you have to be so dramatic?" she mutters. She slips a bookmark into the book and throws off her blanket.

"Yes? It's been two hours! I happen to have things to do."

She trudges to the door, dragging her heels. The door opens with a yank. "That was rhetorical," she says. "I was asking for my own benefit." She frowns. "And what things do you have to do? Go peep in on some women?"

With the door out of the way, Hiwa gets the full force of Jiraiya's scowl. "That's none of your business."

"Alright."

She steps aside and gestures him in.

Jiraiya steps inside, grumbling to himself the whole way.

She will give him some credit—he didn't come through the window, like everybody else seems inclined to do and like she'd expect from him, based on past experience.

He gives the room an appraising look. "Huh. Looks like my gal did a decent job in here."

"Yeah," Hiwa says. "She told you to go suck ass, too."

Jiraiya makes a vaguely annoyed sound in the back of his throat. "'Course she did."

"Not surprised?"

"No. And you wouldn't be if you knew who it was."

"Who was it? I want to thank her."

"None of your business."

Hiwa rolls her eyes. "Tell her I said 'thanks', at least?"

"We'll see."

She wanders into the kitchen while Jiraiya makes himself at home on the couch. "Coffee? Tea? Water?"

"Tea."

"I've got peach or jasmine," she says, rifling through the glass jar. Fresh stuff—she can smell it. And it's not anything she bought herself.

Somebody put this tea in her house and has been drinking it.

She puts a pin in that one.

"Jasmine."

So, she sets the kettle and leans her elbows on the kitchen counter, staring at Jiraiya out of the corner of her eye. "What's the meeting about, anyway? Another mission already?"

"Not yet," Jiraiya says. "Few more weeks on that one."

Which, as luck will have it, might very well send her out right after the 10th. She's grateful for that—having a mission to bury her head in sounds like exactly what she's going to need.

"Oh. Awesome."

"This is about your whole Nara business."

Hiwa stiffens.

The sound of the radio drones on in the background, some sad song with a steady guitar strum to lead along the crooning voice as it sings.

"What about it?" Hiwa asks quietly.

Jiraiya narrows his eyes on her. "I know that voice. What do you already know?"

"Shikaku made some dumb, ominous comments to me while I was handing in my mission report a few days ago."

"What kind of dumb, ominous comments?"

She pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs, knowing what's about to come. She can't lie—Jiraiya is his own kind of lie detector, even without Inuzuka senses. Being upfront is her only option but she's sure he's about to skewer her.

"Something about how Genma had already handed in his mission report."

The temperature in the room drops about ten degrees. "And what, pray tell, might Shikaku have found in there that would interest him?"

"Didn't you read it?"

"No," he says. "I was there for the debrief. The reports were given directly to Shikaku because he's the one using the information to form our strategy to deal with Kusa."

The kettle screams.

Hiwa pushes herself off of the counter and busies herself with pouring the cup of tea, her back to Jiraiya. She stirs the cup, sets the spoon in the sink, and turns back around.

Jiraiya watches her with hawk eyes as she brings over his tea. The saucer hits the glass tabletop with a soft clink.

"Hiwa."

"I taught myself how to use the Nara shadow techniques."

Jiraiya never knew because Hiwa's never mentioned it in her reports and Kakashi doesn't turn his reports in. No other Konoha ninja has seen her use it—the only other two people who knew she could do it were Shinji and Hiro, and they're not telling anybody her secret anytime soon.

"You… idiot. Why did you never tell me?"

Hiwa rolls her eyes. "Wasn't relevant?"

"Oh, try again."

"None of your business."

"Seriously? Why did you never—seriously?"

"What?" Hiwa says. "Why is this such a big deal to you?"

She expected annoyance, sure, for keeping information from him. But this is a step beyond what she thought she was going to get.

"Because who the fuck do you think has been running interference for you between the Nara and the Inuzuka? And between those chuckle fucks and Lord Hokage?"

Hiwa's mouth goes dry. "... you have?"

"Yes," he says. "I have. And now that job is going to be infinitely more difficult."

"You never mentioned you were involved," she says. "And nobody told me you were."

"You think I'd be that obvious about it? I have agents getting involved."

"Since when?"

"Since I heard you were going around asking random asshats on the street to marry you and realized that this was eating away at you."

"They weren't random. I did research."

"Cool. Not the point."

She lets out a long breath. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you didn't need to know."

"I don't think you get to decide what I do and don't need to—"

"You're seventeen!" he says. "I mean, fuck, kid. You're too young to have to be worrying about this in the first place! Kami. I just wanted to make your life a bit easier, alright?"

Hiwa takes a step back, unsure of what to say.

"Look. I'm at least sort of responsible for you, and I have been since Lord Third dumped this—this little wisp of a twelve-year-old on my hands and told me to give her marching orders. What else was I supposed to do?"

Jiraiya rakes a hand through his disastrous hair. "And I get that I haven't always done… the best things. At all. Alright? I've fucked up along the line. But somebody has to look out for you. No parents to help you out on the front lines, no jonin sensei. Nobody on your team. I was the only one left who could try and take the weight of the world off your shoulders, and that's what I've been trying to do. 'Specially since your dad was gone for real. So, yeah. When I found out that that was a thing I put some of my agents on it, to try and put a wedge in things. Prolong it. Make you more trouble than you were worth. Which worked well enough, once you and Shiranui got hitched because by that point, neither of them had the energy to chase too hard."

She walks over to the counter and feels like she should do something, but there's nothing that feels right, no kind of physical contact that she can extend to him, so she settles for closer proximity.

The look he gives her is still sour, but the frustration in it has ebbed. "And now you've gone and made yourself valuable again."

"Oops," she mutters.

"Understatement," he says. "Because right now, it sounds like the Nara think they have some kind of trump card."

"Something to do with the shadow technique."

"I'm guessing so, yeah."

"But it's not a blood limit," Hiwa says. "There's no inherent claim they have on somebody, just because they can use it."

When Jiraiya doesn't immediately agree, dread pools in her gut.

"Right?" she asks.

"From what I know."

"You think they might."

"I think this village has a shit ton of laws and rules and regulations and exceptions and I don't know every single one of them."

"Would Lord Hokage take their side, if they pulled something out of their ass? Tsume said he probably wouldn't, and from what I've always heard, it doesn't sound like he would. But if you weren't concerned you wouldn't have even brought it up."

"Any other time, I'd say they don't have a chance."

"... but?"

"But, Kusa has him on edge right now, and Lord Hokage might very well give them what they want just to shut them the fuck up so he can focus on more important matters and keep on the good side of his jonin-commander. Right now isn't exactly the best time to piss off his most valuable strategic mind."

"Is it that bad with Kusa?"

"That and worse. They're teetering between ready for war and being scared," Jiraiya says. "Can't seem to make up their mind. Anytime they meet our ninja on the borders, they run before conflict breaks out. But they've had no problem sending their forces ninja into Fire Country. That hot spring was one hit of a handful where we were taking out Kusa ninja in the country. Right now we're looking to get a force together and scare them off our border."

Which translates to 'we're going to send a squad of ninja to hunt on the borders and take out any Kusa ninja they come across'. It's an act of aggression, an ultimatum—Kusa can either answer in kind and kick off a war, or they can realize they're outmatched and back off.

"Well, shit," Hiwa mutters. "Don't blame him for not wanting to deal with this with a possible war on the horizon."

"Exactly. Which I'm sure Shikaku knows damn well is the case, too."

"Shouldn't this be low on your priority list, too? Not that I don't appreciate the help, but…"

"Well, yeah. Which is why I can't have idiots wasting two hours of my time."

"Sorry."

"But I'm making time. Because sometimes that's what you do."

"Thanks," she murmurs.

He nods. "I'll get this figured out, alright? But no more secrets. Surprises like this aren't going to help us any. I'll see what I can do—have an agent or two start hunting through some of the older laws and all that, when there's time."

"What are the odds that they might have something?"

"I won't guess at something when I don't have any information," he says. "Until I know what they have, I can't say."

Hiwa takes her lip between her teeth.

Because obviously she's worried about whatever the Nara are about to try and pull, and how that might complicate things. But another war? This soon? Damn if that doesn't send a shock of ice right down into her bones.

Konoha isn't ready for another war—she's not ready for another war.

Jiraiya claps her on the shoulder. "I mean it. Don't worry about this—any of this. Just deal with getting through the next two weeks."

"Easier said than done."

"I know," he says.

She gives him a weak smile. "Thank you. Really. It… it means a lot. To know that you're looking out for me, like that."

"Yeah? Try and remember that the next time I lift something from your mission reports—"

Hiwa groans. "Nevermind, get out of my house."

He gives her a cheeky grin and a wink, then he's gone out the window.

And in the silence of her house, Hiwa smiles to herself.

When the next day somebody knocks on her door, Hiwa starts to wonder if she's going to have to start hiding around the village again just to get some uninterrupted reading time.

Naturally, she doesn't make any move to answer the door. Rei lifts her head out of curiosity, but is content to ignore it, too, and settles herself back down on the rug, her current favourite nap-spot in the house.

"I know you're in there."

Rei pins her ears back and snarls at the door.

Genma.

"Do you?" she answers.

"I think so, yeah."

"Then just come in—the door's not locked."

"You don't lock your door?" he asks, slipping inside. He shuts the door behind him and does, in fact, lock it.

"No," she says. "Because I don't feel the need to lock my door when I'm behind it."

He makes a face but doesn't comment.

She closes her book around her thumb and watches him as he slips his shoes off and shuffles into the apartment. He takes an appraising look around.

"Nice, huh?" she says.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah."

She doesn't think the air was this uncomfortable around them even when they were actual strangers.

Hiwa gestures at the armchair with her book. "You can sit down."

He snorts, and from the wry smirk that lingers on his lips, she can imagine that he's aware of the awkwardness on the same level as she is.

"What can I do for you?" she asks, once he's settled in.

"A trip to a cafe would be nice, honestly."

She blinks.

Genma clicks his teeth against the senbon, and Hiwa can hear the way his heartbeat hammers in his chest. "There's a cute one just down the street," he says. "I've heard their pastries are some of the best in Konoha."

"Right now?"

"Yep."

She should say no. She wants to say no.

But the exhaustion that seems woven into the fabric of him, the droop in his shoulders and the tiredness of his eyes, and the way he's staring at her like she's some kind of novelty, it gets her.

"Alright. Let me get dressed."

.

.

The light blue dress flutters in Hiwa's lap as a breeze rolls over them.

She didn't do much other than put on some clothes—her hair was already braided, albeit messily, and nothing about this situation is worth throwing on mascara and lip gloss. So here she is. Sitting in a new dress, across from Genma at some cafe ten minutes down the street from her new apartment, torn between the comfortable warmth in her chest from being around Genma again and the discomfort of everything unsaid that lingers between them like a smog.

"What can I get for you two?" the waitress asks, once they've had about ten minutes of awkward silence between them to look at the menus.

Genma hands the menu to the woman and smiles. "I'll take the daifuku assortment plate and a green tea."

"Just a coffee, please," Hiwa says. "With cream, two sugar, and cinnamon, if you don't mind."

It gets her an odd look, but all the waitress says is, "Of course. I'll bring those right over for you."

And again, the two lapse into silence.

There's so much Hiwa wants to say that she can't fathom going back to their usual routine of twenty questions, random chatter and people- watching, and all the other crutches they relied on before to keep the back and forth alive.

It feels too mundane. Like a farce.

"What were you reading, when I came in?"

She looks at him incredulously. That's what he asks, in the face of everything?

There's a soft request in how he returns the look, though, that melts away the annoyance.

"A Tale of Green Hands," she answers. "It's a book about a medic-nin who runs—"

"—a mini-hospital out of her house to try and treat ANBU patients that always avoid the hospital."

"You've read it."

"Borrowed it from the library a few months back," he says. He smirks. "Branching from the romance, huh?"

She rolls her eyes. "Yes, I'm reading something that isn't a romance."

"What got you into it?"

"I picked it up back while I was in Wind Country," she says, trying not to pull a face at that. She shrugs. "Since the author is from Suna, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of perspective he might have of a Konoha ninja."

"I didn't know that," he says.

"That the author is from Suna?"

"Yeah. I figured they were at least from Fire Country 'cause it's pretty accurate, all things considered. Dated, yeah, but not so far off."

"It's old enough, you're right." She runs her thumb up and down one of her braids, tapping her sandalled foot against the ground. "The author wrote it after the Second Ninja War—he was part of an exchange program that they ran in the interwar years to try and foster a better relationship between Konoha and Suna. We got some of Suna's poison students, they got some of our medic-nin in training. Did a bit of an information swap. Nothing huge, but a kind of show of grace, I guess. The guy who wrote the book was one of the poison students they sent over, so he wrote a lot of it based on first hand experiences."

Genma cocks his head, flicking the senbon up and down with his tongue. "How'd you find that out?"

"I've got a Wind Country copy, remember? Different stuff was printed in it. They didn't put the biography in the prints anywhere outside of Wind Country. Though, I think that was only the first run of it—after that, they stopped putting it in any of the copies. My copy was second hand, so it was old enough to have it."

"Huh," he says. "I'd wondered if Tsubaki was based off of Tsunade—this just makes me think more that she is. She probably would have been heavily involved in a program like that, if not running it herself. She butt heads with the Suna ninja more than anybody. I can see how she'd want first crack at any information on their poisons that she could get."

Hiwa blinks. "I never even thought of that, honestly," she says. She tugs on her braid harder. "But it… makes a lot of sense."

He grins at her, crooked and easy, and Hiwa's heart somersaults.

She smiles back before thinking about it.

"You think?" he asks.

"Well, yeah. I mean, I might go and look into it a bit, later. Because I'm curious now. But I think that's a solid theory."

"Sounds like fun," Genma says. "We could always drop by the library after we're done here."

And the smile dampens like tiny embers flickering under the first dribbles of a rainshower.

This is why this entire trip is a bad idea—the way he can so smoothly work his way through these interactions, acting like nothing ever happened. He might be able to switch right back to how things used to be, but she can't, and she can't handle being around him if he doesn't understand that.

The waitress picks this moment to bring their things by, saving Hiwa from having to answer.

Genma doesn't press her for one, even after the waitress is gone.

Hiwa stirs her coffee and watches as Genma picks at his daifuku, ripping off little chunks and dipping it into his tea before he pops it into his mouth. She can read the unease in his posture, and how it grows as the silence stretches on, neither of them willing to break it again.

When she does take a sip of her coffee, she finds that it's not that bad, at least. Better than she expected. No comparison to Wind Country, but a step above what she usually finds within Konoha, and she marks the place in her head as somewhere she'll have to come back to, once she can block the association between the place and this awkward situation.

She's half done her cup when Genma clears his throat. "So."

Her cup hits the plate. "So?"

"I think we need to talk about what this is."

And because Hiwa is a coward who is nowhere near ready to have this conversation, she pushes her chair back and clears her throat. "Shit, sorry. I forgot I had a meeting with Jiraiya this afternoon—something about information he wants to go over from my mission report."

Genma frowns. "Hiwa…" But whatever he sees in her face has him shaking his head. "Yeah, alright. But—just, before you go."

"Yeah?"

"The Lunar Festival tomorrow," he says. "Want to go together?"

And if she felt like an asshole for lying her way out of a conversation they both know they need to have, she feels like a double asshole because if she had any doubt that his intention of setting things right were earnest, this wipes them away.

The Lunar Festival is a mess of people and crowds and they both know that. And they both know full well that it's not somewhere Genma will want to be.

But he knows she does. And he's offering to go with her.

It's an olive branch if she's ever seen one and if he's going to take three steps towards her in cleaning up whatever this mess is, then Hiwa thinks the least he deserves is for her to take a step towards him, too.

She manages a smile for him. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah. Sure. Swing by my apartment around six."

The grin he gives her reminds her of how and why she's screwed.

It's not some big, blinding thing, that could light up an entire room or power a village. There are no sexy eyes that go along with it, or anything stupid like all the romance novels like to do, where the male lead's grin is some kind of seduction deus ex machina.

Genma's grin hits her because it's subtle and sweet and a little off-kilter, but uniquely his in the way that it comes so easy, the same way his kindness does. Anything from cracking a joke to saving his life can earn you that grin, because he values the little and the large, the easy and the challenging. It's a grin of somebody who's been stomped on by the world to the point that it's like he expects the boot to keep coming down, and he's grateful when every once in a while, the world decides to prove him wrong.

Hiwa clears her throat again, hoping the tightness in her throat might ease.

Genma might have intended for this coffee meeting to be the easy break, of sorts, the official end of their mini-fling, or whatever it was, after a week and a bit of disastrous limbo.

But all it's done is show Hiwa that time, Genma's bullshit, and another man's lips has done absolutely nothing to wipe away her crush.

"See you tomorrow, then," he says.

"Yeah. Tomorrow."

And she runs away with her tail tucked between her legs.

A/N: It's a little bit wild to go back and skim these to double-check for mistakes post-beta edits because it's been so long since I wrote it that it almost feels like it was written by somebody else.