Of Duty and Bonds

by RedPowder

Kyura Gohama, a kunoichi from the Land of Snow, has a heart and will full of duty towards her Village, Bukigakure. She arrives in Konoha searching for excellence as a ninja, with Kakashi as her one distant liaison to a foreign Village. A story that explores Naruto's universe and the trials of a shinobi life. Slow build. Cover art: The Moon on the Musashi Plain, by Yoshitoshi T.

69. VII - Chapter 10

(I posted two chapters, 9 and 10)

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Part VII | Chapter 10

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"Seiryu…" Kakashi whispered, but the urgent plea shouted loud from his broken voice.

The great dragon smiled as, with one step, he approached him. His left fist was closed, claws spreading outwards as deadly spears. With careful movements, that hand reached for Kakashi, stopping a few metres away from him. It opened, slowly and gently, and inside the protective hard scales of Seiryu's hand was Gohama's body.

Kakashi's wide trembling eyes snapped up to meet the beast's, whatever hope had rebelliously grown after Obito told him he had felt Gohama's chakra when he became the jinchuriki shredded into nothing but a fragile thin thread, ready to break.

"She's alive." Seiryu told him.

Kakashi was sure those were the most wonderful words he had ever heard, spoken in the low rumbling voice of an ancient being, like kami-sama himself hearing his prayers. His shaking knees wavered and he fell onto them, the relief so overwhelming all he could do was breathe through fast trembling puffs, his eyes focussed on her beautiful face. Alive, Gohama was alive.

"Here." Seiryu spoke gently. "Take Gohama."

His willing arms were already extended, longing for the warm weight of Gohama, a feel he had learned so well in these past days. Yet, when he finally had her in his arms, it was an entire new experience, the relief and the love and fear all clashing to make her presence beside him too overwhelming.

Carefully his palm supporting her nape, he cradled Gohama's head to his chest, his thumb resting above her pulse point, feeling the thunder of her heartbeat, strong and alive, as it made her skin raise with the rhythm of life. He had never felt anything so perfect.

His throat clamped up and with a sob the tears finally spilled. Kakashi didn't mind crying, he felt as if he needed it, as if the emotions bursting through him were too wide and bottomless to keep down behind dry eyes. His forehead lowered to press onto her crown as he let the tears fall and his heart calm itself.

Kakashi pulled down his mask to gulp much needed air and used his sleeve to wipe out the wetness of his tears from her skin.

"Gohama is not a jinchuriki anymore." Seiryu spoke again and Kakashi snapped his head back, having forgotten he was there. "The Sage of the Six Paths dissolved the seal without her dying."

Kakashi watched those blue piercing wise eyes, heavy with the weight of a thousand years, the weight of goodbye but hope too, freedom. He didn't know whether to be happy for them now that they had finally broken the chains that held them together, or dismayed that it meant they would be separated.

"And you?" Kakashi asked.

"I'll go back to Northern Snow, my home before the Kyura made me theirs." Seiryu smiled a sad smile, as his eyes lowered to watch Gohama. "Gohama's probably going to be mad when she wakes up. She almost didn't keep her promise of freeing me. You know how her ego has a thing for self-sacrifice."

Kakashi wasn't sure what Seiryu meant with those words, but he didn't ask, not when his blue eyes settled once again on his with barely hidden sorrow.

"I knew who you were since Gohama first walked past you, on the corridor of the Hokage Tower. I hated you at first. And honestly, the more you started growing on me, the more you also infuriated me. Even if I knew why, you still acted as an imbecile. My point is, whatever happens between you two idiots, I trust you to take care of her when I'm not there."

"Aren't you going to wait for Gohama to wake up, Seiryu?"

"Whatever we needed to say to each other we've already said it." Seiryu looked down at Gohama one more time, his gaze lingering before ripping it away and with a nod saying, "Take care."

With a push of his legs, Seiryu was slithering up in the air, disappearing behind the clouds. Kakashi curled around Gohama at the slash of air and dirt from the sheer power of his jump. When he pulled back, she was still there, safe and sound, head resting on the crook of his elbow.

Kakashi's fingers brushed down her cheek softly, not resisting the urge to touch her. Especially when Gohama's skin looked the most radiant and soft he had ever seen. He couldn't be sure if it was because of the rose tint of his eyes, relishing in the sigh of her, so peaceful and so alive.

She was so unlike how he had last seen her, so unlike what Kakashi had thought would be his last image of her, with broken bones and the horrific sight of burnt skin and completely wrecked pathways. His entire body still shook at the memory, his eyes still stung from the putrid smell of her burnt flesh.

It was okay now. Kakashi consoled himself in the feel of Gohama's pulse and chakra, the renovated porcelain tone of her skin, not a blemish in it. Kakashi could watch her for the rest of his life, his heart never tiring, never washing away how full it felt.

Her eyes twitched, dark lashes fluttering, as she regained consciousness. It warmed his heart, lips spreading into a small smile, when Gohama wiggled closer into him, her nose brushing against his chest as she hummed. It was a sign of trust for a ninja, especially one as Gohama who had been a missing-nin with everyone after her life. It meant she felt safe enough to let her guard down at the feel of his chakra, safe enough to be vulnerable in her sleep.

A crease was carved between her eyebrows, her lashes fluttered again and this time her eyes opened fully. She stared for a few moments at his chest and he smiled down at her, patiently waiting for her to tilt her head back, for those beautiful green eyes to look at him with life, as he had thought for a moment they never would again.

Her gaze settled on his face, confused at first, the fog from unconsciousness still not gone completely. It hit him as a hard blow to the chest, the sight of her green eyes as Gohama searched his face, so many things swirling behind them in the few seconds her mind caught up to her sight. Kakashi just smiled down at her, any words he could have said robbed from him, nothing was enough to translate everything soaring in him.

"Kakashi…" She whispered in a broken voice, her tone heavy with a plea and disbelief.

His thumb brushed softly over the arch of her cheekbone. "It's me."

She didn't wait for him to finish his words before throwing her arms around his neck and pressing her body impossibly close to his. His own arms wrapped around her, helping Gohama merge into him, her warmth blending with his, her scent, the lively beat of her heart thrumming through the skin of his chest.

When he felt the dampness of her tears through the mask at his neck, his hand settled at the nape of her neck, gently massaging her there. "It's okay, Gohama. We won. We're okay." He whispered softly, the words holding little meaning, the sound of his voice meant mostly to calm her.

"I think they're good tears…"

Gohama pulled back from the safe spot at his neck, her gloved hand brushing away the rest of her tears. "I'm so sorry I put you through that, Kakashi."

"It wasn't your fault, Gohama. And all that matters to me now is that you're here."

Her eyes lifted, still reddened, and she looked at him like it was the first time she was seeing him. Then the light in them shifted, deepened. Kakashi's fingers flexed against her hip at the sudden intensity of her gaze as if she wanted to burn him alive in the green flames of her eyes.

They broke the distance at the same time, their noses bumping together but Kakashi barely felt the ache of it with how Gohama's fingers pulled at the roots of his hair, the tantalising bite drawing him closer to her. He was sure he tasted terrible but her tongue, sweet and hot against his, pushed through the seam of his mouth right as their feverish lips met. Gohama moaned into his open mouth, the sound vibrating through his body, buzzing like lighting in his belly and each stroke of her tongue against his pulsed through him.

Kakashi grasped onto her with the same hunger, the same violent need that had always boiled under his skin and only now was he letting it fully consume him, fingers denting into the soft flesh of her waist, palm spanning the frail column of her neck, too afraid that she would simply slip away from the gaps between his fingers.

It was sloppy like a drunk kiss, neither caring if they scrapped teeth or if they needed air, as long as they could satisfy the maddening thirst for each other, the unbearable relief that needed to get out before devouring their insides.

Kakashi breathed in through his nose, the smell of Gohama making him heady. He pulled back with a whimper and she followed his mouth with her own.

He really didn't want to fuck her in a ruined battlefield where hours before he thought he had seen her die. Maybe down the road, after many long nights of learning and breathing each other, they could do it hard and desperate, not caring about the pebbles piercing their backs and knees, not caring about making it last enough to relish in it, but not now.

The fingers around her neck slithered up her chin and pressed as a barrier to her glistering lips, soft and bruised, painted with a tempting bright red. Gohama seemed to understand, forehead falling onto his. Their pants were cool against wet lips as they caught their breaths, as they let their hearts quiet down inside their ribs.

"That's not nearly enough." Gohama puffed out with an exasperated chuckle.

Kakashi chuckled too, what else could he do when his muscles were still trembling with thinning control and wondering if anything would ever be enough to satiate his boundless need for her.

When their minds had cleared enough, Gohama finally peeled herself from him, sagging into the crook of his elbow. "Where's everyone?"

"Alive. But having their chakra sucked by a tree."

"What?"

"Madara was a pawn. Kaguya, this crazy horned woman from the moon that originated chakra and shinobi wanted to suck the chakra out of people. The usual shinobi things." Kakashi finished with an eye-crinkled smile.

Her lip jutted out into a pout. "You can't leave me with just that, Kakashi."

Kakashi opened his sharingan to save that adorable expression in his memories, but only when he was met with a perfectly normal picture of Gohama's face did he remember he no longer had it.

She seemed to realise at the same time he did, dread spreading through her expression. "Kakashi… Obito's sharingan…"

"Ah… Madara stole it so he could get inside the kamui dimension and Naruto was in god mode and made a new one."

The panic in her eyes eased at his laid-back tone. "Is it a good thing…?"

Was it a good thing?

Kakashi hadn't had the time to truly think about what it meant to lose his sharingan. It wasn't the devastating failure, plunging him into one of his self-pitying moods, he used to imagine it would be. The sorrow of it didn't seem to be festering deeper and harsher even as he thought about it more. It was sad, frightening, but there was also a lightness to him, deeper than the relief of no longer having most of his chakra sucked in by the eye.

The sharingan had been a token of how much Obito shaped who he was, both as a tie that pulled him to be better and a caging rough cord bound around his heart. It had been a token of his failure and of his duty, a gift that Kakashi had lost, the most important possession of his life.

Yet, somehow, there wasn't a devastating wave of guilt and loathing ready to destroy him from inside out.

"Yes… I think it is."

Her thumb brushed down his scar as her eyes softened in an understanding smile. It was as if Gohama could read everything that he was feeling underneath his words, his gaze.

"And Obito?"

He could see it in how she looked at him that she already knew. "Obito died."

"I'm sorry, Kakashi."

Gohama raised herself slightly to press a kiss to his cheek and wrap him in a comforting hug. Kakashi didn't know how she could feel sorrow for the death of the man that had orchestrated Buki's destruction and hadn't hesitated over killing her for Seiryu.

"Obito came back to us. He… he did good before he died."

"Good." She whispered simply beside his ear and he still couldn't be sure if she actually felt what her voice was saying.

Kakashi pulled back from her, his hand cupping her cheek. "You don't have to say these things for me."

Gohama could feel Kakashi's eyes piercing through her layers, but there weren't any. She was honest in her grief, even if it was a mirror of Kakashi's and not her own, and she was honest in her understanding for Obito, in her gladness over how he had come back, even if later than he had ever been before. Even before knowing he was Obito, there had been a flicker of sympathy in her, a sense of them as overlapping images, and now it had all the space to bloom.

"I'm saying them because I believe it."

Kakashi's hand dropped from her face as he held onto her forearm, turning it so the inner skin would show, pale and unblemished, no dark blue seal of a dragon carved onto it. Her mind stilled, taken aback by the unfamiliar sight of it, the arm so foreign it didn't feel her own. Only as Kakashi's fingers traced the memory of the seal, the soft brush piercingly felt and real in her senses, was Gohama sure it was truly hers.

"Seiryu explained things."

Her eyes widened, bottom lip quivering in what she wasn't sure if it was anger or anguish.

"I'm so mad at him for this." Gohama said and it came out only as a pitiful whisper.

"He said you'd be, but I thought you wanted to be free from the seal."

She had wanted it, but not Seiryu.

"Maybe I didn't know what I was wishing for."

Tears slipped down her eyes onto her cheek, a confusion of things clashing in her chest and Gohama knew this was just the beginning, she knew it would get worse once she had the time to think and let it settle.

Kakashi pressed her head to his chest, nose burying in her crown as he tried to comfort her in his arms. Gohama accepted every drop of strength and comfort that he could spare her. Even when he couldn't lighten the burden, he made her believe that, more than bear it, she could overcome it.

"How are you so…" Her voice trailed off, no words enough to describe Kakashi to her.

"So what?"

It was so simple, the simplest most common thing in the world, the love of a woman for a man. And yet it pierced through her, marked into her, natural and infinite. So infinite and grave that it seemed to magnify the shape of her own heart, it seemed to spread through the forest where they sat, the past where they had lived and endless through the future, so infinite and so grave it seemed to be the power that kept the stars brilliant and the planets whirling.

"So lovable."

Gohama could see what his eyes were silently asking for, with a shy plea as he looked at her, but also that self-doubt, always that self-doubt.

Her hand rose to his face, his stubble prickling her palm, and she tried to seep as much tenderness as she could through her hold.

"I love you, Kakashi."

A lone tear slipped past his waterline, following the ridge of his scar, over the skin of his cheek where Gohama caught it with her thumb. It twisted her heart and only made her pronounced love flare, so suffocating, her throat had clump up around her breath.

A single look from him was enough of a confession for her, Kakashi had the power of making her feel loved with only the shade of his eyes, but, whether it was her failure or his own nature, it seemed Kakashi needed to hear her say it.

And Gohama would say it, because she loved saying it, the words easy in her mouth, so full and central, the perfect tie, the perfect translation of everything she carried in her for him.

"I love you."

Kakashi's trembling eyes closed this time and Gohama laid a kiss above his scarred closed eyelid, feather light, his lashes tingling her lips.

"I'm in love with you," She told him as the back of her fingers traced the edge of his cheek. "have been since my missing-nin year. Did you know that?"

Kakashi opened his lips with a wet breath and rasped, "I didn't."

"Do you know it now?" When he didn't answer, his eyes still closed and hidden away from her, Gohama repeated, "I love you, Bakashi."

He huffed at her words, fingers curling around her hair. "I think it's enough."

"Open your eyes." She asked him and at least he complied, his white lashes wavering to show two dark endless pools of grey that stole her breath away. Gohama smiled as she confessed, "I love you, Kakashi."

"I love you too, Gohama."

"You know that's not what I want, you stubborn man." She whined with an exasperated giggle, her veins bursting with tenderness at the weight of his words. "I love you."

Finally Kakashi conceded, his eyes so impossibly loving and shy. "I know you do."

Her fingers rose from his cheek to his hair, pulling his hitai-ate away, and combing back his dirty and sweaty bangs.

Gohama raised herself in his lap to press her lips to his forehead and whispered, "I love you, my snowdrop." She finished with a kiss and tucked herself back into his chest. "Just to make sure it gets past that thick skull."

Her mouth stretched into a painful grin at Kakashi's burning red face. He was the most endearing man she had ever met and a part of her wanted to keep torturing him just to see just how red he could get. Instead, she pressed her forehead to his throat and waited for him to wrap his arms back around herself.

"Thank you." Kakashi whispered, his voice rumbling in her skin.

"It was the least I could do after completely disregarding your confession."

"You didn't disregard it."

"No, I didn't." It had been the pulsating sound of his confession that had shaken her out of her stupor, had pierced right through her chest and yanked her back into herself. "But it would have been nice of me to say something back."

"Maybe."

"This was probably the best scenario we could have ended up with…"

Her eyes settled on the faraway mountains and the strip above them. The sky wasn't grey anymore, its blue endless and speckled with a few white clouds. It would have been worth it to die just for that sky, real and beautiful, but everything in Gohama was a well of gratitude that she could see it for herself again, that she could walk under it, share it with Kakashi and everyone.

"I was scared you were going to pull away from me."

"I think it's too late for you to get rid of me now, Hama. Besides, I told you I didn't want to be a coward anymore."

Their emotions settled enough, until they could just stay there and enjoy each other's life flowing and pulsing right beside them. Their shadows had shifted with the light when Gohama opened her eyes again.

"I wish we could just stay here, but I think we should go see if our help is needed."

Kakashi let out a displeased groan while he nuzzled her neck and tightened his hold around her. "I know."

"I can't give you some of Seiryu's chakra to loosen those old bones anymore… just mine."

"Yes, just yours." Kakashi deadpanned before a cute gasp rushed past his lips as she pushed some of her chakra into his core, abs rippling under her hand. A smirk played at the corner of her lip, she would be doing that a lot more times.

They unwrapped themselves away and once she was up, Gohama offered him a hand. "Do you need to lean on me?"

"Always." Kakashi murmured with a grin, looping his arm around her shoulders and pressing his lips to her temple, before pulling his mask back up. He was too charming for her own good, just that gesture made a blush break through her cheeks and her heart speed away in her chest.

They walked slowly and, once they reached the clearing, her eyes immediately settled on the head of dark hair and the fan crest at the back of his shirt.

"Sasuke…" Gohama gasped as she looked up at Kakashi.

He looked down at her with soft glad eyes, face so close to hers he only needed a small tilt to lean his forehead to hers. "He's back."

---

Gohama let her finger press gently to the inside of Hansuke's wrist. His pulse was strong and steady, each bump of blood a quiet murmur that helped ease most of her mind's disquiet. Her eyes looked down from his thinner cheeks to his legs. They were there, there was no abysm between them and his torso, gushing with guts, blood and nothing.

Genjutsu. It had been genjutsu and only now could Gohama be sure of it, even if Kakashi himself had told her he had seen her team alive and fighting with the rest of the Alliance on the final battle.

Gohama didn't know if it was her place to be here. She had, by chance, seen someone move Hansuke onto the recovery stretcher and her feet had inevitably lead her there. It was out of a selfish impulse, the need to know with every cell of her body that he was alive, that Obito hadn't torn his body in two because of her. And now that her heart was soothed by the rhythm of his pulse, Gohama didn't want Hansuke to wake up alone.

His face was a blank canvas, Gohama couldn't discern a single emotion in it, neither the shadow of any lingering dream, the one Obito had promised them, the perfect illusion that would make everyone happy.

How cruel it was for all of them to wake up from perfection to a crowded tent with rows of unconscious shinobi, a growing list of dead and missing comrades, and all around them a desolated battlefield, the carcass of the tree remaining still?

Gohama was forever grateful that she hadn't woken up from perfection into their cruel world, but at the same time she wondered if it would help her realise what her most ardent desire was, the right path in her life, a path for perfection, or the closest she could get from it.

Hansuke's eyes snapped open and Gohama startled back at the sudden movement. In a second, he was sitting up, frantically searching around him. His bloodshot eyes pierced through everything, before he looked down at himself, hands pawing at his chest and tattered clothes, the confused frown never leaving his brow.

She rested her hand on his shoulder and tried to coax him to lay back down. "Hey, it's okay, it's okay, Hansuke. Easy."

"Did we win?"

"We did."

His head snapped back so fast Hansuke almost hit her nose with it. With wide eyes, he watched her, recognition lighting up his face but when he called her, his voice was only a whisper full of doubt, and hope too.

"Gohama?"

She only smiled and he jerked towards her, arms spreading open to drown her in a hug. Still, he faltered, stopped by the unclear boundaries they had set for themselves. Gohama was the one to break the distance, her arms wrapping naturally around his middle.

"Please be real." He breathed out.

Gohama chuckled, she had been battling that same thought. "I am."

Hansuke only pulled her closer, a few sniffling sounds rustling right beside her ear. She let him take his time dealing with the furious emotions she had once again shoved into him.

It was different, but it wasn't worse. His warmth and his steady chakra still comforted her, and affection still seeped from both of them, the companionship, the care and love, even their history. The only thing missing was the romance, even if there were still some feelings lingering in her. It felt righter, without all the doubts and guilt that had always underlined their relationship. Now she was certain, now she could say she loved him, because she did, just not as they had expected her to.

When they finally pulled back, Gohama roamed her eyes through his entire body. "Are you okay? Do you need a medic?"

Hansuke's lips spread into one of his disarmingly happy smiles. "I'm glad we don't have to live in a world where you don't exist… Again."

"But are you okay? Do you need something, Hansuke? Water or for me to look for someone?"

"Perfectly content."

"Still, lay down for a little longer." Gohama said, as she pushed his shoulders down and he easily obeyed her, whether he was too weak or too overwhelmed to fight it.

His complacent expression suddenly creased into a frown. "The boys?"

"They haven't been brought here yet, but so far everyone rescued was alive." She smiled reassuringly.

"You don't seem so sure."

"I am sure, but that doesn't mean I don't want to see them too."

After putting Hansuke up to date on all the questions he had, they simply stayed silent. Now that the relief, so intense it could erase all their problems, had tempered, Gohama was painfully aware of how unresolved things still were between them.

She lifted her eyes from where she was tracing the fabric of her pants to find Hansuke watching her with a quiet yearning that broke her heart. He easily corrected it into a sheepish smile and she followed it too.

"It's a little awkward…" Gohama breathed out the understatement with a wince.

Hansuke shook his head, hand laying above hers in a gesture of comfort. "I can deal with awkward."

---

"Now that, Shizune, is a big problem." Tsunade commented as she watched Kakashi lean into Gohama, whispering some joke into her ear that made her throw her head back with a rich laugh.

No joke the brat said could ever be that funny, it almost made Tsunade roll her own eyes. And didn't they have anything better to do besides standing around, throwing jokes and googly eyes at each other, busy people passing beside them as they worked hard on the post-war effort? Yes, it was lunchtime break, but there was still work to be done.

"I thought you were going to let Kyura Gohama go. It's sweet, they seem happy."

Shizune's words echoed through her mind as Kakashi looked down at the girl, his eyes so shiny and… soft. It was the worst type of look that could be plastered to his face, the sweetness nothing but a bitter taste in her mouth.

"And why are you glaring, Tsunade-sama?"

Tsunade leaned forward on her chair, supporting her chin on her intertwined fingers. "We're in need of a Rokudaime, Shizune. And that right there is a man in love."

"I don't see how those are mutually exclusive." Shizune grumbled down into her notebook.

"Brat!" Tsunade yelled and a small smirk spread in her mouth at how both of them reacted naturally to the call, their heads turning to her and feet ready to move at the Hokage's voice. "Not you, brat, just the Kyura brat."

Kakashi threw her a murderous protective glare and this time Tsunade rolled her eyes at the unwarranted demonstration. It wasn't as if she was going to kill Kyura for treason right there and then. And, even if she were, it would only have worked to goad her out of pure spite than to intimidate her.

Gohama put her hand on his arm. The shapeshifting abilities of his looks were impressing, instantly turning from that glare to one of those sugary gazes as he looked down at her. "It's fine, Kakashi, I'll meet you later."

And just like that, Kakashi nodded, throwing one last warning look at Tsunade before whispering something in Gohama's ear that made her laugh even more.

He was hooked, Hatake Kakashi, the most elusive, stubborn and self-governing shinobi in her army, was fucking hooked.

The Buki uniform and the green colour of her eyes were nothing compared to the unconcerned pace of her step, both confident and commanding, as if nothing in the world could touch her, nothing in the world could ever reach so much as her heels. Every step of that walk was that of a Kyura. It toyed with Tsunade's ego and it toyed with her grief.

Gohama propped her hip on the side of the desk, arms crossed. "Are you going to tell me I belong in Konoha's custody like Uchiha Sasuke?"

Tsunade leaned back on the chair. "Would you surrender yourself?"

"Not really."

"Then no."

Her golden eyes glanced at the man sloping against a tree, watching them through the gaps between the crowd, before settling back on Kyura, no flexibility in Tsunade's gaze, only sharpness and command.

"I'm telling you that I'll dismember you myself if you steal Hatake away from being Hokage."

Gohama just stared back, nothing passing behind her eyes. Then slowly, her head turned to look over her shoulder, to where Kakashi was pretending he wasn't watching them.

"I won't." Gohama answered softly as she turned back to her.

"Did he confirm it himself?"

"This is a conversation you should be having with him not me."

So he hadn't.

"Kakashi's loyal to a fault."

"He's loyal to Konoha."

"And he's loyal to you."

Her eyes narrowed, the pretend disregard giving place to anger. "Kakashi has a mind of his own, which is why you should be talking to him not me."

It was surprising how much of her shisho was left in Gohama when there were three generations separating them. It stroke a cord in Tsunade's heart, the ghost of a frightened respect and obligation pestering her mind. Tsunade was Konoha's Hokage and her duty was to provide the best for her village.

The best for her village was Kakashi.

She had been scared they would lose him the moment he ran off to Buki after Gohama and then she hadn't had the power to pull those looks out of him. Men could be incredibly stupid when they were in love and even the great genius of Konoha and his mind weren't immune to it.

"And his heart?"

Gohama steely eyes wavered and she turned them down, a trace of pink on her cheeks. "Konoha will always have his heart."

Tsunade couldn't understand what was in her voice. It seemed more sad than envious, maybe it was reminiscent of her own love for Bukigakure. If there were two people that understood the shinobi devotion and sacrifice for their village they were Kakashi and Gohama.

Now the true negotiation started.

"I am willing to pardon you and allow you to return to Konoha if you become a Konoha shinobi."

Gohama scoffed, not taking her words seriously. "It'd be a very unpopular decision."

"I don't care, a few more months and I'm finally free from that chair. People can hate me all they want. Kakashi will pardon you on his first day and he'll probably pardon his student. Now that will be a problem. Everyone will accuse him of taking advantage of his position and he'll lose all favour and credibility as Hokage."

Tsunade let the words sink in, let Gohama realise how certain they were, because Kakashi would never lead a village that had made a person he loved its undeserved enemy, a village that still had in all its Bingo Books a picture of her face with the order to any S-rank shinobi kill on sight.

"If it's me pardoning you, he's free to do it to Uchiha without causing too much trouble. And I have to admit I'm much keener on pardoning you than the kid."

"I don't have Seiryu anymore."

Tsunade wouldn't deny that her intuition, later proved right of course, that Gohama was the ten-tails jincuriki had been one of the reasons she had accepted her in Konoha, even knowing the catastrophic liability Kyura could be if the village's involvement in the massacre leaked out. That and the guilt as a Konoha leader, the flicker of responsibility for her, that reminiscent duty for her shisho trembling every time her eyes shone with that cocky Kyura tint.

But it wasn't the ten-tails she was after now. Sometimes Tsunade wondered if the biju was even worth all the headaches she had had for five years now. It wasn't, but there were other things that were.

"You may have been a big pain in my ass, but we only have things to win with you on Konoha's side. For one, our Hokage won't have half his heart somewhere else, and then you're a good shinobi, even without being a jinchuriki, no one can deny that."

"A good shinobi wouldn't have lost the ten-tails to the enemy."

The tone of her voice made Tsunade's eyebrow rise. When the higher-ups had been discussing the second return of Kyura Gohama, Gaara had told them just how much she was willing to sacrifice and yet, in the end, she hadn't. Instead she lost herself to the enemy, a worse fate than death for a shinobi and Gohama was as shinobi as they came.

"Why did you?"

Tsunade could see the raise of her jawbone, something bitter in her expression as she looked down, twisting her from two different sides.

"I defected your village once. How can you be sure I'll be loyal to Konoha?"

It wasn't just Hatake Kakashi, Kyura Gohama was hooked with every cell in her body. And when she got hooked, there was nothing in the world that could release her. That was Tsunade's only trump card.

"You'll be loyal to its Hokage."

Tsunade didn't wait to see her reaction, before opening one of the drawers of her desk and rummaging for the cool touch of metal. Her hand extended towards Gohama, Konoha's crest glinting under the muted light in the shadowed tent.

Gohama's wide eyes were petrified on the swirling leaf and her voice left only as a weak breathless whisper. "I don't want it…"

She had always kept her Buki hitai-ate even when risking her life on Konoha missions and then Konoha hadn't been the village that had betrayed her and all that was dear to her. But they couldn't compromise this time, not if Gohama was ever going to be accepted into the village.

"This time, you'll do it right."

---

Gohama hadn't been made for memorials. She had been made for grief and death but never memorials. Uncle's funeral had been the only one where the ritualization of grief had helped her find something other than anguish in it all. Now as she looked from the edge of the forest, her nails pressing back on the bark of a tree, to the crowd of surviving shinobi spread on the desolated battlefield, all of them bearing the same hitai-ate and the same pain, Gohama's heart could only carry anguish, could only carry failure.

The branches from the God Tree remained, piercing up the earth with its empty cocoons hanging down like broken dolls. It was the incarnate mark of her own greatest failure.

It wasn't a village and she wasn't a nine-year-old child, this time it had been the entire world and Gohama had been a fully matured shinobi and jinchuriki. Buki had given their lives to keep Seiryu safe from the hands of the enemy and she had let that sacrifice slip from the gaps of her fingers and shatter into nothing on the ground. She had always believed she would follow Buki's steps and protect the legacy of the ten-tails jinchuriki, but now that the world had asked that of her, Gohama had failed.

It was so easy to kill human beings, they were all so fragile with their soft guts and breakable bones, the tender column of their necks and thin shell of their skulls. All Gohama had needed to do was push a blade into the yielding flesh of her chest, after stabbing so many bodies, after killing so many people, how had she failed to kill herself?

Whatever failure had been in her before could never compare to the absolute loss of yesterday.

Gohama had failed and instead of death she had been gifted life.

Each name pierced like an accusation into her. There had been too many people dead, too many names read with the solemn voice of respect. Did it matter how their names were read, did it matter that they had respect for a life that wasn't theirs anymore?

Gohama could already feel how the letters carve themselves in her heart. The raw pain terrified her, because it was only the beginning and she knew just how shaping those names were, how the cold hands of their deaths pressed onto her, deforming her into a terrible thing.

Maybe it would be different this time, this wasn't her village, the home where she belonged. Against all the good in her, Gohama hoped it was different because she was so completely exhausted of it, so completely exhausted of how the names continued to weigh on her, endlessly, never lighting up, some days flaring as if they wanted to rip her apart to lay beside them.

These weren't her people, even if her hands were tainted with their blood, the red wasn't enough to paint their bond with devotion. There was love, there was always love when she was willing to give her life to them, but it wasn't full. Not like with Buki, not like with her team and with Kakashi.

Gohama couldn't bear any more names, she couldn't bear any more blood and any more death. They continued still, their syllables declared with perfect precision, red drops falling into an already overflowing urn.

Only now, after living through a war, could Gohama truly understand Uncle, before the sympathy had only ever been sympathy, but now… It was so painfully hers she could barely breathe and Uncle had taken the burden for years.

But Uncle had always been stronger than her, sacrificing the life of a few higher-ups, sacrificing his own loyalty, for the sake of his village's peace, so they wouldn't have to stand in a memorial where they heard a litany of their dead people's names.

Gohama could have stopped the list so much earlier, she could have stopped it and if she had she wouldn't have had to listen to it, Gohama would have become a part of it, another red painted name.

"Gohama!"

A shiver jolted up her spine, her ears pierced as if Kakashi had howled her name again name right beside her, real as the litany that would never stop.

This was the best scenario they could have ended up with. Gohama couldn't forget that, she couldn't let her own failure blind her to the gratitude that should be boiling in her veins. And it did boil alongside the frozen dread and the empty anguish, it did boil somehow.

The touch of death, the Kuma called it, where death touched her even if she hadn't died, calling her back to it. This time she wouldn't listen.

From the edge of the crowd, Gohama could settle her eyes on everyone. They were there alive, they had survived and she was there with them.

Kisamaru stood with his clan, his girlfriend beside him. He had his back too stiff under the grief, most of them had. His cousin had died, Hyuga Neji, Gai's student. He had come too against Tsunade's orders, his cheeks hollow and deep dark creases under his eyes, grief having washed out the springtime of his youth.

The sight was strangely eerie, but it could never compare to his bandaged body, every time her eyes settled on it a cringe rocked her entire being. It could have been him, his name recited as all the others.

Gohama had stayed part of the night beside a still comatose Gai, replacing Kakashi so he could sleep, and all her eyes could see as she saw his legs was the red sight of another legless shinobi with a pen stuck to his neck. But Gai wasn't Ichiro, Gai was stronger, stronger than most people ever gave him credit for.

Nikato was with shinobi she didn't know, sharing consoling pats between each other. They were probably comrades from the same division. She hadn't talked to him since he tried to punch her for being alive, only seeing him from afar to make sure for herself that he had not bled out on the ground of that battlefield.

Hansuke was with Yugao, their friendship finally mended, the one good thing that had resulted from her absence the past year. Genma stood beside the nostalgic faces of the corner table at Ippon.

Kakashi, as one of the taicho, was standing at the front much to his displeasure. It wasn't her place to be there beside him. It wasn't her place to be beside any of them.

She hadn't made friendships, her camaraderie with the ones in her division had been disastrous and in the medical tent the cordiality had never developed into something deeper. Ichiro had been the closest one and he had killed himself. There had been Sakura maybe, but she had her team and all her friends from Konoha.

She really had no place there, did she? Tsunade was absolutely delirious if she thought slapping a Konoha hitai-ate on her forehead would suddenly make her belong. The one she wore now with the character for shinobi was proof enough it wouldn't.

It was with a sinking heart that Gohama realised the one person closer to her situation was Uchiha Sasuke. And maybe the reason was that she had an ego the size of the world and all she could think about in the middle of a memorial to dead people was herself.

It felt as if she was invading that ceremony and she couldn't be sure if it was something real or just a symptom of all the chaos the war had raged through her. Gohama had fought as an Alliance shinobi, ready to give her life for them, but that gnawing feeling of intruding had never left her, the feeling that even in the middle of an army she was standing at the margin of it, looking through a faded glass.

Before she had had a purpose, one that was submerged deep inside the shinobi world and still somehow on the periphery of it. And now, without it, Gohama felt like an impostor, like her place in this world was obsolete, her place had disappeared with Bukigakure's.

She felt useless…

Worthless.

But Gohama didn't voiced that world. It terrified her.

Her eyes inevitably fell to the clear skin of her forearm, without a shadow of the seal that had been marked there. It was still so terrifyingly foreign, even when the fingers moved at her command and the touch of her other hand felt real against the flesh of it.

Even her own mind seemed to have a missing piece, her ears ready for the sound of Seiryu's voice, for his mocking or infuriating remarks on her life, his kind patience and also his straightening lack of it. The amount of times in only a day she had called for him and been left hearing only the empty lonely silence of her own mind, when the silence had been rich before, unbearably full from knowing he was there on the other side of her chakra core. And now there was nothing.

Nothing. Not in her mind and not in her arm.

No, not nothing. Gohama hadn't lost his memories when Otsutsuki Hagoromo separated their chakra. Some were blurrier than others, the ones with less emotional links to strengthen them together.

Most times of day, she ran thorough Seiryu's memories, memorising them again, making sure they would never leave her and that, this way, he would be with her and maybe she would be with him.

"You old lizard!"

The word panged through his chest, so unfamiliar to him Seiryu had to make certain he had heard it right. No one had ever called him old because being old entailed that one aged and withered, one died, and Hagoromo had created him immortal in a mortal world.

"I'm not old, I'm an ageless mass of chakra."

Sometimes he forgot himself of that, when he became completely immersed in his jinchuriki's lives, drinking in everything he could of being human, the novelty, the emptiness, the meaning, the bitter taste of envy never quite washing away from his mouth.

The world had a way of reminding him of it, and so cruelly it reminded him. As fully as he felt their lives, Seiryu felt their deaths, in a matter of seconds thrown back into the life of a small baby, thrown back into the same sweet obliviousness to once again be torn away.

He would not forget Gohama's mortality, not when he could see the tragedy marked into her.

Was it worth it?

Asahi. Hotaru. Katsuo. Inaku. Kensuke. Hachiro. Gohama.

They went and he remained always. Always and forever.

Was it worth it?

"That sounds like oldness to me." Gohama pushed her hand against his snout, a little timidly, still unsure of where they stood in their relationship.

Seiryu smiled.

A tear fell down Gohama's cheek at the sudden memory that rose, uncalled, to the forefront of her mind. It twisted in her chest with so much anguish, but also so much burning love. Seiryu had never told her how much he liked that she called him old. Through all his memories there was always a sense of superiority, laced with envy, over human's stupidity, and he was as much an idiot as all of them.

"Seiryu." Asahi started hesitantly as he leaned back on his head. "Do you miss it?"

"Sometimes." He answered, eyes settling on the sea of white that had once been his home.

"Then why did you stop trying to escape the seal?"

"I could never do it. Otsutsuki Hamura didn't spare himself when he shared his knowledge with his descendants before leaving for the moon."

"Is it just that?"

The low rumble of a chuckle sounded in his chest at the kid's sharpness. "It shouldn't have been so easy, Asahi."

"To break your will…" Asahi's voice left as a whisper, guilt wavering through it. He had been nothing but a tool of his clan, as chained to their will as Seiryu himself.

Seeing how much Asahi suffered with the discordances of their bond, his entire body ripping apart when Seiryu tried to escape, had been one of the things to quiet him down. Asahi's patience through it all, his love for his clan and his people, his kindness for the beast breaking him in half, his mind-numbing terror over this new thing that was having a biju inside a human body… it was enough to make the Northern Snow ice that had festered for centuries in his heart crack and melt.

"To make me care about you." He corrected him.

Seiryu had a fuller life as Asahi's biju than in all those millennia where he was free.

This one had made her bawl her eyes to sleep while burying her face in Kakashi's chest, throwing curses at Seiryu for not telling her he had never wanted to be free from their bond.

"She wants so desperately to be free from our seal she can't even fandom that I don't want that too." He had said to the Sage of the Six Paths, his father.

The curses had only been for herself and the downfall of her blinding ego.

Someone smacked her shoulder and Gohama heard a whispered apology thrown back at her. It was only then that she realised the ceremony had ended and the shinobi were going back to camp. She waited for the crowd to pass before deciding whether to leave or not. Her eyes settled on the people lingering and easily found Kakashi's slumped back. She would stay then.

Seiryu…

It wasn't just his personal memories that teased her thoughts away. His mind was a well of knowledge and history, some of it also locked inside myths, in a blend of reality and fiction. And somehow, Gohama had been offered godly knowledge with no idea what to do with it, if she even had a right to do anything with it.

Gohama's heart was burning to go through the ancient withering scrolls of Buki, reading them through the keys that were Seiryu's memories. Even the small bureaucratic papers of day-to-day life had gained a new excitement to her. Gohama could only imagine how his memories of those old times would make them burst with life. There was so much knowledge still locked in Buki, abandoned for a decade to be eaten away by insects and mice. She would find a way of conserving them.

The people of Bukigakure deserved to live through the history of the world.

"Do you remember anything from when you were inside of the tree?"

Her body stiffened at the sound of the painfully familiar voice coming from beside her. Since when had he become so good at hiding his chakra that even she couldn't detect it?

Her face turned slowly, scared to see that he actually hadn't come there and her mind had made up the voice out of pure unadulterated longing and loss.

But, no, there he was, shaggy red hair and a sheepish smile on his lips.

"Nikato." Gohama whispered.

He didn't waste time after seeing there was no resentment in how she said his name. His arms pulled her with a crushing force to his chest and Gohama easily fell into it. His hugs had always been so tight and smothering she could barely breathe.

"I'm sorry I didn't come sooner," Nikato started. "I didn't know what to say and—"

"I don't care. I'm just glad. So glad."

"Still, I'm sorry, Gohama, for the mean things I said and the almost punch. I was angry and hurt… I just needed a little time to gather my bearings. You literally rose from the dead." He pulled her back from his hug, his sweet dark eyes serious as he looked back at her. "I've never regretted anything more than going onto the last day of war without making up with you."

"And I'm sorry for everything I put you through, for leaving you and for hurting you."

Nikato nodded before pulling her back for a more bruising hug.

"You didn't answer my question." He commented while settling beside her.

Gohama answered with a shake of her head. Being inside the tree had been like being in a deep dreamless sleep. "Do you?"

"Everything."

Her wide eyes turned to him at the hint of sadness in his tone. "Do you regret being pulled out?"

"Not really, we would all have ended up dying otherwise."

"Yes, but—"

"I know what you're asking, Gohama. And no, I don't regret it. It was empty, for being so perfect."

"Empty?"

"I can't explain it exactly, it was just a feeling like… like things weren't going anywhere… other people may not feel this way." Nikato looked back at her with a small smile and her heart twisted with a mix of pride and regret. He looked older, a trace of heaviness in his eyes that hadn't been there before, giving a new depth to them.

"I'm… I'm trying to understand things… You know how, being born a civilian and all, I don't really understand some of these clan and shinobi things for real, but I want to. You and Kisa were always… closer because of that, and I want you to know you can also come to be, Gohama. I want you to know I want to understand them."

Gohama gave him a small grateful smile. "Thank you, Nikato. It's a two way street, I hope you know you can also come to me. Besides, I wouldn't say I'm closer to Kisa, I just think it's different… and I'm glad it is. You two are very different people."

Nikato chuckled, his hand brushing the back of his head. "That we are. He's all about using books to help people, I'm more about actually talking to them. The world will crumble if he ever decides to handle three hyperactive teenagers running around, jumping into danger. Oh!" He let out before turning to her with a wide grin. "That reminds me, I started training to be a genin sensei actually. About a couple of months ago."

"That's amazing, Nikato!" Her lips spread into an open smile, mirroring the pride in his own. It was so incredibly good to see that their lives had moved forward without her. "You'll be an absolutely amazing sensei."

"I'm trying at least. There's definitely so things that need tuning out, and it can be pretty scary…" He pushed her arm. "Hey, you could actually ask Kakashi to share some experience with me. He did train the most genius team in centuries."

"Ask him yourself, Nikato, he'll be glad to." Gohama let out a small chuckle as her eyes falling to Kakashi's back. "Well… he'll probably just tell you he was improvising the entire way. Or that it was all them and not him, don't let him get away with that."

Or that he had completely failed his students. Gohama had no idea how she could make him see how untrue it was, how she could help him shed himself of those self-doubts, those burning regrets. Her hand rose to her chest, pressing down on the tension that tightened above her sternum, her love for him thundering on her ribs with each pulse of her heart.

It was there now, forever, tied to her beating heart with a bright red thread. Gohama was sure of it from just how the shape of his back pressed into her eyes.

"Wow."

"What?" Gohama asked as she looked back at Nikato.

"That look. There really isn't a chance that you'll get back with—" His words were cut off as Kisamaru suddenly dropped beside them, his hand clasping Nikato's nape.

"Ow! What are you doing, you idiot?" He whined while trying to shake off Kisa's hold.

"Here we are." Kisamaru declared with solemnity, ignoring Nikato's protests for him to release him, each insult more creative than the last one.

Her eyes looked down at Nikato's ankles and a smile stretched her lips. Peeking through his pants were a pair of socks, one yellow with little rolls of sushi, and the other with green and black stripes. Gohama shared a look with Kisa and his chakra-laden fingers peeled away from his neck. A future genin sensei that could only retaliate with childish comebacks and didn't know how to match his own socks. There wasn't a doubt in her that he would be great.

"And for a moment I thought he had actually matured." She murmured.

And just as easily the insults shifted against her.

"You're loving this." Kisamaru stated.

"Yeah…" Gohama whispered through the lump in her throat and leaned her head on Kisa's shoulder. "But there's one missing."

"Oh, right! Hansuke!" Nikato shouted after her comment, but there was something about his voice that rang weirdly in her ears.

"You never know when to keep quiet." Kisamaru scolded with another smack to the back of Nikato's head. "People are still mourning."

And then she realised what had been missing, Nikato never called Hansuke by his name alone. Gohama shook her head in light-hearted dismay, the amount of times he had called her rude for it and now here he was, doing the same. "And you're rude now, where's the sensei?"

Whatever amusement was brimming in the air vanished. Kisamaru had turned unnervingly stiff and Nikato was doing everything he could not to look her in the eyes.

"You know…" Nikato started, fingers massaging the back of his neck while his eyes were still cast down. "things change…"

He didn't need to say anything else for her to understand. The realisation crashed down on her with the power of a chakra-powered punch. Her eyes burned with unshed tears and she tried to keep them safe and closed. What right did she have to cry when it had all been her fault?

"No…"

"You were gone and our teamwork was slightly wanting." Kisamaru explained and Nikato let out a low sarcastic murmur at the choice of adverb. "After we thought you were… dead, Hansuke stopped trying to keep us together, and at that point our team was more of a risk than any good to us."

Nikato's hand grabbed onto her shoulder. "We were still friends, we just didn't see each other as much. Well… Hansuke was gone for a while… but the war brought us back together!"

Her blurred eyes focussed on the brown tint of the soil. In all her worst-case scenarios, their team was the one thing that remained always, even through grief, hatred, death, they remained still together as a team. There had never been a doubt in her heart that the bonds between the three of them would hold on through any and everything that came their way.

She could only imagine how bad it must have been for their teamwork to crumble. A teamwork that had been honed for ten years. The bud of resolved guilt over her decision to stay dead for months flared once again, a bitter venom swarming in her chest.

"Oh fuck." She heard Nikato expel under his breath and only then did she realise the tears she had tried to keep away were helplessly running down her cheeks. Gohama wiped them with her hands, but others just kept falling.

Nikato tried reassuring her with words and brushes to her back but the ground seemed to be crumbling under her, with everything that also made her.

Hansuke's feet stepped into the blur of her vision as he resignedly dragged out, "And she knows."

Gohama looked up at him. "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't any of you tell me…"

They had had the time to follow other paths because their one together had crumbled, she should have realised it earlier, should have seen it in their eyes as they looked at her. But why hadn't any of them just told her?

And now Hansuke was watching her with another layer to the guilt in his hazel eyes and somehow she just knew, her heart contracting in her ribs. "What did you do?"

"It doesn't matter."

"What?" She asked again, her voice demanding even through her crying.

"ANBU."

"Hansuke…" The sounds of his name almost didn't leave her mouth. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Her eyes inevitably fell to his covered deltoid, seeing through the fabric the hollow of his ragged scar splitting the tattoo in two, a scar he had made himself out of self-hatred, out of so much pain for everything he had survived and done in ANBU, everything he didn't want to be a part of.

Hansuke had to have been shattered in little pieces, little self-destructive pieces, to ever go back to ANBU. Gohama had been the one to crush him between her chakra-laden hands and she just kept on crushing him, with Kakashi, and crushing him, with her almost-death, and crushing him, with her mere existence.

Her feet stumbled back, but before she could take more than a step, Hansuke's hand held onto her arm. "This was why I didn't tell you. You don't get to run away from us. That's not how things get solved, okay…?"

Gohama shook her head, face crumbling and her throat so tight she could barely speak. "I'm not running away, I just… I destroyed the team."

"Hey…" Hansuke started softly, his hands falling to her shoulders. "It's not like you did it alone. It took four to tango. Besides, it wasn't all bad, it gave us the freedom to get out there and realise all the things we want to do for ourselves."

"Yeah! I found out I want to be a sensei! And this one had time to do bury himself in his nerdy books and go to classes."

"But you…"

"I worked on my resentment for ANBU. It was different this time, Konoha needed intel for the war and the targets were mostly missing-nin. And I had Yugao to look after me. I would never have put up with it if it was anything like… before." Like the massacre, Hansuke left unsaid.

He brushed her tear track away with a gentle swipe of his thumb and Gohama's muscles locked up. "I promise, Gohama."

Only then did he come back from where he was lost in the moment of consoling her, an exact mirror of how he had done it so many times before when they had been together. A flicker of hope and that love of before shined in his eyes and it pierced right through her stomach.

They hadn't set explicit boundaries, but this seemed one of them. Gohama stepped back at it. Hansuke dropped his hand from her face into a fist beside his thigh.

"Hansuke's right, Gohama." Nikato said with an encouraging smile, oblivious to the fingers of discomfort clasped around their throats. "Yeah, it was hard and painful… but at the same time we wouldn't be here now if it hadn't happened."

A piercing silence settled between them. So stiffening and so revealing and so so awkward. It showed just how unbalanced and scrambled the ties between them were, and still, through the mess of knots and fraying, they held on strong somehow. They all wanted to hold on.

Why? The slithering voice in her head hissed. Why when she didn't deserve it, when she had been the one to cut them with her blood soaked hands. She should cut her deadweight again and forever.

Gohama breathed the warm September air in, trying to get some strength from it, her gaze fixed on Kisamaru's sandals as she wiped away the remains of her tears with the back of her hand and sniffled away the last of her sobs.

"I'd never seen you cry."

Gohama raised her head up to see Nikato watching her, his eyes glassy with his own sympathetic tears, but most of all there was a glimmer of fascination in them, as if he was seeing a completely different person.

She chuckled, the sound still wet in her throat. "Get ready for more, I'm a cry baby now."

His arm wrapped around her shoulder and he pushed her against his side, voice soft as he said, "You can cry, Gohama, but just know that even if we're not in a team, we're still our team, okay?"

"We'll always have each other's backs." Hansuke's gaze shifted to her, intent as he added, "No matter what."

Gohama showed she understood his underlying meaning with a nod, no matter their strained or uncertain places in each other lives, they would always take care of each other.

"Come on, guys," Nikato started, the arm not holding her extended out. "Let's all hug."

"Not the hugs." Kisamaru mumbled with what was the closest thing he got to an eye roll, before being yanked into the circle.

They were a mess of arms, head bumps and warmth. Still, she pressed herself impossibly closer, her face pressing to Kisamaru's shoulder while her heart felt as if it wanted to burst right through her ribs. Much to Nikato's satisfaction Gohama was crying again, the lump of emotion in her chest too overwhelming to hold in. He joined her of course, and even Kisa let the corner of his lip tremble.

It was far from perfect, but things were slowly falling into place.

How could she ever have given this up? What had the past year brought her that could ever compare to the fullness of sharing her life with them?

Her snowdrops. Her family.

Konoha's hitai-ate burned into the flesh of her thigh.

"This time you'll do it right."

---

The memorial had ravaged through him, all those names, each one like a blade to his flesh. Kakashi still hadn't recovered from it, probably never would, and now there were the celebrations for their victory, for their lives, with an interval of only half a day between it and a ceremony of death.

Obito's name hadn't been read and yet it was the one that reached and marked deeper into him. His missing sharingan throbbing still, the crisscrossed wound on his torso another token.

Was he supposed to forget that he had seen Gohama's body fall down the mouth of the statue, had seen Obito's finger pull away from her neck one by one, his legs not fast enough to reach them, his sharingan powerless against his twin one? Was he supposed to forget Gai's shattered body burnt off with his own chakra? Was he supposed to forget about the comrades that had died under his command and drink to how he had survived once again, survived past all of them, past another war?

Gai had forced him out of his bedside once the wind shifted and the noise of the celebrations reached them. He had thrown him all his typical speeches about youth and beauty, but Kakashi had never felt as weary as now, all the relief of surviving, of seeing them survive, quieted under the burden of grief, of guilt.

He couldn't be sure if this would stay, if it would follow him as a gaping wound for the rest of his life, or wash away, heal and close into one more ragged sore scar.

The shinobi in front of him seemed to want to forget, seemed to relish in how they had survived, the euphoria buzzing in the air as they drank and talked and danced around the scattered bonfires.

Kakashi could never blame them. He was glad for them, desperately grateful that they could be here now, celebrating, not remembering. His self-pity was meant only for himself, his grief had always been more of a fault than a virtue, corrosive and destructive, not spurring him into taking hold of his own life with strong hands and just live it.

His eyes fell once again onto Gohama, his awareness never quite leaving her. She was talking with whom Kakashi assumed was Kisamaru's girlfriend, her cheeks pink from the alcohol even from this far, gestures wide and full of life. She had almost been more nervous about meeting her than setting foot on the battlefield days before. It was heart-warming to see her get along with her teammates again, see that they were open to forgiveness, as Gohama's heart had always been open to it too.

Kakashi had noticed how Gohama would suddenly grow quiet, a distant glassy look in her eyes, too close to the ones he had learned about in Buki. Just the night before he had held her as she cried herself to sleep over the empty place in her with the shape of Seiryu.

But now she was letting herself go in the carefree environment of the celebrations, her green eyes bright with glee. Gohama was so stunningly beautiful, it made his heart ache in the most wonderful of ways.

The sight of it was enough to make everything worth it, even when the shadow of his grief for her lurked behind it, Kakashi never knowing how to wash the dark tint off.

And it was almost enough not to let how touchy Genma was while dancing with her bother him.

Why did she have to love dancing? Even when they had been in Buki Gohama had had the need to dance with his ninken. Kakashi hated dancing, he only forced himself on missions, because in his mind the movements were tied to his shinobi duty and it made it feel less like dancing and more like fighting.

He would have to learn how to dance now, or at least learn how to be willing to try it. His body knew how to be graceful with a kunai in his hand and lightning buzzing though his skin, but when it came to dancing every muscle turned to lead and every movement was painfully self-aware. Maybe if it was just the two of them in a room, Kakashi could make it happen. His pride would suffer, but it would make Gohama laugh to see him ridicule himself, and deep down he knew she would appreciate him trying, maybe even feel right at home in his arms.

"Hey there."

Every muscle in his body froze at the sound of Hansuke's voice in his ears and the feel of his soft pat on his shoulder. He sat beside Kakashi on the log, a good distance between them and still the way Hansuke's chakra oozed against his side felt like needles.

"We're okay, just letting you know that."

The words didn't ease the gnawing bitterness of guilt that wanted to rise up his throat like bile. Kakashi had expertly kept himself from running into Hansuke, just the distant sight of him enough to make him doubt his relationship with Gohama, and now he was here.

Kakashi stayed silent, eyes pinned to the unopened bottle of whiskey in his hands, so completely quiet he hoped it was enough to make Hansuke forget he was there and just leave.

"I knew it the moment you realised it really was Gohama after she did nothing but raise her hand to your face."

His eyes clenched shut at the sadness in Hansuke's voice and he opened his mouth just enough to reassure him that it hadn't been as intimate as he thought. "It was just the mole on my chin."

"Oh, the mole, I'd forgotten that."

From the corner of his eyes, all Kakashi could see was Hansuke's knees. He knew he was a coward, not facing his friend after betraying him in the thing that matter most in his life, his love.

Hansuke had never had any middle term when it came to falling in love, even at fourteen, he had jumped wholly into his love for Yugao, following her to ANBU and sacrificing his own self so he could stay by her side. He hadn't grown out of it when he fell in love with Gohama. When he loved the centre of his world transformed into that one person and he made them the measure for the meaning of his life, he made them his purpose.

As Kakashi had done with his grief and as Gohama had with her duty to Buki, both manifestations of their own love.

Kakashi was terrified how much it would break him but Hansuke was also one of the strongest persons he knew. He had hope Hansuke could pick up his pieces again and place them in a better way, as he and Gohama were learning to do.

"Don't start with that face, Hatake! I won't lie and say it isn't really fucking painful, but I don't want your guilt and I don't want your pity." He growled the words out, true anger trembling in his tone and it pierced right through Kakashi's core.

He would take all the anger Hansuke had to throw at him, he would even take a beating if he wanted it, whatever Hansuke could fling against him would never be enough to make things right between them, not when Kakashi had spit on his loyalty to him.

But there was only sadness again, his elbows pressing down on his knees as he supported his head in his hands.

"All that love Gohama has, and that she doesn't know what to do with it, should never go to waste."

Kakashi finally had the balls to raise his head and look at Hansuke. "I think Gohama knows what to do with it a little better now."

"That has to be enough for me…" Hansuke whispered and Kakashi could hear the wetness in his voice. It reached deeper and harder than a hatred filled shout ever could. "It has to."

There was only heavy silence after that, Hansuke didn't move from where he had his eyes pinned to the ground. Kakashi couldn't look up to where he had been watching Gohama, he didn't want the sight of her to be tainted with his own bitterness for himself. So, he watched as his thumb followed the edges of the bottle's label, careful not to ruin it.

"Did she…" Hansuke's voice faltered. "did she try to end it before he could get Seiryu?"

Suddenly there was blood and melted skin on his gloves and Kakashi had to force his heart not to leap up from his stomach, not to crush into itself.

"Of course she did, I fucking can't—"

"You would have done the same." Kakashi stated firmly, cutting Hansuke's resentment even before he could spell it out. "I would, most of us would. We were so close to losing. Stopping Gohama was the most selfish thing I ever did. And I'd do it again, I'll do it every time. This is the person next in line to be your Hokage."

Hansuke scoffed. "You're ridiculous, Kakashi. Do you want me to blame you or something? You're talking to me, not one of those cold-stoned, hypocrite, wrinkled hags of the Council. If anything this only makes me gladder that you could be my Hokage, our Hokage."

Hansuke stood up then, stretching his back before his hand came down heavily on Kakashi's shoulder. He looked up to see his eyes glaring down at him.

"Still," His fingers tightened painfully around his shoulder "Rokudaime Hokage or not, if you ever break Gohama's heart I'll crush your balls and feed them to your ninken."

Kakashi couldn't help but chuckle at his self-aware theatrical display. "Promise me?"

"Oh, I promise." His fingers loosened and he gave Kakashi one more pat before walking back to the where the shinobi were celebrating.

The sight of Hansuke made that self-destructive part of him flare. All of his insecurities and doubts crashing into his chest now that he was alone again.

That voice was ringing in his ears, whispering about how much better he was for Gohama, how Gohama was trying to deceive herself with Kakashi because life had ripped her apart from Hansuke, how he had killed her parents and every time he touched her he left behind some of their blood on her, how he would fail her, ruin her, pierce a raikiri through her heart.

Kakashi didn't let the voice rip him apart. It would always stay there, hopefully getting quieter with each new day, but he wouldn't listen to it, not anymore. Even when uncertainty loomed in every of his and Gohama's moments together, so quiet under the lively contentment of just being with each other, that it was too easy to forget that it was there.

It wasn't just the uncertainty for their future, the consciousness that both their timings missed each other when everything else seemed to overlap. It was the last battle.

Kakashi had said it to Hansuke, he would do it every time. He would give his life and force Gohama to take his death, but most of all, he wouldn't let her sacrifice her life with her own hand and blade.

He stole the decision away from her, even when he had reassured her it was hers alone a week before, in a darkened shower cubicle, Gohama's eyes pleading him to take away the burden of being a jinchuriki.

Yet, Kakashi couldn't bring himself to regret it. What did that say about him? What did that say about them?

Obito had thought Gohama would cave to his pleading. It had been why he had thrown him away from the kamui, ripping the decision he had forced them into away from them.

Kakashi knew it had been selfishly cruel of him to beg that she fulfil her promise to him. He couldn't care that he had been selfish. Accepting her to die in his place so that he could spare her the emptiness would mean seeing her life reduced to him. Gohama was so much more than him, and her life was so much larger than his. If he had died during the war, her life would still be worthy and be worthy of being lived.

It was why he never understood the shinobi couples that thought that letting their significant others die instead of them was the most loving and merciful choice. It would mean accepting the burden of loss in their place, but it also meant they saw no meaning in the other's life without them in it.

That was true selfishness, that was not love. Love was hope.

Kakashi had all his hope in Gohama's life, whether it be apart from him or not, whether it be scavenged down by grief and loss.

Gohama was more than Kakashi and that was why they couldn't stay together. Not now at least.

I'm here for you, you can drop anything and everything on me and I'll take it.

I'll do anything for you. Anything you ask of me or order me and I'll do it.

"I'm a Kyura. My life is in my bonds."

What would I be without you, Kakashi?

They could seem innocent enough, romantic, every man's dream to have a beautiful woman promise that to them.

The words haunted Kakashi.

For Gohama, love was full, love was surrender, love was giving everything until there was nothing left of her.

Gohama's love had always had a streak of self-destruction in it. Gohama's love had always been erasing.

Shuriken in all its madness had been her great act of love for Buki, her great act of hate for herself.

"Everything. I wouldn't have to choose. I'd love everything."

How those words she had whispered to him in Buki revealed more about Gohama than anything else could. Even immersed in her jaded consciousness of life, Gohama had been ruled by her idealism, her destructive search for perfection, making herself nothing so she could reach everything.

Everything wasn't meant for their human hands and human hearts. Gohama's love, the one that was all action and surrender, required a choice. Even when she had been ready to give her life for the world, she had needed to make a choice between duties and between loves. They were human, hostages of decisions, hostages of their smallness even with all the godlike bloodline limits and chakra infused seals.

All they could change was the tiny circumference with the length of their arm.

"I gave up the big ambitions a while ago." Only now could Kakashi understand just how significant these words were, spoken in a light-hearted way over their political ideas.

Yet Kakashi was still terrified that he had stolen Buki's place in her heart.

But she hadn't, had she? Gohama had fought him on the presence of child soldiers because she believed it was wrong. She had ended their fight, but she had never been close to surrendering to his acceptance of that wrong. Gohama had tried to kill herself even when he had begged her not to do it. Her duty to herself stronger that her duty to him.

There were streaks of self-affirmation too, streaks that were only Gohama, discerned and thought through, not a blind duty to fulfil.

Kakashi had stolen that away from her when he ripped the tanto from her hand.

If only he could also steal away the burden of that decision from her. He could see how failure etched into every line of her face in her silent moments, eyes searching for the faraway roots of the tree, for all the what-ifs that would only ever be potential.

And somehow he still didn't regret it… they could have lost the war and Kakashi still wouldn't have regretted it

All that love burning through her, Gohama was learning what to do with it, she was learning what it meant. Kakashi couldn't have seen the path of Gohama's future cut so short when she was finally taking hold of it, he couldn't have seen her end her own life.

His head raised to find Gohama already looking at him. Once their gazes met, her lips spread into the brightest smile, eyes disappearing behind two slits and the raise of her flushed cheeks. Immediately, his heart burst with so much warmth, something Kakashi hadn't even realised he had been missing all his life and now Gohama was showing him, teaching him, challenging him and completely turning his world upside down.

Love.

The moment Gohama had confessed her love for him Kakashi had known his life could never come back from that. Even absorbed in his doubt, Gohama had branded his heart with her words and her mark would last forever.

Kakashi smiled back, exaggerating the turn of his eyes so even from this distance Gohama could see it. She raised a questioning eyebrow at him and he raised her another. For some reason that made her laugh, and he could hear the tilting sound in his heart, with a shake of her head before finishing with eyes narrowed at him, she turned her attention back to Nikato.

After Buki that sense of misplacement had never left him, the sense that there was a hole shaped as Gohama in his life, one that had been left bleeding out, impossible to heal or scar, when he had thought she was dead.

And now, just these few days, where they had shared a few hours of sleep in the same made-up bedroll, were making that misplacement throb, the longing ache so much worse, especially because it carried a new promise.

It bloomed with too much temptation, too much need to speed everything up. If things were different Kakashi wouldn't hesitate to follow his heart and going after Gohama, wouldn't hesitate to build the life they wanted to build together, their routine, their relationship.

Just watching Gohama now made his mind wander through sweet scenarios of mornings waking up together, a cup of tea in her hand, the vapour rising up to her face, her delighted hum with each sip.

His eyes lowered to the bottle of whiskey in his hands, but even without the real image of Gohama in his vision, Kakashi could see her behind his eyes, could feel her branded into his heart, fierce eyes and soft-hearted smile.

Love was also this wrenching pain, love was also powerlessness.

Kakashi wanted it as he had never wanted anything else in his life, he wanted it as if everything he had lived through had been leading him to it. Maybe it was, just not quite as quickly as his heart demanded of things.

Because things weren't different.

There was the Hokage hat waiting for him and there was Gohama taking hold of herself.

And maybe later… maybe later their duties would be the same, a duty to them, a duty to a family, to a home.

"There's my handsome man…" Gohama's voice suddenly drawled out right beside his ear.

Even through all the confused motions in his chest Kakashi's lips spread into a genuine smile.

Her handsome man. He was hers.

Her hand rested on his shoulder for balance and she swirled around to sit beside him, her thigh pressed to his, much closer than what Gohama was usually comfortable with when they were in public.

Kakashi could feel her gaze on his profile while he watched his nails play with the edge of the bottle's label.

"Kakashi," Gohama started, her voice soft and definitely too close as it left a delighted shiver in his skin at his name on her lips. "you could have joined us, you know. Or just stolen me away if you wanted to."

"I didn't want to steal you away from them."

The hand still on his shoulder glided to his nape, Gohama's fingers burying in his hair and tugging gently, spreading tingles through his scalp and neck. "Maybe I was the one that wanted to be stolen."

Kakashi finally turned to her, his eyes falling to her glistering lips first and then raising into her green eyes as they gleamed with the bonfire flames. "So that's what all those looks were about."

"And you couldn't take a hint, Bakashi." Gohama joked back, her breath fanned against his chin, smelling of sake, and he trapped a shaky whimper in his throat.

The alcohol made her bolder, her eyes not hiding their teasing glint as they bore into his own, her other hand resting on his thigh, thumb drawing maddening circles. And her smell… it was enough to drive him insane. Not like death or burnt skin, not like blood on the metal edge of a blade.

"What if I make it up to you?" He whispered in a low voice as he slowly leaned into her.

His fingers traced a feather light path from her thigh, up her hip and teasing the hem of her shirt. Kakashi could see the goose bumps spurting in her arms and once his fingertips touched the soft skin of her stomach, Gohama inhaled sharply. Alive, so strikingly alive. In a slow fluid movement, he brought her shirt up, his palm melting into the dip of her waist.

Kakashi leaned closer still, his nose brushing her burning cheek, her ragged breath tingling into his ears. Just as he was pressing his masked lips to her own, Kakashi pushed the cold bottle of whiskey onto the warm velvet skin of her stomach, not one ragged raise of charred flesh in it.

Gohama jerked back from him with a yelp and he couldn't contain his genuine laughter in his throat at the murderous glare she pierced through him with after the initial confusion.

"You're an idiot." She grumbled, closed fist coming to hit his chest, but Kakashi caught her wrist before she could, his shoulders still shaking with small chuckles. "And here I was thinking you actually had something nice for me."

"This is the something nice for you, my love." Kakashi answered with a self-satisfied smile while lifting the bottle up. "It's that glass I promised."

Her eyes lighted up and she hummed in delight once the bottle of whiskey was in her hands, looking down at it adoringly. It would have made a lesser man jealous.

"How did you get it? All everyone's drinking is sake."

"I might have found it before tonight."

Gohama lifted her head and narrowed her eyes at him. "So you stole it."

"Borrowed it permanently."

Her head fell back in a loud carefree laugh, hair brushing away from her face, revealing all the glee making her skin glow.

It hadn't been a particularly funny or original joke and Gohama was laughing at it as if it was the funniest thing she had ever heard. Maybe it was the alcohol reddening her cheeks, maybe it was the general mood of the camp, maybe it was the carefreeness of a burden loosened from her back and the relief of living one more day.

Whatever it was, Kakashi wished he could keep it safe, he could capture this moment where she looked radiant, laughing at his joke, so happy, so achingly alive. It reflected in his own chest, with a bottomless frightening love, as if a thread bonded each of their hearts together.

"It's a very generous glass. Thank you, Kakashi." Gohama whispered and used his shoulder as leverage to peel an inch of his mask down and press her soft lips to his cheek.

When had Kakashi gotten this lucky? And how long would it last?

"Now, what's keeping that head of yours so busy?"

Kakashi tore his gaze down to his hands. His lips parted and closed again, he didn't know what to tell her, he didn't even know why he couldn't raise his eyes to hers when he desperately wanted to.

"The battle..." His thumb brushed over his palm, the shadow of her blood still there. "the future..."

He could feel the muscle of Gohama's thigh tense at his words, showing him the dread he didn't have the courage to see in her face, not when he had put it there himself. He hated it, hated how he had ripped away all of her fun, her easy smile and laugh from when she had been with her friends.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No." Kakashi cut in, a little too forceful, a little too desperate. "Not tonight."

Tonight he wanted to capture this contentment of theirs, this carefreeness where there was only now, and make it last, infinite, in the gaps between the seconds.

Her nose pressed to his shoulder and she wrapped her arms around his own. "Then how can I get you out of those thoughts?"

Kakashi tilted his head so his lips brushed her hairline. "Steal me away."

Her lips bloomed into a smile against his arm. Gohama stood up, fingers intertwined in his and looked down at him with warm eyes before laying a kiss to his knuckles. "Let's open this up then."

---

"Wait, you're leaving? Won't you take pity on me, Kisa?" Gohama rushed out as she saw Kisamaru laying his spoon down and raising himself from where he was sitting in front of her.

He didn't even settle his Hyuga eyes on her before stating, "Consider this a lesson on the consequences of your actions."

"In my defense, I didn't know what a common person's limits are. Should I really bear the fault of something whose consequences I was not fully aware of?"

"It was your responsibility to become aware of them."

"Still—"

"Shut it, you two," Genma grumbled where he was leaning into his bowl. "it's too early in the morning for this much pretentiousness."

"Welcome to the mere mortal bracket, Kyura." Kisamaru's voice was perfectly cordial as he said it, no one would recognise the teasing glint in the words, and then he left.

Gohama followed him with her glare, making sure he would feel it burn into his back.

"It's your fault now, Genma, I almost had it."

"You really didn't, so just gulp down your water and hope for the best."

Gohama turned back to the table, her eyes pinned to the halfway gone bowl of stew. Her stomach felt nauseous at the sight of it and she knew it had to do with more than her hangover. She wasn't sure how she would bear a pounding head and erratic nerves until the afternoon.

"What are you doing?" She asked when she felt the slithering touch of an arm on her shoulders, an arm that definitely didn't belong there.

Gohama only needed to look up and see, on the other side of the mess tent, Kakashi as he discussed something with the taicho, his one grey eye pinned to Genma's arm around her.

Last night, the man had decided he wouldn't hide whatever they had and he would embarrass her while he did it. Kakashi had spent the night throwing her innuendo filled comments, letting his hand brush her with lingering touches, pressing himself too close whenever he passed by her, teasing every nerve ending of hers with that smooth witty voice and those strong beautiful hands.

No one had explicitly acknowledged it, except Genma, of course. He was the only one that had the guts to tease Kakashi over it and his way of teasing was by being obnoxiously flirty with her, but always at a safe distance.

She shook Genma's hold off her. "Leave my poor man alone."

"Your man?"

A vicious blush spread from her cheeks down her neck and her eyes lowered to her breakfast. "You know what I mean."

"Oh I do and I love it. There's finally someone that can rip that broodiness out of Hatake."

The words only made her heart cringe, the sensation of her fingers faint as they started shaking. "Don't put that hope on me…"

"For fuck's sake, how you two managed to pull it off so far, I'll never know. Just—" Genma cut off his own words suddenly. "Shit, that's a hangover Tsunade. Have to go."

In an instant, he was standing with the food tray in his hands. "Oh and Gohama, darling," Her head tilted back to watch his warm brown eyes as he spoke. "just stop that head of yours. You're good for him. And you know how Kakashi is, once he gets something in his heart he never lets it go."

Gohama offered him a small smile at the words of reassurance. "Thanks, Genma."

He hadn't asked her any questions, hadn't showed her any resentment or unresolved feelings. Genma had talked to her as if Gohama had never left Konoha and they were just meeting a few days after seeing each other at Ippon.

It had only made her more unsettled. Every time her gaze landed on him, she had tried to search for any hidden feelings behind his eyes, for a fake cover around his movements and his smirks. There had been nothing.

Genma had caught onto it at the beginning of last night and had simply said, "Stop overthinking this.". And she hadn't, the environment of the celebrations helping her with it.

"Shiranui!"

Genma winced at Tsunade's shout and only had the time to bend down to place a kiss on her cheek. With a wink, he was gone.

Gohama was left alone with her thoughts. The way he always said it made it seem as if it was easy to stop the turmoil inside her mind. She doubted every decision already made, every path and line of her discernment for the past days concerning her future. Konoha's hitai-ate hadn't stopped making a hole through her pouch and deep inside her flesh.

A talk had never felt as daunting as now, so entirely defining or destructive.

Her eyes clenched closed as the nausea stirred inside her stomach and cold sweat broke through her back. Her fingers massaged her temples, trying to sooth the headache and the clashing motions of her mind.

"This time you'll do it right."

"This time you'll do it right."

"This time you'll do it right."

Tsunade's words haunted her.

There was nothing that her heart desired more than that, it just couldn't see past its own blindness and the fog clogging the path right in front of her feet.

How many times had she thought she was doing things right and ended up doing the most wrong of all?

Her skin tingled with the familiar feel of Kakashi's gaze on hers. With a deep cooling breath, Gohama opened her eyes to see his worried frown from the other side of the tent, where the taicho were still gathered. He was just as nervous as she was and instead of freaking her out more, it calmed her to know they could share it, to know he wasn't hiding it from her.

Her lips spread into a small smile and he answered with his eye-creases. Gohama drank it in as a starved woman and stood up with the tray in her hands.

There was work to be done until lunchtime and at least that she knew she would do right.

---

Kakashi was mercifully on time.

The familiar sight of him once she fell from the last branch, leaning against a tree, Icha Icha in his hand, transformed that ball of anxious energy into something else. Kakashi closed the book with a thud that jolted up her spine before turning to her, shoulder against the trunk, sleeves rolled up to show the corded muscles of his crossed arms.

Gohama barely had the time to feel her own feet moving before she was ripping down his mask and clashing her lips to his.

His surprise quickly washed away and he clung to her with the same desperation. He spun them around to press her to the rough bark, his firm burning body engulfing her, strong lighting fingers clasped around her thigh while his mouth did wonderful things with hers. Gohama whined, drunk on the taste of him.

Kakashi pulled back to rasp against her lips, "Yo…"

Their heavy pants pushed their chests into each other, breaths mingling together, hearts beating with the same rhythm.

She loved him, under all the nervousness, the uncertainty, the weight of Konoha's hitai-ate, they loved each other and that was why they were talking.

"I needed that." Gohama whispered.

Kakashi hummed, the vibrations of his voice trembling through the sensitive skin of her throat as he lowered his mouth to her ear and neck. Gohama's fingers held harder onto the muscles of his shoulders at the path of those delicious pliant lips, slightly chapped, which only added to the soft wet feel of his tongue on her flesh. They traced her only scar before laying a gentle peck on the rough skin.

Kakashi had admitted that he didn't like seeing it and she could only imagine how much worse it was now that he knew Obito had been the one to slash it into her. Still, he always lavished it with attention, never hiding away from it because he knew how significant it was to her. Kakashi had even seemed as relieved as she had been once they realised Seiryu had made sure Otsutsuki Hagoromo wouldn't heal it when recovering her body from their combined chakra.

His damned hand, holding her thigh up, carefully coaxed it down so Gohama would stand on her own. As his lips left her collarbone, she locked his head before he could run away from her. "Don't stop."

Kakashi kissed up to her cheek and then her nose, before pressing his forehead to hers. "Trying to put it off won't make it any easier."

With his hands on her waist, he put her down gently, his lips still scattering kisses to her face. Gohama's arms only wrapped tighter around him, fingers grasping onto the fabric of his shirt.

His palm moulded to her forehead as he pulled his body back from her own. "How's your hangover?"

Her eyes finally opened to watch him, tender gaze turned down to her, the glassy headiness from their kiss still darkening his grey. "Gone. Kisa ended up taking pity on me. You?"

"Sakura. I should have saved that bottle for another time."

"Now I know, besides last night was the most fun I've had in a long time. Did you like it? Because today I was thinking that maybe you'd have liked it better if we'd had more time alone…"

They had spent most of the night at the centre of the celebrations, the only time together alone had been on their drunken walk to his tent, stealing kisses behind trees, whispering sweet or teasing comments, nothing too profound, nothing that spelled like promises and would shatter the oblivious contentment of that moment. Their night was finished in an attempt at taking off their clothes into something comfortable to sleep with, before crashing down on the bedroll, a tangle of legs and snores.

"I loved it, Hama." Kakashi answered right away, his thumb tracing the edge of her jaw.

"Do you think we stepped out of line, busting into Gai's room like that?"

Only today was Gohama regretting the excessive amusement of the night before, especially when Gai was still convalescing from lethal wounds. He had seemed pleased to see them, tired eyes lighting up with the springtime of youth. But when their drunken delight had quieted, the reality of his condition had pierced into them. Kakashi had cried a few silent tears that he had tried to hide from both of them and that they had pretended had been well hidden.

"Definitely not, I talked to him this morning. He's too glad that he has an ally against my cold winter mood as he calls it."

"I'll get all the medical scrolls I can from Buki." Gohama had promised him so last night, even if still making certain he wouldn't see Kyura medicine as a possible miraculous cure.

"You still don't have to."

"I want to. I can't let all that knowledge disappear. It wouldn't be fair to the people that need it and the people that fought to achieve it. Besides, I'd already decided on asking Kisamaru to take care them. And I know Tsunade will be just as respectful, it wasn't for nothing that she suffered at my great-grandmother's hands."

Once their words fell, they looked into each other's eyes, a silent resolve passing between them. Kakashi brought her hand to his lips before tugging her away to sit down beside him.

"I'll start." Kakashi said right away, the readiness in his voice surprising even him. "I need to say something before we start… deciding…" He added uncertainly, his gaze stuck to his intertwined fingers between his knees. "What we have now, I have no idea how this works, but in all the thinking I've been doing there is one thing I am sure about. That night in the showers, all we said we wanted for us, it hasn't changed for me."

"It also hadn't changed for me, but other things have, or at least we've noticed them now…"

"I know," Kakashi hissed out between his teeth, fingers brushing his hair back roughly. "but I don't want us to give up on them."

Gohama could see the raise of his mandible as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. He looked at her, expression blank except for the tension in his jaw, and his words just spilled out of his mouth. "Obito told me to be the Rokudaime Hokage."

"He was a smart man." Gohama puffed out as she smiled at him. "Now I don't have to pressure you into it."

"You don't look happy."

"I am happy and I—" Her voice broke against the lump in her throat. "It's bittersweet." She explained with a small smile, before letting her hair fall onto the side of her face.

Kakashi didn't let her get away with it, of course. His tender finger brushing the strand away and tucking it behind her ear. Once the silence was so stale it made it difficult to breathe, Gohama had the courage to look at him and see that he was looking back at her with patient eyes, as if he had been waiting for her to speak all that time.

Her eyebrow rose. "Is that everything you're going to say about that?"

He shifted his eyes away from her, hand raising to brush the back of his head. "I'm waiting to hear what you have to say."

"Still, there's more to it than just 'Obito asked me to do it', just the fact that you worded it like that…"

Gohama knew Kakashi knew of the power Obito still held over him, even without the sharingan, but there needed to be something more than acknowledging it. He merely looked down at his hands and her heart trembled, hand reaching out to hold onto his.

"Don't forget that you can always talk to me if you want to, okay?"

Kakashi nodded and lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a soft grateful kiss to her fingers.

"And I'm going to talk more, so get ready for it."

Her gaze ran back down, to their hands, the buzzing restlessness washing out from her finger as it traced his knuckles and his scars.

"I've been thinking about the war and my role in it… and I…" Gohama turned to hold his eyes as she spoke, not sparing him from the sharpness of her own words. "I haven't forgiven you for not letting me choose my death."

She had finally voiced what they had both been evading, the heaviness of it not vanishing even after spelling it out through words. Her gaze ripped away from him the moment his eyes widened with sorrow, her hand slithering away from his gentle hold, because it stung from all the guilt over her absurd resentment.

"Things worked out in the end, but if they hadn't… That battle… I failed everything. Everything I have ever worked for in my life and I failed. We might have won the war but I lost."

"You didn't fail, Gohama. I told you it was my choice, so it is also my burden and my burden alone. My failure. My selfishness."

"But it's not just that, Kakashi…"

She looked at the shadowed grass in front of her, the dips of light falling onto the forest ground, while breathing deeply, her tongue still not ready to actualise her thoughts into words and giving them reality.

"I'm a terrible shinobi."

A desperate chuckle pushed pass her lips once it was finally said, as if it was only now the realisation had formed in her mind.

"Everything I was ever meant to be, the world gave me everything for me to be it, my chakra, my upbringing, my genes…" Gohama looked at Kakashi with pitifully raised eyebrows. "And I'm terrible at it."

She hid her face in her hands as if it would ease the shame of failure prickling into her skin, like blood in her hands that she couldn't clean away.

"Kyura Gohama… The jinchuriki of the ten-tails beast, the Head of the Kyura and the Shuriken of Bukigakure." Her nails scrapped into her scalp as she brushed her hair back, trembling eyes lost in front of her. "I'm not Seiryu's jinchuriki anymore, and I hope I'm not the Shuriken, and I was never the Head of the Kyura, that position died with my clan.

"What does that make me, Kakashi?" Gohama whispered, her soundless words lost somewhere in her throat.

She finally lifted her eyes to his, trying to find an anchor in the loving shade of his grey. His hands had always been better at protecting, at keeping things steady, when all of her pieces felt like they were crumbling once again. Her life had always been an act of holding them tight even through the earthquakes and small breezes, of watching them fall and placing them again, in different ways, worse ways or better ones, only for them to crash once again.

Why couldn't they just hold on, permanent and unchanged?

"Who am I when I can't be what I was always meant to be?"

"You're Gohama."

She shook her head at the confidence of Kakashi's eyes as he said it. "It's not that simple."

"Isn't it? You never told me when I asked you. You never told me what your dreams are, what you found out that you wanted with the Kuma."

"Tsunade…"

Gohama's hand fell onto the button of her pouch and she pulled the heavy burning hitai-ate from it. She had spent hours looking at it, the carved whirl like doom in her hands, like two tearing forces that shouldn't exist together but they did. Even now, as she looked at it with Kakashi.

That was the hitai-ate he bore with honour and love, loyalty and duty, all her precious people did, the hitai-ate of the village that had once terrified her because of the place it was winning in her heart, and it was the hitai-ate that had killed the ones she loved, the hitai-ate that had used her life to fulfil missions when it had marked her family's death, the hitai-ate that had betrayed her, lied to her for four years…

All that in one simple plaque of metal.

"She'll pardon me if I accept to be a Konoha shinobi."

"You don't want to be a shinobi."

Gohama ripped her eyes away from the hitai-ate. "I would stay with you, with them."

Kakashi's fingers grasped onto her arms, just as he had done when yanking her away from her stupor with a confession on his lips. His face was less desperate now, eyes set in firmness and voice rasping with something close to anger.

"You don't want to be a shinobi."

"I don't." Gohama admitted, reminded herself even when she had never forgotten, only allowed the sliver of a possibility, because if it was for them, Gohama knew she could bear anything for them. But she wouldn't. Not this time.

She no longer belonged in the shinobi world, hadn't since the massacre. In the monastery, she had been outside the border of it, in Konoha at the edge, one foot in and out, and as the Shuriken, hands deep in bloody hearts and chakra, Gohama had still been lost in a past that never overlapped with the life of the villages, with the Kuma, she had been entirely out and it had felt right. But only the war had burned the realisation into her, because, even completely absorbed in the life of the shinobi world, Gohama had been outside of it.

But Kakashi did belong, Kakashi was still completely immersed in it, as were every single one of her precious most loved people.

Her eyes burned with the certainty tightening around her ribs. His face was a blur of colours before she could see that firmness wash away into anguish.

"We already know, don't we… we already know how this conversation is going to end…"

Kakashi's thumb brushed the skin under her eye, even if she hadn't allowed any tear to fall. She pressed his palm harder against her cheek, needing the comfort of his touch to seep deeper, under her skin and sheath her shattering heart.

"I still think it's important for us to have it. And you still haven't told me what you want, Gohama."

"I'm not sure…" Even with her eyes closed, Gohama could feel the tender weight of his eyes on her. "I want a lot of things and a lot of opposing things…"

"Like?"

"I want to be with you, Kakashi…"

"But." There was no question behind his word, Kakashi already knew what she would say but he still wanted to hear her voice it, more for her than for him.

"I… I can't stay in Konoha." Her head shook with her words and she pulled Kakashi's hand away from her face, laying it gently on his bent knee. "Shinobi or not, I can't."

"I was scared…" His fingers flexed around his pants and relaxed at the same time he puffed out a quiet breath. "I was scared you wouldn't have said this."

Her gaze raised from the safe spot on the veins of his hands to watch him with a small mocking smile. "Don't you want me to stay with you?" Her tone was light-heartedly but she couldn't hide the slight tremble of it from both of them.

"Of course I do, Gohama, but there are other things I want more. I want what's best for you and us, and even if you coming with me to Konoha may seem like the best for us, I don't think it would be right in the long run."

His hand held onto her own. "The person you want to be, the life you want to build, it's not in Konoha. And I can't… I can't rob you away from it. I've seen you erase yourself in the love to your village and I can't see your love for me reduce you again. I can't see you replace Buki with me."

Her pride should have flared, her protective streak over Bukigakure's place in her self should have shaken at the accusation behind his words, but Kakashi said it with such love, such burning understanding, all the vulnerability that should have prickled like sharp needles in her flesh felt only like freedom.

"I already am sometimes… it scares me… it makes me doubt all my decisions concerning you. I don't want you to be my blind duty. I want you to be my duty because I believe it's good."

It was too much again, the warm colour of Kakashi's tenderness for her. It had never stopped piercing her even when there wasn't a mask for it to pierce through.

"And do you believe it's good?"

A smile bloomed on her lips. "One of the best things of all my life."

Kakashi looked back at her for an unnervingly long time, his face blank, lines smoother than the mask now looped around his neck and her smile faltered. Gohama could see the churn of his thoughts behind his eyes, even if she couldn't read what they meant.

"I can stay with you."

Those were the most tempting words that had ever been said to her. So sharp in their magic they cut her into two parts. Gohama had to forced her lips closed, so her mouth wouldn't shape the most desperate 'yes' of her life. This wasn't the time for yeses and it wasn't the time for walks towards the sunset together.

"I know you can, but you won't, Kakashi."

Whatever contained shell had been around him shattered into tiny pieces, and behind it was the familiar grimace of his self-hatred.

"I'm leaving you alone when you're going to build a new life. I'm abandoning you."

Her hands held onto his face, thumbs soothing down the loathing creases around his mouth. Kakashi's grey had such a sad tinge to them as he forced himself to watch her and she hated it, she wished she could yank it away from him.

"I love all of you, Kakashi, and that includes you as a Konoha shinobi. If there's someone that understands your love for your village it's me. I also can't rob you away from it. Your place now is leading it, we both know it. You're not abandoning me, I know that when I need you, you'll be there for me."

"It's not the same."

"No… but it's no less true. I also know just how lonely and ruthless it is to lead a village, especially when you're already reluctant about it. If anything, we're leaving each other."

"Doesn't really reassure me." Kakashi answered with a light joking tone and it lifted a few wisps of worry from her chest.

"I just don't want you to feel like your failing me or indebted to me, because you're not."

He closed his eyes as his face turned slightly so he could press his lips to the palm of her hand.

"I'm a patient man." The overflowing love in his eyes told her just how deeply the meaning of his words ran.

They were reaching the other layer of their decisions, the one that fell further in time, their eyes blinder to all that it implied, and yet Gohama's heart was more certain of it than any other choice in her life.

"But you're not a patient woman."

"I'm not, but I will be because there's us at the end of it. My dream, my future."

Instead of joy, his eyes twisted into that bitterness Gohama had become so familiar with and the blow of it would never ease. Her thumb traced the raise of his cheek, down into the beauty mark at the corner of his lips.

"I can see that guilt in your eyes."

"You're young, Gohama, you'll start a completely different life from my own, I won't blame you if you realise I'm not what you want. I don't want you to be stuck to me."

"My sweet Bakashi. My life will be different from everything I know, but I'm still my past. Do you seriously think a civilian man could ever accompany me? Not to talk about how I'd completely traumatise him. Even inside the shinobi world, I've found almost none that could and none as much as you.

"I want to share my future life with you, Hatake Kakashi, not anyone else. I want to be stuck to you. Never feel guilty about that. It's the greatest blessing you could give me. Okay?" When he didn't answer, Gohama raised a pointed eyebrow at him. "Do I need to repeat this again ten times before it gets past that thick skull?"

The beginnings of a smile upturned the corner of his lip. "Not today. And I'm trying... I'm trying to not let my guilt pull me back."

"I know, I can see it." She leaned into him to lay a tender kiss above his beauty mark and then his mouth. "And you…" The resolve of before grounded in her own certainty washed away once it became about him, her insecurities wavering through the tone of her voice. "can you say the same thing about me…? Because, even if you are patient, things change."

"Not me and not over this, Gohama. You're the first person I've ever… loved like this. I don't just fall in and out of love, and I don't just stop loving people. If anything, distance makes the heart grow fonder is particularly true for me."

Gohama's hand fell away from his face, the words trembling through her chest. So many of Kakashi's relationships had been with shadows of a memory, with names carved into stone, with dead perfect people.

His idealisation of Obito had crushed him once he met the real one and Gohama knew that Kakashi saw her for herself, these days better than anyone before, but there was that fear that she wouldn't correspond to what he would imagine of her and their life together, their love.

"And why didn't this reassure you?"

"I don't want you to idealise me…"

She couldn't bear it anymore, she couldn't bear people looking at her and seeing only the perfect weapon, the perfect heiress, the perfect future wife when she had never been any of those things, her heart breaking, her self-worth crumbling into nothing, because she knew she could never be them.

"I see you, Gohama." Kakashi told her in his calm drawled timber, his words a repetition of the ones he had declared in Buki when she had begged him to look at her and see her. "Not everything, I'll admit, there's much more I want to learn and know. But I will always love you for who you are, Hama. And if I don't, you tell me."

"We need to talk, Kakashi, really talk. I need you to always tell me what you really want. Please. Promise me you won't hide things just because you think you're protecting me from pain."

The back of his fingers traced the edge of her cheek as he told her with the most tender of voices, "I promise. Promise me back?"

Gohama nodded her burning eyes clenching closed, fingers grasping onto Kakashi's wrist.

"I have a lot of hope for us." She could hear the smile in his voice and how wonderful those words were, how wonderful that it was Kakashi saying them. "If you think about it, there's little that can break us apart. We've had a trial by fire."

She let out a little chuckle, fingers brushing away the blurriness in her eyes. "Maybe boredom will be the thing to do it."

"Then we'll just have to find ways of keeping it away."

Her head shook in wonder at the man in front of her. Kakashi was so breathtakingly astonishing in everything he did. How had someone like him ever ended up falling in love with her?

A blush painted his cheeks at the heaviness of her gaze, he was even more breathtakingly astonishing when he blushed. "What?"

"You're too romantic for someone that's never been in a relationship."

Kakashi let out a delicious low laugh. "Maybe I've been saving it all up for you, my love."

"Ugh, Kakashi," Gohama whined as she fell onto him, burying her burning face in his chest. "you're going to kill me with all that sappiness."

"So this is the weakness of the indestructible Kyura Gohama."

Her hand rose to him as he watched her with those loving soft eyes of his that always made every fibre of her being ache. Gohama's fingers rose to rest over the edge of his jaw, thumb tracing the spot at the corner of his mouth, that small piece of him so few saw and Kakashi wanted her to see, showed it to her with trust and vulnerability.

"You're so beautiful." She breathed out, because Kakashi was more than handsome, everything about him shined with beauty.

His face broke with another red flush, his eyes shy as he looked at anywhere but her own, his brow creased in something akin to pain. And he teased her about not knowing how to take compliments. Her touch was gentle on him, so scared and so protective around the small white flower in her hands.

"I really like you, Kakashi."

His lower lip fell into an endearing pout. "This feels a little like a downgrade."

Gohama shook her head. "I can love things and people that I don't like. I like you and I love you. My snowdrop."

"Now you're the one killing me."

Gohama laughed at his grumble. It was impossible for a heart to flutter with as much gratitude and amazement as now, as much disbelief and also the burning consciousness of how real it was, even through the fear that it was all a genjutsu and would fade right between her hands.

Who would have thought they would end up here, like this? Not her and she was sure that neither Kakashi.

"It's so weird…"

Kakashi understood her vague words right away, his lips falling into a stunning smile. "I still have to pinch myself every few minutes."

"This morning Genma said he had no idea how both of us pulled it off this far."

"Hmm," His fingers held onto her chin and he pulled her into a kiss, his lips shaped into a smirk. "I guess we'll just have to keep proving him wrong."

"Forget about love. The best driver of a long-lasting relationship is proving people wrong."

"Especially Genma."

"Especially Genma." Gohama emphasised.

---

"So I was right. You'll end up being a scholar."

Gohama narrowed her eyes down at the cocky grin he was giving her from his place on her lap. "I'm just thinking of paying specialists to preserve and archive Buki's scrolls."

"Like you're not going to devour them yourself, Hama. Not to talk about all the fuinjutsu research already brewing in that head of yours." Kakashi said with too much satisfaction as he poked her forehead, fast enough that she couldn't catch his offending hand. "You just don't want to admit I'm right."

Kakashi had indeed told her in Buki he imagined her as a scholar as a civilian. At the time she had been mostly offended, her heart craving for action, violence. And now what offended her most was that smirk playing on his lips.

"It would be easier if you didn't look so cocky."

"It's not cockiness." His smile softened as he looked up at her. "I'm just happy I know you."

It hit her chest with a wave of warmth. Gohama smiled too, the hand on his chest smoothing down over the steady beat of his heart in a small caress.

"And happy that I was right."

Her palm came down with a thud on his sternum. They started a small spar, tugging and pushing against each other's hands. Kakashi decided to end it by looping his arm around her waist and burying his face in her belly. His soft lips spread kisses on her stomach, fingers brushing the dip of her spine and Gohama let her head fall back against the tree trunk, a sigh in her mouth.

It was already late, definitely past the time of their lunchbreak and Kakashi had admitted he was skipping on a higher-up meeting, but Gohama didn't have the willpower to be responsible now. Their decision had marked into stone how little time they had together and they wanted to crump months of loving each other, years even, into every small second.

Her fingers combed through his silver strands and Gohama coaxed him to pull away at the dangerous reaction such small ministrations were pulling from her. Kakashi knew it, his nose too close from the dull ache between her thighs, but he loved edging her on, edging himself on, even when they still stood behind their decision to wait and take their intimacy slowly.

It hadn't stopped being hard, if anything it only became increasingly more difficult.

The change in his chakra flow was enough to consume her, the lightning that had always tingled against her senses, made shivers shot down her spine just from a small flicker in it, now that Kakashi didn't have a sharingan to steal most of his reserves. Only now did she realise just how much it had.

He turned back, his nape supported on her thigh, and Gohama continued the soothing motion of brushing back the bangs from his eyes.

"I'm proud of you, Gohama."

A fierce blush burned in her cheeks at the sincerity in his murmured voice. "I haven't done anything."

"Yes, you have. You have done so much. You're nothing short of a miracle." The intensity in his eyes was too unbearable and Gohama looked up at the sky with a roll of her own. "I'm serious." He added gravely, his tone resonant of the one he used as a taicho.

She looked down, the same sincerity in her eyes. "I'm also proud of you, Kakashi."

It was still strange not to see the red colour peaking at her through white lashes. Kakashi's sharingan had always had a dangerous pull on her and he had never shied away from watching her with it, the path it had made on her flesh burning and tantalising. A small part of her felt a little pity that he had lost it, but in the end it didn't change things, Kakashi was still Kakashi without the sharingan, his gaze still completely engulfing.

They had both lost two burdens of power and duty, two tokens of their love, tying them to someone else. She hoped it could help them support each other through it.

"Do you still have the memories from the sharingan?"

Kakashi nodded. "But some of them are disappearing, my mind doesn't have the space for everything. I've been spending most hours of day trying to memorise everything for myself, but it's different, the sharingan's memory is exact, I'd just call on it and a perfect replica would come to my head. I shouldn't have depended so much on it. It's an eye, I lost it once, I could have lost it again. And I did."

"Just don't burden yourself to exhaustion. You don't need one thousand jutsu to be just as great a shinobi."

A small sad smile appeared in his lips. "Actually it's not the jutsu. I can learn them again. But there are some things I can't live through again and I don't want to lose them.

"The first time I saw you in Konoha, when you were just a Kyura back from the dead, a relic of a dead clan, a thorn on my side, an arrogant teenage girl. Two days ago I'd be able to tell you, to show you all the details of your chakra flow, the way your steps moved against the rug over the wood floors, the way your hands swayed beside you, the cocky smirk you don't use so much anymore, how the light reflected on the carvings of Buki's hitai-ate, everything… and now…

"All these small things that led me here today, that show me just how far I've made it in life. The future I promised to show Obito. And I'm losing them…"

Gohama leaned down to press a kiss to his forehead, down his nose and against his lips. She didn't know how else to comfort him, her words could carry nothing that would ease him, all she had was her gestures, even when they always seemed so small, so weightless.

Kakashi held onto the back of her head to keep her from pulling back. "I love you."

He seemed to surprise even himself, but he committed to it, his fingers brushing her hair falling as a curtain around them over her shoulder and behind her ear, thumb not lifting from where it drew circles on her jaw.

"Do you understand? Why I took the decision away from you?"

The guilt in his expression shook through her, the same shade of the one he had always had for the massacre.

"Of course, I do, Kakashi. I know I'm being unfair and irrational. I'm infinitely grateful you did, otherwise we wouldn't be here like this. But I still… I still feel resentment… and I'm not asking you to apologise or feel guilty, not at all… I just want you to understand me too."

"I do understand, I told you it was your decision, I told you to do what you wanted not me." The corner of his lip turned into a grimace. "And then I—"

"Don't you remember what I answered when you asked what I really wanted? 'I don't want to die.' And I didn't, if you hadn't pulled me out of the kamui and taken the tanto away, I would have and I would have left you again, but I didn't." Gohama laid another kiss on his forehead, a gentle gesture to wash away all her harsh words making up what-ifs. "It happened as it happened. We don't need to overthink it."

His mouth pressed to hers and he raised himself up from her lap, never breaking the soft rhythm of his lips against hers. When he pulled back, Kakashi brought her into his arms, breathing in her hair, a quiet desperation behind his touch, like all the other times he had clung to her in the past days, almost afraid she would disappear from under his eyes.

"Gohama!"

A painful shiver crawled up her spine at the memory of her name tearing through Kakashi's voice, carrying only burning anguish and despair with it.

Her arms wrapped around Kakashi's neck and she hid her face against his throat. "I never want to hear you scream my name like that again."

She didn't need to explain anything else, he knew what she was talking about, it had been him feeling the pain, cavernous enough that his voice pierced the same into her with just vibrations in the air.

Kakashi brushed his fingers through her hair as he held her just as tightly, but didn't promise anything. It wasn't in either of their powers, the war had ended, but their future was just as uncertain as it had always been, just as ominous even through the hope.

There was still a heaviness in them, a sense of sadness now that they were away from the unrestrained relief of surviving the war. It had been a few days and Gohama's chest was already impatient with the doom that wouldn't wash away. She knew she needed to give herself time, she knew the wounds needed time to heal and scar, but she was so tired of healing, she was so tired… and all that tiredness reminded her only the past decade of her life.

Kakashi was feeling the same, the weight yet to leave his eyes, the circles under them still so dark and deep.

"It's not over, is it… it's peace time, but it's not over…" She asked him.

"I don't think it will ever be over."

Gohama clenched her eyes closed, her face burying into Kakashi's throat. "There's always something. When we think things are finally falling into place, when we think we're finally fine, there's always something else to deal with. How do we deal with it, Kakashi?"

"I don't know… One day at a time, I suppose."

"It's easier with you."

She could feel Kakashi swallow on her face before he choked out a simple wet, "Yes…"

Now their hearts were breaking with the anticipation of leaving each other. Gohama would have to say goodbye to her team when they were just starting to mend things, say goodbye to Genma and Gai, broken legs and a dead student. Nikato would be furious to see her leaving when she had just come back. A part of her was terrified Hansuke would offer to come with her.

It had only been a couple of weeks, Kakashi and Gohama hadn't even consummated their intimacy, and somehow they had both melted into each other. And now they would have to pull themselves away, pieces lingering back behind, holes in their skin and heart.

It was as if long piercing fingers had sunk info her flesh and were slowly ripping her in half.

Gohama leaned her forehead to his, fear rioting against the walls of her stomach. "What if I lose it?"

"You call me."

She nodded against him. They wouldn't cut themselves from each other. They would be apart, the red thread joining them spread tight, thinning even, but there was a difference from before. In the moment it didn't feel like it was, but it was different. They could write letters, visit each other, share a phone call late into the night.

"And if you ever need a place to stay, my Konoha will always welcome you, my love."

"I'll always welcome you too, Kakashi, and all those doubts and pains and joys." Gohama rasped through the wet cold fingers choking in her throat. "Tell me it'll be alright."

"It'll be alright."

---

The cicadas buzzed along the dirt path north, leading to Snow. Gohama closed her eyes at the gentle breeze that fluttered through her hair, the warm scent of a dying summer filling her lungs.

Father, Mother, Yukine, Uncle. Bukigakure.

The red lines of their mark burned still, heavy and sad, and yet they didn't narrow her anymore, they didn't wash away the white of her own flesh. They held her up and they only ignited her love.

Were they watching her now? Could they see the new shape of her heart that their strong, soft and harsh hands had also helped mould? Could they see the frail white flowers that bloomed in her chest, alive and beautiful, as they hadn't been in a long time, and rose up into her mind, her eyes and mouth, her hands?

She hoped they could, she hoped they were proud of this other form of honour.

Gohama squeezed Kakashi hand, drawing some of his strength and his love through the red thread that had tied them together since before they had even known it was there, continually fraying and interlacing into changed braids, but always there, always different and always the same.

"On the path in the desolate field, the shadows overlapped and parted."

Her eyes opened and she drank in his unmasked profile, the line of his tan cutting the two halves of his face, his lips still red from kissing her.

"You remember." She said softly, behind her lids she could still see the small card Gohama had left on his table, full of anger, understanding, self-disgust and sorrow when years before she had realised Kakashi was leaving her. It had been there already, the seed, the red thread.

How far they had come… and still they were once again repeating the same gesture and it was all so overwhelmingly different. Then they had both been locked in time, still as the rest passed by them, trying to make their future a repetition and renewal of a long lost past. The past would always stay, branded in stone and in their scars, but it no longer caged them.

"Maa, it's not every day someone talks to me through poetry."

"Really?"

"Hmm," Kakashi hummed as if he was truly pondering her question. "I've only ever known one person that was that pretentious."

"Must be a lovely person."

His grey eyes finally fell to meet her own, a tender smile in his lips. "The loveliest of all."

Gohama pressed her cheek to Kakashi's arms and his warm lips brushed her hairline in the shape of his whispered words, his voice still hopeful even when it caught in his throat. "We've parted a few times already."

With a steeling long breath, she smiled. "We have."

Slowly her fingers loosened around his and Kakashi let go of her, both their hands drawing back to their sides, the soft breeze marking the absence into their skin.

An open road north and an open road south. This was what freedom tasted like, fear, a goodbye and the hope of something good.

The path stretched endless before her, no steps sealed into her flesh so she would walk them. The mask of Shuriken had been full of history, of significance, of love and duty, and somehow it had been emptier, more meaningless than the vacant trail before her now.

The road was emptiness ready to be filled, so many bottomless possibilities ready to be actualised. It overflowed.

The daunting shadow of the unknown could have left her floored and paralysed, but, in it, all Gohama saw was meaning. No, not seeing. She couldn't see anything but the road and the grass leading north, the sun gleaming against the clouds at the edge of the horizon.

Even while she saw nothing but the things as the things themselves, her heart was full because there was truth, there was meaning as a simmering invisible thing of beauty that branded right under her skin, into the marrow of her bones, and spread through everything around her.

And all Gohama needed to do was take a step and trust that whatever was ahead it would be good.

THE END

---

Hello there, my lovely readers! I'm not sure what to write, so I'll start by thanking you for accompanying me through this beast of a story, these years of pouring work and love into this thing. It really got out of my hands at some point, but I'm glad it did.

Also I'm sorry it took so long to upload these final chapters, but I just couldn't get them out and into the pages of my Word. It was a battle and even when I wasn't actively battling it, it occupied a nagging space in the back of my head that I just wanted to get rid of.

I'm not that satisfied with them and they seem a bit anticlimactic… Still, I feel like at least I was fair with the characters, I couldn't see how Kakashi could renounce to being Hokage and Gohama could let herself fall back after all the work she had done by returning to Konoha.

I'm also not a fan of another "death" for Gohama in Chapter 9 or using it as a cliff-hanger (the reason why I posted the two chapter at the same time), but I didn't find any other way where I could get her out of the final battle and make her fail. She has always been meant to be a failed over-powered character, without being a villain or antagonist. (I also won't mention the slight Deus ex machina.)

Anyway, this story has always been more about the path, the constant going back and forth of its character and their development, than the ending, so… yeah… I'm going with this excuse.

Once again, I'm deeply grateful to all of you readers and I hope this piece was at least a nice little company for the couple of years I've been sharing it.

I would absolutely love to hear from you!

As always, thank you for reading.

RP