It's been two years since they first met, and their second winter.
She still doesn't know who he is and she doesn't listen to the guesses that the other girls make—there is no point in it. He'll tell her himself if he ever wants to and a small part of her wants to never know his name. It would hurt more, she thinks, to know his name and the reality that he could be a real shinobi who can be killed. She knows he's a real shinobi, but without his name, he seems more like a phantom that visits her.
Not a blood and flesh man who has lived a life beyond her, beyond pleasure and the walls of a whorehouse.
Nana isn't sure if she'd hate him if their relationship were to ever change, or if she would fall even deeper in. She doesn't want the answer, though she anticipates that there will be a day she'll be tested. Or, perhaps that's the hopeful optimistic side of herself that she likes to ignore speaking. If she were tested, if she proved herself, would there be hope to the possibility she's too afraid to think of?
It's more likely that she'll soon have to say goodbye to him for good, never knowing his name forever.
...
...
...
The first time she actually hears his laugh—a true, heartfelt, tear-inducing laugh that isn't a soft chuckle—is when he somewhat opens up to her after their relationship has reached a longevity that no one expected it to run. Her shinobi is not an open man, and he keeps his other life out of the bedroom for the most part, the only indication of his other life the quick, hurried exits and the dead eyed expression he sometimes comes to her with.
Yet sometimes, sometimes, he falters and says something.
"You've never killed anyone," he states after a few minutes have passed with her in his arms, his gaze knowing. She thinks he must have, to look at her with such darkness.
"No," she says quietly, kissing his chest and a scar that runs right over his heart.
There's humor in his next words, his voice light and unaffected. "It's weird to me, how you're so... sweet, yet to the world outside, you're dirty."
Nana smiles. "Aren't I both?"
"No," he answers, an underlying hint of steel in his tone. It's almost as if it snuck in there and he's embarrassed by it, tilting his face from view. Nana shifts, lays herself atop him and settles her hands and chin on his chest.
"Why not?" Nana asks, closing her eyes and acting as if she were close to sleep.
"You wash regularly," he points out, and then lifts a lock of her dark hair to his nose. "Plus, you smell so damn good, always."
She hums at this, still baffled and bothered. "It's not just skin that can get dirty. Reputations, names, dreams, so many intangible things get dirty and me? I'm drenched in filth."
"How so?"
"I'm a whore," she points out, the obvious cause.
"I'm a shinobi," he responds, brow arched. His hands drop to her bare back and his knuckles knead in the muscles there, driving out the tension and setting Nana at ease, even with her mind so heavy in thought.
"If only we weren't the things people call us," she murmurs, struck by the mood to share words she would have otherwise kept to herself.
Her shinobi stiffens beneath her, pauses his movement. "What do you mean by that?"
She meets his gaze and sighs. Might as well.
"Oftentimes, you hear the hopeful voices saying that we are who we choose to be but that neglects public opinion and when personal choice isn't an option, doesn't it? To everyone else, I'm a whore. Been one since I was fourteen and sold by my own parents during the war. And it's true. I have sex with people for money, and I don't turn anyone willing to pay away. I'm a woman with loose morals, low standards, and no future to speak of where I won't be any different. I suppose, we are what people call us because we don't give them reason to think any different."
He shifts underneath her, hands going back to caressing her back. "Is it important to you, what other people think about you?"
"Has to be, unfortunately. Even I don't want to do this forever, and if I have any hope of changing what I am, the public will be a part of it."
"You still aren't dirty," he insists and surprises her with a kiss to her forehead, a show of affection she rarely receives and definitely never has from him before.
"Are you?" Nana asks softly, not sure why she does. It usually isn't like her to pry, delicate with the balance they maintain.
"Yes," he answers and when she opens her eyes to meet his gaze, his frown is deep and his eye is tightened with untold stories and emotions she can't put her finger on. Nana rises, the blanket slipping to bunch at her waist as she straddles him, taking his lank hand into her own. With her eyes closing, she takes a finger into her mouth and sucks, running her tongue over the length of it before switching to his thumb.
Her shinobi groans and she rolls her hips, teasing him as she continues to suck and lick at the fingers on his hand. Did she say she loves his mouth the best? Not so sure anymore. When he hardens against her, she doesn't cover the moan that works its way through her throat, only making her rub against him with that much more fervor.
Nana opens her eyes to watch the delicious torture in his face and smiles upon seeing his gaze trained on hers.
"Not dirty," she whispers with a kiss to his knuckles, then yelps when he lifts her and tops her quicker than she can blink.
Her shinobi looks down at her, his expression dark but somehow smoldering with heat.
"Nana," he says, and then pushes into her, moving in a pace that she loves and hates. Slow, deliberate strokes that reach deep and hit a spot that runs her mind wild each time, making it impossible for her to keep herself from feeling it.
Like she matters to him—the most destructive feeling she's ever had.
"Just fuck me," she begs, tears gathering in her eyes as the heat in her middle builds up, simmering to the point that she can't breathe anymore.
Her shinobi smiles, presses his lips to hers, and drinks the sighs that spill from her. He makes her delusional. He makes her want more. He'll break her.
Yet she holds on even tighter, her nails digging in and raking down his back with each pump of his hips.
God, she loves him, and she doesn't even know who he is.
"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me," she demands, praying he'll finally give in and screw her out of her mind so she doesn't have to think about him.
He laughs at this and this is the sound she's never heard so loudly before, his strokes still slow and deliberate as he laughs and laughs and laughs. It's certainly the strangest sex she's had to date and somehow, this makes her join the raucous sound with her own laugh from the belly, shocked by the thrills of pleasure it zings through her.
She stops only when tears drip onto her chest. She knows what he's trying to do, what he's trying to hide from. He continues to laugh but the sound has turned hollow, strained, and rough against her ear drums. Nana doesn't know what to do, doesn't understand the twisted pleasure that dogs at her as he continues the pace. She can only do what all whores do when a client unburdens themselves with confessions.
Nana reaches with her arms and wraps them around him, tugging his chest to hers, where she can feel his heartbeat. Whispering in his ear, firm and stubborn, she orders him to, "Tell me."
And he does, doing what she couldn't call fucking to finish them both to climax. That night Nana learns about a new kind of love she always thought was for couples who didn't understand the pleasures of hard sex, or were too dumb to be anything but cliché.
He was making love to her, and giving her the key to his box.
...
...
...
From there, their relationship changes in ways that are subtle at first but more obvious each time he visits.
The most obvious is that he uses her as a confessional now, after they've taken their pleasure. Between kisses or as she teases his skin with the swirl of her tongue, he tells her about his missions, about details of his life. He never gives any names or locations, or any information that would provide too much detail. Just the parts that affected him the most, rambling about a life disconnected from them.
Often, she understands nothing of what he's talking about, but listens all the while, touching each of his scars with an attention she's never given to any other client before. She kisses each one, sure he's felt pain unimaginable, but stubborn in that she can ease it.
He doesn't stop her from this show of her devotion and he might not even understand the meaning of it, but she doesn't mind.
Nana simply comforts him in the best way she knows how.
Sometimes, he weeps.
He gasps and sobs and clutches at her like a drowning man, and she cards her fingers through his hair, murmuring lullabies that she thought she'd long forgotten. He shakes with a nameless, trembling horror that makes him grasp the sheets in a way that she doesn't like. Pain wracks his body, but more than that, there's a soul-rending grief.
Sometimes, he speaks.
He speaks of fire, and atrocity. He speaks of children who died too young and being a veteran at seventeen. He speaks of earth magic twisting the land, warping it, soaking it in blood, and he speaks of lightning springing into creation from his own hands, piercing through armor and flesh and patriotism.
(He speaks like he wants to impress her, but she knows the truth of him, of the wretchedness he feels.)
But mostly, he touches her.
The whole thing is… innocent. He yearns for contact not prompted by orders, for warmth without the promise of violence. So she takes him into herself, body and soul, and she gives it to him. Readily, insisting, hoping and praying that this is real.
That he is real and that he actually chose her for something more than sex. For all she knows, he could be married with children, but what matters is that she is different than just a whore in his head. That she is a friend to him, one who he trusts to guard his emotion as fervently as he does.
But sometimes she isn't enough.
Sometimes, mistakes are made.
Sometimes, she realizes fully who and what he is, and more importantly, who and what she is. Nana has limits in her skills. She reads people, she understands people, but him, her shinobi, she fails him.
In one such moment, in the middle of night where he's opted to stay with her to sleep—a rare thing she delights in—Nana hates what she can't do, her lack, with a venom that hurts.
His hands are on her throat when she awakens, squeezing, strangling, and she cannot breathe—
"S-stop…"
His eye widen, a switch in his gaze flicked on. The grip around her throat slackens. She takes a shuddering breath, coughing lightly.
"I'm sorry," she hears him say, "I'm sorry. I didn't realize—I'm—"
Her shaking hand strokes his naked cheek in a silent reassurance. Still, he drops his head onto her shoulder, murmuring apologies into her skin. He was sorry, he didn't mean to, didn't realize she was there, and he'd understand if she never wanted to talk to him again, to never see him—
"No," she blurts out.
He stops short, looks at her, questioning.
"I." Her chest feels tight. "I don't want you to stop talking to me. I like it when you talk to me."
The open shock on his face is something that would have made her laugh at any other time. Now, it strikes a chord with something deep within herself and she can't help but look away.
"If you didn't talk to me," she says, "I'd be sad. I'd be sad, and lonely, because. Because…" She stops. She has to stop.
The rough pads of his fingers reach out to stroke her cheek, hesitant, unsure.
She can't help it. She kisses him. A wounded noise rips out of his throat. He pulls back.
"Nana," he says. His voice breaks. "Nana, Nana, Nana, Nana."
"Lover," she says back, having no name. "Lover."
He lets out a keening noise. His lips pepper hasty kisses onto her face, below her eye, on the corner of her mouth, on her left brow bone, on the sweet spot behind her ear that makes her want to curl her toes in.
He pulls back. "Nana," he says again. His eyes want her in a way that she has never seen before in a man. "Nana." Like a prayer. "I want—"
"Don't…"
The word escapes her before she can think it through, and he stops, unsure, but his hands trace the curves of her body, questing, like he can't help himself.
"Don't look at me like that." Her voice breaks. Don't give this to me. Don't burden me with it.
"My name," he says, breaking past the walls she's trying to build.
Nana sobs without tears to cloud her vision, choked by what he's giving to her and feeling at odds with the vehemence to not hear it.
"My name," he repeats, a sure struggle with his instincts to hide. She wishes he would just listen to them.
"You don't have to." Nana presses her face into his shoulder, into the warm skin that keeps her chained down to reality.
Stop, stop, this is too fast—it's been years—don't pick a whore, don't pick me—
"Nana," he says, pulling her so she has to lay there and face him.
God, please let him pick her.
"Kakashi," he blurts.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Nana laughs at the relief that fills her, anxiety washed away. She kisses him quick, and then laughs again. And again. She can't stop with it, can't wrap her head around the weight of his name, of his answer to everything she left unvoiced.
"I already knew," she tells him, watching him exhale and relax into her. Had suspected it for so long, had listened to the others talk and gossip. A masked shinobi with an eye covered—an eye he never let her see—how many of them were there with that hair color of his to boot?
"How long?"
"Since your third visit."
Kakashi chuckles at that. "With an ability to keep secrets like that so long, you would've made a good shinobi."
Nana hums, disinterested in the idea. "And never meet you? Pitiful existence that would be."
A sharp inhale, and then he embraces her so tightly, her airway gets cut off. Nana wants to cry, to sob into his arms, but her eyes remain dry. Rather, she thinks he's crying enough for the both of them, the wet patter of his tears pressing onto her skin. This is real.
"I love you."
Kakashi chuckles, his breath hitting against the hairs on her cheek. "Nana, I already knew."