Sometimes he just looked out the window and wondered when he'd gotten old.
Wasn't he supposed to have... eh... done more for the world? Hero, Hokage, and all it amounted to was this: a sad old man shuffling through papers and living with the monotony of his daily life.
Was he old? Eh, he was over thirty. As far as he'd been concerned when he was young, that was old.
And look at him - he was. He'd gotten responsible. Cut his hair, given up on playing around and having a good time, chosen work over friends and family... Yeah, he'd done everything he was supposed to do as Hokage. Even the old man of his childhood would have called him an old man.
What had it gotten him? A son who hated him, a wife who barely saw him, a daughter he barely knew. But... eh... everyone cheered him when they saw his face, didn't they? All right, the face was all they saw - but hadn't it always been that way? The fox, and not the boy; the Hokage, and not the man.
So it didn't really matter that his best friend was someone he saw maybe once a year, on good years. It didn't really matter that he went home only to sleep, the nights he didn't sleep in the office. It didn't matter that he hardly saw his other old friends, and then only on business - only as the Hokage to his subordinates, never as the person the Hokage had replaced.
He'd become Hokage. He'd always said that was what he wanted, right? He couldn't complain...
Besides, there was peace in the ninja world, wans't there?
The reports of more Ototsukis, the new organization on the rise, and the other agents of chaos...
Yeah, there was peace. All those groups were just - nuisances, that was all. He'd defeat them like he'd defeated all the other threats to peace. Everyone would have a peaceful life.
Even if almost everyone acknowledged only the shell of the Hokage and not the lonely boy inside, and the few who knew him hated him - or couldn't be bothered to give him the time of day unless the Hokage commanded it.
Because he was the Hokage, and so everyone had to pay attention to him.
Even if that meant nothing.
He fished a bottle from under his desk and uncorked it, pouring himself a glass. It was fine. Everything was fine.
The drink burned less on its way down than the bile in his throat did coming up.
