On the day of Lord Third's funeral, Anko says not a word.
Not that she often has reason to speak, or many people worth speaking to. And not that anyone really knows anything of the particulars regarding her rather stilted relationship with the old bastard, but that didn't matter. She spends the day with her mouth drawn into a thin line, so hard that her lips begin to ache where they're pressed up beneath her teeth. Rain starts to fall, and her knees hurt from standing at attention for hours. It's not until Kakashi's seal around her curse mark begins to warm beneath her dress that she realizes how cold and empty it'd been during the somber ceremony—and realizes he's only just now arrived.
She fights the urge to whip her head to the side, to wherever it is he's sneaked in to stand as if he's been here the whole time. Leave it to him to be late to the Hokage's own funeral—or maybe it's that she's upset she didn't have the balls to try the same thing. And so she stands there on her aching feet and watches, listens, ignoring how badly she wants to bolt. When finally the melodramatic and drawn-out affair ends, she turns heel and marches straight to her apartment.
As she shuts the door, she thinks of Sarutobi's scrutinizing looks, disdain plain on his lined and tired face. When she slips out of her shoes she can hear the strain in his voice, chiding her for her scandalous behavior and demanding to know what's wrong. She strips on her way down the narrow hallway and into the tiny bathroom and, seeing the broken knob, can hear her own voice screaming back at him, placing the blame at his feet for allowing Orochimaru to run unchecked for far too long.
The mere mention of the old snake's name was enough to make Lord Third flinch. That'd always felt good.
She reaches for the hot water knob and turns it as far as it will go. The pipes of the old building creak and moan before the shower head hisses with the force of the flow. It takes closer to ten minutes than five for it to be even slightly warm, but she steps over the low threshold anyway, dipping her head to let the water soak her hair.
Under normal circumstances, a man would be letting himself in through the front door any minute now per her own instructions; her door is rarely locked. Hells, she'd been to plenty of funerals after which she'd led someone practically by their collar back home for a romp. But she instead takes a step back in the minuscule shower to lean her head back on the tiles, letting the water become too-hot and seep into her skin. Her mind wanders, and though she instinctively shies away from it, an understanding blossoms inside of her that she no longer needs to.
With Sarutobi dead, her plan isn't just fantasy anymore.
In spite of the heat reddening her skin, she shivers as she dares to imagine for the first time how she could do it. She hasn't so much as glanced at Uchiha Sasuke since their paths crossed in the Forest of Death, and perhaps had even been doing her best to avoid him after Lord Third's refusal to remove the kid from the exams—anything to prove to anyone who might be watching that she couldn't care less.
But she's all but itching, now, to whisk him away. Every time she'd risk a glimpse, what she saw made her heart sink. Hatred and anger, neither of which are particularly misplaced, in her eyes, radiated from him like he was his own miniature sun. What he'd suffered was gruesome even by the violent measure of a shinobi's life, and she knows all too well that her old master isn't full of empty promises. He'll keep his word and make a fine warrior out of Sasuke, twisting his anguish into something far deadlier, and ruining the kid in the process.
Her thoughts run deeper. There's talk already of naming that lech Jiraiya the Fifth Hokage, an idea she scoffs at alone here in her bathroom. But then again, he may be more inclined to save even just one child from his once-friend's grasp, and her plan would be infinitely simpler were it sanctioned by the state. And if he refused, well, she'd caught him staring plenty on the rare occasion he found himself in the village. A man with a reputation like his was sure to be pliable enough to wrap around her finger.
She's ready to resign herself to the sickening twist in her stomach when there comes a sharp knock on her door.
Frozen there in the hot water, she almost wonders if she'd imagined it. It was only the one, and quiet, almost too soft-handed to be anyone she knows. But her home is just small enough for her pitiful sensory range to reach the front landing of the apartment building, and oh, there isn't just someone there.
The heat of her shower was so all-consuming that she hadn't noticed the blooming warmth pooling around her curse seal until she shuts off the water. Nabbing a towel on her way out, she manages only barely to cover herself in the few steps it takes to get to the door and swing it open.
He stands there looking just as tired as she'd expected, unbothered by the force with which she appeared. His clothes—standard-issue funerary garb, she almost laughs bitterly every time she thinks too hard about that—are still wet from the passing rain, his hair just a bit more unruly than normal, raindrops still dotting it here or there like glitter. Behind him, the sky is full of brilliant streaks of burnt golden sunbeams and deep lavender clouds, dusk already settling over Konoha.
She clears her throat, knowing it will come out weakly from disuse otherwise. "Hatake."
His only response at first is to incline his head in greeting, not bothering to remove his hands from his pockets. His good eye studies her, and she doesn't miss the lightning-quick flick of it as he takes in her state of undress. "May I come in?"
In spite of the comfortable warmth pulsing through her, she sucks her teeth once. She should be annoyed by this, shouldn't she? Side-stepping to allow him access, she grumbles, "Can't even say Sorry to bother you? Hope I'm not intruding?"
The sourness isn't enough to deter him; he crosses through the threshold and slides his feet from his sandals at the tiny genkan. He still hasn't pulled his hands from his pockets, and his nonchalance is starting to grate at her—and nearly ignites into flame when he says flatly, "Sorry to bother you. Hope I'm not intruding."
"You—" She mutters the rest under her breath, shutting her door dangerously close to a slam. "Think you're some kind of comedian?"
He shrugs, unbothered. "You sound like my kids. I didn't realize everyone was a critic these days."
She narrows her eyes and crosses her arms beneath her breasts, glancing away. "What do you want?"
His hooded gaze is steady, unreadable. "I was thinking about you."
"I—" Her heart pounds once in her chest, hard. "You should know better than to let yourself be seen coming to my place."
"And you know better than to think I care much for my reputation," he returns easily. "I want to know if you're all right. Funerals are heavy things."
"That why you showed up late?"
There's only a small pause before he gives a small hum. "I'd made a stop at the cenotaph. You have Yuugao to thank that I left it at all."
At the mere mention of that name, she feels herself go beet red. Smarter, prettier, and kinder, the other woman had always been a shining example of everything Anko could be under better circumstances. She purses her lips and turns on her heel, stomping back down the hall with wet footprints in her wake.
"I'm sure a visit from ANBU's sweetheart got your mind off things," she grumbles as she turns into the open door opposite the shower. Her bedroom remains as cramped as ever, littered with things: kunai, a sports bra, a jacket she preferred to wear on warmer nights. The thick cover on her futon—which itself was almost never rolled up and stored away—sits gathered in a haphazard pile at the bottom that she gives a halfhearted attempt to fix with her foot.
"I wouldn't say that," Kakashi says in his defense. He'd followed her but lingers now just outside the doorway, a respectable distance and certainly out of view. "It's good, though, for me to hear that I'm not the only one drowning in grief. I can get quite selfish without a reminder."
She snorts out a bitter laugh as she tugs her wet hair free of its band and pulls the towel from around her chest. Reaching up to dry the soaking strands in the fraying fabric, she can't much ignore the feeling of her heart sinking in on itself. "So you're here to give me the same lecture."
"I'm here," he says—and she can hear a tense note of restrained anger somewhere in his tone—"to make sure you know you're not the only one who thinks they're tearing apart at the seams."
He'd taken a step and stands now in the threshold of her bedroom. She'd turned just in time to see him take in the sight of her bare body, the heft of her stria-streaked breasts and her toned—but cut across with horrid, feminine scars—stomach and the patch of hair covering her most sensitive parts. If the tips of his ears are any indication, he's gone red beneath his mask.
She swallows, fighting the instinct to push him for more. The night he'd sealed his own mark over her master's, Kakashi had held fast against her hurt-fueled advances. It'd been too dark to see what reactions he may have been hiding, but now in the soft golden hues of her apartment she sees the dilation of his pupil, the slight furrow of his brows that's just a crease between them, for the briefest of moments. Sees the ghosting flex of his fingers at his sides, imagines them curling around her waist. It feels wrong, to tunnel in on the weakness of an ally, but she feels like little more than a slave to learned instinct in this moment—a kunoichi's greatest weapon is her body, after all.
But then there's movement at the center of his throat, the knot there bobbing. His shoulders fall, the movement slight.
Like any fine shinobi, she has looked underneath the underneath: trained to do away with any outward display of emotion, Kakashi's cry for help would have flown over the head of even the most seasoned chuunin. And just as he'd given her, only weeks ago, exactly the comfort she'd needed, she couldn't well leave him wanting for comfort—but not without her own personal flair, of course.
She bends to pick up a pair of loose-fitting sweats, steps into them and tugs them up and over her hips while he watches; she tries not to blush at that, aware for possibly the first time in her life that the timing would be wholly inappropriate. From a half-opened drawer she plucks her last clean standard-issue shirt of deep blue and shrugs herself into it, the hem snagging on her nipples and oh, Kakashi does glance away after that. He's still standing there in a way that's about to piss her off, and so when she approaches him she reaches out and hooks two of her fingers into the belt tied around his waist.
"Get comfortable," she says quietly, looking up into his eye as she tugs the silken band. Her free hand slips around behind him, finding the short knot and slipping it free of itself with expert precision. He smells like pine needles and wet earth and something else, something human and masculine and wholly him.
Light as a feather, the belt falls to the floor and pools at his feet. The black jacket falls open, and she tries hard not to glance down, to study the subtle curves of his hips and his waist and his ribs all covered in his tight, dark undershirt. Then, boldness mingling with those pangs of sympathy, she brings up her hands—careful not to brush her fingertips along his sides or across his lean chest—and winds them through his hair.
She sees his lips part under the mask. There is a part of her just beneath her skin that's screaming at her to tug it down and kiss him, hard and open-mouthed. It would certainly be distraction enough from his melancholy, wouldn't it? To let him feel her, to let him tell her how exactly he likes it, to let him pull at her hair and squeeze at her hips. Under her shirt, she swears she can feel his chakra throb around her cursed seal.
Shut up, she hisses inwardly, focusing on the task at hand. She swallows, fingertips sliding through his soft, wild hair along his scalp until she finds the tightly-wound knot of his hitai-ate. She exhales in a rush; when had their faces gotten so close? Their heads are tilted and he's still watching her with his good eye, gaze hooded, his mind working.
"Only got one rule at mine," she murmurs, unwinding the simple tie of his forehead protector. "The hitai-ate never stays on." It falls to the floor with a small thud, landing between their feet. She pulls away, their tension evaporating as quickly as it'd mounted. She takes hold of his jacket's loose collar and pulls. "Now come and help me finish the sake I started last night."
Night had fallen outside. Through the slatted blinds of the main room's windows comes the flickering orange of the light nestled in the ceiling of the covered walkway outside, but neither of them pay it any mind—they're sitting now beneath her slowly heating kotatsu while she pours full shots of alcohol for them both.
It's not ideal, she knows, to throw themselves to drink. But on such an occasion it feels appropriate, sanctioned in some way that she's probably conjured as a mere excuse. She says as much, and Kakashi laughs, a small but beautiful thing, his eye crinkling as he smiles. Some of the life, she would swear, comes back to him.
When he pulls down his mask, she fights not to stare. He raises his tiny glass to her, waiting as she comes to her senses much too slowly. He's as handsome as she always suspected, bordering on gorgeous—and the birthmark beneath his mouth is especially cute—but it's the sentiment that has stricken her so deeply. How many others, she wonders, has he allowed to see something so private?
Well, she definitely can't be seen blushing. Once she's a few drinks in, she can safely ogle him all she wants and blame her flushed face on the alcohol. She raises her own glass and clinks it against his, eyeing him with a small smirk.
"Are we toasting to Sarutobi?" she asks, not without some wry sense of anguish piercing her. "A long life, well lived?"
Kakashi, his fringe fallen half-messy across his brows, gives a thoughtful hum. Unobscured, his lips give a faint purse that she watches with burning fascination. "An appropriate sentiment for the first toast of the night. Kampai."
They both toss back their shots, slamming their cups back down on the false-wood tabletop. The whir of the kotatsu's fan fills the easy silence that comes between them. She shifts beneath the thick blanket, getting comfortable as warmth prickles at her toes. Kakashi, sitting opposite, stretches out one of his legs, their calves just barely touching.
"This is..." he starts, and something flashes over his features. "Absolutely terrible sake, Mitarashi."
Her face twists in mock anger as she digs her heel into the sensitive spot of his knee. What she'd seen on his face, she knows now, had been his near-inability to resist laughing at his own little remark.
"We can't all afford the top-shelf shit," she says when he yields with a laugh. "I hear your name's thrown in with the candidates for Lord Fifth. When you're sworn in, go ahead and up my pay."
He gives another hum as he gives a brief raise of his brows, his demeanor already so much lighter. As he takes the bottle and pours another round of drinks he says simply, "It'll be my first act. On my honor."
She weighs him, lets their fingers brush as she takes the glass from his offering hand.
"To new friends," he says. And then, almost thoughtfully, "That aren't quite as new as we might've assumed."
It burns its way down her throat, settling pleasantly hot in her stomach. Cheap indeed, but there's no way in hell she'd spend her hard earned ryo on anything more expensive when this got the job done perfectly fine. She chuckles once and shakes her head, missing Lord Third in a way she loathes.
But then she frowns, spinning her glass idly on the tabletop. With Kakashi as Hokage, someone who's seen her—the true her—and has been kind to her, she wonders.
She starts in a rush. "If you're chosen—"
"I won't be." He's propping his chin up with a hand, elbow on the hard surface. He looks so easygoing now, the stress leaving his frame. She almost feels bad for bringing it up, but...
"But if," she continues with a pout, snatching the bottle. It's half-empty, maybe a bit less, but she hasn't had a thing to eat today—and if the budding blush across his face is any indication, neither has he. "Is that something you'd want?"
He seems to consider that with severity as she pours the next round. It's a few heartbeats after he takes the proffered cup, gently swirling its contents, before he begins his slow answer.
"Do you remember," he starts, voice diminished from before, "the fear before your first mission? And don't try to act tough about it."
Though she purses her lips (of course she wanted to puff up her chest and declare she'd been hardened to the ways of the world long before she graduated as genin), the act quickly fades. She's too tired to be indignant. And indeed, she recalls with ease the sleepless night in the orphanage, her mind wandering into all of the colorful ways she could be killed, bleeding out in the dirt far from home. She'd been intimidated, in the weeks before, by her new sensei, who drove she and her two teammates to exhaustion almost daily in training. It was the only thought that'd brought her any comfort, that Orochimaru wouldn't let the fruits of his labor just die so easily.
If only she'd known.
But she bites that down, her thoughts getting ahead of her. No good, she knows, to dwell on something like that. "I do."
He blinks at her slowly, knowing, perhaps, how painful it is to look into the past. "When Lord Third told me I was to try one last time to take on a team..." He glances away, turns his head only slightly, pretends to look out the window at the faulty light blinking off and on at irregular intervals. "I hadn't been so afraid since I was a boy."
She watches as his lips part, his tongue pressing against one of his teeth as if by some nervous habit. Then he presses his mouth into a thin line, his stare gone hard. "The night before each mission, I can't sleep. I lie awake feeling sick, thinking all manner of things. Am I still strong enough? Fast enough? I see their young faces staring up at me, wide-eyed but unseeing, bloody and unmoving. They look like Rin, to my mind's eye."
Anko's blood ices over in her veins. A small shiver racks her, and with the slightest of movements she tugs the blanket more securely around herself.
"Inevitably," he carries on, looking now down into the foggy liquid in his glass, "I get out of bed and start walking. Half of the time I don't even know I'm doing it—I just find myself at the cenotaph. Beneath the stars or in the pouring rain, on warm nights or freezing ones. None of it matters. It's just me and the names, and the ghosts of the people I couldn't protect.
"And so, to answer your question more pointedly...I can't fathom the strength of mind to be responsible for every life in the village. I can hardly handle three."
Grimly, he holds up his drink and doesn't wait for her to return the gesture before he downs it. She sits glancing between him and her own glass, then follows suit. She hadn't meant to dampen the mood again, and a sour guilt creeps into her chest, heightened in intensity by the alcohol joining her bloodstream. But she doesn't have time to even open her mouth and begin her apology before he's taken her glass back from her, pouring yet another set of shots for them both.
"I know," he says lowly, his gaze finding hers again, "that you want to take Sasuke away."
It feels as if her eyes bulge halfway out of her skull. The room falls away from her: the heat from the kotatsu can't reach her, the steady hum of the motor thinning to a high-pitched, strained sound in her ears. A tremor shoots through her so violently that her fingers thrash once against the tabletop, but she feels no physical sensation.
He won't stop staring at her, and all of that careful nonchalance has left him. He's looking at her hard, his face fully exposed to her, though search all she might, she cannot find anger. She finds earnest, she finds concern, and most of all she finds a cautious understanding. But no anger, and, though it must be imagined, she also finds no protestation.
"Don't look so surprised," he tries, but his voice seems faraway, echoing in between her ears. "I told you before: I pay attention."
In a last-ditch effort to compose herself, she leans into some unfounded offense. She steels herself, refusing to let her voice shake or her words quiver. "Pay attention to what, exactly, Hatake?"
She'd been careful, but how could anyone ever play mind games with someone like him? Unable to stop it, she sucks her teeth audibly in annoyance—at herself, of course.
"I didn't think you'd seek out additional fortifications against your old master," he says in reply, "if you were planning to stay behind the Leaf's walls."
"That has nothing to do with your Uchiha boy—"
"I know what happened in the Forest of Death." He sounds closer now, her senses returning to her, her anger the tether to reality. "It wasn't by chance that Sasuke was chosen."
She breathes heavily through her nostrils, doing all she can to ease her lungs so that her chest does not heave.
"And I know"—his voice is soft now, gentle as she's ever heard—"that you wanted to leave with him, even then."
In an instant she's kicked back and slammed her knee into the top of the table, leaning forward to grab in her tight fist the bunched fabric of Kakashi's fallen mask. The small glasses fly to the floor, their contents spilling out onto the wood; she's only just missed the sake bottle, perching precariously at the table's edge. He lets her pull at him, his expression never changing, and that only fans the flames of her rage.
"Fuck Sarutobi," she sneers. "What other private things did he let slip to you?" Without meaning to, she shakes him as she hisses out the words. "His little puppet."
But he only keeps staring. So close, she can see the tiny white streaks of poorly-healed tissue weaving through the scar across his eye, that catch in the low light of the room.
"I'd remind you," he says, only a hint of something dangerous in his tone, "that I sealed your cursed mark without a word to the old man."
This logic is enough to make her drop him, shame flooding in where the anger had been. She sits knelt on the kotatsu, hangs her head, breaths hard.
"It's his fault in the first place," she mutters. "How much suffering has he seen? But the number of orphans only grew under his rule." She looks at her hands, hardly feeling anymore like she's even in her own body. "He could've stopped it. And even knowing what happened to me—he—was still just going to fall right into Orochimaru's trap."
Kakashi says nothing for a long time, silence heavy between them. At her shoulder, his chakra feels more substantial than ever, tangled up with her own, suppressing the decade-old mark. Unspoken, she knows, is the knowledge that it'd been sensei's trap either way: as it so often is the case with the old snake, it'd been a zero-sum game.
"Sasuke is—" She winces, as if speaking his name aloud will draw too much unwanted attention to her. She slumps, defeated, the table groaning a bit beneath her weight. She thinks of him, can picture his face clearly, knows the terrible sting he's trying to hide with his flat expression. Her next whisper comes shuddering, "Sarutobi failed him."
"And now he is dead," says Kakashi. "And Sasuke..." He does not finish.
"You know he can't stay here." Lifting her head a fraction, she can only bring herself to look as far as Kakashi's chin. "You know he doesn't want to."
Their silence this time is excruciating. Even beneath her too-big pants, her legs are cold without the constant pouring warmth of the kotatsu's little heater. The tears in her eyes, at least, have vanished.
"What would you have me do?" he says, strained. She can smell the sake on his breath—has he inched closer? She thinks, He is more drunk than he wants me to know. Finding her courage, she meets his eye and sees his agony plain. "I have tried to guide him, but it all comes out wrong. I—try," he stammers, and she doesn't miss his chest give a heave, "to remember the kindness of my father, but anger spills out in its place."
Words fail her, instinct taken hold instead. Her heart feels run through with a knife—faced with the scope of all he's lost, of all she's lost, and how no one else seems to care—as she pushes, climbing off of the table and straddling his lap. He misses not a beat, which is not surprising, and accepts her readily—which very much is. His arm wraps around her waist, his free hand tugging at the back of her head as their lips meet.
She only realizes her misstep when the heat of his mouth registers against her senses, the splay of his hand at her back, his fingers wound through her still-damp hair. She means to stop—truly, she does—to pull back and mumble some apology, but his hold on her tightens and he pivots abruptly, rolling them onto the floor. Arousal surges through her, her hands finding his waist in appreciative exploration.
But he's better than this—better than being used by her, better than being another tool for her to get what she wants. Better than fucking her, the village whore, senseless. And she can feel the hesitance in him now, the wheels in his head assuredly turning as much as hers, the shock of sudden intimacy already wearing off. It's impossible, she knows, to fool him with the very practiced act of her body.
She turns her head a fraction, breaking the kiss. Somewhere into the corner of his mouth she murmurs his family name, unwilling to bridge the last remnants of distance between them.
"Hatake," she says again, and he stills atop her. "Hatake..."
He pulls back, hand still gripping her hip. Were it anyone else, she'd push—grind the core of her sex into his, tease him until they both were dizzy, let him fuck her until he was practically whimpering.
But he'd been kind to her. He'd stood up for her without her ever knowing, asking nothing in return. It's the least she can do, to ask him plainly.
"Let me take him," she pleads from beneath Kakashi, hating how fragile her true voice sounds. "No one else can understand him. Your chakra beats through me, through him. Orochimaru is incapacitated; he cannot see where I mean to go. Please, Hatake..."
His palm is warm on her face, brushing back the wet strands of hair sticking to her temples. "Tell me where," he says gently. "Tell me where, and I'll look the other way, Mitarashi."
A stillness washes over her. Not the terrifying quiet from before, with the walls and the table and the heat falling away from her; no, this is something closer to peace, a pleasant tingling in her limbs and her head going light. He trusts her, and that is enough.
She rolls to the side, and he releases her—had she imagined it done with reluctance? As she sits she swipes the bottle from the table, ignoring the spilled glasses on her floor, and takes a long, deep swig. When she's had her fill, she holds it out for him, giving a jerking nod to signal that he can have the rest. He takes another moment to look at her, searching, before he accepts it gingerly and downs the rest. She watches with a sort of yearning that's foreign in her bones as his throat tightens and bobs, at the glistening wetness on his lips when its contents are empty and he brings it back down, too-heavy, upon the table.
"I'm taking him to touch the waters," she said, trembling once with the thrums of both intoxication and anticipation, "of the Ryuuchi Cave."