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Tenzo took a deep breath and woke up. He knew that if he opened his eyes it would be to very faint morning light. His internal clock had been honed over years and years of pre-dawn exercises and secret practices. It was just on the dark edge of dawn right now. He had been sleeping dreamless, his favorite kind of sleep. It was surprising that he’d slept that well, considering he wasn’t in bed alone.
Kakashi was snoring on his righthand side, which was a clear sign that Kakashi was wide awake. Ninjas didn’t snore unless they wanted to. Indeed, the snoring stopped the moment Yamato sat up in bed.
“Mmm, Tenzo?” Kakashi said around a large yawn.
Tenzo rested his elbow on his knee and propped his head up to get a look at Kakashi in the morning. The amount of bedhead was truly astounding, as always. Kakashi was totally naked, which was less astounding at this point. He had been sprawled out on his side, on top of the covers as usual, but he rolled over onto his stomach and raised his eyebrows. “Like what you see?”
“You have work,” Tenzo said, not moving.
“Not for ten more minutes.”
“I have work.”
“Not for half an hour.”
“Why do you always wake up at the last minute?” Tenzo asked him.
“I like a challenge,” Kakashi said.
Tenzo considered. “All right.”
Slightly more than twenty minutes later, Tenzo finished cleaning himself up and dropped the damp washcloth in the laundry basket. “You’re officially late for whatever you had to do this morning.”
“I have a reputation to maintain,” Kakashi reminded him. He pulled up his mask and started tying on his forehead protector.
“Why the mask?” Tenzo asked as he tugged on his ANBU uniform. “We all know who you are.”
Kakashi’s eye narrowed. “Are we getting into this now or are you going to make it to work on time?”
Tenzo cocked his head to the side. “You can walk me to work,” he offered.
“Hatake Kakashi hanging out with an ANBU agent is a little too noticeable, even for us. Also, Danzo hates my guts.”
“I’m on Hokage duty today,” Tenzo said. “No Danzo.”
“The Hokage also hates my guts.”
“No, she just doesn’t take your bullshit and you think she’s being mean to you.”
“She’s very mean to me, though,” Kakashi said. “You haven’t met her yet, you don’t know.”
“She’s annoyed that you’re friends with Rin,” Tenzo said. “And she thinks you’re lazy and spoiled.”
“We just had morning sex,” Kakashi said. “She’s not wrong about me being lazy and spoiled.”
“Morning sex doesn’t make— Forget it. We’re talking about the mask later if you don’t want to explain it to me now. I won’t forget. If you get assigned while I’m out, stay safe.”
Tenzo ducked into the kitchen for a banana and an energy bar. The sun was fully over the horizon now, beaming through the kitchen window. He’d hung a windchime out there a while ago but during the fall when the winds were dramatic it had been far too annoying and he’d jutsu’d all the chimes together to get a decent night’s sleep. There were still wooden plugs between the lengths of metal. The whole mess banged against the window if the wind blew the wrong way. He should really just take the damn thing down.
Kakashi had followed him. “Is Lady Tsunade really pissed about Rin? Is that her deal?”
“The Hokage is good at what she does and she respects the younger generation,” Tenzo said. “That doesn’t mean she’s immune to jealousy. Rin’s good at innovating and thinking on her feet and planning new things but she was never the Hokage’s student, not the way Sakura is now. The fact that the Hokage didn’t guide her progress, the fact that Rin has accomplished so much on her own…” Tenzo let Kakashi think it over as he peeled his banana and started eating it, alternating bites of fruit with bites of energy bar. He went back to their room and slipped his faceplate on, nestling the headstrap into place with care. The banana and energy bar were gone by then. He passed Kakashi on his way to the front door. Kakashi seemed deep in thought, but that didn’t mean much. He could be thinking about page 97 in the third volume of Makeout Paradise.
“Stay safe,” Tenzo repeated.
“I will,” Kakashi said.
Tenzo unhooked his ANBU mask from the hall closet, settled it in place, and then faded into the wooden wall. It wouldn’t do to have the same ANBU turn up in the same place day after day, so he phased through the ground and up through a building a few blocks away and came up on a rooftop, legs already moving even when he was still half-merged with the shingles. He made it to the Hokage’s offices precisely on time, which was of course the ideal time. Too early looked overeager and sycophantic but too late looked unprofessional. For a shinobi, professional was everything. Unless you were Kakashi.
The Hokage was just sitting down at her desk when he ducked through the window. The other ANBU was standing at attention already. This one was no one he knew, a cat mask similar to his own but with slightly different strokes of red and black. Sharper lines than Tenzo’s own mask. Careful adjustments in the standard ANBU armor tailoring suggested she was a female operative.
“All right,” Lady Tsunade said with a yawn. “You two, get to guarding me. Relieve the others on shift right now. Oh, hold up, wait—which one of you’s got the thing from my grandfather?”
After a moment to get his heart to restart, Tenzo stepped forward and crouched in one smooth movement. Such steps were a part of performing ANBU—deference to leaders, precise motions, no nervous tics or wasted movement. ANBU were supposed to be interchangeable. That didn’t always succeed (Tenzo had only hit his final growth spurt four years ago and it was still difficult not to default to wood jutsu under duress), but it was an effort that was expected of ANBU agents. The Hokage wasn’t supposed to know about him. The Sandaime had known, but that was Kakashi’s fault. There had to be records, Tenzo realized. It had taken her this long to read through all the documents and now she was finally dealing with him. He had only had two rotations through guard duty in her six months in office. She must read fast.
“Yeah, you stay,” Lady Tsunade said. “Other guy, you can go.”
The other ANBU flickered away.
“Mask off, kiddo,” Lady Tsunade said. “You got Senju Hashirama in you; I want to see what you look like.”
Tenzo took his mask off and stood up to give her a full look. She was his Hokage, after all.
Tsunade didn’t just look at him. She stood up out of her desk chair and walked around him in a circle. She peered into his eyes. She inspected his ears. She was shorter than him, Tenzo was surprised to see. Average height for a woman but her presence was much larger.
“You don’t look like him,” Tsunade said as she sat back down behind her desk. It was impossible to tell if she was relieved or disappointed by that fact.
“No, Lady Tsunade,” Tenzo said. “I was born before Orochimaru started his experiments. I look the way I’m supposed to. I can simply do the same jutsu the first Hokage could.”
“Demo,” she said.
Tenzo blinked. “Pardon?”
She smirked. “Yeah, you don’t talk the way Gramps did. Show me what you got, kiddo.”
Tenzo hesitantly put his hands together. “Um. Mokuton.” He held his hand palm up and built an image in his mind of sliding doors and wide windows and a steep roof with gutters deep enough for the rain to trickle down and fall like pearls from the eaves… A tiny house wove itself together in his palm.
The Hokage laughed so hard she fell off her chair.
Tenzo reabsorbed the house immediately. “Lady Tsunade?”
A hand slapped the desktop and Tsunade pushed herself up to lean her ample bosom on her paperwork. She was grinning. “Good lord. Yeah, you’re nothing like Gramps. Sarutobi had notes but I had to see it to believe it. You’re all you.” She was still grinning when she said, “You want more building missions?”
Tenzo dropped his arms to his sides and straightened up. “Yes, Lady Tsunade. If possible.”
“All right.” Tsunade cocked her head. “What’s your name, kiddo?”
“Um.” Tenzo shifted uneasily.
Tsunade’s smile vanished. Her eyes hardened. “Ah. One of those. What should I call you for right now?”
“I think I’m still Kinoe to ANBU,” Tenzo said cautiously. “But…”
Tsunade raised her eyebrows. “But?”
“You can change it if I’m required for a mission that’s not ANBU,” Tenzo offered hastily.
Tsunade added a line to a note on her desk. “Got it. Mask back on, kiddo, I have a shitload of work to get done today. Thanks for your time, now get guarding.”
“Yes, Lady Tsunade,” Tenzo said. He hooked his mask back on and faded out through the wall to take his post.
It took a special kind of focus to guard someone for eight hours. A stillness, an awareness of details in the wind or of crowd patterns in the streets below, a careful attention to what muscles needed rest or motion to keep from seizing up, and of course a lot of time spent thinking about something completely different.
For the early part of the morning, Tenzo thought about Kakashi.
When he’d been in charge of guarding the Yondaime, Kakashi had been too young for Makeout Paradise. He’d been depressed and traumatized and miserable. What had Kakashi thought about on guard duty?
Kakashi had been assigned to guard his teacher and Uzumaki Kushina at first. He’d told Tenzo about it because Tenzo had asked him when he’d first become aware of Naruto, and Kakashi had explained that he’d been there when Naruto was a weird tadpole in Kushina’s stomach. Tenzo had then corrected him because that was not how babies worked, and Kakashi had begun asking how Tenzo knew how babies worked when babies weren’t going to ever show up in their relationship, not ever, and it had devolved into a ticklefight.
Kakashi argued by speaking loudly over any counterargument Tenzo tried to make and then attacking his armpits. It was frustratingly effective.
Tenzo switched places with the other ANBU operative to give both of them a change of scenery. She had a lot of small braids in her hair that hadn’t been there hours before and he wondered how they’d gotten there. Fidgeting was trained out of you in ANBU. Maybe she’d been doing chakra control techniques on her hair? That was a strange tactic to fend off boredom. Tenzo had never considered weaving his hair with chakra before. It wasn’t long enough to do that anymore, unfortunately.
Tenzo allowed himself a small sigh and remembered how nice it had been when he’d had long hair. He hadn’t minded the maintenance at first. Unlike Kakashi, he liked taking baths. It had been easy to keep out of his face with his faceplate. He’d tried out different hairstyles on his rare days off, too, just to see what he’d look like with a bun or a side-part or pigtails. Unfortunately, his missions had gotten in the way. He didn’t have the kind of talents that kept him out of the field—quite the opposite. Facing another night of easing blood-soaked mud out of the mat of his hair had convinced him to take a kunai to the whole mess.
He couldn’t subtly braid his hair with chakra but he could try to subtly grow bonsai trees in the cracks of the building he was standing on. He focused on that for a few hours. He could do it without looking down, and growing a good bonsai took a lot longer than growing a regular tree (compressing growing time while also compressing volume required a great deal of focus). Tenzo was aware he looked completely still and alert, and so long as no one kept their eyes on him for ten minutes to see the small pines and maples expand at his feet, he was fine.
There was a buzz in his ear that meant Tsunade was summoning him through a jutsu in his ANBU mask. Tenzo smashed his hard-won bonsai trees immediately. He almost phased through the wall, but remembered at the last second that he needed to be ANBU before he was Tenzo. He teleported into the room instead.
“Your relief team’s here, kiddo,” Tsunade said. She’d gotten a rather greasy take-out carton of dumplings; it seemed she really did have a lot of work to do this evening and was planning on staying at the office to do it.
Tenzo dropped to one knee respectfully. “I surrender my position, Hokage.”
Tsunade gave him a small smile and nod before jamming a dumpling into her mouth. Tenzo teleported himself a few houses over, then took off running across the rooftops. It was early afternoon. He could pick up supplies for dinner and if Kakashi wasn’t able to join him, he’d have leftovers for tomorrow.
He dropped by the apartment to change (phasing through a few walls to throw anyone off—paranoia died hard) and then walked down to the corner market and picked up ingredients for cabbage and pork served over rice. Tenzo bought the single-serving portions just in case. It didn’t pay to buy in bulk and then have everything go bad if he and Kakashi were both sent out on long missions. They had an agreement that they’d eat any food left in the apartment, no matter who had originally bought it, but when they were both on assignment there were often mold and ant infestations to deal with when they got back.
He was stirring the chicken stock and cabbage when Kakashi climbed in through the window, sending the windchime banging. If the wooden spoon hadn’t been growing out of his hand, Tenzo might have dropped it.
“We have a door,” Tenzo reminded him, relaxing.
“Almost done?” Kakashi asked. He peered over Tenzo’s shoulder at the pot.
“The rice is, if you could deal with that,” Tenzo said. He waved his hand and the spoon at their rice cooker.
“Yep,” Kakashi said. He dug for bowls while Tenzo turned the kitchen timer off. They served themselves in silence and sat down across from each other at the living room table.
Tenzo waited until Kakashi pulled his mask down to eat. “You still remember our conversation from earlier?”
Kakashi rolled his eye. “Yeah.”
“Care to answer?”
“Nah.”
Tenzo swallowed his bite of pork and cabbage and rice before he pulled out a serious-yet-pleading expression. “Please?”
“You know I deal with puppy-dog eyes on a regular basis, right?”
“Yes. That’s why I know it's your biggest weakness apart from porn.”
Kakashi grunted and shoveled more food in his face.
“Is it a serious secret, why you keep the mask on?” Tenzo asked. “Or is it because you like fucking with people?”
“Can’t it be both?”
“Sure. But I’d still like an explanation.”
Kakashi scratched under his tilted forehead protector, nails digging at the scar bisecting his left eye. “Mm.”
Tenzo ate quietly, keeping his eyes on Kakashi.
“I was genin at five,” Kakashi said after a moment. “Chunin a year after that, jonin before I was ten. Wearing a mask made me feel cool. And then my father died, and every time I didn’t have the mask on I remembered who I looked like. So I kept it on. Now no one remembers the White Fang but I still don’t feel like me without it. And it makes it really easy to piss off my students. That’s why I wear it.”
Tenzo nodded thoughtfully. “All right. Thank you for telling me.”
Kakashi held out his empty bowl. “Seconds?”
“Get it yourself.” Tenzo took a tidy bite of his own food.
Kakashi pulled a face, mouth twisting into a pout. “I told you a tragic story, though.”
Tenzo shrugged, still chewing. He smiled faintly into his bowl. Kakashi had a hard time staying solemn, even in the face of great tragedy. Perhaps it was a learned technique to deal with dark situations, perhaps it was a natural resilience. Either way, Tenzo found it another unexpectedly amazing quality about the man.
“You’re mean to me,” Kakashi said.
Tenzo gave him a long, blank stare.
Kakashi sighed. “You know, the other reason I don’t take it off? Means I don’t have to think about hiding my facial expressions. I'm an open book compared to you.”
“The mask also covers up your atrocious breath in the morning,” Tenzo said.
Kakashi’s eyebrow shot up. “Wow. You’re very unkind tonight.” He stood and moved to get more rice.
“I suppose,” Tenzo said. “Would you like me to take you seriously?”
“No,” Kakashi said, pausing as he passed to press an unexpected kiss to the top of Tenzo’s head. “Rin would pry and Guy would start sobbing and try to hug me if I told them shit like this. I like you mean.”
“I’m not mean,” Tenzo murmured.
“You’re a little mean,” Kakashi called from the kitchen. “But it’s good. If you were a complete pushover you wouldn’t be any fun.”
Tenzo sighed and went back to his food. “You make me mean,” he mumbled when Kakashi sat back down.
“Don’t talk with your mouthful, sheesh,” Kakashi said. Tenzo kicked at him, Kakashi skidded the entire table sideways to tackle him, and the evening devolved from there.