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A soothing breeze floated through the springtime garden, making the nearby trees whisper and sway. Iruka lay on a spread-out coat on the warm bricks, his eyes closed and his face turned up to the sky. Soft suggestions at clouds dotted the blue with wisps of white. It was one of those rare days when the three of them could relax together, enjoying the lazy warmth of late spring, when there were no ministers to meet or tutoring to be had.
"I always liked blue," Iruka mused, a soft smile dancing on his lips. "Dark blue is such a lovely colour, don't you think?"
Amused, Kakashi allowed his magic to creep free, hinting at dark blue around his edges. Against the bright white and gold of his uniform tunic, the blue looked almost like the hottest of flames. He did not move from where he half-lay sprawled up the shallow steps to the courtyard proper.
"His blue looks even better with my orange next to it!" Naruto declared gleefully, sitting up briefly. "Doesn't it, Iruka? That's why he looks so good!" He grinned blindingly, his own orange magic briefly flaring around him, far less controlled or formed than Kakashi's.
Iruka, grinning, rolled onto his side to see the boy, tucking his arm beneath his head so he wouldn't have to get up. Naruto, pleased, laid his head back down on his hunting hound's flank. She shifted slightly, burying her long face more firmly into the grass and sighing with apparent satisfaction.
"True," Iruka agreed mischievously, his eyes flicking up to Kakashi. "That must be why I came to like him."
Kakashi huffed a quiet, indulgent laugh.
"I certainly don't know what else it could have been," he agreed modestly, his low voice rumbling with laughter.
"Except willful corruption of the regent," a voice broke, cold and hard.
At the sound, Kakashi sat up sharply, one hand already lying on the hilt of his short sword at his waist. His magic vanished just as sharply, pulled tight beneath his skin once more.
"Minister Danzō," Iruka said, startled, as he, too, sat up. He frowned but shrank back.
Kakashi took in Iruka's sudden quiet with one dark, assessing eye. Above them on the steps, his back framed on one side by the palace and on the other by the sparkling fountain, Danzō stood stooped over his cane. Danger radiated from him like heat off a red-hot poker.
"We have discussed this. My personal affairs are none of your concern," Iruka mumbled, unable to look up at the Minister of the Crown. He glared instead at Naruto, who had sat up to glare daggers at Danzō, but Iruka shook his head at Naruto.
Let us handle this, was the clear message in Iruka's eyes.
"Perhaps your personal... affairs... are not, but corruption of my prince certainly is my concern," Danzō replied carelessly, not even deigning to look at the boy prince now sputtering with outrage. Instead, he looked up and down Kakashi, taking in the spotless white tunic and the gleaming golden buttons and decor of the uniform Kakashi still wore. "How far to the next nearest high paladin to protect our prince?" he asked Kakashi.
Kakashi did not take the bait.
"None for more than an hour and a half in any direction, Minister Danzō," he said, his voice low and emotionless.
"Then, if you are the only one within half an hour of here—"
"If a mere half hour were allowed of us," Kakashi muttered under his breath.
"—then stand aside, that I might speak with my prince. And his regent," Danzō said as if as an afterthought, though this time, he looked directly at Iruka as he spoke.
Kakashi stiffened.
"Stand—"
Danzō turned his icy gaze on Kakashi once more.
"Did you not hear me, High Paladin?" he snarled.
Kakashi hesitated.
"If I stand, you'll see my face," he finally said in surrender, slumping back down on the step. His hand deliberately fell away from the hilt of his short sword. "I'm sorry, I cannot—"
"High Paladin, that was not a suggestion," Danzō snapped. "Get up and stand aside."
"He doesn't need to—" Iruka burst.
"When the subject at hand is the corruption of the regent and my prince," Danzō hissed, "he may stand aside, as is his place."
"Hey!" Naruto yelled, leaping to his feet. "Kakashi didn't corrupt anybody!"
"Naruto," Iruka said, a warning in his tone. "Treat your Minister with respect."
"But he's wrong!" Naruto protested furiously.
"If I were wrong, would the High Paladin so casually disobey a direct order?" Danzō asked cuttingly. "Particularly a direct order to keep watch over you? And such a fitting regent, who allows his prince such unfitting temper," he tutted, an unspoken threat edging his words.
Kakashi gritted his teeth but rolled his weight forward with a deadly ease, walking with elegant, sure steps past Iruka up the set of stairs leading to the highest point in the garden. As he walked, white and red flickered over his face like a shadow, swirling together even as Danzō smirked.
"So it is you," Danzō muttered under his breath, satisfied, as the bleached-white mask accented with red swirls settled into being over Kakashi's face.
Kakashi turned to overlook the other three, his mask blank of any emotion and his body as firmly controlled as a tight watch spring. There was no trace of Kakashi's personality except in the rakish spikes of silver hair pushed back by the mask. Even the face of his mask was of a dog, too stylized to ever mistake for the face of a living thing. Kakashi was gone, replaced by Ro, High Paladin of the Order of the Anbu.
"You made him stand so you could see the mask?" Iruka demanded, finally furious. "To willfully expose our High Paladin?"
Danzō turned his cold stare on Iruka.
"To see his face?" he corrected with a sneer. "No, I ordered him to stand that I might address my prince, to discuss how one of the supposedly noblest and sinless men in the land corrupted my prince and his regent," Danzō said flatly.
"He didn't corr—" Naruto bellowed.
"Naruto," Iruka said sharply. "That's enough. It's not helping."
Naruto pouted, sticking his bottom lip out ridiculously far, and sat back down beside his hunting hound. She remained lying on one side, but her visible eye had opened, and she watched Danzō as carefully as she would a fleeing rabbit.
"Nevertheless, it is clear to me that his corruption has burrowed so deep into your hearts that there will be no sensible discussion anymore. This is a serious matter, and one I shall have to write to the Hokage to discuss. Prince," he added casually, nodding once at Naruto and turning to leave.
"That's 'Your Highness,' to you!" Naruto shouted, leaping to his feet again.
Danzō paused.
"Hmm. I can't say I've ever been addressed as one's prince, before," he mused spitefully, sending a curl of cold creeping up Iruka's spine. "I can't say I hate it."
He was gone before Naruto could do anything more than sputter with rage.
"Naruto," Iruka finally snapped. "He's just trying to wind you up. Leave it."
Naruto glowered.
"Well, he's a jerk," the boy muttered, plopping back down into the curve made by his hunting hound's tense body. "That Danzō! What a creep! Do you really think he's going to write to Old Man Hokage?"
Iruka rolled his eyes.
"That's 'Lord Hokage' or Sandaime, to you, brat," Iruka chided. He sighed. "He might."
Iruka threw a wistful look over at Kakashi, who remained standing stock-still at the top of the steps, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, except that wasn't Kakashi there, not with the lifeless white-and-red mask of a paladin.
"Kakashi..." Iruka tried hesitantly after a moment.
He flinched as the bone-white mask turned to face him. Ro did not otherwise move or make any sound. He barely appeared to even breathe.
"Oh, sit down," Naruto groused at Kakashi.
"Your Highness," Kakashi said stiffly, except it was Ro speaking, of course.
Naruto, unlike Iruka, had grown up around paladins and was less put off by the impersonal nature of paladins wearing their masks.
Naruto rolled his eyes way too demonstratively to be natural (probably a bad habit picked up from Iruka, in all honesty) and repeated, "Come back and sit down and put away your mask. Jeez!"
Ro walked back to where he had laid on the shallow stairs, each of his steps fluidly deadly. But when he reached the steps and lowered himself to them, Kakashi slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.
"It's my face," he corrected Naruto tiredly. "Not a mask."
"It's not your face," Iruka said quietly, creeping over and sitting beside Kakashi. "Even this isn't your face," he added, his fingers reaching out to brush the black mask covering Kakashi from the nose, down.
Kakashi flinched infinitesimally, but he only sighed and dropped his head into Iruka's light touch, propping his arms up on his knees.
Iruka bit his lip.
"You could quit," Naruto blurted. "You should quit. Then Old Man Hokage couldn't do anything!"
Kakashi lifted his head heavily and smiled with effort.
"One can't just 'quit' being a paladin, Prince Naruto," he reminded the boy. "It's what I was born to do. Fated."
Iruka's fingers dropped down to brush Kakashi's right shoulder — the wrong side, since he sat on Kakashi's right, but the same place where Kakashi's Order of the Anbu mark lay.
Kakashi shrugged, ignoring Iruka's timid touch.
"Besides, even if Minister Danzō does write to Lord Hokage, nothing will happen. My soul is bound by the vows of my Order, and both Lord Hokage and Minister Danzō know it. I couldn't corrupt anyone even if I wanted to." He chuckled a little darkly. "That's what it means, to be fated to be a Paladin of the Order of the Anbu."
"But fate is fickle," Iruka murmured to Kakashi. "Fate promised me an early death ten years ago, and in poverty if I survived. My parents— Well."
"The marchioness and her husband were good people," Kakashi said gently, "and generous."
"To a fault," Iruka agreed with a wry smile. "If the king and his wife, and their dukes, hadn't passed that same day.... I doubt anyone would have noticed where I'd gone, whether to an orphanage or to the streets." His smile gentled. "But fate had plans for me beyond anything I could have comprehended, Kakashi. Don't think it cannot do the same for you."
Kakashi smiled, just a little, over his mask.
"Mah, fate has given me this much, and that is far more than a humble paladin like myself deserves," he said, motioning Naruto over.
The young prince practically threw himself at Kakashi, hurtling himself into Kakashi's open arms, making Kakashi's breath pop out in a surprised, "Whuff!"
Kakashi laughed, and Iruka twisted so he could lean his head on Kakashi's gold-emblazoned shoulder. Kakashi wrapped his other arm around Iruka's waist.
Iruka smiled, curling closer to the other two.
"I'll find a way," Naruto vowed against Kakashi's snow-white tunic. "I'll find a way for you to leave the Order of the Anbu. You can still be the head of my guard! And then you and Iruka can see each other as much as you want!"
Kakashi chuckled and ruffled Naruto's hair, earning an unimpressed look from the prince.
"Maa, if you find a way, I'll gladly serve you as a guardsman," Kakashi joked.
Iruka looked down and glimpsed a frighteningly fierce determination in the young prince's bright blue eyes. He wondered, not for the first time, what kind of change Naruto would bring to the world.