Chapter Text
The white-and-red hat of the Rokudaime Hokage rested crookedly atop a great big pile of paperwork on Kakashi Hatake’s desk, its painted expression frozen in permanent command while the actual Hokage contemplated abandoning his post entirely.
Honestly, disappearing into the wilderness as a wandering hermit had never sounded more appealing.
Kakashi leaned so far back in the oversized chair that the wood groaned against his weight, one boot balanced carelessly against the edge of the desk while reports, budget requests, mission logs, and diplomatic correspondence threatened to avalanche into his lap at any moment. Somewhere within the chaos, there was probably an important document requiring immediate attention.
He had absolutely no intention of finding it.
“I could still leave,” he announced to the ceiling in the solemn tone of a man reaching a life-altering decision. “If I time it correctly, I can fake my death, abandon civilization, and be halfway to a hot spring village before the council realizes they’ve misplaced the Hokage.”
Pakkun, sprawled across the office floor in a patch of afternoon sunlight, barely reacted.
“You said that four times this week.”
“This week has been very difficult for me.”
“You had to attend two meetings.”
“One of them lasted three hours, Pakkun. There were charts.”
The pug opened one eye slowly, the expression on his wrinkled face carrying the exhausted patience of someone who had known Kakashi far too long.
“You’d get caught at the village gate.”
Kakashi waved a dismissive hand through the air. “Please. I’m an elite shinobi.”
“You tripped over a filing box yesterday.”
“That was sabotage.”
“You put it there.”
Kakashi stared blankly at the ceiling for a long moment before sighing heavily enough to qualify as performance art.
The Hokage’s office looked less like the command center of the most powerful hidden village in the Five Nations and more like paperwork had declared war and won. Fresh reports from the reconstruction crews covered nearly every available surface. Blueprints for damaged districts had been pinned across the walls beside mission requests and supply inventories. One entire corner of the office had disappeared underneath stacks of budget allocations Tsunade had very strategically left behind before disappearing from public responsibility forever.
Traitor.
Outside the tall office windows, Konoha was still rebuilding itself little by little.
Scaffolding wrapped around sections of the Hokage Monument where chunks of stone had yet to be repaired, workers moved through the streets carrying lumber and roofing tiles, and somewhere below, the distant sound of arguing drifted upward from civilians trying to reorganize half-destroyed market districts. The village was alive again, stubbornly dragging itself forward no matter how badly the war had broken it.
Kakashi understood that, he just resented being the person expected to organize it.
“This job is ruining your entire aesthetic,” Pakkun informed him.
Kakashi blinked lazily. “My aesthetic?”
“You used to be mysterious, and dangerous. Now you argue about construction permits.”
“I’m still dangerous.”
“You fell asleep during a trade negotiation.”
“In my defense, the Daimyō’s advisor had the same voice as a bedtime story narrator.”
Before Pakkun could answer, the office door swung open hard enough to bounce lightly against the wall.
Naruto Uzumaki stumbled into the office first, barely visible behind an enormous stack of scrolls piled so high in his arms that they threatened to tip over with every step, while Sai followed a few paces behind carrying a much smaller, neatly aligned bundle with the calm expression of someone observing a mess rather than participating in it.
Kakashi looked up slowly, then shifted his gaze from the scrolls to Naruto, and finally — with quiet intent — toward the open window beside him.
“You’re not escaping through the window again,” Sai said pleasantly.
Naruto nearly dropped half the scrolls trying to kick the office door shut behind him. “Seriously, Kakashi-sensei, the ANBU are taking bets on how long before you disappear.”
Kakashi leaned back in the Hokage chair with the weary dignity of a man who had already accepted, in principle, that disappearance remained a perfectly reasonable long-term career option.
“I want it officially stated that I never asked for this job.”
“You literally accepted the hat,” Naruto said.
“I was emotionally manipulated.”
Sai nodded thoughtfully. “Lady Tsunade did call you ‘the only shinobi irresponsible enough to survive dealing with the council.’”
Kakashi stared blankly at him.
“…That somehow feels less like praise.”
Naruto dumped the scrolls onto the desk with enough force to send reports scattering in every direction. One bounced off Kakashi’s shoulder before sliding sadly onto the floor beside Pakkun, who didn’t even lift his head anymore.
The dog had adapted.
“Absolutely not,” Kakashi said immediately.
“You don’t even know what they are yet.”
“I know they’re thick enough to ruin my entire afternoon.”
Sai stepped forward and neatly placed his own reports on top of the pile Naruto had created, somehow making the situation look even more threatening through organization alone.
“These are reconstruction assessments from the eastern district,” Sai explained. “As well as civilian complaints regarding delayed housing permits, supply shortages, trade route negotiations, infrastructure funding disputes, and one very passionate letter concerning bridge aesthetics.”
Kakashi closed his visible eye.
“…Bridge aesthetics.”
Naruto flopped into the chair across from the desk and stretched out lazily, arms behind his head like the pile of scrolls he’d brought in was someone else’s problem entirely.
“Some old guy yelled at me for forty minutes about roofing tiles downstairs.”
“And you brought him to me?”
“No,” Naruto said proudly. "I escaped."
Kakashi looked genuinely offended.
“So everyone gets to escape except me.”
“You’re the Hokage.”
“That title sounds increasingly fictional every day.”
And yet, Kakashi had taken the hat anyway.
It wasn’t a question of capability. As the Copy Ninja, Kakashi had commanded divisions, survived the devastating Fourth Shinobi World War, and possessed a tactical mind few in the Five Great Nations could match. Decades of active duty had trained him to see through disorder and act decisively, which made it almost insulting that his most persistent adversary was now administrative paperwork.
He wasn’t meant to be the ideological future of the village. He was just the constant presence that kept the civilian councils and daimyo from panicking simply by remaining in the seat.
Naruto would take the hat someday; that was an inevitability written in the stars. But Naruto was still too young, still early in his shinobi development, and not yet at the stage where he could be expected to handle diplomacy at the village level. That kind of responsibility required experience he simply hadn’t had the time to build.
It required a shinobi with the mental fortitude to sit through a six-hour council meeting with the village elders without using a genjutsu to make them choke on their own tea.
Admittedly, Kakashi’s fingers had twitched toward the hand signs twice this morning, but his discipline remained unbroken.
Sai tilted his head slightly while studying him, "You look tired.”
Kakashi glimpsed at him flatly. “Insightful.”
Naruto pointed accusingly across the desk. “You’ve gotten old.”
“I’m thirty-four.”
Naruto grinned, propping his boots up on the corner of the big desk without a shred of respect for office decorum. “Yeah, well, speaking of old and tired... I wonder how Sakura is doing right now.”
The tension in Kakashi's shoulders eased slightly at the mention of their third teammate, though it was replaced by a different kind of exhaustion. “Running the entire civilian medical sector, last I checked. Which means she’s likely twice as tired as I am, and significantly more lethal because of it.”
“It is a logical transition,” Sai noted, pulling out a small ink brush to doodle on the edge of a scroll. “With Lady Tsunade completely gone the moment the treaty ink dried - presumably to bankrupt every gambling den across the Fire Country - Sakura-san was the only medic left with the authority and the chakra reserves to keep the hospital from collapsing due to postwar casualties.”
“She’s incredible,” Naruto said, his tone shifting into one of genuine respect. “I dropped by the ward yesterday, and she was managing three operating rooms at the same time using chakra scalpels while yelling at the senior surgeons to keep up. If she keeps this up, she’s gonna catch up to Grandma Tsunade in no time.”
“She’s well on her way,” Kakashi agreed quietly, a rare flash of pride warming his single visible eye. Sakura’s growth from a frightened academy graduate into the undisputed backbone of Konoha’s healthcare system was nothing short of miraculous. She didn't have Tsunade's decades of battlefield experience yet, but she possessed a terrifying, flawless mastery over her own body and chakra which kept the entire village breathing while everything else was being rebuilt.
He looked down at the dreary stack of sewage tariffs waiting for his signature. Then, he glanced at the open window, where a pleasant afternoon breeze was rustling the leaves.
“You know,” Kakashi muttered, slowly sliding his chair back. “As the Hokage, it is technically my civic duty to conduct a formal, unannounced inspection of our medical infrastructure. Right now.”
“You just want to escape the budget meeting with Homura,” Sai said pleasantly.
“I am a man of the people, Sai. I must ensure our chief medical officer isn’t overworking herself.” Kakashi's hand hovered over the window frame, a tactical retreat fully formed in his brilliant mind.
Down on the hospital rooftop garden, rows of medicinal herbs and flowering plants grew in carefully tended beds, their scent rising through the open space and softening the constant antiseptic smell drifting up from the operating floors below.
Sakura sat on a wooden bench with her head resting lightly against the brick wall behind her, eyes closed as she finally took a moment between surgeries to slow her breathing. Her pink hair was tied back loosely, a few stray strands stuck to her skin from the heat of the operating rooms, and even in stillness she looked like someone running on far too little rest.
An abruptly clumsy rustle came from the bushes nearby.
Sakura didn’t open her eyes at first, already recognizing the familiar harmless chakra signature.
“…Shiba,” she said gently, a small smile forming at the corner of her mouth, “you’re not on duty out here.”
A large, dark-furred ninken squeezed through the hedge, shaking loose leaves from his black-patched coat. Unlike Pakkun, Shiba had bypassed Kakashi's office entirely on his afternoon patrol, opting instead to wander over to the hospital roof purely of his own volition. He padded across the stone tiles, letting out a low huffing breath before dropping a scarred chin directly onto Sakura's knee.
Sakura opened one green eye, a soft smile breaking through her fatigue as she reached down to scratch behind the dog's floppy ears.
"Don't tell me," Sakura murmured, leaning her head back against the brick wall again as Shiba leaned his considerable weight against her legs. "Kakashi is hiding from the elders again, isn't he?"
Shiba gave a rumbling sound of agreement, eyes half-closing as her fingers found the spot behind his collar. His responses were never fully verbal the way Pakkun liked to be; most of the pack preferred something simpler. A tone, a sound, a shift in posture, just enough to be understood without needing to explain it. Pakkun was the one who liked words, and the others only used them when it felt necessary.
Shiba, especially, never saw much point in talking when a sigh or a look carried the same meaning.
“He’s going to get himself buried in paperwork again,” Sakura said softly.
A faint huff from Shiba - amused and entirely unsurprised.
Sakura’s smile widened slightly. “So yes, then.”
Before either of them could settle further into the quiet, the garden gate gave a soft click as it opened. Shiba’s ears lifted first, his posture shifting with subtle alertness as if he were deciding whether the interruption mattered, while Sakura’s hand paused mid-scratch against his fur, her attention drifting upward without urgency, already recognizing the new coming presence before she even looked.
Kakashi Hatake stepped into the rooftop garden like a man who had simply redirected himself rather than escaped anything at all. He was still dressed exactly as he always was, in practical shinobi gear that refused to acknowledge his title - the dark uniform worn underneath a standard flak vest, fingerless gloves, and sandals scuffed by constant movement through corridors, rooftops, and meeting halls. There were no Hokage robes, no ceremonial layers, nothing that softened the reality of what he had become; only the hat tucked loosely under one arm, carried like an obligation he intended to return to but had not yet been properly convinced to wear.
In his other hand, balanced with the careless steadiness of long habit, was a fresh cup of coffee.
“…So this is where you both disappear to,” Kakashi said at last, tone dry enough to suggest this was not his first time arriving at such a conclusion.
Sakura’s smile followed a moment later, small and unforced, her eyes still half-lidded as she acknowledged him without a shred of the smothering formality the rest of the village now insisted on using. “Hi, Kakashi-sensei. Let me guess - you’re conducting urgent Hokage-level reconnaissance, or you’ve come to personally evaluate my extremely suspicious habit of resting for five minutes?”
“I’ll have you know I am performing a critical inspection of hospital morale,” Kakashi replied, entirely seriously, as he came closer. He held out the coffee like it was part of the routine between them. “And morale, as it turns out, appears to be critically dependent on contraband caffeine.”
Sakura accepted it without ceremony, letting the warmth pool into her palms. “Mm,” she hummed, taking a sip, and this time she paused, because it was exactly how she liked it. Strong enough to wake her right up, but softened with just enough sweetness that it didn’t turn bitter on the tongue. “That’s… actually good,” she admitted, a little surprised despite herself. “It’s made exactly right.”
“Noted,” Kakashi said, as if adding it to a mental list titled things to know about Sakura.
Shiba let out a soft approving sound from where he was sprawled across her legs, eyes closed like the entire conversation was background noise to a very important nap.
Kakashi glanced down at him with open betrayal. “You’re not even pretending to be neutral anymore.”
Shiba cracked one eye open, looking at Kakashi with the silent judgment of old familiarity.
Sakura made a small sound that might have been a laugh, and Kakashi immediately felt, annoyingly, that he had missed that sound more than he cared to admit. It wasn’t that she had been gone - she was always somewhere in the village, always working, always reachable on paper. It was just… harder to find her these days without also finding strain and burnout first.
He lowered himself onto the edge of the bench with a soft exhale, his posture easing in that familiar way it always did when he finally stopped pretending he had nowhere else to be, and for a moment he simply watched Sakura sit there beside him; same Sakura, same voice, the same reassuring presence that used to fill training fields, and yet something had still changed between them. Not distance in any physical sense since they were still in the same village and still moving through the same days, but in the way those days rarely seemed to line up anymore unless everything slowed at exactly the right moment, as if they were both moving through the same place at slightly different speeds and only occasionally meeting in the brief quiet gaps between everything else demanding their attention.
He watched her over the rim of his mask for a moment, his single visible eye heavy with that characteristic, unbothered laziness that usually meant he was paying attention to absolutely everything. He shifted his weight, propping an elbow on the back of the wooden bench, and added more casually, “Anyone keeping up with you these days, or is the hospital still taking most of your time?”
It was said like a joke, but his internal focus hardened anyway, the gears of a lifetime in intelligence quietly turning behind the mask. He was gathering information, evaluating the emotional welfare of a former student who had spent the last year entirely submerged in postwar trauma triage, all while pretending he was barely awake.
Sakura tilted her head a bit, her green eyes zeroing in on his with a perceptive, distinctly unimpressed look. “Define ‘keeping up with.’”
“Dinner. Conversations,” Kakashi said, his tone dry as his fingers idly tapped against the wood. “Anything that requires you to be in one place longer than a surgery cycle and doesn't involve a medical chart.”
Shiba made an amused huff against her leg that did not help Kakashi’s case.
Sakura thought about it for a second, her gaze drifting down to the dark surface of her coffee, then shrugged lightly. “Not really.”
“Mm."
He let the moment pass without immediate comment, relaxing as if the topic had simply reached its natural end, though his mind didn’t let go of it, turning it over for a while before he decided to test the waters directly.
“Any letters dropped off by random hawks lately?” he asked, his voice entirely deadpan, tracking a leaf drifting over the garden wall. "Sasuke hasn’t sent anything in weeks. You’d think he’d remember he still has teammates.”
Sakura didn’t stiffen; her expression remained completely calm, her posture holding a steady, unbothered indifference that caught him slightly off guard.
“Sasuke? No,” she said simply, taking another sip of her coffee. “He sent a message to the intelligence division about some residual chakra traces in the outer territories a month ago, but that's about it. He's busy, I'm busy. It is what it is.”
Kakashi kept his eyes on the skyline, weighing the casual indifference of her tone. He had reviewed the latest tracking updates before noon - Sasuke’s location logs remained as hollow and uninformative as ever - and he had expected at least a sliver of the old tension when he brought him up. In the early days, her fixation regarding Sasuke had been completely obvious, an intense center of attention born when they were ridiculously young and every connection felt final. But that version of Team Seven belonged to another lifetime, and her transformation had begun long before the front lines changed them all. Hearing her now, Sasuke appeared to be far less of a personal concern, and not due to lack of loyalty, but just distance from how things used to be.
“You ever manage to go on an actual day off?” he asked finally, dropping the words out like an afterthought, wanting to see what else had changed in her routine.
Sakura opened one eye at him, a defensive smirk playing at the corner of her lips. “Is that an official inquiry, Lord Sixth?”
“It’s a genuine concern from a friend.”
She snorted softly, the tension in her neck unknotting as she looked back out over the rooftop railing. “Once.”
That got a distinct pause out of him.
“…Once,” Kakashi repeated.
“Mm.” She took another slow sip of coffee, clearly enjoying his confusion. “With Genma.”
There was a heavy moment of silence.
Shiba cracked one eye open on her lap again, faintly intrigued by the mention of the Tokubetsu Jōnin.
Kakashi didn’t react, not right away, his mind working through the implications of that specific name. When he finally spoke, it was only a small, deadpan tilt of his head. “Genma.”
Sakura gave him a sharp, warning look, “Don’t do that.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
"You said his name all weird."
“Did I?” Kakashi tilted his head slightly, his single visible eye widening in exaggerated innocence.
“It was just one little date, Kakashi-sensei. Calm down,” Sakura sighed, rolling her eyes as she moved back against the brickwork. “And for the record, it went absolutely nowhere. He actually annoyed the hell out of me.”
“Oh?” Kakashi resisted the urge to show too much interest, “Do tell. Did he forget his wallet?”
“Worse. He tried being charming,” she muttered, shaking her head. “We were five minutes into appetizers at that fancy place by the hot springs when he ditched his senbon, grabbed my hand, and tried this deep, smoky-voiced routine about how exhausted I looked, suggesting we skip dinner for a private steam bath to ‘unknot my tension.’
A genuine puff of laughter escaped Kakashi’s mask, but behind the amusement, a suddenly cold knot caught him entirely off guard. It was a bizarre, unexpected twist of protective annoyance - a quiet spike of displeasure at the mental image of his old acquaintance making clumsy passes at his former student over appetizers. He blinked, mentally shoving the uncharacteristic reaction down into a dark corner of his mind before it could reach his face. It was just Genma being an idiot, and Sakura must've obviously handled it with her usual toughened grit. There was absolutely no reason for his chest to clench like that.
“Genma,” he said at last, tone mild again, “continues to misunderstand what qualifies as persuasive behavior.”
Sakura huffed. “That’s one way to put it. I told him if he wanted to relax that badly, he should start by relaxing his entire personality.”
That earned a small snort from Kakashi.
Sakura took another sip of coffee, letting the companiable silence stretch comfortably for a moment before she tilted her head slightly to look at him more directly, her expression shifting into something curious. “So,” she said, voice light but pointed, “what about you?”
Kakashi didn’t respond too quickly, which for him was its own kind of answer if you knew him well enough, his gaze moving lazily toward the edge of the rooftop garden before returning to her as though he had only just decided to acknowledge it. “What about me?” he asked, tone carefully even.
Sakura’s eyes slitted, not in suspicion exactly, but in the kind of long-earned familiarity that came from having once been a genin under his supervision and still remembering how often he avoided direct answers when it suited him. “Don’t do that,” she said, though there was no real bite to it, just curiosity pressing forward. “You’ve spent the last ten minutes evaluating my romantic history, so I think it’s fair to assume you have at least one interesting detail you’re hiding on your side.”
Kakashi hummed softly, as if considering whether 'interesting' was an accurate word for anything in his life, then answered with the same calm tone he used for most things that could spiral into unnecessary complication. “I’m not hiding anything.”
“That sounds suspiciously like something someone hiding something would say,” Sakura replied, taking another sip as if she were testing how far she could push this before he changed tactics.
“It also sounds like something someone who enjoys making assumptions would say,” Kakashi returned, voice mild enough that it almost passed for agreement.
Sakura let out a short laugh, shaking her head as she looked out over the garden again, but she didn’t let it go, not really, instead letting the question sit between them in a way that made it clear she was still watching him even if she wasn’t staring directly. “It’s just strange,” she said after a moment, her tone softening slightly into something more observational than teasing, “I’ve never actually seen you with anyone, not once, not even back when I was a kid and half the village thought you were some kind of mystery genius with a rotating cast of secret admirers.”
Kakashi blinked once at that, then exhaled slowly through his nose, “The village tends to be creative.”
“I’m serious,” she continued, still looking out over the rooftops rather than at him now, as if the topic had become more abstract than personal. “You’re Kakashi Hatake. Famous, respected, mildly terrifying depending on who you ask, and somehow I’ve gone from being a loud twelve-year-old with a crush phase I would very much like to forget, to a medical chief, and I still haven’t once heard a single credible rumor about your dating life.”
“That sounds suspiciously like you taking this personally.”
“It’s curiosity,” Sakura corrected.
“Dangerous habit,” he said.
“You taught me most of my dangerous habits,” she shot back readily.
“That explains a lot,” Kakashi murmured.
Sakura finally looked at him properly now, one brow lifting. “So what, you’re telling me there’s just… nothing? No one? Ever?”
Kakashi didn’t answer right away, giving the question just enough time to lose momentum. “My life has been… occupied,” he said at last.
“That’s not a no,” she pointed out.
“It’s also not a yes.”
Sakura huffed softly, then took another drink of her coffee as if deciding to stop pushing for the moment, though her curiosity didn’t fully disappear so much as fold into something quieter. “Mm. That’s suspicious. The famous Kakashi Hatake likes to play at being Mr. Emotionally Unavailable."
“I am merely preserving the mystery,” Kakashi replied smoothly, leaning his head back against the wall with an affected sigh. “If the world knew the Hokage spent his Saturday nights cataloging storage scrolls or fixing a leaky kitchen pipe, the legend would completely fall apart.”
“The legend is currently dodging his council duties to sit on a roof with a medic and an elderly ninja dog,” Sakura observed dryly, though her expression relaxed. The tension in their exchange faded, giving way to the familiar flow they always slipped back into.
Kakashi let out a quiet rumble of agreement. He didn’t try to defend himself this time, tracking the distant silhouette of the Hokage Monument as the afternoon sun began its slow dip behind the stone faces. Beside him, Sakura finished the last of her coffee, setting the empty cup down on the brickwork with a gentle click. Shiba gave one final big yawn against her knee before shuffling off her lap to find a patch of shade near the doorway.
“Well,” Sakura said, stretching her arms above her head until her joints popped, a genuine smile finally replacing the exhaustion that darkened her features earlier. “As much as I’ve enjoyed meddling in your love life, Lord Sixth, some of us actually have a hospital to run. If I’m late for the shift change, Shizune will have my head.”
“Go,” Kakashi murmured, a faint smile in his voice. “We know how our Sakura prides herself on a strict schedule."
She dropped her feet lightly to the rooftop floor, brushing a few stray bits of dust from her trousers as she straightened. Before heading for the stairs, she glanced back over her shoulder, green eyes settling on him with a certain fondness. “Don’t stay up here all day, Kakashi. Go back and sign at least three papers before you sneak out again.”
“I’ll aim for two,” he countered.
“That’s not how leadership works.”
“It is if I’m very determined.”
With a soft laugh, she waved him off and disappeared down the access stairwell, the heavy metal door clicking shut behind her and cutting off the last trace of her presence.