If the world is split into those who use others, and those who give, Nana would be both. She gives her body. She gives pleasure. She gives her ear to listen. She gives up on those who don't care about her anymore. She gives.

And she uses. She uses the men that visit her for their coin. She uses their sentiments of her beauty to invigorate her vanity. She uses their lives to live vicariously through. She's been used by the people who don't care about her anymore.

As both, she doesn't think one is better than the other. She muses, the givers are easier to sympathize with, but she thinks there's something inherently sad about the plight of users. They're so empty, and she knows what it's like to be empty.

People are like jars, she thinks. Everyone starts off empty, but as people grow up, everyones' jar fills up with something different, or not at all. She thinks of the contents of a jar as love. Some people's jars are overflowing. Some people's jars are half-full, half-empty, three-fourths full, and three-fourths empty. Some people barely have a trickle at all, and some people are entirely empty.

She muses that what goes in the jar is love, love collected by the bonds people share with each other. Not by the amount of relationships, but by the meaningfulness of them. Some people start off empty and stay empty. Some people start off full and then lose it all.

Nana used to be like that.

When she closes her eyes to sleep, the window lets in sunlight. It used to be irritating but now it makes her sigh a bit longingly. She wants to go outside, live a different life entirely. In equal parts, it alleviates and exacerbates the longing, when she pretends to be the men who come to visit her. It's opened her to the realization that sometimes it hurts to pretend to be someone else, as if confirming that she's nothing, that she has nothing.

For a whore, you're a curious girl. How many times has she been told that?

Sometimes, she gets overwhelmed with the thought that everyone around her has a life of their own, different from hers.

Nana interacts with a fair amount of people—clients, the other working girls, the brothel owner. It's simple for her to imagine the outside world, to understand what's out there from the gossip that gets around, but Nana doesn't cope well with the thought of what other people are doing out there, beyond the streets she's familiar with.

She doesn't understand this weakness of hers, only that she has it.

When she closes her eyes to sleep and the window is letting in sunlight, it makes Nana sigh longingly for the past. She dreams of the river, of the trees she's climbed, and of children's laughter. Memories.

Mixed with them now are the sensations of a man's hand on her hips, fingertips biting into her skin and the rough heat between her thighs. From scent alone she knows who it is and the longing that hits her when she wakes up makes it hard to breathe.

She prays.

...

...

...

Kakashi has a problem. A sex problem, though it definitely doesn't feel like a 'problem' to him. In some ways, it's a solution to plenty of other issues people report that he has. Like his hesitancy to close physical distance, to undress and reveal his scars, to expose his face. People rarely call him out on it, but he knows they notice.

He notices quite a bit about how people regard him.

Perhaps it's part of what keeps him coming back to her.

More so than anyone else, in a way that Kakashi has never let happen before, she knows him. A fact that both thrills and terrifies him. She understands him. Perhaps not through his personal history—he's been careful not to give his name or the Sharingan that would reveal his reputation—but that's just another benefit.

Kakashi has tried, but never succeeded until now, to find a place where he is not his name, not his unfortunate history, not his completed missions or the countless mistakes that plague him. Instead, he can be...

Her shinobi, as she has referred to him in gasps that still echo in his daydreams.

He has a secret that no one knows, no one but his father who drove him to don the mask in the first place; he's not good at controlling his expressions. Could never keep his mouth from relaxing in a smile or growing into a frown, a fact that disregarded an iron clad shinobi rule. Do not show emotion.

In the end, he hid them the best he could.

Kakashi isn't sure why he showed her what was underneath his mask, but his small comfort is that she could never know what it means. She will never learn his identity and because of that, he is safe with her.

Safe—for now.

Not a problem then, a situation.

He's become dependent on—he loathes to admit it—her.

Nana is a whore, readily available for him and the ryo he pays with. He's lost count on how many times he's visited her. To the point that when he comes to the brothel, he doesn't even need to say her name, the owner is already leading him to the backroom where Nana waits, that soft smile finding its way onto her face at the sight of him. He knows it's because of the money, and the pleasure she knows by now that they'll have.

It used to chaff him badly that he had to pay for her. Shame used to plague him. It was a low thing, wasn't it? To pay for sex, to pay for the girl who was paid by others for the same. Was it right of him to do so, to become like every other man she'd met? Kakashi had come to the conclusion that he's a lot of things, and being honorable isn't one of them.

So he continues to visit her. He has no idea when he'll stop—how he'll stop.

She's told him he's the rarest sort of client she loves the most; someone she can climax with.

Kakashi might suspect she said it merely to bolster his ego, but he knows it to be true. Her reactions are too vivid to be faked, an entire body shudder he revels in pulling from her, along with the music of her soft pants. He loves when her beautifully luminescent eyes go wide, filling with tears when she's close to orgasm, her entire face red with a blush and that mouth of hers opening on a gasp, milk white teeth all perfectly aligned—a rarity.

She's quiet in her approval, unlike the screams of whores in other rooms but the softness of her voice suits him fine. After all, he's attuned to his heightened senses and he doesn't need her to scream to hear the insistent, begging undertones of her moans.

God, he loves fucking her.

She loves it too—when he leaves her in bed, often times rushed to get back to his shinobi duty, Nana lays in a weakened heap, cheeks flushed, eyes heavy lidded, and her legs, sheets, and sex a mess of evidence. Usually she shifts onto her side to watch him go, presses her hands between her thighs, and smiles in that way that leads to a tightening in his groin. That's how he knows what she doesn't say.

There is nothing more out of place in the brothel than her smile. It's a sweet, careful, delicate thing. Not kind or pacifying, as if she pities him like everyone else. It's warm as if she is genuinely pleased to see him, the softness mixed with traces of eagerness that he struggles to keep off his face but fails to.

When his mask comes off and she can see it for herself, that smile broadens and he can't, with all honesty, say he regrets showing her.

He can't, with all honesty, say he regrets meeting her.

He can't—and that's the real problem.

...

...

...

Nana laughs with him, mixing her throaty guffaws with his small chuckles, ones that send thrills across her skin. When he's being vulnerable, he's not loud in his approval of things, and his behavior edges toward hesitancy in expressing himself verbally. She finds him odd in this way, as if there are two people in him; the crassly humored and flippant man who can brazenly speak the most absurd sentences, and the quiet, introspective and—

His face is a good indicator of what he's feeling and it's best when he's laughing.

She lives now, for his visits and for the expressions she finds in the planes of his face. Nana's fingers twitch to stretch across his cheeks, his nose, the edge of his jaw and the furrow of his brow but she doesn't. Nana has heard that shinobi are skittish people, and she has not had enough of him. She doesn't want to give him any reason to leave.

Nana prays that he'll never have enough of her either. She is not the sort to pray, and it's bizarre, this desire to ask deities to let her keep him, but it's all she can do. After all, she's just a girl with nothing to offer; she needs all the help she can get.

Just a little longer! One more day, I won't ask for anything else but one more day. But then just a day is never enough and she breaks her promise of asking, as most greedy humans do.

Nana thinks as soon as she wakes up, let him come back to me. It's ridiculous. She's being stupid.

She laughs louder at the absurdity of her requests and this dangerous desire. When Nana had been a child warned away from shinobi, she hadn't expected their reputation to be a danger to be so true.

Now, she revels in his attention on her, as quick as it is to leave. She hates when he's gone, laughs at her own strange misery, and feels her heart thud tightly in her chest the second she glimpses his frame in the doorway the next time he appears.

Nana doesn't know if it's a god making him return, but she's too dumbly thankful to care.

Ah, what a silly girl to let these emotions to sink in. What a dumb whore to expect his visits forever. What a painful existence that no one but her would be grateful to have.

He smiles, his eye crinkling, and his lips pull up in the way that reveals his teeth. Nana loves his mouth—and everything else too, just not as much as she loves that mouth of his. It's her secret treasure, the sight of his grins and the too sharp canines that she loves to run her tongue over. The softness of his lips, the way they look swollen and red from her, and how easy they are to nibble and suck.

Heaven.

Nana leans in and presses her lips to his, listening to his breath catch and the kiss quickly deepens. Another special thing about her shinobi; his stamina. Out of the both of them, she's the most likely to wind up too exhausted to leave bed, and when he leaves her for weeks on end, her soreness lingers as a fond memory between her thighs.

He's insatiable, voracious in his thirst for sex. It's something she's both happy about and fearful of. As easy as it was to take his virginity, to find the balance in their 'relationship', it will be just as easy for him to find someone else.

A better girl, perhaps a shinobi who will understand more why he doesn't talk to her about his past. A nice, pretty girl who loves him and who he loves. Someone who isn't a whore with hopes too high, still dreaming of a life beyond the brothel walls.

She is terrified of him but she'll never tell him why.

Instead, Nana continues to give, give, give and let's herself greedily take, take, take.

...

...

...

"Make me feel real," Nana whispers sometimes against the nape of his neck. He thinks she doesn't even realize what she's saying, her expression dazed when he pulls away to gaze at her.

He never knows what to say in response. It's a strange thing to ask for but somehow he understands it. He wonders at her everyday life, what it's like for her to live at the brothel, the type of men she meets and if they treat her well. It makes him ill to contemplate others being with her, and he feels hot scorching jealousy if he thinks that she might even be enjoying it. This response, he doesn't understand.

Kakashi has experience with dirty jobs, understands that she can't help these things.

They can't be faithful to each other. Amidst the natural cherry blossom scent of her skin, the scent of sex, cigarettes, and booze clings to her. He tastes on her those that have come before him, tries not to think about it, and thinks instead, as he suckles at her neck, arms, breasts, back, and thighs, that he never wants to see her with anyone else's mark but his own.

He never does, and he doesn't ask why that is.

Make me feel real.

He wonders at her past.