Shinobi rule #25: Do not stumble when your legs snap like twigs. Do not spit when your mouth fills with blood. Do not stutter when your heart twitches like the beating of wings.

"Were you friends, Kakashi-sensei?"

He turned the key in the door and paused.

That morning he had woke with his name on his lips to find he was greeted only by an unusually blue and cloudless sky. As he walked through the village he felt an unbearable lightness. He imagined that he was gutted and hollowed, floating just above the sidewalk. Gravity reappeared only to hinder him by weighing down his limbs when he reached the dormitory and was forced to clear the stoop of the trinkets left by adoring students in a makeshift shrine. Inside, he put away the dishes from their last meal and folded last week s paper. He averted his eyes from Iruka's palm prints on the windowsill as he threw open the curtains in the bedroom that still smelled of him. Restless and unsatisfied, he sat for a better part of the afternoon fingering his lover s blankets with hands that refused to let go of the memory of the angles of his body.

What was there to learn from this? Each of his virtues and each of his vices had been scavenged from loved ones. In that way he could almost pretend that they had never really left him. But, all he could do when he searched his mind for a piece of Iruka was think of his smile. The way he had looked the first time it struck him that he was in love, the first time he was disposed of the idea that he was a sheltered gem who needed to be told that there was a world beyond the village walls: he remembered it down to the grains of dust that kissed the air. He had mumbled, one awkward beat behind and terrified, Let me brush your hair. And Iruka had responded with a smile said without any words at all, You're slow, I've had it harder than you know and you've been mine for longer than you realize. It was like looking at the incarnation of all that wasn t fair.

It occurred to him that if he were a character in one of his books he probably would have answered with some grand proclamation such as, His touch erased all uncertainty. His very breath ran through my veins until I could at last be still. And if he were Iruka he would have said something simple and touching like, This is a place I called home. He, however, found himself blinking back the sight of the vast years that sprawled ahead and swallowing the burning of the all the words he said already but wished to say again anyway.

He withdrew the key from the lock and replied, "You could say that, yes."