Might Guy had been called to the Hokage's office, and the Hokage's office had no Hokage in it.
That was the first strange thing. The chair behind the desk was empty. It stopped him now, because Jiraiya of the Sannin was standing beside it, and Homura Mitokado and Koharu Utatane were seated in front of it, and all three of them were looking at Guy as though he were the answer to a question he had not heard anyone ask.
"Lord Jiraiya." Guy waved. "You are back. How'd the search go?"
"The search is over." Jiraiya did not look like a man bringing good news. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the road. "We found her. Tsunade's in the village. Came back with us this morning."
Guy's whole face lit. "That is wonderful! Then Konoha has its Fifth!"
"She said no."
The light went out of Guy slowly.
"Flat no." Jiraiya said. "I asked her on a road in the Land of Hot Springs and I asked her again at the gate this morning and the answer didn't move an inch. She'll heal. She's already on her way to the hospital to take it over, and trust me, that's worth more to this village than anyone wants to admit." He rubbed the back of his neck. "But she will not wear the hat. A lot of men she cared about died who wanted that chair and she is not going to stand in it for either of them. I'm not going to make a Hokage out of a woman who'd hate every morning of it."
"Then you, Lord Jiraiya." Guy said it with relief, because it was obvious. "You were offered it first. You are a Sannin. The Daimyo himself-"
"Turned it down twice already." Jiraiya's mouth twisted. "I'd run this village into a ditch inside a month, and I know it, and so do they. A Hokage has to stay. I don't stay. Never have." He stepped around the desk. "So I went down the list. Every jonin we've got. And I kept coming back to one name."
Guy waited to hear it.
Jiraiya looked at him.
It took a moment. Guy was not a stupid man, despite what most people might think. But he eventually came to the realization of what they were getting at. And why it was him invited here instead of anyone else…
"...Me."
"You."
"No." Guy nervously laughed. "No, no. Lord Jiraiya, I am a Might Guy! I'm just an ordinary jonin. Some people don't even think I should be a jonin because of the way I act! I am the man who challenges Kakashi to rock paper scissors in the street and cries when he loses. You cannot put the village in the hands of-"
"Sit down, Guy." Koharu ordered.
He did not sit down. He could not have explained why his legs would not do so.
Homura folded his hands. "Three borders are heating at once. Stone in the south, Cloud in the north, Mist watching the water. We do not have the years it takes to grow a quiet leader and let the nations get used to him. We need a wall now, today, a name our enemies already know and our own people already trust. Strength they can see. There are perhaps four shinobi in this village strong enough to be that wall." He let that sit. "Kakashi is one. Asuma. Kurenai, in time. And you. And of the four, you are the strongest in a straight fight, and the only one every man on the roster would walk into fire behind without being ordered to."
"That is not-" Guy started.
"It is exactly true and you know it is." Jiraiya said.
Guy's hands had started to shake. He thought of the desk. He thought of the names on the rock outside, four faces in stone, four men who had stood in this room and decided who lived and who was spent, who got sent out and did not come back. A Hokage knew the number before the families did.
"I am afraid of it." Guy admitted.
Silence filled the room.
He had not meant to say it. It was the most honest thing he had said in years, and it came out with no sense of youth in it at all.
"I am not afraid of dying. I have never once been afraid of that. But this. Deciding for everyone. Spending people. Being the one who is wrong, and other men's children paying for it." He swallowed. "I do not know that I am the man who should hold that."
Jiraiya and the two elders looked at one another.
And Guy, watching their faces, understood with a slow horror that he had just said the one thing that could not have helped his case worse if he had tried, because Homura was almost smiling, and Koharu had let out a breath, and Jiraiya was nodding like a man whose bet had come in.
"There it is. That's the whole reason it's you and not someone else who wants it. A man who does not fear the position and all the responsibility it entails is the wrong man for it."
…
The jonin assembled in the largest hall the administrative building had, and there were more of them than usually stood in one room, because the elders had called every active jonin in the village who was not on an active mission.
Guy stood at the front beside the empty chair and felt every eye.
They did not all know why they were here. Some did. The rumors had moved through back channels for weeks, and a village of shinobi keeps no secret well. But the official shape of it was new to most of them, and the elders gave it to them straight, the way the law required it given. A Hokage had died without naming his successor. The right to choose fell to the Fire Daimyo, who selected from the names put forward by the village elders, by the Jōnin Commander, and by a representative of the Anbu. Three sources. One slate. And then, by a law older than any man in the room, the slate did not become the Hokage until the jonin themselves raised their hands for it.
Nobody in that hall had been told that Tsunade of the Sannin had been found, brought home, and had refused the chair that morning. As far as the room knew, she had never been in the running at all. That part stayed behind the office door, with Jiraiya, with the elders, with Guy. The jonin were being asked to choose from what stood in front of them, and what stood in front of them was two names.
Shikaku Nara read them out, because he was the Jōnin Commander.
The first name was Might Guy.
The second name was Danzo Shimura.
Danzo spoke first. Danzo did not raise his voice. He had never once in his life needed to.
"For twenty years," he said, "this village has grown weak on the kindness of the men it buried, and called that weakness honor. We put the Second in the ground. We put the Fourth in the ground. We put Hiruzen in the ground not one season past, in the open, in his own arena, in front of the world, because he was merciful enough to let an old pupil walk close enough to kill him." He looked from face to face, unhurried. "That is what our mercy bought. A dead Hokage in the dirt, and five nations who have learned that Konoha forgives."
No one answered. He had not expected them to.
"You want to know why three of our borders are burning tonight. I will tell you, since no one else in this room will say it out loud. They burn because we spent a generation teaching the world that the price of crossing us is a stern word and an open hand. Mercy is a debt, and the nations have decided we are good for it, over and over, until one of them wonders how much we will forgive before we finally break." His voice did not climb. "We are finding out the answer now, on three fronts at once."
"The man you put in that chair cannot be a man who flinches from the dark work. The dark work is coming to this village whether he has the stomach for it or not. It does not ask permission. It does not care whether the hand that meets it is clean."
He let that stand, and said the rest without apology.
"I have spent my whole life doing the things this village needed done and was too soft to watch itself do. I did them in the dark, so the rest of you could stand in the light and believe your hands were clean. I am not asking to be loved. No one loves the blade. They love the silence the blade buys them, and they look away from the cutting. I am asking you to be honest, once, in this room, about what has actually kept you breathing."
He said all of it calmly, and the terrible thing, the thing that sat in the chest of every jonin in the hall, was that not one word of it was a lie, exactly. The silence stretched and did not break.
Then Shikaku turned to Guy. "You have the floor, if you want it."
For a moment it looked as though Guy would not take it. He had heard every word Danzo said, and he had no argument against most of it, and that was the trouble.
"Lord Danzo is right about a great deal," Guy said at last. "A war is coming. I have never done the dark work, and there are things this village has needed doing that I was too soft to do. I will not stand up here and pretend I am the man he is in those places. I am not. I have never wanted to be."
He did not look at Danzo. He looked at the room.
"I cannot promise you I will be clever. I cannot promise I will always be right, and when I am wrong it will be other people's children who pay for it, and I am more frightened of that than I have ever been of anything in my life. I did not ask for this. Lord Jiraiya and the other elders will tell you I argued against it until they were sick of the sound of my voice."
His hands were shaking.
"But there is one thing I can promise, and it is the only thing I have ever known how to do. I will stand in front of you. All of you. I will put myself between this village and whatever comes for it, and I will not move, and I will not flinch, and I will not stop while I am still breathing. Until the springtime of my youth burns to ash, no harm will come to our village." The tears were running now and his voice did not break under them. "Lord Danzo offers you the dark. I cannot. I can only swear that I will never once let go of the light. If that is not enough, raise your hands for him, and I will walk into the same fire at his back and never say a word against it."
He stopped, as though surprised he had said that much.
The hall was quiet, but it was a different quiet than the one Danzo had been given.
Then Shikaku asked for hands.
Guy did not watch the room. He found that he could not. He looked at the floor in front of his sandals and listened to the sound of cloth and air, of arms going up, and it went on, and on, and he made himself lift his head.
Almost every hand in the hall was raised.
For him.
A wall of them, jonin he had bled beside and jonin he had only nodded to in corridors, hard men and harder women, every one of them with an arm in the air, and most of them grinning at him, and a few of them already crying, because shinobi of the Leaf cried easily when they were proud and Guy had showed half of them it was allowed.
For Danzo, when the count came, the hands could be numbered without trouble. A handful. The men closest to him and a few who feared what refusing would cost. Not a fraction of what he needed. Not close.
The Shinobi of Darkness had asked the village to hand him its heart, and the village had looked at him, and had not.
…
Guy found Danzo afterward in the emptying hall, near the windows alone, and Guy went to him.
"Lord Danzo." Guy stopped a respectful distance off and bowed, low, and held it. "I want to say something to you, and I want to say it before anyone tells me I should not."
Danzo looked at him and said nothing.
"You have wanted to lead this village your entire life. I know that. The whole village knows it. You have given Konoha years in places the rest of us were too frightened to even look, and you wanted the hat, and you earned the right to be considered for it." Guy straightened, and his eyes were already wet, because of course they were. "And it went to me. To a man who never asked for it, who did not want it, who is not even sure he can carry it. I cannot imagine what that feels like to a man like you. And I am sorry. I am sorry that the thing you spent your life reaching for was put in the hands of someone who spent his life reaching for something else entirely. It is not fair. I do not think it is fair. I will try every single day to be worth the choice they made, but I will not stand here and pretend it is fair to you, because it is not, and you deserve to hear one person say so."
Danzo regarded him for a long moment.
"You always did lack darkness," Danzo said. His voice did not rise. There was nothing in his face at all. "I told you so once. You wept when a comrade died and you would not put down a wounded enemy who begged, and I judged you too soft to ever be of use in the work that keeps a village alive." A pause. "The village has just handed you the highest seat it has, for the very reason I once turned you away. I find I have nothing to teach you about irony that the morning has not."
"Lord Danzo, I-"
"Congratulations, Lord Fifth." Danzo inclined his head, the exact degree courtesy demanded and not one degree past it. "Hokage."
He turned and left, and he did not look back.
Danzo walked out into the corridor and let the building swallow the noise of the hall behind him, and only then did he allow himself to feel it.
The fury bubbled beneath him. He did not throw a tantrum at his age. A man who showed the village what was in him gave the village a weapon, and Danzo had spent sixty years giving nothing away, and he was not going to begin in a hallway because a clown in a green suit had wept an apology at him.
But it blazed beneath the surface.
He had been so close he could number the days. The seat had stood empty and the borders had given him every argument a man could want, and he had made each one, and the jonin of this village, these sentimental children grown into sentimental adults, had raised their soft hands for a man who cried in public and acted like a fool and told them all that feeling was strength. They had chosen the feeling. Over him. Again.
For now, he thought.
That was the reality of it. Not for always. For now. The hat had a way of breaking the men who wore it, and a war was coming, and a Hokage who flinched at the dark work would, sooner or later, hand Konoha a wound that only the dark work could close, and on that day the village would look around for the man who had warned them. He would be standing exactly where he had always stood. He could wait. He had always been able to wait.
And he had not, in any case, walked out of that hall with nothing.
He thought of the boy. Sparrow. The Hyuga a small few had wept for and buried, the one whose grave had a stone and a name and a team who still left flowers on it. A genin. A child by the calendar. And in the dark where Danzo kept the things the village was too tender to own, that child was already capable of defeating jonin. Quickly becoming one of his top operatives. Besides the mishap during the invasion, he listened adequately on missions.
The richest joke of the whole morning, and Danzo permitted himself the private taste of it as he walked: the green fool now wearing the hat had trained that boy. Had drilled him, praised him, mourned him. Had built, with his own hands and his own soft heart, the finest blade in Danzo's armory, and would go to his grave believing it lay broken under the earth.
Let Guy have the chair.
Danzo had the boy.
They held the proclamation the next morning, and the whole village came.
Lee stood in the crowd packed into the open ground below the Hokage's residence, between Tenten and an embarrassed Sakura-chan, and he could not stop the tears and he was not trying to.
He had been to the Third's funeral. That had been the village standing in black to say goodbye to a man who would not come back. This was the opposite of that. This was the village standing in the morning to say hello to a future, every rooftop full, every window full, children up on shoulders, the old gate veterans and the academy infants and the shopkeepers and the off-duty shinobi and the families of the ones still out holding the borders, all of them turned to the railing above where the elders waited with the robe and the hat.
And then Guy stepped out, and the sound the crowd made went up through Lee like a struck bell.
Guy wore the white-and-red over the green. He had refused, Lee would learn later, to take off the green underneath; he had stood in front of the elders and the tailor and announced that a man could become Hokage without becoming a different man, and they had let him have it, the jumpsuit collar showing at the throat of the Hokage's robe. He looked enormous up there. He looked, for once in his life, entirely serious. He looked out over the village that had chosen him and his lips were quivering and his eyes were streaming and he was not bothering to hide a second of it.
Homura spoke the words. The Land of Fire, the Daimyo's seal, the will of the jonin, the line of the Hokage unbroken. He named the man. Might Guy. The Fifth Hokage of Konohagakure.
The roar that went up shook dust from the eaves.
"Lee's sensei is the hokage… I really never could've imagined it…" Sakura muttered to herself.
"Do you think they'll call him Guykage?" Ino snickered.
"Guykage!!!" Lee screamed.
Sakura punched Ino in the arm for suggesting that and she stuck her tongue out at her while giggling.
Tenten couldn't help but smile with her back straight. Her sensei was chosen to become the hokage of the village. This did make her question something though… Was she and Lee still apart of Team Guy? Can the Hokage be a squad leader?
Lee looked up at his teacher standing above the whole of Konoha, the man who had found a boy who could not do a single thing right and had decided that did not matter, had decided to spend his one life proving it did not matter, and Lee understood that he was watching the exact shape of his own future raised up in white and red against the morning, and he cried so hard that the force of his tears caused cracks in the ground.
Guy's first act as Fifth Hokage was performed that afternoon, and it did not go the way he expected.
The office still smelled of fresh paint and old smoke. Guy sat behind the desk that had belonged to four men before him, the robe across his shoulders, a scroll unrolled in front of him and a brush in his hand that he was holding like it might bite. Izumo Kamizuki and Kotetsu Hagane flanked the door. Ibiki Morino, Anko Mitarashi, and Genma Shiranui stood in a loose cluster off to the side, witnesses to the kind of administrative act a village reassembling itself treated as a small ceremony. Kakashi leaned against the wall behind the desk with a book he was not supposed to be reading in a situation like this.
Lee and Shikamaru stood in front of the desk.
Guy looked at the two of them, and the two folders in front of him, and opened his mouth to begin the formal recitation, and his chin crumpled.
"Sensei!" Lee said, alarmed.
"I am fine." Guy was visibly not fine. "I am the Hokage. I am conducting an official promotion. I am completely composed." A tear ran off his jaw and landed on the scroll. "Shikamaru Nara."
Shikamaru, who had clearly seen where this was going the instant he walked in, sighed. "Lord Hokage."
"The Third watched your match against the sound shinobi and praised you to everyone who would listen." Guy stated. "Every jonin who observed agreed that you should be promoted. They meant to recommend you then. They recommend you now. And now with the power invested in me…"
"Lord Hokage, you really don't have to…" Shikamaru put his hands up already having a feeling he knew where this was going.
"YOU EARNED IT!" Guy bawled, and slapped the chunin designation onto Shikamaru's folder with a stamp that cracked the desk.
Shikamaru groaned. "Thank you, Lord Hokage…"
"And you." Guy turned to Lee, and whatever fragile grip he had left came apart entirely. "Rock Lee."
Lee was already going.
"This is the heaviest promotion file the elders have ever built." Guy opened it with shaking hands. "You killed the Sand jinchuriki in the prelims. You beat Sasuke Uchiha in the finals. During the invasion, you protected the lives of hundreds of villagers by taking on Konoha's enemies. And while this village was on one knee they ran you through every command they had, command of juniors, service under chunin, a peer in a jonin's squad, to see whether the strongest genin in the nations could lead, and every report says the same word, disciplined, selfless, takes correction without ego, carries other men's lives and does not drop them." He turned a page he could no longer see. "And then the Land of Grass. A hundred Stone shinobi. Objective achieved, zero Konoha casualties, and what the most recent report says is that a hundred men took one look at you and ran before you threw a punch."
"Sensei, my plan was useless in the end, they fled before we could even-"
"They fled because you made the cost of fighting you more than the cost of running, Lee, that is what a deterrent IS!" Guy roared through the tears, on his feet now, both hands flat on the cracked desk, the Hokage's robe sliding off one shoulder. "You frightened an army out of a country by WALKING UP A ROAD, and I taught you, I TAUGHT you, do you understand what it is to watch a boy everyone wrote off become the thing whole villages are afraid of?"
"GUY-SENSEI!" Lee sobbed.
"LEE!" Guy sobbed back.
They came around the desk and met in the middle and embraced, both of them weeping, the brush abandoned, the Hokage of the Hidden Leaf and his student crying into each other's shoulders in front of five witnesses and the official scroll.
There was an awkward silence.
"Should one of us tell him he hasn't actually signed it yet?" Genma asked, around the senbon in his teeth.
"I'm good, thanks." Anko declined getting anywhere near that mess.
Kakashi turned a page he was not reading. "Give them a minute. They'll get it out of their systems soon." he said.
Shikamaru looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone working out exactly how long until he could leave, then his mouth smirked, just slightly, despite everything. He didn't personally know Lee, but he knew the boy couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu. If he was born in his shoes, he doubted he would've ever become a ninja in the first place. So, it was pretty impressive to see someone like that became a chunin.
When it was done, and the stamp had finally come down on Lee's folder, and the two of them stood there as chunin of Konohagakure with their teacher wiping his face on the sleeve of the Hokage's robe, Guy drew himself up and tried to recover something of the dignity of the office.
"From this day forward," he said, hoarse, "I expect you both to strive for a level of excellence worthy of that headband." A beat. "Now please get out before I start again."
…
They were halfway down the winding stairs below the administrative level, Lee and Shikamaru in fresh vests, when Shikamaru stopped.
"Isn't that Naruto?"
A familiar orange figure was coming up the other way.
"Looks like it. Sakura-chan said he went out on a mission. He must have finally gotten back." Lee waved. "Naruto!"
"Bushy Brows? Shikamaru? Wait!!!" Naruto squinted at the vests. "You both made chunin?! When did, all that's down there is the registry room! How is it fair you two made chunin when I didn't?! Lee, I get it, but a slacker like you Shikamaru?!"
"Don't remind me…" Shikamaru sighed.
"It's been a long time. Tsunade." Shikaku Nara had come up the stairs behind the boys, and he bowed past them.
Lee turned and his breath caught, because the woman descending the steps with Jiraiya and Shizune was unmistakable even to him, who had heard the name his whole career and never matched it to a face. The Slug Princess. The greatest medical-nin alive.
"Nara, all grown up." Tsunade's gaze moved across them. "These two yours?"
"That one's mine." Shikaku put a hand on Shikamaru's head.
"And the green one belongs to the new Hokage, more or less," Jiraiya said.
"That I do!" Lee bowed so fast he nearly went down the stairs. "Lady Tsunade! It is the greatest honor! My teammate is going to-"
"We'll be seeing you." Tsunade and the others were already moving past, toward the doors, toward the hospital. "I've got a building full of people your Sublime Green Beast of Prey is badgering me to go look at." She apologized.
"Shikamaru! Bushy-brows! We'll catch up, I'll show you my awesome new jutsu! See ya!" Naruto started after the Sannin.
"A shinobi does not show off his moves." Jiraiya's fist came down on the top of Naruto's head.
"OW!"
…
They held the celebration at Yakiniku Q. Team Guy and Team Asuma crammed around a grill, Lee and Shikamaru both in fresh chunin vests, and one chair sat empty, because the man who would have been loudest at that table was buried in the first paperwork of his life.
"Tsunade's back! It's really her! The legendary Lady Tsunade!" Tenten had both hands flat on the table. "And she's going to be right here, at the hospital, where I can actually, I've wanted to meet her my whole life. And my SENSEI is the HOKAGE. I can't hold both of these in my head at once."
"Is she really that famous?" Ino asked.
"How do you not know her?!" Tenten rounded on her. "She's known across the entire world! Everyone learns about the Legendary Sannin in the Academy!"
"Was I asleep for that class?" Shikamaru wondered aloud.
"I don't remember learning that either." Choji had already claimed a corner of the grill as sovereign territory.
"WHAT?! Did Iruka-sensei cut the Sannin out of the curriculum for your year?! Everyone should know the Sannin!"
"I was shocked too." Lee said around a mouthful, "but they really were not taught it. Sakura-chan did not know who they were either, not until everything that happened during the Chunin Exams."
"They should keep teaching it," Asuma said firmly, lighting a cigarette off the grill and earning a glare from Ino. "The Legendary Sannin are a cornerstone of Konoha's history. And now one of them's running our hospital and one of my good friends is running the village. Hell of a week, I tell ya."
"Okay, okay, enough history!" Ino waved her chopsticks. "Look at you, Shikamaru. All dressed up like a real ninja for once."
"You look ridiculous, man." Choji laughed. "Doesn't suit you at all."
"Stop laughing." Shikamaru blushed.
"What about mine?" Lee pointed at his own chest with both thumbs. "It suits me, does it not? I look reliable. Trustworthy. Don't I? Don't I?"
"Yes, Lee." Ino giggled. "You should show Sakura the second you get a chance. I'm sure she'd love it."
Lee's grin dipped by a fraction that only Tenten caught.
"I went by earlier," he admitted. "She could not really talk. Sasuke-kun woke up. She is looking after him." He scratched his cheek. "I knocked, and she opened the door, and behind her I heard a plate hit the floor. Cut apples, all over the ground. And Sasuke-kun was shouting that he wanted to fight Naruto-kun." He shrugged. "So I told her I was glad he was awake and that I would come by another time. It did not seem like the right moment."
"He wakes up and the first thing he does is knock food out of her hands and demand a fight." Shikamaru shook his head. "Sounds like the guy."
"Poor Sakura, I wonder what's wrong with Sasuke-kun…" Ino muttered.
"Anyway!" Tenten clapped her hands once, steering the table back. She turned to Lee with a grin. "Congratulations, Lee. I mean it. You earned this. Ten times over."
"Thank you, Tenten!"
"And the next time the exams roll around," she said, leveling her chopsticks at him like a kunai, "I'm getting a vest too. So enjoy standing a rank above me while it lasts. Because it won't last long. You just wait and see."
Lee beamed at her. "I would expect nothing less from you! And when you do, I will be the loudest person in the entire stands!"
"You'd better be." She went back to her food.
"Alright, let's celebrate Shikamaru and Lee making chunin!" Asuma raised his glass. "And the Fifth Hokage, wherever the poor man is right now. Cheers!"
"LET'S EAT!" Choji roared.
"Choji! Tip your glass before you eat!" Asuma snapped.
"Relax! I know how to stuff myself AND enjoy it!" Choji shot back.
Lee and Choji reached for the last piece of meat at the same instant.
Lee smiled at him. Choji glanced away, then locked eyes with him, and Lee saw in them a man fully prepared to throw down over a single bite of beef. He respected it. He did. If Choji brought that same fire to his training, the outcome of a great many things in his life might be different.
However.
"The last piece!" Choji's chopsticks strained against Lee's, his whole arm shaking. "This is the end! The most precious bite of all! Nobody takes this from me!"
"Show me your youthful spirit, Choji-kun!" Lee did not appear to be exerting any effort whatsoever. "How badly do you want this last piece of meat?!"
"Kick his butt, Lee!" Ino cheered. "He does this every time! Last time he stole the last piece when it was MINE!"
"OUGGHHHH!" Choji's eyes watered. "NO! Why is someone as strong as you picking on a regular genin like meeee?!"
Lee ate the meat.
"Choji-kun." Lee chewed thoughtfully. "That was not even your piece. You were reaching for mine."
Choji wept harder.
"Choji. Eating isn't a battle." Shikamaru patted his friend's shoulder. "Keep it simple."
Choji sighed and accepted his defeat, privately vowing to develop a superior meat-snatching technique before he ever ate out with Rock Lee again.
"Choji, all you do is eat." Asuma said it kindly. "You should train a little more. Shikamaru-kun is already a chunin, you know."
Choji nodded, chastened, and reached for more meat anyway.
The Hokage's office, well past dark, was a disaster.
Paper covered the desk in slumped towers. More paper covered the floor around the desk where the towers had given up. Guy sat behind it in the robe, hat off and set on the corner of the desk like something he was still afraid to break, and he had been signing his name for six hours and the pile had not gone down, because every time he cleared an inch of it Kakashi brought more.
"This one's a requisition for the southern supply line," Kakashi said, adding it to the desk without looking up from his own stack. "This one's three border rotations that need your seal by morning. This one's a complaint from a civilian about training-ground noise."
"How did the Third do this every single day for decades." Guy signed. "How did he do this and stay kind? I have signed my name forty times and I want to run into the forest and never return."
"He complained constantly. You just never heard it because you were training." Kakashi turned a page. "Now let's get this work done already. I just became your aide and I'm already sick of the position."
Guy signed three more in a row, then dropped to the floor beside the desk and did twenty push-ups, came back up, and signed the next one with the ink still trembling in his hand.
"What are you doing," Kakashi said.
"A man who sits behind a desk all day grows soft, Kakashi, and a soft Hokage is no use to anyone. One signature, ten push-ups. It is the only way I will survive this office with my youth intact." He dropped again. "Join me. We can suffer together. For old times."
"I'm good."
"You are my right hand now. You have to."
"I refuse."
"My Eternal Rival can't refuse my orders in my administration!" Guy came back up, beaming, and for a moment he was entirely himself again, and then his eyes fell on the paper at the top of the next stack, and the beam softened into something quieter.
It was the day's promotions, logged and copied for the registry. Two names near the bottom. Nara, Shikamaru. Lee, Rock.
Guy set down the brush.
He thought about a boy who could not throw a single jutsu, who the academy had passed along with a shrug, who he had found doing push-ups alone behind a building because no one else believed there was a point. He thought about that same boy walking up a road alone in front of a hundred enemies and a country choosing to be afraid of him. And now there was a vest, and a name in the registry, and the boy had stood in this office today and cried with him over it.
His chest was tight.
"Kakashi." he said.
"Mm."
"I am going to be all right at this." He picked the brush back up, and he was smiling, and there was water in it. "I was afraid I would not be. But I taught that boy, and that boy is going to be the strongest thing this world has ever seen, and a man who can do that can sign a few border rotations." He pulled the next stack toward him. "Hand me the supply line. And then get down here. One signature, ten push-ups. That is an order from your Hokage."
Kakashi looked at him for a long moment.
Then he sighed, set down his book, and got down on the floor of the Hokage's office, and the two of them did push-ups between the paperwork until the candles burned low.