Minato doesn't tell them at first, that someday, Ling's not going to return to the village. It's only after the fifth time Kakashi returns from his missions to an empty apartment that that he begins searching for Ling. Just curious peeks around the village at first, then he's asking friends, acquaintances and just about anyone who knew her. Then, by the third month, Kakashi begins searching every nook and cranny for her after his missions before realizing why. Kakashi is a genius, he is rational and reasonable and eventually, he stops.

She still eats with Minato and Kushina, but those dinner meetings go from every week, to every month to every month to irregular visits, to almost none at all. Ling is slowly distancing herself from them. Her ANBU work outside the walls are becoming full time is one reason, her inability to interact with them is another because of her lie to them is another. Where once she would have never hesitated to help Kushina in the kitchen, she's now tending to the flowers she gives them; to where she once chattered with Rin loudly, she now only gives stiff greetings. She doesn't want them to hurt. She doesn't want them to know the truth of why she's leaving.

Ling should be better than this, she knows. She's a good actor, she always has been. But when she can't bring herself to lie to them, so she lies to herself instead.

( And that lie, she knows, will cost her. Not everything, but anything that has ever mattered. )

+

Tanabata is the last thing she allows herself before she leaves.

Bright lights and shining stars, she and Rin dress up for the first time in what seems like in years. Laughing, they go from stall to stall until they're too giggly on sake to eat anything else or even win at civilian games.

Minato and Kushina arrive with Naruto sometime later in the night with Kakashi in tow.

Rin immediately joins them, back at the stalls again, no matter how horrible she is, leaving her behind with Kakashi.

"You look nice," he offers, a smile pulling at his mask. She smiles back as they shuffle along.

Konoha has a tradition to snuff out every light and lantern in time for the fireworks, and in the dark, the crowd pushes them together. They haven't been this close in months, not since Ling first asked Minato for that recommendation, but her breath catches when Kakashi looks down at her.

Maybe it's the alcohol in her blood, maybe it's the desperation in her heart because of the little time— Because there is no time, but whatever Kakashi was going to say is forgotten when she grips the lapels of his vest, pulling him towards her and slipping off his mask and kisses him.

A press of lips, warmth, and the sweetness of the alcohol. They're both drunk, and maybe that's what makes everything delirious and hazy. He grips her against him, and he is like the rain after a fire, the moonlight on a pond. Comfort and safety and tomorrow he will be gone.

Tomorrow, the alabaster fingers won't be threaded into her hair and tomorrow she won't remember the way his hand fits on the curve of her waist, the way he tilts his head as he kisses her. And tomorrow, she'll be giving up the chance to explore his edges and crevices, won't get the chance to kiss him again, warmth and musk on her lips.

They pull apart when the last fireworks are fading, dying embers in the night, the last rays of light. For a moment, they stay there, foreheads pressed against each other and eyes meeting. And she thinks Kakashi understands, then, that this is, and was, goodbye.

She doesn't know if he does or even will ever understands how much he meant to her, or that she's forgiven him long ago, because Ling disappears with the current of the crowd, and like that day so long before—

Ling doesn't look back.

( Kakashi, will be a regret for as long as she lives. )

+

Becoming a spymaster links her close to those she will watch over. Anko Mitarashi, whom she always viewed as nothing more than a girl driven mad provides surprisingly intellectual conversations and morbid humour that Ling doesn't share with anyone else. Raidou Namishi and Genma Shiranui are older than her by five years and seems to have a permanent air of unresolved sexual tension but seems kinder than the rest of their battle-worn comrades, put up with her questions — curiosities as long as she doesn't step too far.

She isn't a stranger to this behaviour. But in order to keep them safe, she has to know them, to understand them. The job of a spy is hard. Killing is mindless, but understanding requires time, knowledge and to do it without the former means that she is with less options than she likes.

Peace is nothing as it seems. For the next two years, she travels the villages. Kiri, Iwa, Suna, even Kumo and the lands beyond as she looks on from corpses to wills to cold parchments of data. It's worth it, she tells herself. It has to be.

There are many things she has to get used to. She is no stranger to sacrificing others for herself. But what she won't ever get used to is sacrificing herself for a peace she can't even enjoy. 

Exploitation, seduction, lying, cheating. ( Cold hands, slick skin, dirt and pain and sin and, no matter how hard or much she scrubs, she can't get his touch off of her skin nor the blood staining her fingers, her sword. ) Only in ANBU does she learn the defining difference of soldier, protector and a true shinobi. But, she also serves as the only remnant of home for those that cannot return. 

However, she understands the brand of darkness embedded into their eyes. That particular brand of darkness that only certain people can achieve, the brutally methodical efficiency the first time she had to kill a friend in order to save Konoha from another man.

She doesn't make many friends outside the walls. But to lose Beaver, the mother of two children inside the walls, is devastating.

Trying to escape, she ask for six months leave. 

The shinobi countries remind her of things that have happened. Things that will happen. So she tries to seek out the lands beyond it— Silence, Iron. 

Honour and respect she thinks, when a man gives her a sword— beautiful and hand carved with shifting leaves and roaring waves and sometimes even soaring cranes. Everything I touch turns to ruin, she once told him. And he'd replied something will always grow out of ashes. He kisses her ( slender limbs and graceful like the wind, undaunted and kind, forever smiling ) and asks her to stay. She tells him no. Tried to give back the sword, only for him to tell her that it could only ever be worthy of her. 

Even still, with all his kindness: she forgets him once she returns to duty.  

x

i always wanted to make this longer — but i found i couldn't, since that would take away some of the feeling. some of ling's numbness as she adjusts to anbu and realizes that feeling is only going to cause her more pain.