❝ you have a good heart—despite the tales. ❞ / Nana 💜
His hands freeze as he's sorting through the photos. She's no shinobi, so he as no idea if she's fast enough to notice or if she's so absorbed in the picture she's smiling softly at that it didn't register. Kakashi carefully hands the next one to her, surprised to see that his fingers have a perfect predator's stillness, that they don't shake at the reminder that he's--
Friend-killer Kakashi, right? In no way is he surprised she's heard the little epithet, he's quite certain that his reputation far outstrips her own both in infamy and reach. He wonders if she was titillated more by the whispers of him stealing a doujutsu, something the Hyuuga clan head at the time had clamored to have him executed for just for precedent, or if she was more excited by the rumors around Rin's death-- he knows there's a particularly vicious one about him having impregnated her and gone ballistic. Perhaps she'd even liked the tales about his gallant, tender-hearted father, so different from Kakashi himself by all accounts. Gentle, until he wasn't. Fair, until he wasn't. Well liked, until he wasn't. Perhaps she'd found fascination with the tales of the Hatake, the Otherness, the old rumors of cannibalism. It could be that she'd heard of any number of assassinations he'd conducted, hungry and blood soaked at fourteen or tired and dripping rivers of the stuff just last month. It could be any number of things, really, because people stopped whispering about Kakashi where he could hear them when he came halfway out of the shadows a few years ago, but he knows that doesn't mean they've stopped whispering altogether.
She knows the tales. Some of them, at the very least.
Something in his mouth feels like a hot coal. He isn't sure why the idea of it is making him freeze like a genin, because everyone talks about him, and he's sure she's heard all kinds of things, both absurd and true, from her clan once the rumors of them seeing each other had really started to circulate. She knows how the rumor mill gets, but... The blood on his hands feels very, very literal, even when it isn't. He picks up the next photo, his movement precise, and he looks blankly at Nana's face, smiling so hard with her slim arm looped through his that her pale eyes are only crescents in the soft planes of her face. Kakashi himself is smiling too, visible in the curve of his eye.
He remembers the woman that had asked if they'd wanted their picture taken-- she had dark hair, big brown eyes, and her hands had been very careful when he'd given her his camera, like it was something important. A civilian tourist, and her eyes had passed over Kakashi like he was just another man, and over Nana like she was just another woman, and she'd snapped a photo of them standing in front of one of the fountains in the park in the northwest quadrant of the village. Nana had pinched him on the back so hard in an effort to get him to stand up straight that he'd bruised like a peach.
Kakashi took all these photos so she could put them in a little scrapbook and look at them when she's too on-house-arrest to see the sky and he's too out-of-the-village-again to break her out so they can both just live a little. Does that mean he has a good heart? He hardly thinks he has one at all, let alone a good one. He thinks a man with a good heart would look nothing like him, hungry and mean like a beaten dog. He thinks a man with a good heart would not leave behind a trail of corpses the way a spring storm might.
Maybe she doesn't know, if she thinks that. His shoulders relax. Maybe she's heard, but she doesn't believe them. Maybe he'll never disappoint her opinion of him, or maybe he'll die first and he'll never have to worry about it at all.
"Mm," he hums contemplatively. Kakashi thumbs over the photo, their faces pressed cheek to cheek, and knows he's only imagining the smear of blood that he's left behind. "Don't tell anybody, you know I have a reputation to uphold."
World's surface was as smooth as glass / And they saw the hour coming and they didn't let it pass / I heard you say my name twice through your teeth