Book exchange with your omega:
The winter holidays have officially slowed things down for some of our most notorious workaholics… which means it’s time to catch up on some things they enjoy that are hard to do the rest of the year. All year, these omegas quietly look forward to the book exchange you started with them early in the committed phase of your relationship. Day 2 ( it is still day 2 somewhere! I am catching up!) of 2025 Advent Event
Nanami
He loves the holiday break, really and truly. Email autoreply set, do no disturb on, little note pad of things he wants to get done around the house set up. He also really likes being able to spend time at home with you.
He wants your book exchange to be one of the first things you do. He has a really hard time holding himself back when buying you books (if that’s your thing) because of what they represent for him, but he knows you won’t have infinite time to read them. He’s near perfect at estimating how long a book will take you though so he usually sneaks in an extra one or two shorter options
He’s not picky about what you get him as long as it’s interesting, although he does seem partial to those sort of long-form investigative reporting books about things like the history of wheat or one type of textile art, and genre fiction. Genre fiction is his guilty pleasure. The formulaic-ness of it surrounding the novelty of the characters and a little trope bending is a great combination of comforting and predictable but new and different
He loves bringing you something warm to drink with something yeasted to eat in the morning, to get lazy with you reading for an hour or so before he does some exercise, gets a quick shower in, and then spends time with you in between bursts of reading
“Kento?”
“Mmm.” He can feel the late-morning winter sun, gold and liquid over his back, the sheets draped over his bare shoulders, hair tousled and scalp relaxed without the weight of gel. He groans in appreciation at how his eyes don’t hurt because he was able to go home promptly by five the night before.
One of the short stuttering purrs he’ll sometimes let out in moments of utter contentment like this rolls through his chest and throat as you giggle. Very close. Perfectly close. How beautiful, to have his alpha awake when he’s awake, instead of him sneaking out of the house for work before you get up.
One of the few days of the year… his eyes crack open to you kneeling on the bed, finger poised above his eye. He grabs your hand slow, heavy, pulls it under his chin rather than yank you down. “What were you doing?”
You humph at being caught. “Touching your eyelashes.”
A lazy growl leaves him.
He doesn’t want to choose between getting up and getting the presents in the bag he saw behind you, but trying to decide is waking him up too. He starts patting his hand across the blanket over your shoulder, chuckling when you laugh at him.
“Now what are you doing?”
“Trying to peak,” he grins, eyes still mostly closed.
He is successfully distracted by you wrapping your arms around him and kissing him until he has to catch his breath.
Kakashi
If any of you have met someone who likes a genre of book, but only a handful of books in that genre because they perfectly suit their taste, that’s Kakashi. People like that are HARD to buy for. Not because he’s going to be rude about you getting a book he didn’t like that much, but because you adore him and don’t want to give him something that’s just going to end up in the DNF pile
It’s also kind of rough because Kakashi is an ao3 girlie at heart. He can read the raunchiest of icha icha in public without breaking a sweat but cannot talk about it if you ask him what the book is about, turns into an adorable stuttering tomato
This opens up an optional sort of humiliation ritual of having him read romance novels out loud to you, and he especially has fun if you also read and he can see you getting flustered too. But not all the books can be like that! You still want to get him things he’s going to enjoy!
Actually if you get him an Icha Icha zine from someone he knows has a brain that agrees with him on the tropes, he’d love that. Or a special edition. If he likes the new covers on reprints that’s great, or if you rebind a copy of it yourself to give to him, he might actually cry. He’ll almost certainly be entirely fanboyed out if you can find good art to tuck into the pages as personalized extras
You had never been so happy that Kakashi could reasonably pull seniority to make sure he wasn’t called away in the middle of your vacation. An extended break time with your mate meant reading in the cushy floor situation you’d built together on the balcony/sunroom, romping about in the bedroom, cooking together in the kitchen, shopping for his kids at the holiday market and finding truly awful gag gifts for his friends’ white elephant exchange.
And of course, you had to find a book to give him.
Surely he had noticed you staring at him all morning because he’d given you a precious few minutes to arrange one of your gifts for him on his pillow, perfectly so the pleats of it sort of blended with the pretty tissue paper you’d gotten to drape just so… Because this gift really did deserve such an impression.
You eyed it, admiring your work even if the corners were a teeny tiny bit less neat than a machine-printed book, but the stitching peaking out and connected to the spine matched the heroine’s kimono colors described in detail from the matssuri festival from chapter ten. You’d found enough motifs to emboss a little border of objects, a class beaker, a kunai, a unrolled scarf, a fishing pole, around the front and back covers. And being a shinobi did have its perks in being good enough at forging you’d copied Jiraiya’s handwriting as the summary blurb and quotes on the back. You figured it wouldn’t exactly break secrecy or anything, with Kakashi having been the hokage and all.
Kakashi’s stare on your back was heavy as he caught you looking with pride at the bound copy of book three you’d spent weeks working on between your busy schedules to keep it something of a secret.
And then he knelt down into his spot on the floor with something akin to reverence. “Is that…” he grabbed it with a caress that almost had you getting jealous over the leather your hands had worked over character by painstaking character.
He flipped through it with familiar eagerness, the pages falling open to the ink paintings you had been beyond lucky to find a few months ago being sold by a bookshop worker who was a fan of the series.
He was so absorbed in it so quickly, slouching against your side and curling up in the warmth of your body. You didn’t have to ask if he liked it, and really couldn’t help the low and steady purr that began to thrum in your chest as he lost himself in the book like it was brand new again.
Yamato/Tenzo
He’s not much of an extended sitting novel reader. A page turner is fine, but he likes books that are slow paced enough he can read long and slow, getting up to make himself tea, eat lunch with you, get some training in, then go out into a hammock between his two favorite trees and read again
He likes books about other people’s skills, historical fiction and nonfiction. He’d probably love Les Miserables, books on cooking, or maybe even an economic treatise…
Reading reminds him in a non-painful way that the world is vast and wide and he hasn’t seen much of it yet. Where usually realizations like this make him feel a little naive and resentful, reading about things makes him grateful there’s a lot left to experience, with you, with his friends, even through work. Things have changed, he doesn’t need to be only some ignored trunk, valued only for the graft that took on him when it did for no-one else.
He loves doing book exchange with you on break because it gives him time to think and digest and ruminate, where usually that kind of thing is discouraged as a distracting liability
You’re reading the book he got you on wildflower cultivates native to the woods around Konoha - which in its own way is amusing because you know the Yamanaka who’s the first author and would have never pegged their personality as being suitable for the work in this - when Tenzo crawls onto the wide couch cushions and into the loop of your arms, making quite a comfortable arm-rest actually.
“I think it would be fun to travel to the Land of Iron,” he says after you’ve slowed down reading considerably, distracted by running your fingers up and down his spine.
“Really?” this makes you lower the book.
“Shinobi are quite… judgemental about their lifestyle. But they’ve made beautiful structures with steel and even bronze. It’s hard to imagine.” In this village with most of the buildings made from timber. Many from the wood of his body, and the body of his predecessor.
He’s got the slightly faraway look he gets sometimes when he’s imagining going places. It’s hard because the elders don’t like the idea of the last mokuton user in the village being too far from home for long. But Tenzo knows very well what he is and is not allowed to do, what is and isn’t possible, and most typically errs on the side of caution, so you simply enjoy him spinning the fantasy, walking down the street together and finding one of the pounded disks Iron has learned to carry music in, traveling to the side of their nation set far away from Shinobi society and very different for it.
He doesn’t talk much necessarily, so with you, when he talks like this, you love to listen as he speaks quiet and thoughtful by your side, his words almost tucked precious and self-consciously to the hollow of your throat as you make mental note of the things he was most interested in. If it’s a shorter trip, maybe you can talk them into letting him have it. The world was changing, Tenzo should be allowed to see it.
