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The dessert in front of him was intimidatingly beautiful in its plating and presentation. Everything about it was meticulous, and yet it looked simple. Raspberries and chocolate, a classic combination, but now done up to be fit for a king. It was endlessly more elegant than the chocolate cake garnished with fresh raspberries that Kakashi had eaten the last time he went for a cup of tea back in Tokyo. Yet he would happily replace both the dessert and his company for what he'd had enjoyed a week ago.
"It looks good, doesn’t it?" Kakashi's dinner partner, Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, asked. Her smile was one part diplomat and one part knowing mother. "Almost too good to eat."
"Are you telling me your highness doesn't always dine like this?" Kakashi asked, with a gesture to the grand hall and thousands of dinner guests around them. Ball gowns crowned with tiaras and tuxedos covered in medals and honours glittered in the light of hundreds of handcrafted candles surrounding them.
"I’ve been known to dabble in eating ice cream straight from the tub," Victoria replied, with a delicate shrug and a tinkling laugh. Her crown, or maybe it was a tiara because Kakashi was no expert on royal head ornaments, sparkled in the lights around them. "How about you, Hatake-san?"
"As all writers do, I sustain myself solely on my muse and caffeine."
"Coffee or tea?" she asked with a more obvious singing lilt to her English than before, and Kakashi thought back to the articles he'd read before going to Stockholm about the importance Swedes put in coffee. It was reassuring in a way that it turned out to be true for their royal family as well.
"Tea, I'm afraid," Kakashi answered. "I have tried out Swedish coffee once since coming here, and it was a bit too strong for my tastes."
The Crown Princess did not seem surprised. "Yes, it's a common complaint. A friend of mine once said we must enjoy our coffee so much to survive our dark winters. Or the cold."
Kakashi glanced at the windows that perfectly reflected the inside of the Blue Hall; the cloudless sky outside was pitch black and had been so since the dinner started. It had already been dusk after the award ceremony in the Concert Hall where Kakashi had received his Nobel. And the cold had been crisp in the air ever since he landed at the airport four days ago.
"It is certainly something to get used to," he said in an attempt to be diplomatic. He hadn’t even noticed the sun since coming to Sweden, besides a pale imitation of it right around noon. "But Stockholm is a beautiful city, so it was no great hardship to deal with the darkness to explore the islands."
Victoria leaned forward "Did you visit Gamla Stan?"
Kakashi blinked at the unfamiliar name but thought back to the signs he had seen as he’d wandered around. "Is that the Old Town?"
"Yes, exactly,” Victoria said with an embarrassed smile. “I forget to use its English name sometimes."
"I have," Kakashi said. "I went there on my first day in the city and then once more yesterday."
"Oh?" Victoria asked. "What led you back?"
Kakashi wasn't sure what made him tell her. Maybe it was the plentiful alcohol the waitresses kept discretely refilling or the fact that he had talked to this lovely lady for hours now and it felt like they knew each other a bit in that ethereal way you do after a long conversation with someone. Or, perhaps, it could be that he’d kept quiet for almost a year now and the pressure was mounting. Here he could talk to a friendly stranger who would be obliged to stay polite. He wondered if it was a breach of etiquette to use the Crown Princess as a way to vent his frustrations but resolved to keep it light. He was not yet so far gone he’d rant like a drunken fool about his lovelorn heart.
“There was a necklace in one of the stores. One of the silversmiths,” he replied, thinking back to the blue crystal that had seemed familiar. “I considered buying it.”
Victoria looked at him for a while before she smiled. “As a gift for someone?”
Kakashi couldn’t help but smile at her willingness to discuss something a bit more personal than their previous conversation about tea or coffee. “What makes you think that?”
“A silver necklace won’t cost that much, and you just won the Nobel,” Victoria said with a shrug. “You can afford a silver necklace if you like it, and much more besides. So then it must be for someone else.”
“That’s right,” he said, nodding as he slid the spoon into the artfully crafted giant raspberry and tasted the creation — tart, sweet and perfectly balanced. Of course.
“Do you think they wouldn’t like it?” Victoria asked, and started sampling the chocolate crumbs on her plate.
Kakashi smiled wryly and shook his head. “It’s more that I don’t know if I should be the one to give it to them. We just frequent the same coffee shop, and we’ve ended up talking. I saw a necklace I thought he would like. But we don’t know each other that well.”
A necklace with a crystal so blue it almost matched Naruto’s eyes when he smiled at Kakashi. That soft smile that made Kakashi’s breath hitch as it made him remember impossible things.
“Ah, I see,” Victoria murmured, then she looked across the table to where her husband Prince Daniel sat. The man noticed and glanced over with a besotted smile. “You know, it is a curious thing, reading books.”
Kakashi hummed at the non sequitur and raised a brow in question.
His dinner companion smiled and looked back at Kakashi again. “As a reader, we get transformed to the world that you craft as a writer. Wasn’t it Sagan that said that you’re transformed to the inside of someone else’s mind. That an author is speaking clearly and silently in your head, directly to you, when you read?
”
“I think so, yes,” he said and took a small sip of the coffee that a silent waitress had poured for the dessert. He winced at the bitterness. Victoria handed him a small saucer of cream with a knowing wink. After adding enough of it to turn his drink a milky brown, it wasn't half bad and an excellent match to the chocolate in the dessert.
“I have
read all of your works, and my family read them as well when we learnt of your nomination,” Victoria said and glanced over to where the King and Queen sat. “We were all especially fond of the young adult novels you wrote. The
Hidden in Leaves
series.”
“That is very kind of you, your highness,” Kakashi said and smiled at the mention. He had always felt more closely connected to the universe he’d created surrounding a young sensei tasked with guiding the next generation of shinobi. “Those books seemingly came to me in a dream, and the characters would speak to me. It was easy to write it all down since it sometimes felt like the words wrote themselves.”
They had been like long-forgotten dreams that he could write down as if they’d been real. Demons, death, magic and grief, but also those blue, blue eyes narrowed in determination and a loud, brash voice calling him sensei. He’d been a businessman before he had been an author. He had never fought using swords and shadow, not even rifles. But still, sometimes he’d look into the mirror and be confused at how his skin was unmarred by any scars. And, whenever Naruto smiled at him across the rickety table in the coffee shop, he would wonder why a high school student made him want to kneel and swear fealty.
Victoria looked at him with a wistful smile. “While I read it, I couldn’t help but feel sad for the sensei.”
“Why is that?”
“Maybe it is my imagination, but I read it as if he was in love with his student and never confessed,” she replied, and her smile turned a bit sad. “It might be the culture difference, but that staggering devotion they showed each other made me think that was the case.”
Kakashi blinked at that. He’d never considered it when writing the series. The sensei had ended up alone, a satellite around his student's life. Always there in the background to offer support, but never entirely by his side. If the sensei got a blissfully happy ending, would it be with the loud and so beautifully alive student that had pulled him away from his ghosts and into the present?
“I’m sorry if I insulted you, Hatake-san,” the Crown Princess said, her brown eyes growing wide in dismay as Kakashi stayed silent. “I meant no disrespect. I was just moved by how deeply they cared for each other. It was probably just my romantic side that thought there was more than only platonic love between them.”
He winced at the realisation that she'd thought him upset about the homoerotic reading of his work. He'd rarely covered romance whatsoever in his books, so of course, she would not know his stance on the matter. “I’m not offended, your highness. Who am I to demand that you read my book just as I wrote it? I was only surprised because I hadn't considered that possibility before. Thank you for making me think about my characters in another way. I could see that the sensei was in love with his student, yes."
"A very charismatic and bright personality," Victoria said and looked over to her husband again. "With impressive strength and a heart of gold. It'd be easy to fall for someone like that."
Kakashi did his best not to think about blue eyes across the table or long conversations about writing once a week. He also did not dwell deeply on how they had slowly started to feel less like randomly frequenting the same coffee shop and more like dates.
"I'd imagine so, yes," he replied.
The Crown Princess took a sip of her coffee, pitch-black next to his creamy mix, and grinned at him over the porcelain rim. "The sensei isn't too shabby either. Strong, intelligent and dependable. He was always there for his student, even long after they were equals and his former student surpassed him. I also imagined him to be rather handsome.”
Kakashi blushed at the knowing glance to his face and the indirect compliment. He had based the sensei in his books on fragments from his dreams, and it seemed his dinner companion had figured that out.
Her brown eyes sparkled in the overhead lights as she put down her cup and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “If the sensei had confessed, I’d like to imagine that it would have worked out just fine.”
“Is that so, your highness?”
She nodded and held out her left hand, adorned by a diamond ring large enough to look impractical. “I learned some years ago that sometimes you have to be brave to be in love, Hatake-san. A royal marrying a commoner wasn’t done, you know. I understand it is not the same as what other people have to struggle with to be with the one they love. In comparison, I had it easy. But it granted me some appreciation for the bravery it takes.”
“Be brave to be in love?” Kakashi asked, looking at the princess next to him and then her husband, who had once been a gym instructor. A fairytale that came true in the form of a humble commoner marrying the princess of his dreams.
“It’s nerve-wracking to confess, but it can be so worth it,” Victoria said and had more of the delicious raspberry mousse. “In the same way, I think buying that necklace you saw would be worth it, Hatake-san. Maybe the sensei didn’t get his student, but who’s to say the story can’t continue?”
It seemed so easy when she put it like that. Just go to the store, buy the necklace and, once back in Tokyo, give it to Naruto and tell him that his smile was familiar, but still left butterflies in Kakashi’s stomach. That Naruto’s face was more known to him than his own, but that he’d never tire of it. How would the boy react? They’d met while Naruto was still in high school, and the teenager had graduated earlier that year. And Kakashi? He was more than a decade older. A confession of any deeper emotions than respect for Naruto’s budding novel the young man had been working on couldn’t be wanted. Could they?
“I don’t…” he went quiet, coughed into his hand and didn’t know what to say in the face of that gentle smile.
“Forgive me, it’s not my place,” Victoria said. “I enjoyed your works so much that it felt a bit that I got to know you while reading. And after all these hours of talking, I guess I couldn’t help myself.”
“No, no, I invited the conversation, your highness,” Kakashi hurried to say. “I just don’t know what to say.”
Victoria relaxed and grinned at him, wrinkling the skin around her eyes. “I don’t think you need to say anything.”
“I just need to buy that necklace, huh?”
The waitress came forward to serve a smooth liquor, and Kakashi raised the glass in a toast to his companion. She laughed and raised hers in turn.