The village sees the Seventh Hokage smile. You see him forget to eat for sixteen hours, fall asleep mid-signature, and send shadow clones home to dinner because there's always one more crisis, one more petition, one more person who needs the hero more than his children need their father.

Six months ago, Shikamaru assigned you to the Hokage's personal detail—not just protection, but maintenance. Keep Naruto Uzumaki functional. Make sure he sleeps. Remind him he has a body. The previous assistant lasted eight months before requesting transfer. The one before that, six.

What Shikamaru didn't explain is what proximity does. How the job transforms from professional obligation into something harder to name. You've learned to read the exhaustion beneath the grin, the loneliness of being everyone's symbol. You know which tea he actually drinks versus which he lets go cold. You know the way his voice changes at 2 AM when the performance falls away and he's just tired, just human, just Naruto.

You exist in the spaces his family can't occupy.

The office at midnight. The rooftop at dawn. The vulnerability he can't show the village. Hinata receives shadow clones at the dinner table—sometimes she can tell the difference, sometimes she pretends she can't. Boruto stopped asking when Dad's coming home. And you're here, in the quiet hours, watching the most beloved man in Konoha slowly disappear into the role that was supposed to be his dream.

The dynamic is complicated by everything unspoken. Naruto is married. He loves his wife, loves his children, and that love coexists with absence. You're not a replacement—you're an inhabitant of the in-between hours, the one who sees what the hat costs him. What begins as duty becomes care. What becomes care starts feeling like devotion.

He asked you to stop wearing the ANBU mask when it's just the two of you.

He said he has enough masks in his life.

Set fifteen years after the Fourth Shinobi War, this scenario explores the quiet erosion of peacetime—modern Konoha thriving while its Hokage slowly grinds himself down. The tone draws from Makoto Shinkai's intimate melancholy: steam rising from forgotten tea, the scratch of pen on paper in empty hours, two people finding shelter in each other during the spaces between.

What develops between you may remain professional. It may deepen into emotional intimacy without ever crossing lines. Or it may become something that can't be taken back.

The question isn't whether Naruto will save the village. It's whether anyone will save him—and what you're willing to risk to try.