Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The reports had been stacked too high. Iruka knew that when he left the office. He took them anyway. Yamada was out, the afternoon was tight, and he wasn't about to make two trips when he could make one.

His grading from last night sat untouched in his bag.

Mostly because he had slept terribly.

Or, technically, he had slept very well for approximately twenty minutes just before dawn, which had somehow been worse.

In the dream, someone had been there with him.

Not speaking. Not even fully visible. Just a second presence in the apartment, moving quietly through the familiar spaces as though they belonged there too. The soft sound of water running in the kitchen. A shadow passing the doorway. The faint weight of another person settling somewhere nearby while rain tapped steadily against the windows.

Iruka remembered the feeling more than the details.

Warmth.

Calm.

The strange, unfamiliar relief of not being alone.

That had been the dangerous part.

Not embarrassment. Not desire. Just the simple unconscious certainty, for one brief sleeping moment, that someone else was there to share the silence with him.

Considering most of his dreams lately involved Naruto disappearing into forests or faceless men with kunai at children's throats, Iruka would have chosen this one over nightmares any day.

Which probably said something about his current mental state that he preferred not to examine too closely.

When Iruka woke up alone in the bedroom, the disappointment had hit so quickly and instinctively that he lay there staring at the ceiling in confusion for several seconds.

Then his brain supplied the white hound mask.

Iruka had immediately decided he was never sleeping again.

Naruto, unfortunately, had chosen that exact moment to begin shouting from the kitchen about burnt rice.

Naruto had been relentless this morning like all other mornings in the last week. When are we going to see Hound-san again? Do you think he's still hurt? Do you think he remembers us? Three separate times before breakfast was even on the table. Iruka had answered what he could and finally said, more sharply than he meant to, that he didn't know. Naruto had gone quiet for almost a full minute afterward, which was its own kind of accusation.

Then, because Naruto could not stay quiet about anything for long, he had pivoted. When are we going to see Hatake-san again? Can you ask him to come back? Did you hear how loud Kiba was when you won? And then, because the topic had clearly been simmering since two days ago, the full unsolicited reenactment — and then you went boom and he was on the ground, sensei, you LITERALLY DROPPED HIM, the strongest jounin in the village — complete with hand gestures that had nearly taken out the rice bowl.

Iruka had let him. It was easier than the Hound questions.

He hadn't corrected the part about being the strongest jounin in the village either, which was its own quiet failure of professional integrity.

Iruka turned the corner outside the Hokage's office.

Hound wouldn't be Kakashi.

The thought arrived sideways, half-formed, the way certain thoughts had started arriving lately, when he wasn't braced for them. Same side, his mind had been offering for days now, unhelpfully. The hand that went to Kakashi's ribs in the spar, the place his own hands had worked on by lamplight a week before. The silver hair too, though half the older jounin in this village had silver hair, he'd told himself that part at least three times. The list assembled itself anyway, and he dismantled it anyway, and the thought always landed in the same place.

And then, because the same-side thought had opened a door he had not meant to open, the memory of that night returned with uncomfortable clarity.

Lamplight against pale skin. The cloth darkening red in his hands as he cleaned the wound inch by careful inch. The weight of Hound half-sprawled unconscious against the couch, breathing slow and uneven while Iruka worked.

He remembered the heat of him.

The scars too.

Old ones crossing newer ones beneath Iruka's fingertips in places he had very deliberately not allowed himself to linger on at the time.

Except he had lingered.

Just slightly. Long enough to notice the shape of muscle beneath skin gone slack with exhaustion. Long enough that when he had peeled the gloves off to clean blood from Hound's knuckles, he had let his thumb rest against the inside of Hound's palm a beat longer than he had any reason to, tracing, almost without meaning to, the lines of a hand that should have been a stranger's and was beginning, somehow, not to feel like one.

He remembered the hands.

Long fingers. The calluses where they should be, the pads, the side of the index, the knife-line along the thumb, and a few places they shouldn't, mapped by years of work he could only guess at. The kind of hands that had done things Iruka could not imagine and held a teacup, presumably, the same way anyone did.

Iruka had told himself then that he was focused on the injury. The blood loss. The possibility of infection. Practical things.

Which would have sounded more convincing if he were not currently walking through the Hokage Tower remembering exactly how those hands had looked under the lamplight and wondering, with sudden dangerous clarity, what it would feel like to touch him again when he was awake.

Then he hit something solid.

Papers exploded out of his arms.

"Sorry, I wasn't paying attention—"

He was already crouching, gathering pages, when he registered the hands helping him.

Black gloves. Armor plate across the back.

He stilled.

Looked up.

The white hound mask. Silver hair just visible at the crown.

"Hound-san!"

It came out louder than he meant it to. A bureaucrat across the hall glanced over. Iruka felt heat climb the back of his neck.

He was already reaching for the nearest page when Hound moved.

The mask dipped, gloved hands working fast, too fast, the way a body that had spent years collecting things off floors at speed worked, sweeping up reports two and three at a time and squaring them neatly at the edges as he went. By the time Iruka had retrieved four pages, Hound already had the rest stacked in one hand.

"Ah." Iruka straightened quickly. "Thank you. You didn't have to—"

"It's fine."

Hound rose smoothly, reports tucked against his side. The mask angled briefly toward the door at the end of the corridor.

"For Sandaime-sama?"

"Yes."

A small nod.

And then he started walking before Iruka had to decide what to do with that.

Iruka caught up a second later.

They moved together down the corridor, Hound a half-step ahead, silent in a way that kept catching Iruka off guard. The first time Hound had passed his desk weeks ago, he'd heard the faint scrape of armor and weapons beneath the cloak. Now there was almost nothing. Hound moved like someone consciously deciding not to leave sound behind.

Iruka tried to focus on that and not on what his thoughts had been doing in the corridor two minutes ago. The silence of the body next to him was not helping. It was, in fact, doing the opposite, turning every small sound into something he was overly aware of. The brush of his own sleeve against the reports. His own breathing. The faint give of the wooden floor under his sandals, which he had walked across a hundred times and never once noticed before.

He cleared his throat. Internally.

He needed to say something normal.

"How is the wound?" Iruka asked, before he could lose the nerve.

The mask turned slightly toward him.

"Healed. Thanks to you."

"I didn't do much," Iruka said quickly. "You were already strong enough to—"

"The soup helped a lot."

Iruka stared at him.

Hound did not look back. He kept walking, posture unchanged. The remark sat there between them, dry enough to be a joke and steady enough not to be.

"Are you," Iruka searched for something less obvious, did not find it, settled for, "are you heading out again? On a mission?"

"That's classified, Iruka-sensei."

Said lightly. The sensei landed differently in this voice than it had in Kakashi's. Softer, almost considered. Iruka filed that away too, in the place he was beginning to suspect was getting full.

"Right. Of course. Sorry, I shouldn't have—"

"It's fine."

Another few steps. The door at the end of the corridor was closer now than Iruka wanted it to be.

"How have you been, Iruka-sensei?"

The question unsettled him more than the repeated sensei had. ANBU did not make small talk. Hound, apparently, did.

"Busy," Iruka said. Truthful. "The mission desk, the Academy, Naruto. But," he found himself meaning it before he could decide whether to say it, "I'm glad to be useful. It feels like I'm doing something."

"You're doing a lot."

Said plainly. Without inflection. Which was, somehow, worse, or better, than if it had been said warmly. Iruka looked down at the four pages in his own hand and did not trust himself to answer right away.

"It doesn't feel like much," he said finally. "Compared to—" He stopped himself. Tried again. "I wish I could be more like you sometimes. I'm just... I'm not made for the rest of it."

The words were out before he could examine them. He felt the shape of what he had just said and wished, briefly and uselessly, that he could pull it back.

Hound was quiet for several steps.

Then he turned toward Iruka. "That's not true."

Iruka glanced at him. "What do you mean it's not true? I was useless against Naruto's kidnappers."

It came out faster than he meant it to. Faster than he had let himself admit in two weeks of carefully not thinking about it. The forest. The explosive tag. The calculation he had almost made. He had been telling himself, in the quiet way one tells oneself things in order to keep functioning, that it didn't count because Naruto had been fine. Hound had been there. Everything had worked out.

Saying it out loud was different.

"They were professionals." Hound's voice was even, factual. "Anyone would have struggled."

A pause.

The mask was still turned toward him. Hound was waiting, patient, attentive, not moving, and Iruka could feel the conversation tipping somewhere he was not prepared for. The hallway felt suddenly very narrow. Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened and closed. He shifted the reports in his arms for something to do with his hands.

"I heard," Hound continued, as if deciding to give him an out, "that you won against Hatake Kakashi the other day."

Iruka exhaled. Quietly. Gratefully.

"Who told you that?" Iruka asked.

"ANBU knows everything."

"That's not—" Iruka started, and then realized he was struggling to get the words out. Not because it wasn't true. Because he was, in fact, still quietly furious with Kakashi about the whole afternoon and couldn't say so to an ANBU operative in a corridor.

"It wasn't really a win," he said. "He let me."

"I don't think that he's the type."

Iruka tilted his head. "You know Hatake-san?"

"ANBU knows everything."

Same words. Different voice. Lighter, almost teasing, the smallest curve under the flat delivery. Iruka heard it and could not pretend he hadn't.

He had the strange feeling he was being mildly enjoyed.

"He's hard to read," Iruka said instead.

"Is that right?"

The mask, as always, was unreadable. But the question landed too close to the same teasing register, and Iruka decided, firmly, that he was not going to look at any of this until later.

They had reached the door.

Hound held the reports out. Iruka reached for them, and their hands met along the edge of the stack. The side of his thumb against the leather of the glove, the armor plate cool through the second of contact before either of them could shift.

It was barely anything. Less than a handshake. Less than the casual brush of strangers passing in a market.

But something in Iruka stilled.

He did not look at the gloved hand. He did not look at the mask. He looked at the reports, neat in his arms now, and made his lungs do the ordinary thing of breathing.

"Thank you," he said. The word came out steadier than he felt. "For the reports. And the rest."

The mask inclined. Just slightly.

"Take care, Iruka-sensei."

Hound was already turning, the corridor lengthening between them, and Iruka felt the moment narrowing the way a door does just before it closes —

"Hound-san! Wait."

The figure paused. The white mask turned, patient, attentive, no question in the posture, only space for whatever Iruka was about to say.

He felt the glove press against his thigh through the fabric of his pocket. He couldn't reach it. Both arms wrapped around the reports. But he could feel it there, the plate rigid and unyielding, as present as if his hand were closed around it.

Give it back.

"What is it, Iruka-sensei?"

The voice was patient. Hound had not moved closer, had not turned fully, was simply waiting, the way someone waits for a friend to find their words. It was the gentleness of it, more than anything, that undid him.

"I—"

His hands were full. It would be awkward, he told himself, to ask an ANBU operative to reach into his pocket in a corridor.

Then his mind, helpfully, supplied the image of Hound actually doing it. Long fingers sliding into the fabric against Iruka's thigh. A wave of heat hit his face that he could absolutely not afford right now.

That was the reason, he told himself. He almost believed it.

"Naruto," he said instead.

His own voice sounded strange to him.

A pause. The mask tilted very slightly.

"Naruto said he wanted to see you again. If you have time. Sometime. He was very impressed with you."

The lie was so transparent he was almost embarrassed for himself.

But Hound, Hound, who could presumably read a chuunin's tells from across a battlefield, who had every reason to call the bluff, only stood quietly for a breath. And then, in the same even voice, "Tell him I'm impressed with him, too."

The kindness of it landed harder than Iruka was prepared for.

And then Hound was gone, the corridor empty in the space it took Iruka to remember how to exhale, the rest of his body still half-turned toward where the white mask had been.

He looked down at the reports in his arms.

He was going to think about this later.

Not now.

Later.

He turned toward the Hokage's door, raised his hand, and after one breath to settle himself, knocked.

"Come in, Iruka-kun."

He let himself in. The office was warm the way it always was. A brazier kept burning regardless of season, the smell of pipe smoke worked deep into the wood. Sandaime was at his desk, brush in hand, finishing a line on a document before he looked up.

"The week's reports, sir." Iruka stepped forward and set the stack on the corner of the desk, careful and neat. "Yamada-san has already signed off on the priority items. The rest are summaries and follow-ups."

"Thank you." Sandaime set the brush down. Did not yet open the stack.

Iruka inclined his head. Turned slightly toward the door.

And stopped.

The request sat heavily behind his ribs, suddenly feeling like the sort of thing that would become impossible if he waited even another five seconds.

"What's on your mind, Iruka-kun?" Sandaime asked gently.

Iruka took a breath.

"Have we learned anything about the men who attacked Naruto? The ones who—"

"Not yet," Sandaime said evenly. "But there are people working on it. You needn't worry. It is being handled."

People.

His mind, with the awful punctuality it had developed lately, supplied: Hound. He shut it down before it could finish. Half the ANBU division could be involved. He had no reason to assume otherwise.

Besides, that wasn't actually why he had stopped.

That question had simply been easier to ask.

The other one had been forming somewhere between his knock and Sandaime's come in, and now sat at the front of his throat with the uncomfortable weight of something trying to escape before he could think better of it.

"Hokage-sama."

Sandaime waited.

"Would it be possible for me to take on field assignments occasionally?" Iruka asked. "Low classification. Temporary support missions. I wouldn't want to interfere with the desk schedule or the Academy, but..."

He paused.

"I think it would be good for me to have the experience."

Sandaime looked up properly then.

Not surprised exactly. More attentive.

"I didn't know you were interested in field work, Iruka-kun."

"I wasn't," Iruka admitted before he could soften it. "But after the forest..."

The memory arrived immediately. Naruto struggling in those men's grip. The kunai at his throat. The cold, sick certainty that Iruka had not been fast enough, strong enough, experienced enough—

He forced himself back into the room.

"I realized something about myself that I'd rather not be true," he said quietly. "My lack of experience could have cost Naruto his life."

The words settled heavily between them.

"I hope it never happens again," Iruka continued. "But if it does, I'd rather be prepared."

Silence.

Sandaime regarded him over the brim of his hat with the patient attention of a man who had heard many versions of this request across many years and understood that they were rarely about the mission itself.

Then, quietly: "You carry a great deal already, Iruka-kun."

It was not a kindness. It was a noting. Iruka could not tell, for a moment, which would have been easier to receive.

"Naruto is safe within the village," Sandaime continued.

Iruka felt the but form immediately behind his teeth.

But what about outside the village?

But what about the next time?

But safe because of who?

The questions pressed hard against the inside of his mouth.

He swallowed them anyway.

"Yes, sir."

Sandaime watched him for another moment. Iruka had the uncomfortable sense of being read the way the Hokage read reports. Carefully, completely, including the things left unwritten in the margins.

Finally, the old man said, "I'll consider it."

Not a yes.

Not quite a no either.

Relief loosened unexpectedly in Iruka's chest anyway.

He bowed.

"Thank you, Hokage-sama."

He turned toward the door.

As his hand settled against the handle, a small unreasonable warmth spread quietly through his chest. I'll consider it should not have felt like victory.

But it did.

Three seconds.

Then he straightened his shoulders and headed for the Academy. He still had a full afternoon of six-year-olds throwing kunai ahead of him.

A month passed.

Hound did not return.

At first, Iruka noticed it constantly. Every white-haired shinobi in the village caught his attention for half a second too long. Every ANBU mask glimpsed across a rooftop made something in him straighten before reason caught up.

After two weeks, he stopped expecting to see Hound.

After three, he became annoyed with himself for continuing to notice the absence anyway.

The glove stayed in his pocket. He had grown so used to the weight of it that on the rare mornings he forgot, his hand kept reaching for it through the afternoon, finding nothing, and he would feel briefly off-balance until he could get home and confirm it was still on the shelf where he had left it.

He chose not to examine that either.

Fortunately, Hound was no longer the only thing on his mind.

Training helped.

Or at least exhaustion did.

Sandaime had not approved a mission yet, but Iruka was going to be ready when one came. He had started waking before sunrise most mornings to train behind the Academy grounds before classes began. On other nights, after finishing the mission desk paperwork and shoving grading aside with what he had begun to suspect was a problem, he met Mizuki at the outer training fields long after most shinobi had gone home.

Mizuki had agreed to help almost immediately.

"About time," he'd said the first morning Iruka asked, grinning as he leaned against the fence surrounding Training Ground Three. "I was starting to think you planned to spend the rest of your career terrorizing children with grammar lessons."

Iruka had thrown a practice kunai at him in protest. It went wide on purpose. Mostly on purpose.

Mizuki laughed hard enough that Iruka considered the next one going less wide.

Still, he was grateful.

Mizuki adjusted stances without making Iruka feel stupid for needing correction. He stayed late when Iruka wanted another round and complained just enough to make the exhaustion tolerable. Sometimes they sparred until Iruka's arms shook from overuse. Sometimes Mizuki simply drilled him through the same movements repeatedly until muscle memory started replacing hesitation.

Iruka lost most of those spars.

Less badly than he had at the beginning.

Which, according to Mizuki, counted as progress.

The bruises became familiar quickly. The exhaustion too. Iruka found he liked both more than he expected.

There was something strangely calming about physical fatigue. It quieted parts of his mind that had become too crowded lately. Worry. Restlessness. Thoughts that arrived at inconvenient moments wearing a white mask, with silver hair just visible above it.

The week before, he had landed a strike on Mizuki he could not have landed a month ago. Mizuki had stepped back, rolled his shoulder, and said, with what sounded almost like surprise:

"Huh."

Iruka had carried that huh around for two days like a small private medal.

Mizuki noticed the change eventually himself.

"You've been serious about this," he remarked one evening as they sat along the edge of the training ground catching their breath. "More serious than usual, anyway."

Sweat cooled against Iruka's neck in the night air. Somewhere beyond the trees, cicadas buzzed steadily through the dark.

"I just don't want what happened in the forest to happen again."

Mizuki was quiet for a moment at that.

Then: "How's the kid doing, by the way?"

"Naruto?"

"Yeah. I've heard he's a handful."

Iruka considered the question. It was the kind of thing one teacher asked another about a student all the time, and yet he found himself measuring his answer more carefully than the question warranted, which he decided to put down to tiredness.

"Top of the class in trouble, bottom of the class in everything else. He pulls pranks faster than he can spell. Last week he painted the Hokage Monument and was almost back in his seat by the time anyone realized."

Mizuki huffed a small laugh.

"The funny thing is, he'll fail a test in the morning and tell me at lunch he's going to be the greatest Hokage this village has ever seen." Iruka continued.

Mizuki was watching him now, faintly amused. "You care about him, Iruka."

"I care about all of my students." He protested.

"You don't talk about all of them like this."

Iruka opened his mouth. Closed it.

He had not realized he had been talking like that.

"He's a good kid," he said, more carefully. "He's just one who has to find his own way to most things. The standard curriculum isn't built for him."

"Anything else interesting about him?"

Iruka glanced at him.

The question was reasonable. Instructors compared notes on students. Mizuki was eyeing the year-group like any other teacher might. There was nothing in the asking that should have made Iruka pause.

"Nothing notable," he said. "Just a lot of raw chakra and no idea what to do with it yet."

"Mm." Mizuki leaned back onto his hands. "He's lucky, then. To have you. Someone patient with him."

"He's lucky to be himself," Iruka said, without quite meaning to. "He'd be alright with or without me. He's that kind of kid."

A breeze moved through the trees overhead. They sat with their breathing for a while.

"I could help with him, if you ever want," Mizuki said eventually. "Training, I mean. Extra sessions. A kid like that, probably needs more hours than the curriculum gives him."

The offer was genuine. That made the hesitation worse.

Iruka looked down at his hands instead.

Part of him wanted to say yes immediately. Naruto needed more support than Iruka alone always knew how to give. The Academy only covered so much. And lately, between the mission desk, the extra training, and whatever field assignments Sandaime might eventually approve, there were moments Iruka caught himself worrying he was already stretching too thin.

But another part of him resisted the idea instinctively.

Naruto already spent enough of his life feeling like a burden passed carefully from person to person.

Iruka couldn't bear the thought of making him feel that way here too.

"Maybe later," he said finally. "I think for now he just needs stability."

Mizuki hummed thoughtfully beside him and did not push.

Iruka appreciated that too.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once and fell silent again.

He thought about Naruto on the walk back. The boy had been quieter since the forest in small ways he probably did not realize himself — louder when Iruka left a room, more insistent about walking home together, more prone to checking where Iruka was in crowded spaces.

Iruka had not mentioned any of that to Mizuki.

He did not know why, exactly. Only that it felt like something Naruto had not yet decided to share with anyone else, and Iruka did not want to be the one who shared it for him.

He came home that night to find Naruto already asleep on the couch with a book open across his chest. The lamp was still on. The boy had clearly been waiting up.

Iruka stood for a moment looking at him, then carefully closed the book, set it aside, and got a blanket from the cupboard.

Naruto stirred without opening his eyes. "Sensei?"

"It's late. Go back to sleep."

"Did you win today?"

"...Not really."

"Mmm." Naruto turned his face into the cushion. "Next time."

Iruka pulled the blanket up around his shoulders and did not say anything for a moment.

"Next time," he agreed, quietly.

Iruka finally had a day off.

He had dropped Naruto at the Nara compound that morning with a small backpack of snacks and the strict instruction not to set anything on fire. Shikamaru's mother had taken one look at Naruto and said, with the resigned warmth of a woman who had already raised one troublesome boy and could clearly see another approaching, that they would be fine and Iruka should enjoy his afternoon.

Iruka had stood at the gate for a moment after they closed it behind him.

It was the first time in a long while that anyone had asked for Naruto.

Most parents in the village still found small ways to keep their children at a distance from him. Birthday parties Naruto somehow never heard about. Study groups that filled before his name could be added. Invitations lost conveniently between school and home. Iruka understood why. That was the part that never got easier.

Shikamaru had asked on his own, with no adult prompting.

That felt important somehow.

A small unreasonable kindness.

Iruka carried it quietly with him as he turned toward the village proper.

He had not planned to go to the memorial.

But he had a free afternoon. And he had not been in a while. And the day was overcast in a soft grey way that made the trees surrounding the cenotaph look quiet rather than mournful.

He found himself walking there without fully deciding to.

He saw the figure before he recognized who it was.

Dark uniform. Silver hair. One hand resting motionless at his side.

Standing in front of one of the older stones.

Iruka slowed.

Kakashi.

It had been over a month since the Academy spar.

Long enough that Iruka realized, with some surprise, he had not thought much about Kakashi lately either. Not the way he had thought about Hound. Kakashi had drifted toward the edges of his attention while training and Naruto and desk duty filled the center.

He had also, Iruka remembered now, never properly thanked him.

Whatever else the afternoon at the Academy had been, the lesson had worked. Hinata had stopped flinching before her releases. Sasuke had maintained the adjusted chakra point through the rest of the week. Naruto still talked about it constantly in the loud uncomplicated way children talked about people who had impressed them.

Iruka had been too irritated to admit any of that at the time.

He could correct it now.

He stepped off the main path toward his parents' memorial stones first, intending only a brief detour before circling back to Kakashi.

The walk took only a few minutes.

He stood before the engraved names and said the things he always said — small private thoughts worn smooth by repetition over the years. He thought about how Naruto would have liked them. He thought about how they would have liked Naruto.

He thought about the boy currently at the Nara compound, perhaps making a friend. Or perhaps simply being tolerated.

At this point, either would have felt like progress.

The rain began while he was still standing there.

Not heavy.

A few drops at first. Then a few more. Then something soft and steady drifting through the trees overhead.

Iruka pulled his collar slightly higher and turned to leave.

Kakashi was still standing exactly where he had been before.

He had not moved.

Rain had soaked clean through his uniform now. Silver hair plastered damply against his forehead. Water slid steadily down the side of his mask. He had not stepped beneath the nearby trees. Had not raised a hood. Had not done any of the ordinary unconscious things people did when weather changed around them.

He simply stood there.

As though the rain had failed to reach him at all.

Something in Iruka's chest tightened.

He had stood like that himself once.

In front of stones that had nothing to say back.

After funerals that had not fully felt real until weeks afterward.

He remembered with painful clarity what it felt like to stand before a name while the rest of the world blurred somewhere beyond it. The cold. The rain. The body itself becoming distant and unimportant.

He recognized it now in someone else and found, suddenly, that he could not look away.

He could leave.

That would probably be the reasonable thing to do.

Iruka knew, in the instinctive way grieving people knew these things, that company was not always welcome in moments like this. He could walk away now. Thank Kakashi another time. Pretend he had never seen any of it.

He started walking toward him anyway.

"Hatake-san, I—"

He stopped.

Kakashi had not turned.

A jounin should have heard him long before this. Registered the footsteps. The shift in breathing. The displacement of air.

Anything.

Iruka had spoken under the assumption of being noticed.

The man in front of him had not reacted at all.

Slowly, carefully, Iruka stepped into Kakashi's peripheral vision.

He saw the eye then.

Not focused on the stone.

Not focused on the rain.

Not focused on anything Iruka could identify.

It looked fixed somewhere far beyond the present moment with the dull, absent attention of a body no longer fully inhabiting the world around it.

Iruka carried his own grief.

This was something else.

Or perhaps simply grief lived in too long.

Long enough that it had stopped behaving like an emotion and become, instead, somewhere a person could get trapped.

Something painful twisted beneath Iruka's ribs.

He was suddenly, horribly certain that Kakashi did not know he was there.

"Hatake-san," he said again, softer this time.

Nothing.

Iruka reached out before he fully decided to and laid one hand carefully against Kakashi's shoulder.

Just enough pressure for another person to feel.

Kakashi flinched.

Violently.

His entire body recoiled beneath Iruka's hand, shoulder twisting away before thought could catch up to reflex. One hand snapped halfway upward between defense and attack—

Then stopped.

For one sharp second, Kakashi looked at him with the raw disorientation of someone dragged suddenly out of another world.

Then recognition arrived.

The tension collapsed out of him almost visibly.

"Sorry," Kakashi said hoarsely. "I didn't—"

The sentence died unfinished.

He looked at Iruka one moment longer before stepping back through the rain.

Not fleeing.

Not exactly.

But not the lazy unhurried walk Iruka associated with him either. Just a man placing distance between himself and something he had not meant to let another person witness.

Iruka stood there with his hand still half-raised where Kakashi's shoulder had been.

Rainwater slid cold across his fingers.

After a moment he lowered the hand and looked, finally, at the memorial stone Kakashi had been standing before.

Nohara Rin.

He read the name once.

Then again.

Friend killer.

Mizuki's voice from the staff room weeks ago. Casual. Thoughtless.

Cold-blooded Kakashi.

The words landed differently now that they had attached themselves to a real grave and a man who had stood motionless in the rain like someone lost inside his own memories.

Iruka did not know who Nohara Rin had been.

He did not know how exactly she had died.

He did not know how much of the rumor was truth and how much was simply the village's habit of reducing difficult people into convenient stories.

But he knew what he had just seen.

That had not been the face of a careless man.

That had been the face of someone carrying something unbearable for so long that he no longer remembered how to set it down.

Iruka pressed his palm briefly against the cold wet stone.

He did not say anything.

There was nothing he had the right to say.

He should not have gone to training afterward.

He knew that while walking there.

His clothes were still damp from the rain. His shoulders ached in a way that had nothing to do with drills. There was a heaviness behind his eyes he had been unsuccessfully ignoring since leaving the memorial.

He went anyway.

He needed something exhausting enough to stop thinking.

It did not work.

Mizuki took one look at him and frowned.

"You alright?"

"I'm fine."

"You look like you drowned halfway across the village."

Iruka peeled off his outer layer and rolled one shoulder carefully.

"Let's just do drills tonight."

Mizuki studied him for another second but did not push. Instead he moved toward the center of the training ground and reset the practice markers.

Iruka worked through the drills badly.

His body kept losing the thread of what it was supposed to be doing. Footwork half a beat late. Stances requiring conscious effort instead of instinct. Twice he forgot the second half of sequences Mizuki had drilled into him repeatedly over the past month.

Mizuki stopped the exercise halfway through the third repetition.

"Go home."

"I'm—"

"You're not." Mizuki folded his arms. "Go home, Iruka."

Iruka discovered he lacked the energy to argue.

So he nodded, gathered his things, and left.

The walk home took longer than usual.

He did not notice it had started raining again until he was halfway down his street.

By the time he reached his apartment, even taking off his sandals felt strangely complicated. He managed one. Stood there holding the second in his hand for several long seconds before realizing he could not remember what he had intended to do next.

So he sat down in the entryway to think about it.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on his side with his cheek against the wooden floor and the light coming through the window had shifted noticeably across the room.

He tried to push himself upright.

The room tilted unpleasantly.

He gave up and let his face settle back against the cool wood.

He should move to the futon eventually.

In a moment.

Just—

In a moment.

Before the darkness fully dragged him under, he thought of Kakashi standing motionless in the rain.

Then, inevitably, he thought of Hound.

He was very warm.

Someone was moving in his apartment.

Not loudly. The opposite. Quiet enough that Iruka was not sure, at first, that he had not imagined it. The faint sound of water from the kitchen. The soft displacement of air when someone passed nearby.

The dream.

He recognized it immediately. The same dream. Quiet presence, water running, the sense of not being alone. His body had wanted this dream so badly all month that it had apparently decided to provide it again when he was sick on the floor of his own entryway, which he supposed was about right for him.

A weight settled near him.

A hand at the back of his neck. Cool. Lifted his head slightly.

Water at his mouth.

He drank without opening his eyes.

The hand stayed there a moment longer than it needed to. Then it moved, the back of fingers brushing damp hair off his forehead, careful, the way one moved when one did not want to disturb someone who was finally sleeping.

This is new.

The other dreams had been atmospheric. This one was touching him. Iruka thought, distantly, that his subconscious was apparently escalating, and he was going to have to have a serious conversation with himself about this in the morning.

For now, though, he was very tired, and the hand was very gentle, and he did not have the strength to be embarrassed about a dream he was not even properly awake inside of.

Then he tried to open his eyes anyway.

He could not focus properly. The light was wrong. Everything blurred at the edges. But he could see, at the corner of his vision, the pale outline of something that was not a face. A mask. The catch of silver in lamplight—

The figure went very still.

Iruka tried to lift his head further. To see.

Something red passed across his vision. He did not register what. He only felt his eyes get heavy in a way that was not the fever — heavier, smoother, the way exhaustion came down on a body that had been held up artificially. His thoughts loosened. The room receded gently.

The dream is still here, he thought, with the muddled relief of a man who had been afraid he was about to wake.

The hand returned to his hair. Light. Steady.

A familiar voice, somewhere above him.

"I'm sorry, sensei. Rest."

Iruka thought he reached up. He thought his fingers closed around a wrist. He thought he said don't go.

He woke to the smell of broth.

For a long moment he did not move. He was on his futon now, though he did not remember moving there, and a blanket had been pulled over him. His head ached. His skin felt clammy in the way of a fever that had broken sometime in the night. He was thirsty.

The smell came from the kitchen.

He pushed himself up slowly. The room moved less than it had. He made it to his feet on the second try, steadied himself against the wall, and walked the small distance to the kitchen.

A bowl sat on the counter.

Ichiraku.

He stared at it.

The smell of broth was real. Steam rising in the morning light. Wrapping he could identify across the village. Still warm.

It took him a long moment to understand that this was not a dream.

He had been so certain, last night, that the dream had simply visited him again. The same one. The familiar one. Quiet presence in the apartment, the faint sound of water from the kitchen, a hand he did not have to be afraid of. He had felt no surprise when it began. He had felt only the soft gratitude of receiving the thing one had been wanting, finally, exactly when one needed it.

A bowl of ramen could not arrive in a dream.

He checked the apartment. The main room. The bedroom. He pushed the window open and leaned out into the cool damp air. The street below was quiet. A vendor unloading at the corner. No one else.

The door was locked from the inside.

He stood at the window for a long moment.

Then he went back to the counter.

A small folded scrap of paper sat under the bowl.

He stared at it for some time before he reached for it. The handwriting was visible through the back of the thin paper. He knew it before he unfolded it. He had read four words in that same hurried, uneven slant every night for over a month, kept in the planning journal beside his bed where he could find it without looking.

His hand was not quite steady when he opened the paper.

Eat. Then rest.

Iruka sat down immediately because his knees had abruptly stopped feeling reliable.

Hound had been here.

The realization arrived slowly and all at once.

It had not been the dream.

Or it had been the dream — partly, the parts Iruka could not separate now, the warmth and the safety and the certainty of someone being there. But underneath the dream, inside it, around it, someone had actually been in his apartment. The water from the kitchen. The weight near the futon. The hand at the back of his neck. 

The dream he had been having all month had finally arrived as the real thing.

How had he known Iruka was sick?

How had he known Iruka's favorite food?

The questions arrived one after another and Iruka found, to his own concern, that none of them felt nearly as important as they probably should have.

Then his eye caught something in the corner of the main room.

His clothes.

Folded neatly atop a towel beside the bedroom door. Still damp from the rain, but arranged with the same patient care as everything else in the apartment.

Iruka stared at them for a long moment before the implication assembled fully in his head.

He had not taken those off himself.

Slowly, he turned toward the window.

His reflection stared back faintly through the grey morning light. Hair loose around his shoulders instead of tied back. Soft fabric where his uniform should have been.

Pajamas.

He sat very still. His brain, with the calm efficiency of a traitor, began supplying additional details immediately afterward.

Heat climbed slowly, catastrophically, into his face. He pressed both hands flat against his cheeks as if that would somehow contain it.

"Hound," he informed the empty apartment weakly, "you cannot keep doing this to me."

The apartment, predictably, offered no solutions.

After another moment he stood and crossed to yesterday's clothes.

He rummaged through the pocket.

The glove was still there.

Iruka closed his hand around it.