Fic: Someone To Come Back For (The 'Under the Moonless Sky' Remix)
Title: Someone To Come Back For (The 'Under the Moonless Sky' Remix)
Remixed from: Under The Moonless Sky by aviss
Rating: PG-13
Contains [warnings]: None
Word Count: 2,300
Summary: "He was so determined not to die. Not to let any of us die," Naruto had said. "It made me wonder if he has someone to come back for."
A/N: Originally posted for the summer round of the KakaIru remix. It totally slipped my mind to repost this fic on my journa, which is a shame because Under The Moonless Sky has always been a favorite of mine to read. I hope I've done it justice. Thanks to tucuxi for the betaing!
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Someone To Come Back For (The 'Under the Moonless Sky' Remix)
It was as if the clouds themselves had opened up to spill out endless buckets of ice water upon the fleeing shinobi. Kakashi's normally gravity defying hair was plastered to his head. Chill rivulets of water crept under his vest and down his back - he didn't think there was a part of him that wasn't wet. His sandals were caked in thick, sucking mud from Swamp Country and he was still bleeding in at least four places.
It was another mission gone sour due in great part to a client's lies. In many ways, it had reminded him of Team Seven's first mission to Wave. This time, however the results had not been a triumphant battle across a bridge, but treachery by a cowardly client who had been willing to sell out the very ninja he'd hired to save his own skinny neck.
Kakashi had at least made sure to snap it himself before they escaped: running for their lives with a pack of Mist nin biting at their heels.
Naruto was the only one with any significant amount of chakra left, but even he was starting to falter - splashing through puddles rather than walking on them. Their third team member, a young Chuunin healer named Taromaru, had been hit by a dart in his right heel as they fled. It must have been spiked with poison, because the pin-prick wound had swiftly become swollen and painful. Then rotten.
He and Naruto had been taking turns carrying the crippled chuunin across their shoulders. Naruto had him at present and Kakashi risked a glance back to assess their status: Taromaru would surely lose the leg, if not his life. He was only semi-conscious, his eyes open to slits. They were brown... the same shade as Iruka's.
Iruka...
"Kaka-sensei." Naruto's voice had gone rough with exhaustion. "Can we take a rest? Huh? There's no way they've followed us this far..."
Kakashi longed to stop, for some sort of respite at all. But Naruto was wrong: they were still being hunted. Kakashi could still sense chakra signatures at the very edge of his perception. Pointing this out, though, was futile. The head-strong genin would be all for turning and fighting against what would surely be a suicidal last stand.
"Not yet," Kakashi said, and dropped back to take Taromaru from the boy. The chuunin-healer's weight settled like a large sack of grain on his shoulders.
"You have a bit of ramen on your lip, Iruka-sensei," Kakashi commented, mildly.
Iruka paused in his slurping from the wide-brimmed bowl to rub at the wrong side of his face. "Did I get it?"
Without thinking, Kakashi reached over and flicked a noodle off the side of his mouth. The pad of his finger brushed Iruka's lip, wiping away the moisture. "There," Kakashi said, canting up his eye in a smile.
"Oh!" A deep flush darkened Iruka's cheeks and he turned his head away to run a napkin over his face. "Thank you Kakashi-san," Iruka said, then paused before he smiled almost shyly at him. "I don't know how you keep your mask so clean as you eat."
"Secrets of a jounin, Iruka-sensei." That, and a concealing genjutsu.
Iruka snorted. "You know, this is our fourth time eating together... here," he waved a hand vaguely at the stand around him. "If you would rather eat somewhere private - if it's more comfortable - So you didn't have to eat with your mask on. My apartment is..." he trailed off, blushing again. It was one of the most endearing things Kakashi had ever seen.
"I would like that, sensei," he said.
A portion of the enemy's forces surged forward to take a final strike at them before the storm tapered off, just as Kakashi suspected they would. He sent Naruto ahead against his (loud, screechy) objections and faced the three attacking shinobi alone.
His meager chakra stores meant he'd get little use of the Sharingan eye, but his enemy didn't know that, and a simple henge gave the proper illusion. Sometimes a battle could be won with the will of the mind - anyone would be right to fear the dreaded copy-eye.
A quick set of seals later and a single shadow clone poofed into existence by his side. Kakashi had meant it to look like Taromaru, to give impression that his three-man team was not as weak as it was.
He nearly staggered and fell to his knees in the sopping mud when the air around the clone cleared and Iruka stood in its place.
"You wanted me," his clone said, in Iruka's voice. The devilish smile on his lips was the chuunin at his worst. "Here I am."
Before Kakashi could banish the thing, three Mist shinobi flickered into view less than thirty feet ahead of them.
If it was his fate to die here and now, Kakashi thought as he wearily nodded to the clone and turned to face his attackers, there was at least some comfort in pretending Iruka would be with him.
But the hand of luck was on his side, or, more likely, the Mist Shinobi were expecting powerful ninjutsu from the great Copy-Nin. Either way, they seemed taken aback and a little unprepared when Kakashi and Iruka came at them with a set of low level jutsu - it was amazing what a well timed substitution could accomplish. Iruka, of course, was a master of academy-level moves and Kakashi's version of him was as well.
It was almost embarrassing how the first shinobi died: knocked for a loop by Kakashi's One Thousand Years of Death move, and his neck sliced by Iruka while he staggered to his feet. Kakashi easily broke the neck of the second man with taijutsu hook he'd copied from Gai (although he would never tell him).
The third man foolishly focused the blunt of his attacks on Iruka, thinking him real and the weaker of the two. Kakashi started to call out a warning, but it died in his throat as a flurry of shuriken cut the sensei down. He went out in a puff of smoke, and for a single instant Kakashi both mourned and hated.
Then there was a flicker of power behind Kakashi - a familiar scream of challenge as Naruto ran into the fray: free of Taromaru and an over-powered Rasengan in hand.
The last shinobi didn't have a chance.
"You're welcome for the awesome save!" Naruto chirped, before Kakashi could say anything. "I put Taromaru up in a tree branch before I came back. Say, Kakashi-sensei..." He looked around in slight confusion. "Were you the only one fighting here?"
"Of course," Kakashi said, mildly.
"Oh." Naruto gave a laugh and scratched the back of his head. "I thought for a second I saw-well, it doesn't matter."
Feigning disinterest, Kakashi turned away. "Let's move."
Overhead, the rain was fading away to mist, the moon above the clouds a waning crescent. Konoha was still a day and a night's travel away.
Iruka gasped and threw his head back, exposing the bare length of his neck, hands scrabbling at Kakashi's biceps as his rode his climax out. Kakashi nearly forgot his own pleasure in that moment as he watched him - his face open, every thought and feeling readable as a page of Icha-Icha.
"Kakashi." The name had fallen from Iruka's lips like a half-formed plea and Kakashi only had the presence of mind to think: How can you afford to feel so much for me? before his own orgasm took him.
The poison must have reached Taromaru's lungs. Kakashi could hear the man starting to wheeze as he breathed. The rain had finally ceased, but a merciless wind had replaced it, shredding the clouds across the sky.
Bowing his head, Kakashi focused the last of his dwindling chakra to his feet and increased his pace. Naruto let out a long, panting sigh, but kept up.
The border to Fire Country was only ten more miles ahead. Shutting his eye, Kakashi imagined a smiling, scarred face waiting for him on the other side.
"You coward!" Iruka hissed, his hands balled into fists at his side.
Kakashi flinched. It was only a fraction of a movement - the smallest of movements - but it was there all the same. When he spoke, however, his voice was a measured drawl. "You're taking this too personally."
"I'm taking-?!" Iruka visibly swallowed the rest of what he was about to say and turned away so that Kakashi could not see his face. The silence between them was as frozen as hoarfrost.
"Of course you must do what you think is best for Konoha, Kakashi-san," Iruka said at last, proper, and polite, and frigidly remote.
Kakashi stepped forward, so many words in his throat that they all seemed to stick there, jamming everything up. This wasn't a reflection on Iruka's personal abilities. Kakashi's enemies were powerful and many. If they were to find out that Kakashi was close to anyone...
Iruka was loud and open in so many ways. He could be no less in love. Kakashi couldn't afford that. It was only for the best that they cut it off before Iruka got hurt due to Kakashi's reputation.
Really, it was the most logical thing.
But before he could utter a word of this, Iruka turned back to him and bowed formally. "May I leave, Jounin-san?"
"Iruka-"
"May I leave?"
"Of course," Kakashi snapped. He had never asked permission to leave, as if he were an superior officer instead of a- an ex.
The chuunin brushed past him and didn't look back.
The remaining Mist-nin dropped back after the battle, and seemed content to keep them running with their tails between their legs. Had their client not been a treacherous bastard, and had Taromaru not been literally dying in their arms, Kakashi might have had himself and Naruto circle back and lay a trap of their own.
As dawn broke on a pink, clear sky, Kakashi's ragged team crossed the boarder into Fire Country.
Kakashi's legs were leaden and he was so very weary, but Taromaru's breathing was shallow, his heartbeat thready. They couldn't stop now.
Iruka will be there, waiting for me in the village, Kakashi told himself. He almost believed it. He will be at the ramen stand, and we will eat and laugh... He will be there.
They arrived in Konoha at dusk.
Tsunade took one look at the bedraggled team as they staggered in, and immediately snapped at Shizune to start surgery on Taromaru, and Sakura to check up on Naruto. She oversaw Kakashi's care herself - healing his wounds as he made his report.
"You did well, considering the circumstances," she said, making Kakashi wonder how bad he must look to earn his Hokage's uncharacteristic sympathy.
She surprised him further by laying a cool hand on his forehead. Kakashi felt a rush of power as his depleted chakra stores were given a boost.
"There," she said. "Now at least I can be sure you won't kill yourself after you sneak out of here."
"Then do I have permission to leave?"
Her eyes narrowed. "I don't see what the point would be in stopping you, Hatake, but you'd better make it quick." She flicked her fingers to the window. "Get it over with, and then rest. I'll be patching up Taromaru all night..." The last part was said in a half heard complaint. Kakashi was already out the window.
It was so late in the night that the thin sliver of the moon had sunk below the horizon. Kakashi stole through the streets like a pale wraith, heading in the general direction of the academy.
Only when he came within sight of a block of apartments not far from the school did Kakashi purposefully flex his chakra: in a village of jumpy shinobi, it was wise to declare intent.
Tsunade's chakra infusion had restored some of his vigor, and Kakashi easily made a leap to a high tree branch that curved towards one of the windows.
No light flickered on within, but the window opened anyway and Kakashi let himself drink in the sight of a sleep-mussed, extremely irritated Iruka.
"What are you doing?" Iruka hissed. Then he paused, eyes roaming up and down Kakashi's mud and blood splattered uniform. "Don't tell me you left the hospital early again! Kakashi! This has to stop."
"I wanted to see you," Kakashi said.
"Idiot!" Iruka snapped. "You're going to get yourself killed one day!" Iruka went on berating him, but the words seemed to roll over Kakashi - they didn't matter. Not really. The only thing that was important was that he was there at all.
He waited for Iruka to pause for breath before Kakashi tugged down his mask and leaned closer.
"I was a fool," he said, simply. It was the truth. "Please, take me back."
"You've told me that before," Iruka scoffed, but then snatched his hand out, grabbing Kakashi by the vest and hauling him forward.
Iruka's mouth was hot against his, and Kakashi could still taste the remnants of toothpaste on his lips. Iruka's mouth parted and they kissed for long, endless moments - just like it had been, before.
Iruka pulled back, and his eyes shone with sadness as he said, "Kakashi... I can't-I can't do this with you again. I'm sorry."
He retreated back and closed the window.
Kakashi stared after him before he tugged up his mask and slowly, carefully climbed down the tree. The influx of chakra was only a temporary measure and he felt his shoulders dropping with both exhaustion and long-felt disappointment as he walked away.
He disregarded the two muted, familiar chakra signatures coming from the shadows beyond, and remained unaware of the bet made between the two of them.
Remixed from: Under The Moonless Sky by aviss
Rating: PG-13
Contains [warnings]: None
Word Count: 2,300
Summary: "He was so determined not to die. Not to let any of us die," Naruto had said. "It made me wonder if he has someone to come back for."
A/N: Originally posted for the summer round of the KakaIru remix. It totally slipped my mind to repost this fic on my journa, which is a shame because Under The Moonless Sky has always been a favorite of mine to read. I hope I've done it justice. Thanks to tucuxi for the betaing!
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Someone To Come Back For (The 'Under the Moonless Sky' Remix)
It was as if the clouds themselves had opened up to spill out endless buckets of ice water upon the fleeing shinobi. Kakashi's normally gravity defying hair was plastered to his head. Chill rivulets of water crept under his vest and down his back - he didn't think there was a part of him that wasn't wet. His sandals were caked in thick, sucking mud from Swamp Country and he was still bleeding in at least four places.
It was another mission gone sour due in great part to a client's lies. In many ways, it had reminded him of Team Seven's first mission to Wave. This time, however the results had not been a triumphant battle across a bridge, but treachery by a cowardly client who had been willing to sell out the very ninja he'd hired to save his own skinny neck.
Kakashi had at least made sure to snap it himself before they escaped: running for their lives with a pack of Mist nin biting at their heels.
Naruto was the only one with any significant amount of chakra left, but even he was starting to falter - splashing through puddles rather than walking on them. Their third team member, a young Chuunin healer named Taromaru, had been hit by a dart in his right heel as they fled. It must have been spiked with poison, because the pin-prick wound had swiftly become swollen and painful. Then rotten.
He and Naruto had been taking turns carrying the crippled chuunin across their shoulders. Naruto had him at present and Kakashi risked a glance back to assess their status: Taromaru would surely lose the leg, if not his life. He was only semi-conscious, his eyes open to slits. They were brown... the same shade as Iruka's.
Iruka...
"Kaka-sensei." Naruto's voice had gone rough with exhaustion. "Can we take a rest? Huh? There's no way they've followed us this far..."
Kakashi longed to stop, for some sort of respite at all. But Naruto was wrong: they were still being hunted. Kakashi could still sense chakra signatures at the very edge of his perception. Pointing this out, though, was futile. The head-strong genin would be all for turning and fighting against what would surely be a suicidal last stand.
"Not yet," Kakashi said, and dropped back to take Taromaru from the boy. The chuunin-healer's weight settled like a large sack of grain on his shoulders.
"You have a bit of ramen on your lip, Iruka-sensei," Kakashi commented, mildly.
Iruka paused in his slurping from the wide-brimmed bowl to rub at the wrong side of his face. "Did I get it?"
Without thinking, Kakashi reached over and flicked a noodle off the side of his mouth. The pad of his finger brushed Iruka's lip, wiping away the moisture. "There," Kakashi said, canting up his eye in a smile.
"Oh!" A deep flush darkened Iruka's cheeks and he turned his head away to run a napkin over his face. "Thank you Kakashi-san," Iruka said, then paused before he smiled almost shyly at him. "I don't know how you keep your mask so clean as you eat."
"Secrets of a jounin, Iruka-sensei." That, and a concealing genjutsu.
Iruka snorted. "You know, this is our fourth time eating together... here," he waved a hand vaguely at the stand around him. "If you would rather eat somewhere private - if it's more comfortable - So you didn't have to eat with your mask on. My apartment is..." he trailed off, blushing again. It was one of the most endearing things Kakashi had ever seen.
"I would like that, sensei," he said.
A portion of the enemy's forces surged forward to take a final strike at them before the storm tapered off, just as Kakashi suspected they would. He sent Naruto ahead against his (loud, screechy) objections and faced the three attacking shinobi alone.
His meager chakra stores meant he'd get little use of the Sharingan eye, but his enemy didn't know that, and a simple henge gave the proper illusion. Sometimes a battle could be won with the will of the mind - anyone would be right to fear the dreaded copy-eye.
A quick set of seals later and a single shadow clone poofed into existence by his side. Kakashi had meant it to look like Taromaru, to give impression that his three-man team was not as weak as it was.
He nearly staggered and fell to his knees in the sopping mud when the air around the clone cleared and Iruka stood in its place.
"You wanted me," his clone said, in Iruka's voice. The devilish smile on his lips was the chuunin at his worst. "Here I am."
Before Kakashi could banish the thing, three Mist shinobi flickered into view less than thirty feet ahead of them.
If it was his fate to die here and now, Kakashi thought as he wearily nodded to the clone and turned to face his attackers, there was at least some comfort in pretending Iruka would be with him.
But the hand of luck was on his side, or, more likely, the Mist Shinobi were expecting powerful ninjutsu from the great Copy-Nin. Either way, they seemed taken aback and a little unprepared when Kakashi and Iruka came at them with a set of low level jutsu - it was amazing what a well timed substitution could accomplish. Iruka, of course, was a master of academy-level moves and Kakashi's version of him was as well.
It was almost embarrassing how the first shinobi died: knocked for a loop by Kakashi's One Thousand Years of Death move, and his neck sliced by Iruka while he staggered to his feet. Kakashi easily broke the neck of the second man with taijutsu hook he'd copied from Gai (although he would never tell him).
The third man foolishly focused the blunt of his attacks on Iruka, thinking him real and the weaker of the two. Kakashi started to call out a warning, but it died in his throat as a flurry of shuriken cut the sensei down. He went out in a puff of smoke, and for a single instant Kakashi both mourned and hated.
Then there was a flicker of power behind Kakashi - a familiar scream of challenge as Naruto ran into the fray: free of Taromaru and an over-powered Rasengan in hand.
The last shinobi didn't have a chance.
"You're welcome for the awesome save!" Naruto chirped, before Kakashi could say anything. "I put Taromaru up in a tree branch before I came back. Say, Kakashi-sensei..." He looked around in slight confusion. "Were you the only one fighting here?"
"Of course," Kakashi said, mildly.
"Oh." Naruto gave a laugh and scratched the back of his head. "I thought for a second I saw-well, it doesn't matter."
Feigning disinterest, Kakashi turned away. "Let's move."
Overhead, the rain was fading away to mist, the moon above the clouds a waning crescent. Konoha was still a day and a night's travel away.
Iruka gasped and threw his head back, exposing the bare length of his neck, hands scrabbling at Kakashi's biceps as his rode his climax out. Kakashi nearly forgot his own pleasure in that moment as he watched him - his face open, every thought and feeling readable as a page of Icha-Icha.
"Kakashi." The name had fallen from Iruka's lips like a half-formed plea and Kakashi only had the presence of mind to think: How can you afford to feel so much for me? before his own orgasm took him.
The poison must have reached Taromaru's lungs. Kakashi could hear the man starting to wheeze as he breathed. The rain had finally ceased, but a merciless wind had replaced it, shredding the clouds across the sky.
Bowing his head, Kakashi focused the last of his dwindling chakra to his feet and increased his pace. Naruto let out a long, panting sigh, but kept up.
The border to Fire Country was only ten more miles ahead. Shutting his eye, Kakashi imagined a smiling, scarred face waiting for him on the other side.
"You coward!" Iruka hissed, his hands balled into fists at his side.
Kakashi flinched. It was only a fraction of a movement - the smallest of movements - but it was there all the same. When he spoke, however, his voice was a measured drawl. "You're taking this too personally."
"I'm taking-?!" Iruka visibly swallowed the rest of what he was about to say and turned away so that Kakashi could not see his face. The silence between them was as frozen as hoarfrost.
"Of course you must do what you think is best for Konoha, Kakashi-san," Iruka said at last, proper, and polite, and frigidly remote.
Kakashi stepped forward, so many words in his throat that they all seemed to stick there, jamming everything up. This wasn't a reflection on Iruka's personal abilities. Kakashi's enemies were powerful and many. If they were to find out that Kakashi was close to anyone...
Iruka was loud and open in so many ways. He could be no less in love. Kakashi couldn't afford that. It was only for the best that they cut it off before Iruka got hurt due to Kakashi's reputation.
Really, it was the most logical thing.
But before he could utter a word of this, Iruka turned back to him and bowed formally. "May I leave, Jounin-san?"
"Iruka-"
"May I leave?"
"Of course," Kakashi snapped. He had never asked permission to leave, as if he were an superior officer instead of a- an ex.
The chuunin brushed past him and didn't look back.
The remaining Mist-nin dropped back after the battle, and seemed content to keep them running with their tails between their legs. Had their client not been a treacherous bastard, and had Taromaru not been literally dying in their arms, Kakashi might have had himself and Naruto circle back and lay a trap of their own.
As dawn broke on a pink, clear sky, Kakashi's ragged team crossed the boarder into Fire Country.
Kakashi's legs were leaden and he was so very weary, but Taromaru's breathing was shallow, his heartbeat thready. They couldn't stop now.
Iruka will be there, waiting for me in the village, Kakashi told himself. He almost believed it. He will be at the ramen stand, and we will eat and laugh... He will be there.
They arrived in Konoha at dusk.
Tsunade took one look at the bedraggled team as they staggered in, and immediately snapped at Shizune to start surgery on Taromaru, and Sakura to check up on Naruto. She oversaw Kakashi's care herself - healing his wounds as he made his report.
"You did well, considering the circumstances," she said, making Kakashi wonder how bad he must look to earn his Hokage's uncharacteristic sympathy.
She surprised him further by laying a cool hand on his forehead. Kakashi felt a rush of power as his depleted chakra stores were given a boost.
"There," she said. "Now at least I can be sure you won't kill yourself after you sneak out of here."
"Then do I have permission to leave?"
Her eyes narrowed. "I don't see what the point would be in stopping you, Hatake, but you'd better make it quick." She flicked her fingers to the window. "Get it over with, and then rest. I'll be patching up Taromaru all night..." The last part was said in a half heard complaint. Kakashi was already out the window.
It was so late in the night that the thin sliver of the moon had sunk below the horizon. Kakashi stole through the streets like a pale wraith, heading in the general direction of the academy.
Only when he came within sight of a block of apartments not far from the school did Kakashi purposefully flex his chakra: in a village of jumpy shinobi, it was wise to declare intent.
Tsunade's chakra infusion had restored some of his vigor, and Kakashi easily made a leap to a high tree branch that curved towards one of the windows.
No light flickered on within, but the window opened anyway and Kakashi let himself drink in the sight of a sleep-mussed, extremely irritated Iruka.
"What are you doing?" Iruka hissed. Then he paused, eyes roaming up and down Kakashi's mud and blood splattered uniform. "Don't tell me you left the hospital early again! Kakashi! This has to stop."
"I wanted to see you," Kakashi said.
"Idiot!" Iruka snapped. "You're going to get yourself killed one day!" Iruka went on berating him, but the words seemed to roll over Kakashi - they didn't matter. Not really. The only thing that was important was that he was there at all.
He waited for Iruka to pause for breath before Kakashi tugged down his mask and leaned closer.
"I was a fool," he said, simply. It was the truth. "Please, take me back."
"You've told me that before," Iruka scoffed, but then snatched his hand out, grabbing Kakashi by the vest and hauling him forward.
Iruka's mouth was hot against his, and Kakashi could still taste the remnants of toothpaste on his lips. Iruka's mouth parted and they kissed for long, endless moments - just like it had been, before.
Iruka pulled back, and his eyes shone with sadness as he said, "Kakashi... I can't-I can't do this with you again. I'm sorry."
He retreated back and closed the window.
Kakashi stared after him before he tugged up his mask and slowly, carefully climbed down the tree. The influx of chakra was only a temporary measure and he felt his shoulders dropping with both exhaustion and long-felt disappointment as he walked away.
He disregarded the two muted, familiar chakra signatures coming from the shadows beyond, and remained unaware of the bet made between the two of them.