(Fic): all roads lead to:
Summary: (It is always so fucking trite like that. It is supposed to mean something, maybe, but all that happens is the script and dull dull dull.)
Because you can take the man out of ANBU but not the ANBU out of the man.
Chapter One
all roads lead to:
Kakashi. Hatake Kakashi. He is but another ninja - a too-good ninja, one with a brilliantly sharp mind and prodigious talent. He is - he is the be-all, the one who makes it through every mission, through every dead cellmate and spout of blood as a vein is ruptured, through spattered masks and wind-worn ribbons unraveling in dead children's hair. He is the best. (He is a failure. It is amazing and very much not amazing how one can be both simultaneously.)
Iruka doesn't care because he can't care. He can't, literally - can't dig that out of himself, because he has been down that road before and followed it to the end to find a pile of corpses and broken ideals.
He can't care, and he looks Hatake Kakashi in the eye (almost) and thinks that maybe the other man can understand that. Iruka can't care, but he can pretend to. He can afford to pretend.
But that is all.
That is all.
Iruka thinks of killing the prodigies and beating concepts like friendship and teamwork into thin children with dead eyes. He thinks of black eyes turned red and ugly-beautiful tattoos eating sanity. He thinks of failure and too-bright blond boys and promises.
He knows Kakashi understands.
Iruka stops thinking after a while because he has allotted himself only a certain amount of time for that sort of thing. Thinking too much is what gets ANBU members killed - inevitably. So he shuts off his thoughts like the intelligent survivor he is and switches over to the blank mindset that gets him through life, all instinct and hair-trigger muscle memory and silence.
Autopilot. He knows what to do. Only -
Kakashi is a slight disruption in his schedule. The mission goes off without a hitch. In fact, it is almost smoother than usual, despite the fact that Kakashi has worked with none of them before.
(At least, Iruka doesn't think so. There is a blank period somewhere in there - in the past, after Iruka wimped out and couldn't kill his first madmadmad teammate and everyone except the captain died because of it and - nothing. He tried to go mad for a while. He might have worked with the Hatake then, but he doesn't remember and he doesn't suppose it really matters.)
So the mayor of some city two days' travel away has been assassinated, his plethora of shinobi guards - roughly sixty, in total - have been framed and killed (presumably, in the eyes of investigators, by each other), and the man's son, daughter, and small dog have been hanged in the rafters of the late mayor's mansion. All in a day's work. That finished, the four of them return to Konoha (no such thing as home) and hit the showers.
This is where Iruka's schedule is thrown off. He steps into the showers and is not beset by a storm of needy shinobi on the edge of snapping. He blinks a few times, shrugs, and continues on, figuring that Kakashi wouldn't be quite so obvious. So he still expects it - perhaps as a subtle glance asking him to pretend that it is real, that it isn't farce. Some of them have wanted that. (The first time that happened, Iruka tried to understand. And then he stopped trying to understand and started dredging up memories of centuries ago before his parents died when he kissed the skinny little thing next door - and he never could remember whether the child was a boy or a girl. He tried, that one time, to remember what the flush of a crush felt like. But it didn't really matter, and he didn't really care.)
It never comes.
He sits in his cold, empty flat that night and steadfastly does not think about it or any disappointment that isn't lingering in the flexing of his fingers. Thinking is dangerous.
He doesn't imagine his fingers flexing around Kakashi's hips, a study in contrasts as mocha paints blue against lily-white.
(He hasn't wanted anything for so long that he doesn't recognize it anymore. Perhaps it would be for the best if he never did.)
. ... .
Things continue in this fashion for several months. Occasionally - more frequently, now - Ruri will spread until she seems to disappear, begging begging begging and needing. She always needs so much, but Iruka knows that pretty soon she won't need anything at all and so quietly gives her everything he can.
Strangely enough, Ruri seems to dislike fucking anywhere near their new squad member. So she hunts down a different place to stain.
This place is most often Iruka's flat. They will arrive at Headquarters and she will tell him to GO HOME with the trembling of her hands - and he always knows how desperate she is, so he will stop lingering. She follows him quickly, every time.
His flat has never been anything more to him than a collection of rooms, but they feel strangely filthy and used after.
They feel - worthless.
But that is not such a surprise.
The days bleed into weeks and everyone settles. It is a wary kind of settling - the kind that implies a certain readiness to spring into action. Iruka is waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing seems to and even he cannot wait forever. (But he is getting pretty good at it. He has had a lot of practice.)
And then something does happen. It is a vicious something, a something Iruka didn't expect and wouldn't allow himself to -
It is after an unusually horrible mission. Only Iruka and Ruri are sent, and they sneak jerkily back into Konoha with bleeding minds and twitching fingers.
(It is the kind of mission where infants are brained carelessly against cobblestones and kids lie peacefully in their playgrounds with red smiles stretching across miniature throats. It is the kind of mission where husbands get kunai in their third eye and mothers have their necks snapped. Old folk - grandparents with wrinkly smiles and leathery hands that are good for handing out sweets and slapping small, greedy hands away from baked goods - are strangled. That is the kind of mission this is. There is no fight or "deserving it", no given cause beyond a higher up wanting the entire town decimated in a very blatant way.
And orders are a ninja's god, so...)
So it is after an unusually horrible mission. They - Ruri heads straight to the showers while Iruka veers off to Captain Shori's office. He takes the ten minute interlude to painstakingly check his sanity and think of not-thinking. He is successful, and by the time he is telling an unblinking Shori the (ghastly terrible awful horrendous horrifying) details of the mission in careful monotone, there is no chance of him cracking.
Shori looks at him for a long moment after he finishes. She tilts her head. (Iruka noted that habit twenty minutes into their first interaction. It is like she is a raven, comprehending more simply by looking at something from a slightly different angle. ...Maybe that's why she has made it to captaincy with her sanity intact.) She - to anyone else, she would be looking into their brain. But this is Iruka, and he knows she gets nothing.
And he knows that that is the reason she almost-smiles. The day she gets something is the day that she will kill him. (She once told him, in a brief, blunt spatter of words, that - well, it doesn't matter.)
He leaves her office feeling...assured. And he doesn't expect to have to fuck Ruri right away, considering her new predilection for his apartment, but he heads to the showers anyway because this mission was a very messy one and he has dry blood tightening his skin and causing every square inch to itch.
But he gets there, shucking off his uniform as he walks through the locker room and ignoring the thud of weapons hitting wood. He gets there and - he stares.
Kakashi. Fucking Ruri. Driving into her, naked and gleaming in the spray of the shower, muscles bunching and scars rippling and so terribly beautiful that Iruka -
Iruka turns and leaves.
. ... .
There are - there are infinite places. Times. Dimensions - parallels - whatever. This is what Iruka thinks (lets himself believe in, just for a little bit even though it's dangerous) as he sits on his couch. He has been sitting for a couple of hours - probably - and now he allows himself to think for only a minute: Infinite places and somewhere I'm me and I'm normal, or - or something - somewhere I was always a teacher and never lost my ideals, never trapped myself or broke the glaze or -
Somewhere I have a normal job and hit the pub with coworkers after work and gripe about pay and am too shy to hit on beautiful women. Men. Whatever. Somewhere I manage to fall in love - somewhere I make toast and marmalade for my lover because that's the only food in the cupboard and I - I'm human and never stopped being human.
Somewhere I'm human and never stopped being human.
And then the minute is up and he stares at the wall blankly. He is fine, now. He is fine.
The blood itches.
. ... .
Iruka knows now that Kakashi understands too well - Iruka knows now that Kakashi understands understands understands. He fucked the shattering teammate, so he understands.
Iruka knows now that Kakashi is nothing more than Iruka.
This means something, but Iruka has to have something to control, and that something has been, for an indeterminate amount of time, his mind and thoughts.
So it would mean something, if Iruka was any other man. But he isn't and it doesn't.
Blood. Death. Sex. Survival. Sanity.
None of it mean anything - they just blend, so raw that it's numbing out of pure self defense. And none of it - none of it matters. The ugly feeling just never stops, to the point that it's normal and beauty is so hard to find - not that anyone is looking. Not that Iruka is looking. He has forgotten about beauty out of pure self defense.
Or had, until Kakashi.
But Kakashi doesn't matter. Kakashi isn't allowed to matter.
(Perhaps it would be for the best if he never had, even for a second.)
Iruka doesn't see his team the next day because there is no summons for him. He takes the lack of summons as the sign to do other things it is and fills in at the academy - some of the younger kids don't remember him, which is fine. Some of them he hasn't met - and some of them he knows too well. He even remembers some of them. Some.
He would apologize to one - Kyo - if he could bear to look the quiet, almost-grown boy in the eye. But he can't. Every time he tries, he remembers reading the mission report detailing little Akari's death. He remembers reading the report and he thinks about Kyo and Akari and how she would've grown down some when she got older - and the boy-turned-man who had stuck around through the death threats and cold glares and brush offs since diapers would have been there and she would have seen. And they would have become lovers and maybe they would have died together, the shinobi happy ending.
But now Kyo is silent and taller and still-faced and quick. Too quick, too pale, too quiet - too much of everything, and it is like he has sucked the world inside himself and beaten skill into his nerves with a knife. He is a - he has swallowed Akari, trying not-trying and getting too good. An ANBU in the making, obviously, no longer the cheerful boy always hanging around genius Moshimoto Akari. Akari has been in the ground for ten months now, and Kyo is (growing into ANBU so perfectly and accidentally that his face should turn bone white and porcelain) set to graduate in a year.
The boy is ten. Ten going on two hundred, and Iruka knows why. He almost wants to say something to the kid, but Iruka has been down that road before and followed it to the end to find a pile of corpses and broken ideals. So he stays silent. He stays silent and remembers why he has returned to ANBU.
And (Iruka tries to convince himself) this kid might not break. ANBU always needs the unbreakables, the mediocre who never really were the best (prodigious) but who are so sharply average at everything that they can win against the big boys (this is why Iruka is still alive). ANBU always needs the ordinary ones, the ones who don't have too many issues in the beginning except the issue of being stupid enough to actually join the division - the normals with just a taste of personal childhood tragedy (like himself) last longer, are mentally stronger. It takes more time to make them overload and collapse under the weight of the personalized ANBU mind fuck (gift wrapped for every occasion).
On the second day, he returns to his flat after school and finds that the flowerpot on his windowsill has been twisted widdershins. So he knows there is an S-ranked mission waiting for him.
He actually smiles as he puts on his mask. No one, of course, sees.
. ... .
The mission is a solo one. At first, Iruka is somewhat - no, he isn't relieved to have something to kill. (He can't be. No no no no no. That isn't part of the sanity package, so he isn't relieved.) But as the mission goes on and he slowly but surely picks off his targets, he finds himself reaching a kind of absent-minded, casual state of action.
Razor wire beheads the last gasping, sprinting missing-nin. Iruka finds that in his carelessness, he has failed to remove himself from the immediate splash range. Blood spatters across his mask. He fancies he can taste it (he can't), and he doesn't really care.
He thinks (dangerously and just for a second) that he is finding it progressively harder to care about anything, even the mission. It feels like the -
He thinks that -
Nothing. Never mind.
. ... .
He makes it back to Konoha the next afternoon, five days after leaving. There are - he realized something that he thinks may be important during this mission, so when he reports to Captain Shori, he does not leave immediately after the debriefing. Instead, he looks her in the eye with iron bravado and calmly asks to be put on inactive duty.
He is very careful that she does not see into him. It's a relief that she doesn't. It means that he isn't too far gone - yet.
He leaves her office alive, so he is safe.
. ... .
He thinks that he is getting too old for this.
This is so very true that it isn't even worth thinking - it is one of those things that people know but have to say anyway, just to make it more real.
But those people are idiots. Iruka knows that nothing is more real than thought and belief (and that's why thinking too much gets ninja killed, why he tries so very hard not to think), and that is why he doesn't whisper "I'm too old for this" to the cruelly bright sun as he flits across the rooftops.
He only thinks it, and that is all he needs for it to be real.
Thoughts are interrupted (thank you) as he twirls around, kunai already out, and hooks an ankle around the interloper's, sweeping the enemy's legs out from under him and pinning him to hard tile with the kunai to his -
Her. Her throat.
Ruri.
"Ah," he says. He draws the kunai back only a little.
"Yes," replies Ruri. She isn't in uniform - neither is he - and it is somewhat strange but something that he has gotten a little used to. They are barefaced in the glare of the sun. Iruka can't find it in himself to care anymore. (Except there is a glint in Ruri's eyes that Iruka recognizes so very well. He is almost glad that it is finally there. It won't be too much longer now.)
He stares down at her. "What."
It isn't a question, and Ruri doesn't bother to answer verbally. Instead, she rubs against him - as much as she is able to while pinned, at least.
Iruka wishes dearly that this would all go away. He wants Ruri to die already and everyone to stop taking from him and never replacing -
He loosens the hold obligingly. Ruri wraps her right leg around his waist and uses the other for support as she rubs more enthusiastically. The sharp little knife disappears in a wink.
"No," she mutters into his neck. "Use the kunai."
Iruka lets himself close his eyes and block everything - the warmth of the sun beating against his back, the noise of the streets below them, the occasional tap of feet on the rooftop as other ninja hop by them, Ruri, epiphanies, inactive duty, in/sanity - out just for a moment. Only a second - he only needs a second -
And then he is kneeling between her legs and the kunai is in his hand again, cutting through the thin fabric of her spandex training shorts at the crotch. Ruri's breath speeds up.
She isn't wearing underwear.
He can't help but be intensely disgusted by this specific everything - but it doesn't matter. He cups her with his left hand. She is already wet. He unfastens his trousers with the other hand and focuses on helping her.
...But this is what he thinks as he thrusts into her, silent in contrast to Ruri's stuttering gasps and half-words: Help her? Help her? There is no help. Didn't I already figure this out? There is no changing the world.
There is no changing the world.
One of the ninja traversing the rooftops at this particular moment is a teacher at the academy. Takanaka Akina. She doesn't notice them until she is only two roofs away, where she stumbles and almost brains herself against the tile of the roof. She stares at them - at Iruka, and he glances up and stares her in the eye as he fucks Ruri. He sees his old friend mouth "Iruka-kun?" before blushing at a particularly loud moan from Ruri and starting off in a different direction.
Doesn't matter.
He had thought that he knew better than to try to save anyone. He has been down that road before and followed it to the end to find a pile of corpses and broken ideals, and he had thought that he had learned his lesson.
Evidently he is very fucking stupid.
As Ruri climaxes, she bites his neck.
And suddenly all that is in his mind is that he needs to get home and clean his vest before the stain sets in.
. ... .
A few hours later, Kakashi shows up at his flat. Iruka lets him in without a word. The Hatake is decked out in full ANBU regalia, and he smells strongly of the blood he is covered in.
Some of it flakes off as he follows Iruka into the living room. He sits awkwardly on Iruka's sofa and removes his ANBU mask. His book is nowhere in sight.
"Tea?" It is all Iruka can think to say.
"No." A beat later: "Thank you."
Iruka nods and doesn't fiddle with his hands. He sits calmly on the other end of the couch - it is the only seat he has - and waits.
He isn't disappointed.
"You resigned." The words are even and reveal nothing.
Iruka tilts his head at Kakashi in an unconscious mimicry of Captain Shori. "No. I asked to be put on inactive duty for a short period of time."
Kakashi doesn't ask aloud. Iruka answers anyway.
"Because. You know why. How many years have you been in ANBU, Hound? Nine? Ten? You know. Because I was careless on my last mission and I know that my sanity isn't immortal."
"You are beginning to break."
And there it is - spoken aloud. Real. But Iruka doesn't pause. It was already real enough when he first thought it roughly a day ago.
"Yeah."
There is silence for a few minutes, and then Kakashi breaks it with: "Ruri."
"Is regressing at an exponential rate."
"I know."
Iruka looks at him. "Yes. I suppose you would."
"I saw," Kakashi says after a moment. The two of you together is unspoken. He glances at Iruka's bandaged throat.
"So did I."
They stare at each other, both inscrutable and perfectly understood. The air is fairly vibrating.
But then: "Many times, Iruka-san."
This, Iruka doesn't understand. "Your point?"
They are still staring at each other.
The Copy-nin doesn't explain. Iruka shrugs it off because there is something that needs to be said.
"Kakashi-san. I will be the one to kill her." It is casual and not a question.
Kakashi hesitates before nodding. "If you return in time."
The man's single visible eye is focused entirely on Iruka. He has some sort of presence that Iruka almost thinks is a genjutsu, or would if he didn't know better. He ignores the effect it has on him and replies, "I will."
And the conversation is suddenly over. Kakashi disappears in a swirl of leaves, and Iruka is left to stare at the flecks of dried blood that stand out in stark contrast against his sofa.
He supposes that he should have asked the Copy-nin if he was injured. He thinks of terrible beauty and epiphanies and decides that he doesn't really have much use for manners anymore anyway.
. ... .
Iruka watches the walls of his flat lighten from the plush beige cushion of his couch and thinks of things that he didn't say to Kakashi.
He didn't say, "You stagger me." He didn't say, "I want you." He didn't say, "I don't think you matter." He didn't say, "Leave."
He thinks of things that he didn't say and then tries to figure out if he means any of them.
And then he stops, because he has to get ready for a day at the academy and he has realized one thing that is true: it doesn't matter.
Because you can take the man out of ANBU but not the ANBU out of the man.
Chapter One
all roads lead to:
Kakashi. Hatake Kakashi. He is but another ninja - a too-good ninja, one with a brilliantly sharp mind and prodigious talent. He is - he is the be-all, the one who makes it through every mission, through every dead cellmate and spout of blood as a vein is ruptured, through spattered masks and wind-worn ribbons unraveling in dead children's hair. He is the best. (He is a failure. It is amazing and very much not amazing how one can be both simultaneously.)
Iruka doesn't care because he can't care. He can't, literally - can't dig that out of himself, because he has been down that road before and followed it to the end to find a pile of corpses and broken ideals.
He can't care, and he looks Hatake Kakashi in the eye (almost) and thinks that maybe the other man can understand that. Iruka can't care, but he can pretend to. He can afford to pretend.
But that is all.
That is all.
Iruka thinks of killing the prodigies and beating concepts like friendship and teamwork into thin children with dead eyes. He thinks of black eyes turned red and ugly-beautiful tattoos eating sanity. He thinks of failure and too-bright blond boys and promises.
He knows Kakashi understands.
Iruka stops thinking after a while because he has allotted himself only a certain amount of time for that sort of thing. Thinking too much is what gets ANBU members killed - inevitably. So he shuts off his thoughts like the intelligent survivor he is and switches over to the blank mindset that gets him through life, all instinct and hair-trigger muscle memory and silence.
Autopilot. He knows what to do. Only -
Kakashi is a slight disruption in his schedule. The mission goes off without a hitch. In fact, it is almost smoother than usual, despite the fact that Kakashi has worked with none of them before.
(At least, Iruka doesn't think so. There is a blank period somewhere in there - in the past, after Iruka wimped out and couldn't kill his first madmadmad teammate and everyone except the captain died because of it and - nothing. He tried to go mad for a while. He might have worked with the Hatake then, but he doesn't remember and he doesn't suppose it really matters.)
So the mayor of some city two days' travel away has been assassinated, his plethora of shinobi guards - roughly sixty, in total - have been framed and killed (presumably, in the eyes of investigators, by each other), and the man's son, daughter, and small dog have been hanged in the rafters of the late mayor's mansion. All in a day's work. That finished, the four of them return to Konoha (no such thing as home) and hit the showers.
This is where Iruka's schedule is thrown off. He steps into the showers and is not beset by a storm of needy shinobi on the edge of snapping. He blinks a few times, shrugs, and continues on, figuring that Kakashi wouldn't be quite so obvious. So he still expects it - perhaps as a subtle glance asking him to pretend that it is real, that it isn't farce. Some of them have wanted that. (The first time that happened, Iruka tried to understand. And then he stopped trying to understand and started dredging up memories of centuries ago before his parents died when he kissed the skinny little thing next door - and he never could remember whether the child was a boy or a girl. He tried, that one time, to remember what the flush of a crush felt like. But it didn't really matter, and he didn't really care.)
It never comes.
He sits in his cold, empty flat that night and steadfastly does not think about it or any disappointment that isn't lingering in the flexing of his fingers. Thinking is dangerous.
He doesn't imagine his fingers flexing around Kakashi's hips, a study in contrasts as mocha paints blue against lily-white.
(He hasn't wanted anything for so long that he doesn't recognize it anymore. Perhaps it would be for the best if he never did.)
. ... .
Things continue in this fashion for several months. Occasionally - more frequently, now - Ruri will spread until she seems to disappear, begging begging begging and needing. She always needs so much, but Iruka knows that pretty soon she won't need anything at all and so quietly gives her everything he can.
Strangely enough, Ruri seems to dislike fucking anywhere near their new squad member. So she hunts down a different place to stain.
This place is most often Iruka's flat. They will arrive at Headquarters and she will tell him to GO HOME with the trembling of her hands - and he always knows how desperate she is, so he will stop lingering. She follows him quickly, every time.
His flat has never been anything more to him than a collection of rooms, but they feel strangely filthy and used after.
They feel - worthless.
But that is not such a surprise.
The days bleed into weeks and everyone settles. It is a wary kind of settling - the kind that implies a certain readiness to spring into action. Iruka is waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing seems to and even he cannot wait forever. (But he is getting pretty good at it. He has had a lot of practice.)
And then something does happen. It is a vicious something, a something Iruka didn't expect and wouldn't allow himself to -
It is after an unusually horrible mission. Only Iruka and Ruri are sent, and they sneak jerkily back into Konoha with bleeding minds and twitching fingers.
(It is the kind of mission where infants are brained carelessly against cobblestones and kids lie peacefully in their playgrounds with red smiles stretching across miniature throats. It is the kind of mission where husbands get kunai in their third eye and mothers have their necks snapped. Old folk - grandparents with wrinkly smiles and leathery hands that are good for handing out sweets and slapping small, greedy hands away from baked goods - are strangled. That is the kind of mission this is. There is no fight or "deserving it", no given cause beyond a higher up wanting the entire town decimated in a very blatant way.
And orders are a ninja's god, so...)
So it is after an unusually horrible mission. They - Ruri heads straight to the showers while Iruka veers off to Captain Shori's office. He takes the ten minute interlude to painstakingly check his sanity and think of not-thinking. He is successful, and by the time he is telling an unblinking Shori the (ghastly terrible awful horrendous horrifying) details of the mission in careful monotone, there is no chance of him cracking.
Shori looks at him for a long moment after he finishes. She tilts her head. (Iruka noted that habit twenty minutes into their first interaction. It is like she is a raven, comprehending more simply by looking at something from a slightly different angle. ...Maybe that's why she has made it to captaincy with her sanity intact.) She - to anyone else, she would be looking into their brain. But this is Iruka, and he knows she gets nothing.
And he knows that that is the reason she almost-smiles. The day she gets something is the day that she will kill him. (She once told him, in a brief, blunt spatter of words, that - well, it doesn't matter.)
He leaves her office feeling...assured. And he doesn't expect to have to fuck Ruri right away, considering her new predilection for his apartment, but he heads to the showers anyway because this mission was a very messy one and he has dry blood tightening his skin and causing every square inch to itch.
But he gets there, shucking off his uniform as he walks through the locker room and ignoring the thud of weapons hitting wood. He gets there and - he stares.
Kakashi. Fucking Ruri. Driving into her, naked and gleaming in the spray of the shower, muscles bunching and scars rippling and so terribly beautiful that Iruka -
Iruka turns and leaves.
. ... .
There are - there are infinite places. Times. Dimensions - parallels - whatever. This is what Iruka thinks (lets himself believe in, just for a little bit even though it's dangerous) as he sits on his couch. He has been sitting for a couple of hours - probably - and now he allows himself to think for only a minute: Infinite places and somewhere I'm me and I'm normal, or - or something - somewhere I was always a teacher and never lost my ideals, never trapped myself or broke the glaze or -
Somewhere I have a normal job and hit the pub with coworkers after work and gripe about pay and am too shy to hit on beautiful women. Men. Whatever. Somewhere I manage to fall in love - somewhere I make toast and marmalade for my lover because that's the only food in the cupboard and I - I'm human and never stopped being human.
Somewhere I'm human and never stopped being human.
And then the minute is up and he stares at the wall blankly. He is fine, now. He is fine.
The blood itches.
. ... .
Iruka knows now that Kakashi understands too well - Iruka knows now that Kakashi understands understands understands. He fucked the shattering teammate, so he understands.
Iruka knows now that Kakashi is nothing more than Iruka.
This means something, but Iruka has to have something to control, and that something has been, for an indeterminate amount of time, his mind and thoughts.
So it would mean something, if Iruka was any other man. But he isn't and it doesn't.
Blood. Death. Sex. Survival. Sanity.
None of it mean anything - they just blend, so raw that it's numbing out of pure self defense. And none of it - none of it matters. The ugly feeling just never stops, to the point that it's normal and beauty is so hard to find - not that anyone is looking. Not that Iruka is looking. He has forgotten about beauty out of pure self defense.
Or had, until Kakashi.
But Kakashi doesn't matter. Kakashi isn't allowed to matter.
(Perhaps it would be for the best if he never had, even for a second.)
Iruka doesn't see his team the next day because there is no summons for him. He takes the lack of summons as the sign to do other things it is and fills in at the academy - some of the younger kids don't remember him, which is fine. Some of them he hasn't met - and some of them he knows too well. He even remembers some of them. Some.
He would apologize to one - Kyo - if he could bear to look the quiet, almost-grown boy in the eye. But he can't. Every time he tries, he remembers reading the mission report detailing little Akari's death. He remembers reading the report and he thinks about Kyo and Akari and how she would've grown down some when she got older - and the boy-turned-man who had stuck around through the death threats and cold glares and brush offs since diapers would have been there and she would have seen. And they would have become lovers and maybe they would have died together, the shinobi happy ending.
But now Kyo is silent and taller and still-faced and quick. Too quick, too pale, too quiet - too much of everything, and it is like he has sucked the world inside himself and beaten skill into his nerves with a knife. He is a - he has swallowed Akari, trying not-trying and getting too good. An ANBU in the making, obviously, no longer the cheerful boy always hanging around genius Moshimoto Akari. Akari has been in the ground for ten months now, and Kyo is (growing into ANBU so perfectly and accidentally that his face should turn bone white and porcelain) set to graduate in a year.
The boy is ten. Ten going on two hundred, and Iruka knows why. He almost wants to say something to the kid, but Iruka has been down that road before and followed it to the end to find a pile of corpses and broken ideals. So he stays silent. He stays silent and remembers why he has returned to ANBU.
And (Iruka tries to convince himself) this kid might not break. ANBU always needs the unbreakables, the mediocre who never really were the best (prodigious) but who are so sharply average at everything that they can win against the big boys (this is why Iruka is still alive). ANBU always needs the ordinary ones, the ones who don't have too many issues in the beginning except the issue of being stupid enough to actually join the division - the normals with just a taste of personal childhood tragedy (like himself) last longer, are mentally stronger. It takes more time to make them overload and collapse under the weight of the personalized ANBU mind fuck (gift wrapped for every occasion).
On the second day, he returns to his flat after school and finds that the flowerpot on his windowsill has been twisted widdershins. So he knows there is an S-ranked mission waiting for him.
He actually smiles as he puts on his mask. No one, of course, sees.
. ... .
The mission is a solo one. At first, Iruka is somewhat - no, he isn't relieved to have something to kill. (He can't be. No no no no no. That isn't part of the sanity package, so he isn't relieved.) But as the mission goes on and he slowly but surely picks off his targets, he finds himself reaching a kind of absent-minded, casual state of action.
Razor wire beheads the last gasping, sprinting missing-nin. Iruka finds that in his carelessness, he has failed to remove himself from the immediate splash range. Blood spatters across his mask. He fancies he can taste it (he can't), and he doesn't really care.
He thinks (dangerously and just for a second) that he is finding it progressively harder to care about anything, even the mission. It feels like the -
He thinks that -
Nothing. Never mind.
. ... .
He makes it back to Konoha the next afternoon, five days after leaving. There are - he realized something that he thinks may be important during this mission, so when he reports to Captain Shori, he does not leave immediately after the debriefing. Instead, he looks her in the eye with iron bravado and calmly asks to be put on inactive duty.
He is very careful that she does not see into him. It's a relief that she doesn't. It means that he isn't too far gone - yet.
He leaves her office alive, so he is safe.
. ... .
He thinks that he is getting too old for this.
This is so very true that it isn't even worth thinking - it is one of those things that people know but have to say anyway, just to make it more real.
But those people are idiots. Iruka knows that nothing is more real than thought and belief (and that's why thinking too much gets ninja killed, why he tries so very hard not to think), and that is why he doesn't whisper "I'm too old for this" to the cruelly bright sun as he flits across the rooftops.
He only thinks it, and that is all he needs for it to be real.
Thoughts are interrupted (thank you) as he twirls around, kunai already out, and hooks an ankle around the interloper's, sweeping the enemy's legs out from under him and pinning him to hard tile with the kunai to his -
Her. Her throat.
Ruri.
"Ah," he says. He draws the kunai back only a little.
"Yes," replies Ruri. She isn't in uniform - neither is he - and it is somewhat strange but something that he has gotten a little used to. They are barefaced in the glare of the sun. Iruka can't find it in himself to care anymore. (Except there is a glint in Ruri's eyes that Iruka recognizes so very well. He is almost glad that it is finally there. It won't be too much longer now.)
He stares down at her. "What."
It isn't a question, and Ruri doesn't bother to answer verbally. Instead, she rubs against him - as much as she is able to while pinned, at least.
Iruka wishes dearly that this would all go away. He wants Ruri to die already and everyone to stop taking from him and never replacing -
He loosens the hold obligingly. Ruri wraps her right leg around his waist and uses the other for support as she rubs more enthusiastically. The sharp little knife disappears in a wink.
"No," she mutters into his neck. "Use the kunai."
Iruka lets himself close his eyes and block everything - the warmth of the sun beating against his back, the noise of the streets below them, the occasional tap of feet on the rooftop as other ninja hop by them, Ruri, epiphanies, inactive duty, in/sanity - out just for a moment. Only a second - he only needs a second -
And then he is kneeling between her legs and the kunai is in his hand again, cutting through the thin fabric of her spandex training shorts at the crotch. Ruri's breath speeds up.
She isn't wearing underwear.
He can't help but be intensely disgusted by this specific everything - but it doesn't matter. He cups her with his left hand. She is already wet. He unfastens his trousers with the other hand and focuses on helping her.
...But this is what he thinks as he thrusts into her, silent in contrast to Ruri's stuttering gasps and half-words: Help her? Help her? There is no help. Didn't I already figure this out? There is no changing the world.
There is no changing the world.
One of the ninja traversing the rooftops at this particular moment is a teacher at the academy. Takanaka Akina. She doesn't notice them until she is only two roofs away, where she stumbles and almost brains herself against the tile of the roof. She stares at them - at Iruka, and he glances up and stares her in the eye as he fucks Ruri. He sees his old friend mouth "Iruka-kun?" before blushing at a particularly loud moan from Ruri and starting off in a different direction.
Doesn't matter.
He had thought that he knew better than to try to save anyone. He has been down that road before and followed it to the end to find a pile of corpses and broken ideals, and he had thought that he had learned his lesson.
Evidently he is very fucking stupid.
As Ruri climaxes, she bites his neck.
And suddenly all that is in his mind is that he needs to get home and clean his vest before the stain sets in.
. ... .
A few hours later, Kakashi shows up at his flat. Iruka lets him in without a word. The Hatake is decked out in full ANBU regalia, and he smells strongly of the blood he is covered in.
Some of it flakes off as he follows Iruka into the living room. He sits awkwardly on Iruka's sofa and removes his ANBU mask. His book is nowhere in sight.
"Tea?" It is all Iruka can think to say.
"No." A beat later: "Thank you."
Iruka nods and doesn't fiddle with his hands. He sits calmly on the other end of the couch - it is the only seat he has - and waits.
He isn't disappointed.
"You resigned." The words are even and reveal nothing.
Iruka tilts his head at Kakashi in an unconscious mimicry of Captain Shori. "No. I asked to be put on inactive duty for a short period of time."
Kakashi doesn't ask aloud. Iruka answers anyway.
"Because. You know why. How many years have you been in ANBU, Hound? Nine? Ten? You know. Because I was careless on my last mission and I know that my sanity isn't immortal."
"You are beginning to break."
And there it is - spoken aloud. Real. But Iruka doesn't pause. It was already real enough when he first thought it roughly a day ago.
"Yeah."
There is silence for a few minutes, and then Kakashi breaks it with: "Ruri."
"Is regressing at an exponential rate."
"I know."
Iruka looks at him. "Yes. I suppose you would."
"I saw," Kakashi says after a moment. The two of you together is unspoken. He glances at Iruka's bandaged throat.
"So did I."
They stare at each other, both inscrutable and perfectly understood. The air is fairly vibrating.
But then: "Many times, Iruka-san."
This, Iruka doesn't understand. "Your point?"
They are still staring at each other.
The Copy-nin doesn't explain. Iruka shrugs it off because there is something that needs to be said.
"Kakashi-san. I will be the one to kill her." It is casual and not a question.
Kakashi hesitates before nodding. "If you return in time."
The man's single visible eye is focused entirely on Iruka. He has some sort of presence that Iruka almost thinks is a genjutsu, or would if he didn't know better. He ignores the effect it has on him and replies, "I will."
And the conversation is suddenly over. Kakashi disappears in a swirl of leaves, and Iruka is left to stare at the flecks of dried blood that stand out in stark contrast against his sofa.
He supposes that he should have asked the Copy-nin if he was injured. He thinks of terrible beauty and epiphanies and decides that he doesn't really have much use for manners anymore anyway.
. ... .
Iruka watches the walls of his flat lighten from the plush beige cushion of his couch and thinks of things that he didn't say to Kakashi.
He didn't say, "You stagger me." He didn't say, "I want you." He didn't say, "I don't think you matter." He didn't say, "Leave."
He thinks of things that he didn't say and then tries to figure out if he means any of them.
And then he stops, because he has to get ready for a day at the academy and he has realized one thing that is true: it doesn't matter.