Thought and Feeling Interwound

by tucuxi

Summary:

Tsunade walked around the desk and sat directly next to Iruka, turning both of their chairs with a casually powerful grasp. In the end they were facing each other, not the desk. He tried and failed to hold her gaze. She reached out and tipped his chin up, forcing him to look at her again. Another hit landed. This time it came from Iruka's left. It felt like it must have shattered bone, ribs grinding against each other in his chest, and Iruka bit his tongue almost until it bled to keep from crying out.

“Tell me, Iruka-sensei,” Tsunade said. “How long, exactly, have you been feeling Hatake Kakashi’s emotions?"

Notes:

• For megyal.

“You look terrible, Iruka-sensei,” Tsunade said. “Go home.”

Iruka blinked at her, holding himself still by sheer force of will, and clenched his fists beneath the desk.

“I’m fine, Tsunade-sama,” he protested. He could feel saliva build in his mouth as he spoke, brought on by the nauseating pain rippling through his body. “I'm just a little tired, is all.”

He reflexively hid the flinch as something hit him in the gut, sparking pain along his entire right side. By this point it was virtually unconscious, the majority of the pain walled off behind a sturdy mental barrier. Only the worst blows ever caused him to react visibly anymore. But this had been a bad one, and Tsunade was more observant than most. Iruka prayed she hadn’t noticed, or that she’d chalk it up to something — anything — expected, explainable, normal.

“Hm,” she said, face pensive and a little troubled even through her habitual youthful genjutsu.

She walked around the desk and sat directly next to Iruka, turning both of their chairs with a casually powerful grasp. In the end they were facing each other, not the desk. He tried and failed to hold her gaze. She reached out and tipped his chin up, forcing him to look at her again. Another hit landed. This time it came from Iruka's left. It felt like it must have shattered bone, ribs grinding against each other in his chest, and Iruka bit his tongue almost until it bled to keep from crying out.

“Tell me, Iruka-sensei,” Tsunade said. “How long, exactly, have you been feeling Hatake Kakashi’s emotions?”

Iruka gaped, and then winced again at new a slice across his forearm, hot and jagged. That wince appeared to be answer enough.

“Shit,” Tsunade said.

Somewhere in the background Shizune gasped and dropped an armful of carefully sorted folders.  Even caught up in trying to avoid vomiting on the Hokage's rug, Iruka could find it in himself to resent the work that would have to go into organizing that very detailed pile of paperwork all over again.

Tsunade was still talking. “Well, shit," she said again. "I really hate it when I’m right.”

Iruka just stared at her. He'd only figured this out after he'd started working the mission desk for the Sandaime, after Kakashi left ANBU and Iruka had been able to track which missions Kakashi had come home from injured. For Tsunade to guess meant that Iruka hadn't been nearly as subtle in his paperwork shuffling as he'd thought.

“Okay,” Tsunade said, while Shizune had shuffled together the papers she’d dropped in her surprise. “Iruka-sensei, you’re on paid administrative leave starting now. As soon as Kakashi gets released from the hospital, you will both come to my office.”

Iruka nodded weakly, stifling a blink as something hit him in the face. A left-side hit meant they were aiming for the Sharingan. It seemed optimistic to assume that Kakashi would be making it home at all, given the way he felt right now. Something must have shown on his face, because Tsunade nodded.

“Shizune,” Tsunade said. “Walk him home. Cat," she said, and there was a man with an ANBU mask in the office, where no one had been standing before. "ANBU needs to send back up for Kakashi's team."

Cat nodded, and disappeared without a word. Iruka nearly collapsed in relief at the prospect of being permitted to go home now. Only the fact that he felt like his ribcage was broken prevented him from getting up on his own.

Shizune accompanied Iruka back to his apartment, where it turned out Iruka was placed under what was effectively house arrest, with very few approved visitors. In the end it was only Iruka's existing friendship with several of the bored chuunin and aged genin posted to his apartment block that allowed him to find out when Kakashi's team had returned, Kakashi supporting their medic, who was suffering severe chakra-drain.

Even after that it was several days before Iruka received a message summoning him to the Hokage's office. When Iruka arrived, Tsunade was not there. Instead, Kakashi was, leaning against the wall of the Hokage's office and ostentatiously ignoring the ANBU keeping watch. He looked up from his book – one of his usual smutty novels – for just long enough to dismiss Iruka and went back to reading. Iruka froze in the doorway. There was a reason he tried so hard to stay off Kakashi's radar: the man's casual contempt burned like the Mizukage's acid.

“Now, now,” Tsunade said from just behind him. Both of them jerked their heads around to look at her. It seemed that Kakashi hadn’t heard her appear, either, which made Iruka feel a bit better. “Let’s sit down and talk about things. Seats, gentlemen.”

The glare Kakashi gave her might have melted stone: Tsunade just gave him a distinctly unimpressed look in return. The ANBU member who had been studiously ignoring both Iruka and Kakashi looked between the Hokage and her likely successor before walking out, leaving the room and locking the door. His aura felt faintly of relief, like a hit dodged. When Tsunade raised a single, elegant eyebrow Kakashi wilted slightly and moved to sit down. It only took a half-glance from Tsunade for Iruka to scurry to follow.

“No,” Tsunade said, when Iruka moved toward the remaining chair. "Sit over there.” She gestured at the small loveseat Kakashi had commandeered. Kakashi was already sprawled over three quarters of it, leaving barely enough space for another person.

Iruka felt a distinct spike of irritation, and couldn’t for the life of him tell whether it was his or Kakashi’s. It was most likely to be Kakashi's, Iruka thought. Even knowing Kakashi was angry with him, that Kakashi wanted desperately to be anywhere but here, a tiny traitorous part of Iruka rejoiced at the idea of being so close to him again.

“Yes, Hokage-sama,” Iruka said, and sat down gingerly, as far from Kakashi as he could manage on the tiny piece of furniture.

“Now,” Tsunade said, fixing Kakashi with an even, almost grim look. “Kid. You’re telling me you have no idea what’s going on?”

Kakashi felt exasperated at the nickname, but Iruka thought maybe there was something almost pleased about it, too. It was hard to tell. He resisted the urge to pull down the walls in his mind to peek more closely: it wouldn't be fair to invade Kakashi's privacy in such a way.

Kakashi slouched, if possible, even more defiantly and shook his head. Tsunade raised an eyebrow.

“It’s your bloodline limit,” she said. She sounded almost incredulous. She also sounded decidedly unimpressed.

“I don’t have a bloodline limit.” Kakashi’s tone was definite, no room for doubt. But internally, Iruka could tell, he felt curious, maybe a little shakier than his voice would imply. Iruka slammed his walls all the way back up, and tried to focus on Tsunade.

“Kid,” Tsunade said, and she sounded almost sympathetic now. “You really do.”

Even through the walls Iruka had been holding for so long, he could feel Kakashi’s uncertainty intensify. There was a little bit of something else there, too — horror, maybe, or curiosity. Iruka couldn’t be sure.

“It’s not a very well-known bloodline limit,” Tsunade said. "It's certainly nothing like an ocular jutsu,” and she smiled. “Or the Ino-Shika-Cho combinations, and not everyone wakes it. But it’s a bloodline limit for sure.”

Kakashi felt impatient now.

“No one ever told you?” Tsunade sounded honestly curious. “You should have been told when you were —“ Kakashi interrupted her, and Iruka gritted his teeth, almost sure what was coming next.

“Who was there to tell me?” Kakashi asked. “My father killed himself when I was barely eight years old. He didn’t exactly leave a manual.”

There was old pain there, Iruka felt, a familiar ache that he knew intimately by now. If it had been anyone else next to him, he would have reached out and offered some kind of comfort, but this was Hatake Kakashi sitting next to him and he’d made it very clear over the years exactly how much – or rather, how little – he thought of chuunin-sensei Umino Iruka.

“Hm.” Tsunade steepled her fingers before her mouth, hiding a frown, but not the way her brow furrowed. “So you didn’t know about the chance of bonding with someone.”

Kakashi just stared. His expression was always hard to read, but Iruka could parse the beginnings of what almost looked like fear on his face.

"What?" Kakashi asked. "How?"

Tsunade looked between the two of them.

"Tsunade-sama," Kakashi said. "What kind of bond?"

"A soul-bond," Tsunade said. "Emotional transference."

Kakashi felt horrified. In the next moment, he felt blurred, somehow more remote. It was what Iruka had spent the last few years, and especially the last six months, desperately hoping for. Now that it was happening he found that he didn’t like it at all. The blurring made him feel headachy and distant, even less sure what was him and what was Kakashi.

Iruka gripped the edge of the seat, feeling his knuckles go white with strain as he tried to anchor himself in his own body. He could get through this, no matter how ill it made him feel. What other choice did he have?

“Obviously the answer is no,” Tsunade said, and looked between the two of them. “I'd know if you were in a romantic relationship. So how recently did you two have sex?”

“What?” Kakashi sounded blank, but he felt fuzzily confused, or maybe that was Iruka's confusion. “We haven't —“

So he really didn’t remember. Iruka fought to keep a stricken expression off his face, hoped he was right and the bond didn't go both ways. He’d hoped that Kakashi had at least remembered — well. Clearly it hadn’t mattered to him.

“Almost six years ago,” Iruka said. When Tsunade turned to look at him, disbelieving, he found it in himself to add: “Just the once.”

Tsunade stared for a long moment. Kakashi straightened in his seat, and turned to look at Iruka out of his good eye. His own eye, Iruka thought: the Sharingan was perfectly good, just not for normal vision.

“Six years?” Tsunade said. She sounded astonished. “The two of you have been connected for six years, Iruka-sensei, and no one ever noticed?”

Iruka just shrugged, scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck, feeling a little uncomfortable under both her and Kakashi’s paired scrutiny. He wished Kakashi weren't shielding so strongly: he'd clearly learned mental jutsu at some point, and tossed up some combination. It was making Iruka feel unmoored and almost dizzy.

“It wasn't so strong right away,” Iruka offered, and felt Kakashi's blurry surprise. He had to be feeling it to know it was happening: Kakashi's poker-face was impeccable. “I started teaching at the Academy when it was clear it might interfere with missions. What else was I supposed to do?”

Tsunade looked faintly impressed by Iruka's determination. Kakashi just felt more shocked and surprised than ever. That got under Iruka’s skin, even as muffled as it was.

“I may not be a jounin,” Iruka added, biting out the words and shooting a bitter look at Kakashi. "But I’m still a shinobi of Konoha. I’m not going to just stop doing my job.”

There might have been something there, some kind of shame, or reaction, something behind the cotton-fluff that was crowding Iruka's head, but it was hard to tell.

“We’re getting Inoichi in your head to figure out your mental barriers,” Tsunade said, writing a note even as she spoke. “That’s got to be some pretty impressive architecture to keep Kakashi’s emotions out, especially if you’ve been feeling his pain, as well.” She paused. “You have, haven’t you?”

She already knew the answer, but Iruka nodded anyway and had the satisfaction of seeing Kakashi’s head twitch, as if he wanted to look at Iruka but had suppressed the urge.

“Tsunade,” Kakashi grated out, “you can root around in Iruka-sensei’s head whenever you want. First explain what our apparently having had sex — once — has to do with this.”

She shrugged. “It’s how the bloodline limit activates,” Tsunade said. Kakashi did not look, or feel, satisfied with that answer. “It’s not all that well understood,” she admitted. “You chose him, consciously or not, and a link was created between the two of you.”

“So why me?” Iruka asked, after a momentary pause. “I mean, I’m sure I’m not the only one — that is to say —“ Iruka stopped, feeling himself flush bright red.

He knew Kakashi had slept with other people in that time, both before Iruka, from gossip, and after, from rather more uncomfortable revelations. Kakashi stirred beside him, discomfort coming through even without the bond.

“We don’t know,” Tsunade said. “And it’s not just the sex, though that’s part of it. I’ll go through our records. For now, gentlemen, there’s just one test.”

Iruka sat up a little straighter, trying to look attentive, rather than as if he was desperately hoping for her to be able to do something to get him out of this increasingly miserable situation. Tsunade grinned.

“All right," she said. "it's easy. You just hold hands.”

“You’re kidding,” Kakashi said. Iruka felt something like a buzzing behind the walls in his mind. Even as he protested, Kakashi hadn’t moved from his habitual slouch.

“No,” Tsunade said. There was steel in her voice. “I’m not. Take your glove off, Kakashi, and hold hands with Iruka-sensei.”

Iruka let go of the edge of the love seat, wiped his suddenly clammy hand on his thigh and held it out wordlessly, knowing without having to look that Kakashi was more than a little angry about this: it was a distinctly angry kind of buzzing now, frustrated and incoherent, and very unpleasant.

When Kakashi’s hand took his, it all went away. Iruka gasped, and Kakashi tried to pull back. Iruka grabbed at him with both hands, holding Kakashi’s bare hand between his joined palms.

“Oh my god,” he breathed.

He was alone in his own head. There was nothing behind the carefully constructed walls he’d built over the years: no boredom, no tired, worn grief, no exasperation. There was nothing at all, except Iruka's own thoughts.

“I thought so,” Tsunade said.

“Thought what?” Kakashi sounded bored, and Iruka realized he hadn’t the faintest idea what Kakashi was feeling. And somehow this felt fine — it felt normal, even.

“I can’t tell what you’re feeling,” Iruka explained. “I — it’s like it was before it all started. I —“ he looked down at their joined hands and gingerly let go of Kakashi. The moment they stopped touching, Kakashi’s confusion came flooding back, blurred and cottony and almost overwhelming. Iruka shuddered at the strength of it. He reached for Kakashi’s hand again, grabbing perhaps too hard in the pursuit of less overbearing emotion.

“That’s apparently symptomatic of the early stages of a very strong bond,” Tsunade said. “Physical contact eliminates the involuntary emotional transference.” She shrugged. “We think it was a way for partners to acclimate more gradually.”

The early stages, Iruka thought. Six years is still the early stages? But he couldn't bring himself to let go, not yet.

“So as long as we’re touching,” Kakashi said, slowly, “Iruka-sensei can’t tell what I’m feeling.” He wrapped his fingers around Iruka’s, his grip firm and dry. “I hope you don’t mind, Iruka-sensei” he said to Iruka, though it was clear that even if Iruka did mind, it wouldn’t make the least bit of difference to him. “But I think we’re going to be very close until Tsunade figures out how to break this.”

Iruka gaped at him.

“Well,” Tsunade said, a small smile playing around the edges of her lips. "This should be interesting.”

* * * 

The two of them went back to Iruka's apartment for long enough for Iruka to grab some things. There was apparently no question in Kakashi's mind of them staying at Iruka’s place and Iruka was too dizzy, too high on the feeling of having his head to himself, to be pushy about it in the moment. Kakashi looked surprised that Iruka had a mission pack with everything he'd need, and Iruka tried not to feel offended about it: he might not be on active duty, but he'd survived the Kyuubi attack, hadn't he?

A day later, however, Iruka’s amazement had started to wear thin, replaced by pure irritation at Kakashi’s silence. Iruka didn't want to be a nuisance, but they were supposed to be working this out, and he didn't see how they would accomplish that if all Kakashi did was maintain skin to skin contact and re-read a book he'd already read a thousand times.bloodline limit 

“Did you know pain is an emotion?” Iruka asked, some time after they had finished eating, when the silence had grown unbearable again. “Because apparently it is, or at least your bond thinks it is.”

Kakashi shifted, but didn’t say anything. He was sitting across the table from Iruka, only the skin of their ankles touching under the kotetsu. Kakashi had spent the whole afternoon and evening ignoring Iruka, only looking at him in order to be sure to keep skin to skin contact with him at all times. Iruka was sick and tired of being treated like an inconvenient medical apparatus.

“You know, the first time it happened,” Iruka said, determined not to be ignored, however briefly. “I woke up in the middle of the night with a broken arm.”

Kakashi frowned behind his mask: Iruka could see the faint downturn of his lips beneath the cloth. Kakashi had practically inhaled his food: Iruka had no more idea what he looked like now than he ever had.

“It wasn’t actually broken, of course,” Iruka continued. “But it hurt like it was. Then something invisible crashed into me and crushed me into a wall that wasn’t there. I thought I was dreaming, or under a genjutsu, but,” he shrugged. “None of my friends were good enough to do that, not back then.”

None of them were cruel enough to do that, Iruka didn’t say, because it wasn't really true. Mizuki might have been, in the end, but that was something Iruka was comfortable leaving alone for now.

Kakashi was watching him now instead of ignoring him, but the expression above his mask was still-featured, implacable.

“I thought I was going crazy,” Iruka said. “But at least that time I was alone.”

No one had seen him vomit in pain, that night. No one had seen him stagger into his bathroom only to collapse, gasping in relief, when the faint prickling of non-existent healing chakra had filtered through his arm. "No one saw me collapse," Iruka said. "No one noticed me wincing at things that weren't there."

Kakashi just blinked and kept reading. His ankle was cool against Iruka's own, and there was no way to tell what he was thinking. Iruka almost missed the insight, even as blurry and confusing as it had been at the end of the meeting with Tsunade.

“You know,” Iruka said to Kakashi, who still hadn’t responded to anything he'd said. He kept his tone conversational, almost casual, as if he weren't fishing, weren't aiming for a reaction, as if he weren't baring something he'd been trying to hide for the better part of six years of his life. "It’s fine to have a reputation for being a little weird when you’re a jounin. But chuunin who jump at shadows? They don’t do so well.”

The first time Iruka hadn’t been able to hide something, he'd been chatting with Izumo and Kotetsu after returning from a mission. He’d only blinked when he felt something slice his right cheek, so sharp it almost hadn’t hurt at all. But he’d startled visibly when something hit him in the shoulder, then gasped when something stabbed his upper arm. Izumo and Kotetsu had assumed Iruka was having a stress reaction to the mission. While they'd never been cruel to him, their regard had shifted after that.

After a long year of working his ass off on gradually less menial missions, Iruka had thought he’d earned a little bit of trust from his fellow chuunin. It had taken only a few weeks for that to all evaporate. When it had happened for the first time on a mission, Iruka had almost gotten a teammate killed, unable to tell that the pain in his leg was from his own muscles being hamstrung rather than just an unexplained pain-echo. He’d been too slow to parry the enemy’s next attack, unable to move his own leg as he needed to. Thankfully Genma had been there.

“I almost got someone killed in the field because of this,” Iruka said, bile rising in his throat at the memory.

Kakashi said something under his breath and pulled his foot away from Iruka’s, as if the contact were suddenly unwanted despite its prophylactic results. It wasn't the reaction Iruka had been hoping for. The haze of muddled thoughts and feelings was almost overwhelming in its negativity.

“You’re what?” Iruka snapped.

“I’m sorry that happened, Iruka-sensei, but it’s not like any of this was my intent.”

Kakashi's tone of voice made him sound just faintly bored. He might have been apologizing for not holding a door, or stepping on Iruka’s foot. He hadn’t even looked up from his book. He didn’t feel apologetic, though. He felt angry, the same buzzing storm that was somehow all encompassing and too diffuse to be blocked away.

“You’re sorry?” Iruka stared at him. “Is that all you’ve got to say about it? I’ve spent how long now, fending off your pain and stress and guilt, trying to keep working when you’re so exhausted I can hardly stand up, much less teach, and you’re just — that’s it?”

Iruka had had to give up his dream of being a field shinobi because of this unknown bloodline limit, because of one night, and one mistake, and nothing he'd known he was signing on for. All Kakashi had to say about it, all he'd said all day so far, was that he was sorry.It was as if Kakashi thought it was a minor inconvenience for Iruka. It even seemed as if Kakashi resented having to apologize, resented Iruka taking any kind of initiative, trying to sort this out so that it wouldn't ruin their lives.

It might have seemed hyperbolic to say this was ruining Iruka's life anyway, but it wasn't too far off.

"I've been considering taking a leave from the Academy recently," Iruka said, keeping his tone conversational. "With you out on so many A and S ranked missions, well," Iruka spread his hands. "It's not really safe for the kids to have me monitoring weapons practice when you're getting hit," he said. Not to mention the emotional and physical load had become more than Iruka could handle, too much to hide anymore.

Kakashi had flinched in there somewhere: not visibly, but his shock was palpable, even as he tried to bury it beneath a layer of artificial calm. He could still feel Kakashi’s anger buzzing faintly beneath everything.

“Even now,” Iruka bit out. “When you finally know what’s going on, you could have the decency not to lie to me."

That seemed to hit a nerve.

“Do you think I wanted this?” Kakashi demanded, finally looking up from his book, setting it down on the table with controlled, careful gestures. “Do you think I wanted to be exposed without ever knowing it? To have a chuunin-senseiknow what I’m feeling at every moment of every day?”

Having Kakashi, of all people, shove his rank and occupation at him as an insult stung more badly than Iruka had ever anticipated, and Iruka did his best to hide the hurt that provoked. Given the look that flickered through Kakashi’s eye, Iruka hadn’t been successful. Iruka's expressions had always been too transparent for his own good. Kakashi didn't need a bond to know what Iruka was feeling: he just needed to pay attention.

Iruka gathered the hurt to himself, let it stir up anger in return.

"Do you think –" Iruka started, and bit his tongue. "You really think I wanted –"

This was so much worse than he'd ever hoped, when he'd first daydreamed of telling Kakashi about their link. It was very nearly as bad as some of the scenarios he'd imagined on nights when he'd become aware of just how alone he really was, how alone he had become.

It looked like there was plenty of room for it to keep getting worse.

“What do you want?” Kakashi snapped. Iruka got another flash of anger and discomfort before Kakashi grabbed his hand and the bond was snuffed out again.

“What?” Iruka demanded, reeling from the sudden aloneness, from the muffled swirls of despair and confusion that had hammered against him before Kakashi had taken his hand. 

“What do you want?” Kakashi repeated. “What, exactly, do you want from me, Iruka-sensei? Why are you telling me all of this?”

His tone was casual. It was studied and callous. Iruka wanted to grab his hand away so he could read Kakashi’s feelings, know what was going on under his mask, but Kakashi’s grip on Iruka’s wrist was hard as steel, unbreakable even for someone much stronger than Iruka, someone willing to do damage to get his way in the moment.

And Iruka had been thinking this over for years, ever since he’d figured out it had to be some kind of link to an active-duty shinobi, even more so since he’d deduced that it was Kakashi. Most of his wants had evaporated in the face of Kakashi’s obvious disinterest. One had grown with time, and blossomed in face of Kakashi's behavior.

“I want you to admit this isn’t just about you!” Iruka snapped. “Do you think I — what — I wantedthis? I liked field work, Kakashi. I was getting good at it, too.”

Kakashi blinked.

“So I was never going to make jounin,” Iruka said. “I know that. So what. I was on track for tokujo after less than a year.”

Kakashi made a little noise that might have been surprise. Iruka glared at him.

“Didn’t know that, huh? I’m just a chuunin Academy instructor, one of those washouts you keep at home so we don’t embarrass Konoha by fucking up in the field, right?”

Kakashi’s expression was shuttered again, flat and unreadable. In that moment Iruka wanted nothing more than to hit him, to provoke some kind of reaction.

“Fuck you,” Iruka spat. “I liked field work. I’m the one who's been stuck at a desk for the last six years because of your goddamn bloodline limit. Stop acting like you’re the only one who matters, here.”

He wrenched his hand from Kakashi’s suddenly slack grasp and stalked into the bedroom Kakashi had insisted they share. If Iruka pushed more energy than usual into his walls, well, he wasn't sure he had much choice other than drugging or jutsu-ing himself to sleep.

Kakashi's thoughts, muffled as they were, remained a baffling whirl of confusion, resentment, and perhaps even a little guilt, and Iruka visualized shoving his head under a pillow and forced himself to sleep through the emotional background noise with the ability gained of six long years of practice.

* * *

The next two days were, frankly, awful. Kakashi insisted on continued physical contact at all times except sleep – Iruka finally put his foot down there – and treated Iruka like some kind of moveable, inconvenient piece of furniture. He was obviously aware of Iruka's presence, and just as obviously determined to ignore him as much as possible. It was infuriating, but Iruka had said his piece: he wasn't going to torture himself by trying all over again when Kakashi so obviously didn't want to hear it. So Iruka allowed himself to be manhandled, dragged Kakashi back to his apartment with a couple of bags for paperwork, and set about trying to get caught up on lesson plans and grading for the first time in more than a year.

On the third day ANBU escorted them to Torture & Interrogation so Iruka could talk to Inoichi about his mental architecture. Inoichi put them in separate rooms, examined Iruka, put Iruka in the Machine, which was entirely unpleasant, and generally acted like a kid at a candy store. It was disconcerting in the extreme. After the fourth hour of testing, Iruka found himself starting to feel some kind of affinity to Kakashi, who felt no surprise, only grim familiarity with all of the hoops T&I had them jump through. In the moments where he had to take down the baffling and muffling walls, Kakashi just felt resigned, more than anything else. The bubbling resentment of the meeting in Tsunade's office had mostly died down, replaced by something Iruka couldn't quite name.

ANBU came back the next day and they ran through all the same tests, this time while the two of them were touching. Then they were told to wait for Tsunade's call.

"You'll be briefed," Inoichi said. He looked distracted, which he had since Iruka had let him poke around at the blocked up doors and windows in the wall Iruka had been building for years, visualizing the structure down to the last brick and piece of suddenly crumbling mortar. The wall hadn't liked Inoichi, Iruka thought, and some parts of it looked alarmingly like the ruins of Iruka's childhood home in the aftermath of the Kyuubi attack, now, holding together through inertia rather than any kind of structural stability. He knew how well that had gone in the real world: he didn't want to see it happen in his own head.

"Thank you, Inoichi-san," Iruka said, after a long pause during which it became apparent that Kakashi wasn't going to say anything at all. They were in public on the way home, so they didn't maintain contact, but Kakashi appeared to have started pushing things down more effectively. Iruka got less of an emotional impression from him than usual. It was everything he had prayed for. Now that he had it, Iruka found, it was just disorienting and strange.

* * *

“Okay, kids,” Tsunade said, the morning after Inoichi's final round of tests. “Here’s what we’ve got.” She set a small folder on the table in front of her. “To summarize: it’s definitely a soulbond. It happens subconsciously, it’s not easily broken without family-specific jutsu that no one ever bothered to write down for Konoha's library, and we haven't found in the remains of the Hatake library yet, and it’s supposed to make both of you more aware of each other and able to draw on each other’s strengths as a complement to your own.”

“Hm,” Kakashi said. Iruka, holding Kakashi’s hand, couldn’t read into that monosyllable. He probably didn’t want to.

“So,” Tsunade continued. “The good news is, it progresses in stages. This one’s only supposed to last a few days, maybe a few weeks.” She looked at Iruka. “Apparently if it lasts longer than that, the emotional load is too high, and the non-Hatake partner collapses. That’s when the bond was usually dissolved formally." She paused. "Of course," she pointed out, after a long pause. "We can't do that."

Kakashi glanced at Iruka. There was no way to tell what he was thinking, so Iruka didn't try.

“Seeing as it’s been six years and Iruka hasn’t collapsed yet,” Tsunade said. “We can be pretty sure that either he won’t,” and she looked at him. “Or else that he’s on the cusp of it.”

Given that Iruka had spent the last six months feeling like he was held together with baling wire and sheer determination, with cobbled together jutsu and perhaps a bit of leftover chewing gum, Iruka was pretty sure where he’d fallen on that spectrum even before Inoichi had started talking him into the idea of destroying his only defenses and started crumbling the mortar holding things together.

“Since I couldn’t hide it from you anymore, Hokage-sama,” Iruka forced himself to say. “I’m going with the latter.”

“What happened when someone collapsed?” Kakashi asked. His fingers had just barely tightened around Iruka’s hand.

“Dissociation,” Tsunade said. “Lack of awareness of who was whom, leading to complete mental breakdown on the parts of both participants." Tsunade locked eyes with Kakashi. "Part of the reason the limit is so secret is that it drove several shinobi insane before and during the warring states period. No one wanted to ally with a clan that drove its lovers to suicide.”

She looked at Iruka, then, and her gaze was without mercy. “Many lovers chose to suicide to save their Hatake partners that fate. Some were murdered by Hatake family members who wished to save the lives of their siblings or children.”

Beside her Shizune looked horrified, and deeply regretful.

Suicide, Iruka thought, and knew it to be no choice at all. If it came to a balance between his life and Kakashi’s, he had no doubt which Tsunade would have to prioritize. Other people could teach, could work the mission desk: no one else could be Sharingan Kakashi.

“How many stages are there?” Kakashi asked. His voice was still perfectly level.

Cold-hearted bastard,Iruka thought. He didn’t let go of Kakashi’s hand, though. He didn't want to know what was going on inside Kakashi's head right now, wasn't sure he could handle any kind of concrete confirmation of how little Kakashi cared for him.

“Either three, or seven, depending on the allusions we found to it in passing,” Tsunade said. “The three-stage model starts where you are now, with involuntary emotional transferral, moves to mutual emotional transferral, and concludes with voluntary control.”

“The seven-stage model?” Kakashi asked. He sounded like he was considering it an academic question. Iruka hated him in that moment, more fiercely than he had ever hated anyone, even Mizuki.

“Recognition of a potential bond-mate first,” Shizune said. “Then involuntary one-sided transferral, involuntary mutual emotional transferral third, then voluntary mutual transferral, involuntary mutual emotional blocking, voluntary control, and something they referred to only as ‘the perfected bond’.”

“All the sources agree that physical contact and emotional openness are essential to the success of the bond,” Tsunade said. “So, Kakashi, you’re off the roster until we get this sorted. No missions. Iruka, no Academy, no mission desk shifts. You’re essentially under house arrest except for visits to Inoichi at T&I. No —“ she held a hand up before Kakashi could even open his mouth. “This is not optional. I can’t ground one of my top jounin indefinitely without the other villages noticing, and I can’t pull Iruka-sensei from the desk indefinitely without every active duty shinobi in the village and all the rest of the desk staff trying to kill me in my bed for the inevitable fuck-ups that will follow." She paused. "I'm honestly not sure which will be worse. Deal with it, gentlemen. Now. Go home and start getting this sorted out.”

“Well,” Iruka said, after they got back to Kakashi’s with the alarmingly slim folder Tsunade had provided.  “We’ve done the ‘sitting around and not talking to each other’ thing and it’s clearly not helping. We've let Inoichi poke around in my head long enough to determine that he can see my walls, but can't tell what you're feeling from inside my brain. What’s up next?”

Kakashi shrugged.

“Sex?” he suggested.  He sounded bored by the prospect; his fingers against Iruka’s wrist didn’t so much as twitch.  “It’s what got us into this mess.”

Iruka closed his eyes, heart clenching.  He’d imagined having sex with Kakashi again, in his weaker moments, but never like this, never as some kind of mechanical, medical exercise.  

“I’m fairly sure that fucking just to get it over with won’t help,” he said. His voice remained steady, which was a blessing.  “If anything, it’s going to make us resent each other more.” That sounded reasonable, logical. “Tsunade did have another idea,” Iruka said. He stood, disentangling himself before Kakashi could respond.  “I’ll be right back.”

Iruka didn’t know Kakashi’s neighborhood well, but there was a liquor store not too far away, close to the next apartment complex over.  He stopped at a grocery store as well, and waved at several parents of former students, smiling and making conversation while hiding the blurring waves of rising dread and worry in the pit of his stomach that were probably coming from Kakashi, but might equally be his own.

“Okay,” Iruka said on his return, setting down groceries and several bottles of sake in the genkan and shrugging off his vest.  “If you’re not going to talk to me sober, we’ll do this the stupid teenager way.”

Kakashi frowned.

“You heard Tsunade,” Iruka continued as he toed off his sandals and untied his hitae-ate.  “You’re not allowed back in the field until we have this sorted. If it drags out long enough, though, she'll absolutely put me back to work at the desk, and you’ll hate going to the mission desk and sitting there with me while people gossip only slightly less than you hate being in the hospital." Iruka smiled, one of his scare-the-kids, all-too-honest smiles. "And trust me, if I go insane and bite it, you’ll like that even less, because you can be damn sure I’ll figure out how to haunt you, and not in a friendly way."

Kakashi blinked at him, but he didn't protest. He felt almost surprised, but it was tinged with something Iruka had learned to call a kind of grudging respect for an opponent. It was all still very fuzzy, blocked by Iruka's wall and Kakashi's jutsu. Whichever one he was trying today was better, Iruka supposed, but it made him feel a bit drunk, as if the world were coming at him at two different speeds. 

Iruka picked up the groceries, walked to the kitchen, put the eggs and other food he'd purchased for a greasy, hangover-curing breakfast away, got two cups, and settled at what had become his seat at the small table, placing one cup across from him at Kakashi’s preferred seat.  

“Face it, Hatake,” Iruka continued. “This is going to suck for you just as much as it sucks for me. We're in it together.”

Kakashi didn’t say anything, but they weren’t touching, so Iruka had a tiny window into his feelings.  There was definitely some kind of grudging respect there.

“Rule one,” Iruka said, when Kakashi stretched a leg out under the table. “No touching.  No blocking this out that way, or with mental walls or jutsu, either. I fucked mine up at T&I yesterday, and it’s a bitch, but if we get plastered enough, it might go both ways.”

“Rule two,” Iruka said. “No calling Guy in.  He’s out there,” Iruka tipped his head toward the front door. "But he's only there so we can get shitfaced without anyone bothering us, not to play arbiter when you want some kind of backup.”  

A little fizzle of surprise went through Iruka, satisfaction hard on its heels. Iruka wondered what about that had surprised Kakashi: that Guy was willing to help, or that Iruka had known them both well enough to ask in the first place.

“Now,” Iruka said, “We have food for a massive hangover breakfast, and enough sake to either get us talking, or black out several people twice our size.”

Kakashi nodded, but didn’t move to get them started.

“All right,” Iruka said.  He poured the first drinks.  “Here’s to the stupidest idea I’ve heard from a Hokage in a really long time.”

Kakashi chuckled, feeling almost amused, and they tipped their drinks back without a word.

Some time later, Iruka was having his doubts about whether this was a good idea. Tsunade did seem to think the answers to life's problems could be found at the bottom of a bottle, he reflected, and look how that had turned out for her. She was in charge of a village that had been attacked by the corpses of its own past Kages, stuck in a job she had never wanted. She seemed to hate nearly every minute of it, except when she was solving a medical problem, or terrorizing her underlings. So, Iruka thought, not every minute of it after all.

"She knows her duty," Kakashi said. He sounded almost reprimanding, and felt half reproving and half amused. The feelings were clearer now, with Iruka's walls crumbling, and Kakashi playing along and keeping the jutsu turned off for now.

"How much of that did I say out loud?" Iruka asked. He must be more drunk than he had thought.

"You mumbled something about Tsunade," Kakashi said. "It was more of a guess."

"Fuck," Iruka said. "This isn't working."

He poured them another drink each anyway. It was better than the alternative, which was admitting that he was going to have to commit suicide to save Kakashi's life, and he'd never get a letter from Naruto again, much less see him pass the chuunin exam and take his place in Konoha's ranks.

“Well,” Kakashi said, putting his cup down on the table. “I suppose you could tell me what happened."  

Kakashi had been sprawled back, leaning casually on his hands. Now he sat up and stretched. Iruka swallowed around a suddenly dry throat at the lean lines of him.

“We had sex,” Iruka said. Tsunade had been clear about that being the catalyst, even if they didn't know why it had latched onto Iruka instead of any of Kakashi's other one-night-stands. There hadn't been that many of them, Iruka knew, but it had felt like a lot at the time. 

“Obviously,” Kakashi drawled. “Why?”

At that, Iruka looked away. Kakashi didn’t appear to be looking at him, but there was no telling what Iruka might give away if he weren't careful. Kakashi didn't have a window into Iruka's emotions, but he didn't appear to need one. Iruka wasn't sure if his expressions were that readable, or if Kakashi were just that paranoid a shinobi. It was, he reflected, probably both.

“The usual reasons,” he said.

Because you were so damn attractive, Iruka didn’t say. Because I had promised myself I would do something stupidly brave when I finally passed the chuunin exam and it took me a long time after that to work up the courage to so much as talk to you.

Kakashi folded himself in half and grabbed at Iruka’s wrist, neatly forcing Iruka to look at him or make his avoidance even more obvious.

"You're breaking the rules," Iruka said, but he didn't pull away.

"Why?" Kakashi asked again. His mask was still up, and it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

“It was a one-night stand,” Iruka said, refusing to answer the question as asked. He needed to distract Kakashi from this line of questioning, he thought blurrily. It must be time to go on the offensive himself. “It’s yourbloodline limit, shouldn’t you be telling me why it all happened? Maybe warning people?”

There was no echo through Iruka’s mind, but that had to have hit home — Kakashi’s expression shifted, gaze going almost predatory.

“So why bother, if I'm such a menace?” Kakashi’s tone was flat, incurious and unreadable due to the soft grip of his hand around Iruka’s wrist.

And just like that, Iruka was done. He was sick of lying, of dancing around each other, of being treated like an inconvenience, like a temporary medical infirmity.

“Because I was stupid, and seventeen, and head over heels in love with you, you absolute asshole!” Iruka yelled, grabbing his hand away from Kakashi’s and stumbling to his feet to move away from Kakashi, putting the bulk of the room between them. “Because I was stupid enough to hope that maybe if I slept with you, you’d at least — I don’t know, remember who I was after that!”

He dropped his voice, hating how vulnerable he sounded, but unable to stop talking now that he’d started.

“I thought — I stupidly, stupidly thought – maybe you might even talk to me once in a while, if it wasn't too horrible.”

He got to the window, wrenched it open, and stood looking out at Konoha in the afternoon rain, bracing his hands on the sill and focusing on pulling up his shattered walls as hard as he could to keep from feeling anything.

“Instead, you forgot about it entirely,” Iruka said, more quietly. “And I got stuck on desk work for the rest of my life because of one stupid choice I didn’t know I was making.”

Behind Iruka's shattered defenses and the fuzzy walls Kakashi had been learning to set up, it was hard to tell what Kakashi was feeling anymore, but it didn’t seem to be anger, just a kind of roiling disbelief, and that old, familiar self-hatred.

“Look,” Iruka said when he felt that. Al the anger drained out of him in one rush, crumbling to dust like a shinobi who had opened the Eighth Gate. “I’m sorry you feel like I’ve invaded your privacy. I really am. But you’re not the only one whose life has been affected by this, okay?” Iruka paused, and then turned, leaning against the bare windowsill, looking down at his hands.

He looked over at Kakashi, who hadn’t moved, hand still wrapped around the air where Iruka's wrist had been. The expression on his face was unreadable, even with the hitae-ate removed, but the strain of self-recrimination was widening, deepening in Iruka's mind.

“I’m sorry, Kakashi-sensei,” Iruka said, feeling Kakashi’s walls begin to falter and not wanting to know any more about what was behind them. “I’ve been an imposition on you again.”

He walked over, sat down on the floor, and offered Kakashi his hand. Kakashi took it as if it were a foreign object, and Iruka settled to remain near him, close enough for contact, but not too close. He closed his eyes, reveling in the feeling of being alone in his head, of having nothing there but himself, the ease of figuring out how he felt about things without layer after layer of Kakashi’s feelings mucking everything up.

Did I really take this for granted, before?Iruka wondered again. Does everyone really take this blessing for granted?

Kakashi turned Iruka’s hand over in his own, tracing the lines of scars on the backs of Iruka’s hands, the tendons under the skin. Then he turned Iruka’s hand over, palm up, and began tracing the scars that motion had revealed as well. He pressed his thumb into the meat of Iruka’s palm just beside a shuriken stab that had healed as a little star of scar tissue. The touch was absent, almost impersonal.

Or perhaps it was for Kakashi: Iruka had to suppress a shiver. It was the closest to a sexual touch he’d felt in more than a year, and the fact that it was Kakashi handling him so gently, that it was Kakashi paying such close attention to his fingers and small hard-earned scars, well, that didn’t help anything.

“Um,” Iruka tried, tongue suddenly glued to the roof of his mouth. Kakashi looked up, thumb still pressed beside the star-pointed scarring on Iruka's palm. “I’d appreciate it if you — didn’t do that.”

Kakashi seemed to notice Iruka’s flushed face, how he was cradling Iruka’s hand in his own, and Iruka saw the faintest hint of a blush pink the tops of Kakashi’s cheeks above the mask. Iruka wanted all over again to reach up and pull the mask down, see how the face he only half remembered seeing had held up over the intervening years. He wanted desperately to know what Kakashi looked like in afternoon sunlight light instead of half-moonlit shadow. Iruka balled his free hand into a fist and looked away instead, unwilling to put anything he was feeling into words. Kakashi didn't feel about Iruka the same way as Iruka did about him. That wasn't going to change just because they'd had what was probably – no, definitely – a medically inadvisable amount of alcohol in the last few hours.

“This —“ Kakashi looked at Iruka again, “— really?” He did it again, pressing his thumb into the meat of Iruka’s palm and stroking upwards, a relaxing, welcoming touch. Iruka shivered and tried to pull his hand away but Kakashi’s grip was too strong.

“Kakashi,” he said. “Please don’t.”

“Mmmm,” Kakashi hummed. His grasp didn't let up.

And then he did it again, watching Iruka carefully. Iruka closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The touch was electric. It made Iruka wish he hadn’t been so stupid, hadn't allowed himself to pine quite so badly over Kakashi. A few drunken fumbles and an on-again off-again thing with Mizuki were the only things that had kept him from almost monk-like chastity since this had all started six years ago, and — Kakashi dragged his thumb up Iruka’s palm again — and that was not helping. Iruka caught his breath.

“I asked you to stop,” he said, trying to put seriousness in his voice, rather than the raspy want that seemed to be creeping in along the edges. “I’m not a new jutsu for you to play with, Hatake-san.”

“But just look at how you respond,” Kakashi said brightly and ran one fingertip up the inside of Iruka’s forearm, the touch light and teasing. Iruka shivered. “Aren’t you curious?”

He made eyes at Iruka, thumb petting absently at Iruka’s palm. It felt so good, and it almost certainly meant nothing to Kakashi other than a few minutes of alleviated boredom. It was too much, all at once, and Iruka went from turned on to simmering with rage in a heartbeat.

It was almost worth it for the look on Kakashi's face when Iruka smacked him across the face with his free hand.

“This isn’t a game, Hatake-san,” Iruka said sharply, pulling at his captive hand. “You don’t get to toy with me just because I’m here.”

“But don’t you want to know?” Kakashi asked, keeping hold of Iruka’s wrist.

“Know what?” Iruka bit out.

Kakashi gestured between the two of them. “Would it be the same, do you think? Or better?”

“It would be just like the last time,” Iruka said. He was sure about that.  

He knew that defeat was clear in his tone, but he was too intoxicated to care. Iruka was tired of this emotional roller-coaster, of this game of give and take, of trying to read what little Kakashi gave him without intruding on his privacy via the bond. If giving Kakashi this much of the truth was his undoing, well, so be it. After days of research by Shizune and even Sakura, after all those hours with Inoichi, Tsunade didn’t have even a single lead on how to go about even detecting the bond, much less deconstructing it, and she wasn’t optimistic. If this was going to be the rest of Iruka’s life, it might as well not be built on lies. It didn't look like it would be a very long life, Iruka thought, but that was no reason to start lying now.

“It would be just like the last time, Kakashi.” Iruka pulled a knee to his chest and wrapped his free arm around it. “It wouldn’t mean anything to you and I’d be left out in the cold again. Except this time I wouldn’t be able to get away from your indifference afterwards.”

Something shifted in Kakashi’s expression. Iruka longed for the clarity of the bond, in that moment, knew he'd have been weak enough to chink the wall and peek through, drunk and desperate as he was.

“You —“ he looked at Iruka, who looked back, feeling entirely exposed.

“Kakashi,” Iruka said. “Will you let go of my hand, please? I’m tired.” Kakashi glanced at their hands, blinked, and then, to Iruka’s surprise, nodded, and let go.

“Come find me if my dreams wake you up,” was all he said. Iruka nodded, and fled.

If Kakashi dreamed that night, Iruka didn't feel it, and nothing Kakashi felt was strong enough to wake him once he'd cast a gentle sleep jutsu on himself. Doing so while drunk was definitely medically contraindicated. Iruka couldn't bring himself to care.

Iruka got up and made a massive hangover breakfast the next morning. When Kakashi woke up, he padded into the kitchen in an ANBU turtleneck and ragged-hemmed sleep pants, and then trailed Iruka through the kitchen to maintain contact. Kakashi's hand on the nape of his neck, their ankles touching under the table made it all seem even more like a horrible parody of domestic life. The casual touches and shared living space made Iruka feel sick to his stomach: it was all so close to and so very far from his teenage dreams. Through it all, Kakashi gave no sign he remembered their conversation the previous night, either Iruka's outbursts or his own pushing the envelope. Iruka supposed that was probably the best he was going to get.

“I’m going to T&I again this morning to meet with Inoichi,” Iruka told Kakashi as they washed dishes side-by-side. Kakashi somehow managed to keep his balance even with one foot hooked around Iruka's ankle, and Iruka hated him for that easy grace, just a little bit. “You don’t have to come, but if you do he’ll be able to test some things more easily.”

Kakashi shrugged.

“If it might help,” he said, and went back to drying a frying pan.

That appeared to be Kakashi's sole focus right now: would doing something help resolve the situation, or would it not. If it fell in the first category, Kakashi didn't seem to have any qualms about trying just about anything. Happiness and physical comfort didn’t seem to be of concern, just obstacles to a solution, and Iruka was pretty sure his own emotional state wasn’t even on whatever map Kakashi was using.

“All right, then.” Iruka got his gear together and pulled his hair up. They walked to T&I in silence, untouching, Iruka vaguely aware of Kakashi’s brooding, tense state the whole way. Whatever jutsu Kakashi was using today made Iruka feel faintly drunk, made everything that wasn't Kakashi's feelings too sharp, jagged-edged and overly bright against a muted mental backdrop that seemed to also mute Iruka's own feelings.

When they got to T&I, Inoichi seated Iruka and Kakashi next to each other, and moved to blindfold Iruka. Before the cloth was looped over his eyes, Iruka was able to see Kakashi glare at the man who tried to blindfold him until he put the cloth down.

"Your funeral," Inoichi said. "No touching. And keep the jutsu down, Kakashi. And your walls, Iruka-sensei, I need you to keep them as far down as you can."

Iruka nodded, the room going somehow brighter behind his closed eyelids. Kakashi was mildly curious, but not apprehensive. That appeared to be a mistake, or perhaps Inoichi had a grudge against Kakashi, because they started the day with pain threshold testing.

“Yes,” Iruka said, when a kunai sliced at Kakashi’s forearm. “Yes,” he repeated, when a match was held to the underside of Kakashi’s other forearm. Each test was slightly less painful than the previous.

“No,” Iruka finally said. “There's nothing.”

There was the buzz of healing chakra, and Iruka felt the wounds and burn marks disappear from his awareness.

“Now,” Inoichi said, “Iruka-sensei, I need you to follow my lead here.” His hands landed on Iruka's shoulders from behind, and Iruka stifled a startled jump. Inoichi's chakra form hovered in Iruka’s mind, intangible but clearly visible. “Visualize the wall between yourself and the sensations, as you did the last time? Let me see it, at its lowest.”

Iruka let the wall materialize in his mind's eye as Inoichi looked on, all too aware of how shoddy it seemed, how slipshod its construction.

“Good,” Inoichi said. “Now I need you to find the most recent layer, and remove it. Just let it dissolve into the air, like steam from a teacup.”

It went against all of Iruka’s developed instincts. He looked at the visualized wall, at how battered it seemed, and felt Inoichi’s presence in his head, patient and unyielding. This would help, Iruka thought. It would get them one step closer to freeing Kakashi, and giving Iruka his own life back.

The top foot of the wall melted like water, flowing down over the wall and puddling in some of the visible cracks, washing away bits of the cement between bricks, stones, sections. Part of the wall seemed almost to wobble under its own weight.

Iruka felt pain flare in the back of his mind, the aches and pains of sustained injury flooding his awareness all at once even as the wall melted.

“Go ahead,” Inoichi said through Iruka’s mouth, then relinquished control. Iruka shook his head, trying to free himself of the sensation of possession.

This time as they went through the steps the pain was stronger.

“Yes,” Iruka said. The pain subsided, step by step, until finally he shook his head. “No,” he admitted. "There's nothing.”

“Again,” Inoichi said, and Iruka didn't startle this time when Inoichi's hand touched the back of his neck and he appeared before Iruka's inner vision, intangible and implacable, demanding. “Iruka, another layer needs to come down.”

Iruka let the clay buttresses that were holding up some of the taller portions of the wall melt into the ground. They didn’t melt into mist or water as the top foot of the wall had. Instead they collapsed in miniature mudslides, each buttress creating a small hole under the foundation of the wall.

“Again,” Inoichi said, “Iruka, if you can.”

Iruka stared at the wall, trying to figure out what the most recent layer was, anymore, what he could remove. There was a bricked-up door, where he had initially allowed some of the impressions through. That had been in the beginning, before things had become too overpowering, too unpredictable to allow even that controlled access, those moments of weakness and curiosity.

This time, the entire door frame collapsed, melting into a watery torrent that washed away the ground beneath the wall. Iruka saw the error too late, as a wide section of the wall began to buckle under its own weight. It fell in slow-motion, crumbling into thin air and leaving nothing between Iruka and Kakashi to block the bond.

Then the world was pain, and someone was screaming.

“Oh,” a voice said. Iruka didn't recognize it. “How interesting.”

The pain repeated, echoing through Iruka’s arm, layer upon layer of ache, then a stabbing gesture, salt in a wound. Iruka scrabbled at the blindfold with his good arm, sobbing when it jarred the arm he knew, intellectually, must be intact.

“Stop,” he begged, and the screaming broke off as he spoke, so that he knew it had been him making that horrible broken noise. “Stop,” he chanted. “Stop, stop, stop.”

Chakra pooled over his arm, and Iruka took a jagged breath and clawed off the blindfold. It felt like they had skinned Kakashi's arms alive, like they had roasted him on a spit. Each injury Kakashi had sustained, each cut, prick, or burn, seemed larger than Iruka remembered them being. When he looked over, the cut he had felt as a slight slice went well into the muscle, nearly to the bone.

“Oh god,” Iruka gasped, and was violently sick. The masked T&I agent was making detailed notes while a medic healed one wound at a time, ever so careful and all too slow.  Iruka wanted nothing more than to leave, to stop hurting, to stop Kakashihurting.

It took very little time, all things considered, for the T&I medic to heal Kakashi’s arm. The whole time, the pain subsided gradually as muscle and skin knit together, as burns receded into the background. Iruka still retched twice more during the process, unsure whether he was sick from the pain or from the knowledge that the pain was his fault. He couldn’t sort his own distress out of the tide of feelings that cascaded over him, stronger than they had ever been before, sharp and immediate and difficult to sort out, but still preferable to the muddy waters of before. Kakashi wasn't using a jutsu. It was confusing, but at least it didn't make Iruka feel any more ill than he already did.

Finally the physical pain receded. Kakashi stepped over and took Iruka's shoulder, fingertips touching the skin of his neck. The relief was immediate.

"Fuck," Iruka gasped, and rubbed at his temples with both hands. "That was terrible. Let's never do that again."

Kakashi actually laughed, low in his throat and almost inaudible. If he hadn't been standing so close to Iruka that the two of them were nearly touching, Iruka didn't think he would have heard it at all.

"Perhaps not," Inoichi said. "I don't believe you have much left in the way of artificially constructed walls, Iruka. I recommend continued physical contact until I can speak with Tsunade."

Kakashi gestured to Iruka to put a hand on his bare cheek, which was the only exposed skin other than his fingertips. When Iruka complied, Kakashi moved his hands swift as dancing, fast as a fight, and body flickered them back to the entrance to his apartment in a flash of leaves. Once inside the heavily-trapped doorway, they both began the now-familiar dance of ensuring contact while removing vests, sandals, and hitae-ate.

Iruka's grasp slipped, once, and he fell into a swirl of worry and fear, guilt and pain so thick he could hardly move. It was only when Kakashi grabbed his hand that Iruka realized he had been feeling Kakashi's emotions in full. He was unable to block anything out at all, to separate himself from Kakashi even the least bit.

"So," Iruka said, trying to fight through the fog that seemed to still be obscuring his thoughts, something like a hangover, if emotions instead of alcohol could leave you wrung out and exhausted, unable to think clearly. "I'm going to die. But I won't take you with me."

Kakashi's expression shifted into something Iruka couldn't read. His grip tightened very slightly.

"I won't haunt you," Iruka promised, because he had threatened to do that, hadn't he. That wouldn't be fair. "You didn't ask for this any more than I did, and I won't let them do that to you again."

Kakashi shook his head, as if Iruka weren't making any sense.

"That?" He asked. "You mean T&I? Iruka, that wasn't worth dying over."

"They cut you to the bone," Iruka insisted. "It hurt. You're still hurting. I won't do that to you again, I won't let them."

He tried to pull away, but Kakashi kept a firm grip on his hand.

"Look," Iruka tried, aiming for a target that had a better chance of hitting. Clearly avoidance of physical pain wasn't going to work. Duty might. "If they do that again, and they heal you wrong, it'll hurt your chances of survival in the field. That's bad for Konoha."

"They know that. They won't heal me wrong," Kakashi said. 

Iruka knew better. Chakra healing might seem like a panacea, but it wasn't the universal cure-all most genin considered it to be. Each time the body built up a little more resistance. That Kakashi was still alive at all was a miracle: to subject him to unnecessary risk was unconscionable.

"We'll wait for Tsunade," Kakashi said. "You're exhausted, come on."

He started to tug Iruka toward the back of the apartment, toward his bedroom. Iruka stared at him, only now realizing that the lights in the apartment were on. They'd gone to T&I in the mid-morning: now that he looked out the windows, it was dark out. That meant they had tortured Kakashi for a full day, not the few moments Iruka had experienced. He bit back a whimper at the idea of how much longer that searing, nerve-deep burn must have lasted, how long Kakashi had endured it because Iruka had walls that were too high, built too strong.

"It's late," Kakashi said. "And unless you want to be forcibly knocked out, I think we can make an exception on the sleeping together thing tonight."

Iruka shook his head, but it was a feeble protest, token at best.

"Fine," he said, and followed Kakashi into his room, trailing after him like a baby duck, imprinted on someone who could keep him safe.

Iruka just wasn't sure he could stand to fall into that vortex again unprotected, no matter how selfish that made him. Kakashi might have smiled, then, but it was hard to say. They stripped nearly to bare skin, and Kakashi wrapped his arms around Iruka's bare chest under the covers. If it weren't for the sick feeling of guilt like a stone in the pit of his stomach, Iruka might have enjoyed it. As it was, he simply tried to fall asleep as quickly as possible. Kakashi was just as warm as he had been the last time, the only time, the first time. The time when Iruka had fallen asleep next to him, and woken alone.

This time, when Iruka woke, Kakashi was watching him closely, one hand planted firmly on Iruka's sternum to maintain contact. It took Iruka a moment to realize that Kakashi's mask was pulled down around his neck, which it hadn't been last night.

"You–" he said, and tried to pull it back up, closing his eyes as if he could unsee what he had already seen.

"It's fine," Kakashi said. "It's all right, Iruka. Open your eyes." He sounded serious. His smile, when Iruka opened his eyes again, was slightly crooked, his teeth alarmingly white, and Iruka felt his stomach flip with frustrated want even as he tried not to stare too obviously.

"I was listening," Kakashi said, and Iruka shook his head, uncomprehending. "When Inoichi coached you through taking the barriers down," Kakashi said, as if that should have been obvious.

"Oh," Iruka said. He wasn't sure what to make of that. He didn't remember exactly what Inoichi had said to him, but it must have been something important. He wasn't awake enough for this conversation, but it didn't seem likely that Kakashi would want to talk about it again if Iruka put it off. He nodded.

"I've been thinking," Kakashi said. "You could have put them up for yourself, but that wasn't all of it, was it?" He gestured at his hand on Iruka's chest. "You've been good about this, but it's not only because you wanted your own head back."

Iruka shook his head.

"It wasn't fair," he said. Had that not been clear to Kakashi? It had seemed so obvious, so right. "Once I knew what was happening, it wasn't fair to know so much about someone else," he paused. "About you."

That didn't explain it, not fully, but Kakashi's smile blossomed into something wonderful.

"I thought so," he said.

And he took his hand away from Iruka's chest. The fall was immediate, the maelstrom vicious and deep. But there was something new there this time, too. Along the well-worn grief and regret, the guilt and pain, the newer resentment and anger, there was something warm and almost welcoming, a sense of appreciation that Iruka had never felt before. It wrapped around him like sheltering wings, like Gaara's sand shell, but soft, somehow, gentle and kind.

Kakashi spoke, and Iruka strained to focus on the words instead of the feelings.

"You were protecting me," Kakashi said. He sounded astonished, he felt like he'd been given a gift. "Iruka, you were trying to keep me safe."

Iruka nodded.

"If they'd known, they could have tracked you," he said. "They could have hurt you. I wasn't going to let that happen."

It had been clear to him immediately that no one could know that he was a portal to another shinobi's emotional or physical wellbeing. It being Kakashi had only made that the more urgent, the need for secrecy more dire.

Kakashi nodded. A calloused hand brushed Iruka's hair back from his face.

"Hang on," he said, and he felt almost tender, in that moment, the contact unable to block the bulk of the emotional transferral. "I'm going to try something."

Iruka had grown accustomed to the blurry, headachy nature of Kakashi's various jutsu. He hadn't expected them to make a difference, but somehow it had hurt to know Kakashi was cutting him off, had made things worse instead of better.

Now, suddenly, things started to become even clearer, the emotions almost, Iruka thought, color-coded, or identifiable as being in someone else's handwriting. The strands from Kakashi started not to blur, but to sharpen, to clarify into groups that were clearly not Iruka's own feelings.

"I'm following Inoichi's instructions," Kakashi said. "He and Tsunade think I may have walled you off with more than just the stolen Yamanaka jutsu I was using. It's worth a try."

"You did," Iruka said. He could feel Kakashi's surprise, nearly shock. "After the first meeting, everything got blurrier." He shook his head, unable to put words to it. "It was different," he said. "Like you'd cast a mirror clone jutsu, and I couldn't find all of you anymore to keep you out. It was confusing." He shook his head, as if that would clear something up. "It just made things worse," he said, and wished he could bite his tongue, because it sounded whiny, like a complaint.

"You didn't say anything," Kakashi said.

"You didn't want me in your head," Iruka replied. Kakashi felt almost betrayed now. "You're not touching me," he pointed out. "I know you're mad at me right now."

"Just mad," Kakashi said. "Not really at you." He brushed a finger down Iruka's cheek. "I need to keep trying this," he said, and exhaled, long and slow. When Iruka opened his eyes, Kakashi's eyes were both closed, an expression of fierce concentration on his face. He made small gestures with one hand, of unbinding, unmaking.

He's unbuilding a wall too, Iruka thought, and wondered what form it had taken in Kakashi's head. Each gesture made the noise louder, but also more focused, like individual voices, a well-rehearsed choir instead of a yelling, heedless  mob.

Finally, Kakashi opened his eyes, and Iruka felt a surge of what felt almost like triumph as the noise level settled to what felt almost like a manageable level.

And then Kakashi put both hands to his head, and the noise erupted into confusion. It was pure chance that Iruka grabbed for him instead of pushing him away, and the contact brought back silence.

They clung to each other, breathing hard, and Iruka didn't dare unwrap his hands from around Kakashi's biceps, not when something had so clearly gone awry. But when Kakashi finally straightened up, Iruka allowed him to pull just a little bit away.

"There," Kakashi said. "Stage three of seven."

Iruka felt his stomach drop.

"You–" he said, and felt that he could put words to his feelings after all. "You idiot," he snapped. "You – you did that on purpose?"

The little Tsunade had been able to find had been clear: Iruka's suicide would only help if they remained in stage two of the seven-step process. Once they achieved what Shizune had called 'involuntary mutual emotional transferral' Iruka's death would only catapult Kakashi further into insanity.

"It's the next step," Kakashi said. "We're in this together, Iruka. I'm not letting anyone else die on my watch."

His expression was fierce and sharp-edged and almost fragile, and Iruka found himself helpless in the face of such obvious determination.

"You're explaining it to Tsunade," he said instead, and pulled Kakashi back down. "I'm not up for any more of that yet," he said. "Stay here?"

If Kakashi found it odd that Iruka was suddenly on board for sharing a bed where before he'd been dead set against it, he didn't comment. Instead he wormed his way into Iruka's arms, pulling and prodding until Iruka was the big spoon and their hands were laced across Kakashi's stomach. It was more intimate than anything else Iruka had ever experienced with a lover despite the cloth under his fingertips, and he closed his eyes against a surge of melancholy.

When Iruka woke again, Kakashi was moving to get up out of the bed.

“Kakashi,” Iruka said, “don’t —“ he grabbed at Kakashi’s ankle with a bare hand. Even the momentary lapse in contact had sent him reeling down a rabbithole of confusion and overpowering emotion. Kakashi frowned, and Iruka looked up at him.

“I know,” Iruka said, “I know you don’t like this.” He looked at his hand around Kakashi’s ankle, and started to flex his fingers to let go. “I’m sorry, I —“ he took a breath. Surely he could stand it for as long as it took Kakashi to walk across the room and back. He’d spent years blocking this out, and now he was unable to handle the prospect of mere moments?

But Kakashi simply sat down and laced his fingers through Iruka’s free hand. His skin felt rough against Iruka's own, but he could still feel echoes of something in the back of his mind.

“It’s like it’s working less,” Iruka said.

“What?” Kakashi sounded worried. Or maybe it was that he felt worried, and only sounded confused, Iruka wasn’t entirely sure.

“Touching,” Iruka said. “It’s — it’s like before just fingertips was enough, and now…” he trailed off, uncertain. He couldstill feel something, even now. Iruka sighed and tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. “I hate when I’m right,” he said to the uncaring architecture. He'd told Inoichi and Tsunade that taking down his walls was a bad idea, and they had insisted anyway.

“You mean —“ there was a note of something that might almost be panic at the edge of Iruka’s mind, and he wondered whose it was.

“Don’t panic,” Iruka said. “Unless that’s me. I don’t usually panic like this, though.” He thought about it. “I get mad. This isn’t mad.”

The panic spiked, and Iruka grabbed at Kakashi's hand to no effect.

“Iruka,” Kakashi said, and put his fingers against Iruka’s cheek. Iruka nuzzled into the touch, which seemed to help.

“See,” Iruka said. “You don’t need to panic. I feel better now.”

“No,” Kakashi said, “Well, you might. But I really don’t think that's it. I don't feel much better.”

Iruka considered that, and dismissed it. “I’d be able to tell,” he said. “Wait,” he said. “We’re still —“ They were still touching. He blinked, and looked at Kakashi. “This isn’t good,” he said.

“Iruka,” Kakashi said, after an instant's hesitation. “I need you to sit up, sit behind me, and put your hands on my shoulders.” Iruka blinked, then nodded. “No matter what happens,” Kakashi continued, “I need you to stay there and not move. Can you do that?”

“I’m not a child,” Iruka groused.

“Promise,” Kakashi insisted, and his voice was all tight focus. He was looking at Iruka like Iruka was the most important thing in the world.

“I promise,” Iruka breathed, and Kakashi pulled them into position and placed Iruka’s hands on his shoulders, so his hands were touching the bare skin exposed by his ANBU-style turtleneck.

Iruka could feel Kakashi’s hands moving and dropped his chin on Kakashi’s shoulder to watch the hand-signs. Pakkun popped into existence a moment later on the bedside table where Kakashi had slammed his hand.

“Hey, boss,” Pakkun said. “Iruka-sensei, hey,” he added. “What’s he doing in here?”

“I need you to get a message to Tsunade,” Kakashi said. “Now, and verbatim.” Iruka sat a little straighter, filled with determination by proxy.

Pakkun nodded, looking between the two of them with big, solemn eyes.

“Dissociation is beginning. Do NOT send ANBU or Hunter nin.”

“That’s all?” Pakkun sounded a little disappointed. He might be worried: it was hard to say under all the wrinkles on his small face.

“Tell her Shizune might have had the right idea," Kakashi added. "She’ll know what I mean.”

Pakkun managed somehow to shrug his shoulders, and set off at a run. Kakashi watched him go, and Iruka flexed his fingers against Kakashi’s shoulders, reveling in the feeling of skin against skin. Kakashi took Iruka's hands and turned to face him. When he laced their fingers together, palm to palm, Iruka gave into the temptation to rest his forearms against Kakashi’s and lean closer.

“Mmmm,” Iruka hummed.

“All right,” Kakashi said, “Iruka.” He pulled their joined hands so that he could tip Iruka’s face to look at him. “Do you trust me?”

Iruka blinked.

“Yes,” he said. He was a little surprised at how right it felt. “Of course.”

It would have been hard to say that a month ago, harder still a week ago. Now, with everything humming between them, there was no way Iruka could be anything but certain.

“Then trust me,” Kakashi said, and pulled Iruka close. The windows were all shuttered, and only a little bit of light trickled in. It was hard to see his face. Wait, Iruka thought. Kakashi's bare face.

“You heard me,” Kakashi asked, pulling Iruka a hair closer, looking into his eyes.

“Mmm,” Iruka said. “Trust you.”

“Yes,” Kakashi said, “I know. But you heard what I said to Pakkun, before. You’re dissociating.”

Iruka nodded. He had heard that. He leaned his head against Kakashi's shoulder, because it was there, and because he could.

“Right,” Kakashi said, as if that settled something. “Before this gets worse.” He looked down at Iruka, and muttered something else under his breath that Iruka didn't catch.

Then Kakashi pulled his shirt off, somehow managing to leave Iruka’s hands on his bare waist. Iruka petted the pale skin absently, admiring the contrast between Kakashi’s pallor and his own tanned hands.

Kakashi shivered, and then placed his own hands on Iruka’s bare waist, holding them there when Iruka would have pulled away.

"Wait," Iruka said, as the realization where this was heading hit him like a wall of wind, like a blow from an Akimichi's fist. "You don't want this."

He'd been clinging to that certainty for years now. He had made it part of the bedrock of his life. Iruka was a teacher, and Iruka was tied into Kakashi's pain, and Kakashi didn't want him. None of them were things Iruka had ever asked for, and none of them were things he could change.

"Are you sure?" Kakashi asked, and Iruka looked at him, puzzled.

But he wasn't sure. There was a faint fizzle in the back of his mind that felt new, unfamiliar, and as if to prove it, Kakashi dropped his hands from Iruka's waist, removing all points of contact for a heartbeat. The faint fizzle built to a roar, and then Kakashi was kissing him, pulling their bare chests flush and wrapping his arms around Iruka’s waist. Kakashi’s hands felt huge splayed against Iruka’s back, hot and almost electric, as if Kakashi's elemental nature were overflowing into Iruka's skin. Iruka moaned into the kiss and tried to get even closer.

"I do want you," Kakashi said. "You can say no. But I think this is our best chance."

Iruka bit back disappointment: there had been a very awkward talk with Shizune about emotional transferral and enhanced physical contact. It wasn't proof that Kakashi wanted him. It was proof that Kakashi wanted to live.

Still.

"Yes," Iruka said. He was probably going to die soon. He might be bringing Kakashi with him, if they couldn't sort this out, and this might save Kakashi's life. Besides, Iruka had been so good, for so long, he deserved this. Or maybe he didn't, but he wanted it anyway, and Kakashi said he wanted it too, and Iruka wasn't strong enough to say no to that.

Letting his eyes glaze over, he just soaked up the feeling of Kakashi’s long, lean body beside his, radiating heat and want into his skin.

Iruka could feel himself becoming hard, and tried to pull away, just a little bit, to avoid embarrassing himself any more. They'd been kissing for a bare instant, it seemed like, but also forever.

“Shh,” Kakashi said, a whisper against Iruka's lips. “Just let me — just relax.” Iruka struggled to pull away, and somehow landed halfway on Kakashi’s lap. Iruka yanked himself away as if he’d been burned. Kakashi was aroused, too.

Well, a strangely clear-headed part of him offered. At least he’s not just playing a one-sided game with you this time.

When Kakashi pulled his hand away from Iruka’s waist, and the last bit of contact was broken, Kakashi’s emotions cascaded onto Iruka full-force, as strong as ever, but somehow clearer than even moments before. Iruka struggled to shove them aside, but he could feel desire there, and affection, and sheer, blood-pounding want, and beneath them all something too complicated to understand. He grabbed for Kakashi’s hand to make it stop, at least make it lessen.

“Kakashi,” he said, breathing heavily, feeling his cock throbbing after the jolt from Kakashi’s own desire. “I don’t understand.”

Kakashi laughed a little bitterly. He didn’t move to touch Iruka again, but he didn't pull away either.

“I want you,” he said. “Is that so hard to believe?” He looked at Iruka. "It goes both ways now," he said. "I know you want me too."

“No,” Iruka said, a little dazed. “I mean, I don’t —" He stopped, unable to put things into words. He clearly wanted Kakashi, but that wasn't what he was denying. "I mean, why? What changed?"

Because this might be Shizune's recommendation, but they had both flat-out rejected it earlier. Something had to have changed, and no matter how foggy he felt, or how much he wanted, Iruka needed to know what it was.

Kakashi sighed, and looked Iruka square in the face. “You know me, Iruka-sensei. You know me better than anyone. And you still —.”

—love you,Iruka thought, a little desperate, but he wasn’t far enough gone to say it. Not now, not when Kakashi had felt it and was giving him this bit of space, of privacy.

“You see the best in people,” Kakashi said, finally. "And I need that.” Iruka felt himself slump a little bit. He was useful. It was better than nothing, but apparently he was the world’s greatest optimist, because he’d somehow managed to convince himself that —

“I don’t just —“ Kakashi made a frustrated noise. He felt uncertain, then determined. Then he was straddling Iruka's lap and he was kissing Iruka so, so gently. He rolled his hips down against Iruka’s, sliding his erection against Iruka’s, and Iruka couldn’t help the moan that pulled from him, or the way his hips bucked up, looking for more.

Kakashi chuckled against his lips, and kissed him a little harder, running his hands across Iruka’s chest and belly. Iruka moaned at the touches, straining for more, vaguely aware that this was really not a good idea, and so, so far beyond caring, not with Kakashi kissing him, touching him, just as good as Iruka had always imagined, not with the feedback loop that their touch seemed to have set up sending him farther and farther into their linked emotions despite the skin-to-skin contact.

“Kakashi,” he gasped, and settled his hands on Kakashi’s hips, pulling him closer and tucking his fingertips beneath Kakashi’s low-slung pants. When he slipped his hands beneath the waistband, it became clear that Kakashi wasn’t wearing anything at all beneath them, and Iruka grabbed handfuls of his ass and groaned. Then, almost hesitantly, he worked a hand around to the front of the pants to untie them and tugged them down, pulling out Kakashi’s erect cock.

Kakashi’s hands were busy at Iruka's waist but Iruka batted them away, putting his hands on Kakashi’s hips and urging him to lean up until Iruka could lick the head of his prick. Kakashi’s hands settled on his shoulders, gripping hard, and the man moaned for the first time, a sound Iruka realized he’d been remembering all wrong. He scooted down a little bit and encouraged Kakashi to press down into his mouth, licking and sucking and making loud, sloppy noises that seemed to echo in the small room.

“Iruka,” Kakashi moaned. “God, Iruka, stop —“ Iruka froze, and Kakashi carded a hand through his hair and bent down to kiss him. “Too good,” he whispered against Iruka’s lips. “I want to —“ he paused, and Iruka could see him swallow. “Can I come inside you?” Kakashi asked, and Iruka just about came, right then, just from the raw want in Kakashi’s voice and in their linked minds, the taste of him in Iruka’s mouth suddenly not what Iruka wanted at all.

“Oh,” Iruka moaned, gripping the base of his dick tight. “Oh, yes. Now. Please.”

“Mmgh,” Kakashi managed, non-verbal as his desire sparked high between them. Then he was flipping them over, settling Iruka in his lap, straddling Kakashi's thighs with his pants off somehow in that gesture.

Genius,Iruka thought fondly, and felt Kakashi's reflected surprise that Iruka meant it honestly, that he didn't intend it with an edge or a bite or a backhanded compliment.

"Get on with it," Iruka said. He felt out of his mind with want. “I want you to —“

Kakashi magicked up a small tube of lubricant from some pocket or drawer Iruka hadn’t been aware of, and then his fingers were on Iruka, stroking his cock with one slick hand while slick fingers pressed gently at him. Iruka pressed back greedily, wanting more, now, frustrated when his body didn’t adjust as quickly as he wanted it to. He leaned in to press kisses to Kakashi’s neck, kiss Kakashi’s mouth, run his hands across Kakashi’s chest, belly, to tease just a little bit, getting close to Kakashi’s cock but not quite touching it, not until Kakashi pulled his finger out with a faint popping noise and growled “Iruka, so help me —“ and Iruka moaned, wanting the touch back, and took Kakashi into hand, stroking him in the same rhythm Kakashi was finger-fucking him.

Kakashi grabbed his hand after a few minutes of the upward spiral, stilling Iruka’s grip.

“Too much,” Kakashi gasped, “Iruka. Soon?” Iruka closed his eyes and concentrated, feeling Kakashi’s fingers slick inside him, and nodded.

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Yeah, okay.” Kakashi slipped his fingers out, and encouraged Iruka to move up.

Kakashi flushed.

"Wait," he said, and reached for a condom, his sheepishness at almost forgetting as clear as day. Iruka thought his heart might burst in that moment with how much he loved Kakashi.

"We don't need it," Iruka said. "If you don't want."

Tsunade had run a full battery of tests on them, and Iruka might have taken advantage of a moment in her office to sneak a look at the files while Tsunade had Kakashi in the hallway for a halfway-private word about family history that Iruka had been just as happy to escape. 

Kakashi looked up at him and Iruka flushed.

"I may have looked at our medical reports when Tsunade left me in her office that one time," he admitted. "We could skip it."

There was something like admiration in the back of Iruka's mind, shoved to the side by what felt like pure desire, and Kakashi dropped the condom and crooked the fingers of his other hand in a move that Iruka felt radiate to the crown of his head and down to the soles of his feet.

"Sex jutsu," Iruka gasped. "Cheating."

Kakashi just kissed him, and pulled his fingers out with a smooth motion that still felt weird, uncomfortable.

“No such thing," Kakashi said, and, oh, Iruka could tell he was lying. That was delightful.

"Sure," Iruka said. "Nice try. I —“ And he broke off into a moan as Kakashi thrust upwards oh-so-slowly. “Faster,” Iruka said, “now.”

Kakashi’s hands gripped tighter at Iruka’s hips, and Iruka shoved down to meet him, feeling the burn of it, the slide, the oddly full feeling that he still associated with Kakashi after all this time. Kakashi had been his first, this way, and no one since had really measured up, despite their first time having sex being only, in retrospect, so-so.

Iruka braced his hands on Kakashi’s shoulders, and began to fuck himself on Kakashi’s cock, moaning and gasping in tandem with Kakashi, who was sitting half-propped up on pillows, who was watching Iruka with a look of transparent longing on his face that made Iruka feel wantedin a way he couldn’t remember ever happening before.

“God,” he bit out. “Kakashi —“ he wrapped a hand around his own cock, and then one of Kakashi’s was there, still slick, moving fast and easy. It was almost a surprise when he came, moaning long and low, tossing his head and trying to grab at Kakashi’s arm, the sheets, anything to ground him. Kakashi fucked him for a moment longer, looking up at him, and Iruka leaned in, bleary and wrung-out to kiss Kakashi again when Kakashi cried out, shuddered in place, and then fell back against the support of the mattress, looking almost boneless. Iruka leaned down to kiss him again, and Kakashi hummed, sweeping some of Iruka’s hair out of his face.

He woke when Kakashi tucked a blanket around the two of them, and not again until the morning sunlight started trickling through the windows.

Iruka woke alone in his own head. He wasn't touching Kakashi at all. It took a long moment for that to sink in, and then Kakashi was shaking his head and flailing a strangely uncoordinated hand in Iruka's general direction.

"Stage four," Kakashi managed, after a moment. "You've got to figure out a barrier seal, something that you can pop up and down. Like the walls around Konoha, maybe," he suggested. "That's mine."

Iruka stared at him.

"We're not going to go crazy," he said, because stage three was the bottleneck, the point at which most Hatake partners had gone mad.

"Not from this," Kakashi said, and what felt like a tendril of wry amusement made its way into Iruka's mind. "We'll have to work on control, but it looks like Shizune was right."

* * *

Tsunade looked like she'd won the lottery when they told her later that day, or like a normal person would look when they won the lottery. Tsunade tended to be full of dread when she won anything, no matter how small, because of her horrible luck.

"Good," she said. "Now get it under control. There are some exercises in one of the scrolls, maybe they'll make sense to you now that you're past the point of going bonkers."

"Don't sugar-coat things," Kakashi said, tone dry. Iruka thought he might be amused, but he couldn't have told you why he thought that. They weren't broadcasting at each other anymore, or at least Kakashi wasn't, not really. Tsunade just stared at him.

"Kid," she said. "I want to retire someday. You kicking the bucket would put a serious wrench in those plans, so don't tell me I'm not taking this seriously."

It was the first time Iruka had heard anyone admit, out loud, that Kakashi was going to be the next Hokage. He wondered for a moment if it was something he was supposed to have heard, and then Shizune clapped him on the shoulder with a bright grin.

"I'm retiring too," Shizune said, and she sounded almost cheerful about it. Tonton made a little inquisitive squeak from down by her ankles. "You too," she confirmed with a little smile, looking down at Tonton. "So we're going to have time to get you up to speed on more of the paperwork, Iruka-sensei, since you're not dying on us either."

"Um," Iruka managed. "Thanks?"

"Don't thank her," Tsuande said. "You think I'm lazy about paperwork? You'll be begging me to come back. Getting this kid to do any of his work is going to be a bitch and a half."

"I am standing right here," Kakashi commented. He didn't sound particularly offended, though, and he managed somehow to send Iruka a trickle of what felt an awful lot like amusement.

The next week was full of meetings with Inoichi and Shizune, neither of whom could sense the bond, but both of whom were clearly fascinated by the whole process. Kakashi had more luck setting up voluntary and malleable barriers than Iruka, perhaps because Iruka's barriers kept trying to be walls that wouldn't come down. Finally he and Inoichi found a visualization that made sense to Iruka: a wall with a row of differently-sized doors and windows that could be opened and closed at will.

"It makes sense," Kakashi said, when they got back to Kakashi's apartment after that session. While physical contact wasn't necessary anymore, it had become habit to walk back there from T&I, and Iruka hadn't broached the topic so long as they were still working on the bond. 

"What makes sense?" Iruka asked. 

Kakashi shrugged. "The difference," he replied. "I use binding and protective seals a lot more often than you do. I'm used to putting them up and down."

Iruka nodded. Kakashi had left things open enough from his end that Iruka could tell there was no pride, no mockery in his voice or in his intent. He was stating a fact: Kakashi went through the Konoha barrier often enough to regard it as functionally permeable at will. Iruka, as someone who remained in Konoha more often than not, saw it as impenetrable, a fortress wall that could not be breached without risk of another invasion like Orochimaru's. It just made sense for Iruka's mind to adapt to the bond in a different way, as far as Kakashi was concerned.

The calm acceptance of this made something loosen in Iruka's chest, and he allowed one of the smaller windows in his walls to open, just a crack, to let that relief and thankfulness get through. Kakashi's smile, when Iruka let him in that way, crinkled the corner of his eye in a way Iruka was coming to be incredibly fond of.

That was the last session with Inoichi. Tsunade sent a message to them later that evening via Cat, who appeared to find Kakashi's predicament inexplicable, if his cautious body language around the two of them was any indication. The ANBU mask didn't reveal anything, as it was intended not to, but he didn't seem unhappy, even if he didn't do more than hand Kakashi the scroll and vanish in a puff of leaves. His body language might have been confusion. Iruka supposed it wasn't often you saw the Copy Ninja dry dishes. 

"It says you're going back to working the desk," Kakashi said, when he'd dried his hands and opened the scroll. "And I've got a B-rank tomorrow. She says not to be late, or she'll –" he frowned. "Well, she's still inventive."

Iruka looked around.

"She'll make you spar with Sakura?" He asked. "Why on earth?"

"She doesn't have good enough control yet," Kakashi said. He winced, as if remembering something. "Given the state of training ground five, I think I'll be on time tomorrow."

Iruka remembered overhearing gossip from the desk about the inexplicable, splintery destruction of whole trees on training ground five, and nodded his agreement.

"Probably easier," he agreed. "Where are they sending you?"

He probably wasn't supposed to know, but it was only a B-rank mission. It was practically training wheels for someone like Kakashi, the kind of thing you could send him on with a genin team in tow. It sounded like he'd be going with some new chuunin, including Shikamaru.

"Guarding an envoy," Kakashi said. "Mostly diplomatic, making nice with the daimyo and his lords on the road back to the capital city. It's been on the books for a while now." He paused. "I think Tsunade was starting to get worried about who to send in my place."

Iruka nodded.

"It's a visibility thing," he translated. "Political maneuvering, and making sure they know you're still in play so the other hidden villages know too."

Kakashi cracked a smile.

"You're going to be good at this," he said, and his approval and pleasure washed over Iruka like a ray of sun after a long day of rain. 

"I hope so," Iruka admitted. It was easier to say things like that when he could tell what Kakashi was thinking. "I have a feeling there's going to be more of a learning curve that Tsunade and Shizune let on, even though I helped with the Sandaime's things." 

Kakashi nodded. He looked like he was trying to put something into words, but it felt inchoate, incomplete, and like he was keeping part of it behind a barrier. Iruka didn't push: Kakashi would let Iruka know what he was thinking about if he wanted to. Besides, it wasn't Iruka's place, not really, not if they were going back to their old lives now. 

"I guess I can get out of your hair," Iruka said, when they had gone back to washing dishes. Kakashi was hovering, a little more solicitous than usual. Some of Iruka's uncertainty must be seeping through. "I mean," he paused, because Kakashi flashed distress at him. "What?" Iruka asked, pausing with his hands up the wrists in soapy water. "I thought you'd want your space back, and if you're going to be out on a mission –" 

Going back to his own apartment had made sense, or at least it had seemed to do so. Kakashi had been surprisingly okay with Iruka remaining in his space while he was present, but shinobi didn't like having strangers in their homes unsupervised. And Iruka had more than half-assumed that when they sorted the bond out they would more or less go their separate ways, had been preparing himself for that. Tsunade's returning them to their old jobs only seemed to reinforce that distinction. That thought hurt. Iruka shoved those windows more firmly closed in his mind, unwilling to let Kakashi see what he was feeling. There was no point being clingy: Kakashi had a life to get back to. 

"If you want to," Kakashi said, and his walls went up all at once, harder and less penetrable than they'd been since the touch of Kakashi's hand had cut Iruka off entirely when this all began in Tsunade's office. 

"I –" Iruka said. "I mean, I just thought –" 

"It's fine," Kakashi said. His tone brooked no argument and they finished the washing up in silence. 

"I'll be going now," Iruka said, all too soon after. Everything he had brought to Kakashi's fit in a mission pack and a satchel, and was pretty much already packed, since Iruka had been trying not to take up any more physical space than he had to. It felt strange to be leaving. 

Kakashi didn't look up from his book, just waved a hand in Iruka's general direction. 

"I hope the mission goes smoothly," Iruka said, feeling foolish even as he said it. A few hours ago he'd have added something about not being late, for fear of Sakura, but that felt wrong now. 

Kakashi nodded, and Iruka made his escape. 

* * *

The mission desk the next morning was an utter mess. Iruka arrived an hour early, and was still sorting out the desk drawers when the room officially opened. It wasn't that hard to put mission grade tags back where they belonged, Iruka thought. They were color-coded, for the Shodaime's sake. The organizing files were out of order, the security jutsu had lapsed on one of the B-rank drawers, and the supply closet, when Iruka went to get another pen, looked like someone had let off a wind jutsu in it. Iruka ran his hands through his hair, and went back to the desk. One thing at a time, he told himself. 

Shizune was the first through the door, and grinned, to all appearances entirely happy to see him. 

"Looking good, Iruka-sensei," she said, and settled into her usual seat at the desk. 

"Babysitting?" Iruka asked. He was already cranky, unable to feel anything from Kakashi but the vaguely chakra-ish static of his walls, and the state of the room was giving him a headache. 

"More or less," Shizune admitted, after a long glance at him. "Tsunade-sama wants to have an eye on you, as a kind of proxy." 

"Well," Iruka said. "I have a headache, no one appears to take organization or security seriously, and Kakashi's walled me off hard enough that I can tell he's alive, and that's about it." He slammed a stack of papers on the table. "You can either go through these, or organize the supply closet. You'd never imagine that lives depend on this paperwork being done properly by the state things are in." 

Shizune blinked, but nodded. She took a deep breath, as if about to speak, then visibly thought better of it. 

"Closet it is," she said, and headed off, away from Iruka's fraying temper. 

Things got better from there: Choji was visibly delighted to see Iruka back at the desk when he came in to pick up a mission scroll for a C-rank, and a stream of Iruka's former students came by over the course of the next couple of days, all when Iruka was on duty. 

It was a pleasant reminder that even if he hadn't chosen being a teacher, the students had chosen him. He might not be a tokujo, and he might not be out on missions, but he wasn't wasting his life entirely, and he was giving something back to Konoha in the process.

Kakashi's mission lasted several days, during which his barrier held impeccably. Iruka could tell he was still alive, but that was about it: nothing else slipped through. 

Shizune overlapped shifts with him on the mission desk for the first three days. Then, apparently satisfied that Iruka was not going to snap under pressure, and that Kakashi's barriers were holding and that Iruka wasn't going to be able to tell her anything else, she went back to whatever she usually did while Hokage-wrangling. Iruka was in the middle of wondering, on the fourth day, whether or not he could accept a grievously poorly filled-out mission report from a team of genin whose jounin sensei was notoriously bad at paperwork himself when he felt something stab into his knee.

Instinct kicked in: Iruka's walls went up, and his face went blank. 

"Thank you," Iruka said, deciding to take the paperwork. "Next time, you'll need to pay more attention to the headings on the forms," he warned. "But this will do for now." 

The genin, who had not been in Iruka's class at the Academy, but who had played with Konohamaru, looked at each other in disbelief. Something sliced Iruka's shoulder, and he settled more firmly in his chair. Reminding himself which sensations belonged to his own body would help, at least a little bit. He knew that much. The genin still looked like someone had replaced him with a poorly-constructed clone. Iruka sighed internally. 

"Unless you'd rather do it all over again now?" He asked, using just enough of his teacher voice to let them know he meant it. 

"No, no," the purple-haired girl squeaked. She grabbed at their payment chits and her teammates trailed off behind her. "ThankyouIruka-sensei," she called out as they all but ran from the room. 

Iruka took a deep breath, grateful that the room was empty. 

"Cat," he said, because he was pretty sure that was who was on duty today: his chakra signature was muffled, but the shape of him to Iruka's chakra pinging was about right. "If you have a moment." It wasn't so much a request as a polite summons, but Iruka wasn't in charge of ANBU. It was always wise to people who could kill you in your sleep and get away with it. 

Cat puffed into appearance before the desk. One look at Iruka's face, and he made a complex set of hand signs that resulted in a sound-muffling jutsu. Iruka nodded his thanks.

"Kakashi's in combat. Tell the Hokage." 

Cat cocked his head to one side, and Iruka found that the question was obvious. 

"I don't know who," he said. "I'm not getting anything but the pain this time. A stab wound to the knee and a slice to the shoulder. It felt like standard kunai, I'm afraid, so you can't narrow it down from the tools." 

Cat froze, as if something Iruka had said surprised him. Then he nodded, un-did the sound jutsu, and disappeared in a flurry of leaves. 

Iruka sighed, and made a mental note to have someone sweep up the leaves. He wasn't going to be doing it: this had the feeling of an opening salvo, and it was likely to get worse before it got better. But Iruka had taught through worse than this, and the desk was organized again, a place for everything and everything in its place. Iruka could hand out the color-coded scrolls without full attention, now, and reserve some of his mind for hiding from the pain. 

Tsunade stormed in soon after, which Iruka supposed he should have expected. She slammed the door shut in the face of a surprised pair of chuunin, who appeared to decide that getting mission scrolls could definitely wait until the Hokage was in less of a mood. 

"Hello, Tsunade-sama," Iruka said, and refused to wince as someone landed a kick just above his left kidney. 

"Tell me," Tsunade said, staring at him intently. 

Iruka shrugged, knowing she could tell his shoulder wasn't working properly despite the lack of actual wound. 

"Close-range knee shots, shoulder slices, and now someone using unarmed taijutsu," he said. "Standard kunai, no shuriken yet, no long-range projectiles." Iruka paused. "It's probably a single combatant," he guessed. "But they're new jounin-level, or high tokujo, and probably taijutsu specialized." 

Tsunade blinked, some of the steam going out of her as she stared at Iruka across the desk. 

"That's a lot of information," she said. She sounded a little surprised. 

"It's not enough," Iruka said, frustrated. "There's nothing distinctive about it, no way to narrow down who trained them." 

Tsunade nodded. 

"You can tell, then," she said. She still sounded surprised, but was choosing to roll with it. 

"Different villages use different shuriken," Iruka said. "They feel different when they impact. Some of the other villages' ANBU, and some missing nin use jagged kunai. Those also feel different." He felt another impact, this time a fist. "They're aiming for kidneys and joints," Iruka said, frustrated. That was generic enough not to be helpful either: standard crippling blows.

"How bad is it?" She asked. Iruka thought about it. 

"Not bad enough for backup," he said. "Kakashi's got a team with him, who are probably defending the envoy. This is a test, I think."

Tsunade nodded. 

"They'll still kill him if they can," she said. Her tone of voice was studied, carefully neutral. Iruka felt his heart seize up inside him at the plain factual statement. 

"That's a risk he always takes," Iruka said, trying to keep his tone even. "That's the life of a shinobi." 

"Hm," Tsunade said. She put a seal on the desk in front of Iruka. "Keep this. If he dies, you summon me immediately. We don't know what the bond will do at this stage." She looked at Iruka, her gaze level and even. "You look like you're taking this well," she said. "I hope you really are." 

Then she walked out, leaving Iruka alone with the most complicated summoning sigil he'd ever seen. It didn't look like Tsunade's brush-strokes, either, which meant it was probably Jiraiya's handiwork. Iruka folded it carefully along the existing crease lines and tucked it in a vest pocket. 

The fight continued and Iruka braced himself for continuing blows and kept doing his job. Miri, a new chuunin, came in a little later to help with the desk, which meant Iruka had to supervise her on top of doing his own work. It was a distraction: he took it gratefully.

Then the pain disappeared, cut off in a half-instant after a staggering hit to the side of his ribs: a shin blow, Iruka cataloged, un-weighted. Then the lack of sensation caught up with him. 

Iruka pulled the seal out in a smooth gesture. 

"I'm afraid you have the desk, Miri-san," he said. He walked out while Miri stared at him, visibly aghast. Iruka locked himself in an empty room. There he, pricked his finger, and summoned Tsunade. 

"I can't feel anything," Iruka said. His voice was steady, his hands weren't shaking. "Not even the buzz of his chakra."

Tsunade's face fell, and she looked older than he'd ever seen before. 

"Thank you for calling me," she said. "We're putting you under guard, and house-arrest, until we know what happened." 

Iruka nodded. 

"I'll see myself there," he offered. "And tell Shizune that Miri is alone at the mission desk. She's still unsteady, and might need backup if there's a rush." He ran through a mental list, aware he was distracting himself. 

"Iruka," Tsunade said. "Go home." 

Iruka went. 

* * *

Iruka cleaned his apartment, sorted his paperwork, and tried to keep busy. From time to time he thought he felt something, anything, but it was hard to say, and he didn't have the heart to take down his own barriers only to discover there really was nothing there. 

In the evening of the next day, someone knocked on Iruka's apartment door. 

"Just a minute," Iruka called, getting to his feet. "I swear, if Tsunade is sending over more paperwork the mission desk screwed up," he started, yanking the door open, and then froze, staring. 

Kakashi stood there, still in dirty mission blacks and a sling.

"You're –" Iruka said. His mind was blank, nothing there but spinning wheels. 

"Not dead," Kakashi confirmed. "May I come in?" 

Iruka stepped back on auto-pilot. Kakashi hadn't been here before, not really. It was a good thing he'd cleaned, he thought, wondering what food he had in the house. 

"Iruka," Kakashi said, and put both hands on the sides of his face. Iruka blinked. "Shit," Kakashi said. "You're in shock." 

Iruka tried to shake his head. 

"I'm fine," he started to say. "You're – I still can't feel anything. I thought you were dead." 

Kakashi pulled Iruka farther into the apartment, and Iruka allowed himself to be led. 

"Just the barriers," Kakashi said. "I'm fine." 

"Don't cut me off like that," Iruka demanded. "I – don't do that, Kakashi." 

"But I was in pain," Kakashi said. He sounded puzzled. "You didn't like that before."

"I don't like being in pain," Iruka agreed. "But I knew you were in pain, and then you shut the door. I thought you'd died."

Kakashi nodded, and something shredded away between them. The pain was bone-deep, a bad break, and so, so welcome, because it was proof that Kakashi was here, that Iruka wasn't hallucinating, or at least was hallucinating competently. 

"You checked in?" Iruka asked. "Tsunade knows you're back?" 

"She yelled at me and sent me over here," Kakashi confirmed. "Come here." 

Iruka allowed himself to be folded into Kakashi's good arm, wrapped around in a cocoon of empathy and understanding, and still, always, that faint thread of guilt that never went away.

We'll have to work on that, Iruka thought, muzzily. It's really not all his fault. 

Kakashi stayed the night, curled up with Iruka in a tangle of limbs that had surprised Iruka the first time. Surely elite shinobi needed their space, slept poorly with others around. Kakashi had just shrugged. 

"I can tell it's you," he said. And maybe that really was enough. Iruka allowed himself to be moved around to Kakashi's satisfaction, mildly surprised when he found himself encircled by Kakashi's arm instead of the other way around. 

* * *

The scariest part of the bond progression, Iruka thought, really should have been something they saw coming. They'd both gotten the list from Shizune, and they both knew that involuntary mutual emotional blocking was the next stage of the bond. That is, it was if you looked at the longer list, the one that Iruka personally thought made a hell of a lot more sense.

It was still incredibly disorienting to look across the table several days later and realize that he was entirely alone in his own head.

Kakashi went still next to him when Iruka froze involuntarily, instantly assessing the situation and threat level, and Iruka could tell when he registered what was going on. He didn't visibly relax, though, which was somehow reassuring.

"It's the next stage," Kakashi said. He sounded far less certain than he had before, like he was reassuring himself in addition to Iruka. "It must be."

Iruka forced himself to relax, one muscle at a time, and saw Kakashi doing the same, though it was far less obvious now that Iruka didn't have a window into his head. Kakashi had taken to leaving some of his surface-level emotions open much of the time, vague impressions of contentment or exasperation that Iruka was able to let wash through him with much more ease than he had in the past.

This utter blankness was just disorienting.

Iruka had not realized the extent to which he was relying on Kakashi's background noise to keep himself grounded, to reassure himself. Without that context, it was hard to say what Kakashi was feeling, how he was going to react to something Iruka said or did. Kakashi's face was still almost entirely a blank slate, even when Iruka could see it, as he could now. 

"It's not that different, I suppose," Kakashi said. "There's something different, but –" he stopped, apparently because of the look on Iruka's face. "What?" He asked. 

"Not that different?" Iruka asked. "It – it's completely different. I can't even tell you're alive. Usually there's the humming, the background noise that tells me you're still there, and," he gestured wildly. "And something else, something that gives me a clue." 

Kakashi blinked, attention focusing. 

"You mean it doesn't always feel like this absence to you," he said. "Even when I have the barrier up, you can feel that." 

Iruka nodded. 

"It's made of chakra, right?" he said. "It feels like a concealing jutsu, the way it shimmers in the air."

Kakashi shook his head. He might have looked surprised, or that might have been Iruka's wishful thinking. 

"I'm starting to think we should have, well," Kakashi stopped. "It feels like a physical barrier to me," Kakashi said. "Like something I could walk up the side of, or run straight into. When you cut me off, the absence feels very much like this, unless you choose to let something through." 

Now it was Iruka's turn to be amazed. 

"I'm –" he paused, gathering his thoughts. "I suppose that makes sense," he said. "It's how we visualize the barriers, after all." He paused. "I didn't think mine was that effective," he admitted. 

Kakashi chuckled, a deep, honestly amused sound. 

"What, you thought Inoichi was praising your mental architecture for fun?" Kakashi demanded. He sounded baffled, or maybe honestly curious, as if he were trying to inject emotion into his voice instead of practiced boredom. "Iruka, I have almost never seen him that impressed, and never at someone who wasn't at least jounin-level. No one in the records Tsunade reviewed ever survived this long, and you did it without knowing what you were doing." 

Kakashi might even have sounded impressed. Or that could have been wishful thinking. 

"But –" Iruka began. Then he stopped himself. "All right," he said. "So how do we get it back?" 

Kakashi paused, then shrugged. 

"No idea," he said. "This one just works itself out over time. Some people never got past it, I think." 

Iruka shuddered. 

"I thought you hated this," Kakashi said. He sounded honestly curious. Iruka figured now was as good a time as any to own up to the truth of things. 

"I hated not having a choice about it," Iruka said. "I hated having to intrude when you didn't want me there." He tugged at the back of his ponytail just to have something to do with his hands. "I don't hate it now."

"You didn't have much of a choice," Kakashi pointed out. "You'd have died."

"That was a choice," Iruka said. "It wasn't a great set of options, but it was still a choice." 

Kakashi looked at him, curious. 

"I wasn't kidding," Iruka said. "Konoha needs you more than me. I've always known that." 

Kakashi shook his head, and Iruka really wished he could have felt something from Kakashi in that moment, to know what lay beneath that flat expression. 

"You're a puzzle, Iruka," Kakashi said. Then, plainly changing the subject, he added: "Tsunade still has me back in the field. Will that be all right?"

Iruka nodded.

"It'll have to be," he said. "Besides, I can't keep letting substitute teachers handle my classes. Shikamaru is just lazy enough to teach them something ahead of schedule to keep them busy, or shadow-tie them all to keep them from running wild, and I think Anko just enjoys scaring them."

Kakashi quirked a smile, visible on his unmasked face, and Iruka grinned back. 

"It's almost as if teaching is a real skill set," Kakashi said, voice very dry, and Iruka found himself laughing. 

* * *

Kakashi took the missions he was given after that, some of them frighteningly high-ranked, and came home either on or off schedule, depending on how badly things went awry. For his part Iruka slept at Kakashi's more nights than not, even when Kakashi was gone. He worked the desk often enough to terrorize the staff into some semblance of order, and taught his Academy classes. When graduation had passed, though, Iruka decided enough was enough. 

"I want field recertification," Iruka said to Tsunade one evening, when he had been wrangled into helping her with paperwork because Shizune's friends were celebrating something or other. Iruka was quite sure this paperwork could have waited, but figured this was all part of Shizune trying to break him in to the tasks she had been hinting about gradually. 

Tsunade nodded. 

"I expected that," she said. "No progress?" 

Iruka shook his head. 

"It's still opaque," he said. He stared down at the stack of folders he was holding, and put it on the desk with a thump. "I can't tell anything, anymore, and I thought I wanted that." He sighed. 

"It is preferable to going bonkers," Tsunade pointed out. 

"Just because something is better than the alternative doesn't make it any good," Iruka countered. "I could always be in worse shape. I could be dead, or invalided out, or taken over by a mind-control jutsu. That doesn't mean I can't pursue something better." 

Tsunade smiled. 

"You're doing better," she said. "I'll set up a few sparring sessions. Once you're over the bruising I'll approve you for fieldwork again." 

Iruka glanced at her, but she was already deeply occupied with the minutiae of filing. 

Tsunade set Iruka up to spar almost exclusively with jounin. In retrospect, that should have been a warning sign. Asuma's ninjutsu was, if not easy to dodge, at least in Iruka's wheelhouse. Guy's taijutsu strained Iruka to the breaking point, and the less said about his several encounters with Kurenai the better. Genjutsu had never been Iruka's strong point, and she held back even less than Guy. The only one he felt he had even a ghost of a chance with was Shizune, and that was only because he knew her well enough to be able to guess where she might hide, and could dodge most of her projectiles. She did him the favor of skipping lethal poison for training, though he often ended up woozy at the end of a session.

Iruka spent a week or so on rotation between the four of them, training with Shizune or with whoever else was in town, and wondered how Tsunade had managed to convince them to spend time on him, when he was so obviously losing out in their matches. 

Iruka was sitting at Kakashi's kotetsu with an ice-pack held to the back of his head when Kakashi returned from a mission, only mildly mudstained and hardly bloody at all. His expression brightened when he saw Iruka. 

"Guy tells me you've been improving," Kakashi said, in place of a more traditional greeting. 

Iruka blinked, but he'd become accustomed to Kakashi picking up conversations in the middle, as if pleasantries took too much time, or as if conversations never really stopped, just paused while he was in the field. Then Iruka removed the ice pack, trying not to wince. 

"I've got a knot on the back of my head that would argue otherwise," he said, trying not to move too much. His vision wasn't blurred anymore, but things still had a tendency to double if he shifted his head too quickly. 

Kakashi flapped a hand dismissively, dropping his vest and hitae-ate on their hooks and toeing off his sandals. His hair was matted with what looked like dirt, but might equally have been blood. Iruka would have to check, he supposed: Kakashi was all too cavalier about minor injuries. 

"That just means he was taking you seriously," Kakashi said. "He doesn't go for headshots with genin or chuunin." He stepped into the apartment, and headed for the kitchen. "Tea?" Kakashi asked, as if Iruka's silence were strange. 

"Kakashi," Iruka said. "That can't be right. I'm a chuunin." 

Kakashi paused and looked at him, frowning. 

"Not really," he said. "I mean, you haven't tested out yet, but –" he stared at Iruka, expression searching. Then he came over and settled cross-legged facing Iruka. His casual grace still made Iruka ache a little, even knowing he was allowed to watch, to want, to touch. 

"Iruka," he said. "You're not a chuunin." 

Only the pain radiating from the back of his skull stopped Iruka from shaking his head in denial. 

"I really am," he said. "It took me long enough to pass the exam, I think I'd know." 

Kakashi stared at him. 

"You think you're never going to make rank," he said. He sounded surprised. "But, Iruka, you already have. You'd already be tokujou if they had a category for the things you can do, and I think Inoichi would hire you in a heartbeat. Only Tsunade's insistence has kept him off your back, and he'd promote you before you could blink. Between your mental architecture and your teaching experience, it's all she can do to keep you from being seconded to T&I to teach ANBU to resist interrogation." 

Iruka stared. 

"What?" He demanded. 

Kakashi shrugged. 

"I thought she'd told you," he said. "It's not like the Yamanaka are sharing their mental strongholds with other clans, you know? The way you worked things up would work for anyone, and it's not family specific, so it'd be teachable." 

Iruka closed his eyes. 

"Then why's she making me spar with jounin?" Iruka demanded. 

Kakashi laughed. 

"Probably because she's got a mean streak," he guessed. "Or because she thinks it's funny, or thinks you need the reassurance." He paused. "Probably all of the above," he said. "Plus I think Shizune has a betting pool going on when you're going to beat Asuma."

"You think what?" Iruka demanded. 

"I know," Kakashi said. "But I'm not allowed to tell you who's bet on when, so don't ask." 

Iruka sighed. 

"I'm so glad you're amused," he said, and put the ice back on the lump on the back of his head. "It's good to know I serve some higher purpose." 

Kakashi cocked his head to one side, looking alarmingly like one of his nin dogs in that moment. Iruka fought the urge to fidget, feeling like he was being examined 

"You mean that," he said. He sounded like it was a surprise. His fingers flickered for a moment, and then he huffed in frustration. "Nothing," he said, and gestured vaguely at the air. Iruka knew he was referring to the bond, to the way they were cut off from each other. 

Iruka gave a tiny, almost invisible shrug. 

"You do more good than I think you know," Kakashi said. "Do you think Tsuande trusts just anyone to ride herd on who gets assigned missions? The councillors have a cat on the regular about all kinds of things, but you're never one of them." He paused. "Not to mention the access Shizune gives you to files. That's eyes only, and I doubt she'd let me in at this point." 

Iruka took the ice off the back of his head again. 

"You're going to need to –" he started. It was the first time he'd acknowledged the unspoken truth: that Kakashi was the next Hokage, waiting only until Tsunade was ready to retire, until there were enough other jounin trained up in the field that Kakashi could step back from missions. 

"Have someone who knows those files," Kakashi finished for him. "You."

Iruka had known that Shizune was thinking of him as a transitional player, someone to help make Kakashi get work done. He somehow hadn't realized she thought he would be taking over quite so much. 

"My head hurts too much for this," he said, trying to stave off the conversation. It was almost true. 

Kakashi's expression softened. It looked almost gentle. 

"Guy really does think you're improving," Kakashi said. "And Asuma is thinking about re-tipping his senbon, but he's not going to warn you in advance, so be careful." 

Iruka groaned. 

"Great," he said. "Next you'll tell me Kurenai's been holding back, too." 

Kakashi just shrugged. 

"She's pretty convinced you're hopeless," he admitted. Iruka closed his eyes. "But she's pretty sure Asuma's hopeless, too," Kakashi continued. "And she's really sure Guy is going to get himself killed through sheer bullheadedness one of these days," he said. "So you're in good company." 

Iruka let out a breath, and put the ice back on his head. 

"Come on," Kakashi said. "Have you eaten?" 

Iruka's stomach churned at the thought of food. 

"No," he said. "And I'm not going to." 

Kakashi shrugged. 

"Fair enough," he said. He even ate in the kitchen, so Iruka wouldn't have to smell anything that would turn his stomach any worse, which Iruka took as an indication that Kakashi, too, had received at least one goose-egg like this from Guy in the probably-distant past, and remembered it keenly. 

* * *

Iruka was sent out on his first mission not long after that: routine border patrol and liaison-meeting with shinobi from Suna on their borders. Temari looked surprised to see him, but not terribly much so. 

"Gaara sends his regards," she said to Iruka as the two groups were about to split up. "If you can pass them on to Naruto, he'd appreciate it." 

Iruka nodded. He wasn't quite sure if he could, but Tsunade would be interested. 

"If I can," he said. "He's doing well, your brother?" 

Gaara had been so angry, so fragile beneath his defenses when he came for the chuunin exam in Konoha. Deadly, for a certainty, but almost lost in his own hatred and fear. 

Temari's smile was breathtaking. 

"Very well," she said. Iruka nodded. 

"I'm glad to hear it," he said. "I'll do my best to pass on his message." 

The jounin commander whistled then, and Iruka nodded at Temari before peeling off to follow the Konoha contingent back out of the desert. 

That mission was unremarkable, as as the next. It was the third where something went awry, and Iruka had to carry the team's medic, a young woman called Aoiko, home on his back, bleeding from a wound too deep for any of the rest of them to heal with their meager control of chakra. Iruka ran until his legs felt like they wouldn't carry him anymore, and then kept going. He wished desperately for a summons, for someone on their team to have long-distance jutsu to call out a medical team, but it had been a routine supply-depot check. There had been no reason to expect missing nin to have taken up residence there, much less for one of them to use a mirror-jutsu and the other to go after their medic before any of the taijutsu or ninjutsu users who were trying to protect her. 

Iruka arrived in Konoha on his last legs, and was hospitalized for chakra exhaustion. 

"I just ran," he said, baffled. "I'm only tired." 

"You tapped into your chakra system to achieve unnatural speed and stamina, Iruka-sensei," Sakura said. "You're not getting up for at least two days, and don't let Kakashi-sensei tell you any differently." 

"Aoiko-san," Iruka asked. 

"Will be fine," Sakura said. "She won't even lose the arm, you got her here so fast." She looked at Iruka, and looked older than he knew her to be, and somehow wiser. "You did a good job," she said. "Rest now, Iruka-sensei." 

When Iruka woke, Kakashi was sitting in the chair next to his bed and staring, unseeing, at one of Jiraiya's particularly awful novels. Iruka could tell he wasn't reading it. 

"I'm fine," Iruka rasped. His body felt leaden, but that would be the chakra fatigue, and he would recover. "I wasn't going to let her die." 

Kakashi looked at him, and Iruka wished they were home, so he could see all of Kakashi's face, read his expression. 

"Of course not," he said. He put the book down, and flashed his chakra, bright and demanding. A medic came running almost immediately. "Does he need to stay here?" Kakashi asked, when the medic skidded to a halt in the doorway, obviously flummoxed at seeing Sharingan Kakashi sitting in the hospital when he wasn't all but chained to the bed. 

"I –" the medic said. "I'm not sure. I don't think so? I'll go check." And he ran off. 

Sakura came by soon after, made some disparaging noises about Kakashi's chakra levels, and pronounced Iruka safe to go home. 

"If you behave yourself, Iruka-sensei," she said. "And if you make Kakashi-sensei behave, too. He's more tired than he's letting on." 

Iruka smiled. 

"I'm not sure I can make any promises about Kakashi," he said, and marveled at how natural it felt to say his name now. "But I'll rest up, Sakura-chan." 

Iruka slept most of the next couple of days, building up reserves he hadn't known he was able to tap, and Kakashi was an alarmingly attentive nursemaid. 

"You should be out," Iruka protested the first afternoon. "You're busy." 

"It's fine," Kakashi said. "Things are slow." 

Things were most decidedly not slow, but Iruka was too tired to argue the point. He fell back asleep, and when he woke, it was dark, and Kakashi was curled up in bed next to him, his breathing slow and even, his chakra humming in the back of Iruka's mind almost like the barrier had done. Iruka visualized his wall, carefully going over it as he hadn't had time to since coming back from the mission, and then, as a test, levered open a window, just a bit, to let out some of the contentment he was feeling. 

Kakashi stirred, and Iruka had a moment of hope, but he just stretched a little, and went back to sleep. 

Iruka fell back asleep soon after. When he woke, Kakashi was watching him carefully.

"You're not in a bad mood," Kakashi said. He sounded contemplative. "I would be, if I were in your place." 

Iruka stretched. 

"I didn't fuck up," he said. "Things go sideways sometimes. You see that, working the mission desk. Maybe I could have stopped Aoiko being hurt, and hopefully next time I'll do better, but she's okay." He shrugged, and nestled back into the sheets. The day was going to be a warm one, but the sun wasn't through the windows yet. Kakashi felt surprised. 

Iruka sat straight up. He could tell again – Kakashi felt surprised, felt it from the inside, and Iruka was feeling it too. 

"You're surprised," he said. 

Kakashi blinked, and Iruka pushed a little, building a bit of a feedback loop, letting Kakashi see some of how excited he was about the connection coming back. Iruka could see the moment he opened the windows wide enough, because Kakashi's whole face lit up like a child who had just mastered a new jutsu. 

"You're back," Kakashi said. It didn't make any sense, and it made perfect sense. Iruka reeled him in and kissed him, reveling in the feelings that ran back and forth between the two of them in the process. 

* * *

Iruka was cleared when they finally went into the hospital the next day, but Tsunade benched him. 

"I'm not putting both of you out at once," she said. "Not until we have a better handle on things. You'll take it in turns, if need be. Don't make that face at me, kid," she said to Kakashi. "I'm not having you get yourself killed because you freak out over Iruka-sensei getting hurt, or having Iruka-sensei lose a leg because he thinks the pain is yours rather than his own. "

She'd definitely done her homework on Iruka's mission history, that was for sure. 

But even on rotation, there was more than enough to keep Iruka busy. He and Kakashi managed to work out a way for Iruka to keep receiving muted emotional feedback, without the pain. That made him less antsy even when things went sideways, and they seemed to go sideways more often than not, with all the movement Akatsuki was undertaking. 

"You look better," Asuma said, when Iruka next sparred with him. 

"Bed rest does wonders," Iruka said, because there was no way to explain that he was feeling Kakashi's calm and contentment, not without endangering them both. There might be rumors about the two of them, but they mostly had to do with their relationship, and speculation about how long they had hidden it, rather than anything about a previously-unsuspected soulbond. 

"Sure," Asuma said. Today, it turned out, was the day he broke out the tainted senbon. Iruka dodged all but one, but that was enough to paralyze him for a full four minutes. 

And because Asuma was both an asshole and a soft touch, Kurenai showed up while Iruka was paralyzed. 

"Well, shit," he said when she walked toward him. "I don't suppose you're here to say hello." 

Kurenai grinned. The smile she turned on Asuma was softer, and Iruka wondered how many people saw this aspect of the two of them: not many, if the rumor mill was to be believed. 

"That depends on what you mean by hello," she said. 

Then the strangest thing happened: Iruka saw her cast the genjutsu. It was as if some aspect of his mind had twinned, and he was able to observe her effect even as it mostly took hold of him. He blinked, and watched carefully as she wove a net around him, altering his perception of the training ground. Through it all, Kakashi's emotions fluctuated in the back of his head, and Iruka clung to them, wondering in a small corner of his mind whether that was the difference, whether the bond was making him able to resist even this much. 

Kurenai walked a full circle around him while an image of her stood in place. Asuma and Kurenai chatted about their former students, all of whom had passed the chuunin exam by this point, and Iruka waited out the paralysis, wondering what effect the genjutsu would have on him.

Finally the poison wore off, the pins and needles heralding the return of blood flow to Iruka's limbs. 

"Well," he said. "That was less unpleasant than it could have been." 

"Don't be so sure," Kurenai said. She was still standing by Asuma, but she was also growing out of a tree, like some kind of bizarre mokuton jutsu gone backwards. Iruka flinched, then stopped himself. Remember, he told himself. Genjutsu works through your chakra pathways. Stop the pathways and stop the jutsu. 

The tree-Kurenai was reaching out to strangle him, and Iruka closed his eyes, letting the hands reach his neck and hold on. He grasped onto the feeling of Kakashi in the back of his mind, flashed reassurance through a window, and then stopped his chakra dead. He held it as long as he could manage, then opened his eyes again. 

There was no Kurenai in the tree. There were no hands around his throat. The real Kurenai, standing next to Asuma, looked shocked. 

"You," she said. "Iruka-sensei, how did you do that?" 

Iruka leaned down to rub the tingling out of his shins. The poison from Asuma's senbon was still working its way out through his system. 

"I stopped my chakra," he said. 

She stared at him. 

"You could tell when you were under," she said. "You've never done that before." 

Iruka shrugged. He was pretty sure it was because of the link to Kakashi, but there was no way to tell her that, no way to explain without putting Kakashi at risk, without making them both targets when they left Konoha. It would eventually get out, Iruka was sure, but he was hoping to keep a lid on things until after Kakashi's confirmation as Hokage. 

Asuma grinned, and slapped Iruka on the shoulder. It burned, spreading waves of sensation outwards from the point of contact as Iruka's nerves re-learned how to work. 

"Nice job, Iruka-sensei," he said, and took a drag on his ever-present cigarette. "Shizune will be pleased." 

Iruka nodded. Kurenai still looked shocked, and Iruka was beginning to feel the same way. He had been terrible at genjutsu since childhood. It had been a bedrock of his existence, that he was easily caught and unable to extricate himself, that he was always the first to fail when casting and the last to succeed when resisting. This, though, might change everything. 

"Thank you, Kurenai-sensei," Iruka said. "That was quite a challenge." 

"I'd hope so," Asuma laughed. "She wasn't going easy on you." 

Kurenai might have looked sour, if she were someone else, but her good humor showed through. 

"It was a surprise," she said. "You've not noticed me casting before, Iruka-sensei." 

"Must be the practice," Iruka offered, knowing it was a feeble excuse even as he spoke. 

"Sure," Asuma said. "You'll tell us when you need to, Iruka-sensei. Tell Kakashi he was half-right," he added, as they turned to leave the training ground. "Shizune will be pleased, too," he said. "I didn't think you'd dodge that many of them."

Iruka laughed, and when Kakashi felt inquisitive, Iruka let a little satisfaction seep through, a sense of a job well done. It was getting easier and easier to communicate, now, the more accustomed Iruka was to the process, to having Kakashi always in the back of his head. It didn't feel like an imposition anymore, but more like a friendly companion, someone in the same room with whom he could pick up a conversation when he felt like it. 

Iruka dropped by the Hokage's office on his way home, and Tsunade and Shizune looked like they were just barely resisting the urge to send Iruka to T&I for more testing. 

"I don't know what it was," Iruka admitted. He described the feeling of twinning, and of being out of control of his own body, of watching his mind fall under the genjutsu while being separate from it. "I don't want to count on it," Iruka added. 

Tsunade nodded, and made a few notes. 

"We'll be testing it," she said. "If you can resist Kurenai, you might be able to resist Itachi, and if it goes both ways, it would keep Kakashi safer, too." 

That was a sobering thought. Itachi was one of the most dangerous members of Akatsuki for his mastery of the Sharingan. For Iruka to potentially be able to resist him was staggeringly strange. 

Shizune smiled at him. 

"We won't do anything until Kakashi gets back," she said. "But, while you're here, Iruka-sensei," she added, and pushed a stack of paperwork across the table at him. "We're running the tokubetsu jounin tests in a week. You should apply." 

The paperwork was already filled out. Iruka signed, and signed, and marked the seal with his chakra signature, and felt like he was in some kind of strange dream. He had resisted a genjutsu cast by one of Konoha's most accomplished practitioners, and now he was being asked to test to a higher rank. 

He shook his head, and pushed the stack back at Tsunade. 

"There," he said. "You were right about the ninjutsu specialization." 

They'd clearly had someone observing his training, because he was listed as a mid-range ninjustu user, specializing in detection and evasion, prediction and non-lethal restraint. Looking at the papers, Iruka saw someone much more impressive than he knew himself to be, but that wasn't worth arguing over. Lots of people tried for tokujo and failed: it wouldn't be public, and no one would mock him for it, or at least not meanly. 

Kakashi's mission was a long-term one, to the far borders of Fire Country, and Iruka went back to his own apartment that night and cleaned out his fridge, wondering when the last time he'd gone grocery shopping for his own studio apartment had been. Judging by the state of the life-forms in his refrigerator, it had been a long time. 

Iruka's sheets smelled musty, and he curled up in them anyway, willing himself to sleep. Kakashi felt distracted, but not in a dangerous way: he was paying attention to something, but didn't expect it to become violent. Perhaps the new chuunin he was traveling with were being particularly entertaining, or perhaps they were engaged in some kind of diplomacy that Kakashi was finding uncharacteristically interesting. Iruka dropped off wondering which was which, letting the soothing wash of Kakashi's calm wash him into sleep. 

* * *

The tokubetsu jounin exam was held before Kakashi's return. Iruka fought several jounin, including two in ANBU masks, and had to concede nearly every battle, whether genjutsu, ninjutsu, or taijutsu, by a fair margin. He was pretty sure one of the ANBU was Guy, but there was no way to be certain. 

The next day, Iruka received an urgent summons from the Hokage. He skidded into her office, hair still loose around his shoulders, and stopped dead when he saw the two other people standing before her desk in their best blacks. The councillors were sitting on her sofa, their hands folded in their laps

"Congratulations," Tsunade said, and gave Iruka a very unimpressed look. "You've all passed the exam." 

Iruka stared. 

"There must be some mistake," he said. The councillors looked up and glared at him. "Tsunade-sama," Iruka tacked on. "I can't possibly have passed." 

Shizune handed each of them a scroll, and a small chakra-infused token. 

"No mistake," Tsunade said. She sounded eerily cheerful. "You all proved that you know your limits, and that you are capable of excelling under intense pressure." 

She continued with what Iruka privately thought of as jargon about the Will of Fire, which he paid half-attention to, unable to get over his surprise. After the ceremony, at which the Councillors continued to look distinctly unimpressed by Iruka, Shizune pulled Iruka aside. 

"Congratulations, Iruka-sensei," she said. "Though I suppose we'll have to stop calling you that." 

Iruka felt like today must be some kind of dream. Perhaps he had been caught in a jutsu during the exam, and this was all part of some kind of time-warping test. It would make more sense than the idea that he was actually going to be a tokujo now, after so many years of having given up on it. 

"I – what?" Iruka asked. 

"You can't possibly expect to continue to teach full-time," Shizune said. "You manage your time admirably, Iruka, but you'll have to keep training if you're going to pass the jounin exams." 

Iruka stared. 

"I'm not -" he said. "I mean, those tests aren't for –"

"You'll have to focus on your specializations eventually," Shizune said, frowning. "The Hokage's assistant is always a jonin."

Iruka felt a quiet wash of emotional reassurance aimed at him. It was tinged with Kakashi's mild flavor of no-immediate-physical-danger worry. His dismay must be bleeding through to Kakashi. He tamped down on that section of his barriers, sent back a pulse of reassurance.

"Jounin was never in the books for me," Iruka argued. "I don't think anyone has ever even made tokujo before who made chuunin so late."

Iruka knew that the age at which you passed the chunin exam wasn't a surefire prediction of future ranking, but it did correlate closely to achievement. People who had needed to try multiple times to pass, as Iruka had, didn't often advance farther in rank. Iruka had been surprised enough to have passed the tokubetsu-jounin exam.

Shizune shrugged.

"It's not impossible," she said. "And I wouldn't suggest if Tsunade wasn't sure you had it in you. You'll need to focus. Ninjutsu, she thinks, specifically sensory types. Maybe traps, as well, or triggered jutsu."

Iruka blinked.

"You really think I could –" he said. "You're not just saying this to be kind."

"I wouldn't put Kakashi or Konoha in danger with a sub-par second," Shizune said reprovingly. "Neither would Tsunade."

Iruka nodded. 

"Of course, Shizune-san," he said. "It's all just very strange at the moment." 

Iruka went back to Kakashi's apartment that night, finding that the familiar scents and shapes of things was soothing. He woke in the middle of the night when Kakashi returned, more aware of emotional proximity, the slight rise in Kakashi's aches and pains, than of any kind of sound. 

"Congratulations," Kakashi said as he slipped into bed next to Iruka. He didn't sound or feel the least bit surprised, just proud, almost possessively so.

"You knew," Iruka accused. He rolled over to face Kakashi.

"Which part?" Kakashi asked. He seemed a little sheepish, and Iruka made a conscious effort to batten down his exasperation. 

"Good question," Iruka answered. "You tell me." 

"Tsunade told me you'd be testing," Kakashi admitted. "I knew you'd pass." 

He was telling the absolute truth, confidence and certainty bleeding through in waves. There didn't seem to be any doubt in him at all that Iruka could achieve things that had seemed impossible years, even months ago. 

Iruka leaned over and kissed him. If that ended up being a sufficient distraction to shift the conversation away from Iruka's new rank, well, Iruka had always been an effective multi-tasker. 

Tsunade sent them both to T&I the next day for more testing. Iruka could escape a genjutsu approximately eighty percent of the time; Kakashi managed it every time without fail, except when Iruka's walls were up fully. 

"Fascinating," Inoichi said. He looked very much like he wanted to stick them both in the Machine and start poking around. Kakashi felt bored and also mildly resentful, the latter a more bitter feeling than Iruka was accustomed to feeling from him. He made a note to ask Kakashi about it later. 

"Are we free to go, Inoichi-san?" Iruka finally asked, when they had been sitting there watching him peruse hand-written test notes for a full minute. 

Inoichi looked up. He seemed almost surprised to see them both still there. Kakashi was outwardly calm, but Iruka thought that left to his own devices he would have left by now, which might explain why Inoichi was ignoring them. 

"Oh," he said. "Yes, of course. Good to see you, Iruka-sensei." 

And he turned back to his papers. 

The conclusion, when they sat down with Tsunade, was that the bond allowed them a kind of life-line to the outside world, a stable point of reference. So long as they kept the emotional connection open while one or both of them was on missions, it would be fine. 

"I'm not sending you out after Itachi," Tsunade warned. "And if ever you do go, you'll go with Guy. He's leaving us alone, and I'm not willing to poke that bear right now. We've got enough on our plate." 

"He's also significantly more skilled than Kurenai-san," Shizune put in, which was more or less what Iruka had been worrying about. 

Kakashi shrugged. He felt almost curious, as if he thought running into Itachi would be interesting, rather than terrifying. Iruka swatted him on the side of the head. 

"It would not be fun," he chided Kakashi. "It would be life-threatening. Those are really not the same thing." 

Kakashi radiated amusement. Tsunade and Shizune were silent for a moment, and then Tsunade laughed. 

"He's got you on that one," Tsunade said. Shizune looked as if she were trying very hard to maintain the appearance of dignity, and only managing it by the skin of her teeth.  

"It's like he doesn't realize I worry," Iruka said, confidingly. He sent a little pulse of affection Kakashi's way to cut the sting, though. Kakashi might look bored much of the time, but six years of feeling everything and these last several weeks had left Iruka depressingly aware of how fragile and tenuous Kakashi's emotional state really was. Sometimes it seemed like duty and adrenaline had been the only thing keeping him going, and a grey, overwhelming survivor's guilt that muted and colored almost everything in Kakashi's life. 

"Well," Tsunade said. "You won't have to worry this time. Since you passed the exam, we're sending the two of you out together, with Okei and Aoiko. Think of it like training wheels."

Iruka thought about the balance of that team. Kakashi, who was all-around strong, but best at ninjutsu. Iruka himself, who was an avoidant mid-range ninjutsu user. Okei was mostly taijutsu, though nowhere near as skilled as Guy. Aoiko had passed the test on long-range genjutsu and some applications of medical theory. 

"It's a test," Iruka said. "You want to see who you can bring out of the woodwork, right?" 

A team that green would be a beacon to any missing nin who might be tempted to interfere in Konoha's defenses. Iruka wasn't sure how he felt about being part of the bait, this time: no better than he felt about Kakashi being the bait. Not much worse, though, either. 

Shizune looked at Tsunade, who nodded permission. 

"We need to find out who's been responsible for a string of murders," Shizune said. "They've been torturing people to death, leaving them pinned in place like insects." 

Iruka had read the reports, some of them. He paled, and Kakashi felt inquisitive. Iruka pushed a little bit of patience back at him, and Kakashi settled. 

"Are there more reports?" Iruka asked. "I'll need to see them." 

Tsunade nodded at a thick stack of folders sitting on the edge of her desk. 

"It's not much," Shizune said. She sounded apologetic. "Mostly coroner's reports, because none were alive to tell us anything. And you can't take them out of the office. Eyes only." 

That meant they were meant for the Hokage and her assistant only, and Iruka and Kakashi were probably breaking about a million rules by looking at them. Iruka nodded. He wasn't going into the field ill-informed if he could help it. 

"You leave in three days," Tsunade said. "The official story is that Kakashi is on house arrest for chakra fatigue, so you'll need to play along." 

They really were bait, Iruka thought. He nodded, still staring at the stacks of papers. 

"He wants to read the files, Tsunade," Kakashi said. He sounded dryly amused. "I do too, but I think Iruka will snap if you don't let him at the paperwork soon." 

Iruka scowled at him, and Tsunade smiled. She waved a permissive hand. Iruka took the stack of papers over to the chairs the councillors usually sat in, dropped them on the table, and handed Kakashi a few. 

"We're both reading all of them," he said, opening his first folder. "No cheating, either," he said. "I know you can read without tapping yourself out. If there's anything you need later, you can use the Sharingan. My recall isn't perfect, but it's not half bad." 

Not half bad wouldn't be as good as Kakashi's eidetic memory, but Iruka wasn't going to let Kakashi wear himself out: two days of house arrest would have been more than enough to let rumors spread. That Tsunade was allowing them three meant that Kakashi really was tired. 

Kakashi nodded, and settled next to Iruka, piling his feet in Iruka's lap without asking. Iruka thought he heard Shizune make a soft sound of surprise, but it was easily enough ignored. 

The files were gruesome, and Iruka was glad he'd vetoed the Sharingan by the time he got to page four of the first report. By four folders in, he was convinced they were dealing with a sociopath. By ten folders in, the last report, Iruka felt physically ill. 

"They're sacrifices," he said. "And they're all laid out the same way, and there's never any evidence of who did it." 

Kakashi felt unsettled, though he was perfectly still.

"This isn't jounin-level work," Iruka continued. "The targets were missing-nin, but four of them were S-class themselves. To be restrained alive and tortured, we're talking Akatsuki, and probably two of them." He looked over at Tsunade. "If you send a four-man team of tokujo and Kakashi out against this person, or people, we're all going to die." 

Kakashi would do it, Iruka knew. Kakashi just felt resigned beside him, now, rather than the placid almost-excitement Iruka had come to associate with upcoming missions. This was the sister-feeling to dread that had accompanied some of Kakashi's ANBU years. 

"I won't do it," Iruka said, and felt Kakashi's surprise. He continued, staring at Tsunade and Shizune, and willing Kakashi to understand. "It's not a good allocation of Konoha's resources. We need more information, and we need whoever this is to be an immediate threat to Konoha itself before we send at least two coordinated teams of jounin after them. They're attacking missing-nin right now, which mostly makes Konoha safer in the short term. They're ghosts, Tsunade-sama, but they're absolutely lethal ghosts. If you go after them with insufficient manpower, you'll lose Konoha's future in the process." 

Shizune maintained a poker face for a brief moment, but Tsunade just grinned.

"I told you so," she said. Shizune nodded agreement. "Iruka-sensei is too smart to let duty blind him," Tsunade continued. "Kid," she said to Kakashi. "You'd better keep this one. You'd have gone out there and died, and you can't do that." 

Kakashi laced his fingers with Iruka's, where they were resting atop a particularly gruesome image of one of the sacrificial scenes. 

"I have no intention of losing him, Tsunade-sama," Kakashi said. His voice was steady, but his mood was pulsing with surprise/pride/affection, and something deeper that Iruka was starting to hope rather desperately might even be love. 

"You're still going out on a trap-mission in three days," Shizune said. "But it's in the opposite direction. We think there are some missing nin who defected from Mist about the same time as Zabuza. Do a patrol, see if you can draw them out." 

It was a perfectly normal mission, in place of a suicide run. Iruka nodded, and pushed Kakashi's feet out of his lap so they could both stand. 

"We'll take the papers home," Iruka said. Kakashi hit him with a burst of shock, and Iruka kept going. "And keep a low profile, since someone's supposed to be exhausted." 

* * *

Kakashi started getting bored about a day into his three-day pseudo-house-arrest. By day two he felt constantly antsy and exasperated in a way Iruka had thought he was accustomed to blocking out from years of practice. It was harder, somehow, now that he knew Kakashi better, now that he was allowed to admit to feeling it too. He was more snappish than usual at the desk, and he overheard more than one shinobi warn someone in the back of the line to have their paperwork in order, low-voiced and serious. 

"Go home, Iruka-sensei," Shizune said late that afternoon. His shift was done, but Iruka usually stayed late to help clean up, tidy things for the next day. 

"But –" Iruka said. 

"If you don't go home, ANBU is going to have to kill Kakashi for being intolerable," Tsunade said. "He's been baiting them for hours. Shoo." 

"I'm not a babysitter," Iruka protested, but it did make the brief flares of satisfaction Kakashi had been feeling make more sense. 

"More's the pity," Shizune muttered, low enough that Iruka could pretend not to hear her. Louder, she said: "Your shift is over, Iruka-sensei. Don't you have somewhere else to be?" 

The odd thing was, he did have a place to be, now, where he hadn't before.  It had been all too easy in the past to stay at the desk for longer and longer shifts, to fill his non-teaching time with extra paperwork and to volunteer for thankless cataloging and organizing. Paperwork didn't care if Iruka winced alone in a half-dark apartment, or if he occasionally looked like he was in inexplicable pain. Paperwork didn't care if he was achingly lonely, or that he knew far too much about the emotional state of a near-total stranger. Forms and requisitions and organizational schemes had helped block things out when Iruka's walls hadn't been enough. 

"Oh," Iruka said. When she put it that way, it seemed obvious. "I'll be going, then." 

Kakashi was sitting at Iruka's kitchen table staring at lesson plans for the second-year students at the Academy. He looked up when Iruka came in. 

"It takes all year to cover this?" He asked. He sounded mystified. "Don't they get bored?" 

The lessons he was looking at were a mix. Iruka saw Konoha history and chakra manipulation, basic weapons training drills and underneath it all, some notes on mathematics and reading comprehension. 

"They all start at different levels," Iruka admitted. "But they each have gaps. We're trying to get them all on the same page by the time they're third or fourth years, mostly." 

Kakashi looked down at the pages. He looked mystified. 

"I –" he said. "How do they not know this by that age? It's not that hard."  

Iruka looked at the pages Kakashi had on top: the chakra system diagrammed out, and an explanation of how to harness chakra to cast jutsu. It was something they talked about a lot in that year, but didn't allow most children to actually attempt until at least their third year at the Academy, though he knew many families had their children start younger than that at home. 

"Some of them have a lot of trouble with it," Iruka said. "It's very abstract." 

Kakashi shook his head. He felt frustrated, and baffled.

"Kakashi," Iruka said. "I didn't manage to learn most of this until I was eight or nine years old, and some of it not even then." 

Kakashi looked up at him, pulsing shock, disbelief. Iruka was tired, all of a sudden, and still exasperated after a long day of mission desk minutiae and managing Kakashi's poorly-masked frustration. 

"Most of us don't make chuunin at six," Iruka said. "Most of us don't have an intuitive grasp of several elemental affinities, or the ability to design new ninjutsu when we're barely teenagers, or jounin-level friends to train with on a regular basis before we've even hit puberty. Most of us took a long time to understand what chakra feels like, much less how to manipulate it, and some of us didn't have genius parents to help us along." 

Iruka paused, remembering the delivery of the news about his parents' death after the Kyuubi attack. 

"Some of us didn't have any parents helping us at all," Iruka said, remembering his hastily-packed lunches in those first few weeks back at the Academy, the way people had looked at him with pity until he'd started acting out. Laughter and jeering had been preferable to the reminders of his loss.

Kakashi's mood bottomed out into a familiar spiral of grief-anger-guilt, and Iruka tipped his head back, taking a deep breath as he remembered Sakumo, how much younger Kakashi had been orphaned than Iruka himself. 

"I'm sorry," Iruka said. "I shouldn't have –" 

Iruka pushed regret-apology, and thought perhaps Kakashi allowed it in, though it was hard to say. 

"It's been a long day," Iruka said, and Kakashi nodded. Iruka reached for the papers spread out across the table, moving to close the topic physically. Kakashi let him take them.

"I forget," Kakashi said, and it might even have been an apology of sorts. "It all came so easily, and, well," he paused. "I wasn't given much choice," he admitted. 

It was the most Iruka had heard Kakashi say about his childhood, the closest Kakashi had ever come to talking about Sakumo, other than the vaguest of mentions of family specializations when Tsunade pressed. He didn't seem like he wanted to say more, so Iruka didn't pursue it.

"What on earth were you doing to the ANBU earlier?" Iruka asked, searching for a change of topic as he put the Academy lesson plans back on a shelf Kakashi had cleared for him before his last mission. 

"I may have been throwing senbon at them to let them know they weren't hiding well enough," Kakashi admitted. 

Iruka laughed. ANBU were usually so tightly controlled that the average civilian had no idea they were there. Most chuunin, and even most jounin were unaware of them unless they were looking, and Tsunade had set some of the stealthier ones on watch today, knowing Kakashi would object to too-obvious monitoring.

"They took that well?" He asked. 

"Not especially," Kakashi said. "Crow in particular was almost annoyed enough to un-mask and knock on the door, but I think Tsunade sent Cat to tell him to stay put." He shrugged. "If they can't hide from me, they'll be found in the field," he said. 

It was as if Kakashi assumed all opponents were his level or higher, Iruka thought. It probably kept him alive, but it was a baffling way to look at the world. Iruka had spent so long as a chuunin, as an assumed failure, that the idea of even spending this much time socially with someone who was on par with ANBU was still dizzying. 

"Well," Iruka said. "Tsunade said you can spar tomorrow. Guy's team is back, and he was making noise about dragging me through the dirt again. Maybe if you wear him out first I won't end up with another goose-egg." 

Kakashi felt vaguely amused by that. He leaned back and stretched. 

"You never know," he said. 

Iruka avoided a headshot the next day, but only by chance: he used a clone and dodged in two directions, and guessed correctly which way Guy would strike. Kakashi, who was watching from his perch in a tree, felt almost proud, and Iruka glared at him. 

"I'm not your student," he said, but it was strangely gratifying to have such blatant appreciation. It had been years since someone regarded Iruka as more than a stopgap, a field failure. He'd spent most of the last half-decade being seen as nothing more than someone who could break the rough edges off of children before they learned the realities of life from a real shinobi. 

Guy took that moment to break out his nunchaku, and Kakashi stilled in Iruka's peripheral vision, damping down his bleed-through. Iruka felt himself settle. 

"Only two minutes," he said, because Guy would keep going indefinitely. He dodged Guy's first blow as he spoke, ducking left and jumping backwards to avoid what would have been a bone-crushing hit. 

Iruka made it to one minute and forty seven seconds before Guy had to pull a killing blow, thankfully able to adjust the trajectory of his weapon to land in the loam by Iruka's head, millimeters from his left ear. Guy was grinning, though, and he offered Iruka a hand up with apparent goodwill. 

"Well fought, Iruka-sensei," he boomed. "My eternal rival is not wrong in singing your praises, I see." 

Kakashi didn't falter as he dropped out of the tree, but Iruka thought he might feel a little embarrassed, though that was definitely still being repressed as much as Kakashi dared. 

"I'd still be dead," Iruka pointed out. "Thanks for going easy on me, Guy-sensei." 

Guy looked puzzled for a moment, then clearly decided to let it go.

"Again?" Guy asked, and Iruka groaned at the mere idea. Kakashi came over and brushed a leaf off his shoulder, where it was caught under his chuunin vest. 

"No, thank you," Iruka said. "I have a mission tomorrow, and I'd rather not go out completely covered in bruises."

"As you like," Guy agreed. He looked like he was about to say something else, but clearly thought better of it. Iruka suspected Kakashi of making a crazy face at him behind Iruka's back but couldn't prove it. 

"Come on," Iruka said, turning to face Kakashi. "You're getting me dinner after all that." 

* * *

The mission the next day may have been intended to be training wheels for the new tokubetsu jounin, but Iruka wasn't surprised when it went sideways. Shit hit the fan a day into their trip to the port city where they were to meet the political representative they would be escorting to the capital. 

The first missing-nin jumped down on them with a sword in the middle of a forested stretch of road. Okei, more fool he, rushed immediately into close-range combat, and was nearly decapitated. Iruka grabbed his falling body as a second missing-nin, also from Kirigakure, shimmered into shape from a small pond. 

"Aoiko," Iruka instructed, because the woman had frozen. "Heal Okei, and defend him if anyone else comes." 

Kakashi still looked bored, all but stationary as he watched the missing-nin. But Iruka could tell that he had Kakashi's attention as well. There had been a spike of near-panic as Okei was injured, and something that might almost be satisfaction when Iruka got to his falling body first. 

It only made sense, Iruka thought. Kakashi was the more capable of the two of them: there was no reason for him to be encumbered, even for a moment. 

"Hatake Kakashi," the first nin said. She was broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, and carried a freakishly large sword. "Babysitting again, so soon?" 

Iruka watched the other one, the pond-nin, who was androgynous and green-haired. Probably a ninjutsu user, Iruka thought, and then felt the odd dislocation he'd come to associate with Kurenai's genjutsu use. 

Fuck, he thought, and watched as the green-haired nin multiplied. So they've done their homework on us, he thought. They clearly knew he was listed as being weak against genjutsu. He kept an eye on the oddly mirrored form, which he knew to be the real opponent. Iruka wondered how soon would it be safe to reveal his imperviousness: not immediately, if he could use it as a distraction. Behind him, Okei was coughing, which had to be a good sign, but Aoiko's chakra was still flowing freely, pouring into him at a rate that told Iruka all he needed to know about the severity of the wound. 

Kakashi sprung into action in Iruka's peripheral vision, kunai gripped in both hands as he dodged a sword-swing that would surely have cleaved him in half, as it had almost done to Okei. 

"Pay attention, Konoha," chorused the ranks of green-haired shinobi. One – definitely a mirror, though Iruka didn't think he could afford to ignore it just yet – raised a sword. Iruka flicked a senbon at it, and it poofed, not even trying to dodge.

"One down," the remaining mirror-images said. "But how many can you get before we get you?" 

And they attacked, the real shinobi ducking and weaving until it was nearly impossible to track where he was in the fray. Iruka gave up on breaking the genjutsu for the moment, instead preferring to pop as many of the pseudo-clones as he could with senbon. He held back the poison-tipped ones Shizune and Asuma had prepared for him until there were only a half-dozen figures left. One, not the real one, was smiling. Several looked tired, and one angry. The real one, hiding behind a tree out of Iruka's line of sight, also looked angry, and a bit frustrated. Iruka felt a grim kind of satisfaction at that: he'd never have been able to avoid the real one this long without the baffling new ability to resist the genjutsu and therefore tell which swings were imaginary. 

"Is that all you've got, Konoha?" The smiling mirror taunted. Iruka risked a brief chakra-scan. Okei was stable; Aoiko was standing. Kakashi and the kunoichi were several meters away, locked in combat, the huge sword buried up to its hilt in a tree that might topple soon.

Iruka didn't bother to reply. Banter during fights had never been his style, even when he was a teenager. At first he'd been too focused on keeping up with his peers to have the breath. Then, after the bond, he had been too busy sorting his own feelings from Kakashi's to have any mind to spare for it. 

"I said," the angry mirror image said. "Is that all you've got?" 

They swarmed him again, and Iruka switched to shuriken. He missed three, but poofed two more, and that left the three clones and the original, who was staying out of the fray for now, probably preparing another jutsu. 

They would wear him down, Iruka thought, and then attack Okei while Aoiko tried to heal Iruka. It's a game of cat and mouse, he thought, and just like that, it made sense. 

"Okei," Iruka called, hoping the genjutsu had caught all three of them, that Okei could also see the mirror images. If they couldn't, Iruka's plan wouldn't work. "They're all yours."

Okei nodded, and pulled his tanto again. He'd be moving slowly, but that was only to be expected. Genjutsu-created clones could probably convince you they'd hurt you, but Iruka needed to get to the caster more than he needed to protect an impulsive tokujo. 

"Aoiko," Iruka said. "Code red." 

It meant genjutsu, a holdover from the warring states period and the clans' battles with the Uchiha. She stared, and then nodded, but Iruka was already leaping for the tree adjacent to the one behind which the original caster was hiding, poison-tipped senbon in hand as he ran up the trunk.  

Okei was having a hard time of it, Iruka realized. The other man was struggling with combatants whom Iruka had mentally classified as easier than Guy. Think about it later,he told himself. Kakashi was feeling pressed in the back of Iruka's mind, and he steeled himself for the sensation of injury in the near future. 

But that would happen when it happened. In the meantime, there were enemy combatants to neutralize, and hopefully capture. Iruka jumped to another adjacent tree and all but fell toward the green-haired missing nin in a rain of poisoned senbon. The genjutsu user dodged four, but was hit by the other four, one in the throat, where it would enter the bloodstream immediately. 

"How?" he gasped, and Iruka felt the genjutsu slip away as the nin lost control of his chakra. The poisons were complex, and Iruka was pleased that one of the senbon bearing the chakra-inhibitor had hit its mark. 

"Practice," Iruka said, because he wasn't about to explain his bond to a missing nin. "You got sloppy." 

Okei crashed into the other side of the tree. 

"Fuckers vanished," he cried. Iruka bit back a sigh. Okei was skilled enough to make rank, but no one would ever accuse him of being anything other than a blunt instrument, at best. 

"Code red," Aoiko hissed, and Okei swore again, this time under his breath. 

The nin coughed, and Iruka shifted his grip on the kunai he was holding. 

"You've been paralyzed," Iruka said. "And poisoned. I have the antidote to the lethal poison. Who sent you?" 

The nin laughed, as if Iruka had said something genuinely amusing. 

"Bingo," he said, as if that were all it took, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and his breathing rattled to a stop. 

"Fuck," Iruka said. "Aoiko," he called, but she shook her head. 

"Jutsu," she said. "Long-range, conditional, I think." 

He hadn't had enough control to activate it himself, and that meant someone else was calling the shots, which wasn't a good sign. 

"Pack up the body in a scroll," Iruka said to her, turning toward the clashing sounds of blades. Kakashi and the other missing nin were a veritable blur of activity, and Iruka could see at a glance that Kakashi was using the Sharingan. At that level of threat, there was nothing he could do to help. Okei took a step forward, and Iruka held a hand out. 

"He'll have to protect us," Iruka said. "We can't help right now." 

Okei nodded, and they watched as the missing nin retrieved her sword, which looked nearly as large as some of the swords used by the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist. Kakashi was still armed with nothing but twin kunai. He appeared to be ducking blows and landing small hits, wearing his opponent down. The problem, Iruka knew, was that Kakashi was using the Sharingan, and he was being worn down by it as surely as his opponent was being worn down by kidney shots and stab wounds in major muscle groups. 

"Shit," Iruka said, taking the scene in within a moment. "She's S-class at least. Check the book."

All three of them had been issued bingo books on passing the exam. Iruka's was, he thought, slightly more detailed than the others, but he wasn't about to share that fact with anyone. 

"Mist," Okei said, which Iruka could have told him from the scratched-out hitae-ate. "Bloody Mist era," he said, reading. "Pre-Zabuza, but not by much. S-class. Taijutsu type, but the sword has a blinding ninjutsu embedded in it." 

That was the information Iruka had needed, and that was bad news. Those ninjutsu had been one of the only ways to fight the Uchiha, back when there had been more of them. They had been essential to Mist's survival in the wars. Some of them didn't just blind, they overloaded the chakra system of the Sharingan user, which could be immediately fatal. 

Iruka let a little bit of caution-warning seep through his mental wall, phasing it in gradually enough that it wouldn't alarm Kakashi or distract him. 

Kakashi nodded once, and Iruka saw him pop a shadow clone into existence. That was yet more proof that he was taking the fight seriously, but another incentive to end things soon. Iruka didn't know anyone but Naruto who could sustain shadow clones for an extended period of time, and even Naruto had his limits. 

The sword-bearing missing-nin looked at Iruka, and then pulled one hand aside, cut it on the edge of the blade, and slammed it down on the broad side of the sword. 

Iruka instinctively closed his eyes, putting up a shield that he knew wouldn't be good enough. Kakashi, unwarned and using the Sharingan, was not even that prepared. Iruka started sending out pulses of chakra, as he had when fighting Mizuki, pinging the environment like a bat, like the dolphin he was named for. In his pseudo-vision, Iruka saw Kakashi fall back, visibly disoriented as the woman closed in on him. 

"Back up," Iruka called. He and Okei couldn't fight her: they'd be sliced to ribbons inside moments. "And –" he paused. "Pull." 

And Iruka shoved everything he was sensing at the bond. There was no evidence that it would work, nothing to make him think this would have any effect, but he felt Kakashi straighten, and dodge the sword. He was moving more slowly, but the woman had clearly not anticipated any movement at all. 

She's fought Uchiha before, Iruka thought. She was relying too much on the sword's power, now, expecting Kakashi to be completely reliant on the Sharingan, as all too many Uchiha had once been. 

Kakashi fell back again, feinting confusion and disorientation. The missing nin closed in on him, ignoring Iruka entirely. That ended up being her downfall. Iruka still had two senbon left, and he stabbed them directly into her neck from behind as Kakashi dodged again, leaving her off-balance and momentarily vulnerable. Iruka jumped back the instant the senbon made contact, ducking under the last-minute swing of her sword, able to tell it was coming from shifts in her chakra signature. Iruka backed away as Kakashi kicked her in the sternum, driving the breath from her body. 

She fell without a cry, the only sound the muffled, meaty thud when her body hit the ground at Iruka's feet. Kakashi kicked away the sword immediately, and Okei and Aokoi came over to look when Iruka nodded. The sword's jutsu seemed to be wearing off, the blood on the sword sparkling less with chakra as she lost control over her pathways and the activation of the jutsu. 

In a moment, Iruka could see again. 

"Well, shit," Iruka said, looking down at the missing-nin's body. It was too late. "She's dead, too." 

Kakashi nodded. He was scanning their surroundings, obviously still on high alert, though he'd covered the Sharingan. 

"There's no one in range," Iruka said absently, wondering what the triggering effect of the death jutsu had been. Paralysis might be it, or defeat, but a mental code word seemed more likely, or some kind of monitoring from afar. Monitoring would be a challenge, though, unless they were using some variant on the Yamanaka soul-swap spell with an animal in the vicinity. 

Okei looked at him oddly as Iruka poked at the body with one foot. She was definitely dead, which meant no immediate chance for answers. 

"You sound sure," Okei said. 

Iruka closed his eyes, and sent out another chakra ping, just to be doubly certain. 

"My reliable range isn't more than a couple hundred meters," he admitted. "But if anyone's hiding within that radius, they're better than most of our ANBU at masking their chakra signatures." 

Aoiko walked over, and handed Iruka a sealed scroll. It was marked "green hair, genjutsu" in Konoha field-script, and was heavier than it had any right to be. 

"This one, too?" she asked. She looked at Iruka for direction, rather than at Kakashi. Kakashi, for his part, seemed to be finding Iruka's bafflement at this nothing but amusing. 

"This one too," Iruka confirmed, when it became clear that Kakashi wasn't going to take point. "Tsunade's going to want to find the suicide-trigger, and we can't leave the bodies behind for the hunter nin, if there are any on their tails."

Aoiko nodded, knelt, and embedded the woman's corpse into a second carrying scroll in a matter of minutes, while Okei cleaned his swords. Iruka kept a constant pinging up as he collected as many of his senbon as he could. Kakashi appeared to read a book, but mostly leaned against a tree. He was more fatigued than he was letting on, Iruka knew, but if Kakashi wasn't going to admit it, Iruka wasn't going to push the point in public. 

It was a good thing his senbon were easy to find, because Iruka's mind was spinning, turning over the moment where he'd pushed the chakra-pinging sensory information through the bond. It hadn't had any reason to work: that wasn't how things were supposed to go. But Kakashi had been able to see what Iruka sent him, and it had saved his life. That seemed like the kind of information they would want to keep under wraps. Iruka re-sheathed the senbon and wondered if they would be able to figure out if the fight had been observed. 

"If the deaths were observation-triggered jutsu," Iruka said, coming back over to stand next to Kakashi. Then he stopped, unable to figure out how to finish that thought. 

"Hm?" Kakashi asked, and put the book down. "You'll need to learn poisons," he said, which was not exactly what Iruka had been thinking. It wasn't wrong, though. Iruka couldn't rely on Shizune forever, or Sakura, for that matter. 

"Basic ones, at least," Iruka agreed. He made a note to talk to Kakashi about the bond later, when they were alone, perhaps when they were back in Konoha. 

Aoiko straightened, made a series of hand gestures, and the scroll rolled up into a neat bundle on the fight-scarred ground. Okei finished examining his left-hand sword and sheathed it with a grimace. The blade might well be nicked from being shunted away by the missing-nin's large sword, Iruka thought, but they'd have to figure that out later. 

"Here you go," she said, and held it out. 

"Give it to Kakashi," Iruka said. "I'm not carrying them both at once." He paused. "Do you have another scroll? Get the sword, too. We can't carry it openly, but we can't leave it here."

Not only was it a specialized weapon, it might be helpful against Itachi, when the time came. And Iruka wasn't leaving anything out in the wild that he knew might be used against Kakashi in such a devastating way.

"Are we going back?" Okei asked. He glanced in the direction from which they had come. 

"How long will the scrolls hold?" Iruka asked Aoiko. She looked at him, surprised. 

"At least two weeks" she said. "Longer, if they're not opened." 

It was another day to the port city, three to five days of escort duty, and another two days back to Konoha. Iruka nodded. 

"Then no," he said. "We've got a diplomat to escort," he said. "Tsunade didn't give us this mission for fun, you know. We don't get paid if he doesn't get delivered to the capital, and this is a high-ticket item." 

Konoha wouldn't go bankrupt if it failed one mission, even one of this classification, but they could ill afford to show weakness right now, and not completing the mission would sow doubt in the hearts of the daimyo's council. While Tsunade could make up the difference if she needed to, Iruka had no desire to make her job even more difficult. For one thing, it would mean more paperwork for him in the short term. For another, it would weaken Konoha and Fire Country in the vast balance of power, and Iruka didn't think they had much room for that after Orochimaru's attack and the chaos that had followed. 

Kakashi nodded, and gestured for Iruka to lead the way. He must be exhausted, Iruka thought. 

"We're making camp early tonight," Iruka said. "But we need to get somewhere more defensible and out of range of any animals drawn to blood spoor." 

It was textbook from the Academy, but the other three nodded as if Iruka had said something insightful, rather than something he taught to absolutely every Academy class beginning with the second-year students. 

Kakashi continued to defer to Iruka until they reached the port city, when he straightened up and put on what Iruka was privately thinking of as his politics posture. Still slouched, it managed to convey both boredom and alertness, laziness and carefully-leashed danger. Iruka was fairly certain that it was similar to his teaching posture, from what he had heard from Naruto. He wasn't planning on telling the daimyo's representative, however, that Kakashi regarded him as about as important as a bunch of pre-genin. 

The representative, a young man with lacquered hair and complex robes, seemed disgruntled at the idea of walking the whole way, and dissatisfied at the provision of a horse. After the second day of unending complaints, Iruka just stopped listening. Ignoring the man was preferable to committing a politically ill-advised murder, even if he was certain he could hide the body. 

Kakashi was, thankfully, the only one of them invited to the investiture ceremony at the capital. Iruka spent the evening feeling Kakashi's alertness, punctuated by occasional moments of intense frustration and exasperation, which Iruka supposed were caused by political comments, or forced interactions. The trip back to Konoha over the next few days was uneventful, if odd.  As soon as they were out of range of the capital, Kakashi resumed deferring to Iruka, which really did seem to make Okei nervous. It only seemed to make Aoiko almost invisibly amused. Iruka moved her up in his mental estimation, and Okei down: anyone who couldn't handle Kakashi's quirks was going to have a hard time of things when Tsunade finally retired.

* * * 

The trip back to Konoha was simultaneously tedious and nerve-wracking. Kakashi allowed Iruka to stay in charge, to Okei and Aoiko's visible amusement, and spent most of their downtime reading. Iruka could tell he was bored from the bond, and impatient. Unfortunately, Iruka could also tell that Kakashi hadn't swapped the covers on his books: he was reading straight-up erotica, and his reaction to it was being allowed through his barriers. It put Iruka on edge, especially when Kakashi looked over at him across their rare campfires and pushed a particularly salacious feeling through the bond. 

Telling him to stop that would do no good. Iruka battened down the hatches as well as he could without putting either of them at risk, and did his best to ignore Kakashi until they were back home. The instant they got into the village's gates, Kakashi handed both scrolls to Aoiko, along with a mission report that he had apparently already filled out. 

"Your turn," he said, and grabbed Iruka's wrist. He looked impatient, and all but radiated want in the back of Iruka's mind. 

Oh, Iruka thought. 

"Just hand those in at the mission desk," Iruka said. "Good work!" Then he allowed Kakashi to drag him home. 

It was some time before Iruka felt up to the task of conversation. He sat halfway up, with Kakashi's head in his lap, carding his fingers idly through Kakashi's hair. 

"We need to tell Tsunade about the bond changing," he said, voice soft. He knew Kakashi had good wards, better than anywhere but the Hokage's office or the forbidden archives, but there was no sense broadcasting this. 

Kakashi nodded, and stretched. He didn't seem concerned, and radiated contentment in a way Iruka was beginning to find positively addictive. 

"Later," he said, and nuzzled Iruka's thigh. If that distraction worked altogether too well, Iruka told himself, he was only human. 

Iruka finally dragged them into the Hokage's office the next morning, despite Kakashi's half-hearted protests and attempts to keep Iruka in bed with him. 

"Later," Iruka promised, and pushed some of the increasingly filthy thoughts he'd been suppressing as they ventured back to Konoha in Kakashi's direction. "This is important, Kakashi." 

Tsunade maintained an impressive poker-face, but Shizune all but beamed when Iruka told them what had happened. 

"It must be the final stage of the bond," she said, grinning. "Oh, that's fascinating. You know only about half of the couples documented got there?"

Iruka had not known that: he was fairly sure she had withheld that information intentionally. Beside him, Kakashi looked unimpressed, but radiated discomfort. Iruka took his hand, and pressed their palms together in silent reassurance. 

"Inoichi is going to want more tests," Tsunade mused. "Maybe –" 

"No," Iruka said immediately, remembering how much pain they had put Kakashi through in the name of testing the bond. "Nothing like before. I won't do that again." 

Kakashi felt shocked, and then, below the level Iruka was accustomed to receiving, almost pleased. 

"Just perception tests," Tsunade said. "Distance, and blindfolding is all." 

Iruka sat back, slightly mollified. 

"That's fine," Kakashi said. "But only Inoichi and Guy. It's too important to risk it being leaked." 

So he didn't trust everyone in T&I, Iruka realized. Danzo's faction must run deeper than Iruka had ever suspected. By the look on Tsunade's face, and on Shizune's, Kakashi wasn't wrong to be so cautious. 

"Fine," Tsunade agreed. "You'll start tomorrow."

The next day, Inoichi and Iruka sat on top of the cliff at one of the more remote training grounds and watched as Kakashi and Guy sparred. Inoichi watched without comment for a time; then Kakashi was blindfolded. He held his own against Guy surprisingly well, for a short time, but was clearly outmatched. 

"Now, Iruka," Inoichi said, as Guy offered Kakashi a hand to pull him back to his feet. There was a clear impression in the ground from where he had landed. "If you would." 

Iruka closed his eyes and began his chakra-location. This time he didn't so much push it at Kakashi as open all the doors and invite him in. Pull, he thought, and sent a kind of invitation along with the sensation. 

Guy closed in on Kakashi from behind, what would ordinarily be any shinobi's blind-spot, and Kakashi spun to meet the blow, blocking it with crossed forearms with only a bare moment's hesitation. They began to move faster, then, jumping toward each other and apart with increasing speed. The blows that landed on the land or on the trees around them left craters, split trunks, and more than once they sprang apart panting. It was nearly as fast as the initial sparring had been. Iruka observed it all with his eyes shut, sending pings as quickly as he could, until he began to feel faint. 

"Stop," he gasped, and shut it down. "That's enough." 

When he opened his eyes, the damage to the training ground was shocking: man-sized holes in the ground, more than one felled tree. He had known what was happening, but seeing it in full color was more of a surprise than he had expected. Inoichi put a steadying hand on his shoulder as Iruka wavered in place. Then Kakashi was there, hitae-ate pushed up as he used the Sharingan to examine Iruka's chakra levels. 

"Stop that," Iruka scolded, and reached out to pull it down. "I'm fine." He felt weak as a kitten, but surely that would improve with practice. 

"You're not," Kakashi said. He felt almost guilty about something, and Iruka was too tired to censor himself. 

"Don't you start," Iruka scolded. "This is not your fault. And I'm not going to stop doing this if it will keep you alive, so don't be ridiculous. I just need to rest up, is all, and practice a bit more. I'm a bit rusty." 

Kakashi felt surprised, and Iruka thought he heard Inoichi stifle a laugh. Guy didn't try to conceal his amusement.

"If this is what you being out of practice looks like, Iruka-san," Guy called up from the base of the cliff. He sounded almost proud. "I look forward to the challenge when you feel your skills are up to snuff!"

Oh god, Iruka thought.Now I might have to fight him myself when I'm doing this. 

The idea was exhausting, but almost exhilarating in a way. Iruka would never have imagined himself capable of going toe-to-toe with even a tokubetsu jounin before they had discovered the bond: now that it was settling and he had control of what he received from Kakashi, the idea of sparring with Guy had become almost normal. 

For the first time, Iruka dared to hope that Shizune might be right, that there might be a chance for him to make jounin and be Kakashi's assistant when he ascended to the position of Hokage. 

"I'll write up the report," Inoichi said, folding his notes and putting a family seal on them. "Her eyes only." He smiled. "I'm sure she'll still let you see them," he said. "So I'll skip the blinding jutsu for now." 

Iruka nodded his thanks. Kakashi hopped up the cliff-face and tried to put Iruka's arm over his shoulders. 

"Don't be ridiculous," Iruka said, pulling away. "I'm fine." 

It took all the determination Iruka had honed over six long years of feeling Kakashi's fatigue, but he got back to Kakashi's apartment without any visible assistance. 

"Well, shit," Iruka said. He had meant to stop by the market on the way home to pick up something for them to eat. Kakashi shrugged. 

"We'll get ramen," he offered. It seemed almost to be an apology, though Iruka wasn't sure why Kakashi thought Iruka needed one. 

"Invite Guy to join us," Iruka said, sinking down at the kotatsu. "For his help."

Kakashi felt surprised, but nodded, and when he and Guy came back later, it was with enough food for all three of them. Kakashi lowered his mask to eat, which Iruka found surprising, but Guy didn't comment. It appeared that Guy was perfectly capable of carrying a conversation on his own, but when Iruka asked questions, or offered comments, Guy listened keenly. He was quieter than Iruka had come to expect, and a better listener than Iruka would have suspected. Over the course of the evening, as Kakashi offered few enough comments of his own, but radiated mild satisfaction, Iruka came to wonder if Guy's brash front was a kind of sympathetic symbiosis, a complement to Kakahsi's aggressive silence. 

Guy took his leave after helping wash up, and Iruka leaned back on his hands. 

"We should do that again," he said.

Kakashi sat next to him and pulled out a book. Here at home, he kept the original covers on, and Iruka could see it was a light novel, the kind of willful escapism Iruka had sometimes read as a teenager coping with his family's death. Kakashi read swiftly, Iruka had found, and in so many genres, that his bookcases were almost as impressive as those in Konoha's library. 

"It was nice," Kakashi said, after long enough that Iruka had assumed he was not going to respond. "He likes you." 

Iruka shrugged. 

"I think he likes everyone," he offered, and Kakashi smiled. 

"He doesn't dislike many people," Kakashi corrected. "But that's not the same thing." 

They sat in silence for a time, until Iruka hauled himself to his feet and headed for bed. He slept soundly, and woke to the now-familiar sensation of Kakashi dreaming peaceably. Sometimes Kakashi still had nightmares, but he seemed to sleep easier when he was beside Iruka. This dream was unclear, but seemed pleasant enough from the feelings that were seeping into Iruka's side of the bond. Iruka petted his hair absently and wondered at how very different his life was now than he had ever expected it to be. 

Kakashi stirred, and Iruka felt the butterfly-wings sensation of him waking with something akin to joy. 

"You're content," Kakashi said. He felt almost surprised. 

"Just thinking," Iruka said. He opened up a little more, allowing Kakashi to see some of his wonder at being allowed to have all of this. 

Kakashi went still, and then Iruka felt a flood of almost overwhelming satisfaction, joy, and relief pass through the bond. 

Iruka smiled. 

"Me too," he said, and wove his fingers deeper into Kakashi's hair, holding onto him as best he could. 

* * *

Tsunade began sending Iruka out on more missions, and Iruka finally put in his official letter of resignation at the Academy: he knew some chuunin managed to take the occasional mission and teach as well, but between working the Mission Desk, learning paperwork from Shizune, training with Kakashi and Guy, and taking A- and B-rank missions, he was simply too tired to give the students the attention they deserved. 

"We'll miss you, Iruka-sensei," Susume-sensei observed. "But," she added. "You do seem happier, if I may say so." 

Iruka might have taken offense at such an observation some time ago: his personal life had been so miserable than any observation on his mood had seemed like an attack. Now he just smiled. 

"I am," he said, and walked out of the Academy's gates without a look back. 

The next few weeks were busy: Tsunade appeared to believe that breaking Iruka and the other new tokujo in fast and hard was essential, and he didn't disagree. Knowing what he did about the political situation outside of Konoha's borders, Iruka might have been pushing harder, though he knew that was likely to backfire. 

The only problem, Iruka found, was that missions were often solitary work, even when they were a full team, and working on paperwork or at the Mission Desk was lonely. He had become accustomed to being surrounded by people most of the time, and while Iruka hadn't considered himself to be someone with an active social life, the time he had spent with the other Academy instructors was something he found himself missing. 

It was Kakashi who brought it up. 

"You could invite Guy over again," he offered. "Tomorrow, maybe, after training." 

Iruka blinked, and looked up from his book. Kakashi did seem to prefer quiet evenings, and since they were effectively living in his apartment now, Iruka hadn't thought to change that norm. He must have felt confused, or looked it, because Kakashi raised himself up on his elbows. 

"You're lonely," he said. "Have him over." He paused. "He'll know who else is all right," he offered, and then went back to his book. 

Guy all but sparkled when Iruka invited him over the next day. 

"I will be honored to join you," he said, and insisted on carrying all of the groceries that Iruka stopped to pick up on the way home. 

After a few evenings with Guy, Iruka reached out to Asuma and Kurenai, whom he knew well enough to invite personally. It was strange to spend an evening eating and drinking with some of Konoha's top jounin, but not nearly as odd as Iruka had expected. And if Guy minded being the fifth wheel as Asuma and Kurenai's relationship became more and more obvious, he never gave any indication of it.

* * *

After retiring from the Academy Iruka added lessons with Shizune and Sakura, trying to learn more about poisons. He knew he would never excel, but he wanted to be able to craft the paralytics on his own, at the very least. Sakura seemed to be coming out of her shell, and whooped with joy the first time Iruka successfully paralyzed her: after the poison wore off. 

The next day, she handed Iruka an arm-band to hold senbon, with a bashful smile. 

"I've had it for a while," she said. "They come in handy, and you can pull from the top or the bottom to keep things straight, you see?" 

Over the next few months, Iruka found himself modifying his vest, adding and removing pockets and other items to keep the tools he needed, and reduce bulk in the field. As a mid-range ninjutsu user, and one who specialized in avoidance rather than heavy-hitting blows, he dropped some of the heavier scrolls and storage items: his team would have people who specialized in such things, and he was coming to prefer having more mobility than the traditional chuunin vest afforded. 

It wasn't until just before his tenth A-rank mission as a tokubetsu jounin that Iruka looked in the mirror and blinked at his reflection. The man looking back at him wasn't a nondescript chuunin-sensei anymore. He wore tighter-fitting sleeves, with the senbon cuffs over his biceps, and his vest had been whittled down to little more than armor and scroll pockets. His hair was tightly braided today, instead of being in a ponytail whose ends might get in his eyes. His reflection looked almost dangerous, and much more impressive than Iruka had ever expected to be. He looked like a jounin. He looked like someone who would win a fight. 

Kakashi looked up after a moment.

"You noticed," he said. He seemed amused at Iruka's surprise. "Took you long enough." 

Iruka glanced over at him. 

"You didn't say anything," Iruka accused. 

"Would you have listened?" Kakashi asked. Iruka could tell he was genuinely curious, no trace of mockery at all. "You didn't listen to Shizune before."

Iruka paused to consider this for a moment, fingers running along the bumps of his close-braided hair. 

"Probably not," he acknowledged. He sighed. He was running late for a mission in Iron Country, and didn't have time for awkward revelations right now. "I'll be back in a week," he said, and pressed a kiss to Kakashi's forehead. 

"See you then," Kakashi said. He didn't seem at all worried about Iruka, though this would be his first time leading a mission with no one but chuunin on his team. 

The mission was straightforward enough, and Iruka returned home a day early, dropped off his report at the Mission Desk, and agreed to take a shift the next day to straighten out some filling problems. 

"Thank you, Iruka-san," Miri said. "I don't know how it happened." 

Iruka had a pretty good idea – Miri had never had a head for organization – but there was no sense in saying that right now. 

"I'll see you tomorrow," Iruka said instead, and headed to Tsunade's office to make a verbal report on the information he had collected from informants while his team was occupied at the local temple they were ostensibly protecting from bandits. 

"Very good," Tsunade said. Shizune took notes, and Iruka paused, then took a deep breath.

"I want to take the jounin exam," he said, before he could talk himself out of it. "I'm as ready as I'm going to be. I won't know how to pass until I fail the first time." 

Tsunade grinned at him, and shoved a folder his way. 

"You might be surprised," she said. "Tests are in a month. Shizune's already filled out most of it for you, we just need some details."

"I'll need to take fewer missions until then," Iruka added. "The desk is a mess. It's going to take me at least three days to get things straightened out." He paused. "You really need to find someone other than Miri to head it," he said. "She's good with active-duty shinobi, but she's terrible at paperwork." 

Tsunade laughed. 

"Iruka," she said. "Most shinobi are terrible at paperwork." 

Iruka shoved down frustration, knowing it would only worry Kakashi. 

"Let me train some people," he said. "Give me a list. I'm not going to be able to keep doing this, and someone's going to get hurt." 

Shizune nodded, and handed him a sheet of paper. 

"They all have clearance up to A-ranks," she said. "And they're all clear." 

Tsunade looked pleased about something, and Iruka wondered if he could stab her with a paralytic, just to get the slightly smug expression off her face. 

"Yes," he said. "I know, you saw this coming." 

Shizune giggled, hand covering her mouth as if that would make her amusement any less obvious. 

"She's just looking forward to retirement," she said. "And you are making life easier for her the more of my work you take on." 

Iruka shook his head. 

"I haven't passed yet," he said. 

But, looking back at his last few missions on the way home, and talking this one over with Kakashi, Iruka found that he was less and less uncertain of his ability to pass the exam. 

When, a month later, Iruka was inducted formally into the ranks of Konoha's jounin, he found he was proud, rather than baffled or indignant. Kakashi stood beside Tsunade as she awarded them the ritual kunai that were the only mark of rank a jounin received. Iruka had a sneaking suspicion Kakashi would try to hang it on the wall somewhere in his apartment, given how clearly he was radiating pride through their bond. He honestly wasn't sure he would mind, so long as Kakashi's went up next to it. He took his place in the ranks of other new jounin, and this time, he listened to the words of the ceremony, the invocations by Tsunade of her grandfather's vision for Konoha and the Shodaime's dreams for its place in the world. 

* * *

Being a jounin wasn't, in the end, much different from being a tokujo had been: the pay raise was nice. Sparring hadn't changed, and Iruka was forced to acknowledge that he had been holding his own with jounin for longer than he had been willing to admit, even to himself. 

But the missions Tsunade was allowed to send him on were more dangerous, and decidedly more tiring. After two back-to-back solo missions that left him nearly chakra-dead from trying to escape teams of hunter-nin looking for the bodies of missing-nin Iruka had killed and collected, Iruka put his foot down. He'd felt Kakashi's anxiety through the bond this last time, and it was only dumb luck that Iruka's mission had finished before Kakashi's had picked up steam and become dangerous. 

"You can only have one of us in the field at a time," he said to Tsuande, blunt as he would never have dared to be before without being in a fit of rage. "Or both, on the same mission, if you have to. I'm distracting Kakashi, and he's distracting me, and that's  going to get us killed." 

He'd expected disagreement. Instead Tsunade steepled her fingers and stared at him for a long moment. 

"You'll be pulled back," she said. Her tone was flat, emotionless. "I won't take Kakashi out of the field." 

Iruka shrugged. He'd expected as much: a new jounin, no matter how effective his record, had nothing on the rumor and reputation potential of the Copy Nin. 

"Fine," he said. "I'll put more time into training desk staff. You know they need it." 

The mission desk was a mess every time Iruka got back, and the time he'd been able to dedicate to training new staff had been limited by his fatigue and his time out in the field. He'd been finding it increasingly frustrating to see the backsliding in shinobi he knew had the potential to keep things in check. 

Tsunade huffed out her breath in what almost sounded like satisfaction and unfolded her hands, setting them flat on the desk before her.

"You're really okay with that choice," she said. "You don't mind being pulled so he can stay in the field." She seemed surprised, but pleased as well. 

Iruka stared at her. She didn't seem surprised at all, or to object to losing a jounin from the field roster.

"This was a test, wasn't it," he said, thinking through his past mission assignments, how they had overlapped with Kakashi's. He found he was a little bit angry about that, about the risks she had implicitly taken with both of their lives and the future of Konoha. "Don't be stupid. Konoha needs Kakashi in the field. I can do other things – no one else can be Kakashi." 

Tsunade nodded.

"You had to tell us," she said. "Mist had an assistant who came to resent her Hokage, a generation ago. It went very poorly for them." 

Iruka wondered how they knew that. He supposed he would find out once he had full access to the sealed records.

"Well," he said. "I'll kick up a fuss if it starts to bother me." He shrugged. "Kakashi would listen to me," he said. "And I'd just make his life miserable if he didn't." 

Tsunade grinned. 

"You would, too," she agreed. "You can start by dragging him in here for paperwork when he gets back tomorrow, if he's up for it." She looked at Iruka, and her smile softened, her expression grew more serious. "It's hard work," she said. "But you'll be able to tell when he really needs a break." It was as much a promise as an observation, Iruka thought. 

"And when he's slacking," Iruka agreed, and Tsunade laughed outright at that. 

* * *

Kakashi's mission went sideways, and Iruka kept some of his attention on the bond while he started over again from the beginning. Training desk staff was harder than teaching children in some ways: at least the children accepted that they didn't know certain things, instead of making increasingly bizarre excuses about why the ass-backwards way they had been doing something was actually correct. Iruka made study sheets, assigned homework, and glared anyone who protested too much into submission. 

"Don't make me stab you," Iruka said one day, twirling a senbon between his fingers. Misushi, who was standing behind him and to his left, paused where she was trying to jimmy open a locked file cabinet drawer. She had made rank recently, and seemed to recall Iruka only as an Academy sensei with more bark than bite. 

"You wouldn't," she said. Her tone was one familiar from years of teaching: the voice of someone testing authority. She wouldn't stop until he put his foot down. Letting her unlock the drawer would be one way to manage it: Iruka had trapped each drawer in line with its level of security. But re-setting the traps would be tiresome, and the explosion would startle Kakashi, even if Iruka tamped it down. 

"Do I make idle threats?" Iruka asked. He didn't turn to face her: Misushi was good enough for a chuunin, but she was slow. He sent out a quiet ping to center her in his spatial awareness. 

"You can't just stab a shinobi for being curious," she said, and turned back to the drawer with a huff. There was a senbon in her shoulder before she could attempt another unlocking jutsu. It caught her just under the edge of her regulation vest, lodged into the meat of her trapezius. Iruka caught her, and eased her to the floor, pulling out the senbon with a sigh. 

"I think you'll find I can," he said. "I think you'll also find that I get cranky when I have to mix up new batches of paralytics regularly because my office staff are acting like first-year Academy students and being nosy little shits." 

Miri stepped in, stopped, and moved as if to step back out. She at least had some common sense, Iruka thought. Miri had tried to break into several of the dummy file cabinets, but at least she had done it on her own time, when Iruka wasn't in the same room. 

"Come back here," Iruka called. "Someone has to finish this filing. I think Misushi just volunteered to take your next two night shifts, if you do this one for her." 

From the floor, Misushi made a coughing noise that might have been protest. Iruka looked down, and frowned. 

"I could un-paralyze you," he said. "But I don't think I'm going to. You really ought to know better." He stepped over her, and went back to his chair, where a stack of A- and B-rank mission scrolls needed to be color-coded. 

In the back of his mind, Kakashi sent a wriggle of curiosity. Iruka, who had been facing similar situations since before Kakashi went out on this particular mission, just sent back a wave of resigned exasperation. Misushi had a good head for paperwork, but no respect for security levels that didn't include her. Iruka was seriously considering hiring someone to kidnap her the next time she left the village, just to impress upon her the seriousness of the information she was taking so lightly. 

Miri completed Misushi's filing, stepping carefully over her prone form, and Iruka let her go early when she finished putting away the scrolls Iruka had color-coded. Iruka pulled out a list of mission requests, and began cross-referencing regions and threat-levels with the estimated mission rank, flagging several that were clearly trying to get away with paying too little. It was some time before Misushi coughed, and sat up.

"You're mean," she said. Her fluffy pink hair was just visible over the edge of the desk. 

"I warned you," Iruka said. It really was like teaching Naruto or Konohamaru had been, he thought. "You made an informed decision." 

She huffed a laugh, then wobbled to her feet, grabbing at the desk as her balance struggled to catch up. "You're still mean," she said. "Two night shifts?"

Iruka nodded, looking down at the papers in front of him. 

"It'll be four next time," he said, and penciled in a note next to one of the information-gathering missions. Combining it with an escort would take longer on the way home, but preserve manpower. "And I'll do worse if you try that in front of me again."

Misushi nodded. Iruka was sure she wasn't chastened, but it didn't much matter: the cabinets she was trying to get into were largely empty anyway. 

Something struck his left side, impact clear, but pain dulled. Iruka nodded toward the door, keeping a straight face with the practice of years of similar situations, and Misushi saw herself out. Iruka locked the door behind her, and spread out papers on the desk before him, opening the bond as he did so. It didn't help Kakashi – Iruka couldn't take his pain, or share his chakra. They had tried often enough, but that didn't seem to be how it worked. Iruka made notes as the fight continued: one taijutsu-type opponent, and a ninjutsu-type using wind jutsu. Kakashi's team appeared to be doing well enough: Kakashi wasn't distracted the way he sometimes was when his team was in trouble. Iruka cross-referenced his notes against the bingo book, but there wasn't enough to go on. Kakashi would tell him when he got home, and they would figure it out then. 

Iruka let himself be distracted by paperwork until the clock struck midnight, then bundled himself up and went home. Kakashi was tired, but well enough, and didn't feel concerned about his teammates: there was no need to file a report with Tsunade before he returned to Konoha. 

Iruka settled into what had become his side of the bed with a book, and read for a short time before he fell asleep. Kakashi would be home tomorrow, if all went well. That knowledge, along with the mild impatience thrumming in the back of his mind, made falling asleep alone easier than it had been for long years. This wasn't the life he had expected for himself, and that was a certainty. Instead, it was something far stranger, and far better than he could ever have imagined. 

* * *

Tsunade held out longer than Iruka had expected, past political upheaval and war, and unexpected alliances that would change much of the political framework Iruka had grown accustomed to. She seemed, in the end, both relieved and reluctant to hand over the reigns of power. 

"Come on, Hokage-sama," Iruka said, after the formal investiture ceremony had concluded. "You've got a half hour for lunch before we have to go meet all the daimyo's lords." 

Kakashi's expression didn't change under the wide-brimmed hat, but Iruka could feel his distaste. 

"I'll have to be there too," Iruka reminded him. "And don't even think about trying to alarm them with your reading material. I've already taken three copies of Icha Icha away from you today. Don't think I won't burn them." 

Kakashi laughed. 

"You'd never burn a book," he pointed out. 

"Give them to Guy for safekeeping, then," Iruka countered. "And I can still poison you." 

Kakashi straightened slightly, though Iruka wasn't sure which threat it had been that elicited that reaction. 

"Just ask Misushi," Iruka said, as they started walking toward the Hokage's office. Kakashi huffed a breath, letting Iruka cut a path for him through the crowd of onlookers. Kakashi bore up well under the attention, Iruka thought, and even managed occasional bits of small talk. He would never be the grinning, sociable figure that the Shodaime was said to have been, but Iruka thought it would work out well enough in the end. 

"I think she's pulling your pigtails," Kakashi said, after they entered the Hokage's office and were alone again. He pulled the hat off and straightened his shoulders a bit, every bit as striking in the formal robes as Iruka had known he would be. 

"Don't be absurd," Iruka said. Misushi was part of his staff, and a good decade younger than he was. 

"No one gets poisoned that many times for curiosity," Kakashi said. He stepped forward, and wrapped an arm around Iruka's waist. "What is this, more than a dozen?" 

"Fourteen," Iruka confirmed. "I think I'm doubling the dose next time." 

Kakashi shook his head. 

"I'm just lucky I got there first," he said, and pulled Iruka to him for a kiss.