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It’s Shizune who comes to him in the night, the knock ringing loudly, long past when he should’ve been in bed. His stomach sinks when he opens the door (Kakashi has a key) and instead of his wayward lover, she’s there, grim-faced and haggard.
She doesn’t have to speak. He knows.
“Take me to him,” he says grimly, and she nods.
---
He’s in surgery when they arrive, and it should be a comfort that Tsunade herself is in there with him.
“This way, Iruka-sensei,” Shizune says. “He was found by the patrols on the northernmost boundary of the village.”
He nods, eyes glued to the double doors of the operating theater.
“We’re doing everything we can, Iruka-sensei.” Shizune tells him in a soft voice, and he knows they must be, so he nods again.
They will save him. Kakashi is too valuable to lose.
She leaves him to scrub up, and he sits on the benches and waits. The hand crawls across the face of the clock, tallying up the hours.
One. Two. Three.
Hour four crests and his eyes are stinging with tiredness; his ass has gone numb from the hard bench; and still he waits but nothing’s happening.
He wonders how long Kakashi will be in the hospital this time, how long until he can come home. He thinks about how much of their relationship is spent in the hospital, because Kakashi can never give less than all of himself on missions.
The door flies open with a snap and Iruka’s on his feet in an instant to meet Tsunade at the door. He opens his mouth to ask her, how is he? but then he catches sight of her face, and the ground gives way.
“No,” Iruka whispers, even as his knees collapse. “No.”
“I’m so sorry, Iruka.” She tells him through the tears on her face, “I’m so sorry. We couldn’t save him. Kakashi is gone.”
The sound Iruka makes when he hits the floor haunts her for the rest of her days.
---
The funeral is massive and well attended and Kakashi would’ve hated it.
Iruka knows this with certainty, standing at the front in all black, in front of a stone that bears the name of a man who can’t be gone, a man who he’d loved, a man who he's lost.
Naruto is tucked into his side and there are students here but Iruka cannot stem the flood of tears.
“It’s okay, Iruka-sensei,” Naruto says quietly. “I miss Kakashi-sensei too.”
The weight of his grief is carving sinkholes in his chest and when the priest finishes the chant, he watches through the waterfall of his tears as countless people leave their flowers on Kakashi’s gravestone.
Kakashi’s gravestone.
In the end, Iruka is alone in the graveyard. The sun has set and the wellwishers have gone. Naruto is the last to go. “Please, I want to be alone with him,” he says to Naruto, and Naruto gives in because he still can’t say no to his Iruka-sensei. Sakura leads him away.
“How could you do this to me?” Iruka whispers to Kakashi’s name on the stone, running ice cold fingers over the engraved characters of his name. “You know I can’t do this without you. You know I need you.”
The stone is as silent as the grave.
“I can’t do this,” Iruka sobs, collapsing to his knees, resting his forehead on the cool, unfeeling marble and remembering laying in bed, snoozing on Kakashi’s warm shoulder instead. “I need you back. I need you back.”
---
Tsunade gives him an extended leave of absence from the academy and the mission room; Iruka spends his days in bed, sleeping, dreaming.
Dreaming of missions that were successful, of kisses that were given, of dexterous hands and long bony feet and the clever little grin that was just for him. Silver hair and mismatched eyes and meals at the kotatsu and arguments over cups of tea and coffee.
He knows they’re worried for him but he cannot bring himself to care.
Naruto comes around the most, with take out ramen and all that sticky, needy, rambunctious love that Iruka simply can’t bear. Where before he always managed to muster up a smile for the boy, he finds he simply cannot.
His second week in bed the dreams change.
Sunlight and warmth give way to unforgiving cold and pain. He’s plagued by nightmares of death. Of the deaths of his parents, comrades, old man Sandaime, Kakashi...
But it’s the dreams of Sandaime that stick.
The coffins rising from the ground, the dead walking again, unseeing eyes and rotted hands reaching out of the ground to drag him down deep, and he’s choking on the dirt that fills his mouth and nose until—
Iruka sits bolt upright in bed, panting and soaked to the skin with sour sweat, heart pounding.
“That’s it,” He murmurs, staring out the window at the moon-brightened sky. “That’s it.”
---
His coworkers are all surprised to see him back at work at the mission’s desk, cheerful and helpful, so soon.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Iruka?” Chisato asks him faintly on his third day back.
“I’m fine, Chisato-san,” Iruka tells him brightly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to file these reports with the Hokage.”
His clearance is very high for a chuunin, granted during the time of the Sandaime and never amended since. His work at the mission desk and the records room gives him the unprecedented access he needs. Now, he just needs patience.
---
“I know how to save you,” He tells Kakashi’s grave the next day as he’s polishing the stone and replacing the flowers. “I know how to bring you back.”
The stone, as always, cannot reply.
---
He waits a week before he breaks into the Hokage’s private archives and steals the diaries of the Nidaime, of his brilliant experiments, of his twisted genius, of his unceasing cruelty.
Iruka looks for one thing only; Edo Tensei.
He finds it in the Nidaime’s travel journals from his sojourns as a young Shinobi, several entries over several days;
I've found a sect of zealots, devoted to a God I've not heard of. They claim they can raise the dead. They've invited me to their ritual.
-
The supplicants of this God are hardy. Wounds that would kill an ordinary Shinobi don't phase them. The more pain they feel, the greater their fervor, the more they praise Him.
-
Today the head priest sacrificed a girl, no older than seven years. Her own father offered her to their God. They painted their sigils in her blood and drained her on the altar. When she was dead, they prayed over her body for hours.
-
I cannot believe what I've seen today. The high priest sacrificed twelve, but he raised the girl from the dead. I watched her stand, her body black, eyes red, and the rot of the past weeks fell away. The priest called it a gift from their God.
-
I killed all the supplicants and the priest. This power is too foul and they've killed ten times more than their own numbers. The world will be better for it. I have what I need, and they will not be missed. They worship chaos and disorder and they are a threat to what my brother and I are hoping to build for this world.
Iruka stops, heart pounding as if to burst. Below the last entry where honorable Nidaime admits to murdering an entire temple of worshippers are rough sketches of the sigils that the priest used. The largest of them takes up most of the next page. A roughly hewn circle with a reverse triangle overtop.
Below it, Iruka reads Nidaime’s final entry;
May their Jashin have mercy on them, because I did not.
And he remembers.
An immortal madman, the brutal death of a man with a cigarette who he grew up with as a brother, Kakashi coming home with more scars, more nightmares, more horrors packed up neatly in the bags under his eyes and the shake of his shoulders.
Jashin.
---
He steals the diaries from the archives and takes them home to his apartment. Kotetsu tries to call to him in the street, but Iruka pretends not to hear and scuttles away before he can be stopped. He throws up his wards and locks himself away for the next week to study all he can.
Nidaime documented his attempts to recreate the rituals, his attempts to revive the dead. In the second to last diary, Iruka reads;
It’s impossible to tap into the true power of reincarnation without a supplicant or a priest of Jashin to guide me. The rituals are mentioned as an oral tradition, with very little written about their use. Unfortunately I was too hasty in my elimination at the temple. I am unable to recreate the rituals, even with the requisite materials.
I will continue my search for a priest, and hopefully I can capture one alive.
Iruka frowns, nearly giving in to despair.
A priest. He needs a priest to guide him in the ways of the rituals.
He gives in and puts his head on his arms. He's come so far, but he has so far to go. Every step feels like one forward, two back. Getting closer, falling back. He’s failing.
And then.
His eyes widen and he bolts upright.
He knows where to find a priest.
---
It’s a moonless night when he trespasses on Nara clan lands. Led only by the memories Kakashi had shared and a stolen mission report, it takes him over an hour and a half creeping through the dark to find the place. He knows it by the scar left on the land, by the way nothing grows and the animals stay away.
Nidaime’s books mentioned the way no living creature would come close to the temple of the worshippers. The beasts are perhaps more clever than the men, for they know to stay away. Men, like myself, are more foolish.
He pulls out a kunai and a small mining spade and begins to dig where the soil is darkest. He recalls a lesson he teaches second year pre-genin, a lesson on shinobi tools and their origins.
The kunai knife was originally a farming tool. Primitive warriors used them for gardening and digging, using the flat of the blade to smash things such as plaster and wood, and only the tip was sharpened for digging. Pretty different from now huh? Now, any questions?
No Iruka-sensei!
The sing-song echo of thirty little voices fades slowly in his ears as he sets his jaw, and keeps digging. It’s treacherously slow work, digging with only his hands, his kunai and his spade. Two hours pass and he’s filthy, hands bleeding, back aching when he hears—a voice;
“Who’s there? Who the fuck is out there? I’ll cut your fucking throat you little brat!”
“Be quiet,” Iruka hisses, crawling on his knees in the muddy hole he’s carved into the earth. “Or I'll bury you again and leave.”
“I’ll fucking gut you!” The voice shouts back. “You don’t know who the fuck you're dealing with!”
“Shut up!” Iruka says again, more urgently, digging frantically in the direction of the voice. “Shut up or we’ll both die in this hole!”
His nails are caked with mud and blood and he’s finding bits of body parts and he’s throwing them aside by the disgusting handful until finally, he catches sight of hair. He grabs onto it and pulls and the voice yowls as the head is finally, finally freed.
“Who the fuck are you?” Snarls the head of Hidan, the last living priest of Jashin.
“I’m Umino Iruka, and you're going to help me.”
“Like fucking hell!”
“I think you’ll find,” Iruka says softly, viciously, holding Hidan aloft by his hair so they’re eye to eye. “That you don't have a choice.”
---
The first thing he does when he returns home is toss Hidan’s head in the kitchen sink and flip the tap. Hidan screams, wet and indignant under the rush of water, while Iruka is busy putting up his wards. When he returns to the sink, he pulls the gag from Hidan’s mouth, dodges a furious bite attempt, and sets to scrubbing the filth off.
“Who the fuck do you think you are? Answer me you fucking fuck! Don't touch me!”
Iruka works quickly, using copious amounts of dish soap and dumping Hidan out onto a waiting kitchen towel once he’s clean.
“I’ll fucking kill you, you heathen! You-’
Iruka shoves Hidan’s head into a drawer and slams it shut, cutting him off, and goes to take a shower. He’s quick, mud and blood rinsing a pink and black swill down the drain. He dries himself, pulls on his night clothes and, after consideration, a pair of thick leather gloves.
Hidan has gone beyond swearing now, simply screaming insensate, when Iruka finally pulls him out of the drawer, careful to hold him by the hair to avoid his teeth.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Hidan shrieks. “I SWEAR ON JASHIN, IF YOU DON'T-”
Iruka slaps him, “Please be quiet.”
Hidan lets out another yell, “FUCK YOU-”
Iruka slaps him again, harder, and shakes him by his hair. “Be quiet,” he hisses. “Or I’ll put you back in that drawer to rot.”
“Who do you think you are?” Hidan snarls, finally quietly, through bared teeth.
“I told you,” Iruka says patiently, “I’m Umino Iruka and I need your help. I need you to teach me about Jashin.”
And that... Is clearly the last thing Hidan expected to hear.
“Lord Jashin? What could any fucking sniveling Leaf Shinobi hope to know about the glory of Lord Jashin?”
Content now that Hidan is no longer screaming, Iruka drops him on the kitchen table — “Ow! Fuck you that hurts!” — and pulls out the diary of Nidaime.
“I need you to help me with this.” Iruka shows him the pages.
Hidan’s eyes widen, and he blinks, “Where did you get that?”
“Irrelevant,” Iruka says, impatient now. “I just need you to help me with these rituals. The Nidaime wrote that the priests of Jashin could raise the dead. Is that true?”
“Like you could ever understand the true—HEY!” Hidan lets loose another yell as Iruka smacks him hard enough for him to roll off the table. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”
“I’m not here to play games, Hidan,” Iruka says simply. “I dug you up because this book says I need a priest of Jashin to guide me in the reincarnation rituals. If you can’t help me, I’m going to take you back to that hole and bury you permanently.”
“Fine!” Hidan snaps from the floor. “Pick me up! This floor is disgusting.”
“Sorry,” Iruka says blithely, grabbing him up by the hair again. “I haven’t really been in the mood to clean lately. Are you gonna help me?”
“Who the fuck is so important that you’d come to me?” Hidan sneers.
“My lover was killed on a mission,” Iruka tells him. “And I’m going to bring him back.”
“You're a faggot?” Hidan says, and Iruka punches him so hard his nose breaks, sending his head swinging wildly in Iruka’s grip. “Dammit! Goddamn it!”
“Are you going to help me or not?” Iruka pays no mind to Hidan’s blood dripping on the floor, or even stops to wonder how his blood can flow at all, when Hidan’s heart is still in pieces miles away.
“Fine,” Hidan seethes through the blood on his chin. “Fine.”
---
“The most important part of any ritual of Jashin is blood,” Hidan tells him, head perched on a pile of pillows on the kotatsu. “Blood is life, and Jashinism is the religion of life.”
“Funny,” Iruka says flatly. “Kakashi told me all you ever did was kill.”
“Kakashi? The copy nin? Hatake Kakashi?”
“Yes. My lover. He’s the one you're helping me revive,” Iruka says, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the kotatsu so he and Hidan are eye to eye.
“You expect me to help you revive the dickhead that killed Kakuzu? Are you fucking insane?” Hidan says in utter disbelief.
“I expect you to tell me about Jashinism and keep your voice down,” Iruka snaps at him, patience worn thin. “Or I’ll put you back in that hole where I found you.”
“Are you always this testy?” Hidan rolls his eyes, and Iruka’s irritation flares higher.
“No,” he replies shortly. “Only since they let Kakashi die on the operating table. Now tell me how Jashin is the god of life.”
“Well it’s simple isn't it?” Hidan says, “Death is the only true representation of life. It’s only by killing that we are truly alive. Jashin grants glorious death, and he grants immortal life.”
“Immortal life?” Iruka is skeptical.
“I’m a severed head. On your table. That you’re talking to.”
“Fair,” Iruka concedes with a shrug. “But what does this have to do with reincarnation?”
Hidan snorts, “Everything, you dumbfuck. Jashin and his servants have unlocked the key to life. Through his teachings, we are masters of life and death. If you can survive, you can revive.”
“Clever,” Iruka deadpans. “Tell me about the blood.”
“Blood is the carrier of life energy. We use it to conduct the energy and the chakra that’s needed for our rituals.”
“Huh,” Iruka says. “Just like the special ink we use for seals in fuinjutsu.”
“You do fuinjutsu?”
“Yes, I’m very good at it.”
“Well, that at least will help. The second part of the rituals are the sacrifices. You’ll need to kill in order to create the energy needed for them to work.”
“No,” Iruka says, frowning. “I won't sacrifice animals.”
Hidan laughs sadistically, “Good! Because it won’t do you any fucking good. Lord Jashin requires human sacrifices.”
“Absolutely not,” Iruka says through gritted teeth and narrowed eyes.
“How do you expect to complete the rites of Jashin without sacrifices?” Hidan says angrily, “You can’t create the needed energy without them!”
“That’s bullshit,” Iruka says, crossing his arms. “There has to be another way to create the energy. What about chakra? Chakra is energy.”
“You’re such a fucking pussy,” Hidan snarls, angrier, it seems, than Iruka has yet seen him. “If you don’t have what it takes, you should just give up. If you’re not even strong enough to kill, you’re not strong enough to survive what it would take to do the ritual without the sacrifices.”
“So there is a way to do it without the sacrifices?” Iruka asks, hope that was crushed is reinflating in his chest.
“You wouldn’t be able to do it,” Hidan sneers. “You’re weak.”
“I’ll do anything,” Iruka says quietly. “I know I’m weak, but I’ll do anything.”
“Pain,” Hidan says finally. “The only other way to create the energy and appease Lord Jashin is through pain. You need to hurt, or make someone else hurt, and then use the energy from the pain for the rituals. The more pain, the more energy. The earliest practitioners of the faith used pain for rituals, before they realized the superiority of human sacrifice. It’s much harder to do.”
“I understand,” Iruka nods, relieved that there’s another way. Pain? Pain is nothing. He can handle pain.
He just can’t handle life without Kakashi.
---
He wakes up early the next day, eager to get started. Hidan demands to be settled in another nest of pillows before he’ll begin his instruction.
“You’ll have to practice with mixing the pain and the chakra first,” Hidan tells him. “Go get some fresh dead fish from the market to practice on.”
“Fish?”
“Fish are easy to revive. Less finesse needed. They stink to high hell though. You’ll start with creating the sigils, then you have to inflict the pain at the same time you’re pulling and moulding your chakra. Mixing them creates the energy you need, and applying it to the sigils directs it to the body you need to revive.”
“Okay. I’ll get the fish.”
“Might want to get some iron pills too. Don't forget you need to write the sigils in blood.”
“Understood. I’ll go now.”
Hidan curses him, his mother, his father and his entire “fucking useless existence” when Iruka sticks the gag back in his mouth and shuts him in the drawer before he leaves.
“I don’t need you alerting the neighbors,” Iruka tells him cheerfully. “I’ll be back before you know it. Be good!”
Hidan’s muffled shrieks of rage follow him out the door.
---
“You’re not fucking doing it right!”
“Like you could do any better?”
“Give me back my fucking body and I could!”
“You’re even more insane than they say if you think I’m stupid enough to do that,” Iruka says through gritted teeth. “Either tell me what I’m doing wrong, or shut up.”
Hidan scowls from his place on the kotatsu, and Iruka turns away again, going back to dragging two fingers through the blood pouring down his wrist from his self-inflicted cut and sketching the lines of the sigils from the book.
“Okay, okay fine, just stop doing that!” Hidan snaps finally. “Your lines are too thick and sloppy. You need finesse.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Iruka spits acidly, but listens as Hidan coaches him through creating more delicate lines.
“Yeah, yeah, like that, use your pinky, and try using the nail to make the triads, they’re the most delicate parts. You need to form eight points.”
In the end, he’s left with a network of delicate seal work, inked into the paper with his own blood. He lays it on the floor, across from the large sigil circle, the symbol of Jashin, he’s drawn directly on the wood in his own blood. A large dead fish lays in the circle, eyes bright and clear from a recent death.
“Now remember what I said,” Hidan tells him. “You need to apply your chakra at the same time you’re inflicting the pain or it won’t work. Pain is energy, pain is life.”
Iruka nods grimly, setting his teeth.
He places one hand in the sigil circle, and the other in the glowing red pan of coals.
He doesn’t scream, but clenches his teeth until his jaw cracks.
For Kakashi.
I can do it for Kakashi.
Sweat and tears drip off his chin as he fights through the agony and pulls at the pain and at his chakra.
Feel it, pull it, mould and mix it, push it out, push it out, push it out.
In front of him, the fish gives the smallest twitch.
---
He takes another leave of absence, this one with no predetermined end. He knows they’re still worried for him, but he can’t bring himself to care. It’s too hard to focus on teaching while also trying to learn from Hidan.
And while he can heal the worst of the wounds after the rituals, with help from the healing scrolls and the salves he’s “borrowed” from the hospital, he’s getting tired of trying to explain them away. (Besides, it’s not as if he needs to work; Kakashi left everything to him and the Hatake clan funds are a well that will never run dry.)
His friends bang on his door, but Iruka is forceful when he sends them away. Their worry is touching and annoying and unnecessary. He is fine. And once he has Kakashi back, they will understand. They’ll all understand.
Naruto is the one stubbornly persistent holdout, coming around often. It’s exhausting and Iruka almost feels guilty about the relief he feels when Jiraiya takes Naruto away for more training.
It’ll be easier, once I have Kakashi back, he tells himself, everything will be easier. Naruto will understand. He will. He has to.
----
“You say that they cremated him?”
“Yes. Custom. His remains are buried in his family plot.”
“Well that just fucks everything up. It’s one thing to reanimate a corpse, but if you’re gonna bring back someone without a body, you’ll need a human sacrifice.”
“Absolutely not. There has to be another way.”
“I’m telling you there isn't, you stupid shit! You need something to anchor their soul to, unless you want your stupid boyfriend to be tethered to a dog.”
“Would...would that work?”
“What? No. Of course it wouldn’t fucking work! Human souls are too big to be attached to animals. You need a human body to attach them to.”
“There has to be another way. I won’t kill. Besides, Nidaime’s notes indicate that you can’t permanently attach a soul to a foreign body permanently.”
“Listen, I’m telling you there isn’t another way you useless fuck!”
“There must be. And you’re gonna figure it out.” Iruka snarls, and he doesn’t sound desperate. He doesn’t.
There has to be another way. He can’t take a sacrifice. He can’t.
(Can he?)
---
“Hey, faggot.”
“What?”
“Goddamn. No need to get testy, princess. But I just remembered there might be a way to revive your precious boytoy, without a sacrifice.”
“... I’m listening.”
“You’re not gonna like it.” Hidan sounds gleeful, and Iruka’s stomach clenches.
“What is it?”
“Grave dirt. A shit ton of grave dirt. And blood, a fuckload of blood. And you’ll need to dig up your boyfriend’s ashes. We’ll need the bone bits for the ritual.”
“Grave dirt?”
“Yeah, a shit ton of it. Grave dirt has special properties, imbued from the souls of the dead. But you’re gonna need a lot of it, at least as much as your boyfriend weighed. And you’re gonna need as much blood as a human body has.”
“Does the blood need to be fresh?”
“Nah, but it needs to be wet and it needs to be human. You can’t use animal blood unless you want your boyfriend to oink.”
“And the bones?”
“Yeah, they gotta be the person’s bones. Some things can’t be replaced by cheap substitutes. And you’re gonna have to get over this little thing you have about killing animals. You’re gonna have to practice reviving dead things from ashes. Get some rats to start with.”
“Okay,” Iruka takes a shaky breath. “Okay. Let’s... Let’s get started.”
“That’s the spirit, faggot.”
Iruka takes a savage joy in shoving Hidan's head in the drawer and slamming it shut before he leaves.
---
He goes to the library and reads everything he can on cremation and the preparation of the dead. He uses henge to take the faces of plain civilians, careful not to repeat too often, because he can't risk the questions about why.
It takes a judicious application of his fuinjutsu abilities to construct and contain the crematorium he builds in the kitchen. It’s small, and he builds it in the space where the kitchen table was, it having been the first necessary sacrifice for the cause.
He uses clay to create the chamber and paints on special heat retardant chakra seals, the kind usually reserved for flame resistant clothing, that he’s modified for his purposes. The first two kilns he builds both explode, but he’s able to contain them with barrier seals, and eventually he gets it right. The chamber keeps form, and he’s finally able to start cremating.
It makes his kitchen hot, even despite all the seals that keep it from burning up or being detected by nosy neighbors or meddling ANBU. The smell is awful, but it gives Iruka another tool in his arsenal for dealing with Hidan. Now when the Jashinist acts up, Iruka need only cheerfully suggest tossing his head into the crematorium for a while to see just how immortal he really is.
(Hidan is usually smart enough to keep his mouth shut after that.)
---
It’s both more and less difficult than he expects to gather the grave dirt he needs. Hidan is specific in that it needs to be from a human graveyard, the older (but not too old) the better.
“More time to soak in the death,” Hidan had cackled.
He prays for forgiveness from the souls he’s robbing every night, before slinging his bag and spade over his shoulder and setting to task. The digging itself is backbreaking work, but Iruka relishes the honest pain of it, the sweat that pours off his face under the waxing and waning moon.
He’s always careful to cut away the sod, and once he’s removed the grave dirt he replaces it with soil he’s collected from the forest. Then he replaces the sod and it’s as if it never happened.
He tells himself it’s not grave robbing. He tells himself the dead won’t miss it. He tells himself that it’s going to be worth it.
Hidan tells him to shut the fuck up and stop wallowing and that he’s ruining the mood.
---
“You still haven’t told me why you’re doing all this shit.”
“I’m very sure I did tell you why,” Iruka is irritated and hiding it poorly. The new experiments thus far have been failures. Painful failures.
“Yeah, you’re tryna revive your boyfriend, right, I got that, but why?”
Iruka’s chin hits his chest, and he takes a shuddering breath, “You mean you’ve never loved anyone?”
“Love is weak. Pain and suffering, and surviving through them, that's real power.”
“I should’ve known better than to try to explain love to a madman,” Iruka chuckles softly, shaking his head and ignoring the throb of pain in arms and legs.
“I’m the madman?” Hidan asks incredulously. “You’re the one trying to revive his dead and buried and cremated boyfriend with a box of grave dirt and no human sacrifices.” He scoffs, before continuing on, “You’re not even immortal. You could just die, and be with him right? That’s what you heathens believe?”
“I can’t,” Iruka says brokenly, shaking his head and this time the tears in his eyes aren’t from physical pain. “I made him a promise that I wouldn’t. That I wouldn’t take the honorable way out.”
“Yeah, but he’s never gonna know,” Hidan says impatiently. “You could go cut your guts out right now and he’s still just as fucking dead. What’s he gonna do? Be disappointed? The dead don’t get disappointed, dumbass.”
“You’ll never understand,” Iruka says, looking away so Hidan can’t see the tears on his face and call him weak.
“Maybe I understand better than you.”
---
Five and a half months after Kakashi dies, Iruka revives a bird in his living room.
He can’t believe it at first, staring at the bright-eyed little creature, chirping from where before there was only a carefully shaped mound of blood soaked grave dirt and ash.
Hidan is cackling madly in the background and the tears stinging Iruka’s eyes aren’t from the two broken, twisted fingers he’s sporting or the line of small cuts bleeding sluggishly along the crook of his elbow.
“I-I did it,” Iruka whispers, and the tears fall faster and there’s something trying to claw its way violently out of his chest. “I did it.”
“Congratulations, you fucking faggot!” Hidan crows gleefully. “You're a true follower of Jashin!”
---
Later that night, he curls up in the bed he’s still not used to being empty, and holds the picture of Kakashi that he keeps in his bedside drawer to his heart.
“I did it, Kakashi,” he whispers into the quiet darkness, cradling the picture in his heavily bandaged hands. “I made life. I’m going to bring you back. I miss you so much, but I’m going to bring you back.”
He closes his eyes, presses the photo tightly to his forehead and whispers, like every night these past five months;
“I love you.”
---
The experiments with the rats and the birds are successful, once he figures out the right mixture of pain, chakra, blood and dirt. (Birds are easy, just two snapped fingers. Rats take four, but Hidan hypothesizes it’s because rats are smarter.)
Iruka doesn’t feel too bad killing the scores of rats needed, but feels significantly worse when he works up to trapping, killing, draining and burning the stray cats and dogs around the village. Especially when the first several attempts are miserable failures.
“It’s harder when they’re bigger,” Hidan says conversationally from his pile of pillows on the couch, watching Iruka sweat and bleed in the middle of the living room floor.
“No shit,” Iruka spits through gritted teeth, surrounded by the rot and stench of cat’s blood and the slightly smoking pile of ash and grave dirt.
“The bigger the creature, the more pain you need to create to complete the ritual.”
“I know that,” Iruka presses the filthy heels of his palms to eyes hard enough for pinpricks of light to burst behind his lids. “I know what I need to do. But the more pain, the harder it is to control it.”
“Yeah, try fucking stabbing your own heart or getting beheaded,” Hidan says without sympathy. “You still don’t know shit about real pain. You’re not gonna succeed if you can’t handle the pain.”
“I can handle the pain,” Iruka snarls, meeting his eyes furiously. “I can handle anything to get Kakashi back.”
“Well then you better keep fucking trying, asshole." Hidan sneers, “Because you only get one try with the fuckhead.”
“I know, I know, I know!” Iruka squares his shoulders, rolling them and letting the familiar pain flow down his elbows into his palms. “Let’s...let’s try again.”
---
“Iruka-sensei!”
Iruka turns, summoned by the anguish in the small voice, hefting his shopping bag higher on his shoulder. He sees a student, a former student, Kentarou, pelting after him.
“Kentarou-kun, what can I do for you?” Iruka speaks kindly, but hopes this ends quickly; he needs to get home.
“Iruka-sensei, Bochi is missing!” Kentarou wails up at him, eyes wet with tears. “I’ve looked everywhere!”
“Bochi?” Iruka asks faintly, frowning; he doesn’t remember Kentarou having any siblings.
“He’s the dog who lives under the stairs in my building!” Kentarou whimpers, “I haven’t been able to find him since Saturday! He always comes for dinner ‘cause my mom always lets me give him my scraps.”
“What does Bochi look like?” Iruka asks, feeling lightheaded.
“He’s a big yellow dog," Kentarou tells him. “But he’s got a white spot on his belly. Can you help me look for him Iruka-sensei?”
“I’m so sorry, Kentarou-kun,” Iruka says, squeezing both of his tiny shoulders tightly. “I’m very busy right now, but why don’t you go home and do your homework? I’ll see if I can look for Bochi later. I’ll bet he’ll be home before you know it.”
“Okay,” Kentarou sniffles, wiping his nose on his sleeve and leaving a line of shiny snot. “I miss you at school, Iruka-sensei. Miyumi-sensei isn’t nearly as nice as you.”
“I’m sure Miyumi-sensei is perfectly adequate,” Iruka says gently, spinning Kentarou and pointing him away down the street. “And once I’m done with what I’m doing, I’ll come back to the academy.”
Kentarou leaves, waving wildly as he dashes away.
Iruka goes home, skips dinner and stays up late. He breaks both of his collar bones, and carves a line through his thigh.
At sunrise, he opens his door and lets out a frantic yellow dog who bolts away, yipping in terror.
---
He becomes adept at pain.
It’s not a skillset he ever thought he’d have. But needs must, and so he becomes proficient at hurt, at hurting himself.
He learns how best to cut, to maximize pain and minimize bleeding (papercuts, he finds, work best in the webbings of his fingers). He learns the best places on his hip bones to press burning coals for maximum effect. He learns that electricity, when run through his knees, feels like kneeling in fire. He learns how to break his own bones without flinching and how to stave off shock.
He already knows that breaking two fingers will bring back a bird, four for a rat. He learns if he breaks an ulna, he can revive a cat. But that's harder to fix so he sticks to burning his pelvis with the coals to revive cats. Dogs are trickier, because some are bigger than others, but once Hidan clues him into the agony of skinning, he never fails on a dog again.
It’s pure luck that he finds the dead deer in the forest when he’s out collecting his replacement dirt. A big buck, killed by something with claws and teeth. It’s too good to pass up, so he field dresses it and instead of dirt, that day he brings home a hundred pounds of red deer meat and bones. It takes longer to cremate, and Hidan is gleeful when, after crushing his own testicles until his vision whites out and he vomits from the pain, the buck leaps up and smashes his terrified way through the apartment, destroying several of Iruka’s possessions, until Iruka is forced to re-kill it with a well thrown kunai.
(It’s from the buck that he learns that when his creations are killed, they dissolve back into piles of bloody dirt and ash. Hidan declares the experiment a roaring success and laughs so long and obnoxiously that Iruka shoves him in the garbage can overnight and goes to bed in a foul mood.)
---
It takes a lot of practice.
Practice on how best to inflict the pain he needs to bear life, practice on chakra manipulation, practice on healing himself well enough, just so he can hurt himself again…
His refrigerator is full of blood, labeled neatly in jars; cat, dog, rat, bird, human. Boxes full of grave dirt are stacked in the spare room, beneath the Ramen King posters. The medicine cabinet is filled with bottles of pills; soldier pills, iron pills, calcium supplements. And his collection of torture implements is growing, lined up in rows in the living room, within easy reach for his rituals.
He has to throw out the couch after the first time he almost successfully resurrects a dog; the blood and the rips won't come out. The kotatsu he dismantles and burns for its wood when he runs out of fuel for the crematorium. Hidan complains bitterly about being relegated to a folding chair, but Iruka is long practiced at ignoring him by now.
---
Eight months to the day Kakashi died, a knock rings out on Iruka’s front door.
He freezes, elbow deep in the carcass of a dog, blood spattered all the way up to his chin.
“Who is it?” He calls out, shooting Hidan a look that means keep your mouth shut or you’re going in the drawer.
“Umino Iruka, you’ve been summoned by the Godaime Hokage. You need to come with me.”
Iruka’s stomach drops straight to his toes. The hand holding the kunai knife starts to tremble, “What is this about?” He says loudly, eyes darting wildly around his destroyed apartment, catching on crates of mildewy grave dirt, uncapped jars of dog blood, the three dead cats he’s only just finished preparing for cremation, and the fully animated severed head of an S-rank missing nin responsible for the deaths of thousands.
“This looks bad, doesn’t it?” Hidan whispers loudly and gleefully, and Iruka glares daggers at him.
But he’s forced to agree; this looks bad.
“Can I have some time to get ready?” He shouts to the messenger at his door, “I’m...I need a shower.”
“Thirty minutes,” comes the gruff reply, "Or else we’ll come to collect you.”
The way he says ‘collect you’ makes Iruka very certain that it would not be pleasant. He swallows hard, heart pounding triple time, but keeps his voice remarkably steady when he calls out, “I understand. Please tell the Hokage I will be there shortly.”
---
Twenty-eight minutes past the knock on his door, Iruka presents himself to Tsunade, having taken great pains to scrub himself of the blood and stench of death that clings to him these days.
He tries to calm his racing heart as he meets her golden gaze, “Lady Hokage,” he says, giving his most formal bow, “What can I do for you?”
Her chin rests on her steepled fingers, and he wonders what she sees. The long sleeves he wears, the gloves on his hands, the way his hair is long enough now to brush down his neck even from the ponytail he wears because he hasn’t had the time, the inclination or the energy to cut it.
“I spoke with the headmaster at the academy,” she says finally, “He told me you still haven’t returned to the academy, sensei.”
“Ah,” Iruka speaks haltingly, flushing and not meeting her gaze, “He is correct, my Lady. It’s still not the right...time for me.”
She says nothing for a long moment, and Iruka resists squirming under those too-seeing eyes. The constant thrum of pain is a low undercurrent to the feeling of panic trying to claw its way up his throat. He swallows hard, just as she begins to speak, “How have you been, Iruka? You haven’t been attending the sessions Sakura recommended for you at the hospital with the trauma therapist.”
“I am keeping busy, Hokage-sama,” he tells her, which is true but she frowns, so he tells a little lie, “I’ve been going through the Hatake clan library. The records are extensive.”
He stops, and she says nothing, and there’s something in the way she’s looking at him, too-sharp, and his stomach starts to sink and he fights every urge telling him to run.
“Are you okay, Iruka?” she asks him finally, and it catches him off-guard and he struggles for a long moment before he can finally speak. It feels like a tiger is trying to escape his throat.
“I will be, Hokage-sama.”
She dismisses him with a sigh, and if he wasn’t so relieved he would recognize the raw concern on her face as he leaves.
---
He builds his altar on Hatake clan lands because even without any furniture, the living room simply isn't large enough for the sigil circles he needs. The whole compound and surrounding lands belong to him now, and the generations of wards around it, carefully laid and layered by every Hatake clan head since time immemorial, give him the privacy he needs.
It takes six weeks to haul and mould the stone he needs, arranging a massive, elaborate circle with a raised dais in the midst of a copse of trees. He uses his own blood to paint the sigils, and holds them down with seals of his own design. It takes trial and error, but eventually he can lay the blood lines, apply his seals and the barest hint of chakra, and they're burned permanently into the stone. It will save him time on the night of.
It's Hidan who suggests the night of the summer solstice moon, a night most holy to Jashinists because it signals the start of the summer season, when killing is easier and sacrifices are plenty. When the human world and the land of the dead are closest. "Souls are closer to the line," Hidan tells him, as if it makes perfect sense. "And the closer fuckhead's soul is, the easier time you'll have pulling it back out. Just make sure you have the altar ready before the start of the ritual."
---
“Hey faggot, you awake?” Hidan’s voice is as quiet as Iruka’s ever heard it.
“What?” Iruka groans from his spot, flat on the floor, where he’s been ever since he released a terrified cat. Pain is still sparking fitfully across his nerves, keeping him drifting.
“You realize you’re gonna have to hurt yourself the most you’ve ever hurt for this to work, right?”
Iruka manages to lift his head, squinting muzzily at Hidan’s face. It wavers in doubled vision in front of him; maybe reviving the third cat was a mistake. “Yeah, I know,” he croaks, “I’ll need to create a lot of energy to bring Kakashi back.”
“Are you ready for that?”
“I’m ready to bring him back.”
“You’re such a fucking asshole,” Hidan says, sounding disproportionately angry. “This is gonna hurt. This is gonna hurt the most.”
“I didn’t know you cared,” Iruka says with a weak smile. “Don’t worry. I have a plan. I know what I'm doing.”
“No you fucking don’t,” Hidan snarls, “And you’re probably gonna fucking die from the pain because you’re too fucking stubborn.”
“Thank you for helping me, Hidan,” Iruka says, still smiling softly, closing his eyes and folding his hands over his scarred chest.
He drifts off to sleep to the lullaby of Hidan’s cursing, and the gentle song of pain lapping at his raw nerves like the waves on the sea.
---
“It’s time,” Iruka says quietly, and Hidan says nothing because he already knows.
The lazy solstice moon is climbing higher in the sky, the altar is ready, he’s got two gallons of his own carefully harvested blood in jugs in a cold bag. Kakashi’s ashes are wrapped up safely in a blanket in the satchel bag over his shoulder, the same one he used to use to carry homework and bandaids and bentos, lovingly prepared.
“You’re coming too,” Iruka tells Hidan, scooping up his head and putting it in a soft cloth sack. —“Don’t you even fucking think about—!”— shoving a rag into his mouth to stem the tide of curses, “Please shut up.”
Hidan glares up at him, even as Iruka ties the sack closed. He checks his satchel again; all his supplies are ready to go.
He wraps his rosary around his scarred knuckles, pressing the sigil into the flesh of his palm. He takes one more look at his apartment, before throwing open the door and stepping out into the night.
I’m coming, Kakashi. I’m coming for you.