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What was interesting about Hatake Kakashi was that he was fairly average looking.
Well, no, that wasn’t quite the case, Iruka thinks. Kakashi had a fairly average face, he thought-- the coloring was a different story, when he was awake and you were able to see those dark eyes and silver hair and pale skin, but the face itself--
There was nothing distinctive about the face, not in the way that Iruka had always thought there must’ve been.
A singular beauty mark under his mouth, sure, but the mouth itself was just that, a little thin, maybe. The nose, too, was just a nose, a little hooked but that was it.
An unremarkable face, not exactly handsome but not ugly, Iruka thinks, staring at the unconscious man in the hospital bed. Iruka flushed a moment later, looked around the room. He hadn’t-- well, he had thought there would be someone else in the room. A nurse, or a doctor, or Tsunade, maybe one of Kakashi’s not-quite friends but comrades, perhaps? A terrifying shinobi in a white porcelain mask.
It wouldn’t have been the first time, after all.
Instead, it’s just Iruka, and the newest volume of Icha Icha clutched tightly in his hands, and the sunlight through the hazy window-- to prevent people from looking in, he thinks-- and Kakashi, whose face is slack in unnatural sleep.
Iruka doesn’t know if his face looks younger or more tired when he’s unconscious. He looks pretty young and tired to Iruka.
For the first time, Iruka wonders how old Kakashi is.
He stares for another moment, at the strangely pale eyelashes on Kakashi’s cheek. That’s the other thing, with his hitae-ae off, both his eyes are-- there. Available. Almost the same, with those silvery eyelashes, except for the scar that cuts through the brow and the lid on the left one. It’s a very neat scar, a very well healed old one. Iruka remembers seeing it, the end of it at least, once or twice. He knows what’s underneath that scar.
He knows what’s underneath the scar, and underneath the mask, now.
A quiet sound, and Iruka jumps a foot in the air, comes down and stares at Kakashi. Kakashi, unconscious, whose face is uncovered, and what if someone else comes in and sees—
Why would they leave him defenseless like this?
Iruka feels a small spark spring up in his soul, coals catching fire once again. A brief burning feeling of-- indignation, of fury that they would leave one of their own like this, who would be--
How would Kakashi feel without his mask? Horrified? Ashamed? Uncomfortable and hating it? On display. Vulnerable.
Already too vulnerable, the beeping of the heart monitors a too steady metronome, the sunken shoulders beneath the sheet.
Iruka looks around the room, finds a neat stack of surgical masks on a tray table, along with an white medical looking eyepatch. A few other bits and bobs, for when Kakashi woke up.
If he woke up, the thought slithering by and Iruka blinking it away with practiced ease. He had too many students, too many deaths in the field, to allow it to stay, not when it hadn’t happened. Not when he had so many bites that had come to pass to grieve.
It would be-- unjust, to allow it the same headspace.
Iruka picked up the surgical mask, and, without allowing himself too much time to think about it, hooked it around Kakashi’s ears. They were cool under the touch, or maybe Iruka’s hands were just hot, and sweaty, now that he thought about it.
Kakashi’s nose presses strangely against the blue fabric. Iruka hadn’t thought to bend the wire to better fit his face. He looks more like himself, however, as much of himself as this strange shell-like version of Kakashi could.
“Right,” Iruka says out loud. He doesn’t touch him again, however, not even to fix the mask. Doesn’t reach for the eyepatch, either. That would be-- too much contact, to tie it around his head, push his fingers into the silver hair that apparently flops everywhere without the hitae keeping it up. Which was weird, but interesting.
“Right,” Iruka repeats. Sits down in the only chair in the room, and wonders if the hospital makes them uncomfortable on purpose, to discourage long-term visitors. He doesn’t really know why he’s staying.
Maybe because he’s still angry, on Kakashi’s behalf. Still indignant, still offended. To see who would come in here next and give them a little piece of his mind, knowing that he’s doing too much for a man who’s not even his friend, exactly. To see who had unmasked the Copy nin here, in a place where he’s supposed to be safe and protected, after all he does to keep them safe and protected.
So Iruka stays sitting, wrestling with the uncomfortable notion that the little fire in his heart, this strangely protective urge, he has never quite been able to put out.
It always has been, his achilles’ heel, his soft underbelly. Mizuki had always said that, about Naruto, about any of his problem students, about the stray cats he fed in the stairwell of his old apartment building. Iruka cares.
He doesn’t know when to stop caring, is the problem. He can hear Mizuki say it, the sneer in his voice, half mocking pity. It’s an ugly voice, an ugly diagnosis, a misshapen little truth that Iruka can’t deny.
He’s sitting in the dimming afternoon sunlight in Hatake Kakashi’s hospital room, after all.
Iruka has never quite been able to stop caring about Kakashi. Had started when he was his captain, on that one disastrous mission. Had kept on when the man had become Naruto’s jounin-sensei-- and it was hard not to care about someone who cared about Naruto so much. Had cared about Naruto before Iruka had been able to care about him, albeit in his own way.
It’s not quite a crush, not exactly, because Iruka would never hear the end of it from Kotetsu or Izumo if it was-- and he hears quite a bit from them already-- it’s more like--
Elite jounin don’t really need someone to worry about if they’re getting enough sleep and sunlight and vegetables, do they?
Iruka feels mired down in mundanity, sometimes. His feet stuck in sucking mud. Quicksand quagmire of quotidian concerns. It feels like all he can do is reach out with these small things toward the people he loves, these people who are larger than life, monsters and heroes both.
So Iruka worries, and he cares, and he visits when they’re laid out in hospital beds even if this is the first time he’s doing it for Kakashi, and god does he regret that, regrets leaving Kakashi alone for a single moment he didn’t have to be just to try and protect his own pride. Pretends his heart’s not breaking when he sees Naruto’s black eyes and sorry, cracked voice, or Kakashi laid out like this, the steady beep of the monitor the only clue that he’s alive.
Iruka settles back in the chair, stretches his legs out in front of him, and cracks open the book. He’s got nothing better to do.
“Well, brat, I--”
Iruka raises an eyebrow when Tsunade swans into the room, Shizune behind her, and stops short when she sees Kakashi. Raises her gaze to Iruka.
“Hokage-sama,” Iruka says neutrally, and marks his place.
“Umino,” Tsunade says, narrows her eyes at him. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Iruka bites his tongue. Gives her a short, respectful nod. “I was…concerned about Hatake-san,” he says, formally.
Tsunade’s eyebrows go up, and her gaze stays narrow. “Hm. He woken up yet?”
“No, Hokage-sama,” Iruka says, wonders why she’s asking him. He figures that the machines in this room, with their steady, lulling beeping, would’ve made some alert, some noise that would’ve told her.
“Right,” Tsunade says, and sweeps back out without another word.
Shizune pauses for another moment, looking at Iruka, and says, “Did anyone give you any trouble about coming in here?”
“No,” Iruka says, a little bewildered. “Should they have? I can go--”
“No,” Shizune says. “I think he wouldn’t mind someone being here, when he wakes.” Then she follows her master out.
The door closes with a soft click, and then there is only the sound of Kakashi’s breathing, and the beeping of the monitors.
Iruka sits back in his chair, but he doesn’t start reading again for a few long minutes.
It’s maybe an hour later when the steady beeping of the monitor finally changes. There’s a single missed beep, and Iruka raises his head before it restarts, the same easy beat. He marks his place again. He’s about forty percent into the book.
He folds his hands on top of the book, and waits.
A moment later, Kakashi says, “You’re reading the new one?”
“Sure,” Iruka says.
“I thought you didn’t like them.”
His voice is low and scratchy, and Iruka can’t see much of, if any of his face, what with the mask and the hair blocking even the outline of his profile.
“I never said that,” Iruka says. “I just don’t like you reading porn in front of six year olds.”
“I think they were eleven,” Kakashi says, and it sounds like he’s smiling. “Did you ever read Tactics?”
Iruka flushes a little. “I preferred Violence, honestly.”
“My my, sensei,” Kakashi says, sounding appreciative. “You’re certainly full of surprises today.” There’s a brief moment of silence, and then Kakashi’s hand comes up to touch his face.
“I’m wearing a mask?” he says. Asks it, really, and Iruka feels a brief flare of surprise, incomprehension.
“Well, yes, I--” takes a deep breath, dives in. “I’m sorry, Kakashi-san. When I came in to visit, no one had provided you one, so I. I saw your face. I put one on you, in case anyone walked in, but really, you should speak to Tsunade about the nurses not respecting your privacy.”
He knows he sounds a little too earnest by the end of it, a little too protective and angry.
Kakashi’s quiet. “You put a mask on me?” Very quiet, a little confused.
“Yes, of course,” Iruka says, and flushes, remembering his long moments of just staring at Kakashi’s bared face, when he couldn’t-- see, or defend himself, or-- “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have looked, but I just--”
“Iruka,” Kakashi says. “It’s fine.”
“It’s really not,” Iruka says, looks down at his hands. There’s a nick on the meat of his thumb from where he sliced it on a kunai a student had been waving around, another bandage on the tip of his middle finger. Blue paint has worked its way under his nails, stained his cuticles. “You have just as much of a right to privacy as anyone else.”
“Sure,” Kakashi agrees, easily. “But this is my private room. I don’t usually wear a mask in here.”
Iruka’s head comes up. “What?”
Kakashi’s moving himself into more of a sitting position at this point, and Iruka should jump up and help him-- anything that landed Hatake Kakashi insensible and in a hospital bed probably meant he shouldn’t be moving-- but he’s incapable of doing anything but staring at him.
“It’s not convenient for Tsunade,” Kakashis’s saying, pushing his hair back. It immediately flops forward again. “Or Shizune, for a myriad of reasons, and I’m here often enough, and so. Private room.”
“Oh,” Iruka says. And then says, “Oh my god, and I barged right in, I’m so sorry--”
“Nah,” Kakashi says, waves a lazy hand. Unhooks the unbent surgical mask from around his ears. It can probably be reused. “You’re on the list.”
He turns to look at Iruka then, one eye held closed with the ease of long practice.
Iruka spares a single thought towards Kakashi’s fucked up depth perception.
And then--
The thing was, the face was unremarkable. The man, however, was not. Kakashi regarded him coolly, almost expressionlessly. A mask underneath the mask underneath--
But the mind beneath the face, the animation that filled it, the way the eyes looked at you, the curve of the mouth--
It transformed it, alchemical like.
He understood why he wore the mask, now. Kakashi would never be able to get away with the lazy perverted jounin sensei facade if people could see this, the way the genius pushed sharply at the paper thin skin like his very mind was a box of sharp kunai.
Something about Kakashi’s open bare face was very old, and very still, and very dangerous. It made Iruka keep still in his chair, like a small animal caught in the gaze of a predator.
“What list,” Iruka manages to say a moment later, still suffering, a little bit, under the weight of that regard.
“There’s only certain people allowed back in this room,” Kakashi says, and turns to look at the wall.
Iruka wants to deflate, but squares his shoulders instead. “A list of people allowed back?”
“Yes.”
“But--” Iruka stops. “But I’ve never visited you before?” it turns into more of a question than he would’ve liked.
Kakashi turns back to look at him. The side of his mouth quirks down, then up, like Kakashi can’t quite decide. “Well. One can hope.”
Iruka sits back, still staring, at that. The aegis of the predator hasn’t left Kakashi’s features, exactly-- Iruka doesn’t think it ever leaves, not really-- but it’s subsided, a little, or Iruka can ignore it.
Something resigned, something hopeful, the glittering black eye flickering over Iruka’s face.
Iruka’s been on the list for Kakashi’s private hospital room, been on the list to see Kakashi’s bare face. He wonders who else knows about the list, who else knows what it means to be on it. How many names there are.
How long, exactly, his name has been inscribed there, a sad, hopeful-hopeless collection of kanji.
Iruka sighs, leans over and snatches the eyepatch off the little table. Throws it at Kakashi. “Put this on,” he says. “You’re gonna give yourself a headache.”
Kakashi blinks in surprise, and then obediently dons the eyepatch.
He looks younger, like that, his hair loose and the white medical eyepatch making him more monochromatic than usual. The beauty mark stands out in stark relief, under his colorless mouth. Probably not a good sign. Iruka wonders if this is what he looked like when he first got his injury, sitting in the hospital like this.
“Kakashi,” Iruka says. “How old are you?”
“Twenty nine,” comes the answer after a moment, like he had to think about it.
Iruka flinches in his seat, uncontrollably. Kakashi’s only two years older than Iruka himself.
“You said you’d been a jounin for twenty years,” Iruka says incredulously.
Kakashi smiles, and Iruka marvels at how he can see it, how it really does crease up the lines by his eye when he does so. “I have,” he says.
Iruka stares some more, and then sighs again. “That’s so fucked up,” he says, hears the anger in his voice, his temper rising for crimes outside the statute of limitations, outside his purview, outside his world.
“Yep,” Kakashi says, sounds pleased.
“What are you so happy about?” Iruka says, grumpily. “Aren’t you half dead or something?”
“Chakra exhausted,” Kakashi says cheerfully. “Probably gonna pass out again in a second.” He slurs the s of it, just a tad. Barely noticeable. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s worried about me.”
Iruka freezes at that. Swallows hard. “I do,” he says, quietly.
“I know,” Kakashi says, softer. “That’s why I put you on the list.”
Kakashi lays back down as Iruka stares at his hands, and a few moments later, when Iruka looks up, he’s unconscious again, this time something more of the natural look of sleep about him. Like the animation hasn’t fully drained out of him, like he could be up, bristling knives and strategy and other sharp, shiny things at a moment’s notice.
Kakashi, who made jounin at nine years old, who knows more jutsus than maybe anyone else alive, who everyone whispers about potentially being the Rokudaime. Kakashi, whose mind must be some terrifying, crystalline thing, castles in the sky.
Kakashi, who put him on the list because Iruka wants to protect him, for some reason, even knowing he probably can’t. Because Iruka worries about him. Because Iruka doesn’t know how to stop caring, and Kakashi--
“Right,” Iruka says, for the final time. “I get it.”