Chapter Text
It’s the second day of the new school year, and Iruka already has his hands comically full with his class.
He’s been working as a sensei long enough to expect just as much, but even with several years of teaching under his belt, no amount of experience ever seems to be enough to dull the explosive blow of a new year’s kickoff. His usual class size of 15 has been bumped to 21 this year thanks to an abnormally large number of incoming students for the fourth grade, leaving him not only with many more children to herd than usual, but many more overbearing parents to juggle, too.
His classroom is crammed with extra desks, and in combination with the stubborn heat of late summer and the poor air conditioning in his building, the space is borderline claustrophobic. Normally, the first couple weeks of the school year would be spent largely indoors to escape the heat, but today, Iruka is more than a little desperate for fresh air and breathing room.
And so he takes his class out on a field trip. A very small field trip. They don’t even venture outside of the village walls, which would have been a headache of permission slips, official approval from the principal, and official approval from the perimeter guards to ensure there was no active threat they’d be waltzing into.
But in a seeming continuation of Iruka’s comically chaotic start to the school year, they waltz right into a threat, anyway.
Upon reaching the eastern park’s entrance, Iruka has a gut sensation that something is… off. The morning has already left him frazzled, and spontaneity has never been his strong suit, so it’s easy to brush it off as simple anxiety— no reason to alarm his students, or suddenly deny them the little history lesson he’d planned. Every time he brings a class to this park, he animatedly, and perhaps a little too enthusiastically, tells them the stories behind the three statues that serve as focal points amidst the walkways and winding streams. It’s one of his favorite places to take his classes, and though the weather is a bit hot for an outing, it’s certainly better than the stuffy classroom they’d left behind.
The first statue is a short walk from the entrance, depicting a poet who left Konoha to travel across many interesting and perilous lands, then returned to write of his experiences. It wasn’t long before his works were cemented amongst the classics of the Land of Fire, though the material that was allowed to flow outside of the village walls was highly scrutinized and edited to avoid accidental spilling of intelligence or village secrets. Here, in Konoha, his works in full can be accessed at any library, and they had enthralled Iruka from a young age spent daydreaming what the rest of the world was like beyond those walls.
Carved from polished gray stone, the poet’s smiling face is adorned with the lines and wrinkles of a life well-spent. He sits at a chair, one hand propped on his knee holding a scroll, and the other lifting a brush. His expression, though benevolent, is also just a touch mischievous— like he’s on the verge of winking at the observer.
An expression which is suddenly looking up at Iruka once a loud clang of metal against stone pierces through the air, and the decapitated head of the statue rolls to his feet.
Wide-eyed, he looks up to meet the gaze of a kunoichi perched atop what’s left of the statue, dressed in standard village uniform.
“I— shinobi-san—?”
“They said the park would be empty this time of day,” she interrupts him, her eyes narrowing. “What are a bunch of little kids doing here? This a setup?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Iruka responds as calmly as he can, managing to keep the shaking of his hands minimal as he holds them up and backs towards his students. “We’re here on a field trip. If the park isn’t open, we’ll leave immediately.”
“That’s cute,” the kunoichi huffs, crouching as she peers down at them, a vulture ruffling its wings. “They could’ve come up with something more creative than that.”
Though the heat of the day is overbearing, Iruka suddenly feels very, very cold.
He can already hear confused and nervous murmurs breaking out amongst the children behind him; he stretches his arms out to shield them. His mind darts uselessly for any better defense he can provide, but he’s unarmed; he’s never been one to carry a knife or pepper spray, and in a walled city during peacetime, he should never need anything like that.
(…Not that either of those would be useful against a shinobi.)
The woman is wearing the same flak jacket and forehead protector Iruka’s seen countless times in his life, right down to the leaf symbol inscribed on the metal plate, but she certainly isn’t behaving like any other Konoha shinobi Iruka’s come across.
“We’ll be leaving now,” Iruka says slowly, reaching for every last shred of confidence and finality he can muster to keep his tone steady. “I apologize for the disturbance.”
The woman’s eyes narrow; her nostrils flare. “It’s you, isn’t it? I knew someone was following me. How’d you figure me out?” She hops off the statue, her sandaled feet landing with a loud clap against the stone walkway in front of Iruka. A wink of metal beneath the sunlight is the only warning Iruka has before a kunai is being brandished at him. “Tell me before I slit your throat in front of these brats.”
Iruka’s heart is thudding painfully against his ribs; his shaking palms are growing clammy. Still, he keeps his chin raised, and his arms stretched out, his focus not on the blade in front of him, but on the increasingly frightened students behind him.
“I don’t know who you are, and I haven’t been following you. Let us go in peace.”
The kunoichi sneers, lifting the blade higher, no more than a few inches from Iruka’s neck now. “If you’re going to die an idiot, you should at least put up a good fight.”
Metal glints beneath the high sun. Iruka braces himself, but a hit doesn’t come.
Instead, there are several hollow thunks in its place, and when he turns his head to follow the sound, he sees the kunoichi pinned to a tree by ten shuriken that pierce the edges of her clothing, just barely missing any real damage to her.
“What was that about a good fight?”
The question is voiced at a drawl; almost lazy. While Iruka’s struggling to catch his breath, the man that hops down from a tree across the walkway doesn’t seem to have broken a sweat. Another shinobi— though this one, at least, doesn’t seem to have any interest in threatening civilians.
“You’ll regret this,” the kunoichi snaps as she strains against the shuriken, though her bark isn’t as strong as it had been before. “I’ve got a lot of friends in this village. You’re dead! You hear me?”
The man ignores her, coming to a halt as he glances down at the severed head of the statue on the walkway, then at Iruka. Most of his face is covered by his mask and forehead protector, but there’s a quiet intensity to his gaze that makes Iruka’s stomach flip. “Everyone alright?”
“Yes, shinobi-san,” Iruka affirms, regaining just enough of his senses to lower his arms and bow. “Thank you for your help.”
“Kakashi.”
Iruka straightens back up, his brow creased in confusion. “Excuse me?”
“Just call me Kakashi,” he clarifies.
“Oh,” Iruka answers, intelligently. “Well, um, thank you, Kakashi-san.”
A single-eyed gaze lingers on him for a beat, unreadable. Though adrenaline still has the sensei shivering, he can feel his face slowly heating beneath his scrutiny.
Which is about the same time he realizes how tall this man is. And how toned his arms are. And how toned the rest of him—
“There may be other spies around,” Kakashi says at length, making Iruka jolt as he’s forced back into reality. “If your kids are alright with dogs, I’ll have my ninken walk you back to your school.”
Almost instantly, the nervous bunch of children behind him turns into a little cacophony of cajoling for their teacher to let them see the dogs right now immediately. Iruka should really consider the offer more carefully— not only to ensure there aren’t any children in his class who wouldn’t want to be near a dog, but to also ask what the hell a dog can even do against spies that decapitate statues— but with the kunoichi practically spitting with fury at her predicament, it seems far more wise to take whatever option gets him and his students out of this situation as quickly as possible.
And so he nods, and he watches, with no small fraction of wonder, as a pack of dogs is summoned out of thin air.
“Walk with the sensei to his school,” Kakashi orders. “Meet me at the tower after.”
Iruka gives another hasty bow, and with an uncertain glance cast towards the dogs now trailing at his heels, he ushers his children back towards the park’s entrance.
The walk to the school is no more than ten minutes at a leisurely pace, but it feels much closer to an hour with Iruka alternating between glancing around for any other looming threats and repeatedly having to intervene as his students try to touch one of the eight dogs herding them. Kakashi’s dogs, to their credit, are very well trained— they put up with the children’s curiosity without so much as a huff, some even seeming pleased with the attention.
“Alright, everyone,” Iruka places his hands on his hips where he’s come to a stop outside the school’s entrance. “Say goodbye to our new friends. They need to go back to their owner.”
He’s met first with a chorus of aw and no fair, then begrudging farewells. Iruka waits for his students to finish filing back into the school before he turns back towards the pack.
“Well, ah, thank you for, uh… for your assistance?” Iruka says, barely holding back a wince when he becomes painfully aware of how silly he must look, talking to a bunch of dogs as if they could understand him.
But then the smallest one of the pack looks up at him with soulful eyes, and he responds with a shockingly deep voice, “Sure thing, sensei.”
The pack scatters fast enough to whip up a brief gust of air, leaving behind only a few fallen leaves for the sensei to gape at.
----
“Did you know they can talk?”
Teuchi hums a questioning note, not looking away from the pork he’s cutting on the countertop.
“Shinobi pets,” Iruka clarifies. “A dog talked to me today. In a full sentence.”
That earns a glance— though rather than surprised, Teuchi is merely amused. “You mean summons?”
Iruka freezes in the middle of cutting out a leaf from the brightly colored sheets of paper in his lap— one of many nametags for next month’s classroom board, which he’s hoping to get a head start on before the neverending stream of homework to grade begins in earnest. That, or maybe he’s just a little desperate for anything to keep his hands busy while a trickle of anxiety stubbornly lingers in adrenaline’s wake. Where he’s seated in a little nook beside the pantry that he’d long since taken over when Teuchi had first let him into the back of the shop as a teenager, he unfortunately has a direct line of sight to the amused smirk being cast over the old man’s shoulder at him.
“Summons?”
“A lot of them have one,” Teuchi continues, as though this were simply knowledge as evident as the sky being blue, despite the fact that his ramen shop is well within a civilian neighborhood that almost never sees shinobi pass through, and he has no more cause to be palling around with shinobi than Iruka does. “They can do all kinds of stuff. Talking isn’t that impressive.”
Iruka scowls. “How would you know?”
“I’ve been in this village a lot longer than you, kid,” Teuchi points out.
“You’re old enough to be my dad, not my great-grandfather.”
“Oi,” Teuchi scolds him with a tut. “Respect your elders.”
Before he can catch it, a short laugh slips from the sensei. He looks back down at the orange leaf in his grasp that reads Naruto, his smile slowly fading as his expression turns thoughtful again. “...Have you heard of a man named Kakashi before?”
“Mm?” Teuchi pauses briefly as he considers the question, then returns to preparing the pork, his knife winking beneath the overhead lights of the kitchen as it moves— and briefly stirring an unsettling flicker of a kunai before Iruka forces the memory back down. “Sounds familiar, but I’m not sure.”
Iruka nods absently. Though there’s a vague sting of disappointment, he knows it’s for the best that his interaction with that man— whoever he may be— is kept to a one-off, passing encounter. If there were ever an experience to remind him of just how out of his depth he is when it comes to shinobi, it’s nearly getting his throat cut in front of a group of children. It’s inevitable to interact with shinobi in a hidden village, but anything beyond passing greetings has always felt too intimidating to sustain for long. The way they live— always walking a fine line between life and death, knowing any given mission could be their last— is something Iruka’s never been able to fathom.
Though he’s never been one to neglect a repayment when one’s due, and one certainly seems to be owed for having his life saved, in this case, he’ll simply have to make peace with the thanks he’d given, and do his best to move on.
----
And he does move on. An overfilled classroom packed with loud children will help you forget just about anything fairly efficiently.
But that moving on lasts for less than the span of a single day. Not through any fault of his own, but due to the fact that when he’s minding his business at his own desk, lingering late after the school’s closing to grade his first wave of worksheets, he glances up at his previously empty classroom to discover a man standing beside a now-open window with his hands in his pockets.
Iruka doesn’t yelp. He just… makes a high-pitched noise. Of surprise. Kind of loudly.
“Sorry, sensei,” Kakashi raises hands clad in fingerless gloves, his visible eye crinkling. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Do you do that a lot?” Iruka snaps, only then realizing how breathless he is, and the fact that he’s jumped from his chair to his feet.
“Do what?”
“Just…,” Iruka makes a vague gesture at him. “…Appear. In places.”
Kakashi blinks. “Yes.”
“…Oh,” Iruka says, intelligently. Then, shaking his head, he amends, “Wait— what are you doing here? Was there another threat nearby?”
“Not that I know of.” Kakashi pauses, simply observing him for a beat before he begins to step closer, his movements as deathly silent as his entrance through the window had been. “I was just checking on you. And the kids.”
It’s a simple statement, but one that takes Iruka entirely off guard. He peers closer at him, almost wondering if the shinobi is finding some sort of amusement out of this, but he seems just as serious as he had at the park, that same quiet intensity hidden beneath the laid-back veneer he’s putting on.
It makes Iruka nervous, which makes his stomach flip again, which is a problem.
“I’m alright,” he reassures him, mustering every ounce of composure within his reach so he can pretend that he is not about to cause a huge problem for himself, because his face is not getting red again as Kakashi draws closer, and his stomach is not continuing to do infuriating cartwheels. Not… that much, at least. “You’re a bit late, though. The kids go home much earlier than this.”
“That so?” Kakashi drawls, halting just across the desk. “Haven’t been in school for a couple decades. Guess I forgot.”
Iruka’s brow furrows. Though a lot of the man’s face is masked, he’s almost certain Kakashi can’t be closer to Teuchi’s age than his own. “Decades? You don’t seem that old.” After a beat, he flushes deeper, rapidly waving his hands and amending, “I’m so sorry, that was very rude of me—”
“I graduated when I was five.”
“I— you—,” Iruka splutters, “you graduated at five?” He tries to think back over the sheer volume of curriculum that would have to entail within such a compressed timeframe, which is enough alone to make his head hurt. “But— how would you have had the time to learn— I mean, the last few grades alone contain calculus, physics, chemistry—”
“Sensei,” Kakashi interrupts him, a smile almost visible in his eye. “What do you think is taught at a ninja academy?”
Iruka blinks once, twice, before his face somehow gets more red, which places him solidly on the verge of heat stroke. “…Oh. Right.” Though now would be a great time to shut up, and several minutes ago would have been an even better time to shut up, curiosity gets the better of him, and he asks, “So… no math? Or reading?”
“We do learn the basics,” Kakashi clarifies. “But we don’t exactly need calculus in the field.”
Iruka supposes that’s true for quite a few disciplines— he certainly doesn’t need calculus to teach nine-to-ten-year-olds— but that doesn’t mean calculus isn’t worth learning. There’s a reason that schools in Konoha— at least those that aren’t ninja schools— follow the same curriculum as schools in the rest of Fire: every city needs architects, engineers, doctors, and plenty of other occupations that benefit from an advanced understanding of mathematics and sciences. Everyone won’t be an engineer, but some people will, and many don’t know that until they’ve decided for themselves far later than attending their first math class.
And though he’d known on some level that shinobi don’t exactly choose their lives for themselves, hearing about someone graduating from a ninja academy at five years old makes his chest ache in a way that’s wholly inappropriate for a stranger he has no reason to see again after tonight.
“Well, uh,” Iruka clears his throat and averts his gaze, “I apologize for prying. It was kind of you to make sure we’re safe.”
For a beat, Kakashi doesn’t respond; in the corner of his vision, he can see a single eye on him again, considering him. His stomach flips again, and he becomes very aware of Kakashi’s proximity to him, hovering just across the desk, close enough to smell the faint scent of forest air on him—
“Are you almost done with that?”
Iruka blinks. “Excuse me?”
“Your grading,” Kakashi nods down at the sheet at the top of the stack, which has two red circles and one checkmark beside the barely legible answers Iruka has had to spend years as a teacher honing his ability to decipher.
“I— suppose so? Why do you ask?”
“I was planning on stopping somewhere for a drink on my way home,” he elaborates. “If you’d like to join me.”
For a moment, Iruka can do nothing but stare at Kakashi like he’s grown a second head.
He can’t comprehend why on Earth someone like Kakashi would drop in just to check on him, let alone invite him out for a drink. There almost certainly has to be something else going on here— maybe a mission to survey the neighborhood for more threats, or Iruka himself to ensure he hadn’t been colluding with the spy they’d caught— but no matter the reason, there’s only one rational response he can give: Thank you, but I can’t.
Because if there’s even a sliver of a chance that Kakashi can tell the butterflies in Iruka’s stomach have multiplied into a swarm, and he’s inviting him out for a drink in spite of that, this could end very badly for them both.
But there, again, is the knowledge that this man saved his life, and Iruka’s done nothing to even attempt to repay him, or at the very least show his gratitude beyond a bow.
“…Alright,” he relents. “But only if it’s my treat. It’s the least I can do to repay you.”
Kakashi tilts his head a fraction, the motion slight enough to barely be noticeable. “Repay me?”
“For saving my life,” Iruka clarifies, somewhat incredulously. “And the lives of my students. Of course, nothing can ever really repay that, but if we get drinks, I’d like to at least buy one for you.”
Kakashi— shrugs?
“Alright. But I don’t expect you to.”
Iruka stares, uncertain whether he’s going insane, or the man across from him already is insane. Kakashi turns to step back towards the open window, only stopping when the sensei points out, “You can, um— use the door. With me.” Like a normal person, he almost adds, but barely manages to restrain himself.
Another shrug. “Sure.”
Iruka rushes to gather up his worksheets and materials into his messenger bag, the task made no easier by the fact that Kakashi appears to just be openly watching him now, or the fact that he isn’t sure whether being watched is intimidating him or worsening the butterflies in his stomach. Both, probably.
Out in the hall, Iruka turns to lock his classroom door behind himself, freezing in the middle of turning the key when a deep voice beside him says slowly, almost as if weighing every syllable as they’re voiced: “Iruka-sensei.”
And Iruka replies, “Huh?”
He follows a single-eyed gaze to the label beside the door— his room number, a marker for the fourth grade, and his name. Umino Iruka.
“Ah,” he scratches at the scar on the bridge of his nose. “I never properly introduced myself. I’m sorry.”
“It’s a nice name.”
Kakashi proceeds to start walking down the hall, as though he isn’t actively threatening Iruka’s sanity. Or putting him on the verge of heat stroke.
Or making him give in to a very bad idea.
But Iruka, maybe because he’s insane, or too polite, or simply eons now from knowing what’s good for himself, follows him.