Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first would-be genin to step forward was, predictably, the loudest.  Iruka had heard her three times already this week screaming her frustration out at the grappling dummies as he walked home from late-night ramen.  She slammed her hands on his desk confidently, roaring defiance as usual. 

Also as usual, Iruka and adjacent students plugged their ears as she flailed wildly through the seals for focusing her chakra.  Changing the form of the paper tags was not her forte, but she’d practiced to exhaustion. He held his breath, waving at the pile of tags readied on his desk.  When she began, he bit down on explaining how her fervor interfered with her success—her fingers didn’t even brush, let alone correctly interlock to correctly form seals—when the sudden jangle of a metal object hitting the floor brought him up short.  She beamed at him, scooping up the strange dull knife she’d created, barely serrated on one side, and wildly off balance.

“Ha!” her most sarcastic admirer shouted from the back.  “What even is that, Urusako? And you dropped it!”

“I made it, though,” she shot back, beaming at Iruka, before turning back to the room and yelling triumphantly, her knuckles impacting with her flak jacket rhythmically.  “Woo! Woo! Woooooo!”

They echoed—it was hard not to get caught up in her delight, even if Iruka couldn’t quite get a look at the awful kunai she’d made.  

The second testee, still rubbing her ribs where Urusako had elbowed her out of the way, took a deep breath, kept her hands close in, and produced a respectable paper kunai.  She met his smile with a nod. She had an odd, crumpled scroll tucked in her belt, he couldn't help noticing.

The third through the fifth student produced something similar—a usable, if not weatherproof, kunai from their paper tag, though as the fourth brought his hands together, there was soft pop and a few handfuls of sand poured weakly from his pocket.

The sixth student formed his tag into an apple, and not even a paper one.  She looked equally dumbfounded, and hurriedly pulled out the scroll she’d had unrolled up her sleeve, and that was a good deal more than enough.

Once the academy had finished reverberating from Iruka’s fury, the birds had returned to Konohagure, and the animals had crept back out from under buildings, Iruka collected the pile of confiscated tags, bombs, and scrolls.  In a calm voice, he informed the entire class and assembled parents that testing would resume with cheating countermeasures firmly in place, and then he returned to his apartment. 

Kakashi ambled in just as he was testing a scroll disquietingly labeled “Reproduction Disturbance!!!”  It drooled out two clones with no evidence of skeletal structure. They moaned incoherently, which Iruka echoed, letting his face drop into his hand. “If you didn’t bring ramen, I’m leaving you.”

“Naruto’s bringing it,” Kakashi told him, crouching over the pile of messy, ineptly constructed tools, and then pulled his mask down to press chilly lips against Iruka’s neck.  “They were making some seasonal winter topping.  Looked like snow.  What happened here?”

“Everyone failed the genin exam,” Iruka said crisply, leaning back into him.  “Every single student, for lacking basic, life-saving common sense.  This scroll is labeled goldfish.  What shinobi with powers of sight, touch, or thought would use this scroll for ninjutsu instead of throwing it as far as possible and leaving the area?  I can’t tell whether it’s to summon a goldfish, transform into a goldfish—”

“Borrow the fighting techniques of the mighty goldfish—” Kakashi unrolled it curiously, and unleashed a damp, squishy, wriggly feeling on their hands.  “...kai,” he dispelled the genjutsu, shoulders shaking as he tried to restrain his snort.

Iruka narrowed his eyes.  “I might be more entertained if I hadn’t watched every single student admit they’d wasted money on these.”

“Where did they even—?!” Kakashi reached around him to pick up the impressively-named “Inheritor Jutsu” scroll, which dropped a sock out of thin air on the floor in a billow of smoke.  The tatami mat began to smolder, and Kakashi blew it out with a gust of wind, which sent the other ‘ninja tools’ into a tiny in-apartment tornado, and by the time he’d caught them all he was suppressing cackles. 

Iruka watched, his eyes tired.

“Ramen!” Naruto burst through the door, pausing to frown at the puddling Iruka clones.  Kakashi lifted one’s arm and stretched the sodden limb to the ceiling. It puffed into smoke.

“...Naruto,” Iruka muttered, sweeping the table in front of him clear, hands out to accept ramen, and as the child of Iruka’s soul, Naruto had them all slurping ramen before he asked for details.  The remaining Iruka clone burbled, staring at the ramen, and Naruto poked it with a toe, then frantically kicked the air as it adhered.  After a few seconds of panicked flailing while Kakashi rooted eagerly through the confiscated ninja tools, it poofed when a scroll bounced off its head.  “What is all this, Iruka-sensei?  It looks like my first genin exam.”  

“It’s so much worse than that,” Iruka said, sighing, and prodded the broth at the bottom of the bowl, hoping to turn up some more noodles.  “It’s someone selling inept and possibly dangerous ninja tools to children, who have been failed by me, their teacher, enough to think buying them is a good idea.  I should have apprenticed myself to Ichiraku Ramen.”

Naruto opened his mouth, indignant, then thoughtfully closed it.  “Would you have given me free ramen?”

“No,” Kakashi answered for him.  “He’d make you serve tables with it balanced on your head, and you’d have elegant posture.”  At Iruka’s snort, he looked over and smiled, watching Iruka consider the sad puddle of broth in his bowl.  Kakashi slid his bowl over to replace it.  

Iruka’s mouth quirked up slightly as he dug in to the second bowl, leaning to bump Kakashi’s shoulder fondly.

“Someone is selling these, though?  Who?” Naruto’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, then widened as Kakashi got up to set a containment circle for the pile of misshapen bombs.  

“No one in the village,” Iruka said between slurps.  “No shinobi , as far as I can tell.  They were reluctant to reveal their source, and the source is better at covering their tracks than they are at ninjutsu, but once I hear back from a few parents, I can narrow it down.”

“My team and I are here for a few days,” Kakashi offered, scootching close again, and Iruka coughed.

“I think I can manage.”  He grinned over.  “I don’t think this merits a full jounin investigation.”

Kakashi leaned against him, reaching over for the last fishcake.  “Let me know if you want help, though.”

“It’s basically a prank,” Iruka reminded him, finishing the second bowl of ramen, and then he leaned to breathe sad ramen breath against Kakashi’s neck.  Kakashi hugged him, humming into his hair.

Naruto watched them warily.  “Don’t try to ruin ramen for me.  It won’t work, but I’ll take revenge if you start being gross over ramen.”

“The honour of the ramen is safe,” Iruka sighed.  “I’m too tired.”

“I could revitalize you with a soldier pill.  Or invent a new ninjutsu.  As a genius, I would commit to this effort,” Kakashi put in, his eye narrowed as he touched his chin thoughtfully.

“No.”  Naruto began swiftly picking up dishes.

Kakashi ignored him, raising his voice.  “Allow me to travel to the end of the street for more sustenance for you, my succulent red bean bun,” he begged, lifting Iruka’s chin to stare into his eyes.  “My dolphin prince.”

“Aaaaaugh!  Lalalala!”  Naruto tried to drown him out, as Iruka began laughing helplessly into Kakashi’s shoulder.

“Irucchi,” Kakashi stage-whispered, “—my sea-pig, tell me what great task I can accomplish to impress you—I must unveil the mysteries ‘neath your flak jacket.”

Iruka snorted at him, smiling a little.  “All you’ll find under my jacket is I really need a bath, O Limited Edition Ramen of my heart.”

Kakashi clasped his hands over Iruka’s.  “I am sure your manful aroma will sway me in its favour, my own—” he declared, and Iruka slumped against him, laughing.

Naruto gagged.  “That is the last time I deliver ramen to you.  I’ll just eat it outside!  In the snow!  You don’t deserve it—”

“Come here,” Iruka muttered, waggling his hand at Naruto without lifting his head from Kakashi’s jacket.  “You can help.  Talk to Konohamaru.”

“Is he cheating again?!”  Naruto dropped next to them, already furious, his fists on his thighs.  “He told me he wouldn’t!”

“Oh, I see, he can help?” Kakashi muttered pointedly.  “I could—”

“Naruto isn’t one of the few who can complete S-rank missions,” Iruka interrupted distractedly, demonstrating for Naruto that a scroll labeled ‘Soldier pills’ in fact contained an open, half-filled can of sardines.  “Konohamaru’s likely to talk to you, and he had a bag full of these.”

“I’m gonna go tell him off right now,” Naruto growled, and Iruka sighed, grabbing his pant leg.  

“It’s snowing,” he said, “Sit down and help me find the worst of these to use as examples.”

“This explosive tag uses the kanji for tapir instead of explosion,” Kakashi said.  He sounded fascinated, pulling Iruka against him so he could inspect it with both hands.  

Iruka stared at it for a long second, and groaned, then cocked his head, squinting.  “Do these characters look familiar to anyone?” he asked, turning to use Kakashi as a chair and kissing his cheek in passing.  Kakashi’s cheeks reddened above his mask, and Iruka kissed him again, sighing.  “They obviously aren’t…”

“...fluent?” Kakashi suggested, his eyes having found the Reproduction Disturbance!!! Scroll where it lay unrolled.  “...what…”

“Can I set off these bombs?” Naruto held them up gingerly, jaw set.

“One at a time,” Iruka sighed.  “I should really be writing this down.”

Naruto looked over, glanced around, and frowned accusatorily at Kakashi.  “Kakashi-sensei, why is Iruka-sensei’s brush on that rafter?”

“It was the wild activities we indulged in before you arrived,” Kakashi stage-whispered, waggling his eyebrows, and Naruto rolled his eyes, standing on a couple of clone’s shoulders to grab it.

“It’s nice someone in this home takes things seriously,” Iruka said, sighing, and shaking his head, and Kakashi frowned hard at his ear.  

“He’s smiling,” Naruto reported dutifully to Kakashi, who squeezed Iruka’s shoulders.

“Bomb one.”  Iruka readied his brush like a weapon as Naruto aimed for the containment circle.  It made a soft popping noise, and sat there.

They all watched one fizzle a bit in a pile of dirt, and one that just thudded into the ground like a bag of hard candies.

“...why…” began Iruka, bewildered.

“Interesting.”  Kakashi tried not to laugh into his shoulder.  “These are fascinating.”

“Why aren’t they all at least useless the same way?” Iruka groaned.

Naruto cleared his throat.  “Maybe they wrote down the recipe, but it fell in their ramen, and when they tried to dry it with a jutsu, it caught on fire and then flew into the window of the hokage’s private quarters, and they heard a loud cawing noise, so they left town,” he suggested.

“That’s very specific,” Iruka said slowly, his eyes narrowed, and Naruto laughed unnaturally, grabbing the ramen bowls and moving them out of the way.  Iruka raised his eyebrows, but let it go.  “I don’t think we need to test more,” he said.  “These bombs are not dangerously over-effective.”  

“I can take this handwriting to cryptology and see if anyone recognizes it,” Kakashi offered, and Iruka lolled his head back, raising his eyebrows.  

“...you’re only in town for a few days,” he asked.  “Is that really how you want to spend your time?”

“I will draw a bath,” Kakashi rephrased quickly, sitting the scrolls aside.  

“Aren’t you hungry?”  Iruka stood, brushing himself off.  “I ate your ramen.”

“I’ll make something when we get out,” Kakashi said, prodding him in the direction of the bath and smirking, and Naruto rolled his eyes, waving them away.

“If you forget to silence yourselves,” he called threateningly, “I will summon Boss Frog into your gross sex bath.”

In the bath, Iruka started peeling his flak jacket off, frowning down at his own ninja tools in silence, remembering Urasako’s delight as passing the genin test—she thought—after cheating.

“No one was hurt,” Kakashi said softly.

“Go ahead and rinse first,” Iruka told him, sitting on the tiled floor with a sigh.  “Your hands are still freezing, warm up.”

“It’s fine, you go first,” Kakashi tried, but Iruka’s eyes narrowed further.

“You’ll freeze into an ice sculpture.  Your lips are still blue.” He smacked the seals on the sides of the tub to get the water hot, while Kakashi peeled out of his still-damp uniform, and curled his toes against the cold tile.  

He just stood there, shivering, until Iruka finally joined him, scrubbing irritably with rough soap at whichever part of either of them was within reach. After a minute Iruka said “Good enough,” dumped water over his head, and stalked over to submerge himself in the tub.  Kakashi finished scrubbing blood and ink off his knuckles and from under his nails, watching the stream of bubbles, and wondering whether Iruka was just breathing down there, or yelling at his students again.

Once he was clean, he walked over and nudged Iruka forward and slightly up out of the water, watching him draw a long, deep breath.

Kakashi slid in behind Iruka’s hunched back and lowered head, lips thinning as he dipped a cloth in the water.  “...did they understand why you were angry?” he asked.

“...no,” Iruka muttered.  “Of course not.  It didn’t occur to them the bomb set off by the slight motion of Bakintaro’s ox seal was snug against his ribcage.”

The path of the hot cloth across Iruka’s shoulders paused.  

“...thankfully, it was as effective as those we tested tonight,” Iruka said, sighing.

“Lean back, I’ll wash your hair,” Kakashi offered, and Iruka thudded back against him, muttering school-appropriate, appreciative expletives as the steaming water poured over his head.

“They decided potentially dangerous unknowns were better than failing the exam,” Iruka’s voice burbled from half-under the waterline, and Kakashi’s fingers paused.  Obviously the flowery shampoo was required.  Iruka groaned.  “—and this is the second time, in one of my genin exams.  This is why Naruto stole that forbidden scroll,” Iruka splashed his fists in the water, then laughed softly as Kakashi flourished the glittery shampoo bottle.

Kakashi hummed sympathetically.  “Did you have to say ‘I’m not angry, I’m disappointed’?”

“I was extremely angry.”  Iruka sighed as Kakashi worked the shampoo into his hair, sculpting the suds away from his head.  “If you’re sculpting me into a many-tailed beast, that’s about right. I blew their hair back a bit yelling, I think.”

“Mmm,” Kakashi formed a long spike off his head.  “When Naruto and Sakura found strange ninja tools, they were obviously trained—”

“It didn’t take, with this generation,” Iruka sighed, sliding a few inches lower in the water, so his next words were indistinguishable.  

Kakashi slid both hands around his waist and pulled him back up, so he didn’t drown.  “No, I meant—what about a practical exam?  Use all those untested scrolls—”

Iruka sat up straight, turning to narrow his eyes at his husband.  “Absolutely not, they could have anything in them...but new mystery scrolls and bombs—”

“We could make them technically safe, but very surprising,” Kakashi’s smugness was audible, and Iruka snorted softly, settling back against his chest.

After holding his breath through the bucket of water over his head, Iruka leaned back to kiss up Kakashi’s jaw.  “Thank you,” he ran his thumb over Kakashi’s lip, smiling. “Should I wash your hair?”

“You don’t need to,” Kakashi said, smiling, as Iruka waved his arms trying to decide whether getting his hands properly in Kakashi’s silvery hair would necessitate turning around.

“It still feels good.”  Iruka clambered awkwardly to reseat himself in a kneel, their noses nearly touching.  He waved a hand alongside the tub, grabbing at bottles as he leaned in for a kiss, and Kakashi nearly relaxed too far into it to notice he was about to be doused in Chak-rA-Way.

“Mmf!  Hold up,” he grabbed the bottle-wielding arm.  

“Oh,” Iruka frowned at it.  

“I’m not cursed,” Kakashi held his arms up defensively.  “Probably.”

“No?”  Iruka grinned at him, investigatively kissing Kakashi’s eyelids, as he tried to duck away, laughing.  “Hrm.  Maybe you’re right.”  Iruka pulled back, just looking over the familiar scarred eye, silver eyebrows, and quirked mouth for a long moment.  Kakashi ducked his head, and Iruka leaned in for some soft, messy kisses. The glittery shampoo bottle was somewhere behind him—he flailed for the correct bottle, unable to turn properly, but unwilling to push Kakashi off his neck and shoulder.  Once he had the bottle, he went for a leisurely shampooing, scratching his nails gently into Kakashi’s scalp. “Lift your head up,” he grinned against Kakashi’s ear. “I can’t reach.”

Kakashi groaned, but allowed Iruka to tilt his head back, supporting it with one hand, and scrubbing with the other.  

Once he’d finished, Iruka resisted the urge to spray Kakashi’s head with a water jutsu, and gently poured hot water over him with the scoop.  “...we smell like honeysuckle.”

“It smells nothing like food, at least,” Kakashi mumbled, opening his eyes, and shaking off some of the water, like a dog.  “They make food-scented soaps now. I can see it now, Naruto sniffing incessantly next to my ear.”

Iruka inwardly reflected that they also made soap that smelled like soap, and the problem of Naruto hanging from either of their throats by the teeth could be avoided, but it wasn’t as though he wanted to discourage Kakashi’s oddly serious contemplation and consumption of bath products.  “Honeysuckle is nice,” he said, smacking a seal on the side of the bath to purify the soap out of the water.

Once they were out, and Kakashi was rolling himself some rice balls for dinner, Naruto dropped next to Iruka again.

“...you look...like you’re making scary plans, Iruka-sensei,” he said, crossing his arms.

“Do you remember how you used to make clones, Naruto?” Iruka’s eyes narrowed as he sat his exam sheets aside.

“...I remember what I was doing wrong,” Naruto said, setting his jaw.  “I don’t do that anymore.”

Iruka ruffled his hair, and Naruto grinned up at him.  “No, you don’t.  But Kakashi suggested we have them do a practical, basically what we’re doing—testing strange scrolls, and bombs—”

“I think I used up the bombs,” Naruto admitted, frowning doubtfully.

Iruka smiled, rustling through his notes.  “We’ll make new tools.”

Kakashi leaned around the corner.  “New surprising tools.  This should be perfect for you, Naruto—do your best and your worst, and label them the same.  I’ll do—”

“No chidori,” Iruka put in quickly.

“—I have many techniques, as everyone knows,” Kakashi told him, pointing with the spatula.  “I am the Copy Ninja— ”

“Oh,” Naruto whispered, his eyes widening.  “Oh.  Wait, we should call Sakura—and Ino, she has a huge spider in a scroll she’s been threatening Shikamaru with—”

“It’s snowing,” Iruka objected, raising his eyebrows.

Despite that fact, less than an hour later the table was surrounded by Chouji discussing techniques with Shikamaru, Sakura grinning evilly as she demonstrated some kind of full-body paralyzation on Lee, Ino vividly describing the motion-sickness inherent in her body-switch to Iruka (who was looking green), and Shino silently piling up a mass of scrolls while insects whorled around his head.  Each group of students, everyone agreed, would have to deal with Shino’s bugs, though only one would have the additional surprise of the enormous spider. “It’s no bigger than Kakashi-sensei’s ninken,” Ino said, rolling her eyes, and everyone except she and Shino scooted slightly away.

“I will remain alert for my role!”  Lee shouted, and began doing squats, as Iruka hastened to remind him class would not begin until the next morning.  

“Your students are supposed to survive, right,” Shikamaru whispered cautiously, neatly bundling the scrolls, and watching Sakura demonstrate her strength by slowly crushing a log of firewood with one hand.  He accepted a riceball from the mound Kakashi dropped on the table, and everyone huddled to strategize.

The next day, Iruka regarded the red-rimmed, shadowed eyes around his classroom, and crossed his arms.  “Welcome to your genin exam,” he said, and they all twitched nervously.  “Today we’ll be forming five groups,” he began, pointing around and counting off, so Urusako didn’t end up with either the shoutiest or the quietest kids, and Bakintaro wasn’t with Mirai—Bakintaro meant the stream of compliments sincerely, but Mirai didn’t need any opportunities to force-feed an admirer a huge spider.  

They listened in white-knuckled silence.  “I’ll give each group a selection of unknown ninja tools,” Iruka said, keeping his voice and mouth level, even while watching them sink slowly in their seats under the weight of shame.  He could snicker later, he reminded himself, when class was over, and he was describing their melodramatic dismay over ramen.  “Each group is responsible for documenting the actual contents of the scrolls they recieve. I will be observing, and assigning points accordingly.”

Mirai raised their hand, red-cheeked.  “Did Kakashi-sensei make any of these?”

“Many experienced shinobi took time from their duties to help us,” he said quellingly, narrowing his eyes.  “We have use of the arena today, so we’ll start there.”

The first scroll someone tested, to Iruka’s deadpan delight, teleported Lee into the ring in an explosion of snow.  His defiant screams in Sakura’s honour were nearly as distracting as his kicks, as he declared himself a missing-nin of the Hidden Youth Village, tore the upper half of his exercise suit off, tackled a group of Iruka’s students, and ran off with an armload of scrolls.  Iruka heard Naruto laughing in the stands.

“Sensei,” Urusako yelled, running around him in laps—apparently a Lee-avoiding technique.  Her voice raised and lowered as she blew by.  “How are we supposed to—fight chuunin—sensei— ”

Hayate shrieked as she opened one of Naruto’s defective clone scrolls, and they collapsed on her like an entire grill of hot mochi, gluing her to the ground.  Sakura roared out of another scroll, cratering the ground with a fist—but Mirai, Iruka saw to his satisfaction, had noted the appearance of Shino’s identical bug scrolls, and was massing the troops to point one at Lee.  Ino’s spider was alternately chasing and being chased, until it began repeatedly running into the wall, and Iruka, grimacing, mercifully ended the jutsu for poor nauseous Tomoko, who’d had the misfortune of testing Ino’s body-switching scroll on it.

After nearly a half-hour, Urusako had been claimed as a weapon of volume by several of the class plotters, and she’d been running around yelling “Open no more scrolls!  Bring them to the center!” long enough that Sakura and Lee were facing off against the part of the class that wasn’t puking against the wall next to an enormous yet hesitant spider, or twitching on their sides from Sakura’s numbness scrolls.  Handily, even from across the arena, it wasn’t difficult to follow the plotting with Urusako shouting commands like a first mate on a pirate vessel—Mirai had re-sorted the scrolls so a flank of kids had Shino’s three remaining chakra-eating scrolls pointed at Sakura, and a larger group was fighting Lee with their own skills.  The remaining class was helping Mirai quickly classify the remaining pile.  

Reluctant to turn children into putty, Sakura and Lee were mostly posturing, flexing for the onlookers.  Ino whistled piercingly from the stands.  Iruka resisted a little triumphant spin in place at his class’ serious expressions, keeping his face grim—then rolled his eyes as Naruto leapt into the fray, no longer able to resist.

“Always keep an eye on your surroundings when you’re being really loud!” Naruto hissed as he landed, glowing.  Urusako yelped backwards, momentarily chagrined, before relaying Mirai’s “Second wave!”

That would have gone better if one of the test scrolls hadn’t been another summon—leaving one left, Iruka was fairly sure, after Lee, Sakura, the spider, and now Chouji came barreling out, knocking them all around like toys.  But they got it together again—even, Iruka was pleased to see, the recovering paralyzed kids, and Tomoko, who apparently now felt some sort of kinship with the disoriented spider. She was making a stack of snowballs, though her aim had suffered since returning to two eyes.  Chouji took one between the eyes, and staggered dramatically.

“Oh no, your greatest weapon and your greatest weakness!  Round things! ” Ino yelled from the stands.  

Iruka watched carefully, looking for anyone lagging behind, but while they were obviously outmatched, everyone seemed to be purposeful against the grinning, menacing chuunin.  It looked like they’d set the final summoning scroll carefully aside, which fit well with his plans.

They actually managed to use one of Sakura’s paralysis scrolls on Lee, but in general seemed to have grasped the danger of unknowns in combat.  It ended suddenly, with the summoning of Shikamaru, who instantly caught all their shadows. 

Iruka strode over, trying to restrain his pride. At his sign, the chuunin leapt off to one side, and he stood in front of his class.  He took a deep breath. “I hope you understand the lesson,” he looked around, trying not to smile at Mirai’s battle stance, Hayate’s clone/glue coverage, or Urusako’s bared-tooth snarl. “That...was much more what I would expect from smart, observant students.”  

“My sister says everyone’s an idiot sometimes, Iruka-sensei,” Urusako yelled, saluting, for some reason.

“That’s true.  Do you think you’re all smarter about strange tools from strange places, now?”

“I got turned into a spider,” Tomoko mumbled in a  wavery voice, but the others were all nodding frenetically.

“Now, if you all understand how dangerous these could have been,” Iruka eyeballed them all, and Tomoko waved exhaustedly, her arm around the spider.  She was still a bit green, so they matched.  Iruka continued.  “I need to know everything you can tell me about where they came from.”

“Will we get our money back?” Bakintaro yelled.

“I’m sure they kept a careful record of all purchases and the money sitting by.  They were obviously responsible people,” Iruka said, staring him down, and he slumped, sighing.

“...Kanbutsu Shouten, in class C?” Hayate said, to a sea of sighs and nods.  “His mom trades in Shukubamachi.  She lets him come along. Sometimes a bunch of us go.”

Urusako shot her hand up in the air again, bouncing on her toes.  “We didn’t want to get her in trouble, Iruka-sensei!”

“Did she know?”  Iruka asked, expecting to wait through a lot of uncomfortable shuffling, but Hayate shook her head immediately.

“We didn’t tell her.  She told us not to tell anyone.”

“‘She’,”  Iruka prompted, rubbing his arms against the snowy chill.

Mirai raised their hand.  “When she tried to talk to us, Yaoya-san chased her off.”

Bakintaro immediately backed Mirai up, gazing over adoringly, and Mirai stuck out their tongue.  “Yeah, Iruka-sensei!  We talked to her later.”

“She always found us if we just hung around,” Urasako mumbled.

The flaming cheeks surrounding him suggested his students understood his opinion on that.  “What did she look like?”

“Old!” Bakintaro yelled.

“She had kanji on her head,” Tomoko put in.

“It said ‘deck’,” said Mirai, frowning.

“It said ‘green’,” Urasako yelled, jumping up and down as she corrected Mirai, who narrowed their eyes further.  “And she was bald.”

“She was riding a cat,” Tomoko offered, and everyone looked at her.

“What?  No.” Mirai glowered at her.

“No, she was!  When I met her last time, she was riding a cat!”

“Could everyone draw her?  Come on, all your breath is steaming,” Iruka suggested, herding them back to class, after they thanked Lee, Chouji, Sakura, Ino, and Shikamaru.  Off to the side, Naruto was beaming at him. 

Once back in the classroom, he handed out paper, then collected sketches of their suspect—Mirai’s, stubbornly, marked “veranda” on the forehead, while most of the others agreed it was “green”—but they all agreed she was tall—anywhere from twice as tall as Kanbutsu Yaoya-san, to just about as tall as the nearest building, bald, wearing a short green haori, and possibly possessed of a lot of teeth.  Only Tomoko had seen the cat, but her depiction was deeply considered, and looked likely enough.

He tidied the stack, tapping the edges against his desk.  “I will see,” Iruka allowed his eyebrows to raise, along with the level of suspense, “—whether the Hokage will approve this as your replacement Genin exam.”

“No!” cried a few of the kids, and “We didn’t know!  We didn’t study!”, but he waved them down.  A few of them were still scowling, wet-eyed, at their desks when he registered the late hour.

“You all performed well.”  He watched their faces brighten.  “Regardless of your...activities lately, I’m proud to have seen the progress this class made today.  Every one of you was impressive.  Class dismissed.”

Mirai waved frantically.  “Say thank you to Kakashi-sensei, Iruka-sensei!”  

Iruka nodded, rolling his eyes, then started to flush as his whole class started wolf-whistling.

Urusako cheered.  Naruto joined in from the hall, and Iruka ducked out guiltily, before someone came to find out what all the screaming was about.  They sounded like a herd of giant-size ninken, thundering through the building.

Chapter Text

Having made good his escape from his students, Iruka walked along sedately, separating himself from the outpouring of noise from the door.  He allowed himself to remember the look on Bakintaro’s face when Lee, shirtless and screaming, popped out of the teleportation scroll, and he snickered all the way to the hall outside the Hokage’s office.  

Waiting for Tsunade to finish yelling at her current poor victim, Iruka stood by the window, watching whatever was going on at the training grounds—it looked like more running around than usual.  “Next!” she shouted, and the man she’d been chastising stumbled out, grimacing and frowning closely at a scroll.

She was rubbing her face when Iruka walked in.

“...Hokage,” he tried, after a few moments, and she groaned, letting her face drop to her desk.

“How do you do it, Umino?”

He blinked at her.

She sat her chin on her folded arms, sighing.  “How do you restrain yourself from murdering them?”

“...it can be difficult,” he frowned.  “Speaking of which. The tools.  It sounds as though they’re coming from Shukubamachi.”  

“Well, that figures,” she wrinkled her nose.  “Hard to believe it’s anyone from a hidden village.  Or trained at all.”

“Yes.  I have a pile of...artistic renditions of our suspect.”  He frowned down at Hayate’s depiction, which included fangs, horns, and a tengu nose she insisted gave the correct impression.  “Abe Tomoko-kun said she was riding a cat , but we have no reason to believe it’s missing-nin, or anything dangerous to a cautious adult.  I’d like permission to investigate myself.  Every genin is supposed to undertake a few missions here and there, and I’ve arranged for—”  He spun to see what drew Tsunade’s grim expression over his shoulder.

Kakashi’s voice came from the window, shortly followed by his person.  “I am available for this assignment.”  Her expression brightened into a slow grin.  “Willing and able, my Hokage.  Our best teacher must be protected.”

“I really don’t think—” Iruka began, as Tsunade bit her lips, eyebrows raised.  Iruka started again, squinting.  “Kakashi, do you want a vacation?   Are you really trying to get your team this...d-rank, limp goldfish mission?”

“It could turn into a dangerous situation,” Kakashi said, standing against his side in front of Tsunade’s desk, bumping him a bit to the left.  “It deserves the best minds we have,” he said, tossing an arm around Iruka, and waggling his eyebrows.

Iruka frowned at him for a long second, then addressed Tsunade.  “There’s a replacement to teach classes for me, of course. It would only take a few days for me to check out the sellers in Shukubamachi.”

“...where Jiraiya lurks,” Tsunade leaned back in her chair, eyeing Kakashi, who flushed.  “And where he based the Icha Icha series.”

“Oho, not for me, then,” Iruka said, nodding slowly.  "You'll send—"

“For you entirely,” Kakashi protested, turning Iruka bodily to face him.  “And if we happen to coincidentally see all the locations of my favorite series, or get my first editions signed—”

Iruka stared back at him, eyebrows raised, and Tsunade snorted a laugh.  “The black marketeers are known to use cat summons,” she said.  “Still, I am not certain it requires the skills of a jounin.”  She steepled her fingers, as Kakashi narrowed his eyes.

“To know what is right and ignore it is the act of a coward,” Kakashi claimed, standing tall, as did Iruka’s eyebrows.  “For the children, Hokage.”

“I would prefer to go myself,” Iruka rolled his eyes, mouth twitching.  “Since I’ve seen most of the incidents—”

“It definitely requires your expertise,” Kakashi agreed, nodding.

“—and it’s mostly affected my students,” Iruka continued.

“...you two are requesting a few days in the town of love hotels, then?”  Tsunade smiled sweetly.

Iruka choked back a laugh.  “It is actually important, but I don’t need a jounin if he’s needed elsewhere.”

Kakashi elbowed him.  “Without research, we can’t know what kind of expertise is required.”  

“Consider it a belated honeymoon,” Tsunade decided, waving them away and grinning, before she and Kakashi frowned at the window.  

“Hokage!” Sakura yelled, skidding inside.  “There’s been more mystery scrolls, um, there’s a mountain of rotten pig carcasses—two genin are buried, so they’d like you to stand by for medical aid.  Hey, Iruka-sensei, Kakashi-sensei!”

Tsunade pursed her lips.  “Just—go, you two. Stop this nonsense before anyone else gets hurt.”  

Back at their apartment, Kakashi rooted through Iruka’s clothes.  “These, and these, I think,” he said, holding them up, and Iruka wrinkled his nose.

“My cover is a construction worker just out of the bath?” he asked.

Kakashi frowned at the oufit he’d picked.  “Everything else you own is a flak jacket.”

“Oh, I know,” Iruka opened his eyes very wide.  “We’ll just have to go to Gai for undercover costumes.  I’m sure he has crates of his stretchy exercise wear.”

“No.”  Kakashi shoved an armload of clothes at him.  “No.  No.  Find something.  Anything but that.”

“I could probably make it work,” Iruka said thoughtfully.  “I could tear the top half off and declare I’m from the Hidden Village of Youth.”

Kakashi went very still, then shuddered, and Iruka raised his eyebrows.

“That shudder better not have been imagining me,” he said.

Kakashi shook his head, shuddering.  “Why are you making me imagine Gai on our honeymoon?  Stop.”

After some judicious sorting, Iruka had what he assured Kakashi was acceptable winter menswear for a casual honeymoon—a padded brown hanten and hakama, which looked bulky, but appealingly warm.  Kakashi was fiddling with his hair in the mirror, trying to get it to flatten and stay. After watching for a few minutes, Iruka came up behind him, lifted Kakashi’s mask off, and pulled a striped knitted cap down over his scarred eye, following up with a matching scarf around his face.  “How’s that? Might be a bit warm indoors, but we can look for a lighter one.”  He bit back a smile as Kakashi surveyed himself in the mirror, ridiculously cheery in bright white and candy-apple red.

“No,” Kakashi’s eyes narrowed at the stripes.  “It’s perfect.”

Iruka, already looking for a replacement, didn’t process his approval in time.  “...how about these, then—”

“They don’t match,” Kakashi said, adjusting the scarf, and turning to see himself from a different angle.

“...you want...matching colors?”  Iruka raised his eyebrows, watching Kakashi look himself over in the mirror again, inspecting the bare stripe of face visible through layers of thick scarf.  “I’m just saying, Gai might have some nice Beast of Konoha undergarments, maybe there’s some red and white in there—”

Kakashi stubbornly ignored the offered gray knitwear.  “Blue, maybe?” he suggested, and Iruka grinned to himself, shaking his head.

He held out the remaining hanten he owned, purely to wrap up in after a bath.  “There’s gray, or the black one,” he said, holding them up for Kakashi’s unimpressed assessment.  Iruka made a mental note to look for one loud enough to compete with the scarf, possibly plaid.  Apparently after decades of dull Konoha green, Kakashi wanted a dramatic change, even if it made him look a bit like brightly colored candy.

“Hrm,” Kakashi spun slowly in place, eventually consenting to pull the black hanten over the ends of his scarf, and tuck his white kimono into some grey hakama.  “...we’ll still want to cover the scars,” he pointed up to where his beanie covered his eye, then Iruka’s nose.

“Or we could just go ask questions, as people,” Iruka sighed, but submitted.  He looked odd in the mirror, sans scar, it felt even more odd to drop his forehead protector in a drawer, and oddest of all leaving the house in his after-bath winter housewear, but they’d agreed it was ridiculous to carry luggage full of their shinobi uniforms.  

They weren’t intending to fight—there was little chance a competent shinobi had any dealings in this debacle—and even if they did, they would hardly have time to change.  He felt ridiculous running along the roofs to the edge of town in the thick layers, like a toddler attending a snowball fight.

“How well do you know Shukubamachi?” Iruka asked, as they ran towards it, bounding to a higher branch to see ahead.  “The Hokage’s suggestions will be helpful, but—”

“It’s represented in detail in the Icha Icha novels,” Kakashi said brightly.  “He based one of the primary locations on a gambling den the Hokage frequents, and another on Tsurunoyu, where we’ll stay.”

“Oh, will we,” Iruka snorted a laugh.

“It’s the largest hot spring inn, with the best food,” Kakashi said smugly, and Iruka slumped slightly in surrender.  “We can ask the staff for information, before we steam in the outdoor bath…”

Iruka’s pulse sped up at the image.  “We are going to work, you know—” he said, half to remind himself.

“All seasonal local specialties for meals—” Kakashi whispered seductively, and Iruka groaned, brushing snow off his head.

Kakashi’s eye smiled at him from between layers of scarf and hat.  “I’ll scrub your back, and then we’ll warm our feet at the in-room hearth when we’re done bathing—”

“...you win, how much farther,” Iruka laughed softly.  

An enormous centipede reared up at them, and with a glance between them they both trod on it, letting it fall and thrash angrily behind them as they ran on.  

Glancing back at it, Iruka groaned.  “Naruto said Konohamaru had been invited several times to come with friends to buy ‘amazing jutsu’,” he said.  “We’re lucky no one has gone missing .”

“Probably the wildlife would have avoided a group including Urusako Oukuchi,” Kakashi laughed.  “She sounds like ten shinobi, not half of one.”

“She did well, today, though,” Iruka said proudly.  “I may recommend she group with Mirai more often—they have lots of ideas for her, and she’ll yell at problems before Mirai murders anyone.  Like an alarm.”

“Better for everyone, then,” Kakashi said, raising his eyebrows, and Iruka nodded, then leapt forward even faster.

“I smell sulfur,” Iruka called back, inhaling appreciatively.  “We’re close.”

Between Kakashi’s excited knowledge of his favourite book series, and Iruka’s unerring nose for hotsprings, they homed in on Tsurunoyu without difficulty.  

“Look, they’ve built kamakura,” Kakashi pointed to the small, candle-lit snow huts lighting the path.  “It mentions those in the third volume, when—”

“Yes, later, there’s snow out here, my eyebrows have ice in them,” Iruka interrupted, pulling him inside.  

“Welcome!” cried the lady behind the counter, beaming between them.  Kakashi immediately trotted over and asked whether they had a honeymoon suite (they didn’t), and began consulting with her in hushed and enthusiastic tones.  Iruka rolled his eyes, setting his bag on the floor, and perusing the lobby pamphlets.  A young woman in a blue and white, snowy-tree-covered yukata bowed to him, grinning. “Honeymoon, huh?  I’m Yuwa.  I can take your bag,” she offered, then glanced around as she realized he had none.  “A hurried trip?  Or...” she asked, winking, “—one where you don’t require many clothes?”

Iruka laughed, wiping the melting snow off his face.  “We packed quickly.”

“There’re private baths,” she said, grinning.

He felt his cheeks warm.  “We’ll certainly appreciate the...privacy,” he tried, feeling awkward in his baggy hakama pants and no flak jacket, with concealing jutsu over his scars, in an obviously expensive inn, with a stranger dimpling at him.  

“Hard to get alone time?” she waggled her eyebrows.  “You’ve come to the right place.”

“It is difficult,” he smiled back at her obvious enthusiasm.  “He’s...an important man, so it’s hard to monopolize him.”

“Difference in status,” she covered her mouth in glee, and he wondered if she spent as much time reading as Kakashi did.  “Is it difficult, marrying above your station?” she whispered.  “You’re so brave.”

Iruka blinked, then gamely continued, unwilling to shoot her fantasies down.  “It is, he’s, ah, well known and in demand amongst...similarly remarkable people.  I’m not nearly as accomplished, or talented.  There’s a huge gap in ability…” he frowned over at Kakashi signing them up for what sounded like every imaginable service, “—and pay.”

“We’re all people,” she reminded him, patting his arm sympathetically, and Iruka nodded.

“Blood doesn’t determine what kind of person you are,” he tried.  “I mean, obviously family is important, but—”

She gasped.  “You’re a commoner, and he’s—”

“We’re travel writers,” Kakashi told the counter lady happily.

“He is far above me in publication,” Iruka nodded, trying to roll with it, and wondering how this had gotten so far away from him.  “His house far outstrips my own in sales.”

“I will breathe your secrets to no one,” she whispered, clasping his hands.

The room was lovely, smelling freshly of the dry grass in the tatami mat floor, and surrounded by screens with soft landscapes and trees.  On three sides, there were large round windows over stairs into the hot springs.  Iruka stood and stared out at the lanterns, lit early in the dark of winter, and the steam rising from the springs.  

The paintings on the screens looked a lot like the pattern of snowy trees across the Yuwa-san’s yukata, and he walked back over to her and knelt by the irori, the sunken fire pit in the middle of the room, rubbing his hands.  She poured them tea from the teapot sitting by the fire.  Kakashi watched Iruka sip his tea with obvious satisfaction, his eye slitted in a smile like a cat.

“Dinner is in an hour,” Yuwa-san said, shooting sly glances between them.  “Is there anything else I can get you?”

“I think not,” said Kakashi, striding over to yank Iruka up by the front of his hanten and into a deep kiss, and Yuwa squeaked, delighted, and fled, her short light steps nearly silent across the tatami.  

“I’m glad you’re so dedicated to this investigation,” Iruka whispered against his husband’s lips, smiling, and Kakashi laughed.  

“I know you want to slip into those hot springs,” he said.  “I hate to tantalize Yuwa-san, when you’re happily married.”

“She does work for an inn with hot springs,” Iruka pointed out, shucking his clothes in a few brisk motions, and walking out to stand on the first stair into the spring.  It was hot—possibly hot enough, Iruka thought, taking another step in with a soft sigh, and taking a deep inhale of the sulphury hot springs smell.  Every inch further in felt like it sizzled his chilled skin to perfection, before settling in to a mellow warmth that penetrated to his bones.  

“What are you saying,” Kakashi asked, laughing as he leaned back against the railing.  “You’d marry her for her hot springs?”

“If you truly love me, you’ll understand,” Iruka told him, sinking to sit waist-deep in the flowing water, and wincing as it touched the tender skin of his upper thighs, and then his cock.  It bobbed in the current, and Kakashi leaned to whisper, “Help!  Help!  Too hot!” in a very high voice.  

Iruka elbowed him, and then let his eyes fall shut, leaning his head against Kakashi’s thigh as Kakashi stroked his hair.  

Iruka awoke to almost complete darkness, and a lack of fine, tickly hair against his neck, or a warm bulk to nuzzle closer to.  He lifted his head, causing a bellows of cold air in the futon, and groaned as he rubbed the damp skin between his ear and shoulder where Kakashi must have been breathing minutes before. 

Tugging the blanket along like a snail’s shell,  he crawled until he was closer to the fire. The half-full pot of tea he’d had with dinner was at the edge of the fire, and he wrapped his hands around a lukewarm cup.  His padded, plain grey nenneko jacket from home was warm around his shoulders. 

There would be ridiculous nenneko available tomorrow in town—something for Kakashi to wear. Maybe a pattern of a huge lucky cat. Something, Iruka reflected, as unlike the Konoha flak jacket uniform as possible.  Once the water in the kettle had boiled and he’d brewed fresh, considerably less bitter tea, he took it and both cups and meandered out to the decking overlooking the hot spring.

Kakashi was perched at the edge.  The sulphurous steam rose in the chill to frost his eyelashes and hair, and Iruka held out the second cup.  Kakashi clutched it close, hunching gratefully.

“Want some company?”  Iruka waited for the slow nod.   

“If it’s you.”  Kakashi glanced up.  “Just a restless night, not a haunted one.”

“I could haul the futon out here.”

“Yes,” Kakashi agreed, nodding emphatically.  “The moon’s reflecting in the spring.  I was just thinking up a description for my glowing account of this inn.”

“Eugh.”  Iruka watched him, appreciating the pink the frost had brought up in Kakashi’s cheeks and ears rather more than the rippling water.  “They’ll go above and beyond trying to please you, and then wait excitedly for this travel book to come out. You couldn’t have just said you were a writer?”

“She needed distracting from the, ah, available marital aids,” Kakashi admitted, reddening further at Iruka’s snort.  “It’s hard to properly appreciate this moon without sake,” he said, sighing pointedly, and Iruka laughed.

“The moon’ll be full tomorrow,” he knelt to whisper against the frost-glittered fabric of Kakashi’s mask, “—unless you want me to leave you all alone right now and find—”  An explosion of red light lit up the sky to the east—the direction they’d come, following the scent of bathhouse sulphur from the edge of town.  

They exchanged a glance, resigned, and Kakashi reluctantly let go of the handful of Iruka’s nenneko he’d grabbed to pull him closer.  He lifted his thumb to his mouth to bite it. As the blood balled up and threatened to trickle, he smacked his hand flat on the decking to summon the two of his ninken with the soft, floppy ears and low build of scenthounds.  “Bisuke. Goruko. Go check out the source of that explosion and report back.” They barked a quiet acceptance, trotting around each other over to a sculpturally trimmed evergreen, climbing clumsily up, and balancing along a branch to drop outside the privacy wall of the bath.  

Iruka sighed.  “I suppose I’ll go ask what’s going on, since a travel writer would probably be interested.”  First, though, he nuzzled Kakashi’s shoulder, pressing his face between the cold fabric and warm neck.

“Hurry up,” Kakashi told him, shivering.  “I’ll drag the futon out here.”

Iruka found a cluster of solemn people at the gate to the inn yard—aside from the expected yukata-dressed hot springs appreciators, there were three with prominent tattoos—tsubaki flowers, he thought distractedly, one of the three was a woman, bare-shouldered in the snow and covered in bright red tsubaki flowers—and another woman was in silk kimono with an understated pattern of green on cream pine branches—a town official, he assumed—and another two nearly immobilized in hair adornments, layers of flowery painted silk kimono, enormous bows, and feature-obscuring makeup.  

He took note of the one with the snow rabbit theme to describe to Urusako-kun.  Possibly performers, he thought, popping in to the inn after a late night’s work.  Yuwa-san waved to him, her wide smile a little strained.  She must have been working late as well—the setting moon shone prettily on her still-tidy hair, held in a perfectly symmetrical winged knot by a painted crane comb—but her skin shone blueish-pale, and her knuckles were white clenching the edges of her indigo-patterned sleeves.

She kept her voice low.  “That...sound.  Light.  It came from the Kagiya workshop,” she whispered signifacantly, and Iruka felt his eyes widen, recognizing the name.  “There’s plenty of snow,” she whispered, her hands clenching in her yukata.  “In this much snow,” she whispered, taking a deep breath, “—we should be safe even...in the worst case.”  

Everyone was craning cautiously at the gate, wanting to be the first to know of licks of flame at the town walls, remembering a different, long-ago firework artisan Kagiya’s genius apprentice Tamaya, his workshop explosion, and the raging fires of Sumidagawa that had leveled most of the city, and forced survivors into the river.  The tsubaki flower woman was giving orders, pointing down the street, and the bystander with the tattooed claws visible on his chest hurried away.  

Iruka nodded, preparing, if necessary, to blow their covers with a water release jutsu, but after several more minutes a guard ran up to the gates, gasping for breath.  “No harm done,” she panted. “No—no harm. Just an—an accident, a small one, in a field of snow. No—no harm.” She let herself tip to lean against the wall, closing her eyes.

Everyone breathed deeply, people leaning against the gate and each other.  One stranger hugged him, smelling of the sulphur in the bath, and shivering in their thin cotton indoor wear.  

The woman tattooed in bright tsubaki flowers was eyecatching, and Iruka watched her wave a charm proudly, and grab the startled official, who submitted to a kiss on the head and a bear-like hug.  “This is my daughter!” yelled the tattooed woman.  “She gave me this charm to ward off evil, and I guess it works!”

The official laughed, blushing, but submitted to rough head-pats and kisses as her mother pulled the guard over to brag about the charm.  “Sute-jo!” she yelled, and a few people took it up, laughing.  “Sute-jo!” they yelled.  “Buy a charm with Sute-jo!”

The guard laughed a little hysterically, hugging everyone back back, then ran across the road.  Iruka could hear her yelling “All is well!” all the way down the road, banging on doors.

The woman in pine-tree-worked silk laughed, but submitted to another kiss on the head and hair pat from the tsubaki-inked woman, who thanked her for the charm again with a wide smile.  “We’ll go to the shrine again this year,” she said with a teasing smile, and the official laughed harder, shaking her head.  

“It’s a normal charm,” she protested.  “I had nothing—”

“Tsubaki-kumicho protected us!” yelled someone, and the tatooed woman put her hand on her daughter’s head, shaking her as she laughed harder.  

“No!  It was the charm!” Tsubaki-kumicho yelled back.  “Not me!”

Iruka wondered, a bit, about a town whose government official was the daughter of, to all appearances, the local gang leader, but everyone gathered around them, smiling and talking.  

The daughter, in her understated silk kimono with just the edges and sleeves painted with pine, edged away from her mother’s back-slapping, smiling.  She bent to brush snow off her lower hems, teetered,  and laughed, flailing, as Iruka grabbed her hand before the taut kimono around her knees tipped her right into a snowbank.  She squeezed his shoulder, patting his arm in thanks. 

“I thought we were dead,” she whispered, and he held her up with a hand on her shoulder.  “All I could think was I hadn’t even gotten in the hot spring yet,” she said dazedly.  “I wondered whether it would be worth it to run back and dive in now, kimono and all.”

Iruka snorted, cocking his head.  “Definitely worth it.”

The joy was contagious, the metal fronds in the two entertainers’ extremely elaborate headresses tinkling pleasantly as their wearers laughed and talked, and Iruka grinned back, reflecting that civilians were bewilderingly expectant of sudden death.    

“I’m Sute,” Pine-tree-kimono  introduced herself breathlessly.  “The character for ‘foundling’. I’m thrice blessed in my survival, now.”  Her kimono was short-sleeved and grey-brown like a nesting bird compared to the red, orange, blue, and pink plumage of the women she stood shoulder to shoulder with.  

They introduced themselves as Fukurou, snowy owl—“I belong here,” she whispered, smiling, cocking her head at the snow, and Mameryou, which Iruka mouthed a couple times with a perplexed frown only to be informed that yes, the characters were ‘dragon’ and ‘bean’.  

“I am tiny, but fierce,” she said, holding Fukurou’s hand tightly.

“...Iruka,” he bowed around, and they giggled, bowing back.  “‘Dolphin’,” he gave his own name character meaning, watching for more traffic on the road.  

“Yuwa,” the inn lady bowed neatly.  “How lovely to have a dolphin in our baths.  I hope you don’t mind the heat.” She was smiling politely around, but her hands were shaking.  “Would anyone like a cup of tea?”

At the suggestion, people laughed, remembering they were standing under a cold moon in calf-deep snow, and pressed inside and around the banked irori, where Yuwa-san knelt with a sigh of relief.  The tsubaki-flower woman snapped her fingers at the third tattooed person.  The dyed blue dragon stretching from his knee to the shoulder of his flashy kimono continued in tattoo form up his neck, Iruka noticed, amused.  

Sute-san lingered by the door, listening.  “We’re all supposed to be meeting with the tax inspector,” she smiled quickly, around at the woman with the tsubaki tattoos and her tattooed flunkies, the two Iruka assumed were entertainers, and Yuwa-san, bobbing her head in what looked less like nervousness and more like a bird.  “She said she’d be back, but she’s very late. Are you travelling?”

He nodded.  “Honeymoon.”

“Oh,” she winced.  “What timing.”  Iruka raised his eyebrows, opening his mouth to ask, but she waved him off, laughing.  “I’m sorry. Just—the scare. Honeymoon on fire!  Yuwa-san knows where to find me, though,” she patted her understated kimono, the silk an obvious signal of someone in good standing with the local government.  “If you need any information. I’m always happy to help visitors.”

He nodded again, slowly, and Yuwa-san beckoned him, holding out a cup of tea.    

“I think I’ll return to our room,” he smiled, and she smiled shakily back.  There didn’t seem any particular call for ninjutsu, but Iruka waited until everyone seemed to have relaxed with their tea, and then slunk off, but started at finding Yuwa at his elbow.

“I just...feel I should check in with Tsuru-hime,” she smiled up, the light from the irori catching her round face and reflecting like the moon in the dark hall.

“Tsuru-hime?” he slowed his walk to match the short steps her yukata allowed.

“...here, this way, it’s no longer a walk for you,” she tugged at his sleeve.  The hall she led him to was lit by the moon on paper screens along one side, and a bright doorway on the other.  “Tsuru-hime would have warned us, if there were really any danger.” Yuwa knelt in the doorway. “She has always protected this house.”

There was a rope of twisted paper across the doorway, barring off a pristine room with several child-sized kimono hanging on bamboo against the walls, a small shelf of books, a lovely enameled shell-box, and the flat pebbles Iruka recognized for playing children's games.  

“Another grave?” he guessed, kneeling beside her, and she blinked at him.  

“Oh, no, she isn’t—her grave is outside.”

He raised his head for a slow nod.

“Tsuru-hime was named for the same cranes as the inn,” she smiled, pulling a mandarin orange out of her sleeve, and sitting it on the threshold.  “She would be my...oh, seven or so greats—grand-aunt. She was six years old.”

Iruka nodded, eying the kimono—new, he thought—certainly not over a century old.  The yukata he could see the right side of without leaning into the room looked like a similar design to what Yuwa was wearing.  “This was her room?”

“This is her room,” Yuwa nodded.  “She died in the summer...o-our best indigo crafter, A-Aoi-san, was honoured by my grandmother’s request to replace her summer yukata.  There—” she waved her hand at the hanging blue-and-white yukata with swirling goldfish, then touched her own yukata, blushing. “You can see the same hand as in my clouds, here.  And the screens in your room.”

“Illness?”

“A short one.”  Her jaw worked. “The doctors had seen nothing like it.  Very...very few recovered. She protects this house, now.  She and Tsubaki-dono protect the village.”

“The woman with tattoos?”

Yuwa snorted a laugh.  “Tsubaki-dono...has many flowers, yes.”

Realizing the room was warmly lit, but the only source of light he could see was the small lamp in the doorway, he frowned, leaning inward, and Yuwa smiled.  “She doesn’t show herself to strangers, but she is always warm and bright.”

He nodded once again, suddenly exhausted, and felt the need to discuss something other than dead children.  “Thank you for protecting this house, Tsuyu-hime,” he bowed, and Yuwa smiled, taking a small orange out of her sleeve, and reaching to place it on an empty tray inside the door.

“She warns us, when the sickness returns...and for other things.  Tonight was no real danger.”

Iruka smiled back, but got to his feet.  “Thank you for introducing me.”

“It’s very late,” she nodded.  “Sleep well. Would you like me to wait breakfast a bit?”

“Yes,” he rubbed his face, laughing.  “Thank you, again.”

Chapter Text

The walk around Tsuru-hime’s room mirrored the one he’d taken before to their room, so indeed, it was not out of the way, but he slammed the screen open in relief when he arrived.

At the sight of the blanket-wrapped silhouette at the edge of the hot spring, he thumped across the tatami to yank the edge of the futon away from Kakashi’s side and wrap around him like an affectionate octopus.

“...you’re blue,” Kakashi whispered against his head.  “Did you hear—your fingers are freezing—”

“We need a dip,” Iruka informed him, then braced himself and stood, letting his clothes fall.  He grimaced, swishing one foot in the water—with the snowmelt still drying on his legs, it felt like the spring was frying him crisp in hot oil.

“Snow and nenneko,” Kakashi intoned,

“Gleaming shoulders in moonlight—

Lacking in sake.”

Iruka snickered, flexing in several positions to Kakashi’s appreciative drumming on the deck, and let his eyes flicker shut as he slid into the spring up to his chin.  “The bad news is, no sake is coming.”

“Reality is ever imperfect.”  Kakashi dropped to sit on the edge next to him, letting his feet kick in the pleasant heat, and tugging Iruka’s head over to lean against his thigh.  

“There’s a Kagiya workshop outside town…” Iruka trailed off contentedly.  

“Kagiya, really.”

“Mhrm,” Iruka let himself slide down until his ears filled with water.  Kakashi’s fingers raked through his floating hair.  It wasn’t until a long—but not long enough—while later, when Iruka felt his shoulders hauled upwards, that he opened his eyes again.  “What?” he frowned up.

“Your nose was about to go under water,” Kakashi’s eyes crinkled over his scarf.  “Again.”

“The hot water is more important,” Iruka muttered, feeling his eyes start to slide shut, and he jerked his head upright, groaning.  “No, wait, you’re right.  I’m going to drown.  Get me out.”

Kakashi laughed, yanking on both his hands, until Iruka levered himself upright and staggered light-headedly back into their room.  

“...there were some people Naruto would describe as ‘underworld’ out there,” Iruka yawned, rubbing his face.  He allowed Kakashi to steer him over to the irori, stretching his hands out to bask in the warmth.  “Probably.  Tattoos everywhere.  Oh.  Some kind of tax collector in town.  A guard came and told us no fire had spread.”

“The suspense was terrifying.”  Kakashi's laughter was soft against his neck as he manhandled Iruka into his layers again, when Iruka tried to just wrap himself in the futon.  “My true love returns with tidings, only to sink up to the forehead in water. Were you drowning yourself in fear of explosions?  There was no way for me to know.”

“You’re so brave and forbearing,” Iruka muttered into his sleeves.

“Bisuke and Goruko returned,” Kakashi slid an arm around him.  “They thought there were definitely some materials in common with the garbage we tested.”

“Fgmumf?” Iruka asked indignantly, before lifting his face out of the layer of futon.  “Those garbage bombs were not Kagiya.  Just because they aren’t ninja, there’s no need to insult their skills.”

“Maybe we should go tomorrow and ask around.  It’s odd.”

“You want to meet a Kagiya,” Iruka realized aloud, grinned over.

“I do very much want to meet one of the most celebrated fireworks artisans in the five nations,” Kakashi agreed, nodding several times, and Iruka leaned into his warmth, pulling several layers of futon closer around them.  The heat felt good against his cheeks and closed eyes.

Iruka woke to a knock, in a nest of warmth, squirming between more knees than seemed likely to belong to only two people, and smiled resignedly up at Kakashi’s soft maskless grin. The knock came again.  Kakashi yanked his mask up, and Iruka staggered out of the pile of blankets to try and stretch himself into an upright position. “Euuugh,” he groaned.

“Age comes early to the ninja,” Kakashi’s muffled voice came from within the sushi roll of futon, and Iruka stuck his tongue out at him.

“Come,” Iruka called, and the door slid open to reveal Yuwa, still as tidy in indigo-worked cotton, today with standing and flying cranes.  She handed in two trays, tugging at her yukata, and Iruka brightened, glancing back at Kakashi. “Your yukata is lovely—”

She drew herself up, red-rimmed eyes crinkling as she beamed.  “Aoi-san is a genius!  Look, here at the bottom, this is our biggest spring, and rock garden, and the waterfall here, isn’t it lovely—”

“I was thinking of picking something out—” he nodded at Kakashi, who smirked.  “—maybe something in scarecrows,” Iruka trailed off, frowning back at him.

She padded over to show them in the better light coming through the screens.  “I don’t know about scarecrows, but Aoi-san is so talented, there are so many beautiful things, I’m never able to choose—” She smoothed the fabric, smiling down.  In the white light of morning, her face was noticeably pink.

“Ah.” Kakashi raised his eyebrows as Iruka handed over a tray.  

“This was a gift,” she said softly, pressing her hands to her hot cheeks.  “In—in a way,” she laughed nervously.  “Aoi-san said our springs were inspiring, but I had—I had rambled on, about the cranes landing here, I wanted—I wish we could have seen them together!  I mean—I wish Aoi-san could have seen them, of course. They—they were so beautiful, against the snow, and Aoi-san is an artist.  And the next time I stopped by the shop…of course…of course I-I had to have it.  Aoi-san tried—Aoi-san tried to give it to me, but of course I could never—”

Iruka felt himself starting to flush from second-hand awkwardness, and wrinkled his nose.  He felt Kakashi’s shoulder shift with restrained laughter.

“Aoi-san is a friend, then?” Kakashi asked, and she swiveled, eyes wide.

“I’m—I’m so—I am a faithful customer, of course—I’ll give you directions to Aoi-san’s shop, but I really—Aoi-san is—someone very talented—Aoi-san would never—never want to—w-would you like some more tea?”

“Does Aoi-san design art for everyone?” Kakashi asked, voice sly, and her face shifted several degrees closer to the bright enamel red of her comb.  

“No!  Of course—Aoi-san—wouldn’t—” she squeaked, clutching her tray tight to her chest.

Iruka, seeing no escape from Kakashi’s sudden attack of romantic nosiness, sighed.  “Do join us for tea.”

She dropped to her knees near the irori, sitting the tray aside and folding her hands  neatly, and took a deep breath.  “Thank you.  I-I believe I could use a cup. Last night was exciting,” she said, smiling at Iruka, who poured one, holding it out for her to take.

“Who were—” he began, but she was beaming between them.  

“How did—if you don’t mind me asking—and nothing to do with Aoi-san!  Ah, how—how did you know?  The two of you. That—that it was the two of you, or that, ah, you wanted it to be—”

Iruka paused, cup in midair, before replacing the teapot near the fire, and felt Kakashi’s attention zero in as well.  “Know?” Iruka tried, hopefully.

“You thought of something,” Kakashi leaned closer.  “You paused.”

After a moment’s disbelief at this betrayal, Iruka thought fast.  “I hated him in school,” he smiled at Yuwa. “This horrible teacher kept dividing us into group assignments, and he was always the arrogant one, ignoring the other two, we were just trying to divide tasks—”

Kakashi jerked back.  “I wasn’t—you—maybe I just couldn’t hear you from where you were in the river, you—you loud dolphin, squeaking away—”

“No!” Yuwa held her tea up to cover her mouth, but her delighted eyes gave her away.

“Yes,” Iruka huffed, nodding to Yuwa.  “He always walked ahead of everyone and ignored everything they said—”  

“He was always falling in the river,” Kakashi tried again.

“The third group member was in love with him and would talk about nothing else —”

“Oh no,” Yuwa laughed, staring at Kakashi.

“That is only partially true,” Kakashi put in, but Iruka just grinned at Yuwa.  

“This man has tied children to tree stumps,” Iruka sighed.  “Withheld lunch.”

“This is misleading,” Kakashi protested.  

“Because you’d never?” Iruka smiled over.

Yuwa bit her lips, mouth twitching.  “How cruel of you, Kakashi-sensei!  To children!”

Kakashi’s back stiffened.  “He vandalized a village monument—there were graves— ”

“Oh, my,” her eyes widened.

“I was a troubled child,” Iruka admitted with a wince, his smile wide.

“We actually began talking in that graveyard,” Kakashi attempted to direct the conversation.

“Oh,” she looked between them, eyes wide.  “During the..?”

“Oh, no, we just visited graves.  It was so awkward,” Iruka snorted.  “Neither of us wanted to cry with the other one there, two graves away.”

“You felt awkward,” Kakashi accused, his eyes widened in emphasis.  “Probably because you’d painted nose hairs on the monument of the—”

“Because you were crying over there—” Iruka shot a sidelong glance at Yuwa.  “He’d bawl and tell the graves all these explicit stories, he had no shame at all— ”

“I did not—” Kakashi barked a laugh.  “What—you have no idea what I was saying—”

“Oh, my,” she gasped.  “And you befriended him?”

“We—” Kakashi tried to cut in.

“He met his first boyfriend then,” Iruka sighed.  “The personification of youth and fiery spirit, and, I’ve heard, prone to wearing extremely revealing clothes—”

Kakashi sputtered.  “He was not, he was not my boyfriend, and you’ve seen him tear that thing off at every opportunity—what do you mean you’ve heard—”

“Well, yes,” Iruka sighed.  “We’ve all seen him piggyback you around the entire town, bare torsos pressed together—”

“Oh, my,” she hid her grin.  “How scandalous.”

“No, no, no,” Kakashi tried to cover Iruka’s mouth, but yanked his hand away when Iruka, who dealt with children on a daily basis, calmly licked it.  Kakashi sputtered.  “Gai was not—I did not, this is slander—”

“Then he ran off with this scarred older man three times his age,” Iruka told her, over Kakashi’s revolted groan, and she clasped Iruka’s hands melodramatically, their noses almost touching.  She was a beautiful person, he thought, they should exchange letters. “I thought he was lost forever, and I was really a bit fine with that—”

“You’re making me into—” Kakashi, caught in the web of lies he had, himself, prompted, trailed off.  “This is much more complicated than you’re—”

“This one was a corrupt officer,” Iruka whispered, and Yuwa gasped satisfyingly.  “Of course Kakashi wasn’t having that.”

"A corrupt travel book editor?" Yuwa whispered, wide-eyed, and Iruka choked on his tea.

Kakashi’s ears reddened as his eyes narrowed further.  “None of this even answers her question.”

“Did he report him?” Yuwa whispered back, and Iruka let his grin grow.  

“He did!  He protected a man I respect very much.  Who raised me,” he smirked over, letting it grow fond.  

“He’s a hero,” she beamed between them, and Iruka leaned his head to the side, smiling, as she focused her wide eyes on Kakashi.  “So what’s your story?”

Kakashi sighed, and Iruka echoed it.  “He means he's embarrassed, and he’s never loved me at all," Iruka said sadly.

“He was this weirdo who kept yelling at me,” Kakashi held his cup out for more tea, sharing a grin with Yuwa as Iruka’s head jerked back in offense.  “He shouted about some kid he didn’t like, he didn’t like me promoting someone he didn’t feel was ready—”

“That was when, more precisely,” Iruka said quietly, then accepted more tea, slowly sipping as the other two waited with bated breath.  “When you believed in...my little brother. More than anyone else ever had, more than I did. That was the moment.”

“Really?” Kakashi scooted closer.

“No, you’re right,” Iruka said, considering.  “That’s ridiculous, I’m probably mistaken.”

“Oh, no, no,” Kakashi said, leaning to see his face.  “I need to hear all about this sudden realization, was it my eyes?”

“I didn’t know about his ego at the time,” Iruka confessed to Yuwa.

She smiled into her tea, swallowing hard.  “You two are so comfortable. Maybe someday I’ll…”

“Talk to Aoi-san?” Iruka raised his eyebrows, ready for a new subject.  He could feel his cheeks burning over his moment of sincerity—they were probably emitting steam from his ears.  She groaned, hiding behind her tea.

Kakashi was not ready to be redirected.  “He hugged me, out of nowhere,” he leaned into Iruka’s side, and Iruka slid an arm around him, shrugging.  

Iruka leaned his hot face against Kakashi’s shoulder for a long moment, then raised his head, kissed his husband’s cheek, and cleared his throat.  He sipped his tea.  “Yuwa-san, I was speaking with Sute-san last night, and she mentioned our very poor timing.  What’s going on?” 

Kakashi stilled against him.

“Oh,” she swallowed again, laughed, and smoothed her kimono.  “She shouldn’t—I’m—I’m sure it’s fine,” she clasped her hands.  “Koukyuu-sama. The tax official, who we were to meet with last night.  She has not returned.”

“A...tax official?” Iruka repeated.

“You aren’t familiar with her?”  She blinked. “Koukyuu-sama...sets the taxes we must pay, in rice.”  Her mouth quirked.  “Of course, we do not grow much, here. Our local gods favor hot springs, and gambling, and...indigo.  She decides how much we can afford—” she stopped, wincing. 

Iruka poured himself more tea, listening as she smoothed her yukata, her voice even.  

“Koukyuu-sama is...she...it is very expensive, you see, to buy rice to pay the tax.  The entirety of the farmer’s reported rice crop goes to the tax, so to sell us rice, they must...plan, of course?  They must...hide their excess, and—and smuggle it here.  And guarding and transporting that much rice—” she smoothed her yukata again, biting her lips, and swallowing hard, and Kakashi poured her more tea.  

She accepted it, wiping her eyes and smiling.  “Koukyuu-sama has...developed a system, where she collects the taxes herself, as...money. A great deal of money.”

Kakashi shot Iruka a look.  “Surely you must be familiar with this ‘Koukyuu-sama’?  She must come across your desk.”  

Iruka shook his head, frowning.  “She travels, with all this money?  Surely she hires ninja?”

“Oh, no,” Yuwa-san sighed.  “She...she is protected not only by her status at court, but also by the members of the Tsubaki-rengo, the—” she drew with her finger on her face and down her arm, and Iruka nodded.

“The tattooed woman, by the gate,” he explained to Kakashi.  “With the red tsubaki flowers.”

Yuwa-san nodded.  “They have been looking for her, but Tsubaki-dono has lost her as well.  Sute-san wished for everything to be handled...quickly, but Koukyuu-sama does not...she enjoys her visits here.”  She swallowed, taking a deep breath. “She wishes for everyone to...make their case, before her. She would normally sit in the finest room, taking visitors. Tsubaki-dono calls it holding court.”

“Small wonder everyone was so tense,” Iruka raised his eyebrows.

Yuwa nodded.  “She got in yesterday afternoon, and her luggage is in her room.  She...may have been the person who set off the fireworks, but no one was hurt.”

“Why on earth would she have wandered off in the snow in the middle of the night?”  Iruka wrinkled his nose.

“She may have...had demands of Kagiya-sensei.”  She frowned. “She has the power to make life...very much harder, for everyone.”

“I can imagine,” Kakashi cocked his head at Iruka, who began collecting the info on Aoi-san’s indigo workshop.  When they’d finished grilling Yuwa-san on her love life, and given her several highly-deserved compliments on the breakfast, they ushered her out.

Iruka ate slowly, enjoying the stewed mountain vegetables, but thinking of the bags and bags of rice delivered to each hidden village by their lords.  “It’s a bit uncomfortable to think that rice is for us,” he grimaced, then shivered, imagining the snowy trek to the fireworks workshop.  

“The money is not,” Kakashi grinned, leaning in for a kiss.  “And I suspect Koukyuu-sama is keeping most of that.  Shall we visit the famed Kagiya fireworks workshop after breakfast?” he asked, smiling over his rice, and Iruka sighed.

An hour later, Kakashi tromped happily through the snow, flapping his arms at Iruka when he lagged behind.  The ends of his scarf snapped in the chill wind.

“If you’d walk faster, it wouldn’t be as cold,” he called back, and Iruka turtled further into his layers.  

“If she hadn’t arrived yesterday night,” Iruka replied, thinking, “—I’d blame this tax official for our pirated ninja tools.”  He sighed.  “How convenient that would have been.”

Kakashi snorted, waiting until Iruka caught up, and bumping their shoulders together.  “Still might be her, it sounds like she’s every other kind of waste of air.  Extorting the whole town.”

“If she was selling the ninja tools, we could just throw her through the Hokage’s window, run back, and dive in the hot spring,” Iruka flapped his layered arms, smiling into his scarf.  “It’d be much drier, running across the branches.  Whose idea was it, again, to pretend to be civilian snowmen?”  He blew into his hands. “I’m warmer than in my flak jacket, but I can barely move—it’s like I’m a toddler and this whole outfit is one huge diaper— ”

“There!” Kakashi pointed.  “Kagiya!”

Frozen nearly stiff as Iruka was, there was no resisting the excitement of meeting such a famous artisan, and he bumped Kakashi’s shoulder back as they nodded to the bundled-up child tottering toward them at the open gate.

“Who are you,” the child said, in a dull, snuffly voice.

“We’d like to speak to Kagiya-sensei,” Iruka said, muffled through two layers of scarf.

The child sighed, then turned to look at a building emitting thumping noises.  “Kagiya-kachou is in there.  Bang on the door first, so she doesn’t kill you with a mallet.”  

“Noted.”  Kakashi’s eyes crinkled as he grinned under his scarf, and he drug Iruka over.  The snow crunched behind them as the definitely-civilian child followed, tromping behind a snow-covered bush to crouch and peer after them with narrowed eyes.  She was still, somehow, better at shadowing than Konohamaru, Iruka reflected, somewhat depressed by the thought.

“Come!” a voice yelled, when he banged on the door, and Iruka reached around him to slide the door open, tumbling them both through into the warmth.  They were surrounded by crates and tables covered in lengths of bamboo. In the middle, a short, broad woman in loose hakama pants, an apron, and faded floral back tattoos along her muscles was methodically inserting a wooden dowel into each bamboo tube and giving it a single smack with the mallet to tamp the powders inside.  

“Kagiya-dono,” Kakashi said, bright-eyed, and she glanced over her shoulder at them, frowning.

“It’s warm in here,” Iruka unwound a layer of scarf, frowning around.  “You wouldn’t have a fire in a fireworks work shop—”

“We’re over the hot spring network.” she said.  “Who are you?” Her shoulders and arms flexed as she hammered rapid-fire, once at each tube, with little attention, but complete precision.

“Umino Iruka and Kakashi Hatake,” Iruka said politely, about to go into detail, when Kakashi interrupted.

“We’re writers,” he bragged, and Iruka snorted.  

“I write children’s books,” he smiled over.  “If we don’t get in the way, would it be possible to watch you for a bit, and ask you some questions?”

She paused, frowning over.  “Fireworks aren’t for children.”

“Well, no, of course not.  We do a pretty brisk business with the hidden villages, as well, though I was thinking of something more general—the life of a firework artisan.  The name ‘Kagiya’ is well known, even there.”

“...you came all this way to watch me making fireworks?” she leaned her head back, twirling the mallet around her finger.

“Oh.”  Iruka laughed, shaking his head.  “Not exactly, no—”

“—we’re on our honeymoon,” Kakashi told her, waggling his visible eyebrow.  “I just found out the exact moment he fell in love with me.”

Iruka rolled his eyes.  “My misfortune you triggered my switch, I suppose. Whoops, love!  Suddenly!”

She cocked her head, rubbing her closely shorn grey head.  “I feel like you’re lying, and I have no idea why.”

“No!”  Iruka barked a laugh.

“Not really!” Kakashi said at the same time, and they stared fixedly at her, mouths twitching, with reddening faces.  

“Yuwa-san at the baths was grilling us all morning about our relationship,” Iruka tried.  “We’re feeling a bit awkward about it.”

“Are you?” Kakashi leaned in to him.  “About your explosion of feelings when I—how did you put it—believed in your protege, even when you had no faith at all— ”

“There was no such—I realized you—could be important, is all, that you weren’t entirely a tardy waste of time—and don’t—I had faith,” Iruka sputtered, laughing as he held Kakashi’s scarf-muffled kisses at bay with both hands.

Kakashi grabbed his scarf, and pulled him into a heavily insulated hug.  “Oho, what were you yelling at me?” he asked in a loud, fake voice.  “I can’t remember.  Was it ‘He isn’t ready, Kakashi, I don’t want him disappointed, Kakashi—’”

“We are here to talk about books,” Iruka hissed.  “—and I definitely do not sound like that.”

“Are we?” Kakashi’s eyes crinkled as he grinned under the scarf.

Iruka rubbed his forehead.  “Books and fireworks, unless you wanted to keep practicing your falsetto, it does need the work—”

“You realized ‘I could be important’,” Kakashi mused.

“We actually came for the hot springs,” Iruka told the lady Kagiya, leaning around Kakashi’s shoulder, and she raised her eyebrows.  “I plan to drown him,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Kakashi, who hummed inquiringly. “It seemed like a honeymoonish thing to do.”

She rolled her eyes, but pointed her mallet at Kakashi.  “I know you, you’re in the Bingo Book, from Konoha.” She leaned on her squeaky left leg to turn the mallet on Iruka.  “You aren’t.”  Her frown deepened.

“Nooo,” Iruka ignored Kakashi’s cackles and his own heating cheeks.  “We are on our honeymoon, though, and I do have some questions.  I’m investigating some injuries to my students.”

She turned her frown on Kakashi, who nodded, smiling, and then she sighed.  “From my workshop?”

“Not your fireworks,” Iruka reassured her, grimacing.  “Our ninken traced some suspicious smells here.”  

“Ask,” she said, and Iruka cleared his throat, watching her measure powders, and unwilling to ask a highly respected tradeswoman whether she’d been selling garbage to children.  “It’s, ahh—what are you making right now?”

“Tax official visited last night,” she grunted.  “There’s been...another outbreak of korori plague.  In the capital.  There’s the new medicine, but they can’t—people are frightened.  There are just—bodies floating down the river—and she wants a big display to cheer spirits, and soothe the dead.  As a gift.  To the people.  It...it could help, in a way.”  She set her jaw.  “I can afford it.”

“She isn’t paying you?”

“I’m building them myself,” she snapped.  “Don’t have to pay my crew.”

“Yuwa-san was telling us about her...manners,” Iruka tried, and Kagiya snorted.

“She’s got court manners.”  Kagiya rubbed her close-cropped grey hair.  “She tells you what she wants, and by the end of the talk you owe her money, and you’ve agreed to lend her your eyeteeth.”  

“I’m beginning to hope we never meet her,” Kakashi called over from where he was peering into a bin.  “I’ve never seen a Kagiya assemble fireworks. It’s hard to remember they aren’t all ninja techniques.”

“I’m working on adding colors,” she told them, her mouth quirked.  Fully turned to face them, they could see her tattoo and love of colors extended up her neck, cheek, and into her hair—an odd assortment of willows, chrysanthemums, peonies, and spiders intertwined, and Iruka realized they were types of firework.

“Colors,” Kakashi looked up from his inspection of fuses.  “We know your artisans are some of the few allowed knowledge of hidden techniques—”

Her mouth quirked further.  “With chemistry.  These will light up both yellow,” she paused, glancing between their faces, “...and blue .”  

“Blue,” Iruka blinked, wide-eyed.  

“How—but—” Kakashi trotted over to hover a safe distance from her elbow, and Iruka bit his lips to hide his smile, surveying the pad he’d brought for notes.  

“Did you test some for her?  We saw an explosion last night, from the inn.”

Kagiya snorted.  “She chose herself some ‘gifts’ out of the storeroom.”

“...and just had her own show, at moonset?” Iruka asked, frowning.

“She also picked out three bottles of my sake,” Kagiya told them, her eyes narrowed.  While Iruka grilled her on her life and work, Kakashi wandered a bit, before coming over to crouch next to him.  Kakashi’s abrupt head turn alerted Iruka before the bang of the door opening to admit the man Iruka had seen the night before, with the dragon tattoo up his neck. He threw it open, the hooded child leaning around him.  “Kagiya-kachou,” he said.

“What,” she shouted back, staggering before smacking her left knee with the mallet as she stepped back from the table.  It clanked, but straightened.

The interloper started when he saw them, frowning between their faces and Kagiya. “There’s a meal ready,” he said, glaring at them.

“Almost done,” she called back, and he huffed, slamming the door again.

“This has been fascinating,” Iruka sighed, closing his notebook, and swallowing down his urge to suggest a field trip with his class.  “This Koukyuu-sama, the official...she stole from you?  If she’s a government official, isn’t there anything you can do?”

Kagiya’s laugh was sharp.  “I could ask her to report herself.”

“Ugh.  Were those that we saw all she took, at least?”

She sighed, finishing out the row of bamboo tubes, and tucking the mallet into a loop on her apron.  “I...this is terrible, but I’m not sure. We’ve had...a few things go missing, recently. Once it was just a batch of flash bombs that got wet, but…”

“Other explosives are missing?”

“Not—” she frowned.  “It’s odd stuff. I haven’t wanted to bother Sute-jo—she’s the local official,” she told them, and Iruka remembered the woman with pines painted on brown silk, the night before.

“Sute-jo has enough on her plate—” Kagiya growled softly, deep in her throat.  “What with...everything.  Sometimes, though, I’ll seal away something for safety—if it’s on fire, or unstable, or I just want it out of the way.  In a scroll, you know.  My apprentices practice as well—it’s useful, it’s prevented some real disasters.”

“The scrolls are going missing?” Iruka blinked at her, trying to bend his tone away from triumph, and toward surprise.  

“I can’t think what anyone would want with them,” she untied a handkerchief from around her arm, and wiped the sweat off her face.  “They’re useless. You couldn’t learn the technique from a scroll, and you’d be under a pile of burning rubble besides.”

“Someone could be trying,” Kakashi shrugged.  “Who has access? Where do you keep them?”

“Wellllll,” she frowned, drawing out the word as she glanced between them.  “Everyone who works here, obviously. My family. It’s possible someone tried to dispose of them, though I’ve said I’d rather do it myself.”

The door slid open again to allow the child to stand in the doorway, hands on hips.  “Auntie.”

“...almost done,” she said distractedly, glancing from Iruka and Kakashi to her crate of tubes.  “Just a few left.”

“I can show them out,” the small sniffly voice said.  “Since they’re distracting you from finishing that woman thief’s project.”

“Ah,” Kagiya winced, rolling her shoulders.  

“We are, aren’t we,” Iruka smiled between them.  “We’ll be on our way!  Thank you, we’re so grateful for your time.”  

“We are on a mission, though, so if you could avoid mentioning I’m in the Bingo Book—” Kakashi waggled his most persuasive eyebrow.

Kagiya-san nodded, turning back to her task with a sigh as Iruka ushered Kakashi out and homed in on the kid.  Once the door was shut, he glanced down. “So...you saw the tax official too?”

The little girl’s nose wrinkled.  “She’s horrible!” Kakashi jerked his head back from her tiny flailing arms.  “She’s always horrible!  Every year she’s horrible!  She always knows exactly how much money we make, and what we will make, and she wants that too— ” she made a choking, gulping noise, and Iruka crouched, offering his handkerchief.  There were two extremely muscular tattooed women watching them from under the eaves of the next building, and Kakashi nodded over.  “We don’t even make much money—there are always injuries—and repairs—but she can just take what she wants, and nobody can stop her—” Iruka’s eyes narrowed, remembering the descriptions of their awful-ninja-tool dealer, but also considering the little face in the hood, gleaming with painted flowers and eyelash wings in artful imitation of the tattoos every adult was sporting.  Smudged though she currently was, it wasn’t hard to imagine how many of the buyers in his class were likely to have been swayed by a pretty face.

“Everyone’s told us how awful she is, I’m so sorry,” he nodded almost imperceptibly when Kakashi squeezed his shoulder, jerking his head at their audience.  “Do you sell fireworks here?  Maybe we could buy some.  I’m Iruka, and that’s Kakashi, by the way—”

“You’re tourists, you should pay double,” the child said without skipping a beat, and he suppressed a grin.  “Mikan. I’m apprenticed to my aunt, great-granddaughter of the woman who invented fish stars.” As they blinked at each other, she sighed loudly, grabbed their sleeves, and hauled them to another building—a storeroom, piled high with differently packed and labeled tubes.  “They swim into the sky, I should sell you dirt, you wouldn’t know the difference—” she slammed the door open, tromping in to pat reassuringly at one of the crates.  “We keep the stores small, in case of fire.”

“Wow.  How much are they?”  

She eyed him up, blowing her nose again.  “How much have you got?”

Kakashi was having difficulty restraining his laughter.  Iruka raised his eyebrows.  “I want to help, but we do have other plans for our money.”

“That woman gave my aunt a weeks worth of work and no money,” her fists started to shake—with fury, he expected.  “I had to pay my own tuition by myself.”

“Did you?” Iruka cocked his head.  “You should probably talk to your aunt, though, about that.”

“Does a woman work here that rides a cat?” Kakashi hrrrrmed over a crate of fireworks, and Mikan nearly stumbled off the stool she was standing on.  “She wears all green, and has the kanji for—”

“You leave Midori alone!” Mikan brandished a firework tube at him like a short, boobytrapped bamboo practise weapon.  

“My,” he said mildly, blinking at her.  “Weren’t you going to sell these to us?”

“Midori’s my best friend.  You just don’t know her,” Mikan glared between them.  “Why do you want to know, anyway?”

“She was vending goods in town,” Iruka said, guileless.  

“No!  Again?!  I told her—what was she selling, we don’t even—” she blinked between them.  “...what was she selling?  She’d never take from a storeroom…”

“What was she selling before?” Kakashi cocked his head.  “Oh, I definitely need some ‘fish stars’.”

“... nothing,” Mikan’s eyes narrowed.  “My aunt perfected fish stars, they’re bigger, they swim faster, they’re dragons now, they light up the whole sky, they’re over there,” she pointed, face still scrunched with suspicion.  “What did you see Midori doing?  Is she in trouble?”

“Midori-san does what you tell her?” Iruka accepted the tubes labelled Dragon Star.  “Isn’t she older than you?”

“She doesn’t care about that.  If someone has a good idea, she’ll listen.  And nobody listens to Midori but me, because she doesn’t...she’s—she can be hard to understand.”

“So things Midori does...are often your fault, huh?” Iruka climbed up to investigate a massive crate.

“Yes!” she said stoutly, putting her hands on her hips.  “Everything Midori does is my fault!”

“Oh, really?” Kakashi asked.  “She’s a lot bigger than you.”

“If it’s bad I told her to do it!” she yelled back, elbows straight out from her shoulders, forearms dangling, like she was trying to look large.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have Midori do things that might get her in trouble, then,” Kakashi hopped down.  “We came to ask your aunt about her, but—”

“Don’t do that!” she grabbed his sleeve with both hands.  “No—don’t—ask my aunt! I won’t ask Midori to do anything that would get her in trouble!  I’ll stop!”

“She was selling bombs and scrolls,” Iruka raised his eyebrows.  “Do you know anything about that?”

She swallowed.  “To-today?! ”

“They were dangerous,” he emphasized.  “To the buyers, and to Midori, isn’t she your friend?  You won’t have her sell that kind of thing again?”

“I—no, I’d never—”

“Then I’ll take these!” Kakashi grinned at her, and she gritted her teeth, stomping over to collect paper and begin sums.  

“I—I’ll give you a deal, since you’re leaving Midori out of it,” she glared up.  “Only 75% more than usual.”

“Will that keep you from having to sell more dangerous scrolls and explosives to other children to pay for school?”  Iruka crouched down to sit face-to-face with her, and she squeaked, breaking her pencil.  

“...I will find another way,” she growled back.

“A safer way?” he pressed.

“A safer way,” she snarled.   “This is your total, tourist-san.”

Kakashi’s shoulders were shaking as he snickered, but Iruka nodded, paying up in complete satisfaction.  On their way back to the village, he walked sideways to thud against Kakashi, wrapping an arm around him and pulling him into a kiss.  The inside of Kakashi’s mouth was warm, and Iruka let his eyes flutter closed with an appreciative groan.  

“Iruka,” Kakashi pulled back, his laugh warm against their scarves, but Iruka reeled him back in.  After another too-brief minute, “Iruka.  There are hot springs.  We can take our time—”

“That’s stupid,” Iruka whispered back, tugging at the striped scarf.  “You’re right here.”  He kissed at the heat rapidly rising across Kakashi’s cheeks.

“But if you push me up against this tree,” Kakashi laughed, “—snow will go everywhere—not that I mind—” 

“Well, yes,” Iruka let himself be batted away, grinning as Kakashi shook off the snow already in his scarf.  “Here—” he leaned to brush around Kakashi’s back. “You would have looked so atmospheric, a snow-covered scarecrow—”

“You were distracting me,” Kakashi eyed him warily.  “Lowering my guard with your wiles while you pushed me into this snow trap—and your nose is actually colder than the snow, if you were wondering—”

“Believe me, I’m aware—” Iruka grumbled, rubbing it.

“I barely got you out into the snow at all,” Kakashi reminded him, elbowing his side.  “I thought I was going to have to drag you on a sledge—”

Iruka rolled his eyes.  “The hunting instincts of a jounin were indeed better than my lowly genin—”

“Oh, yes, it was definitely my ninja training that drew us here.  Tell me you got some of the blue ones—augh— ” he yelped, ducking away from Iruka’s mitten-load of snow, and rummaging around in the sack the little girl had given them.

“We should get them back and seal them before they’re ruined in all this slush...but yes,” Iruka grinned, nodding.  “'Blue dragon stars', whatever that means.  Both of our missions are complete.”

“—and yet she charged you nearly twice their cost,” Kakashi raised his eyebrows.

Iruka shrugged.  “They weren’t all that expensive.  And now we can go back to the inn, and spend the next two days naked, bathing in hot water and sake.”

“We should have gotten some bamboo straws to breathe through,” Kakashi suggested, nodding wisely, his cheeks flushed. 

Chapter Text

Yuwa looked even more stressed than she had that morning, pristinely made up  and unwrinkled, but smiling vaguely at them for a few seconds before clapping her hand to her mouth.  “Oh!  Hello again! You’re...back.  I don’t suppose...you saw any sign of Koukyuu-sama?  On your way?”

“She’s still missing?”  Kakashi frowned, glancing at Iruka.  

“She hasn’t been seen since last night,” Yuwa-san said, smiling and bowing to some passing guests.  “But I am sure your bathe will be lovely after that walk in the snow!”

“...yes,” Iruka nodded, allowing Kakashi to prod him towards their room before she decided they needed more attention, but she bustled after them.

“I was supposed to mention this morning,” she bobbed her head with a resigned smile, “Fukurou-san and Mameryou-san, that you met yesterday evening?”  At her pause, Iruka nodded. “They wrote a new show for Koukyuu-sama.  I’ve heard wonderful things, if you’d like to see it.”

“A show, you say,” Kakashi leaned his head between them.  “What sort of show?”

“Oh, it’s a comedy, of course.  It’s about a person who is in love with a beautiful young woman who believes she is a dragon, and seeks another dragon to marry.” Yuwa clasped her hands.  “It’s not really a romance, or—there are so many things Koukyuu-sama dislikes, you know, but the music is lovely, Mameryou has been singing it for months, and their costumes are always divine.  The dragon puppet is made from their old kimono.”

“Perhaps we will go,” Iruka sighed, smiling, as Kakashi peered hopefully up at him, one arm around Yuwa.  She giggled.  “Once I’ve thawed.”

“Oh dear,” she pushed Kakashi towards him.  “Yes! Are you hungry?”

“Hot sake,” Iruka nodded, stomping his feet to knock the snow off before he stepped up to the floor and the seductive light of the fire.  

“Also food,” Kakashi nodded, his visible eye smiling.  “Thank you, Yuwa-san.”

“Of course,” she beamed at both of them.  “It’ll be the work of a moment.”

“I want about eleven bowls of ramen,” Iruka muttered, shivering through the chilly hallway around the rooms.

“Yuwa-san probably would have tried her best,” Kakashi grimaced.  

“...and I’m sure it’d be delicious,” Iruka’s enthusiasm was unconvincing.  “Artful ‘mountain vegetable’ ramen. Sounds...chewy. The food here is good, but if you find in your travels a fancy hotspring with a ramen cart that will hand you bowls while you soak—”

“That sounds like a disaster,” Kakashi said, smiling.  “Noodles in the bath.”

“As if I’d let the one ruin the other,” Iruka scoffed, slamming their door and peeling out of his layers.  “ Strip .”

“I have to get in gradually —” Kakashi laughed, finding himself drug towards the balcony overhanging the steaming spring.  “I’ll combust, Iruka—”

“Just be closer ,” Iruka dropped to sit at the edge of the spring, the waters lapping at his waist, and yanked at Kakashi’s clothes.  “Out.”

Instead of obeying, Kakashi pulled off his scarf, leaning in to bite gently at Iruka’s frozen nose, and kissing across his eyelashes.  “Yuwa-san will bring food soon.” He groaned as Iruka pulled him down with hands steaming from the spring water. “You’re so warm.”

“Mmm,” Iruka grinned against his mouth.  “‘Mystery time’ is over. It’s time for the true purpose of this voyage, and my greatest love:  Baths.”

“There’s a steam room somewhere,” Kakashi remembered, at peace with second place in Iruka’s affections.

“Maybe if they run low on water,” Iruka said, sighing with satisfaction and sliding forward to drop another step into the bath.  

Kakashi scrambled for purchase, laughing.  “Let go, you’ll drown me.”

“The spirit of the baths would be merciful towards his greatest worshipper,” Iruka sighed, letting his eyes slide closed.  “Hurry up.”

Kakashi let go of his handhold on the wall, and found kissing Iruka’s widening smile irresistible.  “Augh,” he pulled away, lengthening the pauses between kisses. “Your nose is still like a snowball .”

“Mmm,” Iruka hummed.  “I know. Come on, it’ll—”  Much too quickly, a knock came at the door, and Kakashi squeezed his shoulder.  

“I’ve got it,” he said, dropping a kiss at Iruka’s hairline.  

“I can be responsible sometime,” Iruka called after him, laughing, as Kakashi reapplied his scarf layers.  

“No,” he stage-whispered, leaning back around the corner, “No one’s watching!”

“I suppose if it’s just you,” Iruka shouted after him, with a splashing noise.  

Kakashi padded out shortly with a tray, and handed out one of the square wooden sake cups bathhouses used to prevent cups sinking into the bath and breaking against the bottom.  “I’ll join you…” he trailed off, tucking a frosted tendril of hair behind Iruka’s ear, and letting his eyes linger over Iruka’s tan, muscled shoulders, loose wet hair, and the delicate layer of frost forming on his hair and eyebrows from the steam hitting the winter air.

“Thank you for spoiling me,” Iruka grinned up, cheeks flushed.  “Of course I can get things myself—”

“My pleasure,” Kakashi dropped to lie on his stomach at the edge of the balcony, twining his fingers in Iruka’s hair to pull him closer and kiss away the flavour of the sake.  “Ask me for anything. Midnight ramen. The Mizukage’s hat.”

Iruka snorted, pulling Kakashi’s scarf off and tossing it onto the decking in order to kiss his whole face systematically.  “I definitely—” he kissed along Kakashi’s eyes and eyebrows, “—need—” he kissed thoroughly kissed both cheeks, biting gently at his ears and breathing warm words against the cold damp skin, “—that ramen.”  He stepped in closer, planting his feet to stand pressed against the edge of the wood decking, and run steaming hands up Kakashi’s neck and through his hair.

Kakashi went boneless, closing his eyes with a smile Iruka kissed softly.  

“Thank you,” Iruka whispered against his lips, and Kakashi laughed.

“For ramen?”

“For taking care of me,” Iruka held Kakashi’s head as he tried to duck away.  “For teaching my students to take care of each other.”

Kakashi laughed, shaking his head, his cheeks heating against Iruka’s lips.

“Naruto and the Third told me about that test,” Iruka kissed along Kakashi’s hairline, appreciating the contrast between his white hair and red face. “—with the lunchboxes, and why, and I...thought about you, after that.”

“At night, right?” Kakashi’s skin was hot even against Iruka’s half boiled bath hands.  “All night long you thought about me—”

“That’s an unrelated issue—” Iruka said dryly.

Kakashi’s head jerked up, wide-eyed.  “Please tell me my page of the Bingo Book was pinned up on your wall—” he begged.

“Right next to the Third Hokage,” Iruka wrinkled his nose.  

Kakashi opened his mouth, then closed it, squinting.  “Wait, but young Hokage, or—”

Iruka pressed a thumb against Kakashi’s lips.  “Do you want to hear this?”

Kakashi lowered his eyes, laughing softly.  “Not sure it’s going anywhere good.”

Iruka raised his eyebrows.  “I don’t want somebody that holds my hand every time I walk outside in case I stub my toe, but the…” his lips thinned as he thought, running his thumb along Kakashi’s jaw.  “You make sure I know I’m...valued. Konohagure can be lonely. Thank you, for...valuing people so much.” Kakashi’s laugh was a little shaky against Iruka’s lips.

As they wandered out for dinner that night, Yuwa was juggling two bags, a pretty silk shawl, and sandals that were nearly a foot tall, putting her nearly at Iruka’s shoulder.  “Are you going to the play?” he asked guiltily, in his comfy indoor socks, steadying her elbow as she staggered.

“Oh,” she nearly fell again, the other direction.  “I’m so sorry, I’m fine once I get moving!  And not...exactly,” she lowered her eyes, neck reddening under her unusually heavy makeup.  “We...opened some rather fine sake, for Koukyuu-sama, you know, and it...it seems a waste not to drink it, so I thought perhaps…” 

Kakashi waited, raising his eyebrows at Iruka.  

“A-Aoi-san,” she swallowed. “I thought, I would—we could—”

“Yes,” Iruka agreed, firmly, pushing her at the door.  “Do.”

That night the people Kakashi had not valued enough came into his dreams, all the people he’d failed to save, and he jerked awake in the darkness, wet with sweat, to the sound of small footsteps padding in a circle around their futon.  He burst into the hallway following the soft creaks and thumps to see the long empty passage bathed in flickering light, and...nothing. 

Sheathing his kunai, he sat down in the doorway, and wondered if he’d dreamed of Obito or Rin as a child, and he listened to Iruka breathe—Iruka was snoring softly, probably already balled up in the center of the warmth.  Kakashi let his head thunk back against the edge of the door, taking a few slow, measured breaths. He considered walking back in and waking Iruka, curling against his warmth, and submitting to a sleepily nonsensical but thorough assessment of his wellbeing.

The mat in front of his folded legs creaked, and he shot to his feet, in light suddenly bright enough to cast shadows into the room behind.  The footsteps returned, and he lowered the hand he’d covered his sharingan with to see only a brightly lit hallway. His sleeve yanked his arm down, and something small and wooden shoved its way between his fingers.  He squeezed it, feeling his back hit the wall again, and it felt like a painted spinning top—a toy. He spared a glance down, and it was, and he smiled. Oh.  I’m still dreaming, then.  Is it my friends as children, he wondered, or the children I prevented them having?

When the footsteps pattered away again, he followed.  They led to a door, and through, the light leaving him in another chilly hallway lit only by the moon through the paper screens.  There were rustling noises coming from inside, and he considered for a long moment, clenching the top in his hand, before pushing his hand against the door to thump it a few times against the frame.

“Come!” called a hoarse voice from inside, and he slid the door open on an unfamiliar face.  There was a woman in a pine-painted silk kimono kneeling in the center of piles of clothes, crates, and overturned sacks.  “I can’t find it,” she said levelly, then looked up, taking a shaky breath and wiping her face. “...you’re—a guest. I’m sorry, I expected Yuwa-san.  I am—Sute—” she tried to stand, discovered her legs were asleep, and fell somewhat gracelessly against a box.

“...would you like me to find Yuwa-san for you?” he assessed her swollen eyes and composed expression.  

“She’s busy, I’m sure,” she smiled up, clenching her jaw.  

“I think you met my...Iruka,” he crouched, rolling the top in his hand.  “You’re staying here?  I thought you lived here in Shukuba?”

She closed her eyes, clearing her throat mid-sentence.  “This is Ko—Koukyuu-sama’s room. I was…” she clenched her fists, taking a long, deep breath.  “She was to bring medicine. We—we aren’t—no one has died, but she said there were discoveries in the capital, that she had wonderful new medicine —one for people already fighting the plague, and one—” she laughed sharply, “—one that prevents it altogether.  She was to bring a great deal of it, and the recipe to make more.” She shook her head. “It is...nowhere. I don’t know how it is...packaged, but there is nothing here, no notes—”

Kakashi spun the top in his palm, considering.  “This medicine. It’s for the...plague?”

She laughed again, scooting over to halfheartedly pat down a pair of sandals much too low for the weather.  “It’s called the three-day collapse. You begin making rice-water—” she gestured at her backside, “--and then you die.”

“I am from a hidden village,” he frowned at the top, and her head snapped up.  “I may be able to help.”

“Please,” she said through her hand, eyes welling, and he bit his finger again, summoning his sniffer dogs.  

“Check for anything in here that smells medicinal,” he told them.  “Any paper that’s been used to wrap medicine, any herbs or chemicals—”

They trotted around curiously, eventually bringing a bottle of sake strong enough to use in bomb-making, and a packet labeled headache powder.  She tasted it, and closed her eyes again. “...the character for my name is ‘foundling’, did you know?”

Kakashi shook his head.

“The first time our village was struck by the plague, my mother was a child.  She nearly died—all her family died. After she married, it returned for her—her husband—his mother—my older siblings.  My mother was pregnant,” she smiled up, her eyes welling up with tears.  

“When she began to collapse, Tsubaki-dono came to her, and told her our family had angered the spirits.  They had sent the sickness, but could be tricked. If they took me outside of the village, and Tsubaki-dono pretended to find me, the spirits would never know I had escaped, and Tsubaki-dono would see I came to no harm.  It’s a traditional—some spirits are—they don’t think as we do.”

Kakashi listened, his fingers beginning to hurt where they clenched the top.

“My mother died too soon for the plan.  Tsubaki-dono found me, in—in the house,” she smiled at the headache powder.  “She took me out in the forest, and pretended I was a stranger’s child.  I was already sick, and Tsubaki-dono is not...used to children—” she laughed.  “Of course. But I lived. This will be the fourth time it’s come for me.” She tasted the headache powder again, swallowing back a sob. “I think--I think this is really headache powder.  It’s not medicine.  Everyone is going to die.”

The room was brighter than the lamp could account for, and Kakashi squeezed the wooden top in his hand.  “Don’t give up yet.  Get some sleep, and—in the morning, we’ll see what can be done.”

She took a steadying breath, and nodded.  “An-anything would be appreciated.” The light faded, then brightened, and she glanced around, then laughed softly.  “I frightened Tsuru-hime,” she said softly.  “And she brought you.  Thank you for your help, Tsuru-chan.”

Kakashi dropped at Iruka’s side on the futon, leaning on his elbow to kiss the cold, glossy black hair poking out of the covers.  Iruka wriggled in, smacking a hand around above his head to yank Kakashi closer—by the ear , unfortunately.  He woke further to Kakashi’s snickers, and realized Kakashi was mostly on top of the covers.  “...s’cold,” he mumbled, tugging at Kakashi’s hat.

“Did you drink all that sake?” Kakashi whispered, kissing his ear.  “I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

“ Sake kept me company ,” Iruka sniffed, smacking Kakashi’s shoulder.  “Shoulda gone to the play.  No sex .  Just sake .”

“I have a lot to answer for,” Kakashi nodded, letting himself be tugged in for hot, wet, sake-flavoured kisses.  “Your revenge will be swift and sure.”

“No,” Iruka tugged Kakashi’s hat down over his ears.  “I love you so much even though you cried too much last night to get good sleep—”

“I wasn’t crying,” Kakashi snorted, muffled by Iruka’s fingers flailing around trying to shut him up.  “I couldn’t sleep, you saw me—”

“—and even when we disappoint Yuwa-san by ignoring her play invitation and staying in for loads of sex but you just—”

Kakashi ducked away from his hands, laughing, and parted the neck of Iruka’s nenneko, kissing along his throat as he rambled.

“—I love you when you fall dead asleep on my foot and snore like a big—really big—animal with lots of—” Iruka’s hand waved.  “—tails—love you,” his eyes narrowed until Kakashi lifted his head and nodded solemnly. Iruka sat up on his elbow, pulling Kakashi’s head close, then distractedly looked from his mouth to his eyes and kissed around his face in a circle.  “Told you so many things,” he whispered, “You snored.”

“Sorry,” Kakashi whispered back, following the kisses to press Iruka back into the covers.  He ran his thumb over the place where Iruka’s genjutsu-hidden scar usually showed, then kissed the familiar freckles.

“Wasn’t muttering,” Iruka pushed him away, patting his cheeks.  “Snoring. I don’t hear names.”

“...I was snoring...names?” Kakashi raised his eyebrows, remembering the vague terror before he’d awakened in a cold sweat to the sound of insubstantial footsteps.

“ Just snoring,” Iruka frowned up, worried and drunk.

“Ah.  I had some...dreams, but I’m fine.  I think I met a ghost.”

“Tsuru-hime,” Iruka nodded, stroking Kakashi’s shoulder.

“...crane princess?” Kakashi ran his fingers through Iruka’s hair, tucking it behind his rapidly chilling ear.

“After the bathhouse cranes.  She died here. A...sickness.”

“I ran into your Sute-san,” Kakashi told him.  “She said it’s here again— a sickness, anyway.  She said no one had died yet, but this Koukyuu-sama was supposed to bring medicine, and whatever she brought vanished with her.”

“No, no, no,” Iruka shook his head.   “Long time ago,” he flung an illustrative arm out, then leaned up to place a soft kiss on Kakashi’s lips, and whisper. “Everybody died but she stayed.  She’s a lamp now.”

“A...yes,” Kakashi said.  “She gave me her spinning top.”

“We can give it back,” Iruka slurred.  “Visit her.  They can visit her.  We can’t visit our dead.”

Kakashi’s throat closed, and he cleared it, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“We can visit them, but they don’t light up,” Iruka corrected.  

“Yeah,” Kakashi agreed, voice rough.  He let his head drop against Iruka’s chest.  

“Sorry I am soooooo drunk,” Iruka told him, hugging his head.  “Soooo drunk. Why did she bring soooo much sake.” He stroked Kakashi’s hair.  “Sake Kakashi. Kakashi Hasake. Kashi. Kashihata—”

Kakashi snickered into his chest.  “...I could probably get drunk kissing you, right now,” he whispered back, shivering as he assessed the empty sake bottles he remembered ordering before he’d apparently dozed off, waiting for his husband to come out of the bath.

“Kashi~take,” Iruka continued thoughtfully.  “Shitake. Shitake mushroom .  I love you, my mushroom, my own.  You’re so...cold.”

“It’s fine,” Kakashi burrowed his face into warm cotton, and the smells of soap, sake, and Iruka’s skin.

“Doubles will get you in bed,” Iruka muttered against Kakashi’s fine hair, and Kakashi abruptly realized the weird poky scrabbling at his head was Iruka trying to form seals.

“No, no, no,” he grabbed Iruka’s hands, kissing them.  “No drunk ninjutsu.”

“No drunk ninjutsu,” Iruka mimicked, pulling his hands away to clasp them over Kakashi’s ears.  They were only slightly warmer than the air, and Kakashi shivered again, harder.

“ Kakashi ,” Iruka hissed, shoving him off their shared futon.  Once Kakashi wasn’t lying on it, the whole side lifted between Iruka’s arm and foot like the yawning maw of an enormous clam so that Iruka could smack his hand out to yank Kakashi inside.  Kakashi grinned, ducking under Iruka’s flailing arm and crawling closer on his elbows. Iruka wrapped both arms around his neck and pulled him close, pressing wet kisses over his face.

The next time Iruka awakened, his face was pressed to the warm cotton of Kakashi’s back, and he kissed it, contemplating the weight behind his eyes, pressing on his brain.  It was so quiet he could hear the water rushing over the hand-high waterfall into their spring, but the light was bright and morning-bluish through the screens. Leaning up to rest his chin on Kakashi’s pile of blankets, he tried to gauge the dark circles under Kakashi’s eyes.  Not as bad as he’d seen, obviously, but as he considered them and the hours of morning available to sleep in, he realized Kakashi’s ears were turning red. 

“Hrm,” Iruka whispered, inchworming up the blankets, pausing to groan as the motion rocked his internal organs, and kissed behind Kakashi’s ear.  “I must have gotten lost in thought.  My brain is full of gravel this morning, for some reason.  And your face is distracting.”

“It happens,” Kakashi sighed, rolling over to rub his face against Iruka’s chest and squirming deeper into the soft covers.  “It’s distracting for me too, knowing all the beauty contests I’ve won.”

“Sleeping beauty god/Hair squashed to his head, breath rank/Lacks humility,” Iruka intoned, and Kakashi snorted.

“International poet sensation,” he muttered into Iruka’s chest, then lifted his head.  “What will you do with all the money you make on this poetry tour?”

“Worship you, obviously.”

“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Kakashi sniffed the air, and grimaced.

“I would never joke about your beauty,” Iruka kissed his ear, then his forehead, watching him turn redder.  “It gets us a discount on ramen.”

“...sorry I fell asleep last night and left you all alone with way too much sake,” Kakashi let his head tip back, closing his eyes as he appreciated Iruka’s warm mouth against his jaw.  “I talked to Sute-san, do you remember me telling you?”

“Noooo,” Iruka cocked his head, biting gently at Kakashi’s stubble.  “Was I awake?”

“I thought I was dreaming, and I followed an invisible child’s footsteps and found Sute-san crying, searching Koukyuu-sama’s room—” at Iruka’s raised eyebrows, he huffed a laugh.  “I sleep better on missions, running around.”

“Oh,” Iruka paused, wrinkling his nose thoughtfully.  “She said...something about...medicine?”

“She said ‘Koukyuu-sama’ was bringing it,” Kakashi nodded.  “It’s missing too. Don’t kiss me until you rinse your mouth out.”

“It’s penance,” Iruka gave his ear a slow, gentle bite.  “I have to taste it, so do you. If they don’t find it, we could get the hokage.”

“I told Sute-san we’d help, but the dogs couldn’t find anything in her room.”

“Have they looked for ‘Koukyuu-sama’ herself?”

Kakashi shook his head.  “It’s been snowing for days.  They’d have to be within feet of her to smell anything, assuming she’s not frozen solid.”

Iruka nodded, combing his hands through Kakashi’s hair, fluffier and warmer-feeling than his own.  “We’ll figure it out.”

“The little ghost girl led me to her,” Kakashi whispered against his shoulder, sighing.

“...maybe she has more to say.”  Iruka kissed his head.

They laid there until the sunlight through the screens got a little warmer, and a knock came at the door, bringing with it a stranger in understated white-speckled indigo bearing trays of  breakfast.

“The guard,” Iruka asked her.  “Night before last, when we awoke to fireworks.  Do you know where I could find her?”

“Oh,” she blinked.  “Tsubaki-dono will...would you like me to send a message?”

“That would be helpful,” Kakashi crinkled an eye-smile at her, waving with the tips of his fingers from the bed.  

She smoothed her hair, tucking a loose end into her bun.  It promptly swung down again to rest against her ear. “Yes!  Certainly.  Ah.”

“How’s Yuwa-san this morning?” he grinned.

“Ah?” She blinked again, blushing.  “Oh! I…” she frowned, considering the wall as she stirred up the flames in the irori.  “I have not seen her.  Would you like me to find her as well?”

“No, no,” Iruka sat dangerously close to the small fire, sighing at the warmth in his toes, and thanked her as she pulled her gaze off Kakashi’s exposed shoulders and left.  Iruka sipped at the broth, grimacing as he nudged the grilled fish towards Kakashi, who was very slowly edging out from under the covers.

“You’re sore from yesterday?”  Iruka blinked innocently over, and Kakashi raised an eyebrow.  “How odd , since you fell asleep just as I was getting romantic—before any actual exertion!  I would think a ninja of your caliber would get more exercise, but if you need me to show you some stretches…”

Kakashi snorted.  

“Maybe you need to have some more instruction— wait,” Iruka sat up abruptly.  “How old were you—they pulled you out of the academy at age five , did you ever get sex ed?”

“Ah,” Kakashi’s face pinked as he grimaced down at his hands.  “Well…?”

“Oh no,” Iruka snickered, wide-eyed.  “Do I need to—”

“I found the Icha-Icha books,” Kakashi stared back.  “They’re not...exactly…”

“Oh no,” Iruka breathed.  “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Kakashi protested.  “There’s this...scene, a woman kneeling before a man, he’s standing, his cock’s in her mouth, right—”

“...yes?”

“And then he starts fingering her,” Kakashi said, sounding bewildered. “—and I was rereading the passage thinking ‘Is he...is he bent over her back?  How is her head still getting in there, with him bent so far at the waist? Why don’t they lie down?’”

Iruka fell back against his pillow, laughing silently as he clutched at his head.  

“And then he starts playing with her chest somehow,” Kakashi posed awkwardly, laughing, “—but he’d have to reach under and around—”

“Oh no,” Iruka cackled.  

“I mean, I’m sure Jiraiya-sensei just got distracted and forgot—”

“What did you do.”  Iruka rolled onto his side, eyebrows raised.

Kakashi scoffed.  “I didn’t!”  

“You are much too red for me to believe that—”

“I did nothing, Gai caught me reading it—”

“Yes!”  Iruka wheezed.  “How have I not heard this story—”

“Because I was taught a rigorous sex ed by Mighty Gai —he chased me around, shouting and hitting me with rolled-up diagrams— ”

“Naruto complains about my sex ed class—” Iruka wiped his eyes.  “He has no idea how much he has to be grateful for— ”  He grinned over at Kakashi’s scowl and lost himself to giggles again.  “I should tell Tsunade-sama—hey, all these elite ninja that got hauled out of the academy as toddlers, they haven’t gotten the Talk.  They’re probably pulling condoms over their heads and suffocating, and it’s getting reported as enemy strikes—”

“That happens frequently,” Kakashi confirmed, solemn, and Iruka barked a laugh, crawling over to slump against him, hugging his waist.

Iruka had a thought.  “I’m sure Gai would help me do a class.”

“He would,” Kakashi said dourly, mouth twitching as he ran his fingers through Iruka’s hair.  “He’s probably still got the diagrams.”

“Something to commiserate with Team Gai over,” Iruka said, patting his hand.  “Until you’ve fielded entire classrooms asking how to use ninjutsu for sex, though, you’ll get no sympathy from me.  They’re inventive.”

“That’s horrifying,” Kakashi’s eyes widened.  

“You cannot believe the questions I’ve been asked,” Iruka shuddered.  “Mostly ‘Would it work if—’ and all I can do is try not to snort, or let my eye twitch, and then I have to calmly say ‘I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but make sure you talk about it with your partner first’,” he groaned into Kakashi’s thigh.  “Or, occasionally, ‘Maybe that should stay...out of the bedroom?’ in the case of, oh, Chouji’s rolling attacks!?”

“We should talk about something else,” Kakashi was staring into the distance with the eyes of one witnessing horrors.  “While I can still look your students in the face and not feel like the dirtiest of old men.”

Chapter Text

They passed Tsuru-hime's room as they left, but the gentle glow of the little girl's soul was not to be seen. Kakashi bowed deeply anyway, placing the wooden top on the tray.  "I'll talk to her later," he shrugged, and Iruka nodded, listening for little footsteps.  When they braved the reception area, the woman who had brought their breakfast nodded to them, waving at someone sprawled by the large central irori.  

Iruka reflected, padding over, that he’d assumed the guard’s slight disarray was due to her frantic dash with good news, but she was now wearing even less uniform—only a wrap around her chest, loose pants, and boots—and smelled nearly as strongly of liquor as Iruka had around midnight.  “What,” she rolled onto her back to frown up at them.

“I was wondering about the last time you talked to ‘Koukyuu-sama’,” he crouched down, realizing the patterns, subtle on her dark skin, were very like the indigo designs the town produced.  

“Nice ink,” Kakashi offered, and she saluted him, grinning.

Iruka introduced them, but pressed on.  “Did she say where she was headed? ‘Koukyuu-sama’?”  He grimaced, realizing he’d picked up the faintly sarcastic over-respectful tone everyone else used.

“Why would you look for somebody like her,” the guard sighed, eyes wide at the ceiling, then rolled her head to frown at him.  “Back to town, I thought.  I know she was looking forward to the ticket money from the theater, but she was drunk.” She shrugged.  “Maybe she froze.”

“She...takes the ticket money?” Kakashi raised his visible eyebrow.  “How much of it?”

“She taxes each business separately,” the guard shrugged.  “We aren’t supposed to ask how much.”

“That’s terribly convenient for her,” Kakashi commented, cocking his head.

“She’s kinda got us pinned,” the guard admitted, shrugging, then yelled “Where’s Yuwa-san?”

“She’s been gone all morning,” their starry blue garbed breakfast-deliverer called back.

“Can my cat come in, then?” the guard rolled onto her elbow to grin winningly.

“Absolutely not.”

“Awww.”  She flopped back on her back, sighing up at them.  “She’ll be cold outside.”

“Is Sute-san here?” Kakashi remembered to ask, glancing from the guard to the inn employee, and both shook their heads.  The guard shrugged.  

“We could go ask around at the theater,” Iruka suggested, and Kakashi hrrrrrmed.  “For Koukyuu-sama.”

“It occurs to me that the lovely Yuwa-san has read all the Icha-Icha books,” Kakashi confided, leaning to whisper in Iruka's ear.

“Has she really,” Iruka waited, mouth quirking.

“Yes.  She’s really a lovely person.  And people are going missing in this town.”

“Well, a person has,” the guard put in.  “It’s not like they’re all walking into the sea.”

"Still," Kakashi sighed dramatically.  "She's very small, Yuwa-san.  Someone might just roll her away."

“Would you like to go check on Yuwa-san and Aoi-san?” Iruka asked, thumping Kakashi’s shoulder with his own.

“Just in case,” Kakashi said, the smile-lines around his eyes deepening, and Iruka took his arm, leaning in to kiss the scarf over his mouth.

They walked into an enormous white cat with black splotches, turning irritably in the snow under the eaves, ears flat against the dripping icicles.  Iruka’s face bounced off its side, smacking him back into Kakashi’s chest, and the cat yowled mournfully, striking them temporarily deaf.  “Riding a cat,” Iruka blinked.  

“The cats are Tsubaki’s friends,” the guard leaned out, grinning.  “So they’re my friends. I bring fish, Tora!”

The cat headbutted her back through the doorway.  

After listening to the muffled shouting for a moment, Kakashi shrugged.  “The carnage sounds jovial.”

Iruka nodded, taking his arm again.

The walk through town to Aoi-san’s indigo workshop was much shorter than the snowy trek to Kagiya’s firework compound, though the snow kept blowing up under their umbrellas, and Kakashi kept ducking under the awnings of random stalls.  

Iruka, laden with grilled mochi, wandered over to see what his cackling was about. He bent nearly in half to duck into the tiny shop, leaning to bump Kakashi’s shoulder.  “Oh, look,” he wrinkled his nose, holding a mochi skewer out for Kakashi to bite off, and then pointing it at one of the pinned-up prints.  “It’s Jiraiya-sensei, wrapped in more frog tongue than I wanted to see, and yet much too much of Jiraiya-sensei is still showing.”

Kakashi looked up from the pile of special editions he was stacking.  “Oh.  Yes.  Hrm.  Did you want it?”

Iruka paused his chewing to cough, and Kakashi waited politely.  “No.  No, I don’t—we could get it for Naruto.”

Kakashi snorted.  

“I’m definitely telling him how much I regret not buying it for him, at length,” Iruka said, chomping thoughtfully at his mochi.  “I’d say we could bring it back for the Hokage, but I’m sure the sensei himself has sent her a copy.  Probably with hearts, and ‘Want to see more?’ written with a winky-face.”

“I’m going to keep looking at this Icha Icha art book, thank you for those mental images,” Kakashi shuddered, red-faced.  

After shopping around for a while longer while Kakashi stood entranced, Iruka waved to the merchant, pointing at the art book Kakashi was drooling over.  “I’d like that, these,” he waved to the armload Kakashi had assembled, “—and the set of kunoichi prints. Can you have someone deliver them to the bathhouse?”  He leaned his head back to thump gently at Kakashi’s. “Should I get Naruto this action figure of the Gutsy Shinobi?”

Kakashi looked suspicious.  “No, and why are you buying lady pinups?”

“Says the man buying Icha-Icha illustrations—”

“They are art—”

Iruka paid, setting his shoulders before they ducked back out into the drifting snowflakes.  “They aren’t pinups.  They’re quite professional-looking.  I’ll hang them in the classroom and assign reports. I believe Hokage-sama is in there—”  

Kakashi leaned in to kiss him.  

“Mmm,” Iruka grinned into the kisses.  “I’m glad you’re so enthused about education.  On second thought, we could always head back to our room—” he trailed off, watching the heavily built people leaning around the door of the mochi stall.  One of them was the gentleman covered in dragons he’d seen the night before, and at Kagiya’s. “Or not. I’m starting to feel a bit followed,” he flicked his gaze towards the man, and Kakashi’s followed.  

“He’s like a buoy, really,” Kakashi whispered.  “Bouncing along behind us.”

“Shush,” Iruka kept his eyes forward.  “You can’t see him when he has his back to us, what are you, some kind of ninja?”

“If he starts scuttling around in a box with eyeholes, I am going to lose it,” Kakashi bit his lips together.  

“I can smell indigo—ah, there,” Iruka pointed to the intricately patterned blue and white banners ahead, overhung by elaborate eaves.  “Aoi-san’s.  Behind that huge wall? It looks like somewhere a lord would live.”

“It’s nice, that they have such well-maintained old buildings,”  Kakashi shielded his eyes from the sun, counting the visible roofs in the complex, some ornately carved and shingled, some thatched.  “What do you think that is, five hundred years old?  That’s why they pay us all their rice, I guess.”

“‘Hidden villages:  We draw enemy fire, and eat all your rice’,” Iruka said, laughing dryly.  “Maybe Tsunade-sama should send pamphlets with the tax collectors.”

Kakashi huffed a laugh.  “She’d make it sound threatening.  ‘Give up your rice, unless you don’t want to keep your nice towns when war comes.  Unless your favourite kind of shrine is on fire .’  People reading it would hear her cracking her knuckles, somehow.”  

Iruka cocked his head, then nodded, shrugging.

The building they faced as they came in had the grandest roof, with sculpted gods, curved tiles of oxidized copper, and a thick woven rope hanging in the doorway.  “Oh, that’s the shrine,” Iruka swiveled on one foot and pointed to their right. “More banners, there.” Nearly as grand as the shrine, and filled with everything from umbrellas to sandals, the shop was separated into the speckled tie-dye patterns on the left, the elaborate stenciled patterns on the right, and in the center, the yukata with nature scenes that Yuwa wore, painted with layers of dye.  Through a door in the back, they could see looms thumping away.

“Welcome!” the shop attendant yelled, her voice deep and strident, and Iruka smiled back, wandering over to look for loud patterns.  Kakashi was still by the door, his back to the shop, but he turned to address the shop assistant. “Is it possible to get a tour of the rest of the complex?”

Iruka raised his eyebrows, but followed along when the shop assistant waved them over, ringing a bell.  “I don’t walk much, anymore,” she grinned at them, tucking her grey hair into place with hands stained deep blue to the elbow.  Moments later, a tall, comely person in disheveled layers of extravagantly dyed kimono stumbled in, elaborately pinned thigh-length hair jingling with bells as it came undone, and smelling strongly of sake.  The shop lady sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. She grabbed the newcomer by a shoulder, yanked out several porcelain hair pins to release the rest of the hair waterfall, and pulled a handkerchief from somewhere to lick and begin scrubbing at layers of smeared once-dramatic makeup.  Iruka turned away, covering a smile, as the new person, much younger, tried to bat away the attack. “You should have washed this off last night,” the shop lady clucked. “Now you need a shave.”

“You’re—Yuwa-san—Yuwa-san sent you?” whispered the newcomer.  It was difficult to speak, obviously, while dodging the fiercely-wielded handkerchief, and the skin being exposed was turning brilliant red.  “She—you came for—a romantic hot springs—”

“You must be Aoi-san,” Kakashi’s gaze flicked over all the untidiness, eyes crinkling with delight.  “Did you have a nice night?”

“Good heavens,” the shop lady rolled her eyes as Aoi-san wailed something unintelligible into blue-dyed hands.  

“Hopefully that’s a yes,” Iruka grabbed Kakashi’s elbow, hauling him over to look at yukata until Aoi joined them, face clean and pink, hair in a tidy bun, and form firmly tethered back into clothes.  

“You wanted to see the workshop?”  Aoi’s voice was a bit whispery.

“What’s that way?” Kakashi pointed out a side door to a little stone path, and Aoi blinked over.  

“Oh!  Through there?” Aoi-san’s extended blue hand looked like a demon’s in a painting of hell, and Iruka covered a snort.  The building at the end of the path was open, little more than a square of waist-high fencing with a thatched roof. “Those are our indigo vats.  Once it’s dried, it has to sit in lye and lime, and stay moist and warm—there are fires and vents underneath, in winter. There are seventy-two vats, and thirty shades of indigo,” Aoi-san explained, practised, as they walked the narrow path towards it.  

What they could see of the clay floor was covered in what looked like the wooden lids to pickle fermenting jars, except wide as a man’s arm was long, and ceramic lids to the vents in the floor.

Kakashi stepped inside, glancing back to meet Iruka’s eyes and jerk his head subtly at Aoi-san.  

Iruka paused in the doorway, eyes narrowing as he glanced at Aoi-san and back, and Kakashi raised his eyebrows, widening his eyes, and over-emphasized:  “This seems as good a place as any to have that private talk.”  Aoi-san’s tall sandals stumbled to a stop on the boardwalk behind Iruka.

“Oh, that talk,” Iruka composed his face before turning to Aoi-san, who was glancing between them, eyes wide.  “Would you give us a moment?”

“Perhaps in the courtyard?” Aoi-san suggested, blinking at him.

Kakashi’s frown tightened, and he knelt to touch something on the ground, rubbing his fingers together thoughtfully before crouching along the ground towards the plank-lid covered indigo vats dug into the floor.  

“We’ll only be a moment,” Iruka said, evading Aoi’s outstretched arm, walking to the doorway, and listening to Aoi’s sandals clopping in an uneven circle behind him.  “I can’t believe you’d buy that right in front of me,” he said to Kakashi, intending his voice to carry.  

The sandals stopped, and Iruka swallowed back a laugh.  “How am I supposed to feel,” he asked, melodramatically, “—with you adding to our porn collection on our honeymoon?  How am I supposed to compete? Are you going to whack off to Jiraiya-sensei tonight?  While I pine , from the corner.”  

Aoi-san gasped, and the sandals retreated a few steps.  Iruka felt a twinge of guilt, and a nearly irresistible urge to laugh.

Kakashi blinked at him, eyes crinkled with amusement.  “Calm down , Iruka,” he paused for a moment, losing his composure at Iruka’s immediate and actual annoyance.  “You just bought a packet of kunoichi prints, I saw them—and Jiraiya’s just—” his voice was strained with laughter, “—a pretty face, Iruka, I’m so tired of these accusations—”

Iruka squawked, clapping his hand over his mouth to cover the noise.   “Jiraiya-sensei is just a pretty face—”

Kakashi turned to clasp a hand to his heart, his eye smiling as he tried not to laugh.  “That’s all,” he muffled a snort, “—and same with Gai, Iruka, I swear, that hot spring trip was nothing to me—” he turned back to touch something on the floor, and Iruka stopped to wipe his eyes, take a deep breath, and put his hands on his hips.

“That’s what you say about all the men, Kakashi—”

He knew Kakashi well enough to interpret his stare and the movement of his mask as him mouthing “ All the men?” back.  Kakashi crouched as he followed whatever traces he’d seen between the vats, trying to ignore Iruka waxing melodramatic.

“‘Oh, Iruka, you are my leaping dolphin lover,’ you always tell me, ‘—oh Iruka, they mean nothing to me—they mean enough that you bought a picture of him naked , curled in the tongue of his frog,’” Iruka felt his nose scrunching, and shook his head with a grimace.

“I imagine him so moist and slippery,” Kakashi called over his shoulder.  “I can’t help where my heart adores.”  He waved his arms, edging around the wooden lids.  

Iruka swallowed down an audible gag, but his shoulders relaxed as Aoi-san’s sandals retreated to the door of the shop.  “I try and I try to be patient,” he called to his husband, “—knowing a legendary spirit beast sat on your head as a child—”

Kakashi almost lost his balance laughing, leaning on his fist against the floor, before carefully lifting a lid aside.  “Maybe we should end this, Iruka—Gai makes me feel loved, Iruka—”  

Iruka smacked his hand into his face.  “Is that what you really want, Kakashi?  To feel thoroughly loved by Mighty Gai?!  Because I hear he has diagrams I can consult—”

Kakashi peered into the blue liquid depths.  “He doesn’t mind that I’m disfigured ,” he called back, “—or when I nearly knock his teeth out because of my depth perception—”

“He really doesn’t, does he,” Iruka rolled his eyes, grinning.  

“Or startle awake and nearly murder him in my sleep—”

“Wait, he sleeps?” Iruka asked, realizing it hadn’t occured to him.  “Like a normal person?  In a bed?  And why were you sleeping with—”

“And—”   Kakashi bit his lip, prodding at something in the vat with the blunt end of a kunai.  “—he gives better piggyback rides than you do—”

Iruka’s mouth dropped open, aghast, before his eyes narrowed at the sound of new footsteps, and he renewed his dedication to their impromptu play.  “Well how could I measure up to that?” he yelled back.  “You’ve never told me my piggyback rides were sub-par —you never tell me anything, you’re always in a mask —if I want to know anything about you I have to go eavesdrop in the graveyard—”

Kakashi’s head jerked up, frowning, and Iruka quirked his mouth, blowing him a kiss.  Kakashi’s shoulders relaxed.  “Ah. Well—you don’t appreciate me!” He yelled back, waggling his eyebrow. “Someone of your level could never understand how foxy my mask is!” he beamed over, and Iruka groaned.  

“Well—” Iruka stopped short as Kakashi reached in and heaved the upper torso of a blue person out of the indigo vat with two fingers holding a fold of her kimono.  Her head hung limply as he lowered her to the floor, dye running from her mouth and ears and pooling under her hand.  Luckily, in the room of dye vats, the puddle spreading under her was invisible on a floor already saturated to a charcoal black.  Kakashi looked up and waved him onward.

“Not as foxy as—ramen,” Iruka tried, shrugging wildly, and leaning to get a better look at her glistening head wound.  “Noodle soup is hotter than you!”

Kakashi, who had been examining her hands, had to muffle his snort against his arm, shoulders shaking.  “I knew you lusted for ramen,” his voice was unsteady.  “How could my foxy face ever measure up to something that’s actually boiling temperature?”

Iruka heard the sandals clopping towards them again, halting so close behind him he could smell the sake on Aoi’s breath.  His stomach twinged in memory of the night before. “And the dogs, Kakashi!  My apartment always smells of dogs! Muddy pawprints, hair on my toothbrush, smoking up the place—”

Kakashi blinked up from his gentle search of her layered obi and kimono.  “Smoke?” he asked innocently, glancing at the sandals behind Iruka turning a nervous circle.

“Oh,” Iruka remembered, abruptly, that non-ninja dogs usually did not smoke pipes.  “One of them sat on the stove.”

“You didn’t...put him out?!”  Kakashi bit his lips, taking a steadying breath through his nose, and continued his search with tears of laughter in his eyes.

“My jealous love makes me brutal,” Iruka’s voice quavered as he tried to get his grin under control.  He took a breath of relief, as the sandals clopped indecisively a few times, then strode back towards the shop again, before they were met by another set.  From the uneven gait, he guessed it was the shop lady now. “We should—”

“Well I thought you were lonely when I wasn’t there, since every time I return from a missio—”

“A work trip—” Iruka corrected, waving for his attention, and pointing to the body and then the vat, with quick ushering motions.

Kakashi stared, then shrugged, shoving the corpse back in, pulling the vat lid back over, and tucking his stained fingers into his sleeves before calling  “Every time I return from a work trip you have yet another child from a different parent—”

Aoi-san squeaked, and Iruka stifled himself, eyes shining above his hands over his mouth, before turning to the rapidly-approaching sandals to see poor Aoi-san, who looked about to descend into a state of shock.  

Kakashi’s voice came over his shoulder.  “I apologize, Aoi-san,” he said.  “We should never have aired our arguments here—”

Aoi-san touched his shoulder, glancing between their shiny eyes and shaking shoulders with wide eyes.  “Yu-Yuwa-san said to—to show you all the—warmest clothing—it’s—would you—” Aoi-san’s hands were shaking, and Iruka walked around to grab Kakashi’s sleeve, yanking him over.

“I apologize, Aoi-san!  We were just having a...difference of opinion."

Aoi-san swallowed hard, gaze flicking between them, then nodded.

"We’d love to see them.  I'm so sorry.” Iruka hooked elbows with Kakashi, letting Aoi-san get a bit ahead as they followed the clopping of sandals back to the main shop.

“What was that?” Kakashi bent to whisper.  “‘Put that corpse down this instant, Kakashi, you know it doesn’t belong to you’?”

“I hope it doesn’t,” Iruka snorted, and Aoi-san flinched, glancing back at them.  “I think poor Aoi-san is going to cry.  Who on earth?  Do you think it was Koukyuu-sama?  I’ll shop for a while, you can sneak back there when no one is listening, instead of having to keep this up—”

“Why shouldn’t we keep this up?  How else would I have found out you want to set my dogs on fire,” Kakashi whispered back, wiping his smiling eyes.  “She didn't have anything much on her—she was wearing silk, though, she’s definitely from the government.  But we should probably show her to someone , though, it’s no good if we find ‘Koukyuu-sama’s murderer’ while Koukyuu-sama herself has been at the bathhouse this whole time, holding court.  Perhaps someone else has gone missing.”

Iruka tried to keep his eyes front, clearing his throat.  “Probably not.  Should we find the guard? With Toro the cat—” he smacked his hand over his mouth and his urge to blurt out the sudden image he had of Toro the cat dragging off the corpse, leaving a wide blue stripe of dye like a paintbrush stroke.

“‘Put that thing back where it came from, you don’t know where it’s been,’” Kakashi whispered in his ear, and Iruka made a horrible wet choking noise, muffling his snickers into his elbow.  

“I can’t believe Aoi-san beaned her on the head and stuck her in there, we were uninterrupted too long,” Iruka whispered back.  “Who would be too shy to interrupt someone finding the body you’d hidden?”

“Good,” Kakashi grimaced.  “I’d hate to have to tell Yuwa-san her Aoi-san is using corpses for dying purposes,” he whispered slyly, then grunted as Iruka’s elbow connected hard with his ribs.  

“I’d hate to find anyone we like in one of those.  Who do you think..?” he frowned back towards the vats.  “Have we met a single person in this town who didn’t want to kill her?”  Their impetus shifted as soon as they were in the door to the shop, Kakashi dragging him over to try on everything Aoi-san held up.  

Under the short curtain across the door, Iruka could see the calves of their dragon-tattooed follower, and he squeezed Kakashi’s shoulder.  “...I’m going to try and get tickets to tonight’s play,” he ducked his head to catch Kakashi’s eye, flicking his gaze toward the man obtrusively waiting outside, and Kakashi’s mouth quirked.  

“I’ll surprise you later, then.”

Iruka leaned to kiss his cheek before trotting down the worn stone steps, and meandered off, slowly enough for his cunning shadow to refold the smaller-than-hand-sized fortune scroll he’d chosen to hide behind and catch up.  Iruka pretended to fix his sock, considering where they could best speak alone, and kept an ear on the slushy crunch of snow twenty feet behind him.

The vertigo as he dropped several feet into warm, earthy darkness was entirely a surprise.

Iruka awoke slowly, at first, before his brain registered his upright body and the smell like a recently-dug grave, and his pulse began pumping wakeful blood into his brain.  

His bonds felt like hands.  Too slim, and too long , and strangely woody, but that was a thumb against his left wrist, and fingers wrapped securely around his forearms.  He couldn’t feel his ankles—he’d been sitting on them for however long it took to wake up—but as he leaned his weight from side to side, trying to direct blood to them, the floor creaked.  Wood.  He was blindfolded, somewhere warm, with a plank floor.   Indoors, at least, he dismissed the problem of the bonds until he had more information, extending his fingers in readiness to form seals for a replacement jutsu.  The thumb that had been curled around his wrist stroked down and slid between his hands, separating them, and chill air hit him as he heard a screen slide open.  

“You’re awake,” said the soft voice of the man who’d been following him.

“You were a distraction,” Iruka sighed.  “What happened to Kakashi?”

“Nothing, as long—”

Iruka snorted.  “Oh, you will be surprised, if you surprise him.”  The smell of varnish nearly overpowered a lot of dust, and paint, and incense.

“You will tell us what we want to know.”

Iruka sighed, rolling his eyes behind the blindfold, and resisted the urge to say things like please respond in complete sentences.  “You might consider telling me what it is that you want to know.”

“You’re brave, for a travel writer.  If you aren’t frightened for yourself, consider your companion—”

Oh, this should be good, Iruka bit down a snort.  “You wouldn’t hurt him!  Please do not.  Do that.”  If he’d been unbound, he’d have smacked his own face.   Wow, I am not an actor—

“Not if we don’t have to!” his captor growled, louder now that things were going as anticipated.

Apparently, Iruka thought, dismayed, I am actor enough.  “Oh no,” he grimaced.  “I still don’t know what you want me to say.  Oh my.”

“The truth!” 

“Truth about what,” Iruka gritted his teeth, yanking at his bonds.  They tightened, briefly, but enough for him to feel his bones grind together.  He called upon the patience of years spent explaining ninjutsu to gradeschoolers.  “You’re going to just have to ask a question.  Try starting with a question word, like ‘why,’ or ‘how’.”  

“How about …‘who,’” his interrogator hissed, prodding his shoulder.  

Iruka fervently wished he was back in the hot spring, possibly drowning.  “That is a question word, yes.”  He wondered whether the hands holding him could detect lies —surely it would be easier to use a rope, why hold me? 

“Who sent you?”

“My boss,” Iruka answered flatly.   Maybe I am thinking too hard about this.

“Aha!  And what were you sent to do?”

Aha, Iruka thought, resigned.  Something touched his hand—it felt like a flower, the soft petals brushing against the side of his finger.   It’s winter, he thought, illogically, as though a plant with hands couldn’t bloom however it wished to.  “I was sent to do my job, which involved interviewing local tourism workers.”

“And murder,” the man breathed in his ear, and Iruka raised his eyebrows, leaning his head away.  

“Actually, no.  Hot tubbing, ramen, and the fireworks, that was all I needed, really.”

“We won’t release you until you confess!” his interrogator stomped by, the wood under Iruka’s knees bouncing with his tread.  

“I confess I’m very cold, and my feet are asleep,” Iruka set his jaw, hoping Kakashi wouldn’t notice he was gone for a while.  He didn’t expect the idiot questioning him to have been subtle, but the branches wrapping his legs and arms, and the drop from a city street into darkness gave him pause.   It’s possible, given the earth smell, that there’s no trail...above ground.  Surely I can pacify this incompetent before Kakashi panics.

In Aoi-san’s shop, Kakashi was selecting a yukata when small feet thumped down the stairs, and Yuwa-san poked her head around the door.  “Oh!” she said, glancing around.  “Ah, where is...Aoi-san?  I should get to work…”

“Aoi-kacho!” the woman behind the counter trumpeted, and Yuwa jumped.  Kakashi heard the thumping of Aoi-san’s sandals, and then came Aoi-san, stumbling through the door to tower over Yuwa-san, who beamed up, and then pulled Aoi-san down for a brief kiss.

“I have to work,” she said, and Aoi-san nodded, sighing.  Aoi-san’s shoulders slumped, and Yuwa-san smiled.  “I will be back soon,” she said softly, her eyes shining, and Aoi-san nodded, smiling hesitantly back.

Yuwa-san stood on the toes of her tall sandals for one more kiss—tipping forward into Aoi-san, who laughed in that distinctive whispery voice, and pushed her back upright.  

“May I walk you back to the inn?” Kakashi offered, watching her teeter towards the door, and imagining her on the uneven snow.  

Yuwa-san blinked at him, then nodded as he offered his arm.  “Thank you, Hatake-san!”

“G-goodbye,” called Aoi-san softly, and Yuwa turned and smiled so wide her cheeks dimpled.  Aoi-san stared mutely, stone-still, and Kakashi shook his head, and offered Yuwa-san his arm, watching her carefully as she tottered down the stairs in a daze.

Halfway down, she bumped into his elbow, then tugged at his sleeve as she stumbled, glancing over her shoulder, and then frowning at the snow.  

“Are you...all right?” he leaned down to ask, and she immediately produced a calm smile.

“Ohhh, the ‘do they love me, do they not,’” Kakashi folded his arms, nodding.  “We figured that out ages ago, thankfully.”

“How so?” she laughed, sidling closer, cocking her head so her ear was angled up at his face.  

“We...know a kid,” Kakashi pretended to scratch his ear, turning away from Yuwa-san’s knowing smile.  “Probably...if Iruka hadn’t known him, and if I didn’t get to know him, we never would have gotten to know each other, not really.  But then his kid goes away, and Iruka starts getting these idiotic letters—”

Yuwa blinked, cocking her head.

“This kid, he kept starting fights,”  Kakashi bounced as he walked, frowning around.  “I was the only one who knew him as well as Iruka, and I’d listen over ramen.  He’d read bits of his letters aloud.”  He snorted.  “He’d reread bits aloud, if I didn’t seem aghast enough.”

She laughed, stumbled, and leaned on his arm.  “...I hate to interrupt,” she mumbled, “—but I need to burn these sandals.”

“I believe Aoi-san would be willing to stand on stairs and lean for you,” Kakashi said cheerfully, and she blushed brilliantly red, but bit her lip in a thoughtful smile. 

Chapter Text

When they reached the inn, creeping around a cart unloading trunks and wine, Yuwa-san kicked off the tall sandals, glaring at them, and returned to the Yuwa-san he’d originally met, the height of his elbow.  

“Yuwa-san!” hissed the woman Kakashi had paid for their room.  

She was talking to a woman in in a glorious silk kimono covered in what looked like the whole illustrated Tale of Genji, an obi covered in phoenixes, and a face with the arrogance to match.  Her gilt jade hair-comb glittered in the light, and Yuwa-san raised her eyebrows, glancing slyly at Kakashi with a slight quirk to her mouth.

He bit back a grin.  “Koukyuu-sama returns?” he asked under his breath, but she shook her head, as they watched more of Tsubaki’s tattooed lackeys unload crates from the cart and sit them around her.

“That’s not Koukyuu-sama,” she whispered back, before bustling over to receive the full force of the woman’s glare.  

Kakashi shook his head, walking away, only to run into Sute-san.  She looked less mousy, he thought, still in her brown kimono with the pine pattern, but brightened by a green obi with bamboo, and a hairstick with plum flowers, displaying the Three Friends of Winter in a quiet show of upstanding virtue against adversity.  Compared to the woman out front, or even Yuwa-san in her cotton painted with cranes and winter at the baths, Sute-san’s dress was muted, but fitting for a young government official--and possibly she wished to look particularly sober and responsible, as the adopted daughter of the local gang boss.

He wondered whether she intentionally dressed down for meetings with the tax collecter Koukyuu-san, to look less prosperous.  

She looked no less harried, though, and flinched back at the sight of him, then wiped her eyes.  “Ha-Hatake-san,” she said hoarsely.  “I must...ask a grisly favor.  You--your husband is not in your room.”

Kakashi raised his eyebrows under his hat, but nodded.  “He’s gone to the theater to ask after the missing Koukyuu-san, and ask about the production tonight—” and draw off our shadows, while I investigated further, he left out, but Sute-san’s eyes widened anyway, and she reached out and caught his arm.  “He--oh, no,” she whispered.  “We--we must go after him,” she said, dragging him along the hall after her.

“Why?” Kakashi asked, beginning to put together the puzzle pieces of the disappearance of a corrupt tax collector, and young, harried official terrified of plague who needed a grisly favor, but uncertain how the theater could be upsetting.

“Tsubaki-dono is not simply my mother,” she hissed, dragging him past the woman in the showy kimono, now sitting on her own gilt-worked trunk, surrounded by trays of food, and shouting orders.

As they left the inn, treading carefully around the mounded snow and deep, platter-sized paw-prints of Toro the cat, Sute dabbed at her eyes with a kerchief.  “Tsubaki-dono…” she began, and trailed off.

“She is a gang boss,” said Kakashi.  

“Yes,” Sute-san nodded.  “Yes, she is, she began by smuggling the rice we needed to pay the tax.  It--it doesn’t grow here, you understand.  We are--we are entertainers, merchants, some--some fishermen--the land is not good for farming.”

“I really don’t understand the system at all,” Kakashi admitted.  “How are you supposed to pay, then?”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Sute-san laughed humorlessly.  “Your villages take the rice, and kill whoever the lord asks that you kill.”

Kakashi nodded, biting his lips.

“...Koukyuu-san was appointed to our town several years ago,” Sute-san said softly, her eyes reddening.  “She had no...patience for our methods.  She claimed our rice was stolen-- it was not,” she told Kakashi solemnly.  “It was unreported rice, grown for our town.  We paid the farmers for it.  She required we turn over the rice, and pay money equivalent to its value.  Every year she grows more demanding.  ”

“I’m surprised she didn’t meet any...accidents,” said Kakashi, “--sooner,” and Sute-san laughed a little hysterically.

“Tsubaki-dono protects her,” she sighed.  “She refuses to hire anyone from a hidden village—”

“It does cost money,” Kakashi snorted softly.

“And here she can...threaten us.”  Sute-san pinched the bridge of her nose, sniffling, and pulling out the cloth to dab her eyes again.  

Kakashi nodded, a few of his questions answered as they neared the huge doors of the shrine, and entered.  The theater, an enormous red and gilt building with several layered roofs and multiple wrapping verandas, stood opposite a shrine just as large.  Towering between them, and dwarfing both, was a tsubaki tree in full bloom, its bright red flowers scattered across the snow.  

“Isn’t she beautiful,” said Sute-san, bowing.  “She has been guardian of this town nearly three hundred years.”

Kakashi bowed, politely, to the tree, and Sute-san cleared her throat.  “You see why...Tsubaki-dono knew the other spirits were angered.  She risked their ire to warn my mother, and save me, though she is no mighty river spirit, only the flowering tree who watches over us.”

“Where is everyone,” Kakashi asked, the hair on the back of his neck rising.

“There’s a story of a spirit who saved a whole town from the sickness, and gave them a tsubaki branch,” Sute-san whispered.  “But it was the great spirit of Mount Fuji, not a tree.  She can’t save us, and she knows it.”

“Why were you afraid when you heard Iruka had come here,” he hissed, grabbing her by the shoulders, and she burst into tears.  

Cold, deprived of his afternoon of ramen and hot springs, and annoyed as a teacher himself at the ineptitude of his interrogation, Iruka sighed.  “Help,” he said flatly.  “Is anyone there?”

They’d finally tied his hands with rope, and placed him in a chair somewhere even colder.  Every creak of the chair echoed out around him, particularly in front, and he wondered if he was somewhere without a tatami grass mat floor to absorb sound--and empty, without the statuary and hangings of the town shrine.   The theater, then, he thought, curious as to why he’d be there.  “Laaaaaa,” he sang, listening to it echo back from a long way away.  “Heeeeeelp,” he tried next, then, a tone higher, “Heeeeelp,” then, too high for his voice, “help!”

He couldn’t help his urge to laugh as all three tones overlapped into a not-very-tuneful chord, though he swallowed it down, turning his attention to untying the rope.  They’d wrapped it between his fingers to prevent him forming seals--a move he was frankly impressed by, considering the general caliber of kidnapper he was dealing with.  The chair didn’t shift with him as he squirmed--it was sturdy, apparently--nor did it scoot or tip as he used his tiptoes to try and hop in place, and he nearly laughed again, imagining himself tied into some enormous throne, center stage.

“What’s all this noise,” came the voice of the man with the dragon tattoo, his footsteps clacking as the wood of his sandals met the floorboards.

“Just warming up for my performance,” Iruka told him, and the footsteps stopped, then ran closer, and fingers tugged at his blindfold.

“How’d you know?” Dragon-tattoo asked, his voice low and suspicious, and Iruka considered turning the whole experience into a lecture, with frequent pauses to ask his students what mistakes his interrogator had made.  

“Lucky guess,” Iruka said, sighing, and felt the man kick his chair.  To Iruka’s delight, it didn’t budge, and the man yelped, thumping around the stage on what sounded like the heavy, unevenness of a single foot.  Iruka bit his lips together, trying not to laugh aloud.  

“Tell us what we want to know,” said his interrogator, the floor creaking unevenly as he limped over, “--or we’ll do worse.”

Than what, Iruka thought, break your foot?  He cleared his throat, blinking back tears of laughter in his blindfold.  “Ask me a question,” he said again, patiently.

“Kagiya-dono told us you’re from Konoha,” the man said, still not a question, but Iruka tensed, still not certain where this was going.  “We know all about you.”

I doubt that, Iruka thought, raising his eyebrows.  “We’re just on our honeymoon.”

“You’re not really travel writers!” his interrogator shouted, and Iruka paused, cocking his head.

“That’s true,” he admitted.

“Ha!” Dragon-tattoo-man cheered, and Iruka couldn’t help asking.

“...I thought you knew that already?”

The idiot was summoning up all his bluster, it sounded like, when Iruka’s skin prickled, his whole attention on a faint, but familiar chittering noise.  “Oh no!” he yelled, as flatly and loudly as he could.  “Will no one help me!  My virtue is at stake!  Gosh!  Dangit!”

“What?!” said his interrogator, but more to the point, the static dance across Iruka’s skin subsided, as his husband put away his chidori.  

“Halp halp,” Iruka called woodenly.  “If only I could see my beloved husband before I die.  He promised he’d protect me, but I have been kidnapped by a moron, so I probably deserve my fate.  Alas.”

“Tell us where you hid the body!” the tattooed man yelled, apparently encouraged by Iruka’s abject surrender.  

“I didn’t hide any bodies,” Iruka said indignantly.  “This week.  Nearly a month now, since I hid a body.”

For a long moment, everything was silent, and Iruka wondered whether Kakashi had buried his face in his hands and left.

“...your husband must have!” said his genius interrogator, and Iruka sighed.  

“No,” he said slowly, so as to be clear.  “We haven’t killed anyone, or hidden anyone.  We’re on our honeymoon.  Why do you think we did?”

“You arrived the day Koukyuu-sama disappeared!” was his reply.

“...hrm,” said Iruka, considering it.  “And?”

“You were hired by someone to kill her!”

“No, you’re wrong there,” Iruka said, sighing.  He squirmed against the ropes, which were starting to torque his fingers a weird way.  “We weren’t hired to come here.”

“A-HA!” shouted the tattooed man, and then, “--wait.  Yes you were!”

It was almost a relief when the smell of earth and flowers surrounded him again, knocking the chair over backwards and rolling it to the side as Iruka bounced in his bonds, and the loud crashing was met with the sound of Kakashi’s chidori once again.  Iruka busied himself yanking at the ropes, lying on his side, and heard someone’s sandals clatter over to him.

The sounds of the chidori and quick movements thumped around the huge room, echoing confusingly.

“Oh no, oh no,” came the voice of Sute-san, sounding like she was in tears.  “Tsubaki-dono,” she whispered hoarsely, then cleared her throat, yanking at the ropes on Iruka’s ankles.  “Tsubaki-dono!  I killed Koukyuu-sama! I did”

The noise stopped.

“Ohhh,” Iruka said thoughtfully, accepting the manhandling as another set of fingers began yanking at his blindfold, and he saw Kakashi bending over him, surrounded by red flowers.  Kakashi bent forward to press their foreheads together, taking a shaky breath, and Iruka strained up to kiss his mouth through the scarf.  “I’m fine,” Iruka whispered, blinking up.  “I’m sorry.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Kakashi whispered back, stroking Iruka’s face with shaking hands.  “Last time I failed to protect someone, he gave me an eyeball,” Kakashi said dryly, sniffling in his mask, and Iruka yanked his hands free as Sute-san tugged the rope loose, and hugged him close.  

“I’m not giving up my eyeballs,” he said.  “I need them to prevent kidnappings.  I may need several more, after today.”

Kakashi laughed, sounding like he had something in his throat.  “No more kidnappings.  Not getting kidnapped is one of your most appealing qualities.”

“I’m sorry to break my record,” Iruka whispered back, kissing him again.  

“You killed Koukyuu-sama,” said Tsubaki-dono blankly, stepping closer to clasp her hand against Sute-san’s face.  The flowers and branches retreated back into her, blossoming up her arms and neck in a new pattern.  “You?”

Sute-san nodded, crying.  “She--she--we met her price,” she whispered, and Tsubaki nodded, wiping her daughter’s tears.  “She said--she said she had the medicine,” Sute-san sobbed.  “She said she had it, and I gave her the money-- it was--it was so much money, and she said--she said she’d wait for some children to die.”  She gulped her shoulders shaking, and Tsubaki swore, hugging her tightly.  “She said little children died first, and she’d wait.  She said we’d pay more, if—”

“Good,” growled the tattooed man, “I’m glad you killed her,” and it was the first time Iruka had agreed with him.

“She said after the children started to die, we’d pay anything,” Sute-san said, crying harder.

“You hid her in the indigo wells,” said Kakashi.  “We found her earlier, but no one else has.”

“Hopefully,” Iruka put in, thoughtfully.  “It might give Aoi-san heart failure.”

“She was a government-appointed official,” Tsubaki breathed, tears spilling from her eyes, amber and thick like honey.  They stretched long from her chin, fine strands of sap with a fresh smell like rain.  “They’ll take you away.”

“There’s no medicine anywhere,” Sute-san wailed.  “I’ve been searching and searching—”

“Is anyone sick yet?” Kakashi asked, and she shook her head.  

“Eight people upriver,” she whispered.  “It’ll come soon.”

“Godaime,” Iruka said softly to Kakashi, imagining the look on their Hokage’s face at Sute-san’s story.  “She’ll figure out the cure, raise ‘Koukyuu-sama’ from the dead, and kill her again.”

“I searched her before I hid her in the indigo,” Sute-san said miserably.  “Maybe I missed something.  I don’t know what could have survived--in the dye—”

“...have you asked whether she asked the innkeeper to store anything?” Iruka asked, and Sute-san shook her head.  

“I couldn’t say I knew she was dead,” she whispered.

“Let’s search the inn again,” said Kakashi.  “With the help of my dogs.”

Iruka stopped to crouch in front of the tree spirit-turned-gangster, and she turned to stare blankly at him.  

“Kakashi is well known and respected,” he told her.  “He can write a letter revealing Koukyuu’s corruption, and be believed.”

She stared back at him for a long moment, unblinking, then stood, wiping her eyes.  “What should I do?”

At the inn, Yuwa-san distractedly denied hiding away any packages, and the woman in the elaborate robes shouted for attention, then spotted Sute-san.  

“There you are,” she said, huffing.  “Official.  Where have you been?  Where is Koukyuu-san?”

“I beg your pardon,” Sute-san said hoarsely.  “She--she is—”

“She is missing,” Yuwa-san said crisply.  “She wandered away drunk in the snow last night.  We fear she has frozen.”

Bizarrely, the woman smiled.  “ Ah,” she said.  “We were travelling together.  If you’d be so good as to move her goods into my room?”

“...what is in these trunks?” Kakashi asked softly, his visible eye smiling.

“None of your business!” she huffed again, sitting back on the fanciest, gilt trunk, and folding her hands.

“What have you brought,” Tsubaki asked, reaching down to lift the end of one.  “Something heavy.”

“I was appointed by the Emperor,” she said, folding her arms.  “You stand in the presence of the Lady O-Isha, and if you—”

“You’re a doctor,” Yuwa-san breathed.  “You were meeting her here—”

“And her goods are government property,” O-Isha-sensei said.  “Surrender your payments, and I will see them to their...destinations.”

“We paid her for the medicine,” Sute-san told her, her eyes wide.  “Will you honor that?”

“I suppose it depends what records she kept,” O-Isha-sensei said, inspecting her nails with a slight smile.  “She often didn’t.  I have no idea how much money she had.”

“Do you have the medicine,” Sute-san whispered, falling upon one of the trunks and yanking at the padlock, and O-Isha-sensei kicked her away, standing tall, and narrowing her eyes at them.

“It’s already suspicious that one government official has gone missing,” she said.  “If I am ...inconvenienced, the Emperor’s army won’t ask questions.  They’ll burn this whole town, and salt the earth after.”

Tsubaki-dono began elongating, her fingers spidery, and O-Isha-sensei pointed at her.  “You think trees don’t burn?!” she hissed.  “You think your peasants will thank you, when their town lies in ashes?!”

Sute-san grabbed Tsubaki-dono’s wrist, her whole body shaking in an effort to keep still, as everyone winced away from a suddenly blinding light over the doctor’s head, and an ominous loud rapping, like wood bent to the point of breaking.  

She shrieked.  “What’s happening?  What are you doing?!”, ducking her head as the food on trays around her crashed into and around her, and the smell of smoke came up under her feet, with nothing visible.  “Stop!” she shouted.  “Stop, stop it!”

Yuwa-san stared, and Iruka put an arm around her, as Sute stepped forward.  “Where is the medicine,” she asked levelly.  “We’ve paid for it already.  Where is it?”

The sounds of breaking wood overhead got louder, and even Iruka, out of the whirl of flying objects and the smell of fire, found himself glancing up warily.  “Fire!” O-Isha-sensei wailed.  “Fire, fire, I smell fire!”

The smell intensified, with the sounds of fire--not the crackle of the small open hearth, but the billowing, deafening gusts of a catastrophic, town-ending conflagration.  O-Isha-sensei screamed, and Sute shouted, “Give us the medicine!” 

“There is no medicine!” she shrieked back, and everything fell back to the ground, including O-Isha-sensei, crying.

“No,” Sute whispered, sitting down on the ground, and Iruka squeezed Kakashi’s hand, leaning to whisper that he was going to bring Tsunade-sama back, when O-Isha-sensei spoke again.

“You have to boil the water,” she whispered, through sobs.  “You just--you boil the water.  It won’t spread if you boil the water.”

“...you would have let people die,” Sute-san said, starting forward, and Yuwa-san grabbed her shoulder on one side, Tsubaki-dono on the other.  “She said there were packets of medicine, a powder,” she hissed.   “What did you sell?”

“There is a salt solution,” O-Isha-sensei yelped, holding her hands up over her head.  “For adding to water!  It speeds recovery!”

“Does it?” Sute-san asked flatly, and O-Isha-sensei nodded frantically.  

“We told everyone a little, in all the water, and then boil it.  Don’t use any water that hasn’t been...treated…” she trailed off, staring up at Sute-san’s towering rage.

“And they buy more, and more, to purify the water,” Sute-san whispered.  

“It’s harmless!” O-Isha-sensei squeaked.  “It helps, even, if they’re suffering!”

“Write the perscription down,” Sute-san said, her voice shaking with fury, “--and return the money.”

O-Isha-sensei nodded, wiping her nose.

“...what is in the trunks, then?” Kakashi asked, slicing through the padlock with one quick stroke of his hand and tossing the lid open on bolts of silk, and a bag Tsubaki-dono tipped over to spill gemstones.

“Bribes,” said Sute-san.  “For their cure.”

O-Isha-sensei jerked back with another yelp, batting at the air.  “Something’s touching my face!” she hissed.  “Make it stop!”

“Give back the money,” Sute-san told her.  “And the goods.”

“We can transport them,” Tsubaki-dono said, letting her fingers stretch to pick up one of the trunks, and carry it back to her.

Yuwa-san cleared her throat.  “I got word of her route changes.  I can...verify her account.”

“Merchants,” O-Isha-sensei huffed.  “You certainly know how to take the money of those who work.”  

“Oh, was it work, making that cure--” Sute tried to step forward again, and Yuwa grabbed her with both hands, this time.

“...perhaps we should go get Koukyuu-sama out of Aoi-san’s dye,” Kakashi whispered to Iruka, and Yuwa-san stared up at them, eyes wide in horror.

“They do seem to have this handled,” Iruka agreed, linking arms with him, and Yuwa let go of Sute-san, nearly allowing a murder before Tsubaki-dono restrained her daughter again.

“I’ll come,” she squeaked.  “Poor Aoi-san!”

“Of course,” said Kakashi, smiling down at her, and Iruka offered her his arm.

“I’ll wear different sandals,” she said, crouching by the door.  “This time, I’ll be ready for anything.”

That evening, while Sute-san, Tsubaki-dono, and the guard decided how to handle spreading the news, Yuwa-san lead Aoi-san, Kakashi, and Iruka to the ramen.  It was on a back street, well-lit and loud, and Iruka could smell it as they turned the corner.  He hurried Kakashi and Aoi-san along, and he was nearly through his third bowl before he registered Aoi-san and Yuwa-san whispering and pointing to the sign, and Kakashi advising them.  

“That was delicious,” Aoi-san whispered intently, through steepled fingers.  “We are deciding which to try next.”

“You’ve never had ramen?” Iruka asked, so startled his chopsticks stopped moving.  

“Yuwa-san is very small,” Kakashi pointed out.  “Don’t explode her with ramen.”

“I can take it,” she said, and Aoi-san smiled, leaning their heads together as they discussed the merits of pork vs. miso.

“The problem is solved,” Iruka announced to his Hokage, half his mind planning a picnic with fireworks for Naruto.

“How was your honeymoon?” she asked, crossing her legs on the desk.

“We found a body,” Iruka sighed.

“Lots of litter in that town,” Kakashi said, nodding, and Tsunade cocked her head.  

“That’s true,” she said, crossing her arms.  “That happened to me once.”

The first letter from Shukuba-machi was from Aoi, and lovely.  It thanked them, between ink paintings, then apparently skipped a page and continued mid-sentence with ‘went to the festival at the shrine’ and a lovely picture of Yuwa-san smiling, and then everything was crossed out for nearly a page.

“It’s like a code,” said Kakashi, considering it on the branch outside their apartment.

“Come in,” Iruka hissed.  “You’re letting all the heat out.”  He pulled his husband inside, and grabbed the letter away.  “This is addressed to me!  Don’t open my mail.”

Kakashi, unbothered, read over his shoulder.  “They grilled and ate a neighborhood in Edo—”

“I believe that’s so -ba,” Iruka said, squinting.  “Noodles.  I’m nearly certain.”

“More illustrations,” Iruka said, flipping through pages of Yuwa-san pouring tea, Yuwa-san threatening O-Isha-sensei with a fan, Yuwa-san modelling a yukata, and her foot, off the edge of the page.  “Ah, look.  ‘Yuwa-san has confiscated several pages of this letter.  She is shy.  In apology, I have included these seeds.  I do not know what they are.’”  Iruka snorted a laugh, shaking his head.

The next letter was from Yuwa-san, and Iruka read it aloud to Kakashi with great enthusiasm, only to have it stolen by Mighty Gai.  

“Do I understand this correctly,” he asked, aghast.  “Iruka-sensei, you were captured?  And he saved you?”

“He is my hero,” said Iruka, clasping his hands together, as Kakashi shook his head.  “In my greatest hour of need,” Iruka said, “--at the moment my cunning opponent nearly broke through my defenses with expert interrogation—”

“Don’t,” Kakashi hissed.  “Don’t fan the flames.”

“The flames of my admiration for my rival will never die!” Gai declared, hugging them both to him with both arms.  “Tell me this story of terror and heroism!”

“It’s very long and traumatic,” Iruka sighed, as Kakashi groaned.  “I’ll need several bowls of ramen to get through it.”