Chapter Text
"Help." The word came hissed almost soundlessly in Iruka's ear. He only had time to register three things: male. Close to his height. And fast.
"Wha–?" Iruka managed to squeak out before he was shoved, bodily, down an alley and against a wall.
He was so startled by the warm mouth pressed against his that he didn't immediately register the indignant squawk of appalled shock coming from the top of the alleyway.
"O– oh, I'll just– ah–" he heard someone say, followed immediately by the sound of a body flicker away.
The other person's lips disappeared.
"Thank you," he heard with an emphatic sigh.
Iruka must have squeezed his eyes closed when he'd been shoved into the alley. He opened them now and found himself face-to-face with the last person he ever – ever – would have expected to see in a circumstance even remotely resembling this one.
"Kakashi-san?" he squeaked.
Kakashi's single visible eye curved into a smile over his mask. "Yo."
"You– I– what– 'Yo'?!" Iruka sputtered. "What just– why did you–?!"
"I assure you, I can explain. But, ah... could we take this conversation elsewhere, sensei?" Kakashi drawled smoothly.
Iruka pinched the bridge of his nose. "No! I– But– Ugh! Fine. ...This had better be good," he muttered.
An arm slipped around his waist before he realized it was happening. The world spun as Kakashi body flickered them away.
The world settled again.
"How do you know where I live?" Iruka demanded, turning on Kakashi.
Kakashi raised his eyebrow. "Naruto," he said, as if it explained everything, and really, it did.
Iruka grumbled and turned to unlock his door, glaring over his shoulder at Kakashi once before letting them in.
The door had barely clicked closed when Iruka crossed his arms, glaring, and said, "Explain."
"Maa, I had to stop and help a squirrel in a tree."
Iruka waited expectantly.
No other explanation was forthcoming.
He threw his hands in the air and rolled his eyes. "Seriously?"
"Maa, so there was this cat in a tree."
"I thought you said it was a squirrel."
"Maa, there were both a cat and a squirrel in the tree, but I noticed the cat first. See, I would have left it alone, but it was attacking the squirrel–"
"You said you would explain!" Iruka roared.
Kakashi blinked. "But I am."
Iruka took in a deep breath, ready to yell. But then he remembered all of Naruto's stories about the fruitless attempts Team 7 had at getting Kakashi to be even a little less oblique. He sighed. "Is this going to take long?"
Kakashi just smiled.
Iruka turned and started heating up water for tea. "You might as well come in," he muttered, irate.
"Why, thank you, sensei," Kakashi said graciously, toeing off his sandals and stepping into the apartment.
"You're welcome to take a seat," Iruka said ungraciously, motioning toward his living room couch. It was a tired, old thing, but it was all the more comfortable for it. "I'm just making tea."
"Anything I can help with?"
Iruka bit back several annoyed retorts. "How about you tell me exactly what happened."
"I kissed you," Kakashi said with a blankly puzzled expression. "I would have thought that part was self-evident."
Iruka closed his eyes and held the bridge of his nose, warding off a headache. "I had gathered that, yes," he agreed, deliberately reigning in his temper. "The rest of it."
"Oh, of course!" Kakashi said brightly. "So, the cat was attacking the squirrel, but the squirrel had a stick of dango. I think the cat wanted the dango, maybe."
"Right," Iruka sighed. He gave up. He wasn't going to get an explanation. "And then?" he asked, resigned to his fate.
"Since it was nowhere near the tea house, I figured the dango had probably been taken from Anko, so I rescued the squirrel. I got very scratched up for my troubles, I'll have you know. Squirrels have claws."
"I know," Iruka said. "And?"
"Ah. Right. Well, it turned out the squirrel had, indeed, stolen the dango from Anko, but in revenge–"
"What?"
"–because one of her snake summons had displaced its cache of seeds in the Forest of Death while she had been sparring with Ibiki."
"Oh, my god," Iruka groaned.
"It was awful!" Kakashi agreed.
"No, this story. I just.... Ugh."
"Maa," Kakashi agreed, unperturbed, "so of course I had to help it go find its cache and collect all of the seeds–"
"No."
"Pardon?"
"No. You didn't."
"I did, though. It was that, or try to explain to Anko why she wasn't getting her stick of dango back."
Iruka suppressed an involuntary shudder.
"So there I was, in the Forest of Death, when I noticed a strange kunai."
"From the chūnin exams," Iruka said dismissively.
"I thought so, too, at first," Kakashi acknowledged. "But it had a seal etched into the blade that I'd never seen before."
That piqued Iruka's interest. "Really? What did it look like?"
"I'll draw it for you, later, if you'd like," Kakashi said. "I took a look at it with the Sharingan, so I have it memorized."
"Please," Iruka said.
"It was an S-class seal, so of course, I had to take it to Jiraiya-sama."
"You should have asked me."
"What?"
"You should have asked me," Iruka repeated. "I can't pick apart S-class seals, usually, but I'll often recognize them and know where to start looking."
Kakashi blinked. "I'm sorry, did you just say you can't pick S-class seals apart usually?"
"You pick up some things when you teach all of the future clan heads," Iruka said with a modest shrug. "And I'm just a curious person."
"...Ah."
"So, your story. You found the kunai. And then...?"
"Oh. Right. So then, I picked up the kunai and found myself in Mist."
"What?"
"It was some kind of teleportation seal," Kakashi said, frowning. "But it wasn't activated until I picked it up, which was why I didn't notice anything unusual with the Sharingan."
"Fascinating," Iruka said, his mind already turning over possibilities about the seal.
"I'm glad you think so. I showed up waist-deep in water. I was considerably less excited, particularly since the squirrel took refuge on my head."
Iruka blinked.
He burst out laughing. "The squirrel was still with you?"
"Well, of course," Kakashi said, mildly irritated. "Where else would she have been?"
"Um, in a tree?" Iruka suggested, snickering.
Kakashi shrugged. "She'd been sitting on my shoulder while we looked for her cache. Anyway, once I got dry, I had to head north to find Jiraiya-sama."
"Mmhm."
"Turns out squirrels don't like the cold."
"You don't say."
"She made a nest in my hair," Kakashi said, pouting. "It was terrible!"
Iruka burst out laughing again.
"We managed to track Jiraiya-sama and Naruto through the Land of Earth. Took two and a half weeks. Jiraiya-sama recognized the seal, but he didn't know what it was. He suggested asking in the Land of Lightning. Apparently, they have a seals specialist there who's quite knowledgeable. But I'd been gone for a week and a half by this point, and I didn't particularly relish the idea of being classified as missing-nin, so I came back to Konoha first."
Iruka jumped as the kettle started whistling. "Oh. Would you care for some tea?"
"Please," Kakashi said politely.
He waited as Iruka prepared the tea. Once it had been poured into two of Iruka's less-chipped mugs, they went to the living room. Kakashi eyed the couch suspiciously until Iruka flopped down on it unceremoniously.
Kakashi perched on the end of the seat cushion like it might bite him.
"It's old, not dangerous," Iruka admonished, rolling his eyes. "So you came back to Konoha."
"Thank you. Yes, I returned to Konoha with the intent to give the kunai to Tsunade-sama and wash my hands of the whole ordeal."
"...And then?" Iruka pressed.
"Well, it turns out I can't go more than about a hundred meters away from the kunai now. I just get teleported back to its location."
"So you need to go to the Land of Lightning?" Iruka guessed.
"Oh, no, I already did that," Kakashi said casually. "The seals master there had just passed away of old age. Bad luck. I missed him by about a week, apparently."
"Oh."
"So I came back to Konoha."
"All while carrying that kunai."
"Yes. Well, his apprentice was able to detach me from it. Sort of. At midnight, I get teleported back to it, but until then, I can be as far away as I want from it."
"Alright, Cinderella," Iruka said, rolling his eyes. "So then what?"
"So now Tsunade-sama has been keeping the kunai safe so it can't be stolen by enemy nin to kidnap me, and in the meantime, she's been sending me on day-long missions. Nothing but C- and D-rank missions! So many of them!" Kakashi bemoaned. "I couldn't take it anymore. Especially because I keep having to sneak out of the Hokage Tower at midnight. I need my beauty sleep!"
Iruka rolled his eyes at Kakashi's melodrama. "And yet you survived a genin team."
"I could read while they weeded and tracked cats," Kakashi complained. "And Tsunade-sama won't even give me a day off. So when my cute kohai came to find me for a new mission–"
"What."
"Yamato," Kakashi said, as though that explained everything.
It did not.
"So when my cute kohai came to find me for a new mission, I panicked. I knew he would leave if he saw me kissing someone."
"And thus...."
"And thus, I kissed you," Kakashi proclaimed proudly.
Iruka put his face in his palm. "That is the dumbest story I've ever heard in my life, and I teach pre-genin."
Kakashi shrugged. "I've heard worse."
"You read worse, you mean," Iruka muttered. "Show me this seal, Cinderella."
Kakashi made a discontented sound. "I'm not Cinderella."
"You are until we fix this, and that makes me your fairy godmother," Iruka retorted. He shoved one of the spare notepads and a pen on the table in Kakashi's direction.
Kakashi began drawing the seal.
Iruka started laughing before it was complete. It was, admittedly, an old and obscure Uzushio base seal, but the on/off "switch" was marred by what was clearly (at least to Iruka) a scratch and would take only a quick sanding to repair. Iruka guessed that the reason it had teleported Kakashi to Mist was because the intended coordinates and the timing instructions, too, had been damaged by the scratch.
"What?" Kakashi asked petulantly.
"You're an idiot," Iruka said with the same fondness his voice held when he spoke to his students after they'd made a dumb mistake. "Let's get the kunai, and I'll fix this for you."
Iruka cleaned up the seal and inactivated it within half an hour. He made a pencil rubbing of the work so he could study and recreate it – it seemed useful – and then, with Tsunade's permission, sanded the seal off so it wouldn't end up in the wrong hands.
Tsunade gave them a knowing leer. "You can have two days off, brat," she said to Kakashi.
"My, news travels fast," Kakashi deadpanned.
Iruka rolled his eyes. "I'm going to kill you," he told the Copy-Nin dryly. He bowed to Tsunade, and the two of them left.
"Ah, young love," they heard Tsunade say to Shizune as the door closed behind them.
"I'm going to murder you," Iruka repeated dryly.
"Can you wait until after I kiss you again?" Kakashi asked.
"Wait, what?"
Iruka generously agreed to let Kakashi live for the time being.
They had a lot more kisses to get through first.