Chapter Text
Iruka sighed as he put quizzes and other assignments into his bag, trying to move quickly without smearing the paint splattered across its front. If he could get home fast enough and wipe off the paint before it soaked into the leather too badly, he might still be able to salvage this bag.
He hated having to keep buying new bags.
He'd thought that buying this bag would solve his problems. The leather would resist weapon oil, according to the manufacturer, and it was lined with some kind of fancy fabric that would apparently prevent ink stains from soaking into the leather from leaky pens inside. It had cost him an entire paycheck, but it had been worth it.
He thought.
He hoped.
Nothing in any manufacturer's guarantees mentioned anything about paint, though.
He sighed again and picked the bag up gingerly, trying to keep the paint off his own clothes as he did. Not that it would be a problem in his clothes, though; he had deliberately chosen washable paints to use with his traps class so that he could stop buying new uniforms over and over.
But the washable acrylic paints said nothing about their removability from leather, and....
It was easier to think about paint than about Sasuke, defected, and Naruto and Sakura, in pursuit.
He locked up his classroom and headed out of the Academy into the cool afternoon.
Evenings had been brisk for a while now, but he could tell winter was well and truly on its way into Konoha by the way the chill crept over him despite the late afternoon sun. He shivered and moulded a small amount of chakra through his limbs to keep himself warm.
Only a few steps out of the schoolyard, Iruka caught sight of a familiar shock of silver hair and a single eye curved into a smile. He smiled wearily. He wasn't really in the mood for socialisation, particularly with the man who had been responsible for his three missing ex-students before they'd left Konoha's walls.
"Good afternoon, Kakashi-sensei," Iruka said.
"Good afternoon," Kakashi replied. "I knew the trees were getting colourful lately, but I hadn't realised it was a fashion statement, too."
Iruka's smile turned into a grimace.
"One of the students thought it would be funny to throw one of the paint bombs at me during class today rather than practising traps," he explained, trying not to let his melancholy show through. He had really been quite fond of the bag.
"Oh," Kakashi said, sounding surprised. "I thought it was part of the design."
Iruka blinked, looked down at his back uncomprehendingly, then looked back up at Kakashi, trying to decide whether the jōnin was messing with him.
"You did?" Iruka finally asked a little stupidly.
Kakashi's eye curved into a smile. "It looks deliberate, like a modern art design. It's nice."
"...It is?" Iruka asked blankly.
Kakashi chuckled. If the chuckle had come from anyone else, Iruka might have wondered if it sounded a little pained.
"You ought to apply some sealant to it and keep it," he suggested. "It suits you."
Iruka looked doubtfully down at the bag once more. The bright blue, yellow, and pink splatter "suited" him? No shinobi would be caught dead in a splash of bright colours like those (other than Naruto, who was a class of his own, really).
Wait, was Kakashi making fun of him?
Iruka glanced up at Kakashi, taking in the jōnin.
He wore the standard uniform, with no hint of extraneous colour or fashion, professional from the sandals on his feet all the way up to the hitai-ate that he, unlike many shinobi who concerned themselves with fashion, wore on his forehead. (The slant of the band, Iruka remembered, was to hide the Sharingan – and thus was really part of his no-nonsense uniform.) His only concession to fashion – if it could be called that – was the (black, of course) mask obscuring the greater fraction of his face.
A textbook professional.
And Iruka recalled the cold way Kakashi had called Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura his subordinates. He'd cruelly said it might be interesting to crush them.
He'd torn into Iruka in front of a whole collective of shinobi, not to mention the Hokage!; made a joke of the chūnin rank by nominating green genin when Iruka hadn't even made chūnin until he was 16; and gone as far as to point out that he, the great and mighty Kakashi of the Sharingan, had been made chūnin by the age of 6.
Yes, he was definitely making fun of Iruka.
And oh, that pissed Iruka off.
It hurt doubly to think of the way he'd mooned over the Copy-Nin when he was younger, when Kakashi had talked him through teaching Naruto, and when Kakashi had appeared like a dashing rescuer out of some fanciful romance novel in the back hills.
How could he think, he wondered bitterly to himself for the millionth time in years, that someone like the Copy-Nin could ever like or respect a forever-chūnin like Iruka?
"You know, maybe I will," Iruka said defiantly.
Kakashi's eye curved up into another smile. Iruka valiantly resisted the urge to introduce his fist to Kakashi's face (only partly because he knew it would never actually get that far. Iruka wasn't a lightweight, but he was painfully aware that he wasn't, and would never be, of the same calibre as Kakashi).
"Have a good evening, Iruka-sensei," Kakashi said cheerfully, already manoeuvring himself around Iruka.
"To you as well," Iruka said, just barely on the friendly side of frostily.
He had been about to go home, but he turned on his heel and began stalking down a different street toward the leatherworker's.
Reluctantly, he parted with several bills to have the splatter sealed so that it wouldn't run if the bag got wet. He also had to part, temporarily, with the bag until the paint and then the sealant dried, so he precariously stacked the contents in his arms and carefully made his way homeward.
It'll be worth it, he told himself fiercely, thinking of Kakashi of the Sharingan.