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Naruto stops at the mouth of Konoha.
Relieved, Iruka finally steps out of the shadows, hoping with everything he has that Naruto’s come to his senses, that he’ll turn around and beam, say he was just kidding, that he wanted to see how far Iruka would follow him.
The answer, if he doesn’t know it already, has always been to the edge of reality. Iruka would spend the rest of his days walking toe-to-heel with Naruto if that’s what it took to keep him safe. Over fire or water or crumbling earth, with his feet or his knees or his nails or his chin.
When Naruto turns around, he looks like he knows, but his eyes glint like the knowledge has burdened him.
He’s dressed in all black with a backpack far too meagre and no visible outerwear, and his hitai-ate hangs loosely at his waist, tied around a belt alongside another with a scratched-through plate. He’s got a bandage on his wrist from where he’d burned himself while trying to fry eggs a few mornings ago. They both knew he’d be fine in a matter of minutes, but for a few sun-soaked seconds they’d pretended Naruto was just a beastless boy, and Iruka had applied balm to his skin like it was thin enough to tear.
No one ever seems to think about how he’s just a teenager. Iruka looks at him and wonders how anyone could ever forget.
“Go away,” Naruto mumbles to the ground at Iruka’s feet, looking young and nothing at all like he’s moments away from giving his back to the entire village for them to paint a target on. Overtop the one that’s faded with time and Iruka’s careful scrubbing. “It’s only gonna be harder this way, Iruka-sensei.”
Iruka takes a step forward, but stops when Naruto takes one back, barely flinching like his body’s betrayed him.
“Naruto,” Iruka calls softly like one would a wounded animal, “please reconsider. You know what’ll happen if you do this.”
Deserter. Missing-nin. A jinchuuriki swiftly approaching kage-level strength on the loose, on the path towards someone Konoha has long since labelled a dire enemy. He would be hounded by death every single day for the rest of his life, and once it gripped him, it would show no mercy.
When Iruka took Naruto in, he promised himself to, ultimately, bring him a life of peace. A full life. Naruto hadn’t looked at peace for a while, but Iruka didn’t think—he never could’ve imagined—
“Don’t—don’t do that, I—” Naruto seems to curl into himself, hands balled at his sides and head bowed. “I have to do this. You know I have to.”
And Iruka’s chest seizes because Naruto has never sounded more weighed down. He’s sixteen and everyone keeps expecting him to save the world when all he’s ever wanted to do, right from the very beginning, is to save his best friend. He’s sixteen and invincible to all but love, and that underbelly has stayed sheathed for so long out of necessity that Iruka’s sure it has to be terrifying to unearth it in this way. To pack his bags and leave a home rebuilt in the name of a traitor. A friend. The moon to his sun.
Iruka aches for him and his uncalloused, all-feeling heart. In the same breath, he feels a harsh lesson crowding his throat, pushing him to tell Naruto his heart will break, and it will break badly. It will consume him until he’s more monster than boy, until the world is swallowed up by his despair, until all that’s left is him sitting on a nation made of rubble, burnt all over without anyone left to offer him a balm.
Sasuke is past the point of no return, and Iruka could watch the world burn but not with his little brother in the center of it.
So, selfishly, he pleads with weaponized heart, “I only have you.”
And he means it, because Naruto has become everything to him. He turned Iruka’s empty house into a home, filling it up with too-loud cackles and battered clothes strewn all over the place and mediocre test scores pinned up on the refrigerator and two sets of all kitchenware just in case. He took his spare room in Iruka’s flat and filled it up with so much life it exploded outwards, splattering the walls with the joys of familial routines.
The first night Naruto slept over, Iruka tossed and turned because of how excited he was to wake up and tell him good morning and don’t forget to make your bed and what would you like for breakfast. For the two and a half years Naruto was gone, Iruka worried, made too much food, and awaited his safe return.
All Iruka wants is to shield Naruto from any more tragedy.
Something shifts, then, in Naruto’s eyes. In a heartbeat he goes from sixteen to six, and suddenly he’s not a hero, he’s just a student who’d thrown a kunai to the ground, called it stupid, and then burst into tears underneath the chalkboard while Iruka, having glimpsed the child underneath the pariah, had patiently sat by his side and tried not to show how helpless he felt.
They’d both been vulnerable and uncertain then. Ten years later, they still are—Iruka feels it in his chest, hears it in Naruto’s voice when he says: “But sensei, he only has me.”
Free of the scrutiny of daylight, his eyes waver, a little lost like he’s answering a question with only a tentative understanding of the answer.
And Iruka knows, then, that Naruto will stay if he asks him to.
Because he’s running away but it’s just as much out of fear as it is out of loyalty. Because for once in his stubborn-headed life, Naruto doesn’t blindly believe he’s making the right decision. Because he’s a shinobi, and the head and heart disconnect will always be cause for inner turmoil, even for someone who feels as deeply and unabashedly as Naruto does.
Because Naruto trusts Iruka more than Iruka trusts himself, some days, and he can use that, can cling onto these threads of precarity and tug ever so gently to lead Naruto home, where it’s safe and warm, where Iruka will fight to keep it that way for him for as long as he can.
But what kind of teacher would that make him?
What kind of brother?
Engaging in deceit, manipulation, shackling a loved one to a life unfulfilled—and if Iruka let Naruto think, even for a second, that he condoned leaving a comrade on his own, then that would make him no better than… Mizuki.
After all, Iruka never knew Sasuke as well as Naruto did, there might be hope for him yet.
And as much as it pains him to base his actions on a hypothetical, it’s all he has. That, and trust in his gold-hearted Naruto.
So Iruka steels himself and chokes back countless iterations of please don’t go and I don’t want to lose you, and he forces himself to remember that he hasn’t had the capacity to protect Naruto from the perils he faces for a long, long time, and he takes in a deep breath and says into an exhale, “I wish you were wrong. But you’re not.”
The words seemed to lengthen Naruto’s spine and infinitesimally push out his shoulders, doubt bleeding out of him thick and dark until he looks a little more like his luminous self. His face unfurls into a very small, very ginger smile, and he shrugs. "What’s that thing they say about broken clocks?”
Iruka laughs like he’s been laughing for so long because of Naruto, knowing the only other option is to cry, and that he wouldn’t force Naruto to witness that. Not now.
For a moment, they appraise each other with matching smiles, conservative in their sorrow.
The second Naruto steps outside of the gates, the village, brutal and fanged, will re-learn to fear him, will re-learn to mask it as unfairly vile hatred. And Iruka will do everything he can to stop them, but outside of the walls, his hands will stay attached to his arms, incapable of pushing Naruto out of trouble or pulling fondly on overgrown hair. He won’t know if Naruto’s going hungry or broken a rib, if he’ll ever come home or raise a new one on his own.
Between one blink and the next, Iruka realizes belatedly that they’re the same height now. That Naruto has a lot more things he can teach Iruka than Iruka can him. And that, most importantly, Iruka loves him with a ferocity that rivals the beast caged inside of him.
Under the blanket of a starless night, Iruka thinks he sees Naruto more clearly than he ever has before.
Naruto is looking at him like he doesn’t want to say goodbye, and Iruka clenches his jaw so he doesn’t make the mistake of telling him he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t expect Naruto to crash into him, wrapping him up in a hug too chaotic and strong and loving to keep a straight face for, so Iruka pushes his feelings into Naruto’s shoulder and just hopes he doesn’t get his shirt too wet.
“It won’t be forever,” Naruto breathes next to his ear with just as much outrageous passion as he had when he was twelve, so overwhelming and out of step with destiny Iruka wants desperately to believe him. “I’ll come back to you, count on it.”
Iruka squeezes his eyes shut, a sudden rush of affection filling him up so fast he’s afraid he’ll burst. “I’ll wait.”
Naruto feels so much so deeply, but Iruka—well, he’s always been the same way. When they part, slowly, it feels like a connection severed, like a limb lost, like looking into a mirror and seeing absolutely nothing.
Iruka laughs wetly and shakes his head.
“Where did you ever learn to love outcasts?” He asks to lighten the mood, taking in the blue of Naruto’s eyes for the last time. He wants to remember them. He wants to remember all of him.
Naruto smiles and taps his hitai-ate—Iruka’s hitai-ate—twice with an overgrown nail, the metal clinking clearly in the night. Iruka wonders faintly who's going to remind him to cut his nails, who's going to look at him and see the side effects of being a parentless child instead of just an unkempt stranger.
“Where do you think?” Naruto asks, humour swimming in his eyes.
There’s nothing else to say as Naruto steps away, as he crosses a line Iruka’s seen him cross both a thousand times and not once. He casts a final look back, swallowing bravely, and Iruka shoves his shaking hands into his pockets and nods.
When Naruto disappears into the trees, he feels orphaned anew.
Iruka stands there until the sun comes up, and then goes home and fulfills a promise: he waits.