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There weren't many places that Iruka deemed unsafe inside Konoha's walls. Not many physical places, at least. Mental places, however, were a whole another matter, as it was with any other shinobi working next to him. To him, just like to anyone else in their ranks, the physical landscape overlapped with the mental one, the phenomenon bringing meaning to places that would have otherwise stayed nondescript, dismissive, plain. Where he saw a bar, he didn't see the building itself nor its patrons only, but also the atmosphere and the promises it carried out on the street. Where there was a market place, not only were there stalls that sold food, there were also present the memories when one could not look at the oranges sold in one of them, or the freshly gutted fish in the other, the foul taste and smell left in their minds by missions gone awry that made shopping appear like a wasted effort.
Any street, alley, shop or place of leisure became just a bit more articulated, just a bit more vivid to a shinobi who had taken it as a part of their mental landscape. That was the point when the decision on 'safety' was made. A building could be perfectly safe when one thought about it rationally, but the hairs on their necks could still stand up at the presence of danger the moment they stepped over the threshold. It wasn't something they could easily explain, either to themselves or their colleagues, as everyone had very different feelings and memories about the same places – although Konoha Hospital seemed to be a unanimously disliked construction in the collective mind of the shinobi population.
In that sense, it had taken Iruka a surprisingly short time to accept the apartment he now shared with his lover as a 'safe' place for him, counting in the fact that he had moved in to live with the Rokudaime after a rather short span of dates when they were still searching words for the butterflies they felt in their stomachs each morning they woke up together. Sometimes he asked himself if the sense of 'safe' had something to do with the place already having Kakashi's scent and presence when he had made room on the bookshelves for his scrolls and books and had found an empty shelf in the kitchen cupboard meant for his tea collection – it had made him feel safe in a new setting, giving him something familiar to keep close to him when venturing into the unknown rooms. Admittedly the way Kakashi had made him rub his own scent all over the couch and bed during the fantastic move-in sex they had that night might have played some part in all that. Nevertheless, Iruka had settled living under Rokudaime's roof with a word 'safe' associated with his new home, and that was all that mattered.
Yet there were occasions when he wasn't sure what he should make of it. To make things more complicated, he wasn't completely sure what Kakashi thought about it, as it was a subject they had not yet breached in their discussions.
“Home already? Whose mid-term report did you set on fire this time?” Rumbled the teasing bass of the silver-haired man from the kitchen when Iruka stepped into their shared hallway and the door swung shut behind him.
“That happened only once, and kami help me if you don't come and kiss me welcome I'll set your coffee maker on fire,” Iruka muttered, his tired, dark eyes narrowed into slits and his body slumped with the posture of a man who had braved far too many battles over education politics for one day. “Don't make me file another complaint on you.” The threats were empty and unnecessary, but at least he could later say at the T&I that he had warned the imbecile should things turn ugly.
“Maa, the earlier mornings clearly aren't your cup of tea,” Kakashi drawled, the jounin strolling out of the kitchen with an appearance of a man who had just gotten home himself, the dark trousers and jersey covering his lean figure and the mask barely taken off from the grinning mouth. “Although, you surprise me. For the first time people of Konoha feel completely safe with the amount of casualties having dropped remarkably when compared to the earlier years, and here you are all pissy about paperwork.”
That form of a greeting however was enough to make Iruka stop on his track. Soon enough, his temper picked things up from where the rest of his brain had stopped. Kiss or not, the man was dead. “In case you haven't noticed, I have been pissy about paperwork ever since I got introduced to your shitty mission reports, you pri-” The peeved headmaster didn't get to finish the insult, as suddenly his back connected with the hallway wall and the jounin's pale face was in front of his own, the narrow, gray eyes peering calmly into his glaring brown ones. The leather strap of his satchel dug uncomfortably into his shoulder and he was tempted to bodily remove his flippant lover from blocking his way to some calming chamomile he could hear calling his name, but the more sensible side of him that was not on a rampage against everything that had went wrong during his day decided to give the jounin credit for not flinching from the flinty look he fixed on the man's unreadable features.
“Breathe.” The word was spoken near his heating cheek, the warm breath of the older male making him shiver as it caressed his skin. The grip the other had taken on his tense shoulders tightened just a little, yet it made Iruka involuntarily breathe in the other's scent, long and deep, and turn him to look properly into the other's sharply gazing eyes, putting the two men standing almost cheek to cheek in the quiet hallway. After a beat, the jounin continued, his words calm and measured."I can see that you are tired, as am I, which is understandable since rebuilding a village takes its toll on all of us. Yet you rarely bring your temper home after a bad day, so it's making me wonder what could have caused that." The jounin's voice, now so close to his ear and so right there for him, made something in Iruka's inner core snap.
“I feel safe with you,” he exhaled, a rush of breath that suddenly left his lungs void of air when his overworked brain screeched to a halt on the same page with his blabbering mouth. Well. That was a rather unexpected turn of events.
He didn't get to panic about the other's silence that followed the slip when a pair of thin lips crashed over his, hot and urgent, taking away what had been left of air in his body, along with his sour mood, rational thoughts and analyzed reasons. He found that he could be without them, for that moment, when the other's mouth tore itself away from devouring his lips and the jounin gasped words that made his heart pick up the pace before his breath was taken away from him again and he was pushed more firmly against the wall, the whole body of his lover pressing against his.
His day had still been a disaster, and he needed to apologize for his rude behavior, but he gave it all a couple of more minutes.
After all, newly found words needed plenty of repeating in case of mishearing.