Chapter Text
When Iruka starts awake at three am, his first thought – as always – is, Naruto!
But there’s no small figure in the doorway; no tug on his pajama sleeve or little voice whimpering about a bad dream. Iruka tenses, stretching his senses. No muffled crying from the next room, either. That’s good. He hopes that after living with him for close to six months now, Naruto has really absorbed that he can come find Iruka if he feels sad or scared, that he’s allowed. But there are still occasional nights where Naruto reverts, and hides in his room, trying to choke back his sobs. (Iruka would dearly love five minutes alone in a locked room with all the people whose actions have conspired, before now, to convince a six-year-old boy that no one is going to comfort him and so there’s no point in asking.)
Not tonight, though. If Iruka strains a little further, he can clock Naruto’s deep, steady breathing through the wall.
So –
The kunai from the bedside table is instantly in his hand, even as he tries to work out what woke him. Was there a sound? If so, it’s stopped. The night is very still.
Then Iruka feels it again – the little snap of chakra, sending a ripple through the wards around the apartment. A ninja’s knock.
Iruka tucks the kunai up his sleeve, and palms a few explosive seals from his desk as he passes for good measure. He’s always telling his students that overconfident presumptions about what people can do or how they’ll behave – like, say, that there’s no way an enemy would just knock – are a good way to get yourself killed. To assume makes dead shinobi out of u and me.
He peers out the peep hole, carefully keeping his body tucked to the side of the door.
To say that he’s greeted by a familiar face – if you can call it a face – doesn’t capture the sheer weirdness of seeing that particular face-that-is-not-a-face here, outside his home. After a couple years of not seeing it at all.
Iruka slips outside. Closes the door behind him. Waits until he feels the wards flow back into place.
Then he takes in a very deep breath.
“The FUCK are you doing lurking outside my fucking HOUSE?!” Iruka intends to yell. He gets as far as “TH-“ when a clawed glove claps over his mouth.
“Shhhhh,” murmurs Hound of the ANBU.
***
For most of teenaged Iruka’s prankster career, Hound was the bane of his life.
It started the day Iruka managed to snare an ANBU agent in one of his traps. One second, he was up a tree, giggling to himself as an annoyed figure in a cat mask hammered on the inside of the barrier that had sprung up when Iruka had triggered his hidden seal; the next, he was dangling by the back of his t-shirt from a clawed fist, his face inches away from a painted dog mask.
“Almost impressive.” The voice was lighter than Iruka would have expected. Younger. Maybe not even that much older than himself. Iruka felt a little spark of surprised pleasure… until Hound added, “If you weren’t using those skills for something so dumb.”
That was the first time Hound dragged him in front of the hokage (who, Iruka suspected, was secretly amused by the whole thing, given the way he kept ducking to hide his mouth behind the stack of papers he’d been reading, as Hound enumerated Iruka’s apparently numerous crimes and Iruka added his own colourful commentary on Hound’s manners, likely parentage, and smell). It was far from the last.
Hound proceeded to tail Iruka all over the village. He wouldn’t just get Iruka in trouble, either. He’d sabotage him. Find the seals Iruka had planted before they could go off; disable his traps; swoop down from a tree and swipe the pots of glitter Iruka had been this close to exploding all over one of his unsuspecting teachers. More than once, Iruka poked his head out from a hiding spot, baffled as to why he hadn’t heard a bang and the sweet sound of adults yelling after him, only to find Hound standing there, the remains of a ripped-up seal or a tripwire in his hand, with his head tilted to the side in that way that Iruka could only read as a smirk. And then, because Hound was the worst, he’d usually haul Iruka into Sandaime’s office anyway, to face penalties even for failed pranks.
It all came to a head with the stinkbomb seal in Hokage Tower.
At the time, it was Iruka’s greatest triumph. (Even now – as a grown man, an Academy instructor, and now a sort-of parent – he looks back on it with a tiny bit of pride.) He’d managed to plant the seal right on the hokage’s desk, and then triggered it remotely from a nearby rooftop. Best of all, there wasn’t even a puff of smoke or a pop of sound to betray the point of origin. The stench just – grew, billowed, silent and invisible, in waves so pungent that even from his hiding place, Iruka could taste it in the back of his throat.
But it was worth it for the moment that ninja suddenly started pouring out of Hokage Tower like a fountain, hollering about the smell. Followed even by the hokage himself, hat off and frantically fanning at the air, and his ANBU bodyguards, who were clearly desperate to find a way of holding their noses without removing their masks. One of them had the top of his mask’s bird beak pinched between two fingers, as if that was going to help, and that was really what set Iruka off, laughing with his hands stuffed in his mouth to try and muffle the sound, until his belly hurt and there were tears in his eyes.
The clawed glove that scruffed him like a kitten, hauling him up by the back of the neck, wasn’t exactly a surprise. Iruka just hadn’t expected Hound to find him quite so fast.
He started, “Hey, what are you –” and found himself cut off by a low growl.
“Don’t.” From the shadowed depths of the mask’s empty sockets, Hound stared at him with an intensity that made Iruka recoil in his grip. The mask was so close to him that Iruka could tell both of Hound’s eyes were open, for once. Before, he’d always assumed Hound had lost the left one, somehow (probably sticking his stupid face where it didn’t belong, Iruka had usually added to himself, though he knew it was more likely in battle). The sheer venom of that gaze was such that, for a second, Iruka was almost convinced he saw a red gleam. “I’m not interested in your denials. Tell me how you got a seal into Sandaime-sama’s office without us catching it.”
Iruka, who had never heard Hound that angry, was startled into honesty. “Did it last week. I returned that book he lent me. I stuck the seal in the back cover.”
Hound continued to stare for so long that Iruka began to grow genuinely afraid.
Then, abruptly, Iruka smacked into the roof, the impact stinging the palms of his hands as he caught himself. Hound was gone.
***
That wasn’t quite the last time Iruka spoke to Hound, but it was close. And even the occasional sighting of him after that, on guard duty or patrolling the rooftops, eventually petered out. It’s been two years since Iruka last spotted Hound. Ninja life isn’t exactly safe, and ANBU has an even higher death toll than average. Iruka can’t say he hasn’t wondered. Or, for all he knows, Hound might have just handed the mask in and transitioned to ordinary shinobi life. Iruka might see him every day in the village and not even realise.
But after two years, here’s Hound, alive and so very close, with one hand pressed over Iruka’s mouth.
Iruka bites him.
He doesn’t get any purchase on the armoured glove, but it’s the principle of the thing. Hound tsks as he withdraws his hand and makes a show of inspecting the palm for teeth marks.
“Well, hello to you, too, sensei,” he whispers. “Nice to see the teaching career hasn’t changed you much.”
“Don’t shhhhhh me,” Iruka hisses – though he keeps his voice low. “What do you want?”
In answer, Hound tugs at the collar of the shapeless dark cloak he’s wearing over his armour, and tugs it down just a little. Just enough to glimpse –
Iruka’s breath hitches in his throat.
Strapped to Hound’s chest, sound asleep, is a child no older than Naruto, with darkly shadowed eyes and a mop of hair that, in the dim light, resembles the colour of blood.
“I hear you’re the resident expert now on the care of jinchuuriki,” Hound says. “Can we come in?”