Work Text:
Iruka stood in his apartment pacing slightly between the same four corners of his small kitchen, restless, fumbling for some sort of news that might bring about some closure. The kind of closure one could breathe a sigh of relief towards, not the kind that he was too used to hearing by now; the kind that left you trembling at night while searching for a way to go back to that time of not knowing.
Dramatic as he felt to wait anxiously for the return of Naruto from the land of waves, he couldn’t deny that he was at his wits end trying to understand why it was taking so long for any word as to their status. In a fit of desperation, Iruka cursed himself for allowing them to take a C-rank with their current shoddy teamwork. In the next moment, before his heel could even hit the next corner, he admonished himself for his lack of faith in their skills. He’d graduated them, for crying out loud, he couldn’t call himself a teacher if he wasn’t one-hundred-percent confident in their abilities as genin or the ability of their sensei to help them along.
And yet, him and Kakashi hadn’t been as close as they once were in years. In between the hustle and bustle of achieving their respective positions within the village, whatever they had once been hurtling towards was extinguished quite quickly. Kakashi-sensei’s nosy persona could have taken him to any rogue spot in Kirigakure that satiated it, not even stopping to think about Iruka’s justified anguish.
Water dripped from the broken faucet endlessly as he awaited any news. It was a noise Iruka hated to have clogging his ears on a good, suspense-free day.
Back home, leaky faucets usually meant some superstition about instability that likely just sprung out of some need to get people fixing their sinks. He wished superstitions would stop targeting him.
..
The minute that Sarutobi-sama gave him the go-ahead, Iruka all but flew out of his apartment without hesitation to hopefully intercept Team 7 before they could step foot past the gates. He preened to think the pride that Gai-sensei would have in how quickly he got from one end of Konoha to the other.
Iruka held back from any public display of affection that would communicate the affection he felt as Naruto ran up to him eagerly. It wouldn’t do to baby a grown ninja like Naruto, despite how Iruka could only notice how small he still was and how many scrapes decorated his person. Even if all Iruka wanted to do sometimes was fix those scrapes and give him the nutrients he’d missed out on. It wouldn’t do to be so sentimental towards a former student. No amount of shoddy ramen dinners would bridge the affection Naruto deserved, but Iruka hated to think that maybe he wasn’t worthy of such a role after all his years of inaction. He would be fine with being a mentor, maybe even a friend, but nothing closer.
Even still, he couldn’t help the relieved smile that threatened to split his face in half as Naruto hugged him ferociously. Despite the melancholy that the team had carried as they walked through those gates, Iruka could count on Naruto to let his positivity shine in the worst of circumstances. Still, Naruto held onto him for long enough that when he released him, the rest of team seven had dispersed.
“Naruto?”
“I just missed you.” He whispered.
And instead of pulling back into that never-ending hug, Iruka cleared his throat. “C’mon. Ichiraku doesn’t close for another few hours.”
..
Iruka had avoided many of the details surrounding what had disrupted their mission in a feeble attempt to keep himself from obsessively petitioning the hokage to retract them immediately, so he only really knew that it had gone wrong. The hokage said it was a mislabeled mission of A-rank severity that slipped through the cracks. Of course, Iruka was the only one lucky enough to have it be Naruto who received the one mission that evaded their dissemination.
Regardless, Iruka wanted to know all of it now that he knew Naruto was safe and the details couldn’t terrify him into more sleepless nights. “Tell me everything, alright?”
“Are you sure? It was totally terrifying.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.” Iruka reminded Naruto, who he thought often forgot Iruka was another shinobi in his own right. It was laughable, most of the time, how often Naruto revealed that he didn’t see Iruka as another shinobi but as something far kinder, more respectable than even the human legends among them. Something they didn’t dare talk about at the risk of upsetting what they had now.
“…Do you know about a missing-nin named Zabuza Momochi?”
Iruka, in the end, was right. He had heard many times about deaths on missions. Allies, enemies, kin. No shinobi was too skilled to die.
So he didn’t react when he heard that name. The one he was so sure he’d forgotten so long ago, because it was something that existed in a life before this one, and therefore not worth remembering.
Naruto didn’t know he was from the Land of Water, and why would Iruka tell him such a thing when it was another thing that he forced to fade into the background of a life that he no longer had. He had no reason to think that Zabuza was someone Iruka would know, something that was by design. The only person who would know such a thing was Kakashi, and he’d sworn to keep that secret years prior lest Iruka meet the wrong end of the kunai of someone with a bone to pick.
“He was kind of a creep but… I think he wanted to protect Haku. Even if he was the worst and Haku deserved way better than that!”
How nice. Zabuza, the missing-nin; dead. That was the way to respond, with joy and pride that Naruto could overpower such a presence. The same pride he’d held for numerous cat rescues, with the appropriate distance that Naruto needed to remain steadfast in his mission to become Hokage.
He was prideful in Naruto, after all. Sure, he was concerned and the pit in his gut that had settled there soon after they left hadn’t been alleviated at all, but he could exercise pride in Naruto as easily as he could breathing.
“An S-rank missing-nin on your first C-rank? I’m nervous what your first A-rank will look like.” Iruka said, ruffling Naruto’s hair like he always did.
Naruto shook his head, spiky hair going every which way as he giggled. Together, they ate silently until two bowls had been replaced with a steaming third for them both. “So, did you know who he was?”
“Hm?”
“You know, Zabuza! Even Kakashi-sensei knew who he was, he’s the demon from the land of water.”
“No, can’t say I do. Please, Naruto do you seriously think I spend all my free time looking at bingo books?”
“No, but…”
“What?”
“It was weird but, he seemed kind of familiar, ya know? On the bridge, he just… that sounds kinda stupid, huh?”
“It makes sense. You’ve already seen a thousand faces in your time as a genin. He probably reminded you of somebody.”
“Exactly. It’s on the tip of my tongue.” Naruto rested his head on the counter as he pushed the empty bowl away. “Ugh! I hate that! It’s really close and then its gone.”
Iruka watched Teuchi spoon more broth and noodles in as Naruto’s eyes glazed over. “I bet so. C’mon, focus on eating. You just got back from a really stressful mission and, while I would never promote not learning from something, you should probably wait until you’re fed and well-rested.”
“Fine.” But Naruto, never one to give up so fast, spoke up once more less than a minute later. “You know, Iruka-sensei, for a second I thought that he was actually going to beat Kakashi-sensei, and us too.”
“Naruto-“
“I mean, I knew we’d win! But for a second it felt like Zabuza and Haku were really gonna... kill us.”
Iruka blinked. For a minute, he was nine, about to be ten, and his mother was reassuring herself that Zabuza wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have killed Iruka if they had told him the truth, because Zabzua wasn’t so far gone that he could.
His bowl of ramen suddenly felt slimy and congealed as he tried to force down the morsel. His brain racing to make the same point, that he couldn’t do that. Or, that he wouldn’t have done it if he had known how important Naruto was to him because Iruka was still his mother’s child and Zabuza respected her. In turn, Naruto could be afforded the same cold indifference.
And then his mind drifted towards Kakashi, who engaged and almost killed Zabuza on his own the first time.
“Did Kakashi-sensei mention anything about him?”
“Like what?”
Iruka shrugged in feigned nonchalance. “You said he knew who he was.”
“Apparently Zabuza was on his shit-list. Kakashi-sensei was pretty scary when he fought him.” Naruto hummed thoughtfully. “Not that I was scared.”
“I know you weren’t, Naruto.”
Iruka laughed, but he couldn’t hear whatever noise escaped him. All he could think about was Kakashi, who was there and who knew everything. Save for himself, Kakashi was probably the only person still alive who knew anything about the person Zabuza once was. Did he even think about that when he let Zabuza die? Or was it the knowledge Kakashi had that allowed him to exercise that ruthlessness in their first fight?
All of these thoughts, and more he couldn’t begin to think let alone verbalize, remained unspoken.
Naruto had gone through hell on a mission Iruka had allowed him to be put on. He didn’t need to know about a life that didn’t exist or feel guilt for someone as barbaric as Zabuza, who Iruka had no reason to believe would have spared them. Even now, he still didn’t know if Zabuza would have spared him.
Sometimes, when he used to lay in that empty apartment and grieve, he’d wished he told him anyway. Let Zabuza hunt him down and take revenge like everybody else was so convinced he would have if he thought Iruka hadn’t been kidnapped and presumably dead.
That was then, though, now all Iruka wanted to do sometimes was yell at the top of his lungs and have a good cry, maybe a decent right-hook or two to the face and it just so happens the person causing that conflict was buried miles away in the Land of Water.
Iruka wondered if his parents would have liked to be buried there too.
.
The broken faucet felt unbearably loud when he returned to his empty apartment, to the point that doing the dishes was preferable to hearing that dull, repetitive noise. Iruka scrubbed at each dish until his hands pruned and reddened under the stream of water and when he finished, he backtracked. He found spots to scrub that weren’t there before. He made work of it until the window opened, the only noise worse for his growing headache than the leaky faucet.
He felt him there, leaning against the window as he pretended that he wasn’t barely lucid when they got back from the Land of Water.
Iruka expected Kakashi to say something he already knew. That Zabuza was dead and Iruka was now truly alone in his clan. He steeled himself for those harsh reminders with his hands still pruning under soapy suds.
“He looked for you.”
“Hm?” Iruka perked up despite himself.
“On the record, it was information gathering for his failed coup, but the records show Zabuza tore apart the seafront that weekend. He terrorized them until the last minute before withdrawing.”
Iruka felt his stomach churn. He’d believed, primarily as a source of comfort, that Zabuza didn’t look. That was who Zabuza was; he hated him, right?
Iruka’s chest constricted painfully, trying to understand why either answer filled him with such devastation.
He shut the faucet with a grip that turned pale as it tried to quiet the drip. “Who cares that he looked? It doesn’t matter. He threatened Naruto’s life, he’s better off dead.”
Iruka meant that. Really, he never wanted to think of Zabuza as anything other than the guy who kept finding new ways to hurt him when they were worlds apart, and he’d choose Naruto over any stupid half cousin a million- no- a billion times over.
Kakashi slid open the window he’d come in through. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“He is a mercenary who threatened Konoha shinobi. That’s all I need to know.”
“Alright.” Kakashi drawled as Iruka wiped his hands furiously with a tea towel. Despite the finality of the words, Kakashi made no move to leave.
The short thud of water against the bottom of the sink was the only thing he had to ground him as the silence stretched on, only broken by the tiny ripple of a droplet against the tiny puddle left behind from Iruka’s dishwashing rampage.
Iruka cursed himself once more, but he couldn’t deny his need for clarity.
“Why did he look?”
“I don’t know.” Kakashi said. “Whatever the reason died with him and the people he stepped on to get to that bridge. I didn’t feel it was kind to ask him on his deathbed.”
Once upon a time attention had been his sole reason for living and now, Iruka found himself willing to do anything for Kakashi to stop watching him. He didn’t like it when Kakashi got it in his head that he needed to dissect Iruka’s every move to gather his own superior conclusion, something annoying that he never quite grew out of. The man had the nerve to drop such awful information when Iruka had already decided it wasn’t something he should think about ever again and Iruka reminded himself that part of the reason they never hung out was Kakashi’s habit of only dropping in when he was in crisis.
Kakashi couldn’t let that child from Kiri be forgotten. It was a useless endeavor for a truth that only existed deep in the back of a closet in a house he couldn’t afford anymore, kept alive only by two men who wouldn’t pass any of it down to anyone.
Iruka sighed. Being a shinobi, or any kind of adult really, wasn’t meant to be easily replicable. He’d wanted to be one as much as any starry-eyed child did, and this was what he was rewarded as a result. Many, like Zabuza, weren’t lucky the way he was to have changed before he fell too far.
“Why did you look?”
“Why does anybody do anything? I was curious and bored while recovering. I wanted to see if Minato-sensei was right. I still don’t know what Zabuza was doing that had him under your mother’s thumb but losing you both was the push he needed to attempt to murder the Mizukage.”
Iruka had always assumed it was ANBU stuff that bonded them, but hearing anything about Zabuza right now had him second-guessing. It felt a bit self-absorbed to so much as ponder the thought that they were directly tied to the attempted murder of the Mizukage, and his nerves only spiked to think there was any evidence to tie him to any of that. That was a hard night, long ago, to hear about his proclamation of betrayal in the papers and swallow his own worst fears of being accused of the same when he already felt like such a non-entity.
Even Mizuki never knew he was Kiri, and in retrospect thank his intuition for that.
Kakashi was content to let him wallow in his thoughts, a captive audience to his growing inability to just smile through it all.
“Zabuza didn’t need anybody to do that.”
Zabuza. That didn’t sit right on his tongue. He’d called him something childish once. Something that made his name and his stature less terrifying.
It was a name that Zabuza had once exasperatedly allowed him to use despite how hearing that nickname in crowds made him look like a weak shinobi, tied down by human affections.
Iruka’s frown grew wider. He couldn’t bring himself to call him by his title or even the name a stranger would use; it felt inhumane to reinforce Zabuza as any of those things.
Iruka wasn’t Zabuza. And he wouldn’t lower himself to his level now.
He didn’t want to mourn Zabuza. He wanted to mourn the guy who brought him takeout dinners when he could have let him starve with the backdrop of their world slowly falling apart. He wanted to separate his cousin from the demon, even if they so often bled into each other, and apply familiarity to the face that once bandaged a wound without mention and searched when Iruka disappeared.
But, like Naruto, the familiarity escaped him before he could name it.
“You should be dragging your body back to the hospital now Kakashi-san.”
“You’re more hospitable than-“
“The hospital?”
Iruka stood in his apartment pacing slightly between the same four corners of his small kitchen, restless, fumbling for some sort of news that might bring about some closure. The kind of closure one could breathe a sigh of relief towards, not the kind that he was too used to hearing by now; the kind that left you trembling at night while searching for a way to go back to that time of not knowing.
Dramatic as he felt to wait anxiously for the return of Naruto from the land of waves, he couldn’t deny that he was at his wits end trying to understand why it was taking so long for any word as to their status. In a fit of desperation, Iruka cursed himself for allowing them to take a C-rank with their current shoddy teamwork. In the next moment, before his heel could even hit the next corner, he admonished himself for his lack of faith in their skills. He’d graduated them, for crying out loud, he couldn’t call himself a teacher if he wasn’t one-hundred-percent confident in their abilities as genin or the ability of their sensei to help them along.
And yet, him and Kakashi hadn’t been as close as they once were in years. In between the hustle and bustle of achieving their respective positions within the village, whatever they had once been hurtling towards was extinguished quite quickly. Kakashi-sensei’s nosy persona could have taken him to any rogue spot in Kirigakure that satiated it, not even stopping to think about Iruka’s justified anguish.
Water dripped from the broken faucet endlessly as he awaited any news. It was a noise Iruka hated to have clogging his ears on a good, suspense-free day.
Back home, leaky faucets usually meant some superstition about instability that likely just sprung out of some need to get people fixing their sinks. He wished superstitions would stop targeting him.
..
The minute that Sarutobi-sama gave him the go-ahead, Iruka all but flew out of his apartment without hesitation to hopefully intercept Team 7 before they could step foot past the gates. He preened to think the pride that Gai-sensei would have in how quickly he got from one end of Konoha to the other.
Iruka held back from any public display of affection that would communicate the affection he felt as Naruto ran up to him eagerly. It wouldn’t do to baby a grown ninja like Naruto, despite how Iruka could only notice how small he still was and how many scrapes decorated his person. Even if all Iruka wanted to do sometimes was fix those scrapes and give him the nutrients he’d missed out on. It wouldn’t do to be so sentimental towards a former student. No amount of shoddy ramen dinners would bridge the affection Naruto deserved, but Iruka hated to think that maybe he wasn’t worthy of such a role after all his years of inaction. He would be fine with being a mentor, maybe even a friend, but nothing closer.
Even still, he couldn’t help the relieved smile that threatened to split his face in half as Naruto hugged him ferociously. Despite the melancholy that the team had carried as they walked through those gates, Iruka could count on Naruto to let his positivity shine in the worst of circumstances. Still, Naruto held onto him for long enough that when he released him, the rest of team seven had dispersed.
“Naruto?”
“I just missed you.” He whispered.
And instead of pulling back into that never-ending hug, Iruka cleared his throat. “C’mon. Ichiraku doesn’t close for another few hours.”
..
Iruka had avoided many of the details surrounding what had disrupted their mission in a feeble attempt to keep himself from obsessively petitioning the hokage to retract them immediately, so he only really knew that it had gone wrong. The hokage said it was a mislabeled mission of A-rank severity that slipped through the cracks. Of course, Iruka was the only one lucky enough to have it be Naruto who received the one mission that evaded their dissemination.
Regardless, Iruka wanted to know all of it now that he knew Naruto was safe and the details couldn’t terrify him into more sleepless nights. “Tell me everything, alright?”
“Are you sure? It was totally terrifying.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.” Iruka reminded Naruto, who he thought often forgot Iruka was another shinobi in his own right. It was laughable, most of the time, how often Naruto revealed that he didn’t see Iruka as another shinobi but as something far kinder, more respectable than even the human legends among them. Something they didn’t dare talk about at the risk of upsetting what they had now.
“…Do you know about a missing-nin named Zabuza Momochi?”
Iruka, in the end, was right. He had heard many times about deaths on missions. Allies, enemies, kin. No shinobi was too skilled to die.
So he didn’t react when he heard that name. The one he was so sure he’d forgotten so long ago, because it was something that existed in a life before this one, and therefore not worth remembering.
Naruto didn’t know he was from the Land of Water, and why would Iruka tell him such a thing when it was another thing that he forced to fade into the background of a life that he no longer had. He had no reason to think that Zabuza was someone Iruka would know, something that was by design. The only person who would know such a thing was Kakashi, and he’d sworn to keep that secret years prior lest Iruka meet the wrong end of the kunai of someone with a bone to pick.
“He was kind of a creep but… I think he wanted to protect Haku. Even if he was the worst and Haku deserved way better than that!”
How nice. Zabuza, the missing-nin; dead. That was the way to respond, with joy and pride that Naruto could overpower such a presence. The same pride he’d held for numerous cat rescues, with the appropriate distance that Naruto needed to remain steadfast in his mission to become Hokage.
He was prideful in Naruto, after all. Sure, he was concerned and the pit in his gut that had settled there soon after they left hadn’t been alleviated at all, but he could exercise pride in Naruto as easily as he could breathing.
“An S-rank missing-nin on your first C-rank? I’m nervous what your first A-rank will look like.” Iruka said, ruffling Naruto’s hair like he always did.
Naruto shook his head, spiky hair going every which way as he giggled. Together, they ate silently until two bowls had been replaced with a steaming third for them both. “So, did you know who he was?”
“Hm?”
“You know, Zabuza! Even Kakashi-sensei knew who he was, he’s the demon from the land of water.”
“No, can’t say I do. Please, Naruto do you seriously think I spend all my free time looking at bingo books?”
“No, but…”
“What?”
“It was weird but, he seemed kind of familiar, ya know? On the bridge, he just… that sounds kinda stupid, huh?”
“It makes sense. You’ve already seen a thousand faces in your time as a genin. He probably reminded you of somebody.”
“Exactly. It’s on the tip of my tongue.” Naruto rested his head on the counter as he pushed the empty bowl away. “Ugh! I hate that! It’s really close and then its gone.”
Iruka watched Teuchi spoon more broth and noodles in as Naruto’s eyes glazed over. “I bet so. C’mon, focus on eating. You just got back from a really stressful mission and, while I would never promote not learning from something, you should probably wait until you’re fed and well-rested.”
“Fine.” But Naruto, never one to give up so fast, spoke up once more less than a minute later. “You know, Iruka-sensei, for a second I thought that he was actually going to beat Kakashi-sensei, and us too.”
“Naruto-“
“I mean, I knew we’d win! But for a second it felt like Zabuza and Haku were really gonna... kill us.”
Iruka blinked. For a minute, he was nine, about to be ten, and his mother was reassuring herself that Zabuza wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have killed Iruka if they had told him the truth, because Zabzua wasn’t so far gone that he could.
His bowl of ramen suddenly felt slimy and congealed as he tried to force down the morsel. His brain racing to make the same point, that he couldn’t do that. Or, that he wouldn’t have done it if he had known how important Naruto was to him because Iruka was still his mother’s child and Zabuza respected her. In turn, Naruto could be afforded the same cold indifference.
And then his mind drifted towards Kakashi, who engaged and almost killed Zabuza on his own the first time.
“Did Kakashi-sensei mention anything about him?”
“Like what?”
Iruka shrugged in feigned nonchalance. “You said he knew who he was.”
“Apparently Zabuza was on his shit-list. Kakashi-sensei was pretty scary when he fought him.” Naruto hummed thoughtfully. “Not that I was scared.”
“I know you weren’t, Naruto.”
Iruka laughed, but he couldn’t hear whatever noise escaped him. All he could think about was Kakashi, who was there and who knew everything. Save for himself, Kakashi was probably the only person still alive who knew anything about the person Zabuza once was. Did he even think about that when he let Zabuza die? Or was it the knowledge Kakashi had that allowed him to exercise that ruthlessness in their first fight?
All of these thoughts, and more he couldn’t begin to think let alone mentally verbalize, remained unspoken.
Naruto had gone through hell on a mission Iruka had allowed him to be put on. He didn’t need to know about a life that didn’t exist or feel guilt for someone as barbaric as Zabuza, who Iruka had no reason to believe would have spared them. Even now, he still didn’t know if Zabuza would have spared him.
Sometimes, when he used to lay in that empty apartment and grieve, he’d wished he told him anyway. Let Zabuza hunt him down and take revenge like everybody else was so convinced he would have if he thought Iruka hadn’t been kidnapped and presumably dead.
That was then, though, now all Iruka wanted to do sometimes was yell at the top of his lungs and have a good cry, maybe a decent right-hook or two to his face, and it just so happens the person causing that conflict was buried miles away in the Land of Water.
Iruka wondered if his parents would have liked to be buried there too.
.
The broken faucet felt unbearably loud when he returned to his empty apartment, to the point that doing the dishes was preferable to hearing that dull, repetitive noise. Iruka scrubbed at each dish until his hands pruned and reddened under the stream of water and when he finished, he backtracked. He found spots to scrub that weren’t there before. He made work of it until the window opened, the only noise worse for his growing headache than the leaky faucet.
He felt him there, leaning against the window as he pretended that he wasn’t barely lucid when they got back from the Land of Water.
Iruka expected Kakashi to say something he already knew. That Zabuza was dead and Iruka was now truly alone in his clan. He steeled himself for those harsh reminders with his hands still pruning under soapy suds.
“He looked for you.”
“Hm?” Iruka perked up despite himself.
“On the record, it was information gathering for his failed coup, but the records show Zabuza tore apart the seafront that weekend. He terrorized them until the last minute before withdrawing.”
Iruka felt his stomach churn. He’d believed, primarily as a source of comfort, that Zabuza didn’t look. That was who Zabuza was; he hated him, right?
Iruka’s chest constricted painfully, trying to understand why either answer filled him with such devastation.
He shut the faucet with a grip that turned pale as it tried to quiet the drip. “Who cares that he looked? It doesn’t matter. He threatened Naruto’s life, he’s better off dead.”
Iruka meant that. Really, he never wanted to think of Zabuza as anything other than the guy who kept finding new ways to hurt him when they were worlds apart, and he’d choose Naruto over any stupid half cousin a million- no- a billion times over.
Kakashi slid through the window he’d opened. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“He is a mercenary who threatened Konoha shinobi. That’s all I need to know.”
“Alright.” Kakashi drawled as Iruka wiped his hands furiously with a tea towel. Despite the finality of the words, Kakashi made no move to leave.
The short thud of water against the bottom of the sink was the only thing he had to ground him as the silence stretched on, only broken by the tiny ripple of a droplet against the tiny puddle left behind from Iruka’s dishwashing rampage.
Iruka cursed himself once more, but he couldn’t deny his need for clarity.
“Why did he look?”
“I don’t know.” Kakashi said. “Whatever the reason died with him and the people he stepped on to get to that bridge. I didn’t feel it was kind to ask him on his deathbed.”
Once upon a time attention had been his sole reason for living and now, Iruka found himself willing to do anything for Kakashi to stop watching him. He didn’t like it when Kakashi got it in his head that he needed to dissect Iruka’s every move to gather his own superior conclusion, something annoying that he never quite grew out of. The man had the nerve to drop such awful information when Iruka had already decided it wasn’t something he should think about ever again and Iruka reminded himself that part of the reason they never hung out was Kakashi’s habit of only dropping in when he was in crisis.
Kakashi couldn’t let that child from Kiri be forgotten. It was a useless endeavor for a truth that only existed deep in the back of a closet in a house he couldn’t afford anymore, kept alive only by two men who wouldn’t pass any of it down to anyone.
Iruka sighed. Being a shinobi, or any kind of adult really, wasn’t meant to be easily replicable. He’d wanted to be one as much as any starry-eyed child did, and this was what he was rewarded as a result. Many, like Zabuza, weren’t lucky the way he was to have changed before he fell too far.
“Why did you look?”
“Why does anybody do anything? I was curious and bored while recovering. I wanted to see if Minato-sensei was right. I still don’t know what Zabuza was doing that had him under your mother’s thumb but losing you both was the push he needed to attempt to murder the Mizukage.”
Iruka had always assumed it was ANBU stuff that bonded them, but hearing anything about Zabuza right now had him second-guessing. It felt a bit self-absorbed to so much as ponder the thought that they were directly tied to the attempted murder of the Mizukage, and his nerves only spiked to think there was any evidence to tie him to any of that. That was a hard night, long ago, to hear about his proclamation of betrayal in the papers and swallow his own worst fears of being accused of the same when he already felt like such a non-entity in Konoha.
Even Mizuki never knew he was Kiri, and in retrospect Iruka thanked his intuition for that.
Kakashi was content to let him wallow in his thoughts, a captive audience to his growing inability to just smile through it all.
“Zabuza didn’t need anybody to do that.”
Zabuza. That didn’t sit right on his tongue. He’d called him something childish once. Something that made his name and his stature less terrifying.
It was a name that Zabuza had once exasperatedly allowed him to use despite how hearing that nickname in crowds made him look like a weak shinobi, tied down by human affections.
Iruka’s frown grew wider. He couldn’t bring himself to call him by his title or even the name a stranger would use; it felt inhumane to reinforce Zabuza as any of those things.
Iruka wasn’t Zabuza. And he wouldn’t lower himself to his level now.
He didn’t want to mourn Zabuza. He wanted to mourn the guy who brought him takeout dinners when he could have let him starve with the backdrop of their world slowly falling apart. He wanted to separate his cousin from the demon, even if they so often bled into each other, and apply familiarity to the face that once bandaged a wound without mention and apparently searched when Iruka disappeared.
But, like Naruto, the familiarity escaped him before he could name it.
“You should be dragging your body back to the hospital now Kakashi-san.”
“You’re more hospitable than-“
“The hospital?”
Kakashi nodded sheepishly, though Iruka would bet all the ryo he had earned this week that he was merely stalling. It was nothing they hadn't done before. “Can I at least have a cup of your world-famous tea before you call someone?”
“That I can do.” Iruka sighed before allowing Kakashi to take up residence on his meager couch. He needed about five cups of tea at this rate to slow down his heart. The whiplash of the last few days alone were enough stress to kill a horse.
"Here's hoping it'll cure me before long." Kakashi muttered, watching Iruka adjust with the tea pot effortlessly, eyes not straying from the sink for long enough to measure the water and yet carrying over a mug whose liquid barely peeked over the surface. Iruka grabbed a rogue dishcloth before plugging it hastily into the faucet, finally quieting the small splash of water against the basin of the sink.
“Stay tonight.” Iruka relented, eyes unfocused as he imagined the old photos he once lauded rotting away where nobody would find them. “But leave tomorrow, alright? I’m not a medi-nin and I’m not going to be blamed if you die from internal bleeding.” Kakashi, with a single eye, managed to look endlessly grateful to not have been tossed out on his ass.
Iruka fell into it with great familiarity. He took all of the emotions he didn’t quite want to understand, and he packaged them away, allowed himself to fall into that comforting feeling of protecting others from their own turmoil. He let a smile shine through, and knew he'd probably never talk about those photos. They would rot, forgotten, and he would learn to let them.
And for a moment, he felt closer to Zabuza.