Blossoms had never felt so accusatory as they did that day, their soft petals trembling softly in the light currents of air that carried the warmth of the unseasonably warm sun. It felt profane, somehow, the beauty of them lying there at the base of the memorial stone, the new names carved in its face a cruel reminder of everything Konoha had lost in their war with Iwagakure.
Fingers trembling like the petals of the flowers he’d laid at the base of the stone, Kakashi lifted a hand to once more hover over the new scar bisecting his new eye. Obito’s eye.
As grateful as he was for the Sharingan, and what he was able to do because of it, the ache of loss still threatened to pull him under. To lose a friend, so senselessly, was almost too much to bear.
The way Rin had cried before the procedure, though, had hurt in a different way. He’d realized, even before she had, that his soulmate eye would not be salvageable. That Obito had given Kakashi his own soulmate eye in return was a gift too great to truly grapple with.
Some days he wondered if the soulmate threads that wound through his eye would understand that this eye no longer belonged to Obito, if they had already accepted their new owner. Obito’s own eye had changed color when he was quite young, returning to a matched set, and so it was accepted that his soulmate was someone among his age group whose own soulmate eye had returned to them. Rin hadn’t met her own soulmate yet, her eyes as two-toned as they’d been from birth, and yet Obito had been drawn to her despite the clear evidence that their souls were not bound to one another.
Kakashi, too, had borne a different eye in each socket, indicating that he, too, had yet to meet his soulmate. Now, he had no way of knowing if he ever did, his eye having been damaged beyond repair in the fight that cost him one of his best friends. He wondered, absently, as he sat before the memorial stone, if that meant the bond with the soulmate he was meant for had also been damaged irreparably.
It was rare, after all, for a soulmate eye to be completely destroyed. There were certain people who chose to cover or remove their soulmate eye as a form of symbolic rejection of the bond, though it was unclear whether this had an actual effect on the bond or simply made it harder to recognize when one met their soulmate for the first time.
But he didn’t know if an unintentional rejection of the bond would have a similar effect, if such an effect existed.
Sighing, Kakashi watched the wind carry away one petal, his eye wandering back up to the names carved in the memorial stone, to one name in particular.
It was a gift, this sharingan.
But it was also a curse.
And he wished…
He regretted…
He longed for a different reality than the one laid before him.
Sighing, Kakashi lurched to his feet, pulling his hitai-ate down over the fresh scar, still not quite used to the way the cloth felt against the sensitized skin, and walked away.
Wishes were useless, and yet, his hopes now rested on his soulmate’s bond, and the desperate hope that it was strong enough to find a way to him, despite the complications his missing eye presented.
Brown hair spilling over his shoulders as he stumbled into the tiny room that could barely be called an apartment, Iruka scowled over his shoulder at the excessive and unnecessary ‘escort’ of no less than four ANBU members, all of whom loomed at him in a deeply disapproving way.
He couldn’t see their faces, but he didn’t doubt that they’d be scowling. He’d even met several ANBU he’d never seen before today, which was always interesting (if by interesting you meant unfortunate and a little annoying, because at least the usual ANBU knew he was essentially harmless with his pranks. The new guys always freaked out a little bit when he showed up in their crawl spaces on his way to old man Sarutobi’s office). The dramatics of marching him out of Hokage Tower and loud scolding, though, he could have done without.
“Well,” Iruka said, turning around inside the doorway of his tiny little shoebox of a living arrangement, “it’s been a pleasure, gentlemen,” he turned to the one ANBU in the group he’d met before, “ladies.”
She nodded briefly in acknowledgement, but still gave off a general air of disapproval that made Iruka want to sink into the floor, a little bit. But he’d long since grown mostly immune to the feeling of shame, mostly because it was the only way to get any goddamn attention in the wake of the Kyuubi attack. Nobody cared about the fucking orphans, and if they weren’t going to feel any shame about the number of children being abandoned by the system, then he sure as hell wasn’t going to feel shame for trying to reclaim a bit of that notice.
“Don’t do that again,” one of the new ANBU, Hound, said sharply. “The crawl spaces aren’t meant for children.”
“Look who’s talking,” Iruka shot back, since he’d need to be blind not to notice that Hound was barely a teen himself. “Takes one to know one, wouldn’t you say?”
The ANBU stiffened a little at the accusation, but didn’t actually respond. Instead, another ANBU stepped forward, and said, a bit annoyed, “Umino, just stay out of trouble, all right?”
Iruka shrugged one shoulder. “No guarantees on that,” he said. “But I’ll think about it.”
Seeming to recognize this was the most he was going to get out of Iruka, the other ANBU nodded. “Think hard,” he encouraged.
Iruka just stepped back. “See you around,” he said, and slammed the door in their faces. He could have been more polite about it, but they could have been more polite about kicking him out of Hokage Tower. And they really hadn’t needed four of them to drag him back to his apartment. He’d just walked himself home, after all. They’d just been following him all intimidatingly to try and make him feel bad. It was all a bunch of dramatics, if you asked him.
Sighing, Iruka turned and wandered across the room. His face was a bit dusty from the crawl spaces – the ANBU probably didn’t care, because they wore masks all the time that made it easy enough to avoid dirt, but Iruka’s hair tie had gotten caught on a nail at some point, and his face was smudged with dust. He probably had a spider or two caught in his hair or something, he was pretty convinced. Somebody needed to clean those ANBU crawl spaces before they got too messy. Maybe he’d tell old man Sarutobi about it, next time he dropped by the Hokage’s office for tea.
Sighing, Iruka kicked off his shoes and clambered into his tiny unit bath, where the sink encroached on the toilet, and the bath was barely big enough to fit in even at his pre-teen size. He didn’t want to imagine how hard it would be to fit in here once he hit a growth spurt or two.
Sighing, he splashed his face with some water, and fumbled for a little bit of soap, lathering his hands up and scrubbing his face to get rid of the dirt and gunk from the crawl space. It wasn’t until he’d finished rinsing off the dirt that he noticed something odd in his reflection.
It took a second or two to realize that his eyes were both glinting the same color back at him.
Both of them.
Iruka felt his heart lurch in his chest, and he leaned closer to the mirror, staring deeply into his reflection. Although the lighting wasn’t great, the close-up made the difference obvious. Before, he’d had two very dark eyes, one of which shone a deep, dark brown in direct lighting, while the other had a soft charcoal gray to it. Now, both of them had the deep brown undertone, and the gray was gone.
His soulmate eye had changed from dark-gray to dark-brown. Which meant that at some point today, somewhere between the Academy and old man Sarutobi’s office and the annoying ANBU walk of shame, he’d met his soulmate.
And he hadn’t noticed.
Had they? Had his soulmate not seen the way his eye changed? Maybe it was too much to ask. His eyes had never been all that different to begin with, the subtle difference of a brown undertone compared to a charcoal glint wasn’t the sort of change one could see easily.
And he’d met several new ANBU today – two of them, if he’d tallied correctly – and none of them had been in direct light at the time.
Would any of them go home tonight and see the change in their own eyes? Would they come back and find Iruka?
It was stupid to feel hopeful, but Iruka had been so lonely for so long. Would he finally be found by someone who was right for him, a bonded partner who could love and accept him for who he was?
Or would the ANBU reject him, pretend nothing had happened, and not approach him at all? Maybe he wasn’t good enough for someone like that. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been spurned for being a bad kid. Would it really be that surprising if his soulmate wanted nothing to do with him?
Still, Iruka stared at his reflection, seeing the hope in his two paired eyes, and couldn’t fight down the longing and desperation he felt.
More than anything, he wanted his soulmate to come and find him. Shutting his eyes briefly, he allowed the wish to bloom in his chest, the warmth of it filling his heart with hope for the first time in a very long time.
“Please,” he whispered, to his empty apartment, “come find me.”
…his soulmate never did.
“Kakashi-san!”
Kakashi fought the urge to groan aloud, turning instead to look back at the young man he’d not expected would ever cross his path again, who instead had turned out to be one of the most impossible-to-extricate-oneself-from people he’d ever had the misfortune of working alongside.
Truly, if he’d known that the young man was so friendly and open, he never would have dared to bare his own considerate side. He’d only talked to Umino because he’d worried for him, and how he handled the A-rank mission Kakashi had captained. He’d certainly expected that the dressing down and critique thinly veiled as concern would rid him of the young man’s attention as surely as every other ninja who hated to be told what to do by “soulless” Kakashi, the man who’d exchanged even his soulmate bond in a bid for power.
It didn’t matter any more that it wasn’t the true story, any more than the truth of Rin’s death mattered to the people who called him ‘friend killer’. He had no choice in how people saw him, and he’d accepted it.
What was harder to accept, he was discovering, were the people who refused to leave him alone. First there had been Gai, who continued challenging him to the most oddball challenges he could imagine, and then there was Tenzo, who insisted on calling him ‘senpai’ and following him around all the time.
And now this kid! He’d taken Kakashi’s advice, and gone on to become a teacher at the Ninja Academy – a far better fit for him than the tokubetsu jonin track he’d been on prior to their conversation – and seemed to be doing well in the position. Too well, perhaps. Because the man kept bothering Kakashi, specifically by assigning him Genin teams.
It was a little ridiculous, because even after the sandaime Hokage had pulled him out of ANBU, no other teacher had been stupid enough to assign a genin team to the soulless, friend-killing master of a thousand jutsu.
And then Umino Fucking Iruka, brand-new homeroom teacher and all-around shameless idealist, had started assigning him genins.
He was pretty sure that even the headmaster of the Ninja Academy had been against it – it seemed like maybe Iruka was going rogue with this plan of his to see Kakashi take on teams.
Kakashi thought that if he was harsh enough with the kids, that Iruka would think twice before sending another team to him. But after the first batch of kids failed his bell test, Iruka had come to him and asked why they’d failed.
Kakashi had expected anger, or possibly accusations. He had anticipated the young man would call him all those epithets the villagers seemed eager to drop at the slightest hint of disdain. Instead, he’d simply pulled out a memo pad and waited for Kakashi to explain.
Slowly, almost grudgingly, Kakashi had explained that the lack of teamwork, the misbalanced cohesion, and the lacking skills of the genin had equally contributed to his choice to send them back.
Iruka had simply hummed slightly, as if considering the information, scribbling on his memo pad, before glancing up at Kakashi with those dark eyes of his, the beams of light from the sinking sun lighting up the barest hint of earthy brown in the depths of them, and said, “So, what would you say would be the ideal traits in a genin team? How would you make the team better?”
Kakashi had stared at him for a long moment. Then, despite himself, he’d found himself answering.
Now, having rejected the second genin team that Iruka sent to him, he found himself shuddering. He wished he’d never encouraged the young man to go into teaching – he was entirely too dedicated and sincere. It was more than he’d been prepared to handle, especially considering how few people bothered to actually talk to Kakashi.
“Kakashi-san!” Iruka called again, jogging up to him, then slowing to match Kakashi’s pace. “Thanks for waiting,” he said, not acknowledging the fact that Kakashi had not, in fact, altered his pace even a little bit. “I saw you rejected the most recent batch of genin students I sent you. Again.” Somehow, despite the formulation of the sentence being quite accusatory, the man’s words sounded less confrontational than expected. Especially given the force-of-nature sort of personality the man was known for.
Still, Kakashi wasn’t going to let the man get under his skin. Instead, he turned to spare a brief glance in Iruka’s direction, and simply said, “Yes, I did fail them.”
He was unsurprised to see the man once again pull out a memo pad.
The pain that seared across Iruka’s back was only just eclipsed by the anguish in his heart, knowing that one of the people he considered a colleague - no, a friend - had betrayed Konoha, and had done so by attempting to take advantage of a vulnerable orphan boy.
He ached, not just for the betrayal he felt, but for the betrayal he knew Naruto must have felt, too. The pain in his back was fading, now that the worst of it had been treated by the medical teams at Konoha hospital, but it only left more space for him to feel the pain caused by the man who had stabbed him in the back not only literally but metaphorically.
He was just staring out the window, sinking deeper into misery, when he saw a figure crawling past the gauzy curtains, only to pause and then lift the window, allowing a gust of cool air to waft into the room, sending the curtains fluttering like cherry blossoms in the wind.
“Iruka-sensei?” a familiar voice asked, and the figure slipped in through the window, revealing the lithe form of Hatake Kakashi, the man who’d rejected Iruka’s genin team picks two years in a row.
“Come to gawk?” Iruka asked, a bit miserably.
“Not at all,” Kakashi said, sounding mildly affronted by the accusation. “I’m just trying to get out before one of the nurses has the sense to cuff me to my bed again.”
Iruka lifted a brow, and spared a bit of time to eye Kakashi, realizing the man did look a bit under the weather. “Bad mission?”
“Something like that,” Kakashi said. “Yourself?”
“Traitor,” Iruka said, and then, with a wheeze of a painful laugh, he added, “A literal backstabber.”
“That’s… huh,” Kakashi said, moving across the room and taking the chair beside Iruka’s bed. “Damn.”
“You said it,” Iruka said. “He tried to use a cursed scroll to unseal the kyuubi.”
The way Kakashi stiffened, Iruka knew the man felt as deeply unsettled by the idea as Iruka had when he’d realized what Mizuki was trying to do.
“The kid is all right?” Kakashi asked. “He wasn’t hurt?”
“He’s not hurt,” Iruka said, then corrected himself, “not physically.”
“Good,” Kakashi said, slumping back into the hospital chair. “How are you doing?” His eye bored into Iruka’s, seeing perhaps more than Iruka wished he would. It was a dark eye, but it lacked the scarlet undertone that the Uchiha clan had in their sharingan eyes. He supposed that made sense, given that Kakashi only had one of those, and it was tucked under his hitai-ate.
Still, the man’s gaze was penetrating, like he saw deeper than the surface level, much in the way the sharingan seemed to look beyond the here and now.
“I’ll recover,” Iruka said, and wished he were better at healing. If he could heal more quickly, he might be able to give Naruto more of the comfort and care the boy really deserved after such a traumatic incident. But Iruka wasn’t that hearty, he wasn’t that strong. He was just a teacher, and bad enough at even that job to fail to find a genin team that Kakashi was willing to take under his wing.
At least the elite-level Jonin didn’t seem to hold it against him, content to sit in the chair beside his bed and keep him company as he drifted off into a fitful, pained sleep.
“Hey.”
Kakashi turned slowly, his eyes pulling away from the battered body of his student, an exquisite failure only exceeded by his own. “Iruka-sensei,” he said, hearing the exhaustion in his tone so clearly that he had no doubt the other man could hear it, too.
“He’s going to be all right,” Iruka said, coming up beside Kakashi, glancing down at Naruto. “He’s been through worse.”
Kakashi nodded. “He’s very durable.”
Iruka turned, frowning. “I meant – of course he’s healing well, Tsunade-sama’s work is evident. I meant Sasuke.”
Ah. Right. Losing a best friend. It wasn’t exactly the way Kakashi had lost his own friend, back when he’d been on a genin team of his own, but the pain was likely no less easy to ignore. At least he’d been able to visit the memorial stone with his regrets.
“Heartbreak is harder to treat,” Kakashi acknowledged. “But not impossible.”
“He’ll be all right,” Iruka said again, firmly. “Sasuke, too.”
Kakashi turned to Iruka, feeling his chest squeeze tight. “He’s turned traitor, Iruka.”
“For now,” Iruka murmured thoughtfully. “Naruto believes in him, though. And I believe in Naruto.”
Kakashi wasn’t sure what to make of that. He wished, faintly, that he had that sort of faith in his friends. “I don’t know if I have that kind of confidence.”
Iruka chuckled lightly, reaching over to pat Kakashi’s shoulder in a friendly sort of way. “That’s all right,” he said. “I have enough for the both of us.”
Iruka was trudging home from work, knowing his misery was poorly hidden, but lacking the energy to do anything about it. He picked up a half-price bento as he passed the supermarket, and by the time he reached his apartment complex, he was ready to fall into bed and wish for the day to be over.
Before he could set foot inside his apartment building, though, he heard someone call out from behind him.
“Iruka-sensei!”
Iruka turned, and was only mildly surprised to see Kakashi – not many people followed him home without an invitation, but Kakashi was the sort who tended to invite himself along to places. He thought it was probably because the man had the sort of anti-social friends who either also invited themselves everywhere (such as Maito Gai), or who would never invite anyone anywhere, and thus had to be forced into personal interactions (like most other jonin in Kakashi’s circle, the man himself included).
“Kakashi-san,” Iruka greeted, turning to wave. “I’d invite you in, but I only bought one bento.”
“That’s all right,” Kakashi said, lifting a large box wrapped with a furoshiki. “I brought my own.”
Iruka blinked a few times, not sure how to respond to this. “All right,” he said slowly. “Care to join me for dinner, then?”
“Thank you,” Kakashi said, following Iruka up the stairs to his cramped little apartment, kindly not commenting on the general state of clutter the place had descended into as Iruka’s mental state had declined at a similar rate of decay.
“Have a seat,” Iruka pointed to the kotatsu. “Do you need to reheat that?” he indicated the bento Kakashi was carrying.
“That’s all right,” Kakashi said, setting the box down and unwrapping it, lifting up the first box. “I brought enough to share, if you’re amenable.”
Iruka felt his brows rise in surprise, but he wasn’t going to turn down free food. “I’ll just pop this in the fridge, then,” he said, heading to the kitchen to set his bento aside. He’d eat it for breakfast in the morning, instead. Once that was done, he filled his kettle with water and popped it on, walking back out to the main room while he was waiting for the water to boil. “Would you like tea?”
“Sure,” Kakashi said, his three lacquered boxes now spread out so Iruka could see he’d indeed made enough for two people. “If you have some hot water to spare,” he held out two bowls, with what appeared to be some paste in the bottom, “The miso soup could use some hydrating.”
“Of course,” Iruka agreed, feeling vaguely confused but again, not about to refuse free food. He retrieved the hot water, pouring some into each bowl before also dropping some hot water into a pot along with a green tea bag and then plucking two mismatched teacups from his cupboard.
“Here’s the tea and soup,” he said, returning to the main room. “Mind if I ask what’s the occasion?”
“You seem lonely,” Kakashi said. “And I thought you could use some company.”
“Damn,” Iruka said, settling down at the kotatsu across from Kakashi. “I didn’t realize I was quite that transparent.”
“Not as such,” Kakashi admitted, taking one of the bowls of soup and tea from the tray Iruka had carried out, and then handing Iruka a plate that had already been loaded with a bit of each of the foods he’d brought in his boxes. “But I think after so many years, there I possess a level of familiarity with your general… existence … that surprises even me.”
Iruka chuckled. “Fair enough,” he said. “And you’re right. I am lonely.” He stirred his miso soup with a pair of chopsticks, watching the wakame seaweed swirl for a moment before adding, “I miss Naruto. It’s …emptier, here. Without him.”
Kakashi hummed in understanding, taking a bite of white rice before washing it down with a sip of his own miso. “I know what you mean, he’s got the sort of personality that fills a room.”
Iruka chuckled. “You got that right,” he said. He took a bite of rice himself, chewing thoughtfully before finally admitting, “I think I just haven’t quite accepted the feeling of abandonment despite the number of times I’ve felt it, it hurts every time.” He felt his heart clench a bit, glancing nervously at Kakashi, wondering if maybe he’d gotten a bit more honest than the man was expecting from a shared meal.
But the man was simply nodding. “Accepting the absence of the precious people in your life isn’t easy.”
“Absence,” Iruka echoed. “That’s the word I was looking for, I think.”
Kakashi glanced back at him, his cold gray eye flashing slightly. “I think the difference between feeling and absence and feeling abandoned is largely academic.”
“Right,” Iruka said. “But there’s something more personal about abandonment, I think. Like –” he gestured then, at his eye. “Like meeting a soulmate, and them never talking to you about it.”
Kakashi tilted his head lightly. “You met your soulmate? When?”
“Years ago,” Iruka chuckled. “They never came to me - I met them sometime during the course of the day, but–” he ducked his head. “This is embarrassing – I think they were an ANBU? In a whole group of ANBU. So I had no way of knowing precisely which ANBU’s eye was the one to change.”
Kakashi frowned lightly. “An ANBU? And they never came to find you?”
“Maybe something to do with secret identities,” Iruka said. “I guess I wasn’t as important as keeping Konoha’s secrets, you know?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Kakashi said. “Being in ANBU doesn’t require you to pretend you haven’t met your soulmate.”
Iruka shrugged. “You’d probably know better than me. All I know is one day, I go from two colors to one.” He gestured to Kakashi’s covered eye, laughing a bit bitterly. “What about you? Did you find your soulmate, before…?”
Kakashi shook his head slowly. “I feel if anyone could be accused of abandonment in my case, though, it’s me.”
“It’s not like you did it on purpose,” Iruka argued. “So you still haven’t met them?”
“If I have,” Kakashi said, slowly, “I wouldn’t know. I still had two colors when my soulmate eye was damaged beyond repair.”
Iruka nodded. “So we’re in roughly the same position, I suppose.”
Kakashi shrugged. “I barely remember the color anymore. It was hard to tell the difference, without looking close.”
“Me too,” Iruka chuckled. “Still, I wish…”
Kakashi frowned slightly. “What color?”
Iruka looked back at him. “What do you mean?”
“Your soulmate. What color was their eye?”
Iruka shrugged. “Similar to mine, honestly.” He considered the question for a long moment, then said, haltingly. “Similar to yours, too.”
Kakashi was staring at Iruka so hard it was like he was trying to look through him. “How similar?”
Iruka’s breath caught in his throat, and for the first time, he allowed himself to really look into Kakashi’s eye. It was dark, almost as dark as obsidian. But in the light of the setting sun, peeking through his apartment window, he could see the barest fleck of…
No. There was no way…
“What about your soulmate?” Iruka demanded. “What color was their eye?”
“Dark,” Kakashi said, voice so soft it was nearly inaudible. “But in the sun…”
“A little bit brown?” Iruka asked, breathless.
Kakashi nodded, like he was afraid speaking might break the spell.
Iruka couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away from Kakashi’s. “Do you think…?”
“I don’t know,” Kakashi said. “There’s no way of knowing.”
For not the first time, Iruka wished things could have been different. That he could have real, concrete confirmation. But maybe he didn’t need that. Maybe they could build a bond all their own, between the two of them, soul bonds be damned. “Maybe we don’t need to know.”
Kakashi nodded slowly. “I don’t care if I ever find out who my soulmate was meant to be,” he said. “If I even have one, anymore. You’re enough for me.”
“Good,” Iruka said, feeling that warm flush of acceptance that he’d grown so unaccustomed to in his life of hardship. “You, too. I don’t want anyone else.”
Kakashi coughed awkwardly. “Is this the part where we kiss?”
Iruka laughed, then lurched towards him, over the kotatsu. “Hell yes.”
The dinner ended up needing reheated after all.
… much, much later.