Abuse and Rejuvenation
"How are you feeling, Kakashi-san?" asked the familiar voice as the chūnin slid into the hard plastic chair beside the bed.
"Like I was run over by a stampede of horses," Kakashi replied, too exhausted and worn down to be anything less than honest about it. He didn't bother trying to sit up; Tsunade-sama had mentioned something about muscle atrophy, and if the physical exhaustion was anything to go by, it was rather severe. He wasn't looking forward to rebuilding his strength from scratch.
"Oh." Iruka-sensei's voice was soft and uncertain. "Is there... anything I can do?"
Kakashi's lips almost quirked into a smile, stayed only by utter exhaustion.
"I just need rest," he said.
"Oh. Oh! I'm sorry. I'll let you rest," Iruka-sensei said quickly, sliding back out of the plastic chair before Kakashi could do more than give a bleary, uncomprehending blink.
"You don't have to go," Kakashi mumbled. The words only just made it out of his mouth before Iruka-sensei had stepped out of the room, keeping Iruka-sensei half a step inside the opened door. It was difficult to string together the thoughts and the words into something coherent. "Sorry. I didn't mean.... Why did you come?"
Iruka-sensei blushed incandescently.
"I just wanted to make sure you were alright," he said quietly. "You've been so...." He shrugged and gave a helpless look.
Kakashi blinked slowly, bemused.
"You visited?"
Iruka-sensei's blush darkened instantly, spreading all the way to his ears.
"I, um. Yes. I mean, I– I was here to see Sasuke anyway, and I just thought.... You know, I just– Are you laughing at me?"
Kakashi realised he was, indeed, huffing softly. It was as close to a laugh as his worn-out body could manage.
"Never," he said, smiling faintly up at Iruka-sensei. "You're adorable, you know that?"
"A– adorable?" Iruka-sensei blustered, now very close to brick red.
Kakashi hummed in agreement, his eye drifting closed wearily.
"You worry like a mother hen," he mumbled. "Not like me. Sasuke needs someone like you. Glad you visited him...."
He heard his own voice drifting off as he sank into an exhausted slumber.
As if in a dream, he thought he heard the whispered words, "I... wasn't worried about only Sasuke."
And then Kakashi knew no more.
◈❖◈
He saw Iruka-sensei in passing, but he saw nothing greater of the teacher for several weeks. In fact, the most engagement they had was when Kakashi pressed his palm against Iruka-sensei's to summon Pakkun in order to recapture the traitor Mizuki.
Was it really such a wise idea to send Iruka-sensei after Mizuki? Kakashi wondered even as he darted down the road away from Konoha, the clock in his head ticking on his own solo S-class mission. Of all the people in Konoha, Iruka-sensei seemed the most likely to have something inconvenient happen – like a paralysing flashback to a debilitating injury caused by someone he'd thought of as a friend attempting to murder him, for example.
But Kakashi didn't have time to worry about Iruka-sensei (or Naruto) when he was busy fighting for his own life against a pair of nasty pieces of work who'd like nothing better than to send Kakashi to his own grave. The ambush was only the first to come, if Kakashi was any judge, and the nobleman's daughter and the other hostages would be murdered soon, if he didn't get to the kidnappers' location.
Besides, he told himself with gritted teeth as he flashed with chakra-enhanced speed from blow to blow, Shizune went, too. They'll be fine.
The thought didn't stop him from being so distracted that a kunai strike, which should have been a glancing blow at best, ended up partly embedded in the meat of his thigh.
He focused a little better on his own battles, after that.
A little while later, Kakashi heard the rumble of a massive explosion in a far distance, somewhere in the direction of Konoha. Kakashi felt something go a little tight in his chest, but he kept his eyes on the tight knots in the trap wire he wrapped around the wrists of the ambushers. He did not look back over his shoulder, even after he'd sealed the unconscious nin into enclosing scrolls. He simply closed the worry into another box in the dark crevasses of his ribs and began to run again.
◈❖◈
By the time Jiraiya-sama and Naruto departed from Konoha, Kakashi wanted to crawl into his bed, curl up beneath the blanket, and never come out. His exhaustion ached in his muscles, chewed at his bones, and throbbed in his Sharingan eye. But everyone was similarly exhausted; he couldn't simply stop because he was a little tired.
He leaned on Tsunade-sama's desk and did his best not to sigh.
"And how many soldier pills have you taken in the past 36 hours, exactly?" Tsunade-sama asked, arching one perfectly-sculpted brow.
Kakashi shrugged in response. He was pretty certain that "eight," besides being a medically-inadvisable (read: life-threatening) number, would also get him either punched, yelled at, or taken off the active-duty roster. He didn't want to be punched or yelled at, and although he wanted a week to sleep and thus wouldn't exactly mind being temporarily taken off duty, Konoha couldn't afford to lose him from the roster.
Tsunade-sama sighed and flipped his refill request for soldier pills onto the desktop.
"Even if you were taking two a day – which you shouldn't be for more than two days at a time, tops – you should have at least enough soldier pills for another week and a half, brat," she said firmly, a glare fixed on him.
Kakashi wanted to wince, but he was too tired.
"So either you lie to me and tell me you lost your supply, or you explain to me why you're taking too many soldier pills. And I don't like being lied to."
Kakashi shrugged again.
"I'm being careful," he said instead. "And, with all due respect, Konoha can't afford for me to take additional time off to recuperate."
Tsunade-sama stood and slammed her palms violently on the desk.
"It won't help anybody at all if you keel over and die from soldier pill toxicity ten paces outside of our gates!" she roared. "Your request for a refill is denied for ten days! And trust me, brat, if I ever so much as suspect you're abusing soldier pills again, I'll have you taken off active duty for a month!"
Kakashi stared at her. He couldn't help it. Even if he had been abusing soldier pills – which, okay, he might have been doing – she didn't need to take him off active duty for a whole week and a half. That wasn't time for recovery; that was punishment.
"But–"
"Get out!" she growled. "Unless you want to be off duty for two weeks?"
He got out.
◈❖◈
Iruka-sensei found him staring morosely into a bowl of ramen several nights later. (Maybe a week; soldier pill withdrawals were nasty. Maybe he had needed the whole week and a half.)
"Good evening, Kakashi-san," the teacher said shyly before sliding onto a stool several spaces away.
"Good evening, Iruka-sensei," Kakashi said, feigning cheerfulness. "How are you doing?"
Iruka-sensei smiled, but there was a soft undertone of melancholy to it.
"I miss Naruto, of course," he sighed. "But I'm glad he's safe. Or, at least, as safe as he can be. How are you doing?"
Iruka-sensei's eyes pierced through the evening light to pin Kakashi to his seat.
"Fine," Kakashi lied, turning back to his bowl of noodles. "It seems a lot quieter in Konoha without Naruto, doesn't it?"
Iruka-sensei didn't say anything for a moment. Then he took a moment to order, and Kakashi wondered whether Iruka-sensei had even heard the comment at all.
But Iruka-sensei's voice broke the semi-stillness to say, "How long are you off active duty?"
Kakashi grimaced.
"Is it that obvious?"
Iruka-sensei shrugged.
"I work at the Mission Assignment Desk. I know that you get most of your assignments directly from the Hokage, but I do a lot of the filing. It struck me as strange that I haven't seen anything with your name on it for a few days even though you're in town."
"Mandatory break," Kakashi explained shortly. "It was her judgement that I had been overworking myself, so she took me off the roster for a week and a half. I'll be back on duty in a few days."
"Well, that's good," Iruka-sensei said carefully. "I hope your break has been restful, at least."
Kakashi forced himself to smile over his mask.
"It's difficult to sit around doing nothing when everyone else is working hard," he admitted for no reason at all. "A sentiment I imagine a hard-working man like yourself can relate to."
Iruka-sensei gave a wry smile.
"I can," he admitted. "But you work so hard you put the rest of us to shame, Kakashi-san. It can't be easy, never sleeping in the same place or in the same bed, never being able to eat normal meals at normal times."
"Hn," Kakashi said, somehow unimpressed by this response.
"I know time off can feel like a waste," Iruka-sensei said quietly. He murmured a thanks to Teuchi-san for his bowl of ramen, but he didn't begin to eat yet. "But we can't take care of others if we don't take care of ourselves. I remember in my first year teaching, I caught the flu, but I insisted on going in to teach. I ended up passing out in the middle of class, and my poor first-years had to fetch another teacher to take me to the hospital. It took them two weeks to stop panicking every time they thought I looked wobbly." He smiled ruefully. "There were no lives at stake that time, thankfully, but believe me, I learned my lesson."
Kakashi poked at his ramen, turning Iruka-sensei's words over in his head.
Iruka-sensei ate quietly for a few moments.
"I love onsen," the teacher said suddenly and without preamble. He didn't look up from his ramen. "Like, love onsen. Every summer and winter break, I splurge on a three-day trip to some onsen outside of Konoha. It's how I rejuvenate for the next semester of classes. It's a luxury in the sense that it's expensive, and maybe it's not the wisest use of my money, but it makes me a better teacher. I have more patience with my classes, and I design better homework and tests. When I can't go on my onsen trip, my students notice. I also tend to get sick more often during the school year, I think from the stress."
"I see," Kakashi said blandly.
"What do you do, Kakashi-san?" Iruka-sensei asked suddenly, turning to look at Kakashi again.
Kakashi started.
"Do?" he asked blankly.
"To rejuvenate," Iruka-sensei explained patiently.
Ah. "Surely you know?" Kakashi asked teasingly, letting his eye curve into a smile over his mask. "I read."
A faint blush rose like an early-evening sunset on Iruka-sensei's cheeks.
"Icha Icha," Kakashi specified cheerfully and entirely unnecessarily, merely because he enjoyed watching the way Iruka-sensei's blush darkened further.
"And had you been reading much, Kakashi-san?" Iruka-sensei asked determinedly despite his obvious embarrassment.
Kakashi blinked.
"No time," he said slowly. "But I suppose you think that's why I needed the time off."
Iruka-sensei shrugged with a noncommittal noise and turned back to his ramen, finishing it in a few quick bites.
"Thank you for the meal, Teuchi-san," he called, counting out cash for the ramen. "Have a good evening, Kakashi-san."
Well, that's not fair, Kakashi thought broodingly as he poked at his ramen once more. I'm the one who's supposed to get to say something cool before walking away.