Fire Inside
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic
Summary: Kakashi's choices were usually somewhere between a rock and a hard place. This time is no different: lose his magic entirely or send it to the only available option. It wasn't actually all that difficult a decision, but the ramifications of foisting his magic off on Iruka might be more costly than he'd originally thought.
Prompt/Scenario: #41 by megyal: For some reason, Iruka gets the Sharingan for a short while.
Notes: This was such a delightful prompt to fill that I got quite carried away. Special thanks to Kiterie for catching all my bouts of stupidity.
A knock after midnight rarely heralded good news.
This was most spectacularly showcased by the time ANBU had shown up at Iruka's door to inform him that his apprentice, at the ripe age of nine, had managed to burn down an entire city block. Thankfully, the area had been condemned and deserted, and there had been no casualties; otherwise, ANBU, a delightful mix of magical law enforcement and special ops, would have been forced to execute Naruto on the spot. As it was, they had rather forcefully suggested that Iruka find a way to reign in Naruto's considerable power until Naruto had the ability and discipline to control it himself.
Given that experience it was understandable that, when he heard the solid thunk against his door, he buried his head deeper into his arm and tried desperately to ignore it. The second knock seemed more anemic than the first, trailing off as if the knocker's hand had slipped down the door at the end. Bad news.
Iruka raised his head to look blearily at the door and scrubbed his hand over his face to dislodge the post-it notes stuck there. His neck and back ached – he was getting far too old to fall asleep on a pile of research materials including books, notes, and pencils, particularly when he'd been sitting on the floor and had slumped over his coffee table.
"'Tis some visitor," he muttered. "Tapping at my chamber door." He shoved himself to his feet and stepped carefully over the precariously balanced pile of books that had collected in the narrow space between couch and coffee table. "An inconsiderate visitor, that is, who's never learned how to use a watch." His grumbling was probably uncharitable, but it helped keep the nagging fear at bay.
The minute he pulled the door open, the sharp copper tang of blood hit the air. Definitely bad news. He peered into the darkness beyond his door and fumbled for the switch to turn on the exterior light.
The dark shape crowding his doorway flinched ever so slightly when the light came on but recovered and said, "Hey."
"Kakashi?" Iruka backed out of the way, allowing Kakashi room to get inside. The metallic bite in the air grew stronger when he passed. "Your blood or someone else's?"
"A little bit of both, but mostly mine." Kakashi staggered through the living room and towards the kitchen. "Could use some healing."
All thoughts of sleep, the late hour, and the still-uncompleted research sitting on his table vanished. "Of course," Iruka slipped past him and into the kitchen, gently tapping Kakashi's shoulder in passing. "Come on."
It took several moments for the water in his sink to run hot – one of the disadvantages of having a water heater that already had rust on it by the time World War II rolled around. He squirted soap into one hand and splashed the other under the water to test the temperature, Iruka said over his shoulder, "You do realize this is not my forte." When the water was finally more than lukewarm, he scrubbed his hands up to his elbows, "You should have gone to Tsunade or Sakura."
"Couldn't make it."
Iruka paused in the process of shaking his hands off over the sink and turned to take in Kakashi leaning heavily against the doorframe leading into the kitchen. Not for the first time, he wished Kakashi didn't make a habit of wearing a soft black mask over the bottom half of his face. It made it almost impossible to read his expression. "It's that bad?"
"Worse," Kakashi grunted.
He slapped his hands across the nearest dishtowel in a vain hope that it would leave them reasonably dry. The books and papers gathered on his table weren't crucial - he had no qualms about just sweeping them to the floor - but he'd rather not get them soaking wet. A second pass of his arm cleared the table of any remaining detritus and exposed the protective circle burned into the surface of the table. "They've patched you up enough over the years that you should be a sight better at this than I am." Iruka tapped his orbital bone just to the left of his eye, indicating the complex tattoo that encircled Kakashi's eye.
"Couldn't concentrate enough." Kakashi had shambled across the room on his own steam but didn't offer any complaint when Iruka slipped an arm under his armpit and around the small of his back and helped him up onto the table. "Abdomen," he muttered, sounding for all the world like uttering that single word had taken an effort on par with moving a mountain.
Iruka's eyebrows shot up, and he carefully helped Kakashi lift his legs up onto the flat of the table. After a moment's hesitation, he settled his hands across the spines of Kakashi's hips - they were more pronounced than usual. Honestly, Iruka'd asked Kakashi's oversized pack of familiars to make sure he was eating enough. He'd have to have words with them later. Now, however, Kakashi was probably bleeding into his stomach or intestines or both, and the only silver lining to the injury cloud was that he hadn't been eviscerated. Iruka pulled gently on Kakashi's hips, shuffling him around until he was more-or-less centered in the protective circle.
The worn gray t-shirt emblazoned with a spiky logo and the words 'Lucky Seven,' all crudely rendered in Sharpie, had seen better days. From mid-torso down, it was a uniformly dark red color. Blood and a lot of it. When it came to injuries, Kakashi never did anything halfway.
After placing a reassuring hand on his chest, Iruka sprinted for the bathroom at the back of his apartment. One of the joys of magic was that you simply didn't need some of the more mundane things, but if he was going to tackle that much blood, Iruka was going wear gloves. Dried blood was a beast to get out from under your fingernails, and since he was going to spend the next several minutes convincing Kakashi's blood that it really should stay all together and inside his body, he didn't really fancy the inevitable weak tugging from those small bits trying to get back to their master.
"I hope you're not allergic." Iruka snapped the latex gloves around his wrists and brandished a pair of medical shears. The injury was so fresh that it might have happened on Iruka's doorstep which meant that, mercifully, Kakashi's shirt wasn't dried into his wound. He set the shears aside with a sigh of relief - Kakashi may never have admitted it, but it was one of his favorite shirts - and peeled the fabric back.
To the layman, all magic was strange, but once said layman learned what to expect, magic became no more mystical than changing a tire or unclogging a toilet. It had materials, tools, and steps that, if followed with the right application of power, would get the desired result 99% of the time. But even in that framework, healing magic was still downright bizarre. All wounds were different, so why develop a spell to heal this particular gash when it wouldn't work on the next one? No, with healing magic you simply applied your own power and tried to right the discontinuities piece by piece.
In layman's terms, you pictured the muscle or artery or skin whole again, zapped it, and hoped. It required a fairly good working knowledge of anatomy, an excellent imagination, and a thorough catalog of the injuries. No point in putting the skin back together if your patient continued to bleed out on the inside. All that did was make the scene less messy.
Iruka grabbed a flashlight from the kit, muttered under his breath to sterilize it, and aimed it at the puncture in Kakashi's abdomen. The wound was fairly small but was bleeding profusely, all of which made it hard to see what the actual damage was. A splash of water cleared off the worst of the wound, but it continued to bleed sluggishly and would continue to obstruct his view if he didn't do something. He traced a haphazard circle around the wound. The circle effectively put a clear shield over the wound to keep Kakashi's blood inside the body. Any blood that made its way to the shield would be gently encouraged to return from whence it came. He spread his hand over the wound, slipping a little bit of his own magic into the gash and prodding around for something that simply felt wrong. Magic abhorred breaks in someone's innate nature.
There. A shudder ran up his arm as his probe brushed past the edge of Kakashi's stomach. The wound was small, a nick at most, but was enough. Kakashi must have been suppressing both the pain and the bleeding just to make it here. Between the blood loss and the power drain, it was amazing he was still conscious. Iruka hissed in a breath and continued to poke around for any other wounds besides the muscles and skin, murmuring apologies and reassurances to Kakashi as he went.
Kakashi hid the flinches well but not well enough. Having someone investigate your insides with magic was not a pleasant experience.
Iruka breathed a sigh of relief; besides the stomach, no other major organs were hit, and he was reasonably sure he could patch that up. He sat back on his heels and closed his eyes to better clear and focus his mind. Expert healers simply pictured the marred skin whole again. When faced with the glaring reality of an injury literally inches from his nose, Iruka had problems simply erasing that image from his mind. Instead, he pictured stretching his magic to a fine thread and using it to suture the wounds closed. Over the next hour, he slowly pieced Kakashi back together.
Magic was not easy. Iruka sagged against the edge of the table. He'd burned out the majority of his power with that healing stunt. He knew Kakashi would be out for a few hours, and Iruka was not falling asleep at his kitchen table again. The short distance from kitchen to couch seemed like a marathon, but he made it and collapsed face first onto the worn fabric.
He woke to the sound of his coffee table being dragged away from the couch and creaking under someone's weight. He pried an eye open and stared at Kakashi's knee for a few seconds before he found the energy to tilt his head up enough to focus on Kakashi's face.
Kakashi ran a hand over his stomach, brows drawn down. "This feels really bizarre."
One of the problems with stitching someone together with magic was that you had to leave some of your magic behind. Iruka could only imagine how strange that would feel, but, in his defense, Kakashi had come to him. "Bite me. I told you it wasn't my forte. If you wanted medical expertise, you should have gone to someone else."
Kakashi inclined his head slightly, clearly conceding the point.
With a groan, Iruka dropped his head back down onto the couch and closed his eyes. Keeping them open was too much effort. "I did manage to save the shirt," he pointed out.
"Yes, thank you for that." There was a smile behind the words.
"I'm going to get some sleep," Iruka mumbled into the lumpy cushions. "You should get some too."
"The couch is awfully small for both of us." The words practically dripped with tongue-in-cheek innuendo. Ever since he'd discovered just how much he could make Iruka blush with a couple of well-placed insinuations, Kakashi had delighted in taking advantage of it. The game had escalated over the years as Iruka's reactions diminished, but it was a comfortable constant of their friendship.
Iruka summoned the energy to smack Kakashi's knee, although his hand just sort of landed on it and slid off. "Take the bed. There's no way I can move." He buried his face deeper into the cushion as he listened to Kakashi stand and shuffle towards the bedroom. Hard as it was to believe that Kakashi was sleeping in his bed while Iruka lounged on the couch, it was harder still to remember that five short years ago, Hatake Kakashi had been nothing more to him than a name dropped whenever an expert mage was needed.
After the SNAFU with Naruto, the ANBU, and the flambéed buildings, Iruka'd agonized for days until he reached the decision that Naruto needed a mage who was used to dealing with significantly more power. Luckily, mages were a dime a dozen in Konoha. Something about the city attracted them to the point that an entire sub-government had evolved to keep the mayhem under control, and Iruka'd found himself in said government leader's office asking her for advice.
Tsunade's eyes had flashed wickedly, and she'd tapped her fingers on the highly polished desk in front of her. "Actually," she'd said. "I think I may have a solution, and this is perfect timing."
As it turned out, two other apprentices had been dropped off that morning by equally desperate masters, although all of them were desperate for different reasons. Iruka still wasn't sure if Tsunade was trying to fix Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke or Kakashi or all of the above. Knowing her, it was probably the later, and it worked. Kakashi'd had six apprentices before the dynamic trio had been foisted off on him. None of the previous six had lasted more than a week. At the beginning, Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura had called themselves the 'Lucky Seven' as part joke and part wishful thinking, but the moniker had stuck, as had their presence in Kakashi's life.
Since Tsunade's gamble had paid off, it was the last Iruka had expected to hear of it, and so he had been surprised when he'd opened his front door and almost run head first into Kakashi. He'd known the name, of course – most anyone in their line of work did – and he'd seen Kakashi loitering in the back of many of Naruto's photographs, but he'd never expected any face-to-face contact.
His heart had plummeted when he'd opened the door, and he'd been about to ask exasperatedly what Naruto had done this time when he'd noticed that Kakashi was glowing. Not physically, but to anyone with even the slightest smidgen of magical ability, he had been lit up light a break-and-shake glow stick. And was just about the same shade of neon green.
"Purging Naruto's magic from me didn't do any good," Kakashi had said without any preamble.
Iruka'd choked down a truly unsympathetic laugh. "That's because it's not his magic; it's yours. That's the brilliance of this spell," he continued. "It causes the target's magic to fluoresce. Makes it much harder to get rid of." The sight of Kakashi scowling down at his hands had elicited a snort that he hadn't quite been able to cover. "Not much good for tracking anyone over a long distance, but it works great in crowds." He'd found out much later that Kakashi'd been teaching his apprentices to guard against attacks and believed there was no better teacher than experience. Sick of not knowing where the attacks were coming from, Naruto had used one of Iruka's tracking spells to level the playing field.
"You developed this to use on Naruto didn't you?"
After a long pause during which he had considered denying it, Iruka'd said, "Possibly." He'd peered at Kakashi. "Do you want me to teach you?"
"I already have this one." Kakashi'd tapped the intricate tattoo that circled his left eye. "But I wouldn't mind learning some others that he might use against me."
Iruka'd caught himself leaning in for a closer look at Kakashi's eye and sat back on his heels before he looked truly rude. He couldn't help but be fascinated – rumors about the Sharingan went hand in hand with Kakashi's name – especially because, besides the tattoos, the vertical scar, and the golden-brown iris that didn't match the right eye, it didn't look particularly magical. "Forewarned is forearmed, after all."
There'd been the slightest hint of a smile around the edges of his eyes while Kakashi'd said, "Indeed."
The Sharingan is a spectacular thing. At its most basic, it allows you to see a few heartbeats into the future and predict someone's moves, no doubt an advantageous skill for a mage who made his living fighting. To the casual observer, it would seem impossible to surprise anyone who possessed the Sharingan. Bad news for those trying to plan birthday parties, but good news for the possessor if it meant that they didn't get killed.
The problem is that the thing has to be turned on for it to work, and, unfortunately, it uses enough power to dissuade even the strongest of mages from leaving it on indefinitely. The tattoos around Kakashi's eye served as the off switch – a breath of power through the patterns and characters, and the Sharingan could be activated. The activation itself was almost instantaneous, but again, you'd have to know that you're in imminent danger and activate it before something bad happens.
No one expected imminent danger on the streets of Konoha. Sure, the plethora of mages made for exciting moments with accidental spell interactions, but by and large, the mages there were friendly types just looking to make a living.
Kakashi rarely had his Sharingan activated in Konoha unless he was training. Had he been training, he might have been able to avoid the solid chunk of wood that struck the back of his head, but as it was, lights flashed across his vision, and he sunk to the ground, fighting for consciousness. It was a losing battle.
Clawing his way back up through the darkness and the grogginess was a harder task than he'd expected. This was not the first time he'd been struck upside the head, so he was no stranger to the feeling of a concussion, but this was somehow worse. He peeled his eyes open and found symbols scratched into the ground scarce inches from his nose.
The air fairly reeked of magic, and he could hear low voices behind him, but he couldn't see what was going on. He reached for his own magic only to find it slipping through his fingers like water – the harder he grabbed, the harder it was to hold. He dropped his chin back to the floor. Suppression spells, the most sophisticated kind, didn't place the user's magic beyond their reach, but simply made it impossible to use. It was maddeningly frustrating and significantly more effective. Walls between a user and their magic could be broken down, but suppressing the ability to use magic was harder to overcome.
He tried to sit up, but was only able to raise his head a few, insignificant inches. As he moved, an enormous weight settled casually across his shoulders, knocking the air out of his lungs. He lay flat and still until the weight lifted and then drew in a deep breath before peering at the symbols inscribed in a circle around him. Now that the ringing between his ears had finally ceased and he found himself more in control of his faculties, he recognized the suppression spell interlocked with another set of symbols that created the circle. They were binding both his magic and physical strength – people tended to only protect against one or the other, which left a opportunity for exploitation and, in his case, escape. Taking control of the situation would not be as easy as he'd hoped.
"He's awake." A soft voice pointed out from over his shoulder, a small amount of concern coloring the words.
"He's not going anywhere." A woman's voice responded confidently from farther away.
Kakashi pressed his cheek into the dirt and wriggled his shoulders, testing how far he could lift them before the unbearable weight dropped onto him. If he could shift himself a foot or so, he might be able to break the circle. It wasn't the most elegant way to cancel another person's spell, and it was likely to backfire on him in decidedly unsavory ways, but he wasn't going to give them the opportunity to finish their spell.
"He's stronger than the others." The first person sounded young, possibly sick, but definitively male. The concern hadn't faded from his voice.
"I know. It's great luck, isn't it?" She was moving around the room, and the intermittent sound of chalk scratching on the hard floor reached Kakashi's ears. "And it gets us so much closer to what we need by the new moon."
Luck may have been on their side, but it was not on his. The spell only allowed him a handful of millimeters of motion in any given direction – not enough that he'd be able to get to the edge of the circle and break it.
"But, we said we wouldn't."
"We're not going to have this argument. We need this."
"But."
"No."
There was silence for a moment, and then the boy seemed to notice Kakashi's faint attempts at struggling. "He's moving. Are you sure you can hold him?" He seemed less than reassured by the snort of conviction from his companion. "It takes time to pull their magic out, and if he gets free..."
"I know who he is. Like I said, I've got him under control." the woman cut him off, her tone brooking no room for any more argument. "I'm almost ready."
Kakashi let his cheek settle back to the ground and took a few deep breaths of musty air to clear his mind and focus his thoughts. Sure, he'd been moving, but the woman was right – she had him expertly corralled. The off-handed comment about pulling his magic out set his teeth on edge. There were rumors of spells that could do that, and the results, once the caster had gotten his hands on a sufficient amount of magic, shared a space on the universal scale of bad things with world wars and plagues.
Stopping it was the only logical course of action, but with the clock ticking and his hands metaphorically tied behind his back, Kakashi wasn't awash in options. The sheer number of spells copied and stored in his mind by the Sharingan offered him limitless possibilities, none of which were helpful given his current lack of magic. He closed his eyes and searched deeper, looking for anything related to his situation, anything that might help. He had used suppression spells before; perhaps someone had countered him in a way he could use.
Tucked away and gathering dust bunnies in one of the deepest, darkest corners of his mind, Kakashi found a dark memory from ANBU that he'd tried his hardest to forget. Deaths of both his comrades and the target ANBU had been sent to subdue hung heavy on the memory. Kakashi'd had the mage trapped and impotent using a suppression spell that no one had ever been able to escape from.
Everyone had been safe right up until the point that they weren't.
Kakashi had turned right before the man had struck – soon enough to copy what he'd done with the Sharingan but not soon enough to stop him. He'd killed the mage, but not before three of his comrades had already fallen. It was a testament to how badly he'd wanted to forget his failure to protect his comrades, the mantra his father had preached, that he hadn't thought of it immediately.
The technique the mage had used had not been a way to break the suppression spell but rather a way to get around it. Kakashi closed his eyes and, instead of grabbing for his magic like a drowning man grabs at any modicum of safety, he pictured cupping his hands and letting the magic pool there. It allowed him to gather some of his magic at the cost of having any finesse when he went to use it. In the water analogy, it was like bringing a soup pot to a water gun fight. You could get someone fairly well soaked with the soup pot, but you couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be collateral damage to nearby targets.
Unfortunately, even with the magic that he'd been able to collect, any options that would help him escape required more control than he could manage. His only chance was to throw raw power at something and hope.
The miasma of magic grew suddenly more oppressive, the frequency of the vibration in the floor climbing until it was beyond of the level of hearing. He had moments only before the spell was completed, and he had no options to stop the spell outright. However, the control he lacked was built into the spell his captors were attempting – the symbols etched in the stone around him and the candles burning in a fiery circle that surrounded them all. They were going to take his magic, and if he couldn't stop it, he'd at least try to change where his magic was going to go.
Directing a spell required almost as much finesse as starting one from scratch, but Kakashi had an ace up his sleeve. Or up his stomach, if he was going to be specific with the phrase. When they'd thrown him to the floor, he'd landed on his arm and, without even moving, could feel the threads of magic Iruka'd used to piece him together.
Behind him, the woman let out a shout, and the candles around them blazed. Now or never.
Kakashi tossed his magic into the churning power that surrounded him, the threads of Iruka's magic tangled within it, and he forcefully encouraged his magic to go where he wanted. The spell railed against his efforts – the boy was coded in the incantations and inscriptions as a destination – but he was stronger than the mage, stronger than the spell, and even without an ounce of control, his sheer power was enough to overwhelm it.
Imagine ripping your circulatory system out through your skin without bothering to make any helpful incisions first. Having his magic torn out of him felt quite a bit like that. Kakashi lay there, blind with pain and panting, and could only hope that the receiving end of that spell was much more pleasant.