Swing, Teacher
The children swing together, taking turns pushing one another higher and higher. Sometimes, one of them jumps at the peak of their momentum, landing in a swift and practiced heap that the others cheer about.
He watches them from the shadow of the classroom window, and every now and then he watches for just a moment too long.
Tufts of dulling platinum hair poke out in an unruly mass atop his head, and he stands in a slouch even Kakashi would be proud of, cradling a paper cup in his hands that is filled with a substance not allowed on academy grounds.
He presses the cup to his mouth for a few seconds, hesitantly, straining his ears listening for shouts outside. When he finds one, he gulps his drink down in a few goes, and when the cup is empty he lets out a satisfied sigh, smacking his lips.
"Go for it, Tetsuo-kun!" A little girl yells, the repugnant sound of her laughter muffled through the grimy window he hides behind. "Come on, Tet! I'll give you a kiss if you jump!"
She has pale skin and a head of vapid reddish-brown braids; she has been his student for three years.
He thinks, in his disillusioned state, that perhaps it is because of her that he drinks so frequently. Whenever he has sake, he allows himself to believe that maybe in the right light, the little girl's hair would be pink like Sakura's had been.
The boy on the swing, Tetsuo, has snowy and spiked hair that remains unmoving despite the rush of wind flying past him when the swing dips down. Sometimes Naruto marvels at the boy's laziness, a mirror of Kakashi's.
Tetsuo doesn't smile while swinging, not like the others do. In a way, he resembles both Kakashi and Sasuke.
And that hurts Naruto a good deal more than it should.
He tosses the paper cup aside, bored, and it settles on top a pile of disorganized test sheets he should have graded weeks ago.
Wiping his tired eyes and swallowing, he watches out the window as the sun begins to set and a couple of the children scurry home before their parents can call them, and he wonders what his life could have been like if someone had bothered to push him when he used to swing.
A small crowd of kids dawdle behind, a group of no more than four or five. With a glance, he can tell that none of them are his students.
A tall, wiry boy stands behind the swing gripping the rusted chains, staring towards the window with a hardened look. The others sit in the grass, pulling up yellowing clumps and tossing them into the dirt, pausing to glance up at the older boy every so often.
Naruto smiles bitterly, smiles because the boy is glaring at him in a way that asks just why he is watching the kids so intently, smiles because the boy is protective of them like an older brother would be.
'Back off,' The boy's stare says.
The blonde nods in his direction, knowing that he will catch the movement. He doesn't stop looking, however…not right away.
It's hard to just tear his eyes away, because all of the children are so content to be around eachother—so comfortable, as if they were a team or a family—and because if he lets them go he might not see them again and for some reason he has to see them because he will die if he can't look at their innocent faces…because, for some reason he can't place, they are just like him, and he wants to feel a little less alone.
'My family is dead,' Naruto mouths to the boy. He isn't exactly sure why he does it, because his students are the only family he needs, and they are all eating dinner at home, safely.
This time, the boy nods to Naruto in an unspoken sympathy. They lock eyes, a thirty-six year old man with glazed over eyes, and a twelve year old whose gaze gives away so much more than he probably realizes.
In this instant, Naruto realizes that the boy is an orphan.
'This is my family now,' The boy says, without really saying it.
And Naruto wants to run outside and hold him, and tell him that he's glad the boy has found something to hold onto, someone to love, but he stops.
He stops because he is jealous, and because he has nothing to hold onto, and because everybody he once loved is dead now, just like Kakashi used to say.
'Everyone I care for is already dead,' The copy-nin said once.
And Naruto wants to repeat it so the boy understands, but when he looks at the boy again, it's as if the boy already knows.
Neither of them says anything, and yet both of them say so much.
The boy leaves with his little friends in tow, and once he's sure they're gone, Naruto goes to stand behind the swing, gripping the sides like the boy did.
There are no more children around. All of his students—his family, or so he'd told himself for so long—are all at home.
His students. His family. …But he had no family.
It was all so confusing.
Had he lied to the boy, but not lied? Did that make sense, to half lie?
He imagines a crowd of kids picking grass at his feet, but they have no faces; they move and they play and they talk, but they are just little shades of gray and he doesn't hear what they say to eachother.
These little not-faces haunt him when he goes home that night, just shadows in his bedroom that whisper to him in not-words.
And when he wakes up for work the next morning and finds his students seated obediently in rows, waiting for him to come and learn them something, he realizes again (but seemingly for the first time) that these are not his children, not his family.
He drinks again that night, another wave of sake flushing down his constricted throat as he looks out the window, and he stands a little more stiffly than before, not listening this time, not hearing Ayumi proclaim her love to Tetsuo as usual.
He doesn't hear Ayumi at all, because she is so much like Sakura that it nearly kills him.
(I'll give you a kiss if you jump, Sasuke-kun!)
…Because God only knows that these words have broken him before, and he will not put himself through that again. He can't.
So he grades the tests he was meant to finish forever ago, before he started keeping watch of the children at the swing.
He got out his red checking pen, intent on handing out good grades, but by the time the pile of papers was finished, ninety percent of the class had failed.
When the term is up, Naruto stops teaching at the academy.
He stops, because the students who failed are not his children…and because, they failed.
And it was his fault.
On the night the term ended, Naruto swung alone.
(I'll jump, Sakura-chan.)
Author's Notes: I was very iffy about this one. Again, exploring another style of writing.
If you hated it, go ahead and say so. I already have.