A/N: In my head this is called Historian!Iruka AU, and yes, it's another Iruka-centric oneshot. Not an incredibly original one, either. So sue me.
Disclaimer: Actually please don't sue me, I don't own a thing. If I did, you can be sure certain recent developments would never have taken place.
A little-known fact: Umino Iruka's favourite subject at the Academy was history.
No-one knew this, even his closest friends. Perhaps it was because no-one expected it to be so: any good ninja knows that expectation shapes perception. Perhaps it was because, beneath the mask of the buffoon, Iruka has always been the type to watch, listen, and say nothing. (Trickster in more ways than one.) Iruka acted almost – almost – exactly the same in history classes. It was just that his loud interruptions tended more often to be questions, and his pranks tended more often to be harmless.
Kazehaya-sensei was good at making history interesting, for those who were willing to listen. Quietly, without talking to people about it, Iruka put his best into the subject. (It was at least partly the reason he passed the graduation exam at all.) Extra research went into every project, to the point where the twelve-year-old pre-genin Iruka knew more about history than the average ninja of any village could remember. Every question was chased up – furtively, surreptitiously: Umino Iruka, as a child, was both an intensely public and an intensely private person.
The results terrified him.
The mission desk began as a temporary job, a quick earner. It became – slowly, and in an unobtrusive, strictly secondary way – a calling.
There is a commonly held belief that the ninja who work the mission desk rarely leave it, which is true. The equally commonly held belief that they are of such low calibre as to be fit for no other work is not true, but the idea that they are fit for no other work, well.
The ninja who work the mission desk will see the face of every single ninja they hand a mission to. They will see that person's face light up, or fall, when it is received; they will see what that person looks like the next time they come in for a mission – if they ever come in again. Against such realities, ideals of service and detachment quickly fall short.
Umino Iruka has seen jounin weep, and genin fight not to. The ninja who work the mission desk know exactly how fragile Konoha really is, and their silent, discreet reinforcement, some days, is all that keeps it standing. If Iruka wanted to destroy Konoha – slowly, delicately, untraceably – he probably could. You just have to know where to press.
It has been a long time since Iruka last thought of Konoha as a bastion of strength.
Umino Iruka is famed for losing his temper, but this is a misapprehension.
He shouts, yes: ninja are children, still, in many ways. (In other ways, never children at all.) They need the voice of the angry parent to move them. It's how they live.
But he – a student of history and a close friend of the Sandaime, and therefore perhaps better informed and with a clearer view of events in Konoha for the past hundred years than anyone else in the village – he can hear Council members and commanders speak of Hashirama, and keep himself from standing up and yelling in their faces, You betray him, you betray everything he stood for! How can you stand there and use his name as if he would thank you for it?
Umino Iruka swallows his anger and turns it to iron. He is an alchemist of emotion, changing everything into something he can use.
He could scream at those who would send Konoha back into the dark ages, but that would be a waste of his anger, and he has better uses for it.
One of Iruka's side projects was an investigation into the nature of shinobi life in the time before the Five Villages were founded.
Out of determination and a natural historian's instinct – or what others might call cheek, insatiable curiosity and sheer bloody-mindedness – he managed to find out an awful lot. Long-standing clan feuds that took lives decades after their causes had been resolved. Missing-nin who had never had anything to desert in the first place, who had fallen through the cracks of a chaotic, shifting world. Revenge quests undertaken by the lost, desperate not to avenge their loved ones so much as simply to destroy, to act out their pain. Those who committed suicide. Those who did so slowly, seeking out yet more dangerous fights, taking on opponents yet further beyond their capabilities, until at last they found someone who could kill them. War orphans who grew up with war and came to understand nothing else, their entire lives centred on violence, killing and being killed.
And the collateral damage…Gods. Who wasn't collateral damage in those days? It was impossible to bring any kind of order to the whole mess, even after the fact. So many dead. Constant, constant war – not even one large one, but hundreds of small ones. Endemic warfare, that's the term the textbooks use. But that's not the word for this… this tangle of blood and death and grief that ate people. That ate lives.
And then Hashirama and the first Gokage appeared on the scene, and everything changed.
The Five Villages were supposed to make things better. A village – ties of obligation between village and ninja so that no matter what, every ninja had something to fight for and someone to back them up, their lives no longer dependent on shifting alliances and warring clans. A code – laws that everyone was held to, whether they were in the right or the wrong – whether they believed themselves in the right or the wrong – laws that would be upheld everywhere, for everyone. Five villages – powers so great that negotiation was the only recourse left, with warfare no longer an option.
They couldn't have predicted that there would be not one, not two, but three wars between the great powers of the world since that time. Warfare on a scale none of them – used to pervasive, petty skirmishes – could have comprehended.
After that project, Iruka found himself looking around at his comrades, at his peers, and what they slowly became. Feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the village, especially around its political figures. We were supposed to be hope for the future. We were supposed to be the better option.
We're not.
We should be better than this.
Fun fact of the day: Umino Iruka could probably have become a jounin if it had been something he really wanted.
He actually thought about it. The thing is, most jounin have some sort of specific, marketable skill, and Iruka just…didn't. Never has, never will. No bloodline limits, no predisposition to any kind of special jutsu, there's never been any kind of speciality with him. Except creativity, and Iruka's version of creativity tends not to be flashy. Good in principle. Bad for impressing examiners, who always assume your victory was a fluke. (This would irritate Iruka more if he didn't already know that those kinds of assumptions were what made it possible for his creativity to be helpful to him in the first place.) So it would have been difficult for him to pass the jounin exam, but not impossible.
What he is very, very good at are the basics.
Another fun fact: chuunin who are very, very good at the basics, and creative with them, often end up fast-tracked to ANBU without taking the jounin exams at all. (There they tend to go through a lot of hazing, because, as Iruka has noted before, most ninja are actually children in many ways.) Fortunately for everyone, Sandaime recognised that Iruka's own particular talents were a lot more extensive than that, and included some that would be downright wasted in ANBU. Sticking someone like Iruka in the black-ops division is just asking for trouble because Iruka is fundamentally incapable of not questioning those kinds of orders. Not because he can't carry them out; because his relentless creativity – and treasured integrity – makes him think, There has to be a better way to resolve this: the only reason I have these orders is sheer lack of imagination. (He'd probably be right, too.) Sandaime does not stick people like that in ANBU.
Phenomenal understanding of the basics is a necessity for any Academy teacher, though, and that's what Sandaime mentions to him one day.
He doesn't really think he's going to take up that offer. He is very, very wrong.
The realisation is very simple.
You know those moments where you've been half-asleep, or something, and all these different elements and ideas have been floating around in your head, and then suddenly when you wake up they've come neatly together into nice interlocking patterns?
Iruka woke up from a reverie one day, looked over at the Academy students, remembered everything he'd learned in his history side projects, and came to the conclusion: If I don't teach them, someone else will.
Politics isn't the answer. The previous generation is beyond hope – hell, the current generation is beyond hope.
For the next generation, though, there's still time.
The great clans are not best pleased when Iruka refuses to allow their prodigies to graduate early, but Iruka sticks to his guns, and the Sandaime backs him. Some days, though, it's hard.
Some days he looks at the prodigies of the class and remembers his reading, back in one of his side projects, and thinks, child soldiers are all orphans, in some ways. And all of them could be counted collateral damage. What do you think is going to happen, when they come home broken into a shape you no longer recognise?
Child soldiers are like the war orphans and the missing-nin of prehistory, with no anchor, no home, nothing but the constant violence around which their lives revolve. They know only destruction, and they will keep destroying until they are destroyed. Or until they destroy themselves. Sometimes it's the same thing. The worst part – Iruka has read the memoirs of one such war orphan, a ninja from a heartbreakingly young age – the worst part is that many of them know what they have lost. Know and yet do not know, because they understand all too well that something is missing, but because of that they will never fully be able to comprehend it. The lack has driven many into addiction, isolation, or the slow suicide of an escalating career in ANBU.
I am protecting your children the way you should be, Iruka thinks, savagely, and fights back the urge to weep.
At least he has the support of the Sandaime, though. There are some kinds of strength that must be nurtured, not forged. Hashirama fought to make Konoha a place where that strength could grow.
Iruka writes Uzumaki Naruto off as a troublemaker at first, not thinking too hard about it, not pressing too hard on the old wounds.
That's until he really looks at the boy's prankster reputation – at how seldom he gets caught, despite increasingly elaborate plans – and at how the boy has somehow managed to stay in the Academy despite his absolutely abysmal grades. Uzumaki Naruto may not have that much natural talent, but he has two qualities in spades: the creativity that makes every path the path forward, and the determination that makes the path forward the only path.
That boy, he realises, could bring hope to the village. He could – perhaps – be part of the answer that Iruka's been trying to find, alone, for years. But that's only if this village doesn't trample him into the dirt, and it will.
Iruka thinks: Not if I have anything to say about it.