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Touchstone Chapter 2
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Tsunade glanced out the window where she could just make out the very tips of silver hair poking up over the edge of the windowsill. She snickered into her tea. Here's a man who has faced down countless enemies, and he's too scared to ask one of his fellow shinobi for a favor. I'm never gonna let him live this down. The soft knocking on her door brought her out of her thoughts, and she smiled up at the chuunin as he leaned around the doorframe.
"Ohayo, Hokage-sama. Shizune said that you needed to see me." Iruka stopped in the open space between her desk and the door, as if he was unsure if he should come any closer.
She waived him forward, "Please, sit." She barely hid a smile when he perched on the very edge of the chair, hands shoved under his thighs and shoulders hunched up slightly. She could only guess at what was going through his mind, but the general rule was that if you got asked to sit down in the hokage's office, you were usually in trouble. Mission assignments took scarce minutes, so there was no point in settling in for the long haul. "Tea?"
Iruka accepted the cup and sipped it hesitantly, watching her as she drank deeply and stretched back into her chair. "So, Iruka, how much do you know about ANBU?"
"Eh? Just the basics." He leaned forward to set the glass down on the corner of her desk. "Why?'
"Have you ever heard the name 'touchstone'?" She studied his face, watching as the brows drew down and the chuunin thought about her question. After a few seconds, he shook his head.
"Alright, listen. Each active ANBU member has a person called a 'touchstone.' They're usually a trained medical shinobi or someone who's a close personal friend – boyfriend, girlfriend, etc – and their job is to keep their respective ANBU members sane." She leaned forward. "Do you understand why?"
Iruka nodded slowly, clearly processing the information that she had given him. "Intense missions tend to give shinobi tunnel vision. The only thing they can think about is completing the mission, and it's hard for them to get out of that mindset."
She nodded, leaning forward and lacing her hands together. "But the reality for an ANBU member is much worse. When they are pulled out of that mentality, they have to deal with what they've done. Being a touchstone means being there for them, both before and after they return to normality, allowing them to know that no matter what they've done, they're not alone. A touchstone needs to be competent, dependable, and strong, because one person relies solely on them to bring him back from the brink of darkness." She leaned forward, studying the play of emotions across his face, the most prominent of which was: what does this have to do with me? "Sarutobi-sensei held you in very high regard; he even asked for your advice on several occasions. Or at least that's what your file says."
She smiled as a blush spread across his checks, and he freed one hand to scratch at the bridge of his nose. "H-hai, Hokage-sama. Once or twice. But I'm not sure if I really understand…. You want me to be a touchstone?"
His eyes widened when she shook her head, "No, one of our ANBU wants you to be their touchstone."
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Pressed up against the wall underneath her window, Kakashi winced. You couldn't have been a little more blunt, could you?
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"One of...?" Iruka dropped his hand back to his lap, staring at Tsunade in disbelief. He wasn't even entirely sure that he personally knew any ANBU members. "Who?"
"Hatake Kakashi."
"Kakashi….sensei?" Iruka blinked slowly, trying to process all the new information. He didn't know the copy-nin very well – though he clearly remembered their encounter before the chuunin exam, and he found it very hard to believe that Kakashi considered him a competent, stable shinobi after that. Maybe Pakkun had put in some good words for him after the whole incident with Mizuki, but he hadn't really distinguished himself with that either. The single question in his mind made it past his lips before he could stop it, "Why?"
"I didn't ask. If it makes you uncomfortable, you can say no. We will find someone else."
Iruka looked up quickly from his contemplation of his hand "Ah, no, that's okay, hokage-sama." He felt the blush start to spread across his cheeks again. "It would be an honor. If Kakashi-san asked for me, then I'll do what I can to help one of our elite."
He watched Tsunade's gaze slide off him and over to the open window to his left, a small smile flickering across her lips, and he followed her line of sight, wondering why the shuttered windows across the street were so amusing.
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Iruka walked back to his classroom in a daze. He just couldn't fathom what had inspired Kakashi to ask for him, but what continued to nudge at the edge of his thoughts was the deeper fear that had settled in his heart and was repeating Tsunade's words over and over again. One person relies solely on them… What if I fail? He had promised to do what he could for the jounin, but what if his best just wasn't good enough?
As he approached, he could hear a small ruckus of laughter and shouting coming from inside his classroom, though he barely noticed it, he was so caught up in his thoughts. His meeting with Tsunade had lasted a little longer than his free period, and the pre-genin had been left to their own devices for a good five minutes, which was easily long enough for them to turn the normally pristine classroom into something that more closely resembled ground zero of a large bomb. Sheer reflex caught the chalk-covered eraser that was shoved into the top track of the door, and he was only pulled out of his internal reflection when he heard an embarrassed coughing amid all the disappointed moans that their trick had failed.
"Ano, Iruka-sensei?" A petite girl with pigtails in the front row looked up at him, shoulders hunched over and looking particularly unhappy what the rest of her classmates had tried.
"Hai, Kamiko-chan?" She reminded him a lot of how Sakura used to be, and he was pretty sure that she would have been cheering – internally, of course – if they had succeeded.
She held out a folded piece of paper to him, "This was tapped to the door when we got here. I thought the others might hide it if I left it up there." She whipped around to glare at her companions when they started making rude noises and pulling faces.
"Ah, thank you." He thought about opening it, but the muffled pop and smell of smoke drifted up from the back of the classroom, and he slapped the note down on the edge of his desk, spinning around. "Sit down!" With a concerted effort, he shoved his worries about Kakashi and being his touchstone to the back of his brain; the most important thing now was keeping his classroom and students in one piece, which was, considering two of the boys in the back were pointing training knives at each other – where had they gotten those? – no easy feat.
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The wind swept through the training area, rattling the adjacent chain-link fence and pushing the ends of Iruka's loose hair across his face. He wrinkled his nose as the ends tickled it and brushed them back, turning to survey the surrounding landscape before checking the folded paper again.
1600 – meet Anko at training area 10
While Anko was certainly more respectful of the human convention of time than Kakashi was, she was still known for habitually being a few minutes late. As he watched the hands on his watch tick past 1610, he wondered whether she had decided to take her lateness to the next level.
The kunai burying itself hilt-deep in the ground between his feet was definitely not what he'd expected.
He immediately followed the trajectory back and saw Anko standing in a tree not far from him, fists planted on her hips. "Iruka!"
"Anko-san?"
She leaned forward slightly, an evil smile licking around the corners of her mouth, "Dodge." She suggested.
"Eh?"
"Dodge, Iruka." The evil smile completely took over her expression. "I won't miss this time."
With that short warning, the attacks came fast and furious. He leapt backwards as another set of kunai hit the ground directly where he'd been standing, and he continued to backpedal as more weapons followed the first.
A shift in the air pressure drew his attention around to behind him, and he half-turned, barely seeing the snakes before they hit him, hard in the side. One final kunai thrown from the front imbedded itself in his shoulder, and he bit down on his lip to keep from gasping in pain as he crashed to the ground.
Anko's snort of disgust was the only break he got.
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By the time she'd finished, the sun had sank below the horizon, and he was on his hands and knees, panting for air and starting to realize how a pincushion usually felt. He didn't even have enough energy to raise his head when her feet came into his peripheral vision. "W….w….why…are we doing this?"
Anko settled down in front of him, crossing her legs, "Sometimes, the ANBU cannot recognize that he's returned home; he cannot distinguish between his touchstone and an enemy. Touchstone's get hurt on a fairly regular basis, at the hands of their ANBU."
Iruka slowly righted himself into a kneeling position, pushing his hair back with an enormous sigh. "So you're training me to dodge?" He resisted the urge to point out that if the copy nin decided he was an enemy, no amount of training with Anko would keep him alive.
Anko nodded, clambered to her feet and pointed her finger at him. "Go home. Clean up. And meet me back here on Monday. We're doing this until I think you're ready."
As she vanished, Iruka dropped his head down against his chest, trying to ignore the blood running down the back of both arms.
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The floorboards creaked underneath him as he plodded slowly up the stairs. Fishing his keys out of his pocket was easily the hardest thing he'd done that day, and he would have seriously considered just sleeping in the hallway, if only he trusted his neighbors not to harass him. The shinobi he shared a floor with took the end of the week as an excuse to go out and get completely plastered. Kotetsu and Izumo had actually fallen through his door one night, both in various states of undress and looking very surprised that Iruka was standing in the middle of 'their' living room in pajama pants.
After three tries to get the key into the lock – he'd missed on the first two – the door opened, and he stopped only to slip his shoes off in the entryway before continuing straight to his bed and collapsing face down. He knew he should get cleaned off and bandage some of the deeper wounds, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to stand up for longer than a couple of minutes in the shower.
His eyes drifted halfway closed, and his mind settled somewhere between awake and asleep.
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Over the past couple of hours, the roof he'd perched himself on had grown increasingly uncomfortable, but he'd been debating with himself – and Pakkun, though the dog had just shrugged it off and pointed out that he really didn't care – about whether or not he should actually use the door.
The debate had ended with him deciding that he was trying to get the chuunin to trust him, and, while he would be probably be falling through the window on several occasions in the future, seeming slightly more normal to begin with might be a better option.
He was more than a little surprised to discover that the door to Iruka's apartment was still partially open, and he hesitated for only a second before letting himself in. He couldn't help but smile when he located the chuunin. Iruka lay on his stomach, head pillowed on his arm, and his hair was pulled halfway out of it's ponytail to partially hide his face. But as Kakashi drew closer, he noticed the scattered wounds – some of which were still bleeding sluggishly. He settled down on the edge of bed, feeling it dip with his weight and reached out slowly and pressed his hand against Iruka's shoulder blade.
The startled scream took him completely by surprise, and he tightened his hold slightly to keep Iruka from sitting up and reopening the scabbed wounds. "Really, Iruka-sensei. You're bleeding all over your bed."
Kakashi smiled happily down at him as Iruka's eyes widened and he turned his head enough that he could see the jounin. "Kakashi-sensei? What are you doing here?"
"Well, I came to see if you wanted dinner."
"Dinner?" Iruka looked very confused and still a little fuzzy from being woken up so sharply.
"Maa, you know, food, mouth, chew, swallow." Kakashi continued to smile brightly as Iruka's confusion disappeared to be replaced by a look of impatience. "Tsunade told me that you'd agreed to be my touchstone. I figured we should get to know each other." He barely managed to swallow his surprise when Iruka nodded and had to take a second to return his brain to the correct track. "But you look exhausted. I'll find you tomorrow."
"Uh, alright."
Kakashi exited through the window without looking back, pausing on the roof of the building to look at the blood still on his hands. Tsunade had explained the training regime for a touchstone to him, and while he was still stunned that Iruka'd actually agreed in the first place, he'd been pretty sure that Iruka might change his mind after the first training session. He'd expected it even more now that he'd seen what kind of beating Anko'd put Iruka through. In fact, he'd originally gone to Iruka's house to allow him the option of backing out; to ask him if he was really sure about becoming a touchstone.
But Iruka'd shown no sign that he wanted out, a fact that had thrown him completely for a loop. Kakashi had used the chuunin's exhaustion to escape because he was not prepared to talk about himself, to open himself up to someone else. Iruka. He turned slowly, heading for his own apartment. Why are you doing this for me?
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Wooo, chapter 2! Please review if you liked, or if you hated. I'm willing to tweak if people really don't like it….
Sunlight through Leaves