Training Kakashi.

Lesson Three: Strength.

On Friday, Iruka woke up to a silent apartment. He blinked a few times to clear sleep off his face and realized almost instantly that he was alone. The awkwardly set cup of coffee waiting by his night stand and the large piece of paper underneath it only cemented his suspicions that Kakashi had left the building. Carefully, he slipped the paper from under the plate and felt a small smile tug at his lips. 'Thanks, K.' was scrawled in a handwriting that was endearingly illegible, but Iruka was well versed in the art of decoding worse – his students even dared to call it homework – and it only made him feel oddly warm inside. Around the simple words, eight paw prints signed along their master, which only made the Chuunin wonder how much it had taken Kakashi to get those ink marks; if anything, after nearly a week of finding dog fur even under his pillow, Iruka was starting to get a clearer picture of each of their personalities.

Guiltily, he was willing to admit he had never thought dogs could have personalities, and such strong ones at that, but then again, any dog that had been trained by Kakashi had to be something special.

Unrolling from the bed with a strange sort of detached laziness, Iruka held the cup of coffee in one hand and his strange thank-you card in the other as he entered the main room of his apartment. It looked spotlessly clean in an unnatural way that showed it hadn't been Iruka who had cleaned it. He wasn't living in dirt all the time, of course, but he always had things to do that were less tedious and generally more important than cleaning thoroughfully. For some reason, the image of Kakashi actually cleaning seemed blasphemous and wrong in all sort of awkward ways, which was why Iruka firmly vowed to not think about it. He was, however, eternally grateful for the fact his house didn't seem infested with fur and paw prints and general dog-related things that tended to put a rather annoying strain on his simple, easy life.

Perhaps he was reading too much into it, but he had his own suspicions on Kakashi's Ninken and their presence in his apartment. The dogs weren't there to protect their master – their master was hardly helpless or in need of rescue, except from, occasionally, himself – nor were they an intimidating force, at least not after the first impression. They were there because they kept Kakashi's mind busy, they chased away the boredom of being locked down because of his own recklessness.

Quite simply, Kakashi was lonely.

The thought amused and intrigued Iruka ever since he first grasped a faint notion of it. It had chased him the last few days, during his classes and his lunch breaks, leaving behind bewildered emotions that had no proper name yet. Kakashi was lonely. Iruka knew loneliness very well, like an old drinking buddy that had been at his side since before he knew what drinking or a buddy was. Iruka remembered meeting Kakashi the first time, the lazy, almost condescending air of a Jounin that knew himself safe in his own skin, the quiet, but not quite threatening whisper of power as he walked purposely into the Hokage's presence.

Iruka was willing to admit that Kakashi fascinated him in ways he wasn't entirely sure he could explain. He was sure he wasn't the only one that was captivated by that strange mix of careless attitude and deadly mystery that made up one of Konoha's greatest shinobis, yet at the same time, his presence had always been intimidating before. You couldn't be in the same room as Hatake Kakashi and forget, even for a moment, that he was the Copy Nin, the legendary prodigy that knew over a thousand sure ways to kill you very dead without breaking so much as a sweat.

But the last days, those long, torturous days in which Iruka confirmed his suspicious that he was just not a loved child of the gods, in which every possible disaster happened to him and then some… it had served to lift a metaphorical curtain over the strange, complex puzzle that was Kakashi. He wasn't intimidating when he couldn't really move and he wasn't all that blunt when you actually paid attention to the underhand sarcastic remarks.

Kakashi was friendly in a way only a deadly, poisonous, mean-looking cactus could be, but just as endearing as a fussed up kitten that had gotten caught up in the rain. Iruka barked half a laugh at the mental image and shook his head at himself; he was going insane.

He sat down in the main room of the apartment, the living room that had housed Kakashi for six long nights, still cradling his note and his coffee and turned to the window to drink. It was automatic, the gesture that had allowed him to eat in the same room as Kakashi and still not look at his face. Iruka watched the sun peek lazily from beyond the horizon, casting a warm, familiar glow over the city – living in a sixth floor had its advantages – clearing the blurred lines one by one until it became a bright image of healing wounds and promising future.

There was no more scent of dogs in the house, no more stray hairs that stubbornly clung to everything he owned and no more sardonic discussions about the quality of red meat between eight highly intelligent canines and one very amused Jounin. There was silence and just a little bit of melancholy in the air.

There was no Kakashi in Iruka's apartment today.

"All is as it's supposed to be," the brown haired Chuunin muttered absent mindedly as he raised the lukewarm liquid to his lips.

He spluttered in shock and coughed violently, seemingly intent on spitting out his tongue, his trachea and at least one of his lungs clear out of his body; but whether it was because the coffee tasted like the bastard love child of an ashtray and a three-day old carcass or because he happened to look at the other side of his note and it turned out to be one of the extra special Come Come Paradise illustrations from the glossy paper edition, it was unclear.

--

There were two types of days for Kakashi, good days and bad days. Good days could be defined by a great number of things: a nice meal, sunshine, a good thunderstorm, clear advance in training, a new issue of the Come Come series, winning one of Gai's silly challenges… basically anything that didn't herald a bad day. And that was mostly an attempt to part Kakashi with his most valued possessions: his life, his duty and his friends. Thus, in the great scale of things, Kakashi had a fair number of good days when compared with the bad ones, but he was not going to get careless about it. He enjoyed every moment, treasured every second and hoped for the best.

This was a very simple system and he figured he was doing something right, because he had survived until now.

But now something was nagging at him, six days that didn't exactly fit into either category. Six days he spent regaining use of his body and his chakra in the living quarters of one Umino Iruka. Those had been… strange, in a way that being the leader of a team that included awkward love polygons of no definite shape, one very enthusiastic, overly loud vessel for the Kyuubi, one overly dramatic survivor from a lost clan that could take brooding and angsting to a whole new level and a pink haired girl with a split personality disorder and a complex on regards to her forehead couldn't even compare.

Kakashi was at loss.

Kakashi was never at loss.

Kakashi stood on even ground with his enemies and analyzed his problems until the Logical and Wise course of action came to him by either sheer genius or sheer dumb luck. Kakashi always knew what to do, because really, he was convinced nothing was ever as dire and complicated as others made it out to be. Everything had a solution, perhaps not a nice solution, but a solution in the end; it was just a matter to think straight, keep emotions away, stay cool and play it safe.

But this was complicated and it was driving Kakashi up the proverbial wall and slamming his head right into the proverbial ceiling.

Before he left with Jiraiya, Naruto never wasted a moment to shower praise and kind words about his previous mentor. Kakashi hardly paid attention to it, because he was not the type to get jealous about the relationships that existed around his teammates. He'd humored the kid a few times, even pat him in the head once – and nearly had his hand bitten off for his efforts, as well – but it had never seemed too remarkable. Umino Iruka was a teacher in the Academy, that was as much as Kakashi knew and that was all he had needed to know.

Until that thrice damned Chuunin exam came and fucked everything backwards.

The village had suffered considerable damage, the Third had been killed, Sasuke had been marked, Naruto had almost-but-not-quite died more times than Kakashi could care to remember and things had generally been Not Good. And amidst the chaos of those turbulent days, one memory stood up as a sore thumb in the Jounin's mind: a rather infuriated Chuunin demanding to know on what grounds he dared to put up his team up for the examination.

To be completely honest, Kakashi could name more than a handful of reasons why it had been a Bad Idea – Sasuke's name came up many times in that list – but it had also proven to be good in that awkward sort of way that Kakashi had resigned himself to be his hand in life.

After the initial butting of heads, Kakashi had dismissed Iruka's concern as over-protectiveness of his students and nothing else, perhaps even a queer sort of expression of his teacher-student bond with them. But then he'd found out more about Iruka's relationship with Naruto, and Kakashi was intrigued.

People, as a rule, ran away from the boy, seeing the creature he held inside rather than him, and Kakashi couldn't really blame them. He had been on duty the night the Kyuubi attacked and he could methodically and in great detail explain just how bad that day had been. But not Iruka, and that was a curiosity in and of itself. Iruka had lost precious people during the attack, like many, if not everyone else in the village. Iruka had been left to grow up alone and fend for himself in life, dealing with the natural hardships of maturity on his own. Kakashi could rationalize that and see, in a strange perspective, why the usually cheerful man showed so much interest in a child like Naruto, they were oddly alike.

That was not what had Kakashi standing upside down the ceiling of his apartment, concentrating a steady flow of chakra to his feet while he carried enough weight to make Gai cry tears of overwhelming joy. What bugged him beyond words was the fact Iruka cared. Iruka cared about Naruto and Sakura and Sasuke and, strangely enough, him as well. The Chuunin, aside episodes of hilarious embarrassment that made Kakashi grin sadistically, slid effortlessly into a routine with his houseguest – plus dogs – and didn't seem overly ruffled by the whole affair. He didn't ask what the hell was going through Kakashi's mind or why he was there, and he certainly didn't ask what he had been doing that had left him so weakened. Iruka just took it all in stride with a smile, a light blush and a strangely endearing charm that made Kakashi wonder.

"You have no sense of self preservation," Pakkun informed him tartly as the apathic dog snorted in his face.

Kakashi blinked for a moment; before he realized he was standing on his head and that his feet were certainly no longer in the ceiling. He blinked again.

"Buy him flowers and serenade him all you want," the dog continued, his furry face contorted in a rather unamused expression that would have made the Jounin snort, if he hadn't been sure he would get a bite for his trouble, "but for the love of anything sacred, stop daydreaming while you're training."

Konoha's infamous Copy Nin wanted to inform his dear friend that he did not, in fact, daydream. Why, he didn't even have the proper setting! But something told him Pakkun would do what he always did when he thought Kakashi was being particularly stupid and stubborn: sleep. Thus he merely glared a little, rolled back to his feet, moved his neck a bit to get the stiffness out of it and jumped back to the ceiling to start the exercise all over again.

Exactly seventeen minutes later, he fell off the ceiling again, when an image of Iruka looking out of his window to find Kakashi serenading him with a bouquet of flowers in his right hand made its way through his muddled mind.

He found Umino Iruka to be strangely alluring in a way he hadn't thought of in a very long while. Finding people alluring like that tended to be troublesome and annoying, since Kakashi couldn't keep them at bay and they eventually wormed themselves deep into his life in ways that put them constantly in danger and made them an exploitable weakness in the eyes of his enemies.

Besides the obvious disadvantages, Kakashi faced a new, interesting challenge, but not something he had never head of: Iruka belonged to the male species, which simply made the idea to pursue this ridiculous… interest even more ridiculous and more difficult.

Not that Kakashi was actually thinking of pursuing Iruka in any shape or form, because that would be openly asking for trouble and Bad Things, and he wasn't that stupid anymore.

Kakashi chose to ignore the snickers from his beloved companions and instead settled to consider this new, bemusing development.

Hm.

--

Iruka was having a bad day, and despite the ridiculousness of it, all he could really think about was what exactly he was going to yell at Kakashi's ear for that horrid piece of… that… that thing he had left in his apartment as a parting gift.

The sharp blade whispered by his ear as he dodged instinctively.

Concentrate! Iruka's eyes slid for a second at the crowd of terrified students that had, mercifully, decided to take shelter under the shadow of a tree, figuring safety was in numbers. He was thankful his attacker didn't seem particularly concerned with the children, although that meant his single minded attention was focused on one thing: Iruka, and how he was going to be killed to death.

"You… you bastard!"

Iruka needed a plan. More accurately, he needed a plan five minutes ago, but his mind refused to work properly and that stupid, obscene piece of debauchery Kakashi had left as a thank-you note was to blame. Iruka found it strangely ironic in a way he couldn't contemplate properly, because he was too busy getting assassinated, goddamnit!

…if he were to be completely honest and objective – which was kinda difficult, with the whole sword-wielding, angry-as-hell young man howling at his face – Iruka would probably admit that the poison currently running through his veins was at fault as well.

It just wasn't fair.

"Mitzuo!" Maybe yelling at his opponent wasn't going to fix anything, but Iruka really didn't want to fight in front of the children, and much less against one of his former students. "Please stop this nonsense, you don't want-"

"Shut up!" The younger man wielded that sword like a possessed thing, swinging it dangerously close to Iruka's nose; in fact, he would already be one nose short if it weren't for his fast reflexes.

Okay, officially, the whole thing had gone from 'enraged ex-student that wants to maybe avenge a very low grade in Stealth' to 'psychopath who wants an Iruka head to hang in his wall'. If he were to steal a quote from one of his former students, Iruka would describe the situation as 'troublesome'.

The scarred man narrowed his eyes, smiled grimly and leaped into the fight; all bets were off now.

--

"Do you know why Iruka will never be a Jounin, Kakashi?" Tsunade spoke without turning to the silver haired shinobi standing respectfully – and maybe a tad bit fearfully – a few steps behind her, her eyes fixed on the group of children that were currently busy giving happy yelps of 'Iruka-sensei is so cool!' and 'way to go, Iruka-sensei!'. Kakashi wondered if this was a thick question. "He's got potential and skills, after all," the Fifth smiled almost ruefully, "but he's too kind and too much of a peace-lover. Had you ever heard about that before? A shinobi that dislikes violence."

"Hn."

For someone who disliked violence as much as the Hokage implied, Kakashi was rather impressed at the neat, effective and rather brutal way in which Iruka had disarmed, disabled and then beaten his opponent. It was a reminder to many that while he was a charming, nice person, Iruka was not someone you really messed with. He was a Chuunin, after all.

It made the… infatuation that had suddenly seized him a bit more complicated, though. Iruka could and would kick his ass when he found out, and worst part was, Kakashi would let him.

"Regardless, I want you to investigate a bit more about this Mitzuo character," Tsunade was already busy with other things, walking briskly away from the scene of the crime, "he was not yet listed as one of our missing Nins, and this worries me. There's been too much silence lately, on all fronts; this could be the first breeze of a storm."

"Yes, Hokage-sama," Kakashi bowed, spared one last glance to the sheepish-looking Iruka and then disappeared in a puff.

Tsunade wondered if the bet she had going on with Ibiki would pay off or not; she really couldn't see much chemistry between a Jounin and a Chuunin that didn't share anything else in common but their students. Then again, with Naruto in that mix, the Hokage couldn't predict anything with certainty.

Even away from the village, that boy had a way of remaining suitable for the future Hokage of Konoha.

--

"I'm still not talking to you, I'll have you know."

Iruka winced a little when Midori set her bag on the counter and glared at him with a faint sense of rightful indignation.

"I—"

"Not. Talking."

"But—"

"Sht!"

Iruka sighed in resignation, this was an argument he was doomed to lose, if anything because he had no right to debate, apparently. Midori's quick fingers poked his wounds a bit too harshly, before she extracted a balm and bandages from her bag. Iruka's injuries had been dressed properly by the medic Nins in the Academy, but Midori seemed to take it as a personal insult if he refused to let her treat his wounds. She glared at him until his vest and shirt were gone and the slightly reddened bandages around his chest, abdomen and his left shoulder were visible. She was a good friend, but a bit overbearing and even exasperating on occasion.

"I can't believe you didn't tell me you and Kakashi are doing the nasty!"

A bit hung up on information, too.

"For the last time, I'm not!"

Regardless of its status of truthfulness.

"Ha," Midori cawed viciously at him, pulling down on the dressings of the poison darts a bit more roughly than strictly necessary, "I know what I saw, Mister, or are you calling me blind as well?"

"There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, you know!" Iruka snorted. "You just refuse to listen!"

"Lies!" The puncture wounds were clean and properly cauterized, so Midori only rubbed a bit of the salve and refastened the bandages. Iruka winced from the vindictive strength behind the motion. "You had your face buried in his crotch. Your face. In his crotch. There's but one 'reasonable explanation' for that, and it is you're getting it on with one of Konoha's deadliest and you didn't even bothered to gossip." Midori paused. "Also, I feel cheated, you could have told me you were gay, you know."

"It's not like that!" Iruka felt like banging his head against the wall. "I tripped!"

"This is from the guy who sent that Mitzuo brat to my office with a concussion and a handful of broken bones, aside showing off incredible skill in disarming and humiliating him?" Midori snorted. "You tripped. Of course, everything seems clearer now, only, you know, not."

"It was an accident! I stepped on one of the dogs and I tripped!" Iruka was getting a bit annoyed here; he was injured, poisoned, tired and aching. Couldn't something go his way, for once?

Midori sank her fingers around the gash in his chest, from the first strike of the sword, which he hadn't been fast enough to dodge; he'd been too busy taking a couple of poisoned darts at that moment. She seemed to deem everything in order, because she merely applied another doze of that horribly sticky salve and wrapped the wound again.

"What I'd like to know, though," she grinned maliciously at him, "is who's bottoming tonight. I hope he's considerate, playing rough in your current state wouldn't be wise."

Iruka turned red, then green, then purple and finally plum before he bellowed, at the end of his rope and the top of his lungs:

"I'm not fucking Kakashi!"

He immediately turned ashen white when he found said silver haired Copy Nin leaning against the doorway, staring at him almost curiously, one eyebrow quirked upwards. Midori eeped a bit, while Iruka made a mental list of all the things he hadn't done and which he would never do now, because Kakashi was hundred percent going to kill him. Mother Earth was still away on lala-land and not swallowing him up as she should.

The Jounin blinked his visible eye, looking non-challant.

"Yo."