A shinobi is a high school student like an other – 11
Beta by Tampopo sensei – thanks thanks thanks!!
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Iruka was waiting for me some steps ahead, with curiosity written all over his face. I could see it clearly since his hair was tied on the back of his neck, and not falling in his face and hiding his expressions. It seemed that he only tied his hair back outside the school.
"What did Ko' want?"
I shrugged, the implications of what Kotetsu had said just beginning to sink in. Genma was right, as much as I hated to say it: I was stingy in civilian.
"Oh, nothing... he sure seems quite protective..."
Iruka turned away, lifted his head to the skies and resumed climbing the stairs -but he had not turned away quickly enough for me to miss the blush spreading over his face. We passed a level, and we climbed some more. His jeans weren't baggy enough to hide his ass, right at the level of my eyes, on those stairs… Bad thoughts you naughty boy. I cleared my throat.
"Er, Iruka? What happened in the bar exactly?" I said, acting the part of the guy who hadn't understood a single thing earlier.
He glanced my way, still climbing the stairs.
"The guy who talked to me, he's my uncle, Syd. He asked me to go fetch Shika before he freezes to death on the roof, and he added that Ko and me were done for now."
"Syd? Is he a Pink Floyd fan? And … Shika?"
"Hey, you're the first one to make the link by the way, I don't know if he's a fan… And Shika, that's short for Shikamaru, my cousin."
It was getting better and better. The whole family had decided to surprise me.
"As in Nara 'The shadows Tactician' Shikamaru?"
I heard his smile in his voice.
"Hey, great… Syd is a fanatic about ninja history, he couldn't help himself… My aunt named their daughter, and he named their son."
"Go on, frighten me for life, what's your cousin called?"
He laughed. "No need to be afraid of her name; she's Emily."
The stairs finally ended, three stories higher than the ground. Iruka opened the door -which opened onto the roof. We slalomed between the aerials and the solar panels to the edge of the flat roof. A brown haired boy was laying flat on his back on the wide low wall that marked the end of the roof.
"Hey, Shika, Syd wants you to go back inside," told him Iruka, once within hearing range.
The wind seemed colder here on the roof, than it had in the streets when I had arrived. Iruka's cousin -Shikamaru, couldn't be older than twelve, and was just wearing a cotton sweatshirt. I was very happy with my pullover, thank you very much.
"Pff," went the kid, "no chance of quiet..."
He rose from the wall, an expression of intense boredom etched on his face - an expression that wasn't fitting at all to so young face.
"He just doesn't want you to catch a cold -do you really want to have Alice on your back all day?"
The kid -no, Shikamaru grunted something that sounded like, 'How troublesome...' while slaloming in his turn between panels and aerials, to the door. Without looking back once at us who were staying on the roof.
Iruka stretched, raising his arms over his head and yawning for good measure. The wind was playing with the few brown hair which had escaped the hair tie. He spoke when the door slammed in the strangely quiet air.
"Shika is cool once you know him, he's just a bit weird and totally unmotivated."
"...seems I understood that part. Who's Alice?"
"My aunt, Syd's wife... by the way, how did you know about Nara Shikamaru?"
I tried to keep a steady tone of voice, the kind of voice every student uses to talk about nothing and everything… I gulped, looking away from Iruka's curious gaze.
"It was an inevitable point? Part? of my education."
It was inevitable. My voice was cold enough to give the devil frostbites down in hell.
"I…," began Iruka, obviously feeling that this little chat was sailing towards dangerous shores.
I cut him right away, a hand at the back of my neck and a lopsided smile on my face. "Sorry, I don't really like to talk about it -some other time maybe?"
As if I would be ready to talk about my father to anyone someday. But, who knows, maybe Iruka would be the exception.
Iruka smiled back at me. His breath beginning to create little clouds of white vapor. He slid his hands into his pockets, turning toward the major part of Konoha. We could see the skyscrapers of the business center, far away, and closer, the complicated roofs of the older buildings. Here and there we could see the scattered tops of the temples, churches and others religious edifices dispersed around the city according to religious denomination. We could see almost all of Konoha sprawled before us, draping herself in her clothes of light for the night who was coming fast. The light from the lampposts, windows and other beltway? creating orange-colored halos under the sky, low and heavy with white clouds.
I put myself just next to Iruka, taking in in the shared silence the sight of this city; this swarming city I was making work from the shadows; this changing city. I loved her as much as I hated her.
"You get the feeling that the whole town is yours from here," Iruka said softly. "She's so beautiful… but I've always wanted to see the sea from here…"
I slowly nodded, agreeing with him. And I could sense there was a story under his words, I could hear it.
He suddenly frowned, raising a hand as if to take his head between his hands, before letting it fall back to his side. He breathed in deeply. All this, I had learned to recognize as the signs that he had one of those headaches he had 'all the time'.
I frowned too.
"Hey Iruka, what are those headaches exactly?"
He hugged himself against the cold.
"Do you mind if we continue somewhere warmer?"
I wouldn't mind at all, the wind was beginning to pass through my pullover and slide under my tee-shirt. We left the same way we had come earier, stopping at the second level.
He unlocked the door closest to the stairs while explaining. "Syd, Shika and the rest of the family live on the third floor, over our heads. Behind, just over the bar, it's mostly storage space; and here, it's the employees' apartments. There's only mine and Sung's that are used though."
He made me enter into what I thought would be just his room. In place of a room, it was a real apartment, a kitchen with a counter opening, a door open to a bathroom, a big bed under the only but huge window, and a desk in a corner. There was a lot of space, shelves disappearing under the books, pictures and posters on the walls, a patchwork quilt thrown on the bed, clothes scattered here and there, magazines on the floor. It didn't look like my room at all, nor like my house. It was lived in and used; and , like the pub downstairs, it was a comfortable and cozy-known-some-place safe... This place felt like home, I had no other way to put it.
"Ah-er... sorry about the mess..."
"Na, don't worry, you should see my room... Sung?"
Iruka closed the door behind him, putting his key on the already-well-inhabited counter.
"SungBae Yong, it's the guy who's in the kitchen usually, but he caught the mother of all flu and he went back home -Kotetsu is doing most of his work till he come back."
He fished two bottles from his fridge and we sit -where we could-, one on the bed, one on the only chair once the stuff sitting on it had met the magazines. There was a framed picture next to me, and I couldn't help but pick it up to take a closer look. A little five or six-years-old Iruka, without his scar, was looking at me. Between a woman with the same eyes as him, fair hair and generally European looking, and a darker-skinned man, with black hair and slanted eyes. They had to be his parents.
"Aah! Don't look at that!" said Iruka, trying to grab it back.
"Why not? You're sooo cute on this picture!" I answered. He flushed violently, still trying to make me leave the picture alone.
"I was five!"
"Seriously, this picture rocks... It's your parents?"
Iruka had sat back. He nodded, but the topic didn't seem to please him. I didn't rub it in, seating the frame back where it had been in the first place. But such a picture, it was really so great... I didn't have one.
Iruka was massaging his temple with two fingers, frowning.
"What is it, those headaches of yours?"
Iruka put his head on his open hand.
"Nothing more than headaches... I've had that since forever really, I remember doing loads of tests to see if there was something wrong with me or not. Nothing ever came out of it. Anyway; it's just headaches coming and going... I got used to."
We chatted a while about stuff and things -it's not only a girls' thing this kind of chat y'know. At some point, he raised himself from the chair and put a CD into his radio, and we talked about music... Thanks Obito, for all the CDs you made me listen to, it was finally useful.
And then we talked about Itachi. There, Iruka stood up again.
"Wait, I'm gonna find this again...," he said, searching through pictures books hidden behind stacks of comics. "I've got a picture we're all in. I think we took it at the party we threw to celebrate the end of the school year and our entry into high school... I've got it."
He came back with a thick picture album, and sat next to me, opening the album on our thighs. The bottles were long since empty.
A picture took up a whole page. I recognized Iruka, Kotetsu and Itachi in it, even if the latter seemed nicer and younger here, with a large smile on his face. I didn't know the others. There was a guy with hair that fell in front of one of his eyes, another with a bandanna tied around his head and circles under his eyes, and the last one who had quite long white hair, obviously dyed.
"We stayed the same group from elementary school to the end of middle school -then, everybody went his own way. Itachi changed a lot during the first year in high school, Hayate's parents divorced... So there it is. By the way, Hayate is coming back to his father's next week, and he's throwing a party Saturday, you can come, he lives not far from your place."
"Mhm, who's Hayate?"
Iruka pointed to the one with the circles under his eyes. He named the other two as well.
"That's Izumo, he's the boyfriend of my cousin Emily –you must have crossed them in school, they're the local 'goth leaders'..."
I inclined my head, narrowed my eye and tried to imagine the normal guy on the picture clothed from head to toe in black and wearing eye-liner. Iruka laughed at my attempt.
"Well, yes, maybe..."
"And here, i-it's Mizuki."
Nothing more, and I hadn't missed the hesitation. The topic seemed closed. Iruka shut the album and turned his head toward me -while I was turning my head too, and toward him. Our faces were only a few centimeters apart. Behind us, a punk band whose name I had already forgotten was singing 'please someone touch me, dig away my loneliness, please someone please someone'. We stayed stuck like that for a while -or maybe it was only for a second. And then Iruka turned away, standing to put his picture album back in its place. It seemed to me my heart had just remembered how to beat. A blank floated between us, the uncomfortable silence disturbed only by the still playing CD.
Someone knocked at the door and put his head inside –I recognized this someone as the guy who had came to fetch Iruka from school.
"Sorry to interrupt guys, but it's time to get back to work 'Ruka."
He closed the door behind him. Iruka looked at his watch.
"Seven p.m. already?"
"I suppose it's your shift… Wasn't he the guy who came to rescue you from school?" I asked, while standing up.
Iruka replied with an 'mm'.
"It's my other uncle, Franck, Syd's baby brother… I'm sorry, but I've got to go back to work…"
"No problem, I'm going to go back to my place…"
We were almost outside when Iruka asked me, "Will you come Saturday next week, to Hayate's?"
"Give me the address and I'll be there," I answered with a little smile.
He went back inside, fished a pen from somewhere on his counter, closed the door and took my hand in his in the corridor. He had warm hands. He wrote the address on the back of my hand.
"There, you don't need to show up early, most people won't be there before midnight…"
Once back in the pub, he went behind his counter. We waved and said, 'see you Tuesday', and I left the 'Ocean's shore' behind me.
Saturday of next week, I really hoped the nice little meeting between the drug lords and ninjas wouldn't last long.
While walking in the deserted streets, I replayed the last few hours in my head… especially the 'face-to-face' episode.
I had wanted to kiss him.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO End eleventh part OoOoOoOoOoOoO
All Iruka's family are OC ( even is Syd is very influenced by Cid Highwind, from Final Fantasy VII if there were some who didn't know), Sung is an OC too, and Hayate, Izumo, Kotetsu and Mizuki are in the manga.
The punk band forgotten by Kakashi is 'Thursday', and the song played was 'Into the blinding light' on the album 'A city by the light divided'.
Thanks to all reviewers, each one of your comm help me.