My patient long suffering dear,

Second letter in one day, although technically it's already tomorrow, I'm writing this in the wee small hours, by the light of the full moon streaming in through my open window shades. Kakashi is due back in the morning, but that's only half the reason I can't sleep, I've had an emotional rollercoaster of a day. My head's still spinning, but my heart, at least, has finally calmed down to something that might pass for normal.

I'd just got home after posting your letter and was chopping up veggies, looking at the knife and wondering whether I should use it to slice the radish or slit my wrists. No, not really, but I'll admit that I was feeling pretty damned low. Anyway I was distracted enough to cut my finger, very embarrassing for a chuunin I can tell you. So I went into the bedroom to fish a plaster out of the patch up kit we keep in there. And then I thought of your package. Now I know I'd said that I'd leave my fate to the hand of, well, fate. But that doesn't mean I can't try to tilt it a bit in my favour, does it?

So… I was trying on the costume, and trying to get the tail in just the right place, adjusting that strap that goes under and between, well you're a married woman you know what it goes between. Anyway at that precise particularly awkward moment there was a knock at the door and the squeak of a hinge. As my ill luck would have it I had forgotten to lock it, or even close it properly, so I peeped out… to see Sakura-chan peeping in.

I guarantee that you have never seen anyone, anywhere, ninja or otherwise, get out of anything and into their clothes as quickly as I did right then. I shoved the article in question back in its drawer and was at the front door before she'd had a chance to finish opening it.

I assumed she was there to pick up our conversation where we'd left off the day before, so I just rolled with it. I stepped back and said, "Come in the kitchen, I was just chopping up some stuff, and I'll make us some tea."

Sakura just looked at me, well stared to be more precise. I thought maybe it was the bandage on my hand, a medic would notice something like that, but she said, "Iruka-sensei, your hair, I've never seen it untied before."

I ran my hands through it and realized that in my hurry I'd forgotten to tie it back up after I'd let it down to put on the ears. Suddenly I felt very underdressed. So I went back into the bedroom to get my tie, and for some reason Sakura followed me. Not that I cared, it was reasonably tidy, I'd even pulled the duvet back in place, although I hadn't really made the bed properly.

Sakura glanced around while I fixed my hair and said, "Iruka-sensei, why do you have such a big bed if you sleep all the way on one side?" Well I'd said I'd leave my fate to the hand of fate, and if this was what fate was handing me…

I told her the truth. "That's Kakashi's side."

Just hearing myself say it, standing there, next to my rival for his affections, and Sakura just looking so pretty, pink and completely clueless. I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to pick up his pillow and hug it, to smell the scent of his hair and to remember just how sweet it is to have him lying there with me, in our bed. As if it was something I never expected to experience ever again.

When I looked back at Sakura-chan she seemed to have shrunk back inside herself. It was like looking at the little girl who had been the most over emotional and over restrained over achiever in her pre-gennin class. She even had a bit of her old stutter. "I..Iruka-sensei, you mean you… you and Kakashi-sensei?"

Then she paused for far too long before she asked, "Why didn't you say anything? I mean I didn't know. I had no idea."

I smiled a thin sickly smile and said, "But you aren't supposed to know anything Sakura-chan, that's the shinobi way. Didn't you learn anything in my classes?"

She tried to look at anything but me and the bed. So that was when she noticed the half empty nail varnish bottle. She picked it up, stared at it, then down at her painted toes, her very pretty painted toes.

My first instinct was to snatch it from her, as if it was an explosive tag in the hands of an infant. You have forgiven me for that, haven't you, by the way? I swear I don't know how he got it out of my vest. And you said you'd always been planning on demolishing that old shed.

Anyways, she's good, at least as fast as me, and I missed. Failed. She kept her fingers wrapped tightly around it and looked at me very hard and asked, "Who's been painting their fingernails?"

Busted, how embarrassing. It was like one of those awful dreams where everything is going horribly wrong, in slow motion, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. So I said, "No one. That is it was toenails actually, at least I tried but I made a horrible mess, the varnish got all wrinkly and all over my toes and ran down between them so that they were all stuck together. It took me ages to clean it off again."

Well she swallowed hard and asked, "You want to have pink painted toenails Iruka-sensei?" I got kind of flustered at that and said, getting quieter and quieter, as I got in deeper and deeper, "Yes, er no, that is, it's just that Kakashi said that you had pretty feet and then I noticed that you had painted toenails, so I thought maybe if I painted mine he'd think that my feet were pretty too."

As you can imagine by then I was blushing hotter than a furnace. Sakura, on the other hand, had gone very pale. She looked at me with her bright emerald eyes and said, "You'd do that for him, paint your toenails pink?" It all just came blurting out, "Of course I would. I'd paint my whole body pink if that's what he wanted. Just not everyday of course, that would be ridiculous."

Sakura's lower lip started to tremble and she hugged me so hard that I really regretted all that strength training she's been doing with Tsunade-sama. Then she shoved me back so that I was sitting on the bed and sat on the floor at my feet and gave me an indescribable look that she can only have learned from her new mentor. "It's really not that hard, by the time we're done you'll have the prettiest feet in Fire Country.

Anyway she lotioned my feet, which tickled like the very devil, as if I wasn't red enough already, clipped my nails and filed them nice and round. There's something very intimate about letting someone else touch your feet. Especially when that person has an emotional attachment to someone you're emotionally attached to. It had a strange awkward, even incestuous, feel to it, but I knew there was no way heaven and earth combined could have stopped her at that point.

She stuffed cottonwool between my toes and put on the varnish with clean even strokes like a real pro. Then she gave me a really sweet smile and said, "Now don't touch it or take the cotton out until it's nice and dry or it will smudge." I would have kissed her but I was afraid to move, and before I knew it she was gone.

I must have sat there for more than an hour. The paint was so smooth and shiny that I daren't touch it before it was dry, and how was I to know if it was dry without touching it? Anyways, by the time I pulled out the cotton my toes were so cramped that I couldn't even stand up. So I just sat there looking at them. And they looked so strange, so different. It was really odd having someone else's feet hanging off the end of my body. I was very very tempted to just clean the stuff off again, but it was fate that had put it there and it looks as if it intends to keep my options open for at least a little bit longer.

Naturally I'll have to wear socks tomorrow (today). The kids at school will probably snicker about my 'socks and sandals', but as long as Kakashi likes it's a small price to pay.

Yours, Konoha's most foolish fool in love,

Iruka.