He knew he should have gone directly home after reporting to Shizune that Saturday. Hell, he probably should have gone to the hospital, if he was being honest, but that week had been particularly rough, and his frazzled brain was determined that the only thing that would make it better would be to see Iruka's smiling face.

He really had planned to only stop by for a minute to get his head on straight and then go home to clean up and rest, but he, of course, had trouble tearing himself away once there. Genma was visiting that night, and Iruka was telling a story about how his students had tried – and failed – to start a revolution at school that week. Kakashi wanted to know how Iruka had ultimately ended it.

Losing consciousness really shouldn't have surprised him.

At least he didn't have to feel the hit to the ground.

He certainly felt the aftereffects though as he began to wake up. He groaned as a watery eye started to crack open. His entire body felt like it was broken. The first thing his eye finally focused on was the inverted image of the window he had fallen from – way up there – which had him realizing that there was a very good chance that it didn't just feel like everything was broken. The second thing it focused in on was a worried brunette hovering over him, calling his name.

If he hadn't been in the condition he was, the shock of seeing Iruka so close would have had him shooting up and out of there faster than the human eye could see. He really couldn't move though. However, his body still tried, which had him twitching painfully and forcing another groan out of him.

Iruka placed a gentle but firm hand against his shoulder. "Stay still, Kakashi. You took a hard fall."

"Of course I did, when I saw you," Kakashi mumbled completely against his will and rational mind.

Iruka blinked rapidly at the strange words, and Genma gave a disbelieving snort from next to him. "Well, that was… sweet." He raised his eyebrows at Iruka.

The chuunin rolled his eyes. "He obviously has a head injury," he snapped, then was back to assessing Kakashi. "Genma's gonna go get help. Just try to relax." Kakashi heard the fellow jounin stand and leap away.

The copy-nin merely grunted. The image of Iruka started to swim and duplicate, so he closed his eye, but a sharp slap had him popping it back open. Iruka was frowning at him even more deeply now. "Stay awake," he ordered. Kakashi's jumbled brain tried to process that, while Iruka was certainly not happy at the moment, he didn't sound or look mad at Kakashi – he seemed concerned and was taking his job of looking over him very seriously.

He didn't have time to say anything else stupid though, because Genma was back with a medic quickly. Kakashi was both annoyed and relieved when Iruka left his field of vision and was replaced by the med-nin. "You said he fell. From where?" she queried to the two shinobi behind her.

"Umm… we don't know," Iruka replied. "We were in the mission room and just heard him hit the ground."

Holy shit, they heard him from up there? How hard had he landed?

Scratch that – he could feel it.

"Hatake, can you talk? What happened?"

The brain fog was starting to lift, though it was rapidly being replaced by a pounding headache, and the only thing Kakashi could focus on now was feeling every single inch of his mangled body. It did not help that the med-nin was starting to run her hand over the broken bones. Every touch, even light, felt like he was being caressed with fire. But he cleared his throat and tried to focus on answering. "I passed out," he squeezed out, pain lacing every word.

"Not surprising," the med-nin stated matter-of-factly. "Your chakra is fried. It's a miracle you're even awake now."

He very much wished he wasn't.

She pressed a palm against his forehead and shined a bright light into his eye without warning. He whined and tried to jerk away, but the hand kept him and his neck steady. "Pupil dilated. You're probably bleeding internally."

He didn't bother trying to respond. There was nothing to say to that.

"Where were you when you passed out?"

"The roof," he lied.

"Hopefully on your way to the hospital," the nin deadpanned.

"Of course," he lied again.

She sighed, finally showing a hint of emotion. He wasn't particularly liked around the hospital, considering the state he generally showed up in – or, more often, was dragged in by someone else.

She finally removed her hand for the moment; Kakashi really wished it provided more relief than it did. "I'll take him from here." He couldn't hold back the shout as her hand returned to his arm with enough grip strength to teleport them both to the hospital. The last thing his swimming eye saw before he was transported was Iruka's tan face twisted into worry beneath a streetlight.

It took a solid month for Kakashi to feel normal and be allowed back on the streets again instead of confined to a hospital bed. He was still supposed to remain on leave for the next week and report for a check-up every morning, just to be sure he was truly out of the woods to be cleared for battle. Tsunade was absolutely pissed at how much energy it took her to heal him, not to mention the fact that her top jounin was out of commission for so long during a tumultuous time. It was one thing for Kakashi to return to Konoha banged-up from a mission; it was another thing for such extensive injuries to purely be the result of his own idiocy. And she reminded him of that every day.

He had had a few visitors in the hospital and was actually kind of happy to have a reason to see Sakura when she would shadow Tsunade to check on him. He wished he could see her more often when she wasn't rivaling her mentor's temper and doing a perfect impression of the blonde Hokage in the way she lectured her old sensei, but he supposed he had to take what he could get nowadays.

Genma had shown up a few times, the first with his own lecture on scaring the crap out of him. It wasn't every day that a trained shinobi took a fall from such a height with zero chakra or control over their body to soften the landing. He may as well have been a normal citizen being throw off a cliff and was lucky that he hadn't just broken his neck and died immediately.

He stuck to his story about being on the roof. He pretended to act embarrassed about trying to take the rooftops home, knowing that his chakra was heavily depleted. By all official accounts, he had been trying to make the jump from the mission room roof to the building next door when he succumbed to exhaustion. He was never planning to tell anyone that he had actually been a few feet lower to the ground, spying on a fellow comrade.

Who, by the way, was conspicuously absent from the jounin's visitors while he recovered from his humiliating near-death experience. He reasoned that he shouldn't have been surprised. It had been months since he and Iruka could be labeled as anything close to friends. The chuunin had never visited him in the hospital at any other time in history. But a part of him ached with disappointment. This wasn't like any other time in history – Iruka had been the one to find him and provide help this time. He had seen the state that Kakashi was in before being carted off. The jounin had thought maybe that would trigger some sort of curiosity and concern in the tan man about his condition. But by the time he was released, with no sight of Iruka, he honestly wondered if he had imagined the looks of worry that he thought he saw that night. His brain had been incredibly rattled.

Which was why, a month after the incident, he was back outside the mission room window, a debate raging inside him over whether or not to go in. He told himself that he was under no delusion that Iruka cared one way or the other about how he was doing, but he also knew that it would be rude not to thank one of the people that had come to his aid. Iruka already thought that he was rude, but maybe this was his one damn chance to try to be pleasant again. If it went badly… Well, things between them couldn't possibly be worse than they already were. At least he could say that he tried. The chances of him having an excuse to approach the chuunin outside of working hours again were slim, so he decided it was now or never.

He slipped through the window but didn't get a chance to announce his presence before Iruka turned and jumped, a stack of folders spilling out of his hands as the sudden intrusion spooked him.

So, yeah, things were going super well already…

"Kakashi-sensei!" One of Iruka's hands went to his thumping heart subconsciously and his eyebrows began to crinkle in a familiar frustration.

Kakashi quickly tried to smile sheepishly. "Sorry, sensei. I didn't mean to startle you." He kept his eye resolutely squeezed shut into a placating arch, hoping that maybe by the time he opened it, a miracle would have occurred, and Iruka wouldn't look so annoyed.

He heard a heavy sigh. "It's fine." It really didn't sound fine though.

Kakashi opened his eye to see the teacher giving him a weary look before the brown eyes averted to survey the mess on the floor. The chuunin's brown ponytail almost seem to wilt in irritation at his very presence. But he ignored his baser instinct to run and instead pushed through the extreme discomfort in his gut to continue with Plan 'Be Exceptionally Nice to Iruka.'

"Can I help you with something?"

The teacher began to crouch down even as he asked, but Kakashi beat him to it, scooping all the folders and their scattered paperwork into his long arms. "I just came to say thank you for the other night." Iruka paused and watched him curiously. "I don't remember much, but I know you found and helped me. If not for you, I might have bled out in a dark alley." As he rose, he saw Iruka scratch shyly at his nose, a light blush dusting his cheeks. Emboldened, he didn't merely hand the papers back to the chuunin, but turned and carried them to the mission desk. He spread them out and began sorting them back into their respective folders. "So, thank you," he concluded softly and sincerely.

"Ahh…" Iruka sounded slightly embarrassed. "Well, Genma was here too…" he muttered.

"Yes. I already spoke to him," Kakashi acknowledged, ignoring the fact that Iruka was trying to pass off all the credit for his rescue.

The chuunin shuffled awkwardly behind him. "You don't need to do that…"

"Nonsense. It was technically my fault."

Iruka didn't argue further even though Kakashi could sense the hesitancy rolling off of him.

Finally, the chuunin swallowed and cleared his throat. "How are you feeling?"

Kakashi didn't dare to break his pace to look back at the other man. They already hadn't spoken this much in ages. "Much better. It's always a shock to the muscles to start even walking around again after being bedridden for weeks, but I'll adjust quickly. I should be cleared for active duty again next week."

Iruka made a small noise of understanding in the back of his throat. "That's good. I'll have to let Naruto know."

Kakashi's head spun back of its own accord in surprise. "Naruto?"

Iruka blushed and looked away. "Uh… yeah… I got an address to write to him right before your accident. When Genma told me you were still in the hospital after a week, I figured he should know… Sakura let me know a couple days ago that they were getting ready to discharge you, but I didn't know exactly when…"

Kakashi just stared.

The chuunin began to look increasingly uncomfortable under the lone eye. "Um… sorry… should I not have told him…?"

The jounin finally blinked and shook his head. "No! Uh, I mean, it's fine. I just wasn't aware… that you were updating him…"

When Iruka dared to flick his eyes back to the silver-haired man, Kakashi looked away again lest his face do something stupid. His heart was beating rapidly against his chest. Iruka hadn't been completely ignoring his situation – he had just been getting his updates through other people. That made him stupidly giddy. It meant Iruka cared – at least a little – whether he lived or died. He even cared enough to let Naruto know what was going on with his old teacher.

"Yeah… actually –" Iruka continued. "I have something for you." Kakashi turned back again. "Naruto was too cheap to address individual envelopes for his letters, so he just sealed them all, wrote names on them, and stuck them in one big envelope addressed to me. Forced me to be his personal courier around the village." He rolled his eyes. "There's one for you. I just wasn't able to get it to you before you…" He gestured with his hand and then stuffed it in his pocket. "I wanted him to know there was a reason you hadn't written back to him."

Kakashi blinked. Part of him wanted to point out that Iruka very easily could have delivered the letter to him in the hospital at any point in the last month. Or just sent it to him via someone else. Left it at the front desk…

"I, um… I don't have it on me right now. But if you're around this week, I can make sure I put it in my bag when I come to the mission room…"

The jounin's annoyance was gone in an instant and replaced with a tiny spark of hope. Yeah… Iruka could have just sent the letter to the hospital with anyone else. But he hadn't. He had held onto it so that he could deliver it personally. Maybe he just didn't want to entrust Naruto's personal letters to anyone else, but it's not as though the kid would have included anything terribly private in them, he was sure. If he had to hazard a guess, they were probably just full of complaining about Jiraiya.

Whatever the chuunin's reasoning, he clearly had intended to purposely interact with Kakashi at some point to complete the delivery. Which was more effort than the teacher had put into their relationship with one another in a long time.

Maybe Kakashi was reaching for something that wasn't there. Probably. But why not go for broke?

"Are you here every Saturday now?" he asked as though he didn't already know.

Iruka nodded. "Yeah… I took over for Shizune awhile ago."

"Well, then," Kakashi scooped up the finished folders and offered the stack back to the teacher. "Why don't I just come back then?"

Iruka looked confused as he slowly took the paperwork back from the jounin. "Umm… okay?"

Kakashi smiled. "Great. See you then, sensei." He was gone in a flash.