Chapter Two: Ghosts
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. I wish I did.
A/N: Homework has been eating me alive lately. My teachers seem to be hooked on this project thing, so I'm constantly covered in paint from one or another of my various artworks/posters. Plus, I have my service thing every Wednesday, and I'm going to a horse show tomorrow, Science Olympiad regionals a week after that, and then the day after that I leave for FL for a week. The upshot is, this might be the last you see of me for a while. Reviews = addiction. PLEASE REVIEW ME!
Kakashi heard his alarm clock through the dream, the sound of the bell pulling him away from the beach volleyball game. He reached out, only half-awake, and turned it off without opening his eyes. He wondered why he'd set it. Habit, he supposed. This, however, was his day off, his first one in three weeks, and he intended to sleep the entire time.
Just as he was drifting back into sleep, the alarm went off again. Annoyed, he opened his eyes and rolled over, seriously considering dismantling the thing with a kunai. However, all thoughts of mechanical massacre left his head as he found himself staring into a pair of huge purple eyes.
Iera grinned, "Gooood mooorniiiing!" She sang, sitting down on the edge of his bed and waiting for his reaction.
Kakashi, not fully awake yet, sat for a moment to allow his brain to process. He had just been woken from a nice dream by his old Anbu teammate who, by all reports, shouldn't have been here, but was. So, he made the logical response, "Aren't you supposed to be a missing-nin?"
Iera's grin faded, as did the light in her eyes. She stared into space, her voice taking on the flat tone that it did whenever she had to emotionally distance herself, "Technically, I am. But there are…extenuating circumstances that made it necessary for me to…make a trade so that I could come back."
Kakashi had been able to tell as soon as he saw her that Iera had changed from when they were last together, and he had no idea how to deal with her. But he knew enough about people in general to realize that this was his cue to drop the subject. "Ah," he said, rather lamely.
There followed a fairly long, awkward moment. Then the happy mask slid back over Iera's face and she seized Kakashi by the wrist, attempting to drag him out of bed. "C'mon! The Gokage wants to talk to you. And me. Us, she wants to talk to us. Come ON!" Her tone became impatient as he easily resisted her attempts to forcibly drag him from under the sheets.
A slightly evil grin spread across his face, "Alright, but I doubt that the Gokage is in such a hurry that she wants me to show up naked." There followed another short silence, during which Iera's face turned several shades of red and she stood up rather hastily.
"R-right then, I'll just go to the kitchen…coffee, coffee is good…" She left the room, looking back over her shoulder once, very quickly, and closing the door behind her.
Kakashi laughed softly and got out of bed. He stretched, luxuriating in the feel of his body waking up. He took a quick shower, then got dressed in his usual uniform. As he pulled his mask on, he realized that Iera had never seen him with it, and took a moment to realize how much he had changed since he last saw her. That brought him to the main question, why WAS she back, anyway? And what was so important that the Gokage was willing to grant amnesty to a missing-nin?
Kakashi shoved the nagging questions to the back of his mind. Tsunade would tell him everything he needed to know when they got to her office, and the smell of coffee coming through the door was reminding him how desperately he needed caffeine.
Iera looked up as Kakashi entered the room. She froze for a moment, looking at the mask that covered his face and the way he had pulled down his hitai-ate to cover his left eye, at the way his clothing covered him from fingers to feet, hiding the evidence of his years in the Anbu. Her eyes strayed to her left arm, left bare by her sleeveless shirt, to stare momentarily at the gold band with a black lightning bolt engraved in it that covered one of her two souvenirs from her Anbu service, the double swirl tattoo. She looked back up at him, making up her mind to ask him the question that had been nagging her since she had come back to the village.
Her tone of voice was soft, entirely different from a few moments ago, when she'd been trying to drag him out of bed, "Why did you leave us, Kakashi? Why did you quit the Anbu?"