Then and Now, a naruto fanfic

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Insert cute reason why here.

(Note: FF was being a jerk. The little slashes mean Kakashi is going to speak after, which is the only combination that it liked. The little lines mean Iruka. They are also talking in different tenses, if that helps out.)

He hates me, and for the life of me I can't understand why.

Every social function he acted politely enough, of course. His tone was just as jovial when he spoke with me as it was when he talked to anyone else, and he never scorned me outright among others—I can't say truthfully in private, because he only talked to me with company. But every time he glanced my way when he sees no one else watching him, his eyes burned with a darkness that made me want to kill something in frustration.

What have I ever done to him?

A buzz of annoyance started to occur whenever I saw him in a room, knowing that I would soon be subject to the most two-sided gaze in all of Konoha. His eyes always lit in joy towards anyone else, and whether that joy was fake or real was usually a little difficult for me to discern from the distances away I stayed, but for the most part he seemed genuinely happy with life. They said he was the happiest person in the village after maybe Naruto, but as long as I was around that was untrue. The feeling was truly aggravating.

. -. -.

I hate him with every fiber in my soul.

He is visible across the room, hair lifting in that idiotic, ugly way when he tilts his neck forward. The muscles in his arms move like liquid mercury when he shifts—lusterless, slowly, and formlessly. A stupid grin and trailing, distorting scar finish up the image of Umino Iruka, and I turn away from the mirror so that I don't have to pay attention to him any longer.

The scroll in front of me receives markings towards the right answer, and I roll it away before picking up the next. These papers are short, easy to grade, and this fact annoys me, although I try not to appear annoyed. It means that I'll be going home early tonight, to sit and look at the fridge for the umpteenth time to find that nothing has changed so far as its contents, and perhaps do some cleaning—except, I remembered, I had cleaned yesterday. Someone had my deck of cards, so I couldn't even play Solitaire. Visiting Naruto was an option, but I had also divulged myself in that yesterday, and while he never refused my company, I always felt a little guilty about dragging him away from his friends. It gave me a warm fuzzy glow to know that he did indeed have friends now, but it also made me a little depressed that I was going to lose my one sure source of companionship.

At least I have myself to anger. I glance up in the mirror again, and the split scar in its permanent frown seems to laugh at me despite all. I hate him.

/.- /.-

So I observed him, unseen, whenever he watched me. Finally, I realized with a jolt, it wasn't I that he was glaring at. It was my Shiruken eye.

That eye, the color of blood, of death, of the Fox. Shiruken, the power that allowed me to kill so many, so easily. Not that he should hate me for being a killer, I mused. He was a ninja himself, after all. He went on missions with casualties. So maybe he just hated me.

Or maybe he just hated the eye.

A night of careful stitching was all it took, and the next day I was Kakashi, the one-eyed copy ninja. The others took it to be a power challenge and I would catch fighters left and right trying to complete missions with one eye closed, just to see if they could do it. Someone announced that I was clearly the best, to my amusement. As if I would do something like that simply because I wanted to prove to the others that I was better. Later, I would jokingly say that there was nothing to prove—it was known fact.

Never did they guess it was shy, quiet Iruka that had prompted such a change. He certainly would not have assumed that. In that, the mask brought me one large advantage. I could not see his glares any longer.

. -. -.

An itch at the back of my neck lets me know that Kakashi is looking my way again, and I slump lower in my chair, wondering if there was a polite way to perform an invisibility technique for no apparent reason. He watches me quite a bit of the time, always with the calm, calculating expression that makes me want to blush, and therefore want to impale myself on a kunai. It both unnerves and depresses me, and I tend to be rather grumpy with anyone else after too long of an exposure to the silver-haired ninja.

I finish the next scroll, and set it to the side. Perhaps if I ignore him, he will go away, and I won't have to break down and leave with the papers unmarked again. I can't help getting flushed with him around—there's something about his stance, his expression, which strikes me at the deepest level. Naruto loves him, and it makes me curious to see why. This is why I tell myself, and I start checking the next scroll.

/.- /.-

Perhaps I had hurt a loved one of his in the past, somehow. I looked into his previous life, and saw nothing out the ordinary—folks killed by the Fox; had one girlfriend (one?) when he was a teen who got killed by an attacking ninja, which was sad but not that rare of a happening; became a teacher. If I took those as main events in relation to myself... I had not been around when he got his teaching diploma, had witnessed the death of the girl, and probably had not been directly around his parents' last image before demise. It was hardly my fault that the girlfriend had been killed, as she was quite dead before my squad had arrived, and he did not seem the type to hold grudges.

So why did he hate me?

Why did I hide my powers from the world, for him?

. -. -.

Having him in the room reminds me of the first time I met him, so long ago. Of course, it wasn't truly the first time I had met him—in a village the size of ours, it was hard to not meet anyone at some point—but the first time in which he acknowledged my existence. I was there, in the dark, crouched shuddering on the forest floor in front of a man whose details I could hardly make out. My body was shielding Mirei, a ridiculous occurrence as she was a far better ninja than I, and I could hear her gasps behind me, as if she knew something I didn't.

The man smacked me away and grabbed her arm. I leapt at him, to be encountered with searing fire that roared across my face as he swiped at me with a kunai, only missing a fatal blow as Mirei threw her weight onto him. He must have had a dagger there as well because she fell back almost immediately, and I could tell from her motion that she was dead, not unconscious.

I always have been rather good at recognizing that.

He died an instant too late, body falling across hers, and I still hadn't moved, fastened down with shock and pain. A silver haired warrior, no older than me, came to stand over both of them, expression invisible behind his pale mask. He watched me for a moment, and then bent down to look them over. I reached out, grasping a dropped kunai with trembling fingers, although to impale myself or him I did not know.

I expected him to kill me in self-defense or perhaps just glare in the silent, nearly snobbish way the ANBU had. Instead, he reached out, grabbing the blade of the weapon. I'm sure it hurt him—blood was dripping from his fingers to mix with the red mess from my face.

"No," he said, and then he was gone. Others of the masked tribe came to take me and the bodies back to the village. Only later did I hear one ask, "Where has Kakashi gotten to, anyway?" I remembered that name, and wept.

/.- /.-

The wrong answer had been marked off three times now, in inerasable red ink. I glare at it, and turn it into a little picture so as to not draw attention before going to the next.

To be truthful, I don't know what prompted me to take such a course of action. I did not truly care what one low-rank ninja thought of me, and it was certainly true that I had spawned hate in others in the past, even in my own village. There was just something so insulting about earning the disgust of the joyful teacher whose name was so often on Naruto's lips.

Actually, that was a lie.

This should be a profound, tear-jerking reason, or perhaps one to make romantics sigh, or maybe something that could cause a blush to rise on those brown cheeks currently bent over a school scroll. The actual cause for caring what Iruka thought of me was much simpler and petty.

I had been reading one of my books, a smutty novel of the type Sakura was constantly trying to steal from me and destroy. This one in particular was new; the characters were just being sorted out. The lead character was a typical stock setup, a lady killer with no family or home, described as wearing a brown suede duster and leather boots. I had glanced up then at some sound or another, and lo and behold, there was Iruka, coming back from a rare undercover mission, dressed in a brown suede coat and leather boots. They didn't do much for him, but that coincidental image made me chuckle, and I realized with a jolt that I hadn't spoken to him in months, hadn't had a conversation in decades, and hadn't noticed that he wasn't particularly bad looking ever.

The main character went off and did what it was characters in softcore do, and when I slept that night I had a dream of the sort that hadn't come up since I was a lost, confused teenager who hoped ninja-ing might gain him some things other than fame and money. I had woken up, dumped my head in a bucket of ice water, and practiced kata for hours until I felt ready to face the world again.

In the dream, he told me that he loved me.

. -. -.

I set the last of the papers aside and rise, putting them in a bag. I spend a minute fussing with the tie of the closing clasp, getting it just so, and look around the room in high hopes that perhaps someone had come around and knocked over a plant or misplaced something while I wasn't looking. No one had, and therefore I had no excuse left. I started the long walk home.

The itch did not go away as I trudged down the street, and I wondered if it was truly a more innocent clause, like the wrong brand of shampoo. Kakashi would have no reason to follow me, and I was ridiculous to think that he would be. He was probably just looking for one of his students, perhaps Naruto. I usually do find the fox-boy on my way home from work, so perhaps he thought it was easier to simply follow me rather than searching out the troublemaker himself. The instincts urging me to stand up straighter and glance into mirrors to make sure that my hair was still relatively straight I mentally bombed and destroyed, feeling like an idiotic girl. You're the lowest of the low, a fairly good school teacher and a second-rate ninja. He's Kakashi the copy genius. He's also a stuck-up punk who isn't worth your time. Not that you have any time for him in the first place.

I hoisted the bag higher onto my shoulder, and walked on.

A/N: More later... hope you liked the beginning!