He Understands
mayonaka-ni-sakayume
11.30.05
(Requisite note: Don't own it. Vaguely described male-male sex follows. You've been warned.)
The darkness is the first thing he notices, so dark it's beginning to circle back towards light, and he is fairly certain he shouldn't be awake yet. But he is, blinking off the last vestiges of an already-fading dream and trying to recall what dispelled it. He is reminded when that disruption comes again, a single tap against the frame of the open bedroom window. A silhouette, painted by the moon and the encroaching dawn, lithe in its near-predatory crouch, shamelessly organic forms at harsh contrast with the smooth lines of a sword –
Kakashi, clad in ANBU dress, is perched on the sill.
Bewildered, and not wholly sure he isn't still sleeping, Iruka manages a nod of permission; in an eerily smooth rearrangement, Kakashi is inside.
"Kakashi? What time is it?"
"Early."
"How early?"
"You don't want to know."
More shadow than solid form, Kakashi is stepping closer; the pale pre-dawn glow picks out the mask tied askew over his hair, finds the curves of a costume Iruka has never seen him in before.
"What's with the outfit?"
Kakashi has stopped approaching.
"They need a tracker for this mission. I've been reactivated."
Suddenly, Iruka is very awake. And his chest hurts.
Iruka doesn't want to understand this. He doesn't want to know that there is a reason ANBU is composed only of the most elite. He doesn't want to accept that theirs are the missions no one comes back from, or face what it means that the higher-ups saw it necessary to call Kakashi back to service. On nights like this, Iruka doesn't want any of it.
"When do you leave?"
"Sunrise."
It doesn't matter what he wants. He understands.
The soft pajama slacks he had been wearing are somewhere near his ankles, lost in the rough tangle of sheets at the foot of the bed, and it's getting harder to breathe. Kakashi is everywhere at once, pressed so close that Iruka's lost track of which frenzied heartbeat belongs to whom. There are lips on his neck, his ear – his own, swallowing his gasp of the jounin's name, because there are things Kakashi doesn't want to understand too. His hands are callused from the blade he never asked to inherit, and his fingertips nearly numb after a thousand bloodstained summonings, but all that matters now is that they are on Iruka's hips, warm and too fast.
His first and only pause comes with a pang of remorse, apologetic tone at odds with the killer's uniform he's still half-wearing.
"I don't have time to---"
"It's all right." Iruka has already braced himself, hands fisted in the sheets and breaths struggling to even out. "I'm ready.'
He understands. He always does. And like always, for these few moments, he tries his hardest to forget. Buries his head against Kakashi's shoulder. Shuts his eyes tight. Cries out just to drown the voices in his thoughts, the ones that refuse to ignore the truth of it all. A pulse pounds just beside his ear, as fast and rhythmic as the thrusts of the older man's hips, and he clings to that – clings to the audible reassurance that the tomorrow he has been dreading for so long has not yet arrived. This shelter is nearer denial than optimism, for he knows too well that much of Kakashi has already died, but he is breathing hard and shuddery against Iruka's neck and that is good enough.
They both knew what they were getting into, that time they bumped into each other at the memorial and ended up in Iruka's bed, playing at being alive so they could forget the dead. Kakashi won't tell Iruka he loves him because he knows he'll say it back, and then the reality they've been dodging will finally catch them. Iruka won't say it because jounin die young, and maybe keeping it unspoken will save him from some of the grief of mourning a loved one when that day comes.
They understand.
Kakashi is moving faster now and the sky is lightening. He's desperate, lips claiming every surface he can reach, hand stroking roughly between them, and something in Iruka wants to beg him to stay. But to do that would expose too many unwelcomed things, and so he merely clings tighter, nails marking Kakashi's back.
He groans Iruka's name, and when they both come back to their senses, Iruka has to pretend those aren't his tears on Kakashi's shoulder.
The sun is up and Kakashi is gone, leaving only a dusty footprint on the windowsill and a dull ache at the base of Iruka's spine. He didn't ask Kakashi how long he'd be gone, because he knows he wouldn't answer – he did, just once, and when that mission ended a week later than it should have, he came home to an Iruka too visibly wearied by concern to face. He doesn't know, or doesn't want to know, that after he's left Iruka will ask anyways, pressing the Hokage for details they both know she can't disclose. She keeps the promise Iruka begged from her and never tells Kakashi about this, because she understands too.
Iruka endures the solitary weeks not by telling himself that Kakashi will come back, but by pretending he never left at all. He leaves Kakashi's book right on the coffee table where he'd forgotten it, falls asleep wrapped in the unchanged sheets that still hold his scent, and keeps the bedroom window ajar no matter how cold the night gets.
When he eventually reappears there in the middle of another night, jolting Iruka from a fitful sleep, neither of them say anything. Someone's blood is splashed against the moon-white ANBU armor; it's still fresh enough to drip, and it'll stain Iruka's floor. He lets him in anyways.
"Welcome home."
Kakashi doesn't say anything. He has been too inhuman for too long, a ghost with no place in this living man's home but one too weary to go anywhere else.
He knows how lucky he is, though, when Iruka catches sight of the empty hunger in his eyes and doesn't even flinch. The chuunin is kissing him now, trying to breathe life back into this spectre, and he nearly recoils for fear the death running in his veins will somehow infect him. He will worry about that the next morning, waking to watch the sleeping form nestled at his side and wondering how much damage he's done. But for now he needs that dose of denial, needs to let himself be convinced that there is still something unbroken within him, and he moves to coax Iruka back to the bed.
But he is already there, drawing Kakashi along and beginning quietly to unfasten the bone-hued guards on his arms.
Because Kakashi needs him, and he needs Kakashi, and maybe he doesn't want to understand that.
But he does.