Iruka was reading a scroll. One of several scattered on the bed. The bandages had been removed from his face, which was no longer swollen, although it was still marked by purple bruises. The largest almost dark enough to hide the scar over his nose.

He looked up as the copy nin entered, greeting him with a wide smile.

"Hatake-sama, I thought you might not come here today, you're much later than usual."

"Well I was in the area anyway." He lied. "Actually I'm surprised they're still keeping you here, you seem to have made a good recovery from the surgery."

Iruka sighed heavily. "Yes I know. Normally I could have gone home by now but I live on my own." He held up his bandaged hands. "These are still pretty useless so I can't take care of myself yet."

Kakashi nodded sympathetically. Part of him was relieved that the teacher was being kept in the hospital where it was safe, and the other part was very very unhappy.

Against every instinct that was screaming at him to leave it, Kakashi heard himself say. "So how is your new doctor?"

Iruka smiled a little too readily.

"Oh he's an excellent doctor, it was a good choice for him. Although I'm sure he would have been a good shinobi too if he'd really tried."

Kakashi struggled to keep yesterday's images out of his mind.

"You seem to know him?"

Iruka's face tinged pink between the bruises. "Yes, he was in my class at the academy."

The copy nin couldn't resist picking at the sore.

"Was he your friend."

Iruka lowered his eyes behind his dark lashes. "No, I didn't have any real friends."

The answer hung in the air, full of loneliness and regret.

"Of course he was much smarter than me, and very popular."

The teacher put his hands over his face, then peeped out between the bandages mischievously.

"Perhaps I shouldn't tell you this but he did get me into terrible trouble once." He paused and took a deep breath. "We must have been about thirteen years old, about a year after my parents were…"

His voice trailed off sadly. Then with a determined shake of the head he continued.

"Well as I was saying… he, well, he dragged me back into the woods during shuriken practice and one of the teachers caught us there kissing." Iruka's blushed deepened. "Actually he had his hand pretty far down my pants too. Of course he started it, I would never have been that bold."

Kakashi's heart pounded

"You were… kissing!"

Kakashi hesitated before asking the question he really wanted to hear the answer to. "Did you have a crush on him?"

Iruka didn't hesitate at all. "Hell yes, I was madly in love with him. We all were, the boys as well as the girls, he was georgeous… still is, well you saw. But that's the only time he ever paid any attention to me. I guess I was just the closest one to the woods, and I expect that he knew I would get all the blame. I had something of a reputation for trouble back then."

Kakashi wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer to his next question.

"Are you in love with him now?"

Iruka lifted his head and laughed, easily and happily.

"Hardly, it was just a crush. He's really not my type, you know the charming playboy kind of thing."

His smile faded and he glanced at the copy nin furtively.

"Besides, I think I'm in love with someone else."

Kakashi hadn't seen this coming.

"Really who?"

He braced himself for the answer. Whatever the man said he knew it would be devastating, but for different reasons.

All the blood drained from the teacher's face, making the bruises stand out like continents on a map of the world.

"You. I think I'm in love with you."

Kakashi gaped at the damaged, haunted face, unable to speak.

Iruka looked down as if the bed sheets had suddenly become quite fascinating. There was a long awkward silence. When he finally continued it was in a hoarse whisper.

"Do you love me too? I haven't dared to tell you, dared to ask." His eyes darted upward for a moment then back to the sheet. "I was afraid of how you would react. That you wouldn't come to see me again. But you have, you've come to see me, every day. That's why I let myself hope…"

His voice trailed off again as he looked up to hold Kakashi's gaze. His eyes pleading for some kind of reaction.

Kakashi struggled with himself. He had to say no. He had to walk away. Iruka had almost been killed because of him. He wouldn't let it happen again.

"What… what do you remember?"

Iruka shook his head, making the copy nin's heart flutter as he watched the cute ponytail.

"Nothing. I don't remember anything at all. But I can feel it, here."

He put his hand over his heart and looked at the other man with such pure unguarded devotion that it took all of Kakashi's famous control not to wrap his arms around him, pull down his mask and drown him with kisses.

Instead he nodded, kindly but distantly.

"Iruka-sensei, your feelings are still confused. We're friends, good friends. It's perfectly normal for you to feel needy right now. I just happen to be the one those feelings have focused on." His visible eye curled into its trademark crescent while the hidden one became quite damp. "But I am very flattered, usually it's a pretty nurse."

The knot in Kakashi's gut tightened with every word. It had been a good save, sometimes being a genius was painful but useful.

The teacher lay back on his pillows. He looked as if a light had been extinguished somewhere inside. The copy nin sat on the bed facing him. He took the bandaged hands in his. Iruka flinched at the contact and pressed himself back into his bedding.

Kakashi knew that he had done the right thing, so why was the guilt unbearable?

"Come and have dinner with me." He said suddenly. "You said yourself that you could go home except for your hands, well let me be your hands this evening. You've been lying here brooding for too long and some decent food will be good for you."

Kakasi found some of Iruka's clean clothes in a closet. Piled next to sheets, towels, bandages, gauzes, catheters and other hospital supplies so depressing that he had to avoid looking at them. One of the teacher's friends from the academy must have brought them in, knowing that they would make Iruka feel just a little closer to going home.

He dressed him carefully but quickly, not letting his hands wander as they once would have, or his mind think about the way he would like them to wander. After buttoning Iruka's vest loosely over his left arm, which was in a cast, he sat the man next to him on the edge of the bed.

"Would you like me to carry you or can you walk?" He deliberately did not look at the blush that he knew must be colouring the other man's cheeks."

"If you don't mind I'd rather walk. I really need to get some strength back into my muscles."

Kakashi positioned Iruka's right arm across his shoulders and slowly stood up, pulling the teacher to his feet. The smaller man grunted at the strain on his sore body but supported his own weight quite well. With their bodies pressed hard together, in a way they both found unsettlingly delicious, they made their way out of the hospital.

By the time they were standing outside in the last fading shadows of dusk, Iruka's strength was gone. Without asking for permission, Kakashi hoisted him onto his back as if he weighed no more than a child, and leapt onto the roof of the building across the street.

As he sailed from rooftop to rooftop, to the restaurant a mile away, he heard the other man whisper. "Do you think I'll ever be able to fly like this again, on my own I mean?"

Kakashi smiled as he whispered back. "Of course you will, sooner than you think. We'll go together and lie on the academy roof to watch the stars the way we used to."

He felt the little explosion of air on his ear as the teacher chuckled. Do you look at the stars with all your friends Hatake-san?"

Kakashi bit his tongue. "We both like stars." He said much too gruffly. "And we are friends, call me Kakashi."

With a burst of chakra he landed in the street outside the restaurant and gently set his passenger on his feet. Supporting him as before they went inside and sat at a remote corner table.

"I thought we would go to Ichiraku's." Iruka said looking around uneasily at the quietly elegant surroundings and hovering geisha costumed waitresses.

There was a happy twinkle in the copy nin's eye. He took off his mask and smiled. Iruka gasped. Had he ever seen that face before, if he had how could he have possibly forgotten it?

"This place is more comfortable, you can hardly eat perched on a stool, and I thought you'd prefer somewhere more private if I'm going to feed you."

Iruka hadn't thought of that, of course the nurses had been feeding him in the hospital but they'd been doing everything else too, so he hadn't really noticed. He hadn't eaten much anyway, he had no appetite and the food wasn't good.

He rested his bandaged hands, palms up on the tabletop and looked at them dismally.

"I'm surprised they aren't healing better, the rest of your wounds seem to be doing well." Kakashi said sympathetically.

Iruka sighed loudly. "Hakage-sama explained it to me. She removed all the skin to the thinnest layer possible and used a jutsu to slow healing."

"Slow it!"

Iruka nodded. "Yes it sounds strange but she said it would allow the cuts to heal and the skin to regrow in a more controlled natural way. If she had left it, or speeded up the healing I would have ended up with a lot scarring and I would have lost most of the sensation in my hands."

Kakashi thought of the dreamy look on Iruka's face as those hands had explored the most intimate parts of his body. Of the pleasure they had both felt as he slid them over his smooth pale skin and hard muscles. He carefully adjusted the twitching napkin on his lap. Ok, if Tsunade could pull this off he would forgive her every bitch thing she'd ever put him through.

Feeding Iruka was the most fun that Kakashi had had in days. He openly delighted in the man's pleasure at the excellent food. Scooping soup into his mouth and feeding him with chopsticks just a little too fast. That gave him opportunity to delight more secretly as he touched Iruka's lips with his fingertips and brushed his hand against his cheeks, while blotting broth and dribbles of sake from his chin.

They lingered over the meal. Kakashi skillfully keeping the conversation gentle and lighthearted, and Iruka just floating in the good feeling of being in the other man's presence. He was just plain happier when he was around him. So what if they were just good friends, that didn't mean that they could never be more. Kakashi knew that he had a crush on him and he didn't seem at all upset by it. That gave him a certain… freedom to do and say things that one man wouldn't normally do and say to another male friend. Iruka made up his mind, he would make Kakashi fall in love with him.

The dishes from the final course were cleaned away and Kakashi ordered desert. Iruka noticed how the pretty waitress fluttered around the other man, smiling attentively and fluttering her eyelashes. He felt a sharp pang of jealousy.

"I suppose you're used to that." He said, trying not to sound sullen.

"Used to what?" The older man asked with secret amusement, watching the show of emotions passing over the bruised face. He couldn't resist teasing just a little, the way he used to. He wouldn't wind him up too far, not enough to make him suspicious. But hell the man was just so damn cute.

Iruka blushed deeply. Yes scored one!

"Women all over you like that." He said to the tablecloth. "Well you're quite a catch, the copy nin of Konoha, famous Sharigan Hatake."

Kakashi looked over at the waitress and smiled. She blushed almost as deeply as Iruka under her pale makeup. The teacher's stomach knotted, this wasn't the way he had hoped things would go!

Kakashi was having way too much fun. He shrugged offhandedly. "I suppose, but she really isn't my type. You know, charming playgirl kind of thing."

Iruka forced a smile through his mortification. "Oh, what is your type?"

The copy nin looked around the sparsely populated restaurant. Then leaned in closely so that Iruka could feel his breath on his cheek. "I have some pictures in some books that I'd be happy to show you sometime."

To the teacher's relief the waitress came back with their desserts. She put three bowls of ice cream on the table.

Iruka laughed. "Surely you don't expect me to eat two ice creams. I know I've been living on hospital food, but that's a bit much.

Kakashi's expression became deadly serious under his smile. "No, Naruto should be here any minute, I asked him to join us for dessert."

He grabbed the younger man's unbroken right arm before he could shrink back into his chair, holding it in a gentle but unbreakable grip. "You have to see him, talk to him. He was very important to you, more like a little brother than a student."

Iruka fidgeted, eyes scanning the room. Looking at the walls, the table, the ceiling, anywhere but at that burning blue eye in front of him.

"I… I just can't. I hate him. He's the reason I can't even remember my mother's face, anything about her or my father. He killed both my parents, and hundreds of others. Made me an orphan and a miserable outcast for most of my life. Maybe what you're saying is true, but it's not true for me, not now."

The two shinobi were suddenly hit by a vivid flare of sinister chakra from behind a rice paper screen. Kakashi thought he recogised it from a long time ago, but by the time he had recovered enough to put on his mask and leap behind the screen, there was nothing there.

Naruto ran from the restaurant with the kyuubi's chakra swirling around him. He would go out into the woods, there was a place there where he used to hide when he was a little kid. He would be safe there. And if that didn't work, deep in his memory he knew of somewhere better. A place several miles to the south.