What do I own? I own nothing. Alas.

Two: Iruka – Endure Demons

He is fourteen when he sees the blue eyed demon for the first time.

There have been rumors, of course. There are always rumors. The demon fox escaped by taking a human form, it had possessed someone, it had spawned some kind of lingering ghost, it had tainted recently born babies and was causing them to grow up as demons…etc etc.

"They sealed it," Iruka's classmate hisses, ribbons in her hair and madness in her eyes. "They didn't kill it, they sealed it in here, so it could come back and finish what it started someday."

Iruka stares at her and at the sleeping demon she is holding too tightly. The little boy has blond hair in familiar spikes and strange, whisker-like markings on his cheeks and chakra patterns that can't possibly belong to a human, much less a three year old. Sachi shows him the spiral shaped seal on the boy's stomach with a triumphant expression.

"I knew it was there. They were hiding it, but I could feel it. All I had to do was keep looking."

A vessel. A child vessel, a sealed container for the nine tailed fox, just like the rumors claimed. Iruka has never seen him in public before and knows that however Sachi spirited him away from his usual guardians (whoever they were), she's just broken god knew how many of the Hokage's laws.

"I'm going to kill it, Umino."

Add one more to the tally.

He protests automatically, stalling for time, and trying not to think about how close her kunai is to the boy's throat and the unsettling note of rapture in her voice. "You can't murder a child."

"It's not a child," she answers dreamily. "It's a monster. It's that monster in the shape of a child. I have to avenge my family." She smiles beatifically at him but it's a fractured smile and his skin crawls at the sight of it. "But you're here, and you've got a claim. Do you want to help, Umino-kun?"

Revenge. Revenge. He remembers three years of living the wrong life, that of the orphaned prankster failure Iruka rather than the promising student Iruka who'd been working to join his father and mother as part of ANBU. Orphan Iruka will never make jounin, much less ANBU. Orphan Iruka will spend the rest of his life as a low level chuunin in Konoha, never achieving any kind of importance, doomed to be forgotten as soon as he died.

And it's all this little boy's fault.

Sachi must have tightened her grip right at that moment because the demon wakes up with a muted, unhappy noise. Eyes as blue as the sky, as blue as the ocean of Iruka's family name, focus on him and begin to well with tears. As young as the boy is, he doesn't make another sound, as if he's already learned that crying doesn't ever make anything better.

As if, even at three, he already knows what's it like to be the living reminder of others' losses.

"What pretty eyes," Sachi remarks. The tip of her kunai is digging into the demon's soft cheek. He squirms away from it a little, face screwing up when Sachi hisses and presses it harder.

"Should I cut them out, do you think?" Her hand creeps over the boy's trembling mouth, ready to silence him. A bead of red wells up at the kunai's point and tearful blue eyes go even wider. Sachi giggles softly to see it.

"Stop it," Iruka whispers, appalled.

"Stop what? Don't you want to see it bleed?" She giggles again. "I didn't know demons bled as easily as any human. I guess that means it's not immortal. Lucky for us." Her arm is tensed to dig the blade in deeper. Iruka's mouth goes dry.

"Sachi, stop it."

"No. Someone has to do this. Before it gets loose again." She blinks as Iruka steps close, pushing the kunai aside and reaching to take the child from her. "What are you--"

"Give him to me," he says firmly. "I have ...claim, like you said."

"Pushy," she accuses, pouting and briefly resisting before surrendering the blond. "I want an eye. I'll let you kill it, but I want its eyes."

"No one's going to kill anyone." The demon is dead weight in Iruka's arms, neither clinging nor struggling, his tufts of blond hair as soft as feather down against Iruka's neck. He is heavier than he looks. His skin is cool from the night air and combined with his curious stillness Iruka has to pretend that it doesn't feel like he's holding a tiny corpse.

Something flickers in Sachi's unfocused eyes. She looks back and forth between his grim expression and the silent child, and her mouth twists in sudden fury. "You—"

"Go home, Sachi." He cradles the boy awkwardly, the only child never having learned how to hold a baby or a toddler.

"It killed your parents." She is incredulous.

"He didn't kill anyone. He's just a baby."

"No." She shakes her head wildly and holds out her hands. "No, no, no. Give it back. Give it back to me right now. It's got to die tonight."

"Go home, Sachi," he repeats, half turned away from her in readiness to leave, but there is leashed tension in his muscles to match the warning under his words.

"Give it back!"

Her kunai buries itself in his shoulder, as he'd expected, right before she launches herself at him.

Perhaps fifteen minutes later, it is a very tired and very bloody Umino Iruka that makes his painful way towards the Hokage's door in the middle of the night, carrying a spattered but otherwise unscathed little blond boy.

"Sorry," he whispers to the child who is now clinging to him like a lifeline and trying not to stagger like a drunk. "Probably not going to look good on your record, getting rescued by a guy like me. I'm a screw-up, you know. A failure. A real ninja would've gotten you out of a scrape like that without a scratch."

If the demon child has any regrets about not being saved by a real ninja, he doesn't show it. His chubby little arms remain tightly locked around Iruka's neck. The chuunin would have liked to put his dizziness down to this stranglehold, but figures it has more to do with the lump swelling into existence on the back of his skull where Sachi had slammed his head into the concrete.

"I'm Iruka, by the way," he says, trying to walk in a straight line and failing. "I guess I don't know your name." He turns to look at the kid. "Do you have a name? Or do they just call you demon boy?"

Wide blue eyes set in a solemn expression stare at him from only a few inches away. Unsettled despite himself, Iruka smiles uneasily. The form might be that of a human child, but there's still a monster underneath the boy's skin.

The boy beams suddenly, his entire face suddenly transformed, and it's like the dawn breaking. "Iruka," he says, clear and pure and delighted.

"That's my name," Iruka mutters back half-heartedly after a moment, a little stunned. "Get your own."

"Iruka!"

"No, your name. You're three, you know how to talk..."

Iruka freezes as the boy buries his face in the chuunin's neck like a puppy seeking heat, and repeats himself so softly as to be a mere breath of sound. "Iruka."

Somehow, one of Iruka's hands finds its way to the demon's soft gold hair. Like feathers, or down fur. Fox fur. A fox demon, his parents' murderer, trapped in the shape of a little boy, and the undutiful failure of a son beating up a girl over him, and Iruka's utter lack of feeling the guilt he ought to be feeling over all of it. It's funny, he surprises himself by just how damn funny he finds it, and between pained wheezes he's laughing until his bruised ribs protest while the little boy looks on in incomprehension.

"Iruka?"

"Yeah." His voice is uneven and his smile not quite right, but it's getting better. "That's me. I guess we can both be Iruka if we have to."