Disclaimer: Don't own Naruto.

Author's Note: Decided this was going to be a two-shot.

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"Love is giving him the power to destroy you and trusting him not to."-Anonymous

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There was no hiding of Iruka's scar. Not unless he wanted to wear a scarf at all times and, with Konoha's weather, that was not happening. It wasn't a bad scar, if they were being truthful. Any worthwhile shinobi had seen far worse. But it was a scar that didn't belong on a gentle face like Iruka's. That was the part that made it seem worse than it was.

Kakashi's fond of the scar. He likes the sudden shift from Iruka's soft skin to the rough scar tissue. It rather completes the school teacher, if he wanted to be poetic. And because he can't remember a time when Iruka didn't have that scar. He knows that he'd seen Iruka when they were children, but those times were chaotic. No one remembered much of anything but utter madness of those times.

Iruka has other, smaller scars, lining his body like roads on a map. The longest one that Kakashi has been able to find stretches from Iruka's hip to the point where it's hardly visible to the inside of his knee.

It became a ritual for them. Every night, with the windows open to let the cool night air and moonlight spill into the room, they would each choose a scar that the other would have to tell the story about. Iruka always went first, his voice lulling Kakashi to the point where, after Iruka was finished, to tell his story with no complaints and no lies.

It had drawn sardonic smiles and bursts of laughter from the both of them sometimes. Like the wound in the fleshy part of Kakashi's hand between thumb and index finger where he had chosen to give cooking a try. Or the three holes in Iruka's shoulder that had been from a food fight among the Academy students and one of them had thrown a fork.

And other times, they wouldn't remember where it came from. This happened to Kakashi more than it happened to Iruka. Iruka hates the idea that Kakashi has become so accustomed to getting hurt that he can no longer remember which ones came from where.

Sometimes, the memories were horrible and vivid and more than Iruka could bear remembering. Those times, the times when Kakashi just holds him close, are almost always linked to the small round scars going up and down Iruka's arms. It was a little known fact that Iruka had been one of the students who had been in Orochimaru's one genin team along with Anko and Hayate. Iruka had come out the sanest of them all, but that didn't mean that he wasn't sometimes haunted by what he'd seen and what had been done to him.

"This one." Iruka says quietly, tracing a path that was half callous and half scar tissue on the back of Kakashi's left shoulder.

Kakashi glances back at it for a moment. "That one you should remember." Iruka frowns a little at him. "It's part of how we got to this point."

Iruka remembers it only vaguely. It had been the day that Pein had attacked and the village reduced to little more than rubble. He'd been concerned with getting the children to safety, of course, and it had been Kakashi that had shoved him out of the way of a falling slab of concrete. Kakashi had been mostly alright, save for the shoulder that the slab nearly broke as it slid down.

Iruka can still hear the screaming kids and the sound of his world falling apart around him.

It had been as they were clearing up and rebuilding that they'd slowly become closer. It had started with a shared bottle of sake that someone had found that was getting passed around to everyone. A few nights later, it was trading pickles for tomatoes over dinner. It hadn't taken long after that for them to end up in a building that was all framework with little more than a few bricks put in all night.

What they had wasn't love. They'd both like to call it that, but it couldn't be something as innocent-sounding as love. Love was for teenagers holding hands and sharing first kisses; not for young old men who'd seen more than could be psychologically healthy. It wasn't for people who'd lost families and fathers and best friends with a world of guilt and grief still tearing them up.

They were both too damaged, too broken and stitched back together to call it love. But that word would work for now.