Title: Ward Five

Author: Your Existence

Date: 10/1/10 (Jan. 10, 2010)

Chapter: One

Author's Note: I guess I should mention that the chapter before this one was a prologue and won't flow straight into this chapter. Future chapters will eventually lead up to that little segment in the prologue.

Anywhoozle, enjoy!

Kakashi casually glanced over at the clock in his dashboard. Twelve minutes past eight. He knew he should have been in the classroom at seven, seven thirty at the latest, to get today's lesson plan ready, but, as always, he wasn't there. Kakashi shot up outside in the teacher's parking lot in his car around the same time every morning. Kakashi didn't have to be late to his classroom full of teenagers every day. He chose to be late. He needed the extra time, actually.

His whole day depended on that shot of heroin.

-

When he walked into the classroom at eight twenty eight, the class grinded out a half-assed 'Good Morning' to him. Kakashi ignored them and, picking up his blue and black dry erase markers, began to write out pages in their textbooks in blue. Underneath the blue, he wrote 'When you're done reading and taking notes, come see me' in black.

The class groaned.

"Kakashi-sensei! You're expecting us to read three whole chapters?!" a boy whined. The rest of the class groaned and complained along with him.

"You also need to have it done before class ends." Kakashi said nonchalantly. "You have ninety minutes for this class period. Use it."

"We only have sixty minutes since you're always late every morning."

"Shut up Kiba and just start reading for Christ sake!" order Sakura, who shot a deathly glare at the brunet.

With the students working on their assignment (that or sleeping), Kakashi stepped out the classroom.

-

"'Ruka?" Kakashi called quietly. Iruka looked up from his computer screen and up at the silver-haired man standing his doorway. Kakashi started towards Iruka before the man could get up from his seat.

"Kakashi," Iruka whispered when said man leaned against his desk. Kakashi waved to Iruka's petty ninth graders. Some of the waved back, while others just stared.

"Umino-sensei, who's the old man?" an obnoxious boy asks. Any students that weren't look up before were now. They looked Kakashi over, all of them ending at Kakashi face. They stared as his badly decorated paper medical mask and matching eye patch. His hair was messily styled, if it was styled at all. It stuck up in random places. If you didn't know any better, you could have thought that he used hair cement to keep the longer locks of hair standing up the way it did.

Kakashi peeked over his shoulder at Iruka. "Indeed, Umino-sensei. Who am I?" he drawled out. Iruka's face flushed just a tad. Kakashi blinked slowly at the scarred man, waiting for his response.

"Am I your… secret lover?" He said that last part in English, winking at Iruka when he looked up at him. That special vein on Iruka's forehead started to show, telling Kakashi that he was getting both irritated and embarrassed. Kakashi then turned to face the confused students.

"Kakashi…!" Iruka said, irritation colouring his voice.

"How many of you know English fluently?" Kakashi asked the students in English. They all looked confused. Kakashi then turned to Iruka, resting his elbows on the desk.

"You are indeed a bad English teacher, 'Ruka…" he said lazily in English.

"Don't you have a class going on right now, Kakashi?" the younger man spat out. Kakashi ignored Iruka's annoyance.

"Nyaa, you look so incredibly cute when you're mad, you know that?" Kakashi purred quietly. "Especially with that particular vein showing on your lovely forehead…" He was tempted to lightly brush his finger over it. He leaned in slightly, making Iruka blush even more. "It makes me want to climb right over this damned desk and—"

"Kakashi." Iruka stopped him from going on. Kakashi looked playfully into Iruka's eyes. "Not at work, especially in front of mere ninth graders." Iruka's accent slightly showed through when he spoke English, even more so when he was aroused.

"Want to 'play' in front of the twelfth graders, then? I'm up for anything." Kakashi said playfully. He winked. Iruka sputtered at this. His face got as red as his brown skin would allow. "I'll be in my classroom if you decide to do so." Kakashi leaned in like he was about to kiss Iruka, but stopped just a mere half-inch away from his burning face, instead letting his breath caress his succulent lips.

"Marriage has made you so boring…"

Kakashi was already walking out the door when Iruka finally looked up at him. Iruka felt desperate now. Kakashi had left him hard and needy. He had half a mind to go follow the mischievous man.

Out of the blue, a naïve student asked, "Are you gay?!" There was an awkward silence that lasted for only a moment before the class suddenly broke out in a mild roar of questions and discussions. Iruka didn't get to teach a thing from his lesson plan for the rest of that period.

-

Kakashi slowly drifted back to his own classroom. Kakashi wasn't missed. The classroom was, for the most part, quiet, save for the hush whispers of the group of girls in the back corner and other chitchat scattered about the room. Kiba had fallen asleep after reading a chapter and a half.

There were only twenty minutes left of the period and Kakashi was as relaxed as ever.

It was well after school and Iruka was sitting at his desk, examining the picture of him and his wife he taped to the side of his computer monitor. He looked fairly happy with her. In the picture, he was sitting in the sand on the beach with his wife sitting in between his legs. He had his arms wrapped around her mid-section and had his chin resting on top of her head. She had put her hands on top of his and had been giggling about something when the picture was being taken. Iruka had smiled a hearty smile, but when he looked at it again, he noticed that he couldn't see the smile in his eyes. That bothered him.

Iruka then looked at the picture below the first one. This picture was of him and Kakashi. Kakashi had set a camera up in his kitchen where Iruka couldn't see it. He had, at first, just taken pictures of Iruka whenever he came in the kitchen. But in this particular picture, Kakashi had snuck up behind Iruka and suddenly hugged him, kissing him gently on the back of his neck. Iruka was smiling and blushing like a schoolgirl in the picture, but when looking at it again, he could see the smile, the happiness in his eyes that he couldn't see in him in the pictures of him and his wife.

Iruka constantly wondered if he really loved his wife. He wondered if it was wrong to have married in the first place. What Kakashi had said to him years ago before the wedding was to take place rang in his ears:

'You're going to regret this marriage, Iruka. You don't love this woman the way a husband should love his wife. You've been happily having an affair for almost four years. You can't expect to have any good could possibly come out of this…'

Iruka had gotten angry with Kakashi and told him that he was just jealous that someone else was more worthy of his attention than he. Kakashi had looked hurt and had walked away without saying another word. It would be a year and a half before Kakashi would say anything to him again.

It has now been four years, ten months since the marriage and eight years, five months since Iruka met Kakashi in that old bar downtown.

It's been eight years, eight months since he died...

Black overtook grey-blue. The minor pain in his arm quickly went away. He could feel the chemical searing through his veins, rushing through his liver and heart before finally arriving to his brain. The drug would soon numb the awful, sickening pain in his head.

Sixteen years. Sixteen painful years. The loss of his left eye was probably the worse thing that could have happened to Kakashi. Being one of the few unfortunate eye amputees to suffer from phantom eyes pains, he was willing to do anything to make the pain go away. He had tried so many drugs before settling on heroin. A lot of the other drugs would numb the pain, but he couldn't function enough to do other daily things. Heroin allowed him to do that, more or less.

One thing Kakashi loved about the drug (besides the obvious pain relief) was that it kept him generally in a relaxed state fore a long time, letting him have the patience with his students he knew he really didn't have. But, every four or five hours (sometimes even three hours), he would need another fix, something he hated about the drug. While his head is still numb from the last fix, his body would start to ache and crave the drug again.

But, if it made the pain go away, even for a short time, it was worth the side effects. The high was coming on. The pain waned away, and Kakashi let out a shaky, yet relieved sigh…