Next chapter. Sorry it took a little longer than I'd planned; my computer decided to die on me.

OOOOOOO

His bedroom was dark when he woke. The scudding clouds that had come in late the night before obscured any light that might otherwise be filtering down from the sky.

He fumbled for the light on the bedside table and fell back against the pale gray sheets once he found the switch trying to gather his scattered thoughts.

Something nagged at the back of his brain as he collected his vague recollections of the Academy, Mizuki, and all the strange things he was sure he remembered from yesterday, but the memories were hazy, as if being viewed through a fogged window.

"Is it possible I dreamed it all?' He queried the room at large and was met with only the soft creaking of the ancient building settling farther into the sand.

The synapses in his brain finally connected in a flurry of fiery sparks and chemical communications. The sheets. He'd bled all over these sheets the night after Mizuki's betrayal. Nightmares had caused him to toss and turn, tearing loose the bandages and partial scabs. He'd opted for dark sheets – a navy so deep it was almost black – because blood didn't show quite as badly on them. These, the sheets he was now tangled in, he had thrown away years ago.

He pushed a hand up under the sleeveless shirt he almost always slept in, fingers sweeping across what parts of his back he could reach. The scar was high on his back, but he'd always been able to feel the bottom of it, a rough patch of skin with well-defined, stark edges where marred flesh met un-marred.

But no matter how many times he prodded his way across his back, he couldn't feel it.

One day, one night. Two mornings waking in this reality without any sign of the previous one to break between them. Terrifying as it was, the truth seemed fairly inescapable.

This was the real world.

The other was nothing more than an exhaustively detailed dream.

Iruka pulled his knees to his chest, pressed his face into them and sobbed from pure relief. Though he had been terrified, overwhelmed and confused yesterday, the reality from the dream was certainly not ideal. It might take him weeks to be able to interact normally with Mizuki again, but given the choice between a month of strangeness and the alternative, he knew full well which he would choose. Not to mention the Sandaime. And Sasuke. And the other nameless – and literally faceless – shinobi who had died during the chuunin exam to suit Orocimaru's purposes.

With a shuddering sigh, he managed to swallow his tears and scrubbed his hands over his face to chase them away.

Something crashed and stuck against his window, and Iruka choked back a completely un-shinobi-like yelp before throwing back the covers and stalking across the room, fully intent on throwing the window open and giving whoever had thrown the object a very vocal piece of his mind.

The window took up the opposite wall of his apartment, looking out at the rest of the village instead of overlooking the balcony that traced each floor of the building and allowed access to everyone's front door. The street below was uncharacteristically empty, and Iruka ripped the sticky item off the window and muttered at it irritably since he'd been robbed of his opportunity to bitch early in the morning.

He peeled off the outer wrapping, which was roughly the consistency of fly paper. He'd seen the sticky envelopes before – a rather low-tech, low-chakra way to secure items, though they couldn't hold much weight – but had never seen anyone throw them. His name was scrawled across the outside of the folded piece of paper he extracted, and he rolled his eyes.

"Che, would it have killed you to just stick it to my door instead of hurling it at my window?" He smoothed it open. Two words were scratched into the paper with what looked like a pen that was rapidly running out of ink. Dinner tonight? Kakashi's name was signed to the bottom in his cramped handwriting that had always looked to Iruka like he'd stopped trying to learn when he was about four. Which, considering he'd become a chuunin at six, was entirely possible.

"You are actually inviting yourself over to my house and making me cook for you." Iruka just shook his head in disbelief. "And here I thought you were joking, Kakashi-sensei."

OOOOOOO

Teaching calmed his mind even more. Spending time with his oh-so-predictable class let him fall into his common routine, and the day passed quickly and uneventfully.

He left the classroom on the heels of his students; he was in desperate need of ingredients if he was going to cook something.

OOOOOOO

A soft clatter at the window pulled his attention from the sliced vegetables he was tossing into the pot. "You know, you could use the door like a normal person, Kakashi-sensei."

"Maa, but the window is so much easier to reach from the roof."

Iruka rolled his eyes. Kakashi strode across the room, leaned against the counter next to him and peered over his shoulder. "Smells good."

"I hope it's okay. It's been a while since I've cooked it." Iruka shook a loose strand of hair out of his face and stirred the mixture before lowering the heat. "It's going to be about twenty minutes. Would you like something to drink?"

Kakashi burst out laughing as he turned around, and Iruka glowered at him. "What?!"

Kakashi had wrapped an arm around his stomach and was waiving his free hand at Iruka. "I'm sorry, Iruka-sensei. I just…your apron…"

Iruka flushed and smoothed the front of the apron. "That's…it's… Kotetsu and Izumo got it for me as a joke a few years ago. It's kind of stupid and embarrassing, but it does the job, and I just never got around to buying a new one." He glanced down at the bright red letters on the front that proclaimed 'Shinobi do it in the dark!' It was accented by a scarlet lipstick kiss next to the exclamation point.

He untied it and swept it off over his head, folding it on the counter and feeling decidedly less self-conscious in his uniform shirt and pants than he had in the stupid apron.

"Tea."

"I'm sorry?"

"You asked if I wanted anything to drink. Tea would be nice. It's awfully cold out there."

"Ah, of course." Iruka pulled open a couple of cupboards. "If you want to wait in the living room, I'll bring it in a minute."

Kakashi was curled in the corner of the sofa reading the back cover of one of Iruka's books when he finished. "Kakashi-sensei?"

The jounin glanced up, smiled and took the proffered cup. "Thank you."

Iruka perched on the edge of the cushion, cradling his own cup close to his chest and enjoying the heat radiating from it.

"So, are you going to tell me why you were topless on the floor in the teacher's bathroom?"

Iruka glared at him over the rim of the cup. "Couldn't think of a more…decent…way to phrase that?"

"Nope."

He guffawed, continued to smile when he met Kakashi's gaze and watched the jounin's eyes twinkle in his direction. "Alright, alright, I'll tell you." He began at the point of Naruto's fourth attempt at passing the academy exam, speaking slowly and gaining momentum though he needed to pause a few time to straighten out the fading details of the dream. Kakashi listened silently and intently, clearly waiting for the end of the story to ask his questions.

"So, that morning…?"

Iruka heaved a weary sigh. "When I saw Mizuki in the academy, I…I was so confused. I was sure he should have been in prison, and I could still picture him attacking Naruto and myself and…and I thought that he had escaped. But then I saw Sakura-chan and Sasuke-kun, and I just couldn't understand what was going on. I was looking for the scar on my back."

"From where Mizuki-sensei injured you?"

"Yes. It's physical proof, you know, that it wasn't just a dream. But it's not there. And I just couldn't wrap my brain around it."

The clock on the wall ticked softly as it marked the passage of time, and the seconds crept by before Kakashi spoke again.

"Kage bunshin? As a pre-genin?"

"Yeah, I know. And there were hundreds of them. My subconscious seems to be fairly imaginative. He can't even create a normal bunshin. It's just not something that he's good at." Iruka swirled the tea in the bottom of his glass. "The more I think about it, the more I realize that most of that dream didn't make any sense."

Kakashi propped his head up on his hand, "But you knew some things about me."

"Kakashi-sensei, please. You're a jounin – a famous one at that. I don't think there's a single shinobi who hasn't heard of you and your strange habits." He gestured vaguely at the air encompassing the other man.

"My…habits?" Kakashi's mask stretched as he smiled broadly at Iruka.

Iruka rolled his eyes. "I'm talking about that book you read all the time." He studied his tea again. "Besides, I've seen you in the mission room before…. I think."

A loud buzzing echoed through the apartment, and Iruka jumped, nearly spilling his tea. Kakashi chuckled under his breath just loudly enough that Iruka could hear it, and the chuunin blushed. "Dinner."

"Good, I'm starving."

OOOOOOO

A flurry of conversation swept the classroom, and Iruka snapped, "Back to your tests!" before he'd even looked up.

Kakashi was already standing over his desk by the time he'd raised his head from the lesson plan he was modifying. "Can you come back in twenty minutes, Kakashi-sensei? We're a little busy here." He jerked his head at the class, who were staring open-mouthed at the infamous jounin.

The jounin inclined his head briefly and vanished from the spot.

After the students had scattered amidst cheers at the end of the exam, Iruka shuffled through the answer sheets, putting them in alphabetical order and then checked to make sure that they'd all been turned in. After forty minutes had passed, he dropped his forehead on the edge of the desk and wondered aloud where the jounin had gotten off to and whether he was ever coming back.

"My apologies, Iruka-sensei, there was this woman who needed help trimming the hedges around her apartment."

Iruka raised an eyebrow before shaking his head, deciding that he just didn't really want to know.

"I've been working with Naruto this morning." Kakashi stood on the far side of Iruka's desk, his hands shoved deep in his pockets and a pensive look on his face. "Do you need me to write him a excusal note?"

"I'll take your word for it, Kakashi-sensei."

"It's really interesting." The jounin almost sounded like he was talking to himself. "Kage bunshin uses a different method of chakra release than a normal bunshin. It occured to me that it was possible for a shinobi to be completely incompetent with a bunshin and be exceptionally talented with a kage bunshin."

For a few moments after Kakashi'd finished, Iruka blinked rapidly. "Do…you have a point?"

"Naruto. He can do a kage bunshin." Kakashi shook his head in bewilderment. "It only took a couple of hours, and he's practically mastered it. Plus his chakra reserves are incredible." Kakashi pierced Iruka with an intense gaze. "He has amazing potential given the right instruction. If you hadn't had that dream, Iruka-sensei…."

Iruka was shaking his head, "I should have realized Naruto needed to learn differently. I've been his teacher for three years now; I should have picked up on it."

"Yeah, probably."

He jerked his head up to meet Kakashi's gaze, snorting when he saw that the jounin was grinning at him. "Jerk."

"Maa, Iruka-sensei, who'd have thought you could be so thoroughly impolite."

"You started it." Iruka shot back.

Kakashi gaped at him for second before doubling over, laughing uncontrollably, and pressing a hand to his side.

"Knock it off. I can't help that I spend all my time with ten-year-olds." Iruka snatched up his papers and stuffed them into his bag, pushing past the chuckling jounin.

He felt the other man's eyes on his back until he slid the door shut.

OOOOOOOO

Iruka blinked in surprise as a nondescript box was thrust between his face and the papers he was supposed to be working on. "What's this?"

"Well, you see, some cultures have a custom of consuming sustenance at a point between breakfast and dinner, typically around midday. I believe it's called 'lunch'."

"Lunch? Never heard of it."

Kakashi chuckled. "Oh really? Didn't I just hear you telling your students a moment ago to break for it?" He leaned over the desk, crowding into Iruka's personal space. "You're such a liar, sensei."

Iruka threw up his hands in mock surrender and looked skyward. "Alright, alright, guilty. You caught me red-handed." But his gaze slid from ceiling to the box that Kakashi was holding scarce, tantalizing inches from his nose as his stomach let out a hopeful rumble. "Did you really bring me lunch, or are you just here to torment me?"

He laughed out loud when Kakashi clapped a hand over his heart. "Iruka-sensei, how could you possibly insinuate such a thing? I am not that cruel."

"Uh-huh." The box was deposited gently into his waiting hands, and tendrils of enticing smells curled out of it. "Thank you, Kakashi-sensei."

"Ah," The jounin shook his head violently. "Don't thank me until you've tasted it."

Iruka paused with a forkful of food partway to his mouth. "Did you make this?"

"That depends. Is it any good?"

Iruka pressed a hand over his mouth as the food scalded his tongue. "Hot." He muttered around the mouthful. "But tasty."

"Maa, in that case, I will take full responsibility for it."

Iruka snickered and pushed out the chair next to his desk with his foot. Kakashi flopped into it with an obscene amount of grace and popped the top off his own lunch. "Can I ask what brought this on?"

"Seeing if I can help you with the whole childish attitude."

"Excuse me?" His voice lilted upward at the end more than he'd intended.

"Well, you said that you act like that cause you only hang around with kids. Seems to me that this is the simple solution."

"This?" When Iruka looked up after asking the question, Kakashi was tugging at the top of his mask, and the food was gone.

The jounin rose and stretched. "I'll see you later, Iruka-sensei." He waived once and vanished.

"Tha…I…you….That's not an answer!" Iruka spluttered at his empty classroom.

OOOOOOOOOO

Hope you like it!