I was really going to post this to the plot bunny shelter after going over grammatical errors. I was, I swear. It was inspired by this art:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B3dlGK7Janx/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
The dog ate it (930 words) by artsies
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Naruto
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka
Characters: Hatake Kakashi, Umino Iruka
Additional Tags: Inspired by Art
Summary:
It’s late. Iruka is tired, and they have paperwork to fill out.
Iruka supposes this horrid late night shift is apt punishment for his big mouth. He was, after all, still one of the junior teachers, and he all but called the principal an idiot to his face at the staff meeting. Not prudent, he admits, but… well. He is who he is.
Maybe he ought to be brewing another hellish cup of coffee, he thinks with a dramatic sigh, when he suddenly hears quiet footsteps approaching the mission room. They are so soft, he is sure their owner must make them deliberately this loud… and while he appreciates the courtesy, he doesn’t appreciate having to attend to someone when his brain is just about shut down. (He understands now why Maeno was grinning at him when he bailed about two hours ago. The jerk knew he’d crash half an hour later, pouring over the forms in front of him with the speed of a snail and the grace of a sloth. Ugh.) He squares his shoulders, straightens his stamps and clicks his pen several times for good measure. He can do this. He can absolutely write correct Form 35/6C-s after teaching the whole day, doing weapons inventory and being stuck on this shift. Of course. Pssh.
The door opens slowly.
Oh. Oh man, he is going to be here until dawn.
“Good evening, Iruka-sensei. I had not expected to find you here, on the graveyard shift”, says one Kakashi of secret crush fame as well as notorious report messer-upper, “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
First off, Kakashi had no business saying the word bed to Iruka. He had enough fantasy material, thank you very much. Second, he seemed oddly cheerful for a man arriving in the middle of the night with leaves in his hair and mud on his trousers. (Iruka decides the coated senbon hidden in his leg bandages are a moot point if the other man has snapped, and he should just surrender himself to his fate.)
“Well, if your report is in order, we can both find ourselves in bed soon.”, Kakashi blinks at him slowly. Iruka, oblivious, blinks back. A moment passes, and then he realizes the sounds his mouth had made can sound like entirely different sounds, and he can feel himself begin to blush at his mangled words, “I mean, in our respective beds. Your report, please?”
There ensues some long suffering at his point, which consists of a) Kakashi listing dangerously sideways, b) Kakashi going through his pockets - of which there are many - and not noticing leaves, debris, rocks and, uh, feathers, falling out at specific intervals from them and c) a soft monologue about the benefits of bathtubs which was probably meant to be internal. Iruka feels they might be a perfect and dangerous match to the efficient bureaucracy of Konoha at this moment.
Finally, he is presented with the most torn up Form 35/6B he has quite possibly ever laid eyes upon. Really. It’s just… the fact that it is in one piece - no, hold up, it’s taped together via a field bandage - the fact that it even exists and hasn’t crumbled to dust is a testament to the power of something. He isn’t quite sure what. Maybe whoever they buy their supplies from?
Anyway, at this point Iruka has been staring at that piece of… good intentions in his hands for quite some time, and is jerked out of his trance when Kakashi leans a bit too forward. Or staggers in a very controlled manner. He blinks angrily up at the man he has imagined kissing silly, “Do you hate me or something?”, because this would be a nightmare under normal circumstances, but now that it’s half past fuck off to sleep o’clock, he isn’t even sure he knows how to write the kanji for assassination. (It had… like… the kanji for music in it… right?)
Kakashi fumbles to lean forward even more and prop himself against the desk, his dirty fingers brushing Iruka’s wrists, even dirtier gloves no doubt leaving a mess on the papers underneath his palms, sighing softly down at him. Iruka looks up from the dirt beneath the man’s fingernails, and gosh, that face is too red and too pale at the same time.
“Not at all. I’m actually quite in love with you, really.”
Iruka stares.
He can feel his lungs begin to burn as he kind of forgets to breathe. There might be a continuous loop of what Kakashi had just said so very casually in his head, like that tape he had when he was fourteen and got stuck in the cassette player he salvaged from the trash behind Mr. Okomura’s shop. Except this one is not a silly song about finding the love of your life. Except maybe it is? Oh shit, what if Kakashi means it, what if he really loves Iruka like Iruka has been burning for him in the past three and a half years, and they’ve been wasting time on longing glances and secret pinings when they could have been coming home to each other and sharing soft smiles and by every god he has ever known he is going to hyperventilate from the sheer dumbassery that they -
Kakashi falls down towards him. His messy white head lands painfully on his collarbone; Iruka grabs his shoulders out of pure instinct, unable to stop the heavy weight of a fully-geared unconscious shinobi from knocking him back and over his chair, pulling said out-of-commission man with him with a terrible racket.
As first confessions go, this is not ideal.
