Ripples in an Ocean

by Swiss

1. Truth, Sum of Many Lies

Character(s): Iruka-sensei, Kakashi, Assorted
Summary: When asked about his scar, Iruka never tells the same story twice.

"Be fond of the man who jests at his scars, but never believe he is being on the level with you." - Pamela Hansford Johnson

Umino Iruka didn't stand out in a crowd. It wasn't because he was particularly boring, but only that he was particularly ordinary. He wasn't bubbly, or mysterious, or especially shy. He had a dark complexion, with unremarkable brown features - eyes, skin, hair. He sunk in instead of standing out. Not very tall, not very short. Not very anything. There were those that admired his warm, easy smile, but for the most part he was merely Iruka.

The only thing singular about Iruka at all in appearance was drawn across his face – that odd, aberrant scar. It sat on the bridge of his nose and crinkled when he grinned and burned white when he blushed. It was like a little upward twitch of the mouth – secretive, special.

His children soon grew used to it, but every fall there were a fresh set of questions. "Sensei! Iruka-sensei, what happened with your face?"

And always Iruka crossed his arms and looked down at them while they sat with their mouths vapidly open, waiting from their desks.

"Once, when I was traveling on an undercover mission through grass country," the teacher intoned gravely. "I was attacked by an alligator." And when the young people looked on wide eyed, he would trace the line on his face in a slow draw, like a great, hooked tooth. He finished, "I barely made it away alive."

Gasps, astonishment, babbling, and declarations of disbelief. His new class spent the rest of the year befuddled, trying to decide if they believed it was true.

Naruto's year had gotten a different story. "He was crossing a bridge in a snowstorm," Shikamaru once told his father as they sat hunched over a game board. The son's face twitched with irritation as he recounted the scene, as though he could not begin to describe how troublesome such conditions must have been. "There was so much snow that he didn't see the sai-wielding eucalyptus demons until they were close."

"I didn't know you believed such stories," the older man lightly chastised after he had ceased blinking with surprise.

The child nudged a piece forward on the board. Brow furrowed, he muttered firmly, "Sensei doesn't lie."

When asked, Konohamaru would enthusiastically divulge how Sensei had bravely climbed the Hokage's mountain in a deluge of rain to rescue a lost tarantula. He had saved the beloved pet, but unfortunately fell half the way down. "Iruka-sensei was still learning to be a ninja then," Konohamaru always ended, shaking his head. "That's the reason he fell. I bet he could do it easy now."

Many of the teachers had similar stories. Dozens of children felt certain that their private inquiry had yielded the true story. Yet no one really knew. And this became as intriguing as the old injury itself, because as many times as Iruka had ever been asked, he always gave a different answer.

Which was how Kakashi first got involved, when he overheard a conversation about it while pretending to read Icha Icha in the mission room.

"Who knows how he got that scar," one of the nameless mid-rankers spoke to a companion as they stood idly by the window. "He told Takashi that he was tortured by a tribe of beet-eating madmen, and he told a group of ambassadors he was escorting from Wave that it was part of a Konoha blood-letting ritual."

"By the Hokage," his companion sputtered with laughter.

The former nodded. "Umhm. And the story seems to shift according to it's purpose. He told my little girl, Hana, that he tripped while carrying scissors."

Intrigued, Kakashi reluctantly opened his eyes and pushed away from the wall. The two were so lax in their discipline that they did not notice him come upon them until he was right at their backs. They turned when he cleared his throat.

Kakashi loomed. "Umino. He never tells the same story?"

"N-no," the youthful nin stammered.

The jounin nodded. Such audacity was like a welcome invitation. And Kakashi, ever one to fill the chronic boredom of his off hours with a bit of harmless intelligence gathering, was only too happy to oblige.

He quickly gathered the stories of the students and children, ever an overflowing cascade of weeping secrets. Dull little animals. He wondered that any ever made it to adulthood.

Naruto was his last resort among the young. There, he felt, was surely the truth. Everyone in Konoha was familiar with how poor, strange Iruka-sensei had taken in the Kyuubi brat and kept him alive for so long. Moreover, he knew the adolescent was fiercely, even familially, attached to the older man.

"Scar?" Naruto asked. "Which? Oh, on his face. I dunno. Probably it was something stupid." Conspiratorially, the blonde whispered, "Sensei's pretty clumsy. I bet he just fell off of the roof."

"You never asked him?" It made the jounin's eye narrow with gruff frustration. The lack of curiosity and complete disregard for vital intelligence was galling. Not to mention the fact that he'd considered this brat to be his most reliable source of information, and now he was disappointed.

For his part, Naruto looked dumbfounded by his question. "Ask?" he wondered aloud. "But lots of people have scars. And what if he doesn't want to tell? It could hurt his feelings!"

The blunt humanity reminded the copy-nin forcefully of Iruka-sensei himself, which only compounded his irritation. Proof positive that the teacher was rooting the deliberate evil out of the future warriors of Konoha in his free time. The rest of which was obviously spent conspiring to confuse the well meaning stalkers of his community with these foolish stories.

And the man called himself a loyal nin.

However, Kakashi was determined. He slunk away from the children and went to dredge the well of individuals more certainly contaminated with a decent sense of non-privacy.

"Yeah, I asked him once," Asuma said. "After Konohamaru's yammering about the Tarantula, I felt like the truth might make my brain less numb."

Kakashi agreed with this sentiment; his own brain felt like someone had sat on it. But Iruka, so far as he knew, was relatively friendly toward Asuma, and he was close to the Third's family. Surely Asuma would have been told the truth. "What did he say?" he asked.

Asuma withdrew his cigarette from his mouth and exhaled a puff of smoke. Deadpan, he repeated the story: "Rock."

Kakashi blinked. "He was...hit by a rock?"

"No, it challenged him to a riddle game. Apparently he's bad a riddles. The rock retaliated."

There was a pause. "Retaliated?"

Asuma was patting his pockets for a new cigarette. "I wondered that too, but he only said it was rude to ask. He looked so serious, and I don't like being around him when he's fussy. Damn-scary-teacher-no-jutsu."

Genma and Raido's combined story was even less comprehensible. "Iruka's scar?" Raido scratched his hair, as though he wondered what could possibly be so interesting about a facial scar. Smiling, he related, "He told me it was a toaster malfunction."

Perhaps misinterpreting Kakashi's stunned silence, he frowned and prodded Genma, who was sitting across from Kakashi looking bored. "It was the toaster, right?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah. Iruka never did make good toast."

Tsunade was more helpful in the ordinary way of things, if not very enlightening. "It's not in any of his records," she told him, bristling over her playing cards. Kakashi was winning. "Not in the medical folders, mission reports, or private records. I looked after he tried to tell me it was a mark of approval from the gods giving him permission to torment the current Hokage. Ha! What a dissident. I'm going to flog him one day."

Kakashi looked at her critically, wondering if she really would. Probably not. Iruka was a pretty popular guy, for all that averageness. And besides, public flogging had gone out of favor with the general population at least a couple of decades ago.

It was as he was leaving the Hokage's office that Iruka himself finally caught up to him. A little brat emerged from the corner of a building, and stomped up to Kakashi with the air of one who had been kept waiting inordinately long. He gestured imperiously.

Kakashi knelt beside the scruffy child. "Yo," he said by way of greeting.

The boy hardly seemed impressed. If anything, he looked cross. "I have a message for you," he said.

A crease of his one visible brow. "Oh?"

The brat placed his hands, arms akimbo, and his expression became one of truly furious irritation. "Iruka-sensei said to tell you, 'Stop being stupid. Just come and ask me.'" More puffed up fury followed, and the child declared, "If you're harassing Sensei, I won't forgive you!"

Kakashi's eye narrowed. Maa, the youth today. Disrespectful as hell.

He actually met Iruka at the tea house by accident. He'd been mulling over what the next step might be in his greater Plan when he noticed the teacher pacing down the road through a dusting of snow flurries, chin hunched into the folds of a deep red scarf and carrying a packet of papers under his arm.

Hesitating, Kakashi almost hadn't hailed him. However, after today there wasn't any doubt that his molesting of the general public for information had reached Iruka, and so there was no reason for him not to attempt a frontal assault.

Iruka joined him with surprisingly little resistance, smiling amicably as he settled at the table and laid aside his papers. He sighed in the pleasant warmth and undid his scarf as he placed a quiet order for tea.

Then he turned. "Kakashi. My students mentioned that you were making inquires."

Blunt, straightforward. The jounin flinched slightly, though not in chagrin. He wasn't particularly sorry for anything except the break down in intelligence. Children were so hard to threaten these days.

"I don't appreciate you telling my children lies. Really – that you'd come for them at night and tear out their liver? Touya wouldn't stop crying for an hour."

Kakashi balanced his chin against his palm. "From what I heard," he said. "You're the one known for telling lies, Sensei."

A slight tilt of the head that made the neat ponytail fall sideways. The snowflakes caught in it were melting, and so it looked almost black in places. His body language indicated that he was waiting for something more. It was very diplomatic of him. Kakashi often wondered if Iruka wasn't more involved in politics than he let on.

"I was interested in the real story about that mark you carry. I wanted to know who hurt you."

Iruka looked at him without expression. "What makes you say that?" he asked.

"Oh," Kakashi said, leaning over his cup and observing the back-and-forth sloshing as though it held great interest for him. "I figured it had to be painful or embarrassing or else you'd just say."

The teacher grinned then, and it was a particularly wicked thing for the usually mild-mannered teacher. Smugly, he suggested, "Maybe I just like to make up stories. It's a wonderful conversation starter, you know. Or don't people usually ask why they can only see a quarter of your face?"

"People don't dare," Kakashi responded, a vein of steel winding around his words. Deflection. He hadn't expected to be attacked.

Iruka shrugged, leaning back in his seat. He suddenly seemed to find the rest of the denizens interesting, and peered through them in a distracted way that left his eyes wandering and difficult to read. "Perhaps I'm just not intimidating enough," he said, and chuckled as though amused by the idea he might ward off small children and well-meaning citizens by emitting a radius of aggression.

Put that way, it did sound silly.

Though perhaps not so much as believing that Iruka was a crocodile wrestling, eucalyptus demon dodging, pet tarantula saving, mountain climbing, riddle solving, clumsy toast burner who tripped while running with scissors.

Iruka made a choked sound suspiciously like a giggle when he heard the run-down. "Ha," he rubbed his eyes, which were tearing with mirth. "I had forgotten about some of those. I used to be really creative."

"But not now?" Kakashi inquired.

The teacher shrugged. "I'm busy. Papers to grade and troublemakers to thwart. Mostly I just alternate between falling meteors and shuriken mishaps."

The jounin blinked. Right. Then, deliberately quietly, he leaned forward and murmured, "Perhaps it was your choice in friends. I hear that you were close to that traitor who provoked Naruto to steal the forbidden scroll."

Suddenly Iruka was ice cold. "That's none of your business."

"Hm," Kakashi said, but even in that short breath Iruka had regained his composure.

Pausing to take a drink from his cup, the teacher murmured, "Meddlers inevitably meet an ugly end."

True, but the jounin was an even more insensate flirter with death than most. He took back up his thread of inquiry, making known his guesses while he watched Iruka carefully for any reaction. "It had to have been before your graduation, because people remember you with the scar as a pre-genin. It could have been the fox, but I'm starting to doubt it. Pre-fox is interesting or very boring. Childhood accident is boring. Deliberate injury, however..."

If there was one thing Kakashi knew, it was how to spot deliberate injury. He finished, "There just aren't a lot of places a little brat can get cut up like that and it not be an accident."

"You assume altogether too much." Iruka was beginning to stand.

Kakashi caught his wrist, demanding, "Tell me."

Iruka looked at him with eyes that seemed to grow deeper and wider as they anchored on him. Waves and a tide. His scar settled just beneath them like an outline, like an emphasis. Mystery. Vicious damage to a plain brown package. He said, "My father thought it would help him find me in a crowd."

Silence.

A grim little smile and Iruka asked, "Believe me?"

Kakashi wasn't sure if maybe he did.