Title: Lonely Mr. Ukki
Summary: What with all the missions, Kakashi spends little time at home, and his plant must get awfully lonely. Iruka's remedy for that doesn't go as smoothly as he'd hoped.
Pairing: Kakairu
AN: For Sejitsu's birthday. Happy Birthday!

Ire filled him. He chose to take the long way through the streets to the Hokage Tower rather than teleporting simply so he could stomp his way there, casting menacing looks at anyone ill-fated enough to glace his way. The fact that the crowds parted before him, however, had less to do with the expression on his face and more to do with the spiked implement tucked carefully under his arm.

His apartment was sparse to the point of being barren. He liked it that way - he always knew where to find something even in the dark and half-poisoned. No one was supposed to move items around in his apartment. He didn't even move things around in his apartment.

Okay, so nothing had technically been moved, but that was beside the point. What would have happened if he'd come through the window as always?

It would have been thoroughly unpleasant, and he would have forced Iruka to deal with the resulting wounds. It would have served him right for putting something in his apartment.

He stomped all the way to Iruka's classroom, threw the door open, walked into the middle of the lecture and glared. "What is this?"

"What is what?"

"This!" He brandished his burden in Iruka's face.

Even though Iruka leaned way back, he barely avoided being stabbed in the face by one of the bristling spines. When he replied, it was in his best patient teacher voice. "It's a cactus."

Several of the students snickered behind him. No doubt they were well acquainted with that voice.

"What was it doing in my apartment?" Kakashi punctuated each word with a stab of the plant.

"Kakashi, I'm trying to teach! Stop...! It's not..." The cactus almost made a singing noise as it passed just over Iruka's head. He ducked just in time and surfaced, looking a little white around the eyes. "Mr. Ukki looked lonely!"

Kakashi froze in mid swing. "You...you got Mr. Ukki a friend?"

"Yes!" The cactus had skewered several loose papers when it passed over Iruka's desk. He reached out and yanked them off the spines. "Your poor plant is left there with only your photos for company and whomever you get to water it during this mission. I sing to him when I'm in there, but I can't be there all the time. I thought he needed some company!"

Kakashi wasn't sure that he had ever loved Iruka more than in that moment, even if a chorus of little kids had just started giggling away in the background. He set the cactus down carefully, adjusting the little string of lights that was wrapped around it and replacing the stick-on gift bow that had fallen off because of his vigorous movements. "Why's it decorated?"

"It's almost Christmas, and she wanted to look nice?" Even though he'd just made the effort to buy a friend for Mr. Ukki, the look on Iruka's face suggested that the conversation had slid a bit too far into the topic for him to be comfortable.

He paused in the midst of making the last adjustments on the lights. "It's a girl?"

"Sure, why not?" Iruka pushed the cactus into Kakashi's arms, put both hands on his shoulders and began to sternly nudge him towards the door.

The wooden floors made digging his feet in to resist the forward motion hard, but Kakashi gave it his best effort. He huffed, "You're making assumptions about my plant's sexuality."

One of the kids yelled, "Your plant's gay?"

Another called out, "Shouldn't it be a fruit then?"

Kakashi twisted in time to see Iruka drop his head in a sure sign of defeat even though his shoulders were shaking with barely suppressed laughter.

"Fine! It's a boy."

"No, you've already told me it's a girl. You can't just change your mind about something like that."

After a minute of struggling to get him out the door, Iruka threw his hands into the air. "Then they can just be friends. Will that work?"

"I never said he wasn't bi."

The dark look Iruka gave him would have quelled a lesser man. "You're impossible, you know that?"

"He's not, but he could have been." Kakashi grinned at him - Iruka'd opened this can of worms and leapt in feet first, he should have fully prepared himself to deal with it.

Iruka pinched the bridge of his nose. "If I promise to find him a boyfriend, will you stop?"

The students leaned forward, watching in earnest. Waiting for his response.

He gave it a long moment of consideration. "...yes."

A deep sigh of relief escaped Iruka's lips, and before Kakashi could even open his mouth to ask when exactly Iruka was planning on finding a suitable companion for Mr. Ukki, he was shoved roughly into the hallway.

Iruka yanked the door shut behind him, but was not fast enough to completely drown out one particularly loud question.

"You sing to his plant, Iruka-sensei?"

With a cactus under one arm and a certain feeling of levity in his heart, Kakashi could barely swallow his laughter. He pointed a strict finger at the plant, "Friends only, you got that? Don't you go working your girlie wiles on Mr. Ukki before Iruka finds him a proper boyfriend."

OOOOOOOO

I don't know what it is about this woman that inspires me to write crack, but...yeah...Enjoy the silliness!