Title: Broken
Genre: angst? Yeah, angst works...
Characters: Umino Iruka and Hatake Kakashi (well, duh, look at my ship.) A few OCs, but they don't do anything but get killed spectacularly. Like Barbies with Cherry Bombs. smiiiiiiiile
Summary: Breaking is a fact of ninja life. Sometimes, though, it hurts a little more than it should. KakaIruKashi. Fluffy angst and sad romance.
Status: WIP...Part 1 of Unknown...
AN: Hallo! 'Broken' started as something to keep my hands busy at the beach, and it ended up becoming a hugely drawn out thing. But I've had fun writing it, so far, and it just keeps getting better.
Background notes: Broken starts about a year after the timeskip. A lot of the beginning is spent in flashbacks, however. Every story needs back-story, ne? If you ever get confused, please just raise your hand and a flight attendant will assist you email me at I will respond to that email and try to clarify it in the post.
Have fun!
-cc
Naruto is the property of Kishimoto Masashi. Kishimoto-sensei, I promise to return them in (mostly) one piece!
Broken
Chapter One: Not All Hurts
Every ninja breaks. It is a fact of life in a village like Konoha. It is a very rare day when there isn't a single admittance to the Konoha hospital for something shinobi-related. There are injuries from people having nightmares and injuring loved ones. There are injuries that are self-inflicted, unwittingly or in full command of their mental powers. There are injuries from trying to prevent this. There are people admitted for going catatonic. There are people who just snap and go crazy, and who are safest under a med-nin's sharp eye.
Then, there are the ones who just…break.
They are the ones who just fall apart at the seams, like the glue holding them together has disappeared, has been washed away in a tide of red. They are the ones who just stop. Stop fighting, stop crying, stop hurting, stop thinking, stop living. It's almost as if though they're frozen in time, afraid to leave wherever they are. And usually, wherever they are isn't a very nice place to be.
Every ninja breaks at some point or another. The hospital has special wards, set apart within the psychiatric ward itself, especially for the ninja who have broken. There, dedicated med-nin heal their physical wounds. They even try their best to heal the mental. Tsunade has warned them not to feel it inside them when they cannot heal it. There are some things, some injuries that run too deep, that heal too slowly, that are just too old and picked over and scabbed and picked over again. Some things will never heal.
It is the way of the med-nin to understand this.
They take it to heart and bury it, doing their best to forget they know this fact, even as they cling to it in the night, when it's dark and cold, and all their failures come rushing in at them. It's little wonder that med-nin can survive and be human (well, as human as nin get, anyway) after struggling through fourteen hour shifts. It is a wonder that they remain so human in appearance after the fourteen hour shifts where every second is a fight for someone's life, someone who shouldn't have been injured in the first place but they were and you're a med-nin so it's your job to fix them up and put them to rights and if you cannot…
It's little wonder that many nin (the ones like Kakashi and Iruka and Genma and Raidou and Anko and Kurenai and Tsunade) sit back and thank the gods for the med-nin and their tireless sacrifices. Without them, there wouldn't be a miraculous replacement of a man's eye. There wouldn't be the story of that time when a mother rushed her tiny child in because a trip wire had sliced straight through his face. There wouldn't be a training course specially designed after that time that one genin came in with his team, a whole set of senbon stuck straight through his face, trapping his mouth half-open. There wouldn't be legends about that one chuunin whose team accidentally set him on fire, covering him in third-degree burns—they still talk about how he shouldn't have survived the hour. And so many other stories and legends and skills would be missing.
But still, there were some hurts the med-nin couldn't heal.
This, clearly, was one of them.
Iruka slammed the cabinet shut, forcing himself away from his less-than-cheerful thoughts as he downed the set of pills he had been ordered to take on a strict regimen. The med-nin had all warned him that the chemicals in them needed to be built up, and to be eased off slowly, both to be done only under the strict supervision of a trained medical professional with morals (which ruled out Kabuto, not that Iruka would have asked him for Prozac or whatever he was on now, anyway). Needless to say, just not taking those nasty horse pills those poor, lazy excuses for wash-out torturers forced upon him was not an option.
Damn.
He choked the pills down, muttered nasty imprecations on all who worked in the medical field, and went to bed.
The night that proceeded was, while uneventful, not one most people looked forward to. The assortment of pills he took included several specially designed pills for exhausted shinobi—a way to sleep without ever losing that constant vigilance. These pills did help with the constant insomnia. Tsunade had insisted they be thrown into the mix after he passed out in the middle of her office one morning after going a whole two weeks without sleep. He required a week in the hospital to recuperate.
So, at least he slept. But really, what Iruka had tried to avoid so frequently by staying awake was the nightmares that came when he lapsed into unconsciousness. No, a nightmare wasn't really the right term. More like, memories. Only memories that had been twisted and turned and utterly corrupted, even the good ones. And those were few and far between to begin with.
TBC...
will be continued soon. I'm just revising chapter two, and then I'll chuck it here. As a note, I need a beta. Anyone willing to play?