Another Life (Naruto, Kakashi/Iruka)

Iruka dreamed in hazy red. In his dream he was trapped in a box. It was not a big box, but it was a strong one, thick like iron around him. It protected him, but he couldn’t remember what he needed protecting from. He just knew that being outside of the box was dangerous, painful, terrifying. It didn’t hurt inside his box. He knew his body was in pain, but he couldn’t feel it here. He was past pain, beneath it. He floated in his red box while pain hovered like foam on the surface of the sea above him.

He dreamed strange things. Knives. Flashes of metal and red blood. Women screaming and dying all around him. Flesh moving. He dreamed he was changing, morphing like a caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly. He dreamed he had wings of bone and he could soars over seas of blood and fresh corpses, but he never got far. There was a snake haunting his dreams and every time he tried to fly away, the snake caught him in its sharp, sharp teeth.

Then the dreams stopped. An arm plunged through the sea and pulled him screaming from his safe little box. It was a familiar arm – pale skin clad in blue and green – but that didn’t matter in the face of the pain. This was what he’d forgotten. This was what he’d sealed himself away from, this blazing agony. It went straight through him like hot lava, pooling in his belly and seeping from his every pour.

There were voices. Someone was fighting. The stench of blood and death was all around him. He was strapped to a table and his stomach… there was something wrong with his stomach, something horribly wrong.

“It’s going to be alright.” The words sounded like they came from a great distance away. They were comforting nonetheless. He felt like he should know the speaker but he couldn’t remember. “You’re going to be alright.”

Strong pale arms picked him up and he screamed until he couldn’t scream anymore. He felt like he was falling but there was no box there to catch him, only deep, darkness and the painless bliss that came with it.