Live Wire (Naruto, Kakashi/Iruka)

Iruka opened the door to find a strange man with spiky white hair standing on his welcome mat. His hand hovered over the alarm plate but there was something vaguely familiar about the strange man that made him hesitate. There was no obvious insignia on the stranger’s plain black clothes to hint of why he was here, but the cut of his clothing and the discreet bulges in certain places screamed military. His face was completely covered save for a small triangle of skin around one blue eye.

Sometimes bluntness was the best approach. “Are you here to kill me?” Iruka asked, affecting a bored tone. If he was, that would make the stranger the third this week. It was starting to get rather annoying. Expensive, too. The standard bribe for the local constables had gone up considerably in recent years.

The stranger raised an eyebrow. There was a subtle shift in his blank expression, almost imperceptible. He seemed faintly amused. “No.” The stranger had a nice voice. Iruka found that he liked it, which made him hope all the more that the stranger wasn’t here for a nefarious purpose. Silence stretched between them, broken only by the occasional hum of a craft taking off from the nearby spaceport. Iruka stared, hoping that his expression made it obvious that he expected the stranger to elaborate. It worked. “Your son sent me.”

Iruka reappraised the man. He was too old to be one of Naruto’s classmates or one of his squad. Given Naruto’s sense of humor, and his last video chat in which he’d gone on and on about how worried he was that Iruka was alone and unattached, that brought a few possibilities to mind. “You’re not a hooker are you?” A growing part of him hoped the answer was ‘yes’.