Mission’s End (Naruto, Kakashi/Iruka)

Iruka pressed his hand against the rough bark of a tree to steady himself as a wave of dizziness hit him. The sounds of the forest disappeared beneath the ringing in his ears. He could feel his chest heaving as he labored to breathe, but the sound of his gasping was lost. Each breath spread agony through his chest. His hand curled, fingers scraping against the bark.

The dizziness took minutes to clear. Iruka straightened slowly as each cut and bruise and broken bone reasserted their presence. He needed to move. His body didn’t want to. Closing his eyes, Iruka forced the pain outside of himself, back into a far corner of his mind where he could ignore it. He’d been ignoring it for days, or trying to. Each day was harder than the last. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep moving. Not long. Hopefully it would be long enough.

Iruka opened his eyes and sucked in a deep breath before pushing off from the tree. His vision swam for a moment, then settled. He stumbled, caught himself, kept moving forward. Once he started walking, it was easy to fall into the rhythm of putting one foot in front of another. The pain stayed with him though it was muted, like the annoying buzz of a fly circling his head.

He jogged, the closest he could get to a full-out run, though he stumbled far too often for the speed to really make a difference. All this time in the woods made him wish he’d taken the time for extra tracking lessons. Maybe then he wouldn’t have to stop every fifteen minutes or so to obscure signs of his passage. An experienced tracker would have had no problems following his trail, even with his clumsy attempts at concealment. Thankfully he wasn’t dealing with experienced trackers, otherwise they would have been dead already. As it was, their chances of survival were slim enough.