Training a Shinobi of the Leaf
by Nee
Summary: What set of circumstances would cause Umino Iruka to finally teach Naruto the shinobi arts from the very beginning?
Warnings: Rated M for language, violence, and sexual situations. No pairings.
Author's Notes: Please let me know what you think. Thank you for reading.
Last Edited: July 11, 2012.
Chapter 1: The Question
Six months ago, 17-year-old Chuunin, Umino Iruka, happened across a training session of a Genin team. Curious to see the level of proficiency exhibited by the younger shinobi generation, he decided to stop and watch the Genins' practice for a while. He had not intended to stay for very long, because he had expected to witness a group of serious young adults endeavoring to prepare themselves for the future hardships of the shinobi lifestyle. However, Iruka found his expectations did not match reality. The Genin did not act like young adults at all, but like ignorant civilian children.
Incredulously, Iruka sat in a tree and watched the Genins' training with their Jounin sensei. Iruka marveled at how the children did not seem to understand the significance of the art in which they practiced. The children were laughing while they trained, as if the multiple ways to incapacitate an enemy were some grand joke.
One boy, who was about 12 years old, was bent over laughing as his female teammate, who also was around the same age, tied up their third male team member. Once the young man was secured to their satisfaction, the children hailed the Jounin-sensei over to inspect the integrity of their attempt, all the while they were laughing like mental patients.
In bizarre fascination, Iruka listened to the lesson as the Jounin proceeded to instruct the bound boy in the different ways to contort his body in order to wiggle out of the ropes. The Jounin even told the boy to be prepared to forcefully dislocate any of his joints in the effort to get out, because in a true-life-situation being captured was unacceptable – escape or death, were their only options.
The Jounin continued with his lesson by telling the children of a few easy ways to commit suicide, should escape truly be impossible. And the boys laughed and taunted each other about who would be the first to resort to killing himself. The taunts flew back and forth while the girl giggled at the responses and the Jounin watched as his team's training session disintegrated into roughhousing and finally, to playful bondage; only this time, the other boy ended up bound in ropes. Unfortunately for the Jounin, throughout the rest of the team's practice time together, he was constantly forced to redirect the Genins' playfulness back to actual training.
Iruka quietly watched everything from the concealment of his tree. He was struck dumb by the Genins' inappropriate and unrelenting laughter as they playfully practiced the very techniques that Iruka had seen used numerous times before with deadly efficiency. Despite the fact that he was disgusted by the children's refusal to take the skills they were learning seriously, Iruka never left his tree. He continued to watch the Genin and the Jounin sensei until the end of the training session.
As the Jounin dealt with his students, Iruka found himself wondering if he had ever been so playful when he had been a new Genin or even as an Academy Student. Iruka tried to remember, but he found most of his memories fuzzy and surreal. His most recent memories were of times full of exhausted terror, with the faces of his allies constantly changing from one mission to the next. However, those were not the memories he wanted and he struggled to remember further back, to when he had been a small child and his family had been alive, back to when he had been the unremarkable second-son of two unremarkable Chuunin shinobi.
Years ago, before the Kyuubi attacked, all of his family's spare time had been devoted to training. Iruka's days were comprised of lessons at the Academy and, in the afternoons, practice held in the backyard of their small two-bedroom home. At night, when they were too tired to continue training, their conversations revolved around past missions and shinobi anecdotes. They spoke of foreign and domestic shinobi that they admired, and confessed their desires to have a doujutsu or some special bloodline ability. They discussed techniques they planned on learning and teachers they were going to approach for further instruction. And they whispered their fears of crippling and debilitating injuries that would force them to permanently drop from active duty.
Iruka never resented his parents for how he had been forced to spend his childhood, because the shinobi lifestyle was all his parents had ever known and all they could ever offer him. Besides, the common belief among shinboi parents was that the more the children trained in the ninja arts, the better their chances were of surviving when they became Genin. Because of that belief, Iruka could not remember ever having any unstructured time allotted for superfluous activities. Every spare bit of time was used for preparing him and his brother for the violence that would dominate their later years.
As a consequence of all that training and mental conditioning, Iruka had never pictured himself as anything else but a shinobi. He had been born to be a ninja and his best memories of his family revolved around the backyard of his childhood home, while one or both of his parents strove to teach him and his brother. It was in that backyard that most of the memories of his family played out. It was also the one aspect of the old house that he remembered best.
Iruka smiled sadly to himself as he remembered his brother performing advanced tricks while throwing shuriken and kunai, early morning taijutsu workouts with his father, and chakra control exercises with his mother. The more Iruka contemplated his childhood, the more he agreed with his original assessment of himself. He had known the truth of what it actually meant to become a shinobi long before he had ever received his hitai-ite.
Iruka had been born to the life of a shinboi, and had been prepared for it, so when they had received word of his mother's death, he had not been surprised. His mother had been killed in action along the border to Earth Country, during a routine scouting mission. No other information was ever shared concerning her death. He had been 8 years old at the time and his brother had been 11.
Two years later, the Kyuubi came.
During the Kyuubi's attack, both his father and his brother were killed. Again, Iruka never learned the particulars of how or why they died, and their bodies were never found. They just never made it back from the combat zone.
The only information available about his family, during the attack, concerned his brother's Genin team. Apparently, his brother's team was responsible for delivering medical supplies and soldier pills to the all of the shinobi involved in direct combat. They also had the secondary responsibility of removing the wounded from the battlefield and delivering them to one of the many medic tents. Nothing else was known about what happened. The Genin team just disappeared during one of their forays to the front.
Like hundreds of other people, the Kyuubi had been the end of his family.
After the attack, there was a severe shortage of shinobi. In a desperate attempt to maintain appearances of strength, the Hokage was forced to accelerate the education of hundreds of children already enrolled in the Academy. It also became common knowledge that if you were an orphan and younger than 20 years old, you were immediately drafted into the Academy's Genin Preparation Program, also known as GPP.
Two months after the attack, when Iruka was 10 years and 8 months old, he was promoted to Genin and assigned to his first team. His grace period, as a new Genin, did not last long. After a month of basic training and D ranked missions, his Genin team accepted their first C ranked mission. Two months after his graduation, from the Academy, they started taking B ranked missions.
It was on their second B ranked mission that Iruka's first teammate was killed. She had been only 9 years old. For a while, the third person on their team was rotated from one Genin to the next until the death of his second teammate. The boy had died just shy of their six-month-anniversary of when they graduated from the Academy. At the time of his death, the boy had been 13 years old, two months away from his 14th birthday.
As a consequence of the death of both his teammates, his Jounin sensei was removed from the responsibility of leading a Genin team. Umino Iruka then became an extra Genin and was used to patch the holes in other teams' rosters. Without a direct and constant superior, no one was there to break Iruka's continuous rotation from one team to the next, and he continued in this cycle for five years.
No, Iruka grimly decided, he had never been so playful or so seemingly innocent as those three children down below, with their protective Jounin sensei. Instead he had been forced into adulthood long before his body was halfway grown.
Iruka sat in his tree and bitterly watched the training session, and contemplated the three Genins' future and his past, while feeling offended by their obvious happiness. Didn't they understand? Didn't they see the meaning of what they were being taught? Didn't they see what was going to happen to them if they didn't start paying attention? They must not, because they kept right on playing and ignoring their Jounin as he tried to teach them. Finally, the children were released for the day, and Iruka was relieved from his memories.
The Jounin did not leave immediately after his students had disappeared down the path towards the village. Instead, as soon as the Genin were out of site, the Jounin looked up at the tree in which Iruka was hiding and called him down.
Iruka calmly jumped down from the tree and landed lightly in front of other shinobi. He had not been surprised that the Jounin sensei had known about his hiding place. In truth, he would have been disappointed in the older man if any evidence had proved otherwise.
"Is there something you need, Chuunin?" the Jounin asked once Iruka had stopped adjusting his clothing.
Iruka shook his head in the negative and said, "No, I was just watching."
Iruka's answer caused the Jounin to relax his body, so that he was leaning his right shoulder against the trunk of a nearby tree. The Jounin then began to examine the state of his fingernails on both hands. After his inspection, the Jounin started to clean his nails with a four-inch-long needle.
Since the Jounin did not seem as though he was in a hurry to leave, Iruka relaxed a bit, himself. After a second of watching the Jounin clean his fingernails, Iruka found the nerve to ask the older man, "Did they even understand what you were teaching them?"
Confused as to the reason of the question, the Jounin drew his black eyebrows together and shifted his dark eyes over to observe the young Chuunin standing tensely beside him. He noticed that the Chuunin looked tired, his clothes torn and dusty, as though he had just returned from some assignment or other. Interested now in the Chuunin's story, the Jounin asked in return, "What are you talking about?"
Iruka shifted his weight and avoided eye contact by looking out over the empty training field. He said again, with uncomfortable bitterness liberally lacing his voice, "Your students, the Genin, they seemed so happy. Did they even understand what you were trying to teach them?"
The Jounin smiled slightly, just enough to stretch his lips into the faintest of grins, and said, "Oh, they understood, at least, academically."
Iruka frowned and questioned, "What?"
The Jounin then fully smiled at Iruka, displaying a gap in his front teeth before explaining, "You're right that my Genin don't understand the true importance of capturing an enemy or being captured by one. I can lecture them until I am blue in the face, about every dirty trick I know, but they still won't hear what I am actually trying to tell them. All they will hear are the words coming out of my mouth. That second meaning that warning they aren't picking up on but you hear loud and clear, well that only comes with experience, and those three idiots are as green as late spring grass."
The Jounin gingerly dragged the needle under the nail of his middle finger on his left had, successfully removing a bit of dirt. His deep voice rumbled in patient amusement as he continued speaking, "Those kids treated the lesson like a game, and for the next couple days to weeks, they are going to be hunting each other and finding opportunities to tie each other up, especially the boys. Nevertheless, the severity of what I was teaching them probably won't sink in until they actually encounter a situation in which they need those survival skills. For now, it will be a game and they will unintentionally practice their skills because to them, it's fun."
Iruka frowned, irritated by the Jounin's blasé attitude about the ignorance of his Genin students. His annoyance got the best of him when he blurted, "But that's not good enough. It's not a game, it's real life."
The Jounin grimly smiled and nodded that he agreed, before he tolerantly observed, "You're a Kyuubi graduate, aren't you."
Familiar with the term, Iruka nodded that 'yes,' he was one of the many children who had their education rushed in an effort to fill the slots left behind by the dead, the crippled, and the critically injured due to the Kyuubi's attack.
"I thought so," the Jounin said in response to Iruka's nonverbal answer. "First off, not everyone gets promoted to active duty before they are ready, and those kids were ready to become Genin when they graduated. Second off, seven years is a long time in the life of a hidden village, and things change. Now my Genin have been Genin for the last three months, and they haven't seen the outside of the village during active duty yet. In fact, I don't plan on letting them outside this village until the girl manages to finally take down one of the boys in practice, and whether or not that's next week or a few months from now, nothing changes for them until then."
Iruka shifted to look at the Jounin in confusion and asked, "Why?"
"Because I said so," the Jounin immediately replied. A thoughtful silence momentarily fell over the Jounin as he switched the needle from his right hand to his left and started to clean those nails, as well.
Deciding to be a little more insightful in order to continue the conversation, the Jounin added another observation. He said, "Besides, knocking one of those boys on his ass will be both good for her and good for him. It'll be like a right of passage for her. The academy was too easy for her, and graduating wasn't such a big accomplishment in her mind. The boys are loud, and aggressive, and she's a bit intimidated by their craziness, which definitely isn't good for the team. Anyway, when she finally takes one of those loudmouths out, she'll start to get their attention. Their teamwork will start to come together, and she'll become more of an active participant on the team, instead of just someone the boys automatically leave behind in their mad rush forward. The boys will then learn that, although she is different and forced to fight differently because of her disparities in strength and speed, she is still a contender and that she is useful if given the chance to contribute."
Iruka snorted cynically at the Jounin's assessment and said, "That's a lot to have happen just because some little girl finally decided to defend herself."
"Maybe, then again, maybe not. In any case, I definitely need her to become more confident in herself and in her training, because there are people out there that are ten times worse then a couple of boneheaded, adolescent males."
Iruka snorted and emphatically acknowledged, "Isn't that the truth!" The Jounin raised his eyes from his nails and looked at the Chuunin again. Their eyes connected and they shared a bleak smile reserved for the cruel memories of past experiences.
In an effort to lighten the mood, Iruka asked tauntingly, "How do you know she'll be useful?"
The Jounin huffed a laugh, before answering, "I don't know – I hope. Besides, I read her file and I tested her myself. As of right now, she's a typical female academy graduate. She's proficient in taijutsu and genjutsu. Most ninjutsu are beyond her chakra capacity, but I plan to build her up so that by the time of the team's first C rank mission, she'll know at least one major offensive technique. Hopefully, I'll be able to round her out before then, so that she'll be fairly versatile when the time comes. The entire process is called 'Aging the Genin.' Every new Genin goes through it, just some teams mesh faster than others."
The Jounin stopped cleaning his nails and put the needle away in a pouch on his service belt. Curiosity seeped into his manner and he asked, "How long did you have to get acclimated to your team before you guys started taking real missions? A couple days, weeks?"
"Twenty-seven days. I had twenty-seven fucking days."
"Shit."
"Yeah, 'shit' is right," Iruka said angrily, and he scowled down at the summer's crispy-brown grass.
"What happened?"
Iruka sighed and released his hold on most of his anger. Now, he just felt sad and he said, "We weren't ready, but they had no one else. Kids were just dropping so fast that, at one point after the attack, the estimated Genin survival rate was one in ten. None of the Genin teams ever stayed together long. Personally, I had about fourteen or so Jounin-senseis when I was a Genin. I had to take the Chuunin exams twice before I finally passed when I was 16."
The Jounin nodded in sympathy before he asked, "That's not that long ago, is it?"
Iruka shook his head in the negative and said, "No, just a little over a year, now. Sir, how do you stand it?"
"Stand what, Chuunin?"
"The Genin. How do you deal with their constant puppyish stupidity?"
The Jounin laughed again. He wryly eyed Iruka as he explained, "I've been a shinobi a long time and I've been a Jounin for more than half of it. The Genin team you saw me with will be my third batch of students during my career, and frankly, they're a relief from everyday shinobi life."
Iruka shook his head again and said, "I'm sorry sir, but I can't see that. I think I would be more a nervous wreck with always having to watch over them then if I just worked with Chuunins and up."
"In a way, you're right. Those kids will surely put you through the ringer if you are always trying to guard them, but the true test of an effective Jounin-sensei is not doing just that very thing. Part of becoming a true shinobi is fucking up and getting hurt. They need to learn how to deal with their mistakes, the pain of the consequences, and move past it. Now, during practice, they feel safe and know that they can always call an end to a spar if they hurt themselves, but it's out in the field that Genin grow the most. The trick is training their bodies enough beforehand so that they survive their first critical injury, and training their minds enough so they don't shut down when they're hurt and scared. If there's another way to go about turning Genin into Chuunin, no one has ever showed it to me. Besides, look at yourself. By your own admission, you didn't have a regular Jounin mentor, but you survived, improved, and eventually got yourself promoted. That's nothing to sneeze at Chuunin."
Iruka snorted sardonically and mockingly said, "Yeah, I should be real proud. I'm positively the next Hatake Kakashi or Uchiha Itachi."
The Jounin steadily watched the Chuunin as the younger man agitatedly sat down against the base of the tree the Jounin was already leaning against. When the Chuunin appeared to have settled and was ready to hear what he had to say, the Jounin said, "Chuunin, don't go selling yourself short of your due credit. Getting yourself promoted is something to be proud of and I'm serious about that. Besides, don't go comparing yourself to Hatake and Uchiha Itachi. They have their own problems."
Iruka made another sound of disbelief and viciously began picking the brown grass and putting it in a pile between his legs.
The Jounin decided to explain further. "I've worked with Hatake, and a more effective shinobi you'll probably never find, but that man has never once removed his mask during the entire time I've known him. I have no idea what his face looks like. I can guess and probably be pretty accurate, but I won't ever know unless he shows me or if I rip that mask off his face. I asked him once about it, and he told me it's because he's punishing himself. For what, though, your guess is as good as mine."
"As for the Uchiha, Chuunin, well enough said really. That boy's had a heap of things against him from the very beginning of his career. First, the Kyuubi attack created a vacuum within the ranks, and he was one of the many children sucked into it. Second, his damn clan doujutsu activated early because of his early promotion to Genin so that set him up for further promotions before he was mentally ready for them. Third, he unfortunately has a highly political clan behind him who are using him to vie for importance within the village. That family believes they found their promised child and that hailing him as a prodigy will give the clan more political status, but all it really does is put a big fucking target on that boy's back. Not to mention the fact that this kid is 12 years old and going through puberty, he is as stressed as can be, and now he's running difficult missions with no real support system at home. All the while that family keeps pushing him and pushing him to be better, but nothing ever seems to be enough for those people. And, mark my words that boy's going to snap. The only thing in doubt is who his target's going to be."
Surprised by the level of insider knowledge about the two renowned prodigies, Iruka was momentarily lost for words. The Jounin just smiled his easy, gap-toothed smile again and patiently waited for whatever Iruka was going to say next.
"How do you know all that and why are you telling me?" Iruka asked a moment later.
"Well, I've been a shinobi for a long time, as I said, and I know the look of a young man searching for reasons to continue on as he is. I told you about Hatake and the Uchiha because those seem to be the two people you judge yourself by, and if I do say so myself, you appear to be quite hard on yourself too."
Iruka shook his head, refuting the Jounin's claim. "I'm not hard on myself, just realistic. I'll never compare to them."
"Well, who asked you to?" the Jounin asked as he stepped away from the tree and spread his arms wide, as if encompassing the entire population of Konoha.
"No one, but it's still true."
"So what! If the Hatake and the Uchiha are so great, then why do you still have a job?" The Jounin asked, beginning to sound exasperated.
"What are you talking about?"
"Just this, no matter how wonderful Hatake and the Uchiha are they are still only two men out of the entirety of Konoha's shinobi force. If there was a war tomorrow, Konoha will need the help from every last person in this village, no matter how gifted or how trained, because there are a thousand things that need to be done and someone has to do them."
Iruka scowled at the Jounin and said, "I know that, but – "
The Jounin angrily waved the Chuunin to silence and said, "Everyone fulfills his or her part. The farmers feed us, the weavers clothe us, the armories arm us, and the teachers teach us. All that shinobi are is a mobile fighting force that the village hires out to the highest bidder. Shinobi bring in the money and with the money comes political power that we use to purchase favor in the Fire Daimyou's court. It's a perpetual cycle. You do not have to become a shinobi figurehead like Hatake Kakashi to be considered a successful and useful ninja. All you have to do is complete your missions and get paid for your services. Anything else is purely extra. Hatake and the Uchiha cannot accomplish great things without Konoha's backup forces."
As Iruka sat silently thinking about what the Jounin had said, the Jounin took the opportunity to squat down beside him. Iruka finally said, "That's not very flattering to think of myself as nothing more then a mercenary."
The Jounin rolled his eyes and said, "Well no matter what you call yourself, shinobi or mercenary, that is what you are and what you have always been. Shinobi are not heroes; we do not save anybody unless paid to do so. It is true that some of us have made names for ourselves amongst the shinobi community, but not many."
It was silent between the two men until the Jounin sighed and reluctantly said, "Look, a big part of my job is helping the young people figure out if they're lifers or if they're retirees before that decision is taken away from them by injury or death. Despite all this talk about Hatake and the Uchiha, I can see that, young as you are, you're now facing the question of going or staying."
Iruka shook his head and said, "I'm at no such decision. I have always been a shinobi and I'm too old to learn anything else." When Iruka had finished speaking, the Jounin broke into great big gulping guffaws.
Embarrassed now, Iruka dropped his eyes to the ground, stood up, and started to walk away while the Jounin laughed. Before he could cross the training field to the other side, the Jounin called to him, "Hey now, don't leave. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, it's just that I see you're in trouble, and I'm just speaking like it is."
Iruka turned and walked back over to Jounin; however, he did not retake his seat in the grass but remained standing.
Amusement still thick in his voice, the Jounin said, "First, you're what 17, 18 years old? You aren't too old for anything. Hell, I'm not too old for a complete career change and I'm more than twice your age and if I could do it, so can you. Now the second thing is this, there's no shame in deciding not to be a shinobi anymore. Fuck, you know the life, you know what it's like, and I can assure you there's definitely more to the world than just killing people."
At seeing Iruka's unconvinced expression, the Jounin decided to make a comparison. He said, "How about this, your idol, Hatake will never quit being a shinobi because he simply can't see himself as anything other than a shinobi."
"He's not my idol," Iruka snapped, annoyed.
The Jounin just smiled and continued, "As for the Uchiha, if his family ever left him alone, I believe young Itachi would gladly quit the shinobi life and leave his controlling family far behind. He'd probably take that big brain of his and start some charity business, and in the process, save the world or some such fucking thing. But for you, I think you're a bit more like Hatake in the way you can't seem to think beyond a being a shinobi for the rest of your life. Hatake deals with his problem by just not thinking about it. You deal with your problem by sitting up in a tree and watching a Genin team practice."
Iruka growled at the Jounin, feeling as if he was being insulted. The Jounin put his hands up in the air to show that he had meant no harm by his observation, and he continued talking. "Look, I'll make it simple, all right. You've told me you had a rough go of it, and that's pretty typical seeing as most of the shinobi class in Konoha is made up of Kyuubi survivors. Whatever the cause, you got a raw deal and because of that it sounds like you didn't get your chance to mature into your shinobi duties and instead had them thrust upon you, and that sucks. I admit it."
Iruka momentarily stopped focusing on his anger and turned back to regard the Jounin, warily. He didn't know if he wanted to continue talking with the Jounin any more, but he decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt. After all, if he didn't like what he heard, he shouldn't have left himself open for such observations.
Resignedly, Iruka sighed and prompted, "Fine then. How are you going to help me?"
"Simple, I'm not."
"Good. Then are we done?"
"Just a bit ago, you were watching my kids as they practiced and I could feel your irritation that they were having a good time together while they learned some techniques. Either you saw those techniques effectively used in an actual combat situation and it's stuck in your head, never to come out again, or you were never taught them in the first place and you had yourself a moment when that bit of knowledge could have saved you quite a bit of skin. Am I right?"
Iruka nodded and answered softly, mournfully, "One of my teammates got caught in a wire trap and was torn to pieces."
The Jounin was quiet for a second, allowing Iruka his moment of remembrance for a fallen teammate. Once he was sure that Iruka was no longer mentally watching his teammate being brutally dismembered, he observed, "At the moment, I would wager your head's a bit screwed-up with bad memories. My grand advice to you is real simple. I believe you need a break from active duty, at least for a little while."
Iruka's face twisted in indignation and he protested, "I do not need a break. I am perfectly fine."
"Fine then, no more hiding in trees and being mad about children acting their age!" the Jounin snapped. The older man's momentary flash of anger cowed Iruka enough for the man to continue with his point. He said, "I think you've finally hit a wall in your career. Now either you continue on as you are, get promoted again, and eventually die on some mission, or you take a break for a while and enjoy what the sacrifices of your childhood won this village. Take the time to eat bad food and get laid. Maybe even think about retiring, getting married, producing babies – something. Maybe, you should think of teaching."
"What? Teaching? That's stupid. I don't have the patience for training brats, and for me to get a Genin team I have to get promoted to Jounin and most slots are reserved for prodigies, people with bloodlines, or people from powerful clans. The best I could do would be Tokubetsu Jounin, but …"
"Stop talking about what you can't do. I never said anything about becoming Jounin. All I said was maybe become a teacher."
The Jounin sighed and removed his forehead protector and then scrubbed a callused hand through his peppered black hair. Iruka was marginally surprised to see that the Jounin actually was concerned about him, a complete stranger.
A second later, the Jounin spoke again. He said, "Look kid, if you are anything like most shinobi, you started your training young, maybe you even went through the Academy, but in general, your whole life has been dedicated to this one career path. This is probably your first time actually considering leaving, am I right?" Iruka nodded and the Jounin continued with his assessment of his character and future prospects. "Now it seems to me that you need a bit of a break, not a real break where you get away from the shinobi life completely, but a break where you just leave the overly dangerous stuff for a while."
"And how do you do that?" Iruka asked snidely. "You either a shinobi or you aren't. There isn't any partial leaving of anything. Besides, I can't believe I'm actually talking about this. I don't want to quit being a shinobi, it's all I've ever known, and in a year or two I'll make Tokubetsu Jounin and then a year or three after that, Jounin. I shouldn't stop now. If I was going to quit I should have done it when I was still a Genin."
The Jounin snorted derisively. "Please, Genin is the only paying job for children under 15 years old in this village, and you have 'orphan' stamped all over you. You became a shinobi because you had to. What I don't know is if you were an Academy student before the Kyuubi, or if you were one of the hundreds of children that became shinobi because the Hokage saw an opportunity and opened up the Academy to everyone. Either way, you survived. Now you have some money put away, you have a home somewhere, and the ratio of missions to active shinobi has finally started to equalize. This has probably been your first time to breathe without having to run out and accomplish another mission right after you finished your last, and it's probably the first time you felt comfortable enough with the state of the village to actually think about becoming something else. Now, whether or not you leave this lifestyle is up to you, but all I have to say in the matter is this: you spent most of your life acquiring the ninja skills that you have and it will be a waist to just become another shopkeeper without passing on what you know to the next generation. Yeah, those kids will irritate the fuck out of you, but when you get one kid that really excels then all the shit you put up with becomes worth it, at least for a moment."
Iruka didn't know what to say. He hadn't woken up that morning with the objective to quit being a shinobi nor had he even thought about using any of his vacation time, but there he was actively considering retiring. What concerned him the most, was that nowhere inside him did he feel quitting would be a bad idea. He knew he was smart enough to get a job as someone's apprentice or find work as a shopkeeper. The only thing he did feel was regret for all the people he lost during his career.
"Ah shit," Iruka mumbled to himself, his hands on his hips and his eyes on the ground. "I don't know what to do now. Either way I look at it, I don't see much of a benefit in whatever I decide to do. Most of my friends are dead; I have no girlfriend and wouldn't know what to do with one if I had. I don't know shit about teaching and I don't think I'd like it much, anyway."
"You won't know unless you try," the Jounin said compassionately.
"That's just it. I don't know if I want to put forth the effort to learn how to teach or to learn anything new. Mostly, I just want to be left alone, and I want to sleep."
The Jounin laughed and nodded. "Yeah, I know that feeling. Chuunin, take a week off and think. After that week, come back here and let me know what you've decided. If you decide to keep going as you are, then at least you got a week's rest out of it. If you decide to retire, then I know some old buddies that will accept a new apprentice if I give them the word. And if you decide to teach, I can write you a letter of recommendation so that you can start training to become a sensei for Konohagakue no Sato's Genin Preparation Program. It's up to you."
Stunned by the Jounin's generosity, Iruka just stared at the older man, before softly asking, "Why? Why would you do all that for me?"
The Jounin dispassionately shrugged his shoulders and answered, "Because I'd do it for any of my Genin students."
Even more confused than before, Iruka shook his head and said, "But you were never my sensei."
"That might be right, but you never had a real sensei to begin with. The Kyuubi fucked up a lot of things, and unfortunately, a lot of our young people were cheated out of proper training. Besides, you're about the age of my last batch of Genin. They were Kyuubi graduates too, and throughout that crazy time, I only lost one during a mission. Who knows, you might have filled her slot a time or two, and you just don't remember."
"Maybe," Iruka conceded, but was still mainly unconvinced.
"Anyway kid, my name's Itō Shiro. If you need me, I'm here everyday with the Genin from 1200 to 1600."
Iruka smiled and said, "My name's Umino Iruka."
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Story notes: Also posted at Archive of Our Own under the pen-name Archer, as well as at FanFiction.net under the pen-name of Nee339.