Chapter Text
There was a soft scent lingering throughout the city that made his heart ache.
Iruka twisted his hands on the railing again, surveying everything he could from the top-story hotel room balcony. He could tell, deep inside him, that he was coming up on a particularly bad full moon. But, somehow, that wasn’t the real worry: it was whatever strange thing was happening with the scent. He transformed willingly most months and rarely had to do anything more than chase stray dogs out of his neighborhood to feel satisfied.
But… he could sense this time was different.
Turning back inside the hotel room, Iruka went about the usual procedures for routine cleaning. He had already stripped the bed and gathered the wet, dirty hotel towels as soon as he came in. As his mind rolled over the strange scent, he worked automatically, wiping clean all the surfaces and taking meticulous care of the bathroom. Iruka was glad, as always, for his second shift job and the oddly flexible hours of his schedule. He wasn’t sure if he would ever go back to teaching unfortunately, but this would do for now.
Especially since Naruto needed him now.
Iruka went about the rest of the shift in a busy contemplative daze. He tried recalling other scents and kept coming back to Naruto’s overwhelmingly strong youkai scent. It had drawn him clear across the city to find a dirty-faced boy alone on a public playground. Naruto had been blissfully unaware that he was emanating anything at all. Only when the pair of them had run into several rather nasty other youkai had the discovery been made: Naruto Uzumaki, orphaned twelve-year-old boy, blonde hair, blue eyes, was actually a kumiho, a nine-tailed fox.
Naruto’s parents were both dead and the full extent of his powers were unknown to him, but that was Iruka’s story, too. Iruka continued to feel an instinctive bond with the boy, even though Naruto could be damnably irritating and for some reason only wanted to eat ramen for the first full year of their life together. Iruka had only just managed to diversify his diet, even though he himself was a terrible cook. He’d also gotten Naruto properly enrolled in school and was tutoring him with unashamed joy. Sometimes, of course, Iruka felt like screaming in frustration so much that it turned into howling – and that’s when he thought about how different life might be if he was a part of a pack and had literally any sort of support network whatsoever.
Besides Naruto, he had no one, but there was no need to mope about it.
Iruka would have liked to ask someone else what this new scent was – the one that made him feel like he should both run away from it and also track it down and shake it until it fell apart. Of course he knew there were other werewolves in the city, but he always painstakingly avoided them even before he’d taken Naruto in. Now that he was caring for the young youkai, Iruka was taking no chances: for the first time in his life, he’d started being aggressive when confronted as a wolf. He’d even begun to threaten werewolves in person when they met in the street. Most were merely curious about his existence on the edge of the city – they could smell him going downtown to the hotel and then back to his dismally small fourth-story apartment – but Iruka had put more than a few wolves in their place who were far too interested in Naruto and if either of them were available as a midnight snack.
Sitting on the bus, slumped back in the seat, Iruka knew he looked normal to the people around him, even with his unusual facial scar. He barely remembered getting it as a child, before his parents died, but life was hard, and plenty of people had peculiar scars. He glanced at his image in the bus window: his slicked-back brown hair was disheveled from work, and his dark eyes looked truly tired. Iruka scratched at the long scar through his cheeks, wondering if Naruto would be fine tonight when he left to become a wolf once more…
He didn’t have to worry: Naruto was utterly enthused when Iruka got home, loudly shouting at the top of his lungs that he had been invited to a classmate’s house to spend the night. He was nearly bursting into tears for fear that Iruka would say no – and honestly Iruka almost did say no, feeling pin-pricks of concern about not knowing who this Sasuke Uchiha was – but the timing was too perfect, and Naruto was genuinely excited, and Iruka relented, making sure to pack him a spare dry ramen before sending his – well – his son away to another boy’s house.
Alone with himself, and with no other tasks to complete, Iruka found himself twitchy and restless. He normally waited a few more hours before turning wolf, preferring to transform after midnight and giving himself only six or so hours before dawn, but that damn scent…
He was a wolf before he knew it.
The fine white full moon beckoned him, and Iruka relished the sensation of cool weather on his dense fur. He’d seen himself in storefront windows, subway glass, and shallow puddles before: he was all dark thick brown fur, more like a timber wolf than the gray wolves that seemed to frequent the city with their white, grey, and black colors. His facial scar transferred over, too; the mark retched across his muzzle like a human had whipped a thin blade across his skull. Ultimately, he was bigger and stockier than other werewolves, but he wasn’t as skilled at fighting, having never been a part of a real pack who would teach him such things.
But what Iruka lacked in finesse, he made up in street smarts.
Tonight, he was intent on finding the source of the strange scent, but it was a full moon, and the city was filled with all sorts of wolves on the prowl. Most went after each other, seeking out new and old mates, establishing and re-establishing territories. Some attacked humans, shifting out of wolf form to ambush, rob, rape, claw, bite, murder. A few – such as Iruka – had very little interactions with wolf or human during the full moon, using the brief bit of time where his instincts took over to better study the city that he lived in.
Iruka ignored the big white wolf that was stalking him through the edge of town as he made his way into the center near the hotel. He didn’t know this wolf – the creature was overly scarred and far too silent for Iruka’s comfort – but he didn’t want to know him, either. Instead, Iruka purposefully lost the other werewolf as he ran through the alleyways, having perfected his knowledge of the streets long ago.
He didn’t want a fight, not tonight.
He wanted to fight the scent – no… – no, he wanted to find the scent.
Iruka shook his head. His nose was directing him to one single spot, which he was so unbearably relieved about, but he could feel his wolf brain turning into mush far sooner than he wanted.
On full moons, he almost always lost himself by the end of the night. He had been disgusted when he first came to the city and realized that he’d eaten rats and pigeons – but then Iruka had gathered that other werewolves ate people’s pets and sometimes people, so he just threw away chewed-up rat carcasses and tossed the pigeon feathers out the window. He’d never gotten so out of control as to assault a human, but he had fought other werewolves before. He tended to win his battles, but he also ended up bloody and sore and calling in sick to work, too, so he stubbornly avoided other wolves during the full moon.
He wasn’t sure why he was already losing himself this early in the night.
He’d even transformed earlier than normal!
All of a sudden, Iruka went perfectly still and stared up at a specific balcony in a brownstone apartment building. He… he could smell the scent, really smell it, and it was coming from there. He was trying to piece together what he wanted to do about the information, but… but all he could think about was getting up to the balcony and finding the person who was so very strange-smelling.
Before he understood what had happened, Iruka was standing nude on the damn balcony.
He stared back down at the ground, flabbergasted.
But he didn’t gawk for long! Instead Iruka forced himself back into being a wolf, feeling hot and stupid for making such an irrational decision to – to climb a fucking wall? How had he even done that? Had he done that naked??
He turned towards the balcony door – and realized with a start that it was open.
Iruka padded inside on instinct. His ears were pricked, he was careful with each step. He knew enough about invading human spaces to know that very, very few of them liked when full grown wolves entered their apartments. He certainly didn’t like it when a particularly quarrelsome werewolf had tried to make a statement by coming into his own space: Iruka still daily glowered at the blood stains on his kitchen cabinets that he couldn’t get out.
He wasn’t about to lose even an ounce of blood in this apartment; in fact, he promised that he wasn’t going to lose himself at all.
But… but then…
Iruka went still all over. He could hear the person finishing a shower. The entire studio apartment was swamped with sweet-smelling steam, dampening Iruka’s fur with its heaviness. The scent itself was still as strong – no, it was even stronger – now that Iruka was clearly within only a few feet of the person.
He felt strange.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to kill the person. He didn’t feel like how he did when he was fighting other wolves – even the dumb brute who had burst into his apartment last year. He had never felt any desire to tear apart humans, and he had never done so in his life.
So this – this was something else.
And it worsened infinitely when the person stepped out in front of Iruka.
He was fully nude, fresh from the shower. He was forcefully drying his pure silver hair, his whole lithe body on display. His skin was moonlight-white… and impossibly unscarred, unbruised, unblemished, unmarked. He was clearly a he: his flaccid sex and silver pubic hair attracted Iruka’s full attention with startling intensity. He was taller than Iruka, and fifty pounds lighter, and was full of lean supple muscle, looking like he could either be a competitive dancer or a professional runner.
And Iruka wanted to devour him, he wanted to mark every inch of him.
The man suddenly looked up, and then they met eyes.
Well, they almost met eyes: the man had his left eye firmly closed. A fine featherlight scar slid down the left side of his face, from his forehead down towards the corner of his lip. He looked like he was permanently winking or wincing, but his right eye was black-colored and open wide as he took in the very large timber wolf standing on four paws in his kitchen.
But Iruka wasn’t thinking anymore. He moved on instinct, he was abruptly across the room, he was pushing the man down on the ground. He had knocked the towel aside, his nose was shoved against the man’s throat, he was breathing it in, all of it, all of him.
It was him! The soft sweet sad scent – it was him!
He was suddenly not in his wolf form, no longer scratching crimson claw marks down the man’s painfully white skin. Iruka was instead holding the other man down, he was kissing the man’s throat, he was licking it, too. His grip on the man’s forearms was ruthless, uncaring, forceful: he held the man’s arms over his mess of half-dried silver hair. They were both nude, so very nude, and he was hard hard hard. He was panting into the man’s neck before he suddenly, violently couldn’t stop himself, and he bit down on the pretty soft white flesh there, eliciting the loveliest keening sound from the man underneath him.
Iruka moved his mouth just as he moved his hands. He kissed the other man’s mouth, at first clumsily, unthinkingly, but then he remembered some distant skill, and he was doing his damn best to learn everything about the man’s lips. He didn’t part them with his tongue, instead the man did that, opening himself up for Iruka, and then Iruka was eagerly licking into the man’s mouth, touching his tongue, panting panting panting.
His hands went to the man’s cock and his as well. There was enough residual water from the man’s shower that Iruka used it to ease their cocks together in one hand, and he was soon stroking them both together with delirious zeal. His arousal had been so great that he was weeping pre-cum, which only made the movement easier, sweeter.
Underneath him, the man shifted his hips suddenly, joining in the motion, and Iruka tore his mouth from the other man’s to stare down at him for a single senseless second.
The man was so wildly flushed, his entire pale face had gone pink.
It was delicious, delightful.
Iruka glanced at the long scar down the man’s left eye, which he was still amazingly keeping shut, and he found himself licking its very end with incredible obsessive want.
The man moaned underneath him.
Iruka felt his body doing that perfect shudder that signaled he was close, close, close. He stopped licking the man’s scar to force his face under the man’s left ear, where he breathed in as much as he could the wonderful scent that had dragged him here so blindly, mindlessly. His hand shook uncontrollably, then his hips did too, then his whole body, and he came with a wordless gasp against the man’s sweet wet skin.
He couldn’t really parse though his actions, but suddenly he was down between the man’s legs, and his mouth was on the man’s very wonderfully large erect cock. Iruka’s eyes rolled to the back of his head as the whole hard thing went past his lips, pressed down his tongue, pushed at the back of his throat. Iruka grasped roughly at the man’s hips, he was forcing the man’s cock into him more, more, more. He heard sounds – and he realized he was making some of them, but not at all of them – the man was moaning again, loudly, heavily. He moved the man’s cock out of his mouth, and he was harshly breathing as he begged desperately, “Please come, please, please, please…”
Then the man’s slender hand shoved Iruka’s head back down, and Iruka was so very thrilled to take the man’s cock back past his kiss-bruised lips, and he was rewarded beautifully by the man’s cum filling his mouth, dripping out, slipping down the outside of his throat.
He sat back, stumbled backwards.
Iruka finally caught full sight of the other man – and his breath disappeared from his lungs.
The unbearably soft-smelling man had propped himself up on his elbows. He was still only one-eyed, keeping the other scarred eye closed, as he stared in thrown astonishment at Iruka. His silver hair was thoroughly messed up, scrubbed against the carpet, some of it still soaking wet and other parts dry to the point of fluffiness. The man’s whole body was painted a faint pink from the flush of arousal, most of it concentrating on his finely featured cheeks. He had thin red claw marks from Iruka’s wolf paws on his shoulders and chest that stood out fearfully on his moonlight-white skin. The man’s cock was limp, spent against his quivering thigh; his muscular abdomen was streaked with Iruka’s own white cum.
Iruka stood suddenly, still staring at the man.
And then he changed back into a wolf and flung himself out the apartment, off the balcony, and onto the street below.
The impact was bad, he could feel it as soon as his front two paws hit the asphalt. He fumbled further, his muzzle smashing against the street, his sensitive scar getting pulled as he slid a few feet against the pavement. He struggled to stand on four paws, but he finally made it, and then he was running down the street, turning sharply into an alleyway, all without looking back at the man’s apartment.
The rest of the night passed in a wild, wicked blur. He scratched down another wolf’s face at some point, held her down, had his teeth on her throat, but then he realized what he was doing and dropped her and ran again. He saw a human couple kissing in a side street, and he scared them terribly, and he was hurt when the man stepped in front of the woman to defend her from him, from Iruka, and Iruka went home, desperate to be home, he wanted to be home again.
He slept at the end of his own bed as a wolf, taking up the majority of the lower part of the mattress, his wet dense fur shedding on his bedsheets.
When he woke up the next morning, Iruka had an unbelievable headache, and he spent more than a few minutes dry-heaving into the toilet. He mechanically went about cleaning his bedsheets, sweeping up wolf hair, throwing away a flower vase that he’d broken while fighting to get into the apartment through his bedroom window. He was desperate not to look in a mirror or catch his reflection on anything: he was terrified what he would see there.
He’d attacked a man last night. He’d found the source of the confusing but amazing scent – and he’d assaulted him. He’d broken into the man’s house – and then he’d – he’d -
Iruka slumped down in his kitchen, dropping the dust pan, slapping both hands over his scarred face, groaning to himself.
And then he realized he could smell the man… on his own skin.
So, naturally, he passed out on the kitchen floor.