| [Dec. 27th, 2013|06:16 am] |
It took Naruto a second to notice, enraptured by his own tiny bubble-beast, but then he caught sight of Minato going cross-eyed and nearly fell off his stool. “You have a dragon on your nose. Nosedragon!”
Minato sniffed, caught a bubble the wrong way, and sneezed loudly. The dragon exploded in a tiny cascade of sparks.
“Aww,” Kakashi said.
Minato rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist, and then flickered through a fast set of one-handed seals. “Here,” he said, and offered up a soap lotus that bloomed into a translucent lion-dog.
Naruto gave it a disapproving look as it gallivanted over to prance about on Kakashi’s shoulders. “That dog has curls.”
“It’s a lion-dog. A komainu,” Kakashi said, studying the tiny creation. Minato had managed to pack all the proper details in, because of course he had; there were even little flaring nostrils, and the curleque of the closed mouth. “They’re temple guardians. My ANBU mask has the same design.”
“Oooh!” said Naruto, excited again, and scrambled up off the stool to get a closer look. His dragon flew up to land safely in his hair. Minato took the opportunity to simply give Naruto a full-body scrubdown, shoulders to toes.
Kakashi captured the lion-dog carefully, and brought it down to give Naruto a better look. “See how his mouth is closed? That’s because he’s saying ‘um’, like ummmm,” he hummed, drawing the sound out into a low, meditative monotone. “If the mouth is open, they’re saying ‘a’, like aaaaahhh. Put them together, and you get aum, which is a sacred syllable, because ‘a’ is beginning and ‘um’ is ending, and together they mean the beginning and ending of all things.”
Minato had paused scrubbing to listen, eyes bright with surprise and a little intrigue, but Naruto had completely glazed over. “Because you kill everything?” he said, lost.
Explaining the theory of creation—well, one of them—was probably a little much before breakfast, especially since Minato wasn’t trying to pull much religion into Naruto’s life anyway. They already had enough trouble with demons and demigods. Until the bigger deities actually showed themselves and caused problems, they could stay quasi-neglected legends.
“Not everything,” Kakashi said. “I haven’t killed anything in almost a week.”
Though his lion-dog mask was closed-mouthed, making it an um. Presumably the Quartermaster’s idea of humor.
Naruto twisted around. “What about you?” he asked Minato.
Minato looked caught short, just for a moment, and his grin slipped. “I—Last night,” he said, and picked up the wash ladle. “Let’s rinse off.” |
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