| Comfort Trap |
[May. 24th, 2015|07:40 pm] |
[Takes place the afternoon of May 14, Yondaime Year 5, the day after Trouble Round My Door]
On Saturday afternoon, Ogata-san didn't come to pick Naruto up from preschool.
Dad came instead. Naruto knew it from the moment he squeezed past Shikamaru out the door and saw most of the moms and nannies bunched up in a cluster at the play-yard fence, like pigeons on a roofline with a cat at the other end. Only Dad wasn't going to eat them.
He was just standing at the gate, chatting to Shikamaru's mom and Kiba's uncle, and he wasn't even wearing his white Hokage coat. He had jounin blues and a flak vest, just like Kiba's uncle. Nobody was going to mistake him for Kiba's uncle, though. He didn't have the tattoos, or the big brindled dog looking over the fence and perking up her ears when she saw Kiba come shrieking.
Since Kiba was shrieking, and trying to scramble over the fence and launch himself at the dog, Naruto tried sneaking. Dad was right in front of the gate, but there was a loose board on the side yard that Shikamaru and Naruto had made looser and none of the sensei had found yet. Naruto went that way. He had to wriggle, and he scraped his hand and tore his shirt but only a little. Kiba was still yelling when Naruto stood up.
( Dad had stepped aside from the fence, so the more nervous nannies could scrunch past and collect their children. ) |
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| Little Lion Man |
[Sep. 21st, 2014|11:30 am] |
[Takes place May 12, Yondaime Year 5, about nine days after Breakfast of Champions and the day after One of Those Lives (Get Used to It).]
Naruto approved of the new housekeeper from the start. Turtle recommended her, and Naruto got to interview her, and she turned out to be a short, lean, iron-grey person with her hair all up in a topknot and one eye missing. She wore an eyepatch when she came in for her interview, like Kakashi-niisan did.
Naruto asked her what was behind it. Dad made an exasperated noise and said "That is the kind of question you don't have to answer."
"I don't mind," Ogata-san said briefly, and took off her eyepatch.
There was a hollow where her eye should have been, and a knotted mess of scar tissue, all faded red. Naruto made an excited noise and tried to jump out of his chair to get closer and see, but Dad grabbed him and put him back down.
The corner of Ogata-san's mouth twitched up. She said to Naruto, "We didn't have masks, the way Turtle-san does, when I was young."
She was Turtle's aunt. She had been ANBU until she lost her eye, under Nidaime, when they were just barely beginning to be ANBU, and then she had been a jounin sensei twice, and then she'd retired after the war and gone to cooking school in Hikouto, ( only she lost her job at the last restaurant she worked at because she threw a cleaver at the head chef. ) |
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| Shoot the Messenger |
[Jan. 4th, 2014|01:07 am] |
[Takes place the evening of May 4, Yondaime Year 5, a few hours following Breakfast of Champions.]
Kakashi slept until the late afternoon, sprawled comfortably on the couch in a moving sunbeam, until Naruto burst back fresh from school.
“Is he still here?” Naruto demanded.
Kakashi hooked a thumb towards Minato’s room.
Whooping, Naruto charged in like a tiny whirlwind and pounced, rousing his father in a cloud of bed hair and confusion. Despite familiar surroundings, Minato was still operating in a mission frame of mind; he immediately tried to go to the office. It took a combination of emotional manipulation, small boy tears, and Otter—the afternoon ANBU guard—leaving and returning with a message from Sagara that simply said ‘No’ before he could be persuaded to have dinner instead.
Since it was a special day, they ordered take out ramen (Otter taste-tested for poison, while Naruto watched in fascination) and cued up the old favorite movies that Minato rarely had time to watch anymore, since there was only so much Captain Seaweed he could tolerate before declaring mutiny. Naruto settled belly-down on the rug, feet tangled up with his father’s, and drew increasingly incomprehensible pictures with his crayon set. He presented each one to Minato, who declared them all a work of mad genius.
( It was proven fact that Minato had questionable taste (see: opinion on Captain Seaweed, frog motif, his son’s name), but Kakashi didn’t argue with him. ) |
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| Breakfast of Champions |
[Dec. 26th, 2013|10:59 pm] |
[Takes place the morning of May 4, Yondaime Year 5, about an hour after Leading the Lost Ones.]
Naruto woke up too hot. His hair was sticky, all over his head, and his new footie pajamas with the frogs on them were all twisted up around around his belly and too tight. He squirmed, trying to get comfy, and kicked something.
Something said, "Nrgh."
Naruto froze, clutching his blankie. This was his bed. There wasn't supposed to be anybody else in it. Monsters lived under the bed sometimes, but Dad always went under the bed with a kunai and when he came out the monsters were all dead. But Dad wasn't here. What if the monsters got brave, with Dad away, and tried to come up on the bed and eat him?
( A monster that fit under the bed couldn't be very big. ) |
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| Leading the Lost Ones |
[Dec. 26th, 2013|10:04 pm] |
[Takes place in the early morning of May 4, Yondaime Year 5, a few hours after We Started Nothing.]
Minato landed on the red-tiled seal in the corded-off corner of the hospital lobby, staggered, and dropped to one knee. Someone grabbed for his shoulder. He shrugged the hand off. "When I'm facedown, you can grab me," he said sharply. "Not before then."
"Sorry, Hokage-sama," the woman behind him muttered. Her voice was thick with exhaustion, too. Fukui Ayane, he dredged up. ANBU Ferret. Rookie on Fukeda Hajime's team, currently one-half of what was left of ANBU Team Three.
Hajime himself lay on a stretcher on the floor with his face bare of his Squirrel mask and a mess of charred meat where his left hip had been. They'd sedated him for the nightmare jerk between realities from Hikouto to Konoha, like the others too badly injured for Hikouto's medics to heal. He'd brought back eight in total—four unconscious, one walking, Team Three's rookie, one medic, and the Sandaime's son.
( And three bodies, two ANBU and the brave, foolish Intel agent who'd triggered the traitors' trap for them. ) |
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| Ain't We All Just Runaways |
[Oct. 19th, 2013|01:37 am] |
[Takes place Yondaime Year 5, May 2, three days after The Way Home]
The ANBU were talking.
Naruto heard them when they thought he wasn't listening. They had soft voices and quick gestures but he had good ears, and Turtle-san had taught him some of the hand-signs once. She thought he would forget but he didn't. He didn't forget what the ANBU said now, either, when new masks slipped through the windows at shift-changes or caught up in the hallway on the way to preschool.
They talked about his dad, except they called him Yondaime-sama, and about Sagara-san, who was sometimes Hawk and sometimes Sagara-sama. Sagara-san was in Dad's office today and she'd been there yesterday and the day before, and she'd only come once to Naruto's room, on the first day, to tell him that Dad was gone for a little while and he needed to be good.
No one but Dad and Kakashi-niisan and Rin-neesan could expect Naruto to be good just because they said so, and Kakashi-niisan was gone right now, too. Rin-neesan came by for dinner once and she didn't know where they were, either. Sometimes Rin-neesan lied, though, like when she said this wouldn't hurt a bit and she made you count to three but she stuck the needle in when you were still on two. So he didn't know.
Sagara-san knew where Dad and Kakashi-niisan were, but she wouldn't tell. Turtle-san wouldn't either. Wolf-san got stiff and uncomfortable and told Naruto not to ask questions that they weren't supposed to answer. But Wolf told Turtle, when they thought Naruto was throwing a fit over the bones in his grilled mackerel, that Yondaime-sama was hunting down traitors and they needed every mask they had right now, so it was a good thing that Crescent Moon's squad was coming home.
( Crescent Moon was Kakashi-niisan's captain. ) |
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| Take Me Back to the Start |
[Jun. 29th, 2013|02:46 pm] |
[Takes place Yondaime Year 5, April 17th, in the early morning after Run, Rabbit, Run.]
A hospital was a good place to reflect on your shortcomings.
Of course, with a little practice, anywhere could serve as a place to yank your flaws out, sharpen up the edges, and stab yourself with them—repeatedly, for preference, until you’d finished bleeding incompetence over the floor and could actually stand your own company again.
Not that Kakashi had that kind of problem.
Or difficulty looking at himself in the private bathroom’s tiny, depressing mirror.
He washed his hands, careful not to wet the edges of the new white bandage wrapped around his wrist, and shoved his hair back from his forehead. It fell forward one spike at a time until it looked exactly the same. He gave up on it.
( Minato-sensei was waiting for him back in the hospital room, backlit by milky dawn light. ) |
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| After the Ending |
[May. 20th, 2013|07:02 pm] |
For the first three days after Kushina’s death, Naruto never stops crying, and Minato never puts him down.
Maybe that first is an exaggeration, Kushina’s dramatics rubbing off on him at last (too late.) Naruto wails himself into an angry, exhausted sleep from time to time. The world is too big for a newborn to rail against forever.
Minato envies him, all the same. He wants to scream, wants to weep, wants to shake the foundations of the earth, rage with thunder and whirlwinds against the heavens until the gods themselves kneel down in fear and give him Kushina back. And he could, he thinks sometimes, walking the rooftop in the smoky hours before dawn, with Naruto sniveling against his shoulder and ANBU guards shadowing silently behind-- he could challenge the gods, if gods there are in a world burned over. There are demons. Kushina died with one.
Another ANBU appears in a flicker of smoke, kneeling with his fist to the concrete rooftop. “Hokage-sama,” he says, not quietly; Naruto has begun wailing again with the abrupt chakra flare, and he has his mother’s lungs. “They’ve found the Sandaime’s body.”
The bone-white armor is charred and cracked; dried blood masks his tattoo. He reeks of death and fire, and his bowed shoulders tremble, a little, as he waits. Minato isn’t the only one who hasn’t slept since the Kyuubi came.
The ANBU might follow him against heaven. But half of them are dead, and so is the Sandaime, and a quarter of Konoha’s ninja corps. Who would look after the survivors, if Minato waged war against the gods?
He cradles Naruto’s head against his shoulder, rubs the tiny, shaking back. Blinks hard, against the drift of smoke that is all he can breathe, these days.
“I’ll come down,” he says. “Can someone warm a bottle for my son?” |
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