| ||||||||
| Something Funny Slight YondaKaka R Angst. The Yondaime and Naruto during the time they’re both alive. Yondaime’s POV. Making certain assumptions about Naruto’s past, how he got his name, none of it’s proven, but it makes sense and it’s yummy to play with. Kakashi-centric and Yondaime-centric, with Naruto and Jiraiya on the sidelines. The baby leans into his hands as he touches its face hesitantly, even in its sleep. He can’t help smiling, can’t help the happiness bubbling up under his lips (and it’s real happiness, sharp and pink and so painful he wants to break down crying again (and what would Jiraiya-sensei say if he saw that again? He’d go ballistic), wants to hold onto this moment forever as much as it hurts, and it hurts even more to know he can’t). His hands feel too big, too clumsy and heavy against the baby’s skin and spidery blond hair, and he worries the calluses on his fingers will scratch the round soft cheeks. He doesn’t try to ignore the whisker marks—the boy (his boy, his child, his son) is a hero, a hero from birth, and he loves him harder and deeper than he ever thought possible, so deep it’s painful. He knows he’s dying. It feels like love’s killing him, tearing his physical heart in two, rending the left pulmonary from the right. It’s not true. He’s used up too much energy, so much his body’s depleted and dying. The depleted energy, the fact that his body is dying in bits in pieces around him, didn’t stop him from crashing into the near-empty maternity ward when he heard his son screaming, physically tearing the door from the hinges. Jiraiya-sensei was shouting behind him, irate and pissed and terrified (You’re hurt you idiot you get back here now! I’m going to kill you if I have to drag you back!). He’d ignored it. He’d ignored Kakashi dogging his shadow silently, desperately. His son was screaming. Nothing else mattered. His baby had kicked the blankets off, his tiny eyes screwed up tight while a red wound of a mouth bawled. Thin, almost invisible fingers of indigo fire danced and skittered around the cradles edges, sneaking under the white cotton blankets. Pale orange flames flickered around the bassinet’s stainless steel legs, scattering when he stormed closer. He couldn’t feel his left leg. The feeling was gone from most it—occasional tingles of pain from his far two left toes, infrequent sharp violent green stabs in his knee, but most of it was numb. Dead and numb. He ignored it. The baby had gone dark red in the face, sobbing and choking on his own saliva. His arms still worked, still functioned enough to pick his baby up and cradle his head just like she’d shown him before she— The crying hiccupped and stuttered as he rocked his arms back and forth gently, clumsily, ineptly. He had no idea what he was doing, the great Hokage of Leaf, the Yondaime genius, and he had no idea how to rock his own son to sleep. He laughed dryly in his throat, interrupting the steady “Shhh, there, there, shh, it’s ok, it’s all right" mantra. The laugh was a little hysterical—he felt bad for Kakashi, standing in the middle of the ward clueless, looking terrified because it looked like his sensei had finally gone mad. He hadn’t gone mad—he wasn’t even being cynical, which was what Jiraiya-sensei would do. He was just…happy. He had so much to learn. He knew how to raise kids past seven and ten years old, but from a baby? He was going to be the laughing stock of the village for sure, putting the diapers on the wrong way around and letting his son stay up to late and letting him read pornography way too early and eat ramen until they were both sick. Oh, the women were going to have fun with him, fun with him and his son that fit in just one of his hands. He was so tiny! And Jiraiya-sensei would probably be there giving him hell too, mocking him for being able to defeat a demon and not knowing how to button a baby’s jumper. Perhaps there was some secret ninja scroll for parenting…? His child was a warm liquid bundle in his arms, a living-breathing teardrop he could burst so easily if he just squished a little bit. He’d never felt so awkward and brutish in his life. He’d never felt so happy. His baby was fine. His son was alive and healthy and such lungs-- He collapsed backwards and Kakashi caught him, shoved one of the lobby chairs underneath him. He couldn’t feel his right ankle. Kakashi was giving him a worried look over the top of his mask, one hand on his shoulder, saying something low that he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand it, but he could hear it, which meant the baby had stopped crying. He looked down. A hand, a hand that was so tiny it didn’t really look real didn’t look possible, was clutching the front of his white shirt, still dirty and sweaty and bloody in places. In the places, the blood was still fresh. Most of the blood was his. The baby was only snuffling gently now, a thin shard of polished glass from his necklace (her necklace) lying on top of his son’s fist that wasn’t even big enough to hold a quarter. The smile that broke over his face was a little hysterical, a little terrified, but mostly proud. His son. His baby. The smile drained slowly as comprehension crept behind his eyes, his eyes that traced the thin dark red lines that cut across his son’s cheeks. The infant whimpered sharply as any animal, flinched, thin runny tears flowing fresh out of its eyes. The baby was too tired to continue screaming. Three parallel lines, heavy angry things, the color of deep fire, of a furnace and a volcano, the deep red of arterial blood. His son sobbed and shivered, and he hugged him closer, crouching and curling over him protectively, still murmuring nothing sensible. “It’s ok, it’s ok, Daddy’s here now, it’s ok, it’ll be all right, I’m here now--” He was not a violent man. He didn’t enjoy fighting—he enjoyed a challenge, enjoyed the thrill, but not the violence. Jiraiya-sensei had given him—gave him hell over that. Others—Orochimaru-sensei, Sarutobi-sama, sometimes even his own student Kakashi—saw it as a weakness. He’d never cared what people thought, not really. He wanted to tear the demon’s heart apart. He wanted to rip its ribs out, crush its skull, do whatever he had to. He hadn’t hated it before, not really, it’d only been an animal and an enemy and it was nothing personal, but he wanted to drown it alive now. He kept swaying in the chair, whispering nonsense, half-feeling Jiraiya-sensei watch him from the doorway wordlessly and not really caring that he looked like a madman. They shouldn’t have separated them. He told them not to separate them, to keep them together even after he passed out. They shouldn’t have separated them. His son was in pain he didn’t have to be, and they shouldn’t have separated them. A hand grabbed his shoulder and pushed him upright, held him steady. He blinked, and noticed Kakashi looked ready to punch him: angry and disappointed, which was how Kakashi looked at himself in the mirror too often. “You were slipping out,” Kakashi stated. “You need sleep.” “I need a manual,” he wasn’t really thinking, only half-aware Jiraiya-sensei was standing closer, still quiet. He couldn’t feel his right thigh or calf—only the knee and parts of his toes. His left leg was gone, as good as severed from his body. “I still don’t know how to change diapers. I’m going to make a mess.” “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Kakashi answered dryly. “You’ve just got--” He was never sure why Kakashi stopped, or why he took his hand away suddenly. Jiraiya-sensei was holding him from the other side. The feeling was starting to go out of his left arm—it felt a little cold in places, and nothing in others. The baby was still gripping his necklace, still curled against his undershirt, tiny and perfect and impossibly fragile. Almost too fragile. Almost too fragile to be alive. He kissed the top of his head gently, afraid of denting his son’s skull with his lips, afraid of doing the wrong thing. The baby smelled nice, felt impossibly soft. It really was exactly like a raindrop, like a rose bud, only fleshier. Why hadn’t he ever noticed how fragile children were before? “He looks like you,” Kakashi whispered. Jiraiya-sensei was holding both his shoulders now, keeping him in place. This couldn’t be possible. It was absolutely surreal. “He’s handsome,” he said with a rueful smile, trying to ignore Jiraiya-sensei’s hands, trying to ignore his silence. He’d gotten so used to having the old man swearing and laughing and lecturing every second the new silence felt…wrong. Bad. “He looks like you,” Kakashi repeated, agreed. Kakashi was acting strange too—he was talking when he didn’t have too, and was actually looking him in the eye, with one gray eye and one of Obito’s red Sharingan. He held Kakashi’s gaze a little longer than either of them felt comfortable with. On the one hand, Kakashi didn’t actually need the mask—he’d gotten so good at hiding his emotions, his feelings and thoughts, he barely used it. On the other hand, when Kakashi did show emotions, it was always the strong overpowering ones, the ones that could easily be used to destroy him. The mask never protected him when he needed it to—it all came out of his eyes. Looking at Kakashi looking at him, something inside him froze solid, hung its head. He forced a smile, and tried to ignore it. There wasn’t time for that. “C’mere,” he reached out with his left hand, trying to force some feeling and response into his knuckles. “Hold out your arms. That’s an order,” he added, because Kakashi looked terrified and ready to bolt, and Kakashi never disobeyed a direct order, not from him. Kakashi’s arm felt thin in his grip--thin, but strong and hard, steady and reliable. He trusted Kakashi more than Kakashi trusted himself. The boy would have to learn how to get over that one day. Somehow. “Hold his back—good, now support his head—there you go. Kind of—kind of cradle his body, don’t really squeeze him, but he likes to be held tight. Don’t shake so much, you’ll wake him up,” he couldn’t help the smile on his face, a good honest real one; he sounded like an old woman. He was repeating her words, her advice, and somehow it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt. Somehow. He tried not to think why. He surveyed his handiwork proudly, his newborn son resting in his adolescent student’s arms, “Great: you look more foolish than I do.” Kakashi glared at him. Jiraiya-sensei’s fingers dug into his shoulders, hard and insistent, worried and helpless. He was steadily going numb there, but somehow the pressure was still hard to ignore. It was easier to ignore the slur in his words, the falter in his voice, than it was the pressure on his shoulders. His lungs felt odd. He was dying, but somehow with Kakashi glaring at him, nervously holding his son, more terrified of a small weak creature than he’d ever been of any monster, that didn’t matter. It wasn’t important. It was a problem, to be sure, it just wasn’t…important. “He really is handsome,” he repeated with smug satisfaction, speaking of a chubby blotchy thing with a thin swathe of blond spider webs stuck to his head and marked with a demon’s features on his cheeks. “He’s going to have to beat the girls off him.” No one said anything. Jiraiya-sensei wouldn’t speak, Kakashi hardly ever spoke, and the slurs and fumbling in his vocal cords, throat, lips, teeth, and tongue were getting worse. “He looks like you,” Kakashi whispered almost inaudibly, almost in his chest. He had to strain to hear the voice, strain harder to make out the words. No one said anything. He had nothing to say. Kakashi wasn’t looking at him, was looking at his son regretfully, longingly. Kakashi had looked—did look at him like that, sometimes, usually when he was busy and preoccupied and there wasn’t much chance of him noticing his student was staring at him a little too hard, watching him a little too closely. It was getting harder to see, to focus clearly. He was afraid to blink. He wasn’t blind enough to not realize what it meant; he’d watched Kakashi grow longer than he’d watched Rin or Obito (chiefly because they’d died while Kakashi had lived), especially after the boy lost his father and left his clan. He’d watched Kakashi grow from a boy to a teenager, from a child to a ninja, and had shepherded and guided the boy as best he could. He’d watched the kid stare curiously and hungrily at girls and women he never chased, watched Kakashi stare at boys and men with apprehension and hunger that he avoided, and he’d watched Kakashi stare at him with respect and longing and fear and something too tender to be hunger. He’d hoped Kakashi would grow out of it, as time went by. He’d hoped—he’d thought—he would live long enough to make sure Kakashi grew out of it: not out of looking at men, if that was what Kakashi wanted to do, because that was fine, but out of looking at him, married and starting a family and too old for the boy anyway. He wasn’t attracted to men. Kakashi was only fourteen. Kakashi was only fourteen, and before he actually had a son, the tiny little warm thing lying in Kakashi’s arms, he’d treated Kakashi as his son, as his little brother and student. As long as he wasn’t too familiar, too presumptuous, Kakashi would let him pretend, sometimes would even reluctantly enjoy the pretend-play, until he remembered his own dead father and his own family, his own dishonor, and then Kakashi would hate him and hate himself for hating his teacher and hate everything for making him hate it. He worried about Kakashi. There was so much underneath that, underneath the mask, and if Kakashi wasn’t careful… There were yellow ducklings on his son’s bib. Yellow ducklings and tiny green stars. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? Where’d it come from? Had his son even been fed yet? Did he need to be fed now? Later? When would he be hungry? When would he need to be changed? Cleaned? Shots? What if he got sick? He blinked and shook his head slowly, feeling the maternity ward floor tilt and curl under him like a ship in a mild storm. He felt oddly cold—not odd because it was a bit chilly (was that good for the baby?) but odd because it was only cold in some place, and not in others. There was a sort of green cold in back of his lungs, sharp like a knife, a hazy light blue cold over his right knuckles and a heavy purple cold on the base of his skull. Odd. He was oddly cold. A hand gripped his hard, sweating warmly: Kakashi. Kakashi’s hands sweated when he was nervous, which was almost never, and it was too small to be Jiraiya’s. Jiraiya-sensei didn’t sweat when he was scared: he simply went quiet and serious. Like now. He tried to ignore it, and found it harder than the others. He opened his eyes, and it was harder than it should’ve been. When had he closed them? He didn’t want to blink in case he missed anything. Kakashi was glaring at him, furious and sad, oddly fiercely loyal. “Do you have a name for him?” Jiraiya rasped gruffly behind him, rubbing his shoulders. He couldn’t feel the pressure very well, or the movement, but he could hear the scratch and rustle of cloth. He blinked again, and the movement took too long. He found himself wondering at the tableau they made up: three men and a baby, and none of them really having a clue. It was a little funny, but not very much. It was getting too hard for him to think, to focus, to really be funny. “No. No I don’t,” and when he concentrated and went slowly, really shoved himself into the words, they came out clearly, sharply enunciated. Three men and a baby wasn’t a very accurate description anyway. He was the Lord Hokage, and he was dying slowly after imprisoning a demon in a maternity ward that smelled oddly suspicious with his clothes tattered and bloody in places. His teacher was at his back, Jiraiya-sensei, one of the greatest shinobi of the era who smoked a foul pipe and read bad porn and flirted with all the wrong women, the last of his team who hadn’t gone completely mad yet. His student was at his side, his last student, Kakashi Hatake the prodigy of the Hatake clan, one of the few successful Sharingan commanders not of Uchiha blood, the only one of his students he’d always been deathly afraid for, the only who survived. His son was going to be a living hero, and his baby bore a demon’s mark before he bore a name. Three men and a baby. No. It wasn’t funny. His lungs felt funny. It was getting darker. “We were…we weren’t sure. About a girl or boy.” “He needs a name,” Jiraiya-sensei insisted, the gruff impatience in his voice strangely comforting. He found himself smiling weakly. He tried to focus on the gray and dark blue silver that was Kakashi, still holding his baby more ineptly than he had. The smile came naturally to his lips, but his strength was fading. He could feel it leaking out, shutting off. “C’mere,” he said, and this time Kakashi didn’t hesitate, brought his son close enough for him to kiss his head gently, still amazed by how soft his skin was, softer than a pampered woman’s, softer than water. Lightening pain shot briefly up his arm as Kakashi crushed his hand, still sweating, and knocked their foreheads together gently. Kakashi smelled like cold water and grass. Was it dawn? He blinked, and rested his head against Kakashi’s. He could always trust Kakashi. Always. He worried about him, but he was dying and he could kill his baby just by lying on it. Jiraiya-sensei was… He blinked. He couldn’t feel Jiraiya-sensei’s hands anymore. Had he left? No. Of course not. His body was just dying, that was all. That was all. It wasn’t important. What was important was that Kakashi grew up, and Jiraiya-sensei didn’t go mad like the rest of the Sannin, and his son lived. That was important. His baby smelled nice. Not exactly like milk, not exactly like skin, but clean. New. “Something happy,” the words were badly slurred, and he couldn’t stop that. He propped his head a little further on Kakashi’s shoulder, so he could half-see his son and half-see Kakashi’s breast-plate because he couldn’t lift his head up far enough to see his head. His neck ached, like there was a rope around it. Death by hanging was never pretty. Something happy…what was happy? What was a happy name? Something funny…three men and a baby. He blinked, only he didn’t close his eyes, because he still wanted to see his son, still red in the face, his blond hair plastered close to his skull. So tiny. Then he had it. *** A/N: Woe be the perils of listening to too much Enya. | ||||||||
comments: Leave a comment     |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
gelfling8604's journalLog in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more