Ties That Bind
Swirls
It had all started when Hizaki Uzumaki discovered something called lipstick. After a long day of attempting to evade the unusually high stack of paperwork, Naruto had come home to a chaotic kitchen. But that wasn't what was unusual.
Inabi was sitting in her chair, and despite the way she was innocently drawing what was either a kitty or an owl, he was 100% sure that the mess of spaghetti on the floor was due to her.
"Hi dad," Naruto's eldest son greeted him, not bothering to look up from where he was dissecting his green beans. Mito was what made the chaos a little less hectic, as he was merely sitting at the kitchen table and cutting the green beans into smaller pieces and peeling off the outer layers with a kunai that still looked too big to fit in his tiny hand. Naruto watched for a moment as the boy cut open a green bean as a medic would cut open a patient, with perfect concentration and dexterity.
Naruto examined the mess before him. Spaghetti had been smeared across the floor and part of the table, and a bucket of soapy water stood by the back door. It was only half-full, though, because the other half looked like it had been splashed across the wall and dripped down to form a large puddle on one side of the room.
Suddenly in a stream of red, Hizaki came running through the kitchen followed by a flustered Hinata. The two came skidding to a halt only when the short boy slipped on the spaghetti mess and landed on his bare butt. The two watched carefully as the boy's pale purple eyes slowly began to fill with tears, and in the blink of an eye he seemed to deem himself unharmed and the tears disappeared. Naruto had been amused when Hizaki entered his 'no-clothes' phase, where clothes seemed to personally offend the boy. While he still found it a little funny, his wife was obviously a little tired of it.
Hinata attempted to wrestle the stick of lipstick out of the naked five-year-old's death grip, and that was when Naruto noticed that bright red swirls had taken the place of Hizaki's clothes. The boy seemed to be a mess of red, from his red hair to the red lipstick to the red spaghetti sauce that was smeared all across his backside.
Only after Hinata had finally snatched the stick of lipstick and the boy was hauled to his feet was Naruto's presence noticed.
"Can you clean him up, please?" Hinata asked breathlessly, holding Hizaki's little hand out to Naruto. The two tagged out so that Hinata could either confiscate the kunai from Mito, clean the spaghetti off the floor, or stop Inabi from continuing her drawing onto the table.
Naruto pulled Hizaki into the hallway and towards the bathroom to get the noodles out of his hair, deciding that he may as well have just been given a B-ranked mission when the boy's arm, slippery with soapy water and red sauce, slid from Naruto's grip. In a giggle that reminded Naruto of himself when he had evaded punishment, Hizaki disappeared into the living room.
. . .
It wasn't long before Hizaki's fashion statement caught on, and when Inabi could coordinate enough to break into her mother's now-well-guarded makeup drawer, swirls began appearing on her as well.
Inabi was decidedly more subtle than Hizaki had been. Instead of taking off all her clothes and bearing the symbol that resembled the mark on Naruto's jacket sleeve proudly, she kept her clothes on – though still bore the symbol just as proudly.
Naruto was unsure of whether to scold the children for destroying several sticks of lipstick or not. After watching Inabi carefully apply a large swirl to the bottom of her foot – because the rest of her body seemed to be full of them already – he opted to let them have their fun.
After a long talk, Naruto and Hinata decided to draw the line on foot-drawings after Naruto came home from work to discover bright red footprints throughout the entire house.
. . .
Now that the three Uzumaki children were older, Naruto waited and watched for those red swirls to slowly disappear. But as the years past, Inabi and Hizaki only became more adamant about their swirls, even when they were limited to one swirl on their inner left arms.
It had become a proud symbol, though of what, Naruto struggled to find out.
Mito, ever the neat-freak, flat out refused to draw anything on himself, and looked at the bright red lipstick in his little sisters hand with something akin to disgust. Inabi was never one to back down, and soon Hizaki joined in, badgering Mito mercilessly to draw just one swirl on his inner left arm so he could join the pact.
Naruto was floored when Mito had calmly walked into the kitchen for breakfast, with a swirl identical to Inabi and Hizaki's drawn on his inner left arm.
. . .
Naruto shouldn't have expected it to stop there, because of course, it didn't. These were his children, he was talking about.
After Mito's flawless performance in the chuunin exams, Naruto noticed a small change in the drawing on the boy's arm. It was no longer chalky and smeared after he came home from practice or a mission, and it was when Mito was handing over a mission scroll that he realized what his son had done.
It seemed to be a small badge of honor that bonded the three siblings together. After each chuunin exam, the swirl of red lipstick on each of their inner left arms was drawn once more in ink.