Naruto – Masashi Kishimoto. This story and original characters – Mine.
A Working Knot.
The metal band slipped down over his eyes, and he cursed under his breath. The damn forehead protector was defective, he was sure of it. It wouldn't stay on his forehead like the thing was supposed to.
Untying it, he took it off and looked at it. Cautiously sneaking a glance at the other graduates around him, he saw that most of them had gotten their hitai-ate around their head like it was supposed to be worn. Hinata had hers around her neck, he noted dryly. She had obviously already given up on getting hers to stay. Maybe he should copy her and put it around his neck as well?
He'd be damned if he let this piece of cloth and scrap metal get the best of him, though. Knotting it tightly around his forehead, he felt his skull begin to pound slowly with the pressure. The headband stayed in place for the customary graduate photo, which made him happy. As soon as the flash flashed, however, it fell down around his eyes again and he took it off in disgust. He headed home after the ceremony, he was in no mood to chat with any of his classmates. He wanted dinner and something to help him relax. And he wanted to figure out how he was going to wear that damn forehead thing, as well.
"I'm proud of you for graduating, son. You came in second lowest in the class, but that doesn't matter. I know you'll do better if you want to, so let's celebrate!!"
To emphasize his words, Shikato cheered loudly and popped a bottle of sake, pouring some for himself and some for his son. He was plainly ignoring the drinking regulations of the village.
"Hey, why aren't you wearing your forehead protector? That's what marks you as a ninja, you know. When I got mine, I slept with the thing on for three weeks."
Shikamaru mumbled a response and sipped at his sake. He didn't want to be drinking, but he wanted to explain why he wasn't wearing his badge of adulthood even less. He was supposed to be smart. So why the hell couldn't he figure out how to fasten a piece of cloth to his head?
"It's getting late, dad. I'm meeting with my team tomorrow, and I want to be at my best. I'm gonna go to bed. Night!" Quickly, Shikamaru set down his almost full sake cup and headed off towards his room. His father was already too drunk to argue, so Shikato set himself to making sure that the sake which had been opened didn't go to waste.
"So we'll meet again tomorrow, and do some training exercises, just so we can see where we are. Sound good to everybody?" Asuma finished his address to his new team, and they nodded. "Good. Then we'll meet here tomorrow, same place, same time."
Asuma wandered off, leaving his team to chat about their future together. Chouji wandered off as well, although Asuma had gone towards Kurenai and Chouji had gone toward Ichiraku. Ino stayed with Shikamaru.
"Why aren't you wearing your forehead protector?" She asked curiously. "You're not really a ninja unless you have one, you know." Shikamaru nodded, although he didn't provide an answer. He pulled out his headband to show that he had it, and Ino motioned for him to put it on.
"come on," she huffed. "You need to put it on, we're a team of ninja."
Shikamaru groaned, but tied it around his forehead. As soon as his hands left the knot, it fell down over his eyes, just like he knew it would. Ino snickered.
"You didn't tie it tight enough," she informed him. "Let me try". She took the headband from him, and began tying it around his forehead again. He was amazed at her simple, businesslike competence, although he never would have told her that. It wasn't like he liked her, right?
She finished the knot and stepped back, critically appraising her handiwork. As if on cue, it slumped down again, and Shikamaru laughed at the utter futility of it. What sort of a ninja was he, if he couldn't get a headband to stay around his head?
Ino stamped her foot angrily. "I will make this work!" She declared, upset that something so simple could be defying her. She grabbed the hitai-ate from his head, inspecting it to find flaws.
For fifteen minutes, she tied it around Shikamaru's head, using a variety of different knots, all far too complex for Shikamaru to know about, understand how to tie, or even care about. All of them failed. Ino's tongue inched its way out of her mouth, a sure sign that she was thinking.
Struck by a flash of inspiration, Ino removed the forehead protector from Shikamaru's forehead and began manipulating it in her hands, bending the metal band this way and that, all the while humming softly to herself. Shikashi made a few tentative inquiries as to why she was mangling his badge of ninja hood, but she ignored him with a haughty toss of her head, apparently baffled that somebody wouldn't understand what she was doing.
After several moments of impromptu metalworking, Ino presented Shikamaru with his new forehead protector, glowing with pride in her work. Shikamaru picked it up cautiously, treating it like a bomb about to explode at the slightest jostle. That was silly, he knew. If it was going to explode at the slightest jostle, then A) it wouldn't be given to ninja jostled things almost constantly and efficiently, with an air of professionalism, and B) Ino would have set the damn thing off a hundred times over with her futzing.
Seeing that Ino was about to tear his head off if he didn't put it on, he attempted to tie the thing onto his forehead again.
"Ouch!" She had bent the damn thing so it was too round to go around his forehead!
Ino sighed at Shikamaru's incompetence with life, and took the forehead protecter from him. "I swear, sometimes you're such a dummy. It's supposed to go around your arm, now. I made it into a forearm protector. So it'll protect your forearm, see?"
Quickly, Ino wrapped the armband around his left bicep, knotting it snugly. He flexed, expecting it to bind his muscles. Suprisingly, the knot allowed for plenty of stretch while still taking up the slack when needed. It was a good knot. A good fit around his arm, he concluded finally.
"Thank you…" he muttered automatically, still moving his arm to see if he was limited in motion somehow. Ino smiled radiantly, and untied it quickly. "Now you do it," she informed him, placing the hitai-ate in his hand. Their fingers met for a moment, and she blushed slightly.
He placed the metal band around his arm with one hand, and quickly discovered that he lacked the proper placement of joints to tie it around his forearm like Ino had. He looked at her helplessly, and she giggled at his plight.
"I can't tie it by myself." He informed her redundantly, "So I guess we'll need to find another solution. Good idea, though." Ino stamped her foot again, pouting like only a twelve year old girl can.
"It still is a good idea! You just need to get me to tie it for you every day. Besides, you probably don't know the knot to use, anyway. If I didn't do it for you, you'd probably end up tying it too tight and cutting off circulation to your arm. That's the sort of thing a boy like you would do." The tone of her voice indicated with no doubt her opinion as to the general intelligence of boys. Her deft fingers reached for the ends of the cloth and quickly knotted it again. She cautioned him about how to wear it as she did so.
"Now, don't take it off until you finish practice, okay? And then just bring it in tomorrow morning, and I'll tie it for you again." She looked him in the eye, now. "And don't do anything stupid like try to bend it, okay? It's perfect right now, and I don't want you to screw it up or something."
Shikamaru nodded, deciding that blind agreement was probably easier than attempting to show Ino that he wasn't stupid and wasn't about to do something bizarre and inexplicable like shove the forehead protector up his nose, or something.
"Don't do something stupid like shove it up your nose, or something, either."
Shikamaru glared at the blond girl. "I think I'm smart enough to keep things bigger than a chestnut away from my nasal cavities, thank you very much."
Ino snorted, once again silently stating her opinion about the intelligence of men, and of Shikamaru in particular. She'd known him for a while and knew that he was educated, but there was a difference between being educated and being intelligent. Shikamaru sighed again, accepting the futility of arguing with a girl.
Adjusting the position of the band one last time, Ino stepped back and looked at her latest project. Satisfied, she smiled and swiveled on her heel, waving goodbye to her teammate. "I'll see you tomorrow morning, and I'll tie it for you again, okay?" she called over her shoulder.
Shikamaru waved slowly at her departing back, before turning around and heading towards his own home. He dragged his feet, thinking of a way to explain his new fashion in armband wearing to his father.
"Lemme guess…Ino did it?"
Shikato looked plenty drunk still, but he managed to focus his bleary eyes on the headband fastened around his son's arm. Not only did he identify the item for what it was, he managed to dredge up some vague, correct, drunken idea about who had put it there.
Shikamaru nodded, before going over to the fridge to prepare the Nara family hangover remedy. He cracked two eggs into the cup, before adding in a dash of tomato juice, experience having taught him how much to put in for the optimum effect. His father downed the finished concoction gratefully, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
"Is she going to tie it for you tomorrow, as well?"
Shikamaru nodded, then vocalized his answer. "Yeah. She said that she was afraid that if I tied it myself, I'd cut off my circulation, or shove the entire thing up my nose."
Shikato clapped a calloused hand on his son's shoulder. "Someday," he intoned seriously, "You'll be glad that she's showing such an interest in your health. Until that day, keep that thing the hell away from your nose, and I'd learn how to tie that knot as quickly as I could. Who knows when Ino's not going to be around to tie it for you, you know."
Shikamaru nodded assent, but in his heart, he knew that he would delay learning how to tie that knot for as long as he could. After all, as long as Ino had to tie the knot for him for each practice, that meant that at least once a day, she'd have to pay attention to him, right?
And who knows, Shikamaru reasoned. Maybe he could interest her in something other than tying knots for him, someday. Something other than that Sasuke she was always going on about, too.
"Mom, I can't get this tied around my arm like dad has it! Can you do it for me?" At twelve years old, Inoka had just graduated from Ninja Academy, and she didn't suffer from any of the incompetence that her father had. She could tie her forehead protector around her forehead perfectly.
But Inoka wasn't interested in tying it around her forehead, like it was supposed to go. In that little girl's mind, there was only one way to tie something like this, and that was around her left arm, just like her dad did it.
Ino clucked softly at her daughter, reaching for the metal plate. "First, you need to bend it a bit, so that it will fit around your arm, see?" As Ino demonstrated for her daughter, Shikamaru transferred the hand of his son from his right to his left and began to rub his own forehead protecter, bent the same way all those years ago. He smiled at the memories, and watched his wife go through the same warnings with her daughter that she had gone through with her future husband, save for one important one.
Shikamaru broke into the conversation, much to the dismay of his wife and daughter. "Remember, Inoka. Keep the forehead protector out of your nose, that's not where it's supposed to go." Ino laughed gaily, remembering when she had made that same statement to her husband. Inoka didn't find it quite as funny.
"Dad, I'm a ninja just like you are! You don't need to tell me things like that, okay?" She stomped her foot in an unconscious parody of her mother, and Shikamaru hugged her.
"I know, baby girl. But it's a lesson that your mother passed on to me, and I'm passing it on to you. So when you have children, if they want to wear their badge of ninjahood like this, I trust that you'll give them the same Nara family warning, right?"
Inoka smiled, and promised her father that she would warn her children about proper and improper things to insert within their nasal cavities. Running off to join her friends from the academy for a group picture, Shikamaru brought his wife to his side, watching their child together.
"You know, I figured out how to tie the knot in about a week after you used it." He informed his wife softly. She smiled at him.
"I know." She told him.
"And I figured out how to tie it by myself, as well. If you didn't want to, I could have done it by myself."
"I know", she told him. "But I wanted to. Because I hoped that something like this would happen. And it has."
He hugged her fiercely, smelling the subtle wisp of perfume that she wore for special occasions. Pulling away, Ino smiled at Shikamaru. "And besides," she told him. "You're a man. If I had let you do it, you would have screwed up at the worst possible time, and it would have fallen off. And I would feel responsible, because I should have known that you need me to do simple things like that for you."
He hugged her again, and she accepted that as a reasonable response.
Author's note: Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Well, a rumor. If there was a rumor. And if the rumor said that I died…I didn't.
Sorry. What happened was that I got very busy. And when I wasn't busy, I had no inspiration to write. But I'm about eleven pages through Chapter 8 of Last Step right now, and it's looking like I still have another 9 or 10 to go. So at the very least, I can promise you that it'll be a long chapter.
And I'll have it out by this Friday, as well. I promise you that. It's been an inexcusable amount of time since my last update, and I really feel bad. So by the end of this week, I'll have a new 20 page chapter for you guys to read. Hopefully, it'll be worth the wait.
This started out as a small scene with Ino tying Shikamaru's forehead protector to his arm, because when I bought one for my birthday, I tried to tie it myself and discovered that it was quite hard. So I wrote the scene, in order to get my creative juices flowing. Then it turned out that it wasn't actually a scene, it was actually a short Shika-Ino one shot thing. I think it fell apart a bit near the ending, but the first five pages are pretty good. I like Ino when she's trying to figure out how to tie it. She's fun to write for, all angry and pouty and convinced she's right.
The thing about putting things in your nose is my own little joke. When I was teaching somebody how to make sushi rolls, I cautioned them not to do something stupid like put the rice in their nose. They say they weren't going to, but I know them. They were thinking it.
Gemin16, you're awesome and you know it. Clap your hands or something, cause you're my greatest help during all of these.