Side Effects, chapter 5
Looking back on it later, Iruka thought he'd been fairly discreet. He transformed himself with sexy-no-jutsu just in case the seamstress was particularly insistent on taking, ahem, delicate measurements; he put a scarf over his hair to try to disguise the fact that it was their spiky-ponytailed new schoolteacher sneaking around the market looking surreptitious with a bag of wadded-up dresses; and the seamstress he found didn't have the same family name as any of his students. She was also a harmless-looking grandmotherly type with eyeglasses. He hoped she was nearsighted enough from all the years of sewing not to take too close a look at his face, sexy-no-jutsu or not.
His voice cracked noticeably higher than usual, even considering the effects of the jutsu. "Er... I was wondering... how much would it cost to have these... changed a little?"
"Changed, dearie?" The grandmother lifted a couple of the dresses out of the bag, and looked him-her up and down. "Changed how?"
"In the... er... stomach. For... for some... um... growing room..."
"...OOOoohhh. "
Iruka buried his face in both hands, completely humiliated by the volumes of sudden-comprehension-and-gleeful-delight loaded into that one syllable. The grandmother reached up and patted his hands gently.
"We can make these work for a while; if we cut them a little shorter, we can put panels in the sides, so that there's more room for your development. But sooner or later you're going to need some different dresses; you're a tall girl, but you're so slender there's just nowhere to grow but out, if you see what I mean. So we'll have to find you some other things, especially for later on... you can't be very far along yet; I'm sure it'll be winter before your time comes, so something soft and warm, and let me see, what colors would go nicely with your complexion?"
"Not pink," Iruka said, half strangled.
The grandmother dimpled at him quite unfairly. "You're sure? You're so cute when you blush like that, sweetie. --All right, all right, I'll stop teasing you. Just sit right here and rest yourself and I'll be right back..."
About an hour later, Iruka left with an empty bag, a promise to return for the altered dresses the following weekend, and trembling knees.
I did NOT need to know that. I did NOT need to know that her granddaughter was in labor for six days with her firstborn. I did NOT need to know how to diagnose ailments from the color of the slime a baby is excreting from various orifices. I did NOT need to know...
He stumbled home, dropped the empty bag on the floor, and went to dump a bucket of water on Kakashi's head to get him to stop taking up space on the kitchen floor. Then he dragged himself upstairs, curled up under the blankets, and didn't come back out.
And he thought he'd been discreet. He'd only asked the one seamstress. But the next day, allof his students' mothers showed up with ear-to-ear grins, maternity clothing, and an unbelievably assorted array of baby supplies.
Since there was obviously going to be no actual education happening while the mothers threw their new schoolteacher the surprise baby shower from hell, Iruka chased Kakashi into keeping the children out of harm's way in the yard while their mothers oohed and aahed and fussed and scared the living wits out of him with stories about ninety-six hours of labor followed by emergency surgery.
When the clamoring mob of mothers decided that their damage had been done and reclaimed their offspring to head home, Iruka sat straight down on the floor in the middle of a pile of party wreckage that looked like it had come straight out of a war zone. When Kakashi wandered back inside, he found his lover laughing hysterically at a piece of orchid ribbon.
"What...?"
"At least... at least... it's not... pink or blue...! I swear... half of them are going to kill me if I have the wrong type of baby for their gift... so I think I'm dead both ways...!"
Kakashi decided the only sensible thing to do at this point was to order takeout ramen for dinner, take Iruka upstairs, and ravish him until he collapsed from exhaustion so that unconsciousness spared him the trauma of the flashbacks to the baby shower.
Afterwards, however, Kakashi climbed out onto the rooftop to do some industrial-sized worrying.
Three months. We've been here three months and there hasn't been so much as a suspiciously twitching blade of grass. No hunters, no shadows, no nothing. Too much nothing. And now Iruka's like this, which is more than half my fault since I'm damned sure henever thought it might be a possible side effect from that fox-tailed brat's sexy-no-jutsu. Neither did I, but then I wasn't the one who might have to suffer the consequenses, so it was damn well my responsibility to think about it and it never even crossed my mind. So this is my fault, and there's no way in hell I'm letting him near a fight. But we were sent out here all but blind. How can I protect him when I have no idea what it is we're up against?
The Hokage just said to be prepared. That's not too bloody useful, now is it.
...And we've screwed that up already; no way in hell were either of us prepared for this...
Me. A father. What the hell? I mean, Iruka was practically born to be part of somebody's parents, but still, I'll bet he was thinking a lot more along the lines of daddy than mommy. And me... I'm the grinning bastard of an uncle who makes his nephews' lives a living misery. I'm the one who gives them back to somebody else at the end of the day and says "okay, you lucky parents, youget to deal with this noise or this stench or this noxious substance they're exuding."
Get them old enough to have personalities and conversations and I'm fine, but some squirming helpless little thing that looks like a plucked chicken and screams bloody murder to say everything from 'food' to 'pick me up' to 'looky, I shat myself again'... what the hell am I doing...?
He heard the window slide open, and Iruka's voice floated quietly from inside. "Kakashi...?"
"Right here," Kakashi replied, sliding down the roof and grabbing the edge to swing himself back in through the window. Iruka was looking at him with enormous dark eyes, pupils dilated by the dim moonlight, his face a pale blur framed by clouds of rumpled dark hair; he looked cold, tinged by the frigid moon-blue half-light, and Kakashi immediately gathered him into his arms to try to warm him.
Iruka was warmer than he looked, of course, but still he settled his head against Kakashi's shoulder with a small grateful sigh. "You're not... upset... are you...?"
"Me? About what?"
"I... I should have... thought. I mean, I don't know why I didn't think... well, no, I take that back. I do know why I didn't think -- I mean -- I just... didn't think about changing back and forth, rearranging things like that, and... for heaven's sake, I was born male, it never occurred to me that I might get pregnant, but still... it's the woman's responsibility, because it's the woman's body, and--"
"Like hell is it just the woman's responsibility," Kakashi growled. "It takes two to tango, you moron."
Iruka sighed a little. "You still haven't answered me."
"What was the question?"
"Are you... um... angry...? Because I'm even more useless now than I was when we started this, and it'll only get worse, and it's not fair to expect you to have to defend us both; I should have been your partner, not a dead weight holding you back--"
The best way to deal with bursts of irrationality like this, Kakashi decided, was to cut them off at the source. So he locked their lips together for a good long time, until Iruka stopped squeaking and struggling and just kissed him back.
"That answer the question?" Kakashi asked, grinning.
"I... I think so... but I'd still rather hear you say it..."
"I'm not angry with you." Kakashi bent forward to touch their foreheads together, so that he could smile directly into Iruka's eyes. "I love you. I'm scared shitless, I never in a million years would have expected this, but I could never be angry with you because of it -- and the first damn thing we're doing the minute we get back is telling Naruto never to have sex in his life, because either way, the thought of his offspring running around making some other pathetic unsuspecting victim of a teacher live through twelve to eighteen years of that walking nightmare is just too horrifying to contemplate--"
Iruka was trembling in his arms; after a minute, Kakashi realized it was laughter he was biting his lip hard to try to suppress. "He's not that bad...!"
"Easy for you to say," Kakashi retorted. "It's been a couple years since you had to deal with him. I'm sure trauma-induced memory blocks are taking their toll on your recollections."
Iruka was still too damn perceptive, even when Kakashi was doing his best to distract him. He pushed his bangs back from his face and said, "You said that you're not angry with me; are you angry with yourself?"
Hell yes. "Come on back to bed. You need your beauty sleep. And even if you don't, I do."
"Kakashi..."
...damn his eyes. "No one's ever done this before," he said, a little hoarse. "Nobody knows what it could do to you. I'm pissed as hell that I was so busy thinking with my groin that I didn't even stop to think that you might... --never mind. But if anything goes wrong, I swear, I'll give my life if it'll let me save you. Because this is my responsibility."
"Kakashi--"
He decided it was time for a little more kissing therapy. "Come on, lovebird," he murmured. "Trust me on this, at least. You're going to need some sleep. Because tomorrow you're going to be faced with two dozen bright-eyed little innocents who want to know allll about how their schoolteacher's making a baby."
Iruka said a word Kakashi hadn't realized he even knew. It was followed by several more, and starting to build into an impressive litany of profanity, obscenity, and general paint-peeling vitriol. But Iruka didn't resist when Kakashi led him over to the bed and eased him softly down onto the futon.
"...Kakashi?"
"Hmm?"
"You're going to regret not being a carpenter when you had a chance. Because your complete and total unemployment means there's no earthly reason you can't be there to help me figure out how to explain this to them."
Kakashi grinned lazily into the darkness. "What a good idea. I've got ten years of back issues of Icha Icha Paradise in the closet, I'm sure I can find all kinds of helpful and informative illustrations--"
"...Damn you. Damn you to hell. Never mind; I'll figure it out myself!"
"There's my wise love." Kakashi brushed a kiss against the crown of Iruka's head, still grinning. It was good to know he hadn't completely lost the art of conveniently-timed distraction.