Side Effects, Chapter 9

The best part of being an incorrigible scoundrel, Kakashi thought to himself proudly, was that after a while anyone who didn't try to kill you on sight just gave up on expecting anything other than mischief, irresponsibility, unpredictability, and a running string of pranks. So he very helpfully didn't mention to Iruka that he'd deliberately neglected to pack an alarm clock, and he let his lover sleep the morning away.

In Kakashi's world view, you slept as long as your body needed to, which meant that if Iruka was still asleep, then he was still tired. Also in Kakashi's world view, alarm clocks were made to be ignored and/or thrown across a room and/or beaten with large heavy objects; alarm clocks were a form of masochistic self-abuse he'd rarely bothered with. Punctuality also fit into the masochistic self-abuse category. Time happened, and things happened, and sooner or later things got to where they needed to be.

He himself was climbing back in the window after having gotten himself to where he needed to be and back. His only disappointment was that since school had been cancelled, there wasn't even any entertainment value in not having set the alarm.

On the other hand, that disappointment was counterbalanced by the fact that Iruka would likely consider it sweet and thoughtful that he'd 'neglected' the alarm on a non-school day. On a school day, of course, Kakashi's head would have been used for the blackboard eraser whenever Iruka got done frantically running around having hysterics about not wanting to have two of the teachers turning into chronically tardy reprobates wasting perfectly good educational time.

That part was always greatly entertaining to watch -- up until the point where Kakashi got himself thrown into a headlock and dragged to school and used as target practice for everything from flung blackboard erasers to a live demonstration of kunai-throwing practice (ninja students learned much more effectively through visual aids, Iruka had told him, looking just a little too wild around the eyes and showing more teeth than any human mouth should have contained).

But right now that much exertion wasn't good for the baby, Kakashi told himself quite piously. So it really was kind of him to have neglected the alarm clock on a day when Iruka wouldn't feel morally compelled to threaten his life for it. Morals were quite a nuisance to try to work around. They tended to get in the road of actually getting away with most of the things that could be classified as fun. Kakashi took a certain amount of pride in having rid himself of as many extraneous morals as possible.

He considered it a point in favor of his own philosophy of time that even after his expedition had come to a successful if less than punctual conclusion, Iruka was still sound asleep, curled up on his side under the blankets, his unbound hair an adorably shaggy rumple-ness all over the pillows. Grinning to himself, Kakashi settled himself on the windowledge and pulled out a book and started to read.

Iruka finally blinked his way back to consciousness around noon; he was cute when he was that bewildered, blinking up at the angle of the sun for quite a while, until the angle of the sun translated itself into a time in his head and the panic button got tripped.

The panic button seemed to coincide with the fast-forward button in Iruka's world, Kakashi noted. Iruka nearly tripped over the blankets trying to get his feet untangled from the futon as he shoved all his hair to the top of his head and tied a shoelace around it and started hopping toward the knapsack for day clothes, chattering, "What time is it? Why did you let me sleep so late? I've got to--"

"No class," Kakashi reminded him hastily, so that they wouldn't skip ahead to the headlock-dragging kunai-throwing part of the routine. Iruka stopped motionless, blinked a couple of times, and then sank down on the floor with a deep sigh.

"...Right. The eggs. Fire. Flour. You. And the back wall of the house..." He paused and shuddered. "Yes, I suppose I really couldn't have been lucky enough for that all to have been a nightmare."

"Ah, the springtime of our love," Kakashi replied drolly. "To think that you so easily mistake our life together for a part of your dreams... it makes a man's heart overflow."

"Really?" Iruka asked with a growl. "Where's the blood, then?"

Kakashi smirked. "My sweet innocent. Where do you think a man's blood goes when faced with such a tantalizing vision of marital bliss in the morning?"

Iruka turned an adorable shade of crimson and clutched the blankets up to his chin. "Is that all you ever think about?!"

"Of course not. Sometimes the towel racks come into the picture too!"

Iruka grabbed a pillow half-blind and flung it at his head, reached for the next nearest available thing to fling, and was surprised when it rattled. Realizing he was holding a bag of groceries, Iruka said in incredulity, "You went shopping?!"

"Glad to know that even my unpredictability hasn't become predictable yet. It's the little things that keep the spice in life," Kakashi said, and turned another page.

By now, Iruka was so accustomed to reflexively averting his eyes from any book in Kakashi's hands that he stared down into the bag in a knee-jerk self-defense mechanism. A minute later, the bag dropped out of his hands, and the contents tumbled out onto the floor; Kakashi looked up from the book then, mildly surprised.

"What?"

Iruka had one of those knock-me-over-with-a-feather expressions on, his mouth hanging open, one hand gesturing helplessly at the wild assortment of boxes of prenatal vitamins that had spilled out of the bag and tumbled onto the floor.

"Those? I didn't know which ones were the best, so I got one of everything they had," Kakashi shrugged, and went back to his book.

The silence was a little too loud.

With a sigh, Kakashi looked up from the book again. "What did I do wrong this time? Besides leaving the alarm at home. --No, actually, besides blowing a hole in the house so we had to evacuate so I left the alarm at home. Aside from those, what did I do?"

Iruka shook his head a little, still at a loss for words, and walked across the room, and took Kakashi by the shoulders. Grinning inside his mind, Kakashi braced himself for a shove out the window; but instead, Iruka pulled him close, and held him tightly, for a long, quiet minute.

When Kakashi realized that it really wasn't going to be followed up by a shove out the window, he chuckled a little, and slipped his arms around Iruka's waist, nestling his cheek against the new and still delightful fullness there. "Does this mean you're not going to kill me for the kitchen?"

"I don't know what to say," Iruka murmured, and shifted a hand to stroke Kakashi's hair lightly. "I don't know how you always do these things to me. You destroy the kitchen because you're so intent on telling me how you love me that you don't notice the fire. You leave the alarm at home to watch me panic at oversleeping, but you got yourself up early to surprise me with every damn box of prenatal vitamins at the store... how do you always, always manage to do the sweetest things in the world in the most obnoxious way humanly possible...?"

"It's a gift," Kakashi said wryly.

Iruka laughed, and bent to brush a kiss against his forehead. "I love you. And the next time you make me furious enough to kill you, remind me of that. I'm sure I can manage to hug you until your head explodes if I really put my mind to it."

"What a wonderful way to go," Kakashi replied, grinning. "Need any tips on positions? Because if you're collecting up ways to love me to death, I've got a long list of fantasies that I'm more than happy to contribute to the cause--"

Iruka pulled the book out of his hands, hit him over the head with it, and handed it back to him.

"...Oh, yeah. Speaking of which, you've got to read this book!" Kakashi's voice took on a note of unmistakable glee. "All kinds of amazing positions, and completely illustrated--"

"Kakashi!" Iruka protested, his face bright crimson. "There's a little girl in this house -- how could you bring something like that under their roof, where she could pick it up?"

"See for yourself," Kakashi replied, and shoved the book under his nose before he could look away.

Iruka's eyes widened. The 'position' in question had nothing to do with sex; instead, the illustration was of an unborn child nestled head-down in the mother's womb. He took the book from Kakashi's hands, then flipped through a couple of pages quickly, and then looked at the cover -- Pregnancy's Progress: Your child's development, birth, and first months of life.

Iruka's mouth was hanging open again. Silently, Kakashi patted himself on the back for another successful attempt at shocking his lover speechless.

He doesn't even stare that much when he catches me with Icha Icha Paradise. Maybe it's time to change tactics after all; this one seems to be working nicely.

Finally, in a soft, husky voice, Iruka asked, "When you're done, can I read this...?"

"You can read it now if you like," Kakashi said easily. "I've got another." And he reached into another pocket and produced the other fruit of his morning's shopping expedition.

Iruka blinked at the cover of this one. Hot Sex and Hot Mamas: Nine months of pleasuring pregnant vixens, from sensual prenatal massage to [censored] [censored] [censored], Sixth Edition, Newly Updated, 160 Pages of Illustrations Cross-referenced by Month and Position--

"...You... you... AUUUUGGGGHHHH!"

Over at the schoolhouse, the repair crew was surprised by the rather abrupt and unannounced arrival of two new recruits just after lunch. The normally polite and soft-spoken young schoolteacher was dressed in a gently rounding set of maternity overalls --and she was stalking toward the crew with a deathgrip on her husband's ear and a hammer in the other hand, shouting incoherently into his ear every step of the way as she dragged them both up the street toward the construction site.

"...And the sooner this place is livable again, the sooner I can get you out from under the roof of decent, respectable, well-meaning people who have no concept of what a perverse, explicit, and FAR too detailed set of reading material you constantly drag in like a tomcat with a mouthful of rat guts--"

"...Yes, dear." The husband looked like he was enjoying the experience. Of course, he was the one who'd blown up the kitchen in the first place. Either way, he was clearly certifiable.

"And DON'T YOU 'YES, DEAR' ME, you--"

"Yes, of course, dear. Now, let's not forget to give you your vitamins after all this exertion..."

"....ARRRGGGHHH!!!"

The work crew traded a nervous glance, and by silent mutual agreement they put down their lunches and started sawing and nailing double-time. The sooner they got this job done, the less time there was for the pregnant woman to go hormonal on them as well. There was a silent agreement among construction men that was not unlike the silent agreement among housewives. While the housewives' agreement read "No man should be allowed within 10 feet of a pressure cooker without a tranquilizer gun on the premises," the construction men's agreement read "Pregnant women with power tools and hormonal mood swings are very, very rough on the workplace injury record."

Iruka would, of course, have taken great exception to being classified under the hormonal pregnant woman subclause of the construction men's agreement, since he felt he had a perfectly legitimate reason to be furious with his perverted idiot of a lover. Over centuries of experience, the first corollary to the construction men's agreement had been fixed at "They always think they have a reason; never mention the hormonal mood swings to them or the consequenses will be unbelievably ugly," and so none of them mentioned aloud why they were being so extraordinarily helpful and fast.

Fortunately, since Iruka hadn't spent the rest of his life as a woman on the watching-and-seething end of the "Significant Looks Exchanged With Other Mood Swing Victims" routine, he thought that there was nothing more to it than simple helpfulness, and was simply rather baffled by the way they kept fixedly grinning at him and backing away as though he carried some unspeakable plague.

What with one thing and another -- including Iruka frequently applying the hammer as a motivator to his 'ex-carpenter' of a husband, who seemed less interested in work and more interested in laughing his fool head off every time the big burly construction men started warily backing away from the plump little curve of the schoolteacher's overalls -- in the end, the house was closed up enough to be declared inhabitable by that evening. (This declaration of habitability was spurred in part by an inspector nervously watching Iruka tap the hammer against the palm of a hand, and having visions of the hammer connecting with the contents of his skull like a soft-boiled egg being capped for breakfast if he provided a verdict that Iruka was unhappy with.)

The first thing Iruka did, upon being granted permission to reoccupy their house, was to take the second book away from Kakashi. He wrapped it up in several bags, and shoved it into the top back corner of the office closet, where he hoped inquisitive six-year-olds wouldn't be able to reach even if they had dragged along a stepstool. The second thing he did was to collapse onto the futon with a groan, rolling onto his side and rubbing the hollow of his back.

"...I've got to do something about this center of gravity thing..."

Kakashi didn't reply aloud; he just pulled out the first pregnancy book again, the one that hadn't triggered Iruka's confiscate-and-destroy reflex, and sat by the window to read.

After Iruka had fallen soundly asleep, he put a bookmark into it, and pulled out the final fruit of his shopping spree: this month's Icha Icha Paradise.

Nice day, Kakashi thought to himself. Got him the prenatal vitamins; scored several blushes and a near record number of silent gawks; didn't get self killed for the discovery of the educational books; he still doesn't know I've got this one. And there's still no school tomorrow, which means I can tickle him awake in the middle of the night and try out Hot Mamas page 37 on him and he can't even protest. Much.

All in all, life was good.