Side Effects, Chapter 10

Part of Iruka regretted the loss of half a week of classes less than a month before the children left for their summer vacations. Even though the building was enclosed again, there was simply no point in holding classes one rather thin wall away from people with hammers and power tools reconstructing the inside of the kitchen. And another part of him was guiltily relieved at the delay, because it gave him more time to work on something that he really couldn't do while he was teaching... or even when he had to stand unsupported.

He'd learned the parts of sexy-no-jutsu that involved becoming visibly female, but he was already an adult, and so unlike Naruto he hadn't needed to drastically shift his height in the process. So he'd concentrated on mastering the most essential parts, and hadn't bothered changing his skeletal structure. And he wasn't looking forward to making up for that oversight. Reshaping and force-healing bones always hurt. But he had to do it soon, or else the baby would be getting big enough that he wouldn't have the strike range to fracture his pelvic arch without risking hurting the baby in the process...

Kakashi had tried to talk him into just working on shifting everything with sexy-no-jutsu. But one hour of sparring had finished off that idea. Iruka could hold sexy-no-jutsu through the most ridiculous flirts, gropes, and surprises that Kakashi could think of -- but whenever Kakashi swung anything toward Iruka's abdomen, Iruka instantly reverted to the body he was stronger with and most comfortable fighting in... and then he lost his balance. Less than halfway through the pregnancy, the child's weight was slight enough that he could correct before he fell; later on, he knew he wouldn't have that assurance.

The instinct ran far deeper than conscious thought, to protect his child with the body in which he was best trained. He wasn't going to be able to train himself out of it in time.

And it was just safer this way. He'd never before gained this much weight this quickly in one unbalancing area; if he reset his bone structure earlier rather than later, then the only shifts in balance he'd have to learn would be due to the child's growth. He didn't trust himself to learn how to carry the child's changing weight in two different arrangements of hips and shoulders and leg joints.

The truly hellish part, Iruka thought humorlessly, was that this was all necessary because of the baby -- and yet again because of the baby, he wouldn't even be able to take painkillers for it.

With a hand resting against the gently rising curve of his abdomen, Iruka said, "You know, kid, I hope someday you appreciate all this."

Kakashi stuck his head around the bedroom door. "You're determined to do this?"

Iruka nodded. "I'm not looking forward to it, but I'm determined."

Kakashi's eyes went cheerfully unreadable. This was never, ever a good sign.

"Kakashi, what are you--"

His lover's hand appeared around the edge of the doorway, with a throwing dart in it.

Sharingan. Haku. Oh, hell--

That was the last thing Iruka had time to think before the world went dark.

- - -

Kakashi looked down at Iruka's limp figure, sighed, and sat on his heels to run his hands over the arch of his hips.

He doesn't know anything about the inside of women's pelvic bones anyway. Too shy to read anything really educational; if I left it to him to redesign his hips, God knows what he'd come up with. And there's no way in hell anyone could fracture their own pelvis twice; you'd be lucky not to pass out at the first strike. All right, let's see here.

He'd already decided it would be safer to use a sound attack than a physical strike; flesh transmitted sound waves without much damage, but the rigid resistance of bone could be shattered at certain carefully overlapping frequencies. And if he turned Iruka onto his stomach and struck downward at an angle from his back, then the baby wouldn't be in the path of the sound waves; that book said that the baby wouldn't have finished forming bone yet anyway...

Kakashi closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and set his fingers to his lips, humming in a subvocal range until he felt the resonance hit the right pitch. Then he opened his eyes and struck.

- - -

It took Iruka a long, long time to realize he was actually conscious again, partially because it was dark outside, and partially because he was completely and utterly limp in what felt like the aftermath of mindblowing sex.

When he managed to put a name to that feeling, it stirred a little indignation, but he was so far lost in boneless bliss that he couldn't seem to manage to protest it. With a giggle that sounded giddy even to his own ears, Iruka asked a shadow in the windowsill, "Took shameless advantage of an unresisting body to try that book on...? If that's what happened here... then I've got to read that...!"

Kakashi chuckled, low-pitched. "Words I never thought I'd hear you say. I ought to seize the opportunity while you're clearly not thinking like yourself, you know. Damn, looks like I haven't managed to banish all my morals yet."

"So what happened...?"

"I rerouted some things," Kakashi said. "Instead of feeding into your pain receptors, all those nerve endings are feeding into your pleasure receptors for a while. Closest I could think of to a drug-free painkiller that doesn't leave you paralyzed, anyway."

Iruka thought about it, and blinked a couple of times, hazily. "Can I get you to do this to me again...?"

Kakashi struggled with himself for a long, long minute. "...Damn stupid morals...! I have got to do something about those..."

"Opportunity doesn't knock every day," Iruka purred, and tried to reach toward him. The resulting jolt of pure euphoria made his breath catch short, and then he made a near-animalistic sound of utter bliss. "Get down here...!"

Kakashi was kneeling at his side in a heartbeat -- but rather than stripping him and starting to play, the silver-haired figure bent over him and touched careful hands to the splints and restraints holding him in place. "...Don't do that. Don't move. Hell, I guess there's a reason to let a little bit of the ache get through after all; I've got to let you know how not to hurt yourself..." He stopped, blinked, and shook his head sharply. "Bad idea. Bad  idea. I'm not going to wire you to get pain and pleasure that tangled up. Just... trust me on this one, okay? Don't move for a few more hours."

"Awww...!" The pressure of breathing enough to speak sent a waterfall of bliss pouring through every nerve in his body, and he giggled again, breathless.

Kakashi shut his eyes tight, struggling against unspeakable temptation.

Just breathing was enough to send delight shivering through him; a vague and distant corner of Iruka's mind observed that that had to be saying something about the amount of pain he would otherwise have been in, but the rest of his mind was too busy exulting in the orgasmic effect of being alive to take much notice of it. He reached for Kakashi's hand, rubbed a thumb needily against the hollow of his palm, and purred deep in his throat.

Even half mad with ecstasy, he knew the limits of Kakashi's self-restraint well enough to break them when he really wanted to. With a heartfelt groan, Kakashi bent over and brushed his lips against Iruka's, softly at first, and then stronger.

But somehow, that didn't seem to be affecting him at all. Iruka struggled to reach closer, to beg for more, and something in the attempt at motion set off a wild cascade of fireworks behind his eyes.

With a shuddering sigh, Kakashi nipped his lower lip, and Iruka finally managed to connect the little jolt of delight with the thought that it should have hurt.

"Being gentle isn't going to do anything for you right now," Kakashi said, his voice ragged with desire and frustration. "And I'm not enough of a bastard to hurt you. And you don't need me the way you think you do right now, much as it pains me to admit that... close your eyes and go back to sleep."

"Kakashi...!" Iruka gazed up at him with completely unfair puppydog eyes hazed with raw lust.

Kakashi swore under his breath, and took out another needle.

- - -

Despite completely undue temptation the next few times Iruka woke, Kakashi managed to keep him both still and fairly quiet for the next couple of days, until the bones had knitted back together enough under the pressure of accelerated healing for it to be safe to let him move on his own. The casts came off by the weekend; at that point, since there weren't any outward signs left, and since his pain had eased to a level where he was no longer blissfully trying to seduce anything that moved, Kakashi thought it was safe enough to let the construction workers and the occasional curious child see him.

Iruka spent most of his time carefully settled in the sofa or a hammock, still drowsing between the drain of healing and his body's own sleepy reaction to prolonged pleasure. He read the same chapter of the pregnancy book four or five times, because it kept slipping out of his hands when he nodded off, and he never remembered where it was he'd fallen asleep the last time.

And he didn't even complain about meals that consisted entirely of takeout ramen, strawberries, and prenatal vitamins. In one sense, it wasn't Kakashi's fault he couldn't cook anything, since the wall with the stove still didn't have its connections back in place. Of course, in the other sense, that was entirely Kakashi's fault too, so he just crossed his fingers and hoped Iruka didn't notice.

They spent most of Sunday teaching Iruka how to walk again. Kakashi had corrected his nerve paths, so that Iruka could tell if he was doing something he wasn't supposed to do; but Iruka kept inexplicably laughing anyway, even without the shift in the neural feedback.

"How do women do this?" he asked, leaning most of his weight on locked arms on the railings as he very, very cautiously practiced going up and down the first three steps of the stairway. "Everything's... down, and forward, and... --I'm going to have to commend Sakura-kun again when we get back; I don't know how she even walks around... particularly when you add things like those ridiculous six-inch high heels to the mess! How do any of them keep from breaking their necks?"

"Practice, I suppose," Kakashi said drolly. "And speaking of practice, I'm still planning on taking you up on that offer."

"Which offer?"

"You said you wanted to read through That Book for inspirational purposes, remember?"

Iruka's jaw dropped, and he let go of the railing in order to lunge at Kakashi. "You liar!"

"No I'm not!" Kakashi protested, dodging and planting both fists on his hips. "Well, all right, sometimes, but not this time--" He ducked another swing, and said, "Honestly, if I was going to make up a lie like that, wouldn't I make up something that made sense?"

"Being late for graduation because mutant orchid grasshoppers were staging a revolt and trying to seize control of the nation's vital kumquat shipping trade?"

"Well, you see..."

"Missing the end of Sakura-kun's first solo mission because the Holy Ramen Spring had been blown up by rice-eating terrorists who knew the Konoha ninja would be so demoralized by a week of nothing but rice porridge that they could walk in and have their way with their sex goddess Tsunade?"

"I can explain that--"

"Turning up four hours late for our anniversary date because Naruto and Sasuke had started shagging each other in the middle of trying to kill each other, and then you had to stop them both from killing themselves long enough to get them to cheer up and work on killing each other again?!"

"That actually happened!"

"You liar!"

"But--"

Iruka stopped in the middle of the room and stared down at his feet. "...I didn't fall over?"

Clinging to the top of the light fixture he'd scrambled up to keep Iruka from committing assault and battery, Kakashi said encouragingly, "See? That's progress!"

Iruka took a couple more experimental steps, to make sure he could still do it consciously as opposed to instinctively while in the grip of mad bloodlust; then he laughed again.

"All right, this time I forgive you. I suppose you were right, at that; I probably wasn't going to stop worrying and just move until you got me irritated enough to try to strangle you again. But you just know all the buttons to push, don't you?"

With a morose little sigh, Kakashi said, "But I wasn't lying. Damn, I should've known it was too good to last... all right, that does it; next time, screw the morals..."

Author's note:

Wow, this is taking longer than I thought; I originally thought it was going to be three or four chapters. But they just keep DOING things, and things keep exploding, and then Kakashi makes a naughty suggestion in my head, and then Iruka tries to kill him before I can write it down, and that turns out hilarious to watch, and it just keeps snowballing... I originally thought this piece was going to be maybe half a page of exposition and then on to the next piece of the story, except then Kakashi pulled out the needle, and... ^^;;; one of these days I've got to learn to put a leash on the plot bunnies...

Thank you, thank you, thank you for the reviews! (A first-ever review? I'm flattered! And grateful too... now I just hope I don't screw up the story and disappoint people... ^^;;)