Side Effects, Chapter 13

[author's note: where've I been? Working eighteen hours a day for the past month, thanks to the bloody ignorant virus writers having their badly spelled little insult-slinging duel in source code with each other. Had run out of prewritten just-needs-editables and didn't have time to sleep much, let alone write more... took a day off work just to recuperate... anyhow, if I vanish for a while, it's usually because work has eaten me alive, literally. Please don't ask why something's taking me so long, because I'd far rather have the free time to relax and write than be working insane overtime trying to clean up the damage from computer security disasters. ^^;; Anyway, on with the story...]

An hour later, there were about four very soggy cereal flakes left floating in some milk at the bottom of the bowl, donut crumbs all over several sheets of paper, and several more wadded-up-and-thrown-over-a-shoulder pieces of paper littering the floor.

Iruka had the pencil by now; Kakashi had gotten bored, and had invented a new game. His hands were curved playfully over Iruka's rounding belly, and although Kakashi barely twitched his fingers, the little flares of chakra were clearly quite noticeable to the baby. Every time he "touched" the baby with a little brush of energy, the baby started wriggling and rolling around; Iruka couldn't tell if it was through enthusiasm at someone to play with or misery at being tickled, but the end result was that it felt rather like there was an octopus swimming around in there.

 "...You're making me seasick, Kakashi. Come on. Pay attention. We can do this..."

There was an astonishing lurch inside, and Kakashi paused in his chakra-tickling to stare down over Iruka's shoulder towards his abdomen. "What was that?"

"A somersault, I think," Iruka said with a sigh. "Kakashi..."

"There's enough room for that?"

"There won't be for long," Iruka said. "Look, if you can't even pay attention long enough to make a good list, let's forget it. I can be a summer tutor or..."

Kakashi shook his head quickly. "I'm listening. I don't see what was wrong with 'used car salesman,' though. It's as close as it gets to 'lucrative underworld dealings in fraudulent goods with under-the-table bargains', but still on the sunny side of the law..."

"Look, let's try a different angle," Iruka said. "Let's start on the high end of the ethical scale and then work downwards if we have to. --You're good at teamwork, and good at leading teams, and good at defending things; why not think about something like being a policeman?"

Kakashi gave him a half-lidded look. "Laws. Regulations. Punctuality. Me. Remember?"

Iruka groaned, and buried his face in both hands. "...I'm not giving up. I'm just... regrouping..."

Kakashi brushed a gentle kiss against the curve of Iruka's throat, and rubbed a soothing pattern over the curve of his belly. "I could be a massage therapist," he offered. "With what we know about energy flow, I'd be a damn good massage therapist. I'd still get to run my hands all over naked people and turn them limp with sheer bliss, and it's perfectly legal..."

Iruka bit his lip, and then murmured, "You would be... very good at that."

Hearing the unspoken hesitation in his lover's voice, Kakashi coaxed, "But...?"

"It's a good idea."

"I know it's a good idea; I thought of it. So why do you sound upset? --Leaving aside the last fifteen ideas I came up with, that is."

"It's a very good idea," Iruka said, unhappily. "I'm sure you'd have pleasantly relaxed clients. It'd be good for them, and good for the village, and you could tell enough to know when to recommend someone go to visit a doctor--"

"It's not me you're trying to convince," Kakashi said wryly. "What's the problem?"

"...I'm... I'm... selfish..." Iruka gulped hard, and bent his head. "I... want your hands to be mine, I want to be the one you touch like that..."

First surprised and then delighted, Kakashi said, "Always happy to oblige. --Particularly happy any time you actually say out loud  that you want my hands on your body!"

"But I'm just being selfish--"

"You've got the right to be possessive of me if you like," Kakashi said. "Shall I demonstrate exactly how happy I am to hear it...?"

Iruka sighed, and kissed his fingertips to touch to the back of Kakashi's hand upon his stomach, and said, "After we have an idea we can work with."

"It's a date, then?"

Iruka nodded, with a rueful grin. "If it'll help motivate you? Of course it's a date."

Kakashi produced one of the most lasciviously insinuating grins Iruka had ever seen. "Score!"

...And he plucked the pencil out of Iruka's hands, grabbed a piece of paper, and started writing furiously, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration.

Iruka blinked in some astonishment at the paper. Kakashi had apparently taken the "start at the high end of the ethical scale" suggestion to heart, and was writing down everything that occurred to him, in approximately that order.

Priest, monk, mendicant healer, nun, hermit, hospital volunteer...

"...NUN?" Iruka echoed incredulously.

"You got pregnant, after all," Kakashi reminded him, still scribbling. "Cross-dressing is a piece of cake next to that--"

Iruka reached back and smacked him across the head. "You are NOT taking holy orders as an excuse to get into my pants!"

"But you said--"

"I said we needed to find a job that suited you," Iruka said. "And I would not take kindly to getting ourselves run out of town because the new priest decided he should take his sermons chapter and verse from Icha Icha Paradise, no matter how enlightening the contents might be!"

"Icha Icha Paradise makes magnificent sermon material," Kakashi said. "It's all about 'love your neighbor as yourself.' As many of the neighbors as possible, in fact!"

Iruka drove his elbow straight back into Kakashi's ribs. While he was choking and gasping over that, Iruka grabbed the pencil back, wadded up the latest set of scribbles, and threw it over his shoulder. Wheezing, Kakashi watched the paper fall with mournful eyes.

"You know... the world would be a... a much better place... if... if everyone had such an all-encompassing... love of humanity... as I've learned from Icha Icha Par-"

"Not when 'all-encompassing love of humanity' is just a translation for equal-opportunity pervert, you-- you--"

Iruka stopped himself short, leaning his face into both hands and blinking back tears of sheer frustration. "Never mind. I'll become a tutor. I'm sure some of the parents would be glad to have educational babysitting over the summer--"

"Easy, there," Kakashi murmured, cradling him close again; one hand cupped itself beneath the baby's curve to rub and cuddle, but the other was gently working the knots out of his shoulders. "Don't give up on me just yet."

"You were born to be what you are," Iruka said. "Which is an infuriating lecher and a precocious genius of a jounin. I'm not giving up on you; I'm giving up on making you into anything else. I shouldn't have tried in the first place..."

"However oddly sweet that is to hear, I do have a couple more ideas," Kakashi said, smiling.

Iruka glared over his shoulder. "If any of them involve sex, drugs, larceny, or passing yourself off for a virtuous moral paragon -- and particularly if any of them involve any combination of those -- you're sleeping on the floor for a week."

"You said yourself I'm good as a jounin," Kakashi said. "What do shinobi do for a living? Stealth, information gathering, and assassination. When you leave out the assassination part, what have you got left? A police detective or a private investigator. Leaving aside the police detective part because of the rules and regulations and such..."

Iruka was staring at him, his mouth hanging slightly open. Kakashi smiled again, unable to resist the temptation, and kissed him.

"...And I can do things like explaining to the bank what exactly is wrong with their security system with a hands-on lesson I'm sure they'll both take to heart and pay me for. And besides, if I'm a private investigator, I'm my own boss, which means I can sleep in as late as I like!" he added cheerfully. "So? What do you think?"

"That's brilliant," Iruka breathed. "That's absolutely brilliant. In a way, we've been doing it from the moment we arrived; you just didn't advertise the fact. So how do we quietly advertise an... er... 'expansion of the clientele'?" A moment later, he blinked, and then glared. "Precisely how long ago did you think of this anyway?"

Kakashi chuckled. "So suspicious...?"

"How long?"

"It was the first thing I thought of after you said 'policeman'. But massage therapist sounded like more fun. Besides, this way I even got you to promise me a horizontal tango!" Kakashi said, sounding far too proud of the results.

Iruka blinked again, several times. "...In other words, you were completely jerking my chain with the Icha Icha Paradise sermons and the cross-dressing nuns and...?"

"I still think Icha Icha Paradise would make magnificent inspirational and devotional material, of course," Kakashi said piously. "But yes, I've noticed you get quite a bit more uninhibited when I wind you up a little first. For example, you think of a lot more places to put your hands when you're not sure whether you want to be petting something or breaking something..."

"You perverse, manuipulative son of a-- You actually TRIED to--"

Iruka twisted around in Kakashi's lap, locked both hands around his throat, wrestled him over onto the kitchen table, and concentrated on knocking the back of Kakashi's head against the wood with every flex of his fingers. Kakashi's grin was quite an inducement to further violence -- but at the same time, Kakashi's fingers were...

"...Bastard!" Iruka had to let go of Kakashi's throat long enough to clutch at the pants that were sliding down the curve of his belly and hips. Unfortunately, that left his top undefended, and it all went downhill from there...

Most of an hour later, when Iruka had finally caught his breath again after their rather strenuous mutual exertion, he said, "You're washing the table..."

"I wasn't the one who tried to hit me over the head with your still-occupied cereal bowl," Kakashi observed sleepily, nuzzling his cheek into Iruka's slightly milk-sticky hair. "...Mmm. Blueberry..."

He reached over, fumbled a couple spare spilled blueberries off the table, dropped them into the curve of Iruka's ear, and started nibbling and licking; Iruka shrieked at the combination of cold-and-wet and hot-and-wet and far too much tickling.

"Aaaaaggh--! You -- you -- I'm going to take a bath--"

"Why bother? I'm perfectly happy to lick you clean!" Kakashi followed the offer with a demonstration.

With a wordless squeak compounded of embarrassment, alarm, and tickle-incoherence, Iruka slid off the table and picked up the milk-soggy pile of clothes on the floor and hurried upstairs.

Grinning to himself, Kakashi picked up the sugar bowl and followed on silent feet. It would, after all, be a criminal waste to let the shower get all the enjoyment from a milk-and-blueberry-sticky Iruka; Iruka might have sworn off extra sugar for the baby's sake, but Kakashi had no such reservations, and even if Iruka did make it as far as the shower, well, sugar stuck better to damp skin anyway...

Note to self, Kakashi thought. Get employed more often, if a person gets laid like that every time he thinks of a new career path... oh, yeah, and remember to buy more blueberries. Lots more blueberries...