Side Effects, Chapter 18

The more he saw of how a woman's world worked, Iruka thought with a mouthful of ramen, the more bewildered he became.

They'd encountered Satori and her boyfriend on the way back from the pond; Iruka had made hasty introductions, and Kakashi had helpfully kept a hand over Naruto's mouth, and the meeting between the two girls was truly astounding to watch, somewhere between a quick-draw death match and a ritualized flower-arranging: a precisely calculated spate of aggressive civility that took place in under three seconds...

The girls took one look at each other, and their eyes changed, and Satori latched onto her boyfriend's elbow at the same moment that Sakura latched onto Sasuke's -- and then they noticed each other's reflexive marks of possession on someone who was not their own object of desire, and they blinked at each other, and something mentally recalibrated in perfect unison.

And then, three seconds later, they were chattering away as though they'd been best friends for years, with Sakura complimenting Satori on her taste, particularly for 'helping' with Iruka's dress and hair, and Satori complimenting Sakura on her own fashion sense, and asking about each other's favorite shops in their villages, and Satori happily offering to show Sakura her favorite places to go for dresses and ice cream and hair ribbons, and... it was enough to give a grown man shaking chills.

So Iruka just kept staring down at the table, gazing into the bowl of ramen as though it were some sort of prophetic mirror of wisdom, hoping that whatever silent duel had just taken place, it had led to an armistice which would actually last.

Sasuke was staring down into his ramen too, without even bothering to eat it.

With a silent sigh, Iruka fumbled under the table for Kakashi's hand, and held it just for comfort; Kakashi glanced over at him, followed the direction of his anxious gaze, and smiled behind the turtleneck.

With one fingertip, he traced a combination of scout's shorthand and kanji into Iruka's palm.

Don't worry, OK?

Iruka replied, What's wrong with him?

What's NOT wrong with him?

I'm serious.

Me too.

Irritated, Iruka pulled his hand away, and turned his attention to the source. "Sasuke-kun, what's bothering you?"

The boy's lips tightened a bit; he didn't reply. Instead, he picked up a pair of chopsticks, making a visible effort to stir the ramen around, but it was obvious he couldn't bring himself to lift it to his mouth even for the purpose of avoiding conversation.

Naruto, who had been regaling Satori's somewhat glassy-eyed boyfriend with tales of the bear whose ass he'd kicked, shifted gears midstream to glare at Sasuke again. "Bastard, quit being rude to Iruka-sensei!"

Hastily, Iruka reached to catch Naruto's hands before the kunai could put in an appearance. "It's all right, Naruto," he said. "Maybe he's just tired. It's all right. --Don't let your ramen get cold; it's delicious, isn't it?"

With another glare Sasuke-wards, Naruto sat back down and started grumbling his way through a mouthful of ramen. Sakura, clearly distressed, glanced at Sasuke and then traded a silently pleading look with Iruka; Iruka shrugged a little, feeling oddly helpless, and struggled to gather the nerve to try again.

After a moment's hesitation, he leaned across the table toward Sasuke a little so that he could speak more softly. "Sasuke... did you know about the two of us...?"

Sasuke didn't repond, his face even more tightly shuttered than usual.

Iruka closed his eyes for a moment, placing himself in the position of a sensitive, troubled, and brittle young man who might just now have realized that two of his most respected teachers had been conducting a secret love affair for years -- and who had also just been presented with completely undeniable proof that they were sexually as well as emotionally involved with each other. Moreover, there was no way for the boy to have braced himself in advance for that type of proof, given that he'd known that both of his teachers were male -- and yet, the impossible, unbelievable evidence sat right across the table, dressed in a now-visibly-bulging maternity gown...

No, the mental picture was not pretty at all.

Carefully, trying not to think about how much every word hurt like a knife to the chest, he murmured, "Sasuke, I... I think I can see... why you could be upset. But if you won't talk, how can I help? I do understand... why you might be offended, or... revolted..."

Sasuke pushed himself away from the table sharply, and turned for the door.

Wide-eyed, Sakura said, "Sasuke-kun--"

"Sit back down, loser!" Naruto growled. "You're acting like a total dick and you're wasting ramen! RAMEN!"

"I'm not hungry," Sasuke muttered, and stalked out through the noren curtains at the front of the little shop.

Naruto's jaw dropped open. "Get your cocky ass back here so I can kick it up between your ears, punk! Just you wait--! --hmm. 'Wait...' wait... what was I waiting for...? Oh yeah, the ramen! Just a sec, I'll kick your ass soon as I'm done here--"

He slurped up the contents of Sasuke's bowl in five seconds flat, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and shoved his chair back too. "All right, now you're in for it!"

"I'm sorry, I've got to go with him," Sakura said franticallly to Satori and her bemused boyfriend, standing up to follow. "The problem is Naruto's a brain-damaged pathological liar, you see--"

Naruto froze in the middle of the shop, torn between chasing down Sasuke and arguing the unbelievably insulting description. Caught between the pull of those conflicting desires, he only managed a couple wordless squawks of indignation.

"...So if he starts rambling about being a high-class ninja or getting eaten by a cobra or this boy who walks in and out of ice somehow, or Iruka-sensei being a man in disguise and Sasuke-kun being a woman, or -- or summoning giant pink-and-lavender-colored toads--"

"Sakura-chan!" Naruto protested, in betrayed outrage. "I summoned a giant red toad! RED! Pink and purple are way too girly-looking!"

"You see?" Sakura asked Satori and her boyfriend, grabbing Naruto by the ear and dragging him toward the front of the shop with a sickly grin on her face. "So that's why I've got to keep an eye on him. I'll talk to you later, 'kay? Bye--"

Satori and her boyfriend stared at each other, then at Iruka and Kakashi, and then down at Kakashi's ramen bowl, which he'd emptied in the three seconds they were staring at each other rather than at him.

"Er," Iruka managed, rather intelligently given the circumstances. "It's... complicated."

"They're teenagers," Kakashi supplied helpfully. "That's always complicated."

"Dude," Satori's boyfriend said, "what's with the turtleneck, er, thing?"

"Oh, that's how I got Naruto-kun fixated on the idea that I'm a ninja," Kakashi said. He pulled the turtleneck back down, and added rather sheepishly, "He's fun to tease. Old habits die hard."

A little faint, Iruka said, "Naruto's not... he's really... not that bad..."

Satori and her boyfriend nodded in perfect unison, but they still paid for their ramen and made a beeline for the other exit with astonishing speed.

Leaning back to stretch both arms over his head, Kakashi said, "Remind me to commend Sakura on that one. That was an amazing level of quick thinking under fire."

"She called him a brain-damaged pathological liar!"

"Can you think of a better way to explain half the things he says, without blowing our cover?" he murmured, with a grin.

Try as he might, Iruka simply couldn't come up with another even halfway plausible alternative. "...Poor Naruto."

"He'll survive. He's good at that."

"And Sasuke's not," Iruka murmured. "Poor Sasuke..."

"Don't waste too much sympathy on him," Kakashi said, munching on a stray piece of seaweed left in his bowl. "He has an allergic reaction to sympathy."

"But... I do understand why he'd be revolted by... by my condition, by what's happening to me..."

"No, you don't understand, and you're not even close," Kakashi retorted, dryly. "You've spent too many years around Naruto and his complete lack of anything resembling a filter between brain and mouth. Whatever you think you've guessed about why Sasuke's upset -- believe me, you're completely wrong."

"And you know better?"

"When it comes to Sasuke, yes. Just like you know better when it comes to Naruto."

Iruka sighed and slumped against the table, rubbing his temples against a tension-headache. "So what is Sasuke's problem...?"

"Where do I start the list, and how many hours have you got to listen?" Kakashi moved Iruka's hand to brush a kiss against his temple, lightly, and then shifted to toss money onto the table and stand. "Come on, let's go catch up before we have another set of property-damage bills to add to the debt collection."

Iruka paled, and scrambled to his feet to join him. "Do you want to talk to Sasuke, and let me talk to the other two?"

"Actually, no. The exact opposite of that, in fact," Kakashi said.

Iruka blinked up at him. "But... you understand him better than I do..."

"Yes, and that's precisely why," Kakashi said.

"Wait. What? Kakashi--"

"Are you coming or not?" he asked, and brushed aside the noren curtain to step through.

Iruka caught his breath, startled. "Kakashi-- the turtleneck--"

"They're going to have to see my face some time," he said with a lazy shrug.

"But... I mean... I know it's been... important to them, important to you... are you sure you want to do it like this? Just walking up to them in the street, like nothing had changed...?"

Kakashi rubbed his chin for a minute, then nodded cheerfully. "Yep! Because I guarantee 'just walking up to them in the street' is the one and only possibility for unmasking me that none of them ever thought of!"

Iruka put a hand to his temples again. "...I suppose it does make a certain impossible logic, doesn't it? When you're dealing with a mind that gets even more crooked than a corkscrew, sooner or later, you eventually twist around to the ultimate in devious calculation -- which ends up indistinguishable from being completely straightforward."

"And that always makes it even more of a shock to your victims," Kakashi agreed, smiling. "See? You're starting to think around corners too."

"But you think around corners that don't even exist!"

"So do sailboats. They never travel a straight line, but they still get to where they're going by traveling back and forth at angles across the shortest route they can take," Kakashi said. "I get to where I need to be too. I just don't keep track of how many times I have to twist and turn things in order to get there."

"...That explains a staggering amount about your approach to punctuality, you know."

"I am nothing if not consistent in my unpredictability." Kakashi bent to brush a kiss against his cheek, then took his hand and led him toward the street the teenagers had taken; Iruka struggled almost despite himself, trying to pull his hand away.

"Sasuke--"

"No, I will not stop holding your hand just to appease a touchy angst-and-hormone-ridden teenager. Sasuke and his little attitude problem are about to come down with a serious case of us," Kakashi said, quite soberly. "And since I know we're the best thing that's happened to him since his family died, he's just going to have to learn to live with a serious case of us."

Then, as inevitable as the sunrise, both his eye and his lips curved into a mischievous grin: "And lucky you, you get to go first! You're the perfect torture for him all by yourself. Because he isn't going to have a clue what hit him, and I still haven't forgiven him no matter how much I understand why."

Truly alarmed, Iruka pulled harder -- but Kakashi wasn't letting go. "Kakashi, he doesn't need to be hurt any more than he already has been--"

"Which is why I'm about to fling you at him," Kakashi replied smugly. "You'll make him absolutely miserable without hurting him in any way. If it were me, I know I couldn't resist puncturing his ego right along with setting him straight about the way the world works! You'll do fine--"

"But I don't know what to do! Not with Sasuke--"

"That's why you'll do fine--"

There was a distressingly familiar shriek of Sakura-frustration from further down the street, followed much too quickly by the sound of something heavy splintering something wooden and fairly thin, most likely a wall...

Iruka took off running, silently thanking the heavens that the boys had put in their first appearance while he wasn't yet too child-heavy to run a block or two, and dragging an unhelpfully laughing Kakashi along with him.

By the time they tracked down the source of the commotion, Iruka was gasping for breath around the combination of the baby's unhappy kicks at the jostling and the heart-pounding, light-headed effects of sheer panic: if it's one of the festival stalls I can make excuses somehow, but if it's an actual building -- I don't know what I'm going to do if it's an actual building; damn it, these people are just not accustomed to overexcitable ninja students; what am I going to--

"Hah! See, I told you so!"

"...Hmph."

Sakura translated from Sasuke-ese with the familiarity of long practice. "Naruto, you moron, you're supposed to throw the beanbag through one of the holes that's already there! NOT through the board itself!"

...Sure enough, a toss-the-beanbag game vendor was staring in slack-jawed astonishment at his previously normal-looking painted-clown board. But now, instead of having holes for the eyes and the mouth, there was another hole smack in the middle of the forehead, and splinters everywhere, giving the unfortunate impression of a messily slaughtered ex-clown...

Naruto looked back and forth between the board and the fuming Sakura. "...No way! That'd be too easy. It's a lot harder to get enough momentum behind a beanbag to splinter wood; it'd practically be cheating to use a hole that was already there!"

Sakura had one hand fisted at her hip and the other knotted in her hair to keep herself from strangling her teammate. "This is a kids' game, idiot! For LITTLE KIDS!"

Naruto looked at the gawking game vendor with suspicion in his eyes. "Hey, mister... is that all there is to it? Seriously? Talk about lame--"

Iruka's knees simply weren't going to hold him any further; he crumpled toward the ground, and Kakashi caught him hastily.

"Iruka? What's wrong?"

He opened his mouth to try to say something remotely appropriate, but the only thing he could manage was a few gasps of increasingly hysterical laughter, clutching at Kakashi's shoulder as though it were his last remaining hold on sanity, the other hand pressed hard against a stitch in his side.

"--Iruka-sensei?!"

All three of the students were huddled around them in a flash; the part of Iruka's mind that was distantly noting the absurdity of it all was vaguely surprised that Sasuke had also reacted with such immediate concern. Both Sakura and Kakashi had their hands curved to his abdomen; Iruka shook his head a little, still too overwhelmed for coherence.

"...Fine... the baby's fine... --where do you feel for whether my mind's been fractured, though...?" He gasped for breath, and started laughing again. "I... I thought... it was going to be someone's skull through a wall...! You... both of you...!" Iruka shook his head a little, helplessly.

After a moment's frozen silence, Naruto began shouting at Sasuke and Sakura began shouting at Naruto and Sasuke stood silent, head bent, staring fiercely at a piece of pavement that had never previously offended anyone.

"Will you three just SHUT UP?" Kakashi roared.

All three heads swiveled to stare at him. And then their jaws dropped open in unison as they realized they were looking at Kakashi's face.

"K-k-k-kakashi-sensei--!" Naruto and Sakura choked in near-unison; Sasuke seemed to be beyond the capacity for speech.

"Sasuke, you're taking Iruka home," he said, with just barely a glint of amusement at their reaction hidden behind a perfectly conversational tone. "The day's been long and stressful enough without us having to worry whether we can leave you and Naruto in one place without chaos, mayhem, and bloodshed. Sakura, Naruto, you're with me."

The boys were still staring at Kakashi's face; Sakura was the first to recover from that shock and slip over into indignation. "But Kakashi-sensei--! It's Naruto's fault; send him home instead--"

"Leaving your teenaged hormones out of this, Sakura -- Sasuke is responsible enough to see to it that they get home without picking a fight with yet more defenseless inanimate objects," Kakashi retorted. "Iruka's had enough to deal with already tonight; she doesn't need to babysit a hyperactive brat the rest of the evening too. And when we're introducing you lot to the members of a new village, it's better to bring the ones that actually speak in response to a friendly introduction."

The students looked back and forth among each other, glowering, because he'd tidily managed to insult all three of them in a few short sentences.

"So, we're all set!" Kakashi said with a grin; he grabbed Sasuke's wrist, looped it through Iruka's arm, and gave them both a little turn and push in the direction of the schoolhouse. "Sasuke, don't let her fall; it could be dangerous for someone in her condition. Iruka, make sure you rest, now-- Sasuke can make tea for you while the two of you catch up on things."

His one visible eye was dancing with absolute glee. Iruka struggled to keep silent, and to bite back the urge to shove Sasuke into Sakura's arms, grab Naruto, and run before Kakashi could inflict more of his sense of humor on them.

When it came to the serious things, Iruka trusted his lover with his life and more -- things like life and death, the defense of that which he loved, his extraordinary ability to see beyond the surface of everything even without his Sharingan eye. And Iruka was fairly certain that somewhere,  there was a serious reason that Kakashi had thrown Sasuke at him with an almost-order to talk to the boy.

Unfortunately, he was equally certain that Kakashi had chosen this particular method in order to also maximize his own amusement at Iruka and Sasuke's mutually uncomprehending tongue-tied misery.

Before Iruka could think of a way to protest Kakashi's self-indulgent entertainment without saying too much aloud in front of strangers, the infuriating rogue had taken both of the other students and nearly dragged them away.

Sakura was still protesting at the top of her lungs. It was an odd not-quite-consolation to realize that even if he'd managed to protest, Kakashi would have ignored him just as blithely as he was ignoring her...

"Come on," Sasuke said quietly. Iruka flinched.

"I'm sorry -- I'm... never mind, you're right, let's go--" He started toward the school hastily; Sasuke dragged on his arm, with a dark-eyed glare.

"You just about collapsed," he said. "Slow down."

"...I'm sorry. I'm fine, really -- I just... I was so certain it was going to be someone's head that had gone through the board, and..."

Sasuke glared at him again; Iruka stopped short, and bit his lip to keep from chattering any further irrelevance in his nervous panic. He slowed his steps to match Sasuke's, and in a much smaller voice, he whispered, "I am sorry, Sasuke-kun."

Sasuke didn't respond, watching the road in front of them with a fixed stare.

This was going to be a long, painful evening.