Theme 19: Rice Pudding

Sorry to people who like rice pudding. I had a bad experience with it, and have never felt the same way about it since. In fact, I've had traumatic experiences with numerous Christmas related dishes: rice pudding, bread pudding, eggnog. It's not the food, it's me. Really.

Timeline: the year after the Red, Mistletoe, and Tinsel themes.

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It was one week until Christmas, and while Iruka was frantically hanging up decorations and baking cookies to hand out to the neighborhood children, his boyfriend Hatake Kakashi was ever so helpfully sitting in the kitchen, poking a chopstick into a bowl.

"It jiggles. Disgusting." He commented, and gave the congealed white substance in the bowl a second poke.

Iruka shot him a glare from his perch on chair, hanging up garland over the doorway. "It wouldn't hurt you to help out, you know." Sometimes Iruka wondered why he bothered with the Copy Nin. Kakashi made no move to help Iruka get ready for Christmas; he stared with rapt attention at the goo inside the bowl.

"Kakashi, leave the rice pudding alone and come help. You can have some later." Iruka yelled. The garland was starting to fall, and unless Iruka grew an extra set of hands to catch it, or Kakashi got his Copy Nin butt over to help, there was no way for Iruka to fix it.

Kakashi looked up with his eye held open wide. "You actually eat this stuff?" He asked. He gave the pudding a third fascinated poke with the chopstick. The garland fell. The vein in Iruka's head started to throb.

"KA-KA-SHI!" Iruka growled. The jounin leapt up when he heard Iruka's angry-sensei voice, and pinned the garland in place quickly enough to avoid Iruka's full wrath. Once his task was complete, he wandered back to the pudding.

"How can people eat this?" He wondered aloud. Iruka tried to ignore him. He started working on taping Christmas cards onto the door.

"Ugg, it's cold!" Kakashi gasped. Iruka looked up. His lover had his finger in the bowl, testing the temperature, apparently.

"Kakashi, get your fingers out of there! Nobody wants to eat your germs!" Iruka scolded. He wondered how much blood there would be if he threw one of the decorative snow-globes at Kakashi's head. Surely not enough to stain the carpet permanently…

"No one will eat this anyway. It's cold and mushy and soggy. It's like a…a bastardization of rice!" The jounin insisted.

"It is not! It's a Christmas tradition. And people enjoy it. Just wait until the party tonight. Everyone will be eating it, if you'd just get your fingers out of it!"

Kakashi ignored Iruka and picked up the other half of the chopstick set. He snatched up a single grain of rice from the concoction, and shuddered when pudding dripped off of it.

"'Help me, Iruka. Get me out of there. I'm drowning.'" Kakashi cried in a high pitched voice. He waved the rice grain at Iruka. "'Save me! Don't make me go back in there! Nooooo!'" Kakashi dropped the rice grain back into the bowl. He draped a napkin over the bowl solemnly.

Iruka put down his stack of Christmas cards and grabbed the biggest of his three snow-globes. Ninja were remarkable good at getting blood-stains out of carpets. He waited until Kakashi was carving a tombstone for the grain of rice into Iruka's frosted gingerbread house, and threw the snow-globe with all his might.

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The next one should explain a little more about how Iruka and Kakashi's relationship got from point A to point B. you'll also find out whether or not Kakashi gets hit. And yes, Iruka loves Kakashi; he's just gotten to that point in the holiday season where you get so frustrated you turn just a tad psycho. The next one will be more exciting, I promise.

Now, here's my story about rice pudding, and why it makes me sad.

So, I had just gotten all four of my wisdom teeth out, and was lying on the couch, drugged out and swollen up like a chip monk. I hadn't eaten anything for a day or so, mostly because I was drugged out the wazoo (so much so that on the drive home from the procedure, I didn't even notice when my mom got pulled over for speeding). My dad said he was going to go grocery shopping, and asked me if I wanted anything. Being, let me mention again, drugged out of my mind, I couldn't think of anything, but I asked my little sister to bring me home something I could eat that would be yummy. I wouldn't have trusted my dad, because he always brings home the nastiest things that no one ever eats, but I thought my sister could be trusted.

So, she gets home and tells me she got me pudding. I got really excited, because when I think of pudding, I immediately assume chocolate. I get all keyed up for chocolate pudding. But, lo and behold, they bring out rice pudding. Ug. It was made doubly worse by my high expectations. Really, though, the stuff isn't that good. A few days later, I tried to pass some off to some of my coworkers (who work at a kid's summer camp and eat nasty camp food every day, I might add), and none of them would even touch the stuff. Now, I associate rice pudding with pain, swelling, and severe disappointment.