Chapter Text

Minato smiles at the sight of Naruto tying Kakashi's apron around his waist as he places their ingredients on the counter. As fun as it's been to train with Naruto and teach him techniques and tricks he knows, Minato is the most excited he's been since his first time meeting Naruto.

He's no great chef but what he's about to teach Naruto is his specialty. Minato hopes, one day, this meal will be a trigger for happy memories for his son. Those, in Minato's opinion, are the most precious thing a person can possess.

Finished with fiddling with the apron, Naruto turns to Minato, eyes wide as he waits for Minato to begin. He grins at his son and says, "Your mom was the best cook by the time we married but there's one dish even she said I did better than her." He gestures at their gathered ingredients and declares, "Omurice!"

Naruto's lip puckers and a small groove shapes itself between his blond brows. "That's kind of a lazy dish, isn't it?" he asks.

Minato rolls his eyes, unbothered. He's faced plenty of criticism of his cooking at this point and has a healthy, thick skin. "Do you know how to cook it?" he asks, crossing his arms.

Naruto glances away and scratches his chin. "Ah…"

He laughs. "It's okay, I'll teach you!" he reassures. Minato pulls out the cutting board from Kakashi's cupboard and reaches for the carrots he put out already. "My first couple of years on my own I practically lived off these," he explains to Naruto while getting a knife and beginning to prepare the carrots.

"Oh yeah?" says Naruto as he leans closer to observe him turn his now-sliced carrot into tiny, diced pieces.

"Uh-huh," hums Minato while he puts aside the carrot and moves on to the green onion. As he slices the onions, he reminisces about his early days as a Genin and living on his own. "I was pretty clueless at first and the ventilation of the apartment complex I lived in was bad," he tells Naruto. "My neighbor above me kept getting whiffs of my failed attempts and came down and taught me how to make it with some leftover fried rice I had after I ended up ordering takeout for the hundredth time."

He looks at his chopped vegetables and then at the ham (his preferred meat for omurice) still in need of dicing. "We're making our own fried rice for this but take-out works just fine too."

Naruto nods seriously then smiles. "That was cool of your neighbor," he remarks.

"Yeah, he was a nice guy," agrees Minato as he recalls the stout, stubble-cheeked shinobi who helped him. "I don't think he knew much about cooking either but he knew how to make Omurice!" he says with a laugh. Putting the carrots and onions in separate bowls, he brings his slab of ham to the cutting board and offers his knife to Naruto. "Want to dice this up?" he suggests.

Eagerly, Naruto takes the knife. "Sure!"

As he watches his son chop up the ham, Minato tells Naruto, as an aside, "I didn't really start experimenting with cooking again until after he moved out to marry his girlfriend when I was thirteen. She was an Aburame. It was easier for him to move into her and her family's home since he didn't have anybody except for a cousin who'd retired from being a shinobi after losing an arm, you see."

Naruto doesn't look up from the ham as he asks, "Did you get better at cooking after that?"

"I think so," replies Minato as he goes to get a pan and places it on the stove. As he puts a little oil in the pan in preparation for cooking the carrots and ham, he muses, "But if you were to ask Kakashi he'd probably tell you I made everything too bland."

Naruto's head cocks at this news. "Kakashi-Sensei ate your cooking a lot?"

Minato shrugs as he takes the cutting board laden with ham from Naruto and begins to scrape it off into the pan. "Sort of," he answers before pointing at the bowl of carrots. "Hand those to me, please." Naruto passes them over, eyes boring. Minato grins at his son. "At least Kakashi did at the start of our time together," he elaborates. "I think he ate dinner with me most nights from about age six to eight." Minato snickers. "I'd bribe him with extra lessons if he'd come home after training to eat with me."

"Wow," murmurs Naruto. He watches Minato moves the ham and carrots around in the pan for a time. "When do we add the rice?" he asks.

Minato hums. "Soon," he says. "Want to measure our soy sauce? I've got the recipe written on the paper next to the bottle.

"Yeah, okay," agrees Naruto as he gets to work. When he returns, he has the prepared rice and soy sauce in hand. "Why'd you cook for Kakashi-Sensei so much?"

Minato takes the rice and dumps it into the pan, then the soy sauce. In a second they'll need ketchup too but for now, they can let the ham, rice, and carrots mingle. Tapping his wooden spoon on the edge of the pan, he turns away from the food to measure the ketchup. As he does, he explains to Naruto, "Kakashi was alone and I worried because he was still so little." Meeting Naruto's gaze as he gives him the ketchup and urges him to add it to the pan, he adds, "I mean, I just told you how bad I was at cooking, right? I was nine then. When we became a team he wasn't even really big enough to reach all the way across the stove."

"Why'd you stop when he was eight?" Naruto questions while stirring in the ketchup.

Minato's lips twitch into a smile as he studies the fried rice. They should add in the green onions now. Picking them up, he tosses them in and motions for Naruto to stir the rice. In a moment, they'll set aside the rice and start on the eggs. "That's a funny story," he replies at last.

Naruto bounces, excited. "Really!"

Taking the pan from Naruto, he splits the fried rice into two bowls. "With hindsight, yeah, it is," he says. "How it goes is I broke some ribs on a mission and I was moaning at 'Kashi how expensive the next week was going to be because of all the take-out we'd have to order since I'd been told not to do anything too strenuous."

Minato puts the pan back on the stove and brings over the eggs to Naruto. He cracks one into a dish and then hands the other to Naruto. As his son gets to work breaking it and then stirring the eggs, he picks up the spoon and uses it to cut off some butter from the stick he has out on the counter and puts it in the pan. As it sizzles, he waves the spoon around and tells Naruto, "And he looks up at me and says, 'I can cook for us, Sensei.'" Minato shakes his head and suppresses a laugh. "I didn't believe him, of course. I'd been cooking all of our dinners up until that point and, more often than not, I saw his lunches consisted of stuff you'd pick up from a store. I didn't tell him that, though, because I thought it was very sweet. I figured I'd let him try and when he burned the rice or made the miso soup too salty or something I'd just send him out to get us take-out instead."

Naruto bobs his head and passes Minato the eggs to put in the pan. "Yeah, makes sense," he murmurs. "How did he do then? Did he set your place on fire?"

"No!" exclaims Minato as he stirs the eggs. "The little shit cooked a near-perfect curry for us to eat. You wanna know what he said when I asked him when he learned to cook?" Minato prompts, glancing up at Naruto.

"What?" demands Naruto, leaning closer.

Minato bumps him in the arm, urging him to look at the eggs. Naruto looks down and dips his chin to show he's taking note of what Minato's doing.

Satisfied Naruto will know what to do when it's his turn to cook eggs for his own omurice, Minato tells his son, "He said, 'Ages ago, Sensei. Dad taught me after I started at the Academy.'"

Naruto slaps his cheeks. "Oh man! What did you do?"

He grins at his son's reaction. "I asked why he'd been letting me cook for him for so long. I felt like I deserved some kind of answer since he'd been slandering my cooking pretty much the whole time too."

"What'd Sensei say?" Naruto replies.

Moving with his eggs turned omelet over to where the rice is sitting on the counter, Minato flips the bowl onto a plate and then carefully drops the egg over the top. Once it's in place, he cuts open the omelet. As the egg drapes itself over the rice, Minato picks up the ketchup and drizzles it over the top. "It was actually kind of cute, now that I think about it," Minato admits. "Kakashi thought I liked cooking and that, by torturing himself, he was helping me to get better at it."

Naruto snickers. "That's great!"

"It kind of is, right?" says Minato, one hand on his hip, pan in the other. "Anyway, after that, I had him cook for us, or I got us takeout when we ate together. Then it became less regular for us to eat dinner after your mom moved in with me around the time Kakashi turned nine."

Without being instructed, Naruto starts mixing up some more eggs to make his own omelet. "How did Kakashi-Sensei like your omurice, Dad?" Naruto asks as Minato regreases the pan for him.

He hums, thinking back on those days when it was just the two of them more often than not. It brings back fond, fuzzy memories of the tiny, clean but dingy kitchen they used to whittle away their evenings in. Kakashi often had harsh words for his food but not always.

"You know," he says, a slow smile rising over his face. "I think it's the only dish he never criticized."

Thank you very much for reading and let me know what you think!