Obito and the entirety of the Chicago branch of the Uchiha clan , including Granddad Uchiha, were milling around the miniscule room that looked like nothing so much as a classy prison cell, squawking like a flock of seagulls and picking up all his belongings, carrying them around, and replacing them exactly where they’d been before, only shifted slightly to the left.

His mother was folding and refolding his clothes and speaking very loudly about the importance of fabric softener and to please, please wash his laundry just once a month, please, while Mr. Uchiha was cursing in Japanese while hunched by Obito’s new (but technically super-old and decrepit) desk as if her could simply intimidate the various computer chords into the right outlets, while Granddad sat on the lower bunk and looked peaceful, which was generally Granddad’s favorite hobby. Obito had just finished shouting for his mom to STOP FOLDING HIS UNDERWEAR ALREADY when a tall, skinny kid with dark eyes and hair even more ridiculous than more somehow infinitely cooler-looking than Obito’s holding a duffle bag and a cardboard box walked in, gave a resigned sort of look at the door as if to confirm that, yes, this was his assigned 12×12 chunk of hell, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Hey. Are you Obito?”

The noise level in the room immediately rose at least three decibels as the Uchihas swarmed the kid, grabbing his bag and his box (Dad), patting at his impressive scruff of hair (Mom), and cackling in highly amused Japanese (Granddad). Obito just stood blinking in the settling dust, still clutching a pair of boxers and feeling confused. Obito and “Kakashi Hatake” had been sent each other’s self-penned profiles in one of those “please describe the entirety of your being so we don’t shack you up with a sociopath. Please use 3-5 sentences.” surveys that Campus Housing Commission (whatever that was) used to “carefully and thoughtfully pair you with the person with whom you will be sharing the next year.” Obito has agonized over his for days, trying to find just the right syntax to seem hip and cool and friendly-but-not-desperate, and had gone over it with every person he knew to get just right before changing the whole thing to something about skateboards in the last few seconds and clicking the “Send” button exactly eight minutes before it was due.

Kakashi’s had said “I don’t smoke.”

That was it. Obito had no idea how to respond to this. He didn’t smoke either, but it had never really occurred to him as the defining trait of his existence. And what did it mean, ‘I don’t smoke’? He was a health freak? He was simply above such things? Broke? Socially crippled? Was he actually talking about pot? WHO KNEW. It was another thing Obito had been agonzing over for the past month, and he was slightly underwhelmed by the reality of Kakashi Hatake The Non-Smoker.

Who was (judging by his family’s enthusiastic fawning) either a new family member or some kind of Christ figure. Mrs. Uchiha grabbed Obito by the strings of his hoodie and pulled him next to an obviously startled Kakashi, and ordered them to “SMILE LOOK HAPPY CHEESE!” before snapping three pictures of them in a row with a giant monstrocity of a camera, complete with flash bulb. Obito, blinking the white spots out of his eyes, began to protest that they were roommates, they weren’t getting married, but was silenced by a round of barking Japanese and violent hugs. And then they were gone, like some sort of tiny, Asian twister, and the two of them were left gaping in the wreckage of Town Hall.

The silence stretched on for a while, in which Obito suddenly realized that his “Obito Goes to College!” photo album would be featuring him clutching his unmentionables like a security blanket. He kind of wanted to die.

“Nice poster,” Kakashi finally said into the silence, and Obito knew without a shadow of lingering doubt that things were gonna be okay.

So from now until Valentine’s Day (or whenever, it’s not like the stuff disappears – just like those Hershey Pounds!) drop by and enjoy a healthy dose of fandom and information. Because we all have a duty to fight our own ignorance just as we all have a duty to live up to our very own brand of awesome. Rock the fuck on, man, rock the fuck on.

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Gate Team 7 is going to be the death of him.

(Author’s note: Cat is to blame for this. Because when I frantically IM’d her at midnight the day after finals she had the poor judgment to encourage me in my quest for fandom INSANITY and CRACK and SHAME. The word ‘AWESOME’ was used several times. The next day I was stuck for hours and hours and hours in various airports across the Midwest because of a gigantic snowstorm. COINCIDENCE? YOU DECIDE.)

Gate Team 7 is going to be the death of him. He looks up at the rope trap Uzumaki has somehow managed to get himself caught in, dangling from the gnarled alien tree like a loud, angry ball of yellow fluff and camo print, then at the way Haruno and Uchiha are just standing there looking, not doing anything to assist their fallen (risen?) teammate, not even laughing (like normal kids) – just observing. They’re practically taking notes on this.

Then Uchiha, all pale, serious-eyed dignity, takes a step forward, hand outstretched, and Kakashi has a brief, shining moment of hope that maybe they have a glimmer of a chance – and then Sasuke goes flying as yet another extremely obvious snare drags him up by the foot to leave him dangling next to Naruto, who, blood having gone to his head and left him even more feral that usual, interprets this as some sort of attack and starts to – from what Kakashi can tell – trying to claw Uchiha’s face off. Only now does Haruno begin shrieking in a voice shrill enough to make ears bleed that Naruto is an IDIOT, which makes Uzumaki start wailing that he ISN’T and it wasn’t his FAULT and shut UP, Sasuke, he is NOT retarded!

Kakashi thinks he might actually cry.

*

Later, when he’s back in Atlantis (surprisingly, still with the right number of subordinates who even more surprisingly still have the right number of limbs), he props up his feet on the edge of his neat little alien bed in the middle of his neat little alien room and settles in for some good old-fashioned bodice-ripping. The boxed-set of romance novels (some newer, some very, very old with yellow pages and smeared ink and dog-eared favorite bits) were some of the few things he brought with in his cardboard box filled with what essentially defined him as a person. There is the rest of the series, propped up on his neat little alien desk with what look a whole lot like shiny rocks but what he strongly suspects to be neat little alien bookends. There is his battered guitar, leaning innocuously against a smooth, warm wall, the varnish rubbed off all along the edges and plate. There is his poster of Billy Bragg, scotch-taped above his neat little alien headboard. There is the photograph propped up by his bedside, dead, smiling faces beaming at him right before he goes to sleep, in the groggy moments before he wakes up completely.

And there, he knows, are his father’s dog tags, lying in silent disgrace at the bottom of his alien drawer.
This is Kakashi’s life, and this is Kakashi’s life on Atlantis: sparse.

*

“All I’m asking you is to be out of my sight for five minutes without making the native go all Lord of the Flies on us,” Tsunade growls from the other side of her Very Impressive Commander’s Desk, her pretty face a mask of hungover irritation, her unreasonably generous bosom actively attempting to break free from her unprofessionally low cut top, over which she has thrown her red-paneled jacket, a necklace of what looks like a quartz crystal (he never took her for the hippie type) dangling down her collarbone and drawing the eye to dangerous places. She’s making a somewhat inaccurate analogy, but Kakashi figures inspecting his fingernails will be a more beneficial use of his time and energy.

“We didn’t make them angry,” he demures, his feet propped up next to the ‘Tsunade Godaime – Commander’ nameplate, “We made friends.”

“You traded Lt. Uchiha for food!”

“We bought him back,” Kakashi replies defensively, crossing his arms over his chest. And it had been a hard bargain, too. The Athosians had already started weaving flowers into his hair – they’d apparently gotten quite attached to the sulking young man in the few hours they’d been his rightful owners.

Luckily, the kids from the Atlantean mainland had found a kindred spirit in Naruto, as all of them were rather dumb in that little-kid way and enjoyed games that involved lots of thrashing and running and high-pitched screaming. But it had been Sakura who’d really saved their asses on the ambassador front, with her Magic Neosporin of the Gods.

“The priestess chick said she thought we’d be a city of cannibalistic barbarians, judging from what she’d seen,” the blonde commander went on, brown eyes blood-shot and boiling with the thinly-veiled instinct to throw things.

“Oh, you know Kurenai,” Kakashi replies easily, “Such a kidder.”

Tsunade arches a delicate brow and makes a motion like she’ going for her paperweight when Shizune bursts into the room, gasping for breath and looking even more harassed and panicked and borderline sociopathic than usual.

“Cammander –“ lots of gasping and frantic arm-waving, “third-floor – botanists – broken glass everywhere – blood!” And then it all dissolves into a series of hand gestures what could almost pass for ASL if it weren’t for the choking motions.

Tsunade heaves a put-upon sigh and hauls herself to her feet. “Fine, fine, stop hyperventilating.” Shizune honestly appears to try to carry out this order but fails rather crushingly. “And you,” Tsunade adds, rounding on him, “behave yourself Colonel.” Kakashi smiles infuriatingly and waves.

Once she’s gone, he rearranges the contents her desk drawers, just to screw with her head a little, and ambles off to find food or spaceships or whatever else may happen to strike his fancy. He does have a whole lost alien city of his own to explore at his leisure, after all. There are perks.

*

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Despite the fact that Naruto created his Sexy No Jutsu to instigate mayhem, mischief, and nosebleeds, he had honestly believed it to be relatively harmless, all things considered. (WIP)

Despite the fact that Naruto created his Sexy No Jutsu to instigate mayhem, mischief, and nosebleeds, he had honestly believed it to be relatively harmless, all things considered. But as he stares down at his tiny, tapered hands (tapered – like candles, melty and breakable and small) he is forced to reevaluate his initial conclusion.

He’s kind of confused by how all this looks on him – like everything about him is magnified and exaggerated, like everything that makes him him has been blown out of proportion, but only slightly. Gigantic blue eyes, snub nose, small mouth, freckles that on his old face looked sort of like a smear of dust from a distance and now somehow make his skin look almost transparent. It’s like he’s a caricature of himself. But strangely, he doesn’t feel like a caricature of a girl.

*

Sakura, fists on hips, eyes narrowed, one pink brow arched, informs him that he is both being stupid and wasting her Very Important Medic Nin Time when he says he can’t change back. After he starts feeling himself up in the waiting room, though (because boobs are unbelievably distracting) she at least pays attention to him, even if it is just to hit him a lot for freaking out her patients. She makes him wait in the nurses’ lounge despite the fact that the last time he was in there he broke the water cooler just by touching it, and when she comes back at the end of her shift and he’s still sporting one too many X chromosomes and his clothes are falling off him in awkward places she gets a weird look on her face and tells him to knock it off. When he explains to her again that he can’t, she finally starts doing things like taking his pulse and jabbing at him with her pale green chakra and frowning a lot.

Finally she stands back and looks at him with something akin to awe on her face. Then she pulls back her hand and slaps him across his chute little cheekbone.

“You’re an idiot.”

*

An hour later Tsunade does the exact same thing, only she throws a potted plant at him instead. Apparently he just has to wait for it to fix itself. Kind of like the skull fracture he’s sure he has now. Hag.

*

He doesn’t know how to move in this new body, with these new bones. He practically tip-toes all the way back to his apartment because he can’t shake the feeling that if he falls over or trips or if the wind blows on him too hard he’s going to break himself or something. He just looks so damn fragile whenever he glances down at himself, and it’s making him antsy and paranoid.

He drags himself up the stairs with minimal damage, despite the fact that his sandals are massive and tripping up feet that are suddenly smaller but surprisingly still kind weird-looking. He figures that that’s a “Naruto” thing and not a “girl” thing which makes him feel a little better for some reason, because now the fact that he’s a chick and he’s missing important parts of his anatomy and he has to explain to people how exactly that happened has sunk in and he kind of wants to throw himself off the Hokage monument, just a little.

He practically tears off his stupid, too-big clothes when he finally makes it inside, suddenly half-frantic and itching all over and hot and overwhelmed. His tiny little fingers fumble over zippers and buttons and ties until his clothes are in an orange and black pile on his floor and he makes a bee-line for the shower because maybe if the water’s hot enough the girl parts will just evaporate or something.

He catches sight of himself in his mirror, though, a blur of tan skin and all that hair and he skids to a halt, approaching his own image nervously. It’s bizarre to see the strong lines of his face – the hard edges and distinct angles – rounded off to soft curves and gentle arcs. His already prominent blue eyes are ginormous on his smaller face. His hair is just a mass of soft-looking yellow. The scars that he’s accumulated over the years stand out in stark contrast to his smooth skin with its constellations of freckles, the little rolls of skin that hadn’t mattered at all are suddenly and persistently there, the swirled not-tattoo seems oddly fuller when lai over the soft slope of his stomach. He looks…delicate. He feels delicate, in places that never looked that way on any of the girls he knows. Thinking back, he’s sure that Sakura’s collar bone dips the same way his does, but he’s never once thought about how easy it would be for hers to break. He’s confused and exhausted and just a little turned on, which weirds him out way more than even the fact that he got himself stuck as a girl, so he just collapses on his bed and sleeps until his body’s forgotten that it’s all wrong.

*

His boobs get in the way. Of everything. He feels top-heavy and he keeps bumping them when he tries to dodge shuriken and throw punches and stuff. Kakashi doesn’t know what to make of it, since he’s never had to teach anyone how to work around their breasts before. His sensei asks Kurenai’s advice on his behalf and gets weapons thrown at his head for his trouble by Kurenai and a fist thrown at his face by Asuma. He claims that they misinterpreted him and says no more on the subject.

*

Naruto, to absolutely no one’s surprise, is kind of awful at taking care of himself. Sure, he always scrounges up enough money to keep his belly full of ramen and the dust bunnies under his bed haven’t actually managed to grow arms and kill him in his sleep yet, but basic things like hygiene are suddenly completely beyond him. When he had just his thatch of straw colored hair to contend with, it was easy. He jumped in the shower, scrubbed at himself almost violently until he felt relatively clean or until the water ran clear. Dirt seems to show more obviously on his skin now, like it’s rejecting this state of uncleanliness and keeping the filth and dried blood near the surface, begging to be wiped away. The thought of actually washing his long mane of yellow hair practically makes him want to cry, and he’s not really sure if this is because working shampoo through yards and yards of soft golden hell is really is as traumatic as he’s making it out to be or just because being a girl means wanting to cry at just about everything because girls are just insane and now he’s joined the ranks of the fucking psycho.

When he designed the jutsu, he’d found all the hair to be pretty alluring, but he just tried to shove one long pigtail out of his face and his fingers got stuck and he only managed to regain use of his hand by violently yanking it out, along with a large-ish chunk of yellow hairs that hurt like fucking all get out.

Clutching at each ponytail like they’re injured limbs, he finds Hinata (whose long hair is glossy and so straight it looks like a sheet of metal in the bright sunshine) training with the rest of Team 8 and just sort of whimpers at her and gestures hopelessly at his head and he knows it’s bad when her tiny fingers fly to her mouth and she whispers “Oh, Naruto.”

*

She takes him to the hot springs, both of them wrapped in clean white towels. He sinks into the water and she sits behind him, perched on a slick stone and works something purple and gooey and strangely amazing smelling into his hair. He feels weird. Well, it’s more like he feels weird that he doesn’t feel weirder. All around him are women and girls and most of them are in towels, but a handful are naked, and they don’t even care. When he’s come here with other men…when he’s come here with men, they’re naked too, but there isn’t this feeling of…”community” sounds weird, but that’s sort of it. Nobody’s ever washed his hair before, ever scrubbed at his back for him, ever told him how soft his hair is as it slides between slim fingers.

He feels unreasonably relieved to be able to run a comb through his hair (given to him by Hinata with a small, closed-lipped, bright-eyed smile). But seriously, this is getting out of hand. So he lops off a foot or two with a kunai right there in the changing room and is completely at a loss for why Hinata is staring at him in horror, mouth open, like he’s just gouged out an eyed in front of her, rather than merely given himself a haircut.

“Naruto,” she starts, voice tiny, “Nartuo – you just – ” her voice catches, like it’s afraid, and she opens and closes and opens and closes her mouth a few times while he just stares at her repeating “What? What?“

She brings back Ino a few minutes later, dragging the other girl by the hand in an uncharacteristic display of force.

“Jeez, Hinata, what’s gotten into – ” she stops when she catches sight of Naruto, and her bright blue eyes go so wide he can see white all around. “…you.”

She turns to Hinata and says with perfect calm that makes Naruto very, very nervous, “Give me half an hour.”

*

I KNOW. I HATE MYSELF, TOO, SOMETIMES.

Title: Minato, In Love

Rating: T

Summary: Kushina Uzumaki is insane.

Kushina Uzumaki is insane. This is the first thought that is stamped across Minato Namikaze’s brain when a strawberry blur literally tackles him to the ground only moments after he feels claws sinking into his face, and then leapfrogs over him in pursuit of a runaway cat. Kushina is a jounin and way past the part of her life when she has to track down lost pets for a living, but she is doing so anyway, with a wide, manic grin plastered across her face as she manhandles a ball of grey and white fluff, adorned in nauseating pink ribbon. Her eyes are wide and bright in the late afternoon sun, their color indeterminable, and her hair looks like a particularly glossy birds’ nest. She is barely five feet tall and Minato is terrified of her.

*

Somehow she cons him into buying her lunch the next week, despite the fact that he’s been hiding from her and her terrifying smile with a vigor he usually only shows around training his kids and working on totally awesome new jutsu. But she tracks him down somehow, or just stumbles upon him or something, but either way, he gives a totally un-awesome yelp when she taps on his shoulder where he’s hiding behind a display of gardenias in the Yamanaka flower shop, and all he can think is one, he sounded almost exactly like Rin that one time when she found a snake in her bedroll and attached herself to him until Obito could bravely capture the little thing and release it back into the bushes, and two, someone please kill him.

He takes her to Ichiraku because it’s the only place he can think of. The man who works there is showing his little daughter how to add the barbeque pork just so, and she keeps shooting furtive glances at him. He grins at her, but then notices that Kushina is watching him at the exact same moment he realizes that there is a smattering of freckles all across her snub nose and cheekbones, disorderly and delicate and mortifying. When their orders come she takes one bite and her eyes roll back in her head and she moans that it’s the most amazing thing she’s ever had in her whole life ever, no seriously and Minato knows he’s doomed.

*

Minato knows he’s sort of good-looking the same way he knows he’s sort of amazing, but he’s never really been all that interested in women. They’re nice and everything, and he likes a whole lot of them, but kissing is messy and groping is awkward and he could really be spending that time with his team or working on a technique or attempting to read Sensei’s latest masterwork over his shoulder. It’s because of this, along with the fact that Kushina makes him clumsy and stupid, that he has no idea what to do around her, no clue what to do with his hands, no words to say that aren’t so, so, so incredibly lame. His team is catching on now, and they’re completely awful little brats, all smug and knowing with their giggles and secretive grins and nudging elbows. He decides once again that Rin is favorite one day, because she’s the only one of them who’s not touched in the head and because she steadfastly refuses to laugh when he asks if his hair looks stupid, at least not to his face. Kakashi actually snickers and Obito laughs so hard he practically injures himself, so Minato buries them both up to their neck in the ground before running off to embarrass himself some more in front of the crazed Whirlpool kunoichi.

*

It’s two weeks later, and she throws him up against a wall, and he still doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Luckily, Kushina does.

*

Kushina has those same freckles all over her body, little constellations like spilled brown sugar along her arms and her legs and her back. Minato has tried to count them, but he always falls asleep too soon. Her body is compact and muscular, with strong legs and rough hands that Minato loves to feel on his skin almost as much as he loves the feel of his own hands on her sugar-spill skin, soft and warm and tan from the sun. Her hair is course for a girl’s, although he doesn’t have much to base this off of – just his few fumbles and those times when he’s combed tangles out of Rin’s illogically fine, cocoa brown locks. He has never told Rin this, but he loves touching her hair, and he looks for excuses to play with it when they’re out on their weeks-long missions, sees the way Kakashi and Obito look on with curiosity and longing, respectively, while Rin blushes with pleasure at his attention and ducks her head. Kushina’s hair is a shade of strawberry blonde that he has never seen before and he runs his long fingers through it every time he gets a chance, constantly, until she bats his hand away and makes faces and makes him love her that much more.

Oh shit. He loves her. He loves her so much he doesn’t even know what to do with it all, and he kisses her so hard her eyes (which are hazel) go wide, and then she grins against his mouth, teeth sharp against his lips.

*

The war fucks everything up, takes away one of his kids all at once, and takes the other two from him in fractions. He’s dragging himself home after days out on the field, feeling used up and numb and he nearly died today, he watched good people die, from both sides. Kushina is sprawled across their couch, mouth hanging open, hair a hopeless mess, a scratch across one cheek, angry against her soft freckles. He sees her like that, a total wreck and completely perfect and his knees give out, collapsing next to her, face across the small of her back. He passes out like that and she drags him back to their futon with her strong arms, and holds him until he realizes that he’s not ever going to let anything happen to this place that he loves, this place that gave him her.

*

One day she asks him how he feels about kids.He says he loves kids, loved his team when they were little, loves little Ayame, loves to babysit for his friends.

She says that, so, that means he’d like to have some of his own some day, right? and he replies that yeah, he totally wants kids. A second later he’s afraid that maybe he’s accidentally scared her off, that this is way too much to throw at her so soon, that this wasn’t the answer she wanted or the answer she needed. But she just shrugs and asks that it’d be cool if “someday” was in about nine months, right? And because Minato can be astonishingly slow for a genius he just says, sure, yeah, that’d be fine.

Ten minutes later he drops a cup of tea all over his pants and grabs her and swings her around their kitchen, whooping. Kushina just rolls her eyes and holds on tight.

*

He supposes this means they’ll have to get married now. Kushina just scoffs and says “As if,” before forcing him out at three in the morning to get her a plate of dango she absolutely cannot live without. Minato looks at her still flat belly and grins and sighs because this is the woman he loves and they’re stuck with each other forever and he loves that.

*

Rin takes over all Kushina’s exams, her tired face so full of determination and hope and that girl she used to be that Minato knows nothing will ever go wrong with the pregnancy because Rin simply won’t allow it. He lets himself mourn for her then, for everything she’s lost along the path of being a prodigy. He wants to save her, wants to comfort her with his strong hands and open arms. He wants to comb her hair for her, but he no longer knows how.

Kakashi watches the exams from the edge of the room, leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, eyes mismatched. He always watches these moments with his hitai ate pushed up, which is unusual for him, and Minato is sure that Kakashi is sharing these moments with Obito. He doesn’t know anymore whether he should find comfort in this.

*

Some nights, he lies awake with one large hand spread wide over Kushina’s swollen belly, utterly awed that there is a life beneath her soft skin, a life that is half her and half him. He hopes the baby has her freckles.

Some nights he stares at her stomach and is paralyzed with fear he has never felt on the battlefield because he still hasn’t ended this war and he won’t let his child live in fear, he won’t. He’s so, so scared that he won’t be able to be a father worthy of this child, a father worthy of a life that Kushina kept inside of her.

*

Rumors fly through Konoha at high speed that Kushina Uzumaki took out three enemy shinobi that had infiltrated the village while on maternity leave, with nothing but a single kunai and a set of chopsticks.The rumors are only slightly exaggerated. The rumors about the Hokage pulling out chunks of his hair in the hospital lobby and then passing out from sheer nerves are completely accurate.

*

His son is born in the midst of chaos, tiny and perfect with his hair – he can tell already – and Kushina’s nose. He looks at his boy, his own, his only, and all he can think is how this love that is flooding him is familiar. It’s that familiarity that makes him realize just how he really feels about Kakashi and Rin and Obito, how he knows that they are his children, that this fierce, feral father’s love is thicker than both water and blood. He knows he loves this village more than he loves his life and he knows he loves Kushina and Naruto even more than that.Minato loves so much it pushes out through his pores, so much it envelops him, so much he can’t contain it inside himself, and when he walks out to meet the maelstrom of fire he’s not afraid.

So to fulfill my promise of providing an insider’s guide to my currently college-addled brain, I’ll give you the low-down on Life of Brinn, as told by Fandom, verbatim. Since my current and arguably most passionate love affair is with the Naruto ‘verse right now, let’s begin there. As it turns out, a really amazing way to get into the heads of your characters is to literally try to write from inside their headspace – if that headspace happens to involve classic rock and copious amounts of alcohol, well, I am just a vessel to totally awesome muses. Now it’s probably misleading to wax poetic about my love for Naruto, since – as I’m sure many people have discovered with their favorite fandoms – it’s not exactly the manga or the show I enjoy so much as it is the world itself and the characters the dwell therein. And yet again, it’s not so much the characters as they are written, but rather the characters as you choose to interpret them – since in a way, you only ever love the backstories you create in your own head without even noticing and you only ever love the characters as you see them. There’s nothing wrong with that. In my opinion, the beauty of fandom – any fandom – is the way in which it belongs to the fans first.

There’s no better example of this than RPGs. Role-playing presents a unique opportunity for fans to literally become the characters they love so much, for whatever reason, and you’d be amazed at how that forces you as a writer to think about the motivations behind your character’s actions. This delicacy of “why the hell would they do that?” is what makes IC such a bitch and so super ultra mega deluxe important. It allows you to, as one of my profs once said, show and not tell. Let your fingers do the walkin’, baby. (Okay, okay, a poorly connected pop culture reference, fucking sue me.)

Anyways, what I have been building up to is that through a series of serendipitous events including ff.net’s Tea Leaf, one of my many, many, and therefore contradictory OTPs is Kakashi/Rin. (For those of you who just went scrabbling for the Wiki entry, let me save you the trouble.) It’s true that this is a rather obscure pairing, as Rin is a rather obscure character, but once I actually began thinking about how these two characters would interact, the more my blatant and admitted crack habit came back to growling, shrieking life, demanding tribute and first borns and the local virgins. It’s interesting for me to think of Kakashi with somebody soft, as most of his more popular pairings involves characters that are strong, loud, and opinionated (read: Iruka, Sakura, Genma, in that order). Half the entertainment of those pairings is watching how their righteous fury rolls off Kakashi like water off a particularly infuriating duck’s back. How would that dynamic change with someone who didn’t pick fights to begin with? Who would feel inclined to defer to Kakashi naturally? Or, more importantly, how would Kakashi behave with someone who actually knows him? We all know that we’re suckers for the impenetrable, sleepy-eyed gaze with nothing but a long trail of fog and blood to give away their motivation – really, we wouldn’t want to see what’s along the path of that particular trail. Kakashi likes it that way, and he keeps it that way. So how would he interact, then, with someone who couldn’t help but know all his dirty secrets, all his childhood heartbreak, and all his awkward teenage growth spurts?

I totally wanted to answer all those questions, but instead I started writing this. Oh well.
Rin falls out of love with him on a Friday. It’s probably before that, but it’s on a Friday that he notices. Somewhere along the convoluted path of his life he’s picked up a people watching habit, and sometimes he just follows a randomly selected stranger all around Konoha, lithely hopping from rooftop to rooftop, following them home like some sort of demented puppy, curiously spying (observation reconnaissance training, if anyone asks) in through windows, like soft yellow squares on a quilt. On the Friday he realizes that Rin’s left him behind, he follows her, for no real reason besides the fact that she’s there and looking sort of secretive, which intrigues him slightly because as a rule Rin doesn’t do secrets (Rin is a medic for a reason, after all, she’s not cut out for being ANBU and impassive and creepy, all of which he’s excellent at, being a genius and all).

So he darts over and under clotheslines, dodges flower pots, ducks around chimneys for no better reason than he’s mildly curious and that now Rin’s doing that thing with her hands, wringing them, picking at her nails, biting her cuticles, which has always been her tell, and now he’s almost interested when she goes to the very edge of town and walks under a tree.

It’s tricky, but he manages to fling himself into the upper branches soundlessly, and peer down through the rustling green bits of paper and velvet to where Rin and Genma are sitting, Rin with her knees pulled up to her chest, mauling her fingers, Genma relaxed and sprawled and hiding his sweaty palms in the grass.

Kakashi is slightly confused now, because while he comprehends what’s going on, he doesn’t get what’s going on, doesn’t really understand why Genma of all people, since he is distinctly un-Kakashi-like and he doesn’t think he’s being unreasonable by assuming that Kakashi-like is pretty much Rin’s type. But he’s clearly failed to collect all the data because Genma smiles slow and then crawls over to her on hands and knees and even though Rin curls in on herself, she doesn’t draw away. She leans in just a bit, tilts her head just a little, almost like she’s done this sort of thing before – this kissing thing, this skin and hands and hummingbird heartbeats thing. But then her hair hides their faces and he has to climb down a few branches to get a better view – Kakshi is nothing if not thorough in his observations.

He has to crane his neck at an uncomfortable angle when Rin’s back hits the grass, and he’s having trouble seeing her face past Genma’s hair, but when Genma trails his mouth down her neck, he can see her clearly, eyes closed, biting her lower lip, cheeks flushed and hair a tousled fan around her.

The branch he’s on makes a creaking noise then, and her honey-brown snap open, Genma starts and looks up, too, and even though they can’t see him, he realizes he’s about to lose his battle with gravity anyway, and heads home, putting his ANBU quiet to good use.

Mostly, he’s just…quizzical. It’s not that he’s upset with Rin or with Genma, it’s just that he never really thought she’d get tired of him. He supposes he’s a little surprised Genma had the balls to ask her out, though, just because Rin has always been associated with menacing and/or overprotective males – first as the student of the Yellow Flash, then as Obito’s girlfriend in a “so-not-why-don’t-you-shut-your-face-Hatake” kind of way, then as the best (and only…? Probably….) friend of Hatake Kakashi.

But, now that he’s thinking about it, getting into Genma’s mindset – he hasn’t really been seen anywhere near Rin for…months now, hasn’t talked to her in weeks, hasn’t made eyes contact for a, oh, maybe a year or two. He supposes that’s long enough for association with him to fade. So apparently Rin is fair game in the mind of the teenage shinobi now. Alright, well, that’s fine with him, it’s not like he has any claim on her or anything, no stamp that says ’Property of Kakashi’ anywhere. He forgets it after a while.

Rin and Genma don’t become an item, and sometimes he sees her walking through town with Gai or Asuma, talking with Raido in Ichiraku, and he marks it down, but nothing more than the cursory acknowledgment of the event. She’s never anywhere with anyone for too long, though, nothing worth mentioning as outstanding in his figurative report.

One night he bumps into her quite literally and quite by accident while walking home, his nose buried in a book, and hers red and blotchy like the rest of her face from tears she’s completely failing to hide (as usual – some things about Rin will never change). He pretends not to notice her face just like he pretends not to notice her abused and bleeding fingertips, because he knows that’s what he’s supposed to do even if it’s not necessarily what she wants per say, and after they exchange ‘hello’s and ‘goodbye’s, he tracks down Asuma (because he has some details for a mission report to confirm anyway) and he mentions it, wonders if Asuma maybe knows anything since he and Rin talk sometimes (he knows this just offhand, it’s not like he eavesdropped that one time at the Korean BBQ place, not like it was their own fault for being so obvious about it anyway). Asuma is tight-lipped behind that beard he’s been attempting to grow out for months, explains in clipped, gravely tones that Kurenai may have said some things to Rin and that he is officially over that catty chick if the best thing she can think to do with her time is to pick on someone like Rin who’s sensitive and doesn’t know how to play games like that Yuuhi brat. Kakashi walks home and knows that Kurenai called Rin a slut.

He’s strolling by Kurenai’s place later that night (because he’s on his way to the all-night grocery store), and when he stops by her window he sees her in a chair in her living room, sobbing and holding what seriously resembles that shirt of Asuma’s that went missing a while back. He decides to skip the grocery store and walks home, hands shoved deep in his pockets and his eye twinging from the dust he’s kicked up on the old street.

He misses Rin’s birthday. He’s on a mission that week, but even if he were home he’d have forgotten. He doesn’t get birthdays, doesn’t see the point. So you were born once, big deal. So was the rest of humanity. Throw a party, why don’t you.

But when he comes home, and swings by Rin’s place (it’s on his way) he sees flowers on her windowsill with small cards nestled in their leaves, and he feels oddly defensive – he would’ve gotten her flowers if he’d been there. Excuse him for protecting the village from slow, kunai-riddled death.

He spends a week pointedly ignoring the Yamanka flower shop, which he’s sure purposefully located itself directly on his way to ANBU headquarters just to irritate him. On the eighth day, he sees Genma chatting up the ramen girl at Ichiraku and for some reason he turns on his heel, and strolls into the flower shop like he owns the place. Inoichi is apparently amused by this, which Kakashi ignores because he’s a prodigy, after all, and above such things.

He breaks into her apartment and leaves the sunflowers on her kitchen table and hopes she understands.

Two months or so later he’s in the hospital – some medical bruhaha about blood loss and a punctured lung – and he’s squinting at the antiseptic white lights on the ceiling when they’re blissfully blocked out, easing Obito’s eye into peaceful slumber. He looks up with his good eye and sees a pair the color of honey dripped on chocolate peering down at him and Rin tells him it’s going to be just fine, she’ll take care of him. He’s almost sure there’s some irony in there, but he’s too fuzzy to fully appreciate it right now. Then her warm chakra slips into his bloodstream and he feels…naked. Exposed. Like they’ve pulled off his mask and he’s just noticing now. Rin’s inside of him, touching every last one of his cells, and he doesn’t even know what he sees then, but it’s not her face and it’s not the ceiling, and then it’s nothing at all. He’s passing out, drowning in the feel of her against his veins. When he wakes up, he’s alone, and he sneaks out of the Intensive Care Unit before Rin can show up, and before she can…not show up.

He starts to think he goes a little crazy, but that maybe it doesn’t matter. Sometimes he hears voices, or thinks he does. He likes to think they’re Obito’s or Sensei’s or even his father’s, but really, he can’t be sure. He wants to tell someone these things. It’s not so much that he wants to be assured of his sanity so much as he wants someone else to know, wants to be able to talk about this with someone. He doesn’t like Asuma all that much, he doesn’t like Genma at all, Kurenai is out of the question, and Gai is insane – not the way Kakashi might be insane, but just completely, naturally, off-the-wall bonkers. He could, in theory, tell Rin, but that’s not an option, so he starts talking to Obito instead. Not the Obito-esque voice bouncing between his ears, but to the idea of Obito, the Obito he still sees in his head with his good eye (his own eye, anyway), the Obito he sees when he goes to the memorial marker. Obito is a lot easier to talk to now that he’s dead and this time Kakashi doesn’t miss the irony.

A work in progress, with more to come.

But for those of you who, like my sixth grade self wondering why the hell I kept failing math, are visual learners observe Figure 10-1 aka the “I’d hit that, possible contagious diseases or not” diagram. Ahem.

If either of the above appeals to you, please read on for a snippet of the soon-to-be-posted.

*

She says things that he doesn’t really listen to in her calm yet earnest doctor voice, but he catches things like “guinea pig” and “blocked chakra flow” and “just a hunch but” and “chakra vessels” and “possible side effects” but the only thing he really needs to hear is the part where she says “the worst that would happen is you just wouldn’t get any better.”

He tells her to just do whatever the hell she wants to his body, and while he leaves off the “everyone else does,” it hangs in the air above their heads and he’s certain she can hear it, can see it in the way he leans back and assumes the position, arms at his sides, all anatomically correct. She looks at him with very green eyes and very pink hair and she doesn’t tell him to “just relax” for which he’s unreasonably grateful.

She slides one hand underneath his shirt to rest at the bowl of his chest and the other over his navel, and his lean to the point of looking slightly emaciated stomach muscles give a little jerk because her hands are actually kind of cold. She murmurs a “sorry,” but it’s mumbled and her eyes are closed and she’s already a world away.

*

One particular tryst who had a way with words that Hayate always liked had said he reminded them of the wind rustling through dead rushes. He never asked if he was the wind or the rushes to them, just accepted what was given – metaphors, arms, body heat, and a moment’s peace. Palms against his shoulders.

He wonders what it must be like to be the giver and not the receiver, the healer and not the resigned patient. It’s been years since he’s had to wonder if he has cold hands.

*

Another person’s chakra seeping through his body is always an unfortunately intimate experience. While it almost always falls into comfortably midland categories – cool or warm depending on personality and purpose, gentle or firm, personable or stoic – it’s never felt like anything but a violation. Trifling, yes, necessary, yes, but it feels like being open-mouth kissed by someone he’s never met, and not in the fun, sake-soaked kind of way. But hers seeps through his cracks and his permafrost and his topsoil like thick water and it feels…”seduce” is probably the wrong word, but that’s what it feels like she’s doing, cajoling and teasing his body into doing what she wants.

For the first time in…for the first time he feels explored rather than invaded. Like he’s a cavern and not a cliff face.

*

In the meantime, feel free to check out my latest drabble and first Naruto oneshot on my ff.net account. Naruto wooed me quickly, unexpectedly, and without the frills. It didn’t romance me so much as engage me in a Beatrice and Benedic-style catfight of denied sexual attraction and then throw me up against a wall. Once again, I can blame Cartoon Network for turning me into a shameless (albeit slightly closeted) anime whore and making me hang my head that much lower every time I go to church. IT WAS EASTER SUNDAY TODAY, FOLKS. JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD JUST TO SHAKE HIS HEAD AT ME IN DISSAPOINTMENT FOR ALL THIS LITERARY PREMARITAL SEX AND GROPING. Catholic school, you have ruined me for everything.