Here's where I'm putting a collection of miscellaneous Naruto shorts I've written for various LJ communities. I'm posting them in the order I wrote them, because there's really no common thread tying them together aside from the fact that they're all Naruto-based and most of them are KakaIru-centric.

--ChibiRisu-chan

KakaIru Themes: #3 - Memories
October 2004

So I thought somebody ought to start the ball rolling on the KakaIru themes that got posted on LJ, and one of them kinda overlapped with my sewing spree. I was trying to deal with a full bolt of muslin today, and flashing back on life as an undergrad in the theater department combined with life with the Viking reenactors who were in Braveheart, and it occurred to me that if I wanted to be strictly authentic with the chuunin costumes I've made, then I shouldn't hem the leg wrappings, and also why I shouldn't hem them. But since these are costumes they're nice and hemmed and frayproof! But I had to write this down and get it out of my head and be able to say I'd actually gotten started on the themes thing...

Theme 3: Memories

When he was a child, Iruka had never understood why his mother had always looked away when he offered to help with certain chores. She'd been more than patient with his attempts at 'helping' her cook, and always managed to eat some of it even if it turned out charred or hard as a brick. He didn't much like cleaning, but sometimes he offered to help anyway, particularly if the weather was bad and the alternative was (shudder) reading something; she'd smiled and rumpled his hair and always gave him a dustcloth, and he remembered being ecstatic the first time he was judged old enough and tall enough to manage the broomstick by himself, and then the rake for the falling leaves that same autumn.

Leaves were trickier than dust bunnies; they scattered and danced away, and the trees kept making more of them, which Iruka considered unforgivably rude behavior in the face of his best efforts. But when he was worn out and the yard was as clean as it could get despite the trees' vengeful spitting of occasional stragglers onto the exhaustively-raked yard, his mother met him at the door with two mugs of hot cider in her hands, and they sat on the porch and watched the sun slip away for the evening, and Iruka had felt terribly grown up for an eight-year-old.

Laundry, though... for some reason, laundry was a touchy subject with his mother. He liked splashing in the bubbles, even though he was far too short to reach the laundry-lines for drying, so his mother left a few shirts for him to 'help' with as she hung the rest of the laundry to dry. And she was patient with his attempts at sewing on buttons, and kissed his finger when he poked himself and cried, and didn't even scold him too much whenever he came home head to toe mud after an afternoon of playing ninja with his academy-mates. But sometimes her eyes would go strange and tight as she washed and hung the laundry, and Iruka never quite found the courage to ask why.

Iruka learned to dread the bandages-day by himself, even before he had his own reasons to hate the task, because one particular day each fall, his mother's face was always pale and grim and tired, the day when she came home from the market with a bolt of fabric, white like a shroud. Iruka didn't know why she hated bandages-day so much; he offered to help, and she shook her head and chased him into the yard to play, or to rake leaves, or to do anything but stand there watching her. So Iruka went and climbed a tree, and masked himself as well as he could with a young genin's barely-learned skills, and watched anyway as she tore and folded the bandages.

By the time he was a teenager, he understood why his mother had hated bandages-day.

His own nightmare had begun on Naruto's birthday. Dragged shouting from the field his parents would never return from, some harried medic had set the boy to making bandages to keep his hands busy with something useful while the old men and women who could no longer fight tended to the wounded who were lucky enough -- or unlucky enough -- to survive.

The muslin came in stacks like cordwood, twenty-five yards to a bolt. Iruka's world had tightened into a white-draped cycle of eights and threes: eight sections, three yards apiece, the leftover yard tossed aside to be used for padding or mopping up blood or worse. Each piece was to be torn in half, then in half again, then in half again, leaving eight long strips, the ends dripping long white threads like spider-silk, tangling in everything. Then the pile was thrown into a tub of bleach, not for whitening but for sterilizing, and someone older would take the tub away when it was full, and return an empty tub for filling.

For the rest of his life, the smell of bleach, smoke, and blood intermingled was enough to make his mind shut down for a moment, and his body shake as he tried to fight back the sick flood of terror left from that night's desperate silent wager with an uncaring universe: if I can finish three more bolts before midnight, then my parents will come back... two more bolts... one more... --if I can finish three more before one... before two...

He didn't remember three a.m., but no matter how many bandages he tore, there weren't enough bandages in the world to bring his parents back to him, or to bandage the wounds in his own heart.

By the time he understood what he saw in his mother's eyes, she wasn't there for him to tell her, I'm grown up now, Mother. Now I understand, and that's what makes me grown up, in this village.

But he wished, sometimes, that he could have asked her what it was that she'd seen, just so that he'd know. Just so that she could have died knowing someone would live on who knew what it was her eyes had remembered.

That was what made the leg-wrappings the most difficult lesson to teach, every year at the Academy. Not the complex things, not the blending of hand seals and chakra for a tricky-to-balance jutsu, not even teaching children how to sharpen blades and throw kunai... no, the one that always hurt was the lesson on leg-wrappings.

Three pieces of muslin, three yards apiece, one wrapped around one thigh -- on the side of your dominant hand -- and both calves. So that you can hide shuriken in the folds of the thigh-wrapping, and so that you always have emergency bandages available. Yes, I know the threads go everywhere. No, it isn't worth sewing the edges to keep it from fraying. You won't have it around that long. You'll have to replace it fairly often.

At this point someone always poked fun at whichever child was the most likely to trip and fall in the mud -- every class had at least one child with an uncanny magnetism for dirt, it was practically a law of nature -- and the children would laugh, and Iruka wondered what any of them might see in his eyes, if they looked in that moment.

After they'd had their laugh, he would draw a ninja with a leg wrap on the blackboard and tap it with the chalk a few times to draw their attention back up front, and then when the sheepish little faces turned back towards him, he would go on.

You'll never bother sewing the edges because people will keep throwing things at your legs, and you'll bleed on them. The white makes them an ideal target. A kunai to the front of the thigh at the middle of the wrapping and you can sever muscle; hit the inside of the thigh and you cut a major artery, and they can bleed to death within minutes; hit the back of the thigh and you can sever the hamstring and cripple your enemy for life. The back of the knee is a surer strike at a hamstring, but more difficult to aim at while in motion, and they never stand still to let you figure out where the knee is -- so aim for the white of the thigh-wrap...

And even teaching at the Academy, he never bothered to hem his leg-wrappings. Because he was teaching children to play lethal mock-games with sharp objects, and there were always accidents -- and his leg-wrappings were usually cleaner than the children's after a day of romping around in the mud, so that when someone fell from a tree and broke an arm, or someone's grip on a kunai slipped and they were crying in shock at the blood, it was pure reflex to unbind the muslin around his thigh, measure it to length, tear it off with a kunai, and be bandaging the child's hurts within a few seconds of the first cry of pain. Talking seemed to reassure them that it would be all right; he turned each of the accidents into lessons in field first-aid, stopped the bleeding -- it was rare for an accident to be serious enough that he couldn't stop the bleeding himself -- and ushered the child off to the nurse's office.

It helped, a little, that he had the freedom to design the timing of his lectures as long as he covered the entire curriculum. So he quietly arranged for his classes not to be studying sharp things when the leaves were falling, and being gathered and burned. He could deal with it any other time of year, but October was just... difficult.

Every October tenth, Iruka came home with two bolts of shroud-white muslin, and spent an hour tearing and folding in silence. Kakashi had learned better than to try to make jokes; over a couple of years, he'd learned to be quiet, to be elsewhere, and to let Iruka struggle to bandage the still-open wounds of his memories one torn strip at a time.

Kakashi always managed to have a pot of hot tea done right when Iruka finished, and they drank it together in silence, as Kakashi waited for Iruka to find his voice again.

Sometimes the first thing he said afterwards was "thank you;" it wasn't for the tea. Because Kakashi knew what it was that he saw in Iruka's eyes, just as Iruka knew what certain dates and the sound of rain on metal did to the expression in Kakashi's usually-cheerful eye. Iruka supposed his parents must have felt the same type of connection when they looked at each other on days like this.

Other times, when Kakashi had come home with bloodied, mud-soaked bandages a few times too often, a little too close together, the first thing Iruka said was a bit more profane, and went on for some time, laced with outrage and worry and frustration and saying everything except the thing he tried hardest not to say, which was don't do this anymore -- one of these days you won't come home; stop doing this, because you know wherever you go I'll follow you. I can't lose you too. I can't. So stop before I have to follow you into your grave; if you love me, stop doing this...

Which was the one thing he could never ask, because it wasn't really Kakashi's choice -- not really. There were prices to be paid for being a legend in your own time, and as often as not the prices were paid in blood. Iruka understood that. So he never let himself ask.

But Kakashi, being Kakashi, heard it anyway; and he would gather Iruka into his arms and hold him quietly, until Iruka could hear the equally-silent I'm still here for you.

And then Kakashi would ruffle his hair and toss a jacket at him and tease him about which of them was making them late this time around and Naruto would have eaten Ichiraku out of ramen by the time they got there for his birthday dinner. He usually managed to rile Iruka into a full-blown howl of outrage somewhere along the road to Ichiraku -- this year it came from speculations about whether Naruto was old enough to appreciate Icha Icha Violence even if Icha Icha Paradise was banned for a couple more years.

Iruka never admitted aloud how much it helped to have a good fit of righteous outrage induced, because if he was scolding Kakashi within an inch of his life, then he was here, and now, and the smell of burning leaves in the autumn air didn't seem quite so unbearable, and then there was always the smell of ramen to help mask it, and Naruto's enthusiastic chatter too. And it helped to have a sunny-haired bundle of energy sitting beside him slurping loudly on noodles and reminding him that a great deal of the joy in his life had also come from this day. It made it easier to smile without any shadows in his eyes when he wished Naruto a happy birthday.

Naruto didn't need to ask the name of the pain of memory that he sometimes saw in Iruka's eyes, either; and Iruka wished he knew how to apologize for that. Because Naruto didn't yet have his own bandages-day -- there was no particular mundane event that reminded him with a stab of agony of a particular someone precious that he'd lost, because the boy had lost everything before he was even old enough to understand loss. And Iruka silently hoped that it would be years before a new loss made him an adult in Konohagakure -- years before those bright sky-blue eyes came to be clouded with the pain that he saw in Kakashi's eyes sometimes, or in the mirror.

Naruto was getting old enough to be a little embarrassed by a sudden bear hug from his teacher, but he was also getting old enough to understand why Iruka sometimes got emotional about things like birthdays and the passage of time. So when Kakashi started loudly protesting about adultery and teacher-student affairs and challenges for slighted honor and such -- with the visible eye far too amused at the opportunity for all-around embarrassment presented, of course -- Naruto just stuck out his tongue at him and kept eating.

Kakashi stood up and started in on some kind of incoherently overdramatic lecture with lines that must have been snagged from years of being harangued by his eternal rival, and apparently he was judging the success of his speech by how far Iruka's head had tucked itself down into the collar of his chuunin vest in pure humiliation.

However, this tactic left Kakashi's bowl of ramen undefended on the bar. Naruto promptly snagged it and started slurping away.

Iruka buried his face in his hands so as not to need to watch the beating-of-heads-against-wooden-structures that was about to commence... and also because it really wouldn't be polite to the Ichiraku staff to be seen smiling at the prospect of massive structural damage to their establishment. But in their own unique ways, both of his 'boys' helped anchor him to the here and the now, more than a decade away from the night his world had fallen apart and he'd been left to pick up the pieces alone.

Now, he felt almost confident that he'd never have to pick up the pieces alone again. And the fear wasn't enough to stop him cold anymore, because there was the warmth of their exuberant living to warm his hands with.

...Of course, right now there were far too many pieces that needed picking up, most of them belonging to the poor ramen-seller. But bowls could be replaced. The sound of Naruto's laughter, even while Kakashi had him in a headlock and was scruffling knuckles through his hair, was a gift beyond any price. Quietly, Iruka bound that sound up along with the memory of muslin tearing in his hands, and then he took a deep breath to start the scolding again. He hoped he wasn't smiling too much, or they'd never take him seriously.