[Naruto] I like my girls with their sunny sides up
Title: I like my girls with their sunny-sides up
Rated: pish-posh 15.
Warnings: LANGUAGE, light-hearted angst, my very own brand of magical realism. Lots and lots of food.
Pairings: InoChou+Sakura, InoShika, implied SasuNaru? (Including the whole Sasuke-comes-back-and-behaves-himself!-realm.)
Summary: Chouji learned to wax poetics in his mother's kitchen.
Note: God I haven't written untarnished het in ages. Hope I haven't lost my touch, not yet. You can hear the fucking innuendoes crying out from underground. Oh and if anyone makes a single Like Water for Chocolate reference I swear to Jashin I'll commit sweet delicious crime. No sex-on-horseback for me, no sir.
I like my girls with their sunny-sides up
You've gotta dice up the carrots and potatoes real fine, like you want to make a mosaic out of vegetables or something. Dice it into little pieces, small enough they'll fit inside the mouth of a baby gerbil, now leave it on the board and prepare water and broth for the stove. This is going to be a real work of art. Twist a spatula around Renaissance and Pablo Picasso, then you've got hearty soup in your cauldron-it'll feed a battalion, that's what they all say. Stimulate the tongue enough to reach an absolute threshold at the taste buds, colorize your mind to form a newly-erected post-consciousness. Heighten peripheral vision, spill sensory experiences out under the sun, caustic partial-hallucinatory at an absorption rate quicker than Ivan Pavlov ringing his bell at dogs on LSD. And where one delusion ends, culinary begins.
Homogenius starts with vegetable chicken soup.
Here is the birthplace of the proverbial flavorgasm.
Chouji learned to wax poetics in his mother's kitchen.
It was the same year he learned how to walk, and open his first bag of Yama-chan Squid Crackers.
The broth level can't be too high or too low, either, only about half of a pinky's height, and above the tallest chunk of carrot-potato. You'll want to make sure the broth isn't too thick or too thin; use your pinky to measure out and discern the different particles in the broth. Cooking is chemistry, H-2-O to O-2 to C-6-H-12-O-6. You'll want to test the water a little more. Enough to oxygenate, but not enough to flood out the flavor, the timid sweetness that carrot-potato can inspire. That's the kind of perfect you want.
Theoretically, perfect girls should all come with the perfect pinky size to measure broth level in a stew.
"And how long of a pinky would that have to be?" Shikamaru asks conversationally, holding his pinky up to the clouds. (His is a little stumpy, to be honest, but Shikamaru has Man Hands, there's no doubt about it. The manliness of Shikamaru's hand appalls him. His fingers start out thick at the bases, but somehow taper off around astonishing semi-circles that could probably generate world-class debate in geometric universal existentialism. Calluses on the pads, but every shinobi's got a handful of those. Just like how the length of your foot is proportional to the size of your dick, fingers speak volumes about your character. So Nara Shikamaru had that one down pat, too. Chouji short-circuits another spark of envy; he's been short-circuiting for quite a while, now.)
"Long enough for the soup to taste good, I guess."
"Wouldn't that be the same as measuring to taste? You can never figure out anything practically like that," Shikamaru retorts.
(He shrugs. He doesn't have any trump cards against a champion of logic.)
"…but I guess it's a good form of reassurance for an amateur cook," Shikamaru continues, "for example, the right-hand rule for magnetic fields. No one actually likes using it, but it helps cover the basics. Like that?"
"A sensible woman would never try to ruin her fingernails by sticking them in boiling broth," Ino huffs, wiggling her hand in the air like a celebrity. (Her fingernails are all manicured. Less pink than turquoise-tangerine. It's a bold shade for a fifteen-year-old girl; page twenty-four in Konoha AnAn magazine, Lady Onogoro's Felicitous Fall Nail Polish Line-Up. Yamanaka Ino is a perfect girl with the perfect pinky size.)
There's a minute of silence where Chouji frowns and both Shikamaru and Ino secretly wonder if they've said something else to offend their protein-sensitive teammate.
"Ino," Chouji finally says.
"Yes, Chouji?"
"Because of this, I'm not going to talk to you any more."
(This is priceless, all three of them think at once.)
"Oh come on," Ino whines, "I'll cook you something?"
"But Ino burns everything."
(Shikamaru's lips turn white as he bites down on them to keep from laughing.)
"Oh, I know, I'll make you that some of that stupid vegetable soup!"
Nope. Definitely not talking to Ino.
"Ignorant feminine pride," Shikamaru yawns, takes another jab at correcting the universally-accepted dictionary entry for masculinity. (Someone in Budapest sneezes; that is the end of that to the tune of the end of everything.) "Work on it, Ino, won't you?"
Ino pouts, Shikamaru digresses. Because it's the rare moments like these that bring the light back into Team 10.
And so years later, Chouji learns to enjoy Yamanaka-style cooking.
+
It was a joke, Ino tells him exasperatedly, four years seven months five days fifteen hours three bowls of vegetable-chicken soup and four shots of tequila later, I honest to fuck meant for it to be a joke, Chouji so stop taking it like it was a big cocksucking insult to your pride or something, okay? It was a joke, wasn't it, Shikamaru? Tell him it was a stupid fucking joke. Now she's crumbling bouillon cubes into the stew in lieu of Macbethian witchcraft, tipping in one earth brown consolidate of MSG after another like pieces of chewing gum into a smoker's mouth. He doesn't mind it, of course, because Ino's soup always tasted better with consolidated MSG compared to the singularity and monochromatic flavor of supermarket chicken broth, but it makes him dizzy now, when he witnesses Ino in action, especially while she's taking tequila shots along with the stew-making and spouting enough salty language to make an Inuzuka feel embarrassed.
Shikamaru pays no heed to the girl (of course), continues to formulate strategies in front of the shogi board and compose secret love notes to Yuuhi Kurenai in the Sky with Diamonds. It's been one year since her death, three since the death of Sarutobi Asuma. Tragedy can only go so far before Shikamaru figures himself out.
+
(But what's ironic is that Shikamaru is the one who ends up bringing him out from Asuma's death.
"You know what makes you smarter than anyone else in the world? It's your taste. You can always figure it out, even when nobody else can. You can read moods because you can taste the fear in people, taste their emotions. You always try to make everyone feel like they're the most special person in the world, and it's all because you want to make sure that you can taste the happiness in their hearts. Eating isn't eating until you can eat it for what it's worth. Don't cry, Chouji. I know you can taste your own sorrow, too, and it hurts, doesn't it? Listen to me. Grow stronger from it the taste. And when you do, you'll be great."
He has to smile, "Shikamaru always knows the right thing to say."
His friend shrugs. "Don't look at me. Yakiniku's on Naruto tonight.")
+
No, what's funny is that the soup doesn't taste any different from before.
+
"Marry me," Shikamaru says.
Two years old and weaned from the oatmeal and flower-bud tea grown from the Yamanaka garden, Asuma's child claps her hands. It sounds like little cymbals clashing together from a distant planet, underneath a thousand brilliant moons, suns and red roses.
Ino says yes.
(What a perfect girl, Chouji thinks.)
+
They reach for the last carton of eggs at the same time, hands and wrists bump, retract, reach forward again. If this had been a fight for the last discount pork chop, Chouji would have lost. His opponent didn't seem too interested in winning, either. Luckily, they restock the eggs every twenty minutes, but it didn't stop the urgency from showing through. Hands and wrists bump, again and again and again until they both pull back and finally look each other in the eyes. He notices her pinky finger; it looks rather worn and cramped from this angle, but a perfect pinky finger nonetheless.
"Well," the pink-haired girl finally asks, "what do you need the eggs for, then?"
He ignores the subtle amount of innuendo he hears, ploughs on without much thought, "I promised Shikamaru that I would bake his wedding cake." I promised him a long time ago, before I realized that he would marry Ino, but I promised him and a promise is certainly a promise.
She makes a small laugh. It tinkles like the wind chime his mother hangs by the back door of the kitchen, open to keep the smells circulating through the neighborhood and into everyone's homes. Rubs a hand against the back of her neck sheepishly, "I guess you win, then. I was only going to make a few fried eggs for breakfast tomorrow. Naruto wanted eggs in his ramen, but he says that Sasuke-kun keeps stealing them from his fridge to hard-boil for bento boxes. You'd think that two of Konoha's more accomplished ninjas could take care of each other under the same roof, but obviously not. I wanted to make a breakfast for them, but a Nara-Yamanaka wedding would take priority, wouldn't it?"
He laughs easily. "You'll be going too, right?"
"Oh, I suppose. Though I have no idea what I should give Ino-buta. I'm a flower kind of person, but giving flowers as a present to a Yamanaka is just kind of silly. Perfume always comes off skanky to her, and she doesn't like reading books very much…you're so lucky, all you have to do is bake a cake!"
He makes the offer before he regrets it. "You can bake it with me, if you'd like. Then we can count it as one big gift from two people."
"Really? You could do that?"
He nods. "And you can take any leftover eggs that are left for Sasuke and Naruto."
"Incredibly generous of you, Chouji," the chimes tingle. He's always been such a nice guy. Shikamaru tells him he'll be cheated of it one day, but he thinks that he probably wouldn't have cared anyway. He can taste the happiness.
And he can't help from saying, "Eggs are always best sunny-side up."
So Sakura has to smile, too, "I'll keep that in mind."
+
When you chop the onions, you should probably keep a tissue box somewhere nearby to staunch the tears. There are tears of joy, of sorrow, of nostalgia, of memories and peace, and then there are the tears that come from dismantling onions, the tears that aren't supposed to make any sense but do anyway. Chouji's mother tells him to go play in the garden when she's chopping onions; she doesn't want her son to see her cry for no reason. Chouza tells Chouji's mother that she looks beautiful when she's crying onion tears. Chouji doesn't exactly know which side he should stand on; only that he likes the smell of onions, especially when you put them into the broth to boil with the sweet carrot-potatoes. The ingredient turns the broth a pleasant creamy heliotrope; idealizes the coloring palette of the Artist, toned to hues in Femmes d'Avignon. The onions should be cut into cubes to match the vegetable chunks, and when you add them in, you'll be able to smell that concoction seven kilometers away. Kiba says that he can smell it twenty kilometers away.
But it's not really the soup that matters, but the person you make it with. It doesn't taste good, won't touch any absolute thresholds and hallucinatory-reaction absorption rates unless you can feel it for yourself. Soup is one of the most common objective correlatives in the world. Grandmother's soup, great-aunt's soup, uncle Sarutobi the soldier's soup. This must be what they mean when they call it sentimentality. (Chouji believes every word of it.)
When Haruno Sakura dips her pinky into the pot, the water comes up half-way from the tip of the tallest carrot.
A perfect Woman, nobly plann'd,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
-William Wordsworth
END.
EDITS PLZ. The original title of this fic was going to be, "Puff-Up Doll". No, srsly. I was gonna talk about cream puffs and Ino's breasts and everything. Always knew I was gonna lose it one of these days, haha. Wish me luck on my AP exams tomorrow?