Oh, Dear God, There Are A Lot of These
I'm still taking and filling requests for the tiny-fic prompts, but here are those I've finished now in the process of stress relief.
Tenten's voice rose high and wavering, and Neji's joined it, steady and low. After a minute or so, Lee joined them with a somber note balanced in between, his fingers digging into their shoulders as they closed ranks. Naruto added in his own voice, then Sakura, then others, flowers and melody spilling together to be tossed in with the dirt.
If Guy could have seen them standing there with their straight backs and strong voices, Kakashi knew, his own throat clenched shut, he would have been proud.
---
"What do you mean they don't have tea?" asked Touya, voice burning like dry ice.
"Touya, this is a Starbucks," Hikaru said, pleading.
"Fine," Touya said. "FINE. But from now on, I'm picking where we go."
Hikaru hung his head. It was going to be traditional food and a distinct lack of McDonalds for years to come.
---
Lee's hand had slipped--that much was obvious by his flushed face and mortified expression. Tenten knew he was too much of a polite dweeb to ever try groping her on purpose. That did not, however, explain why once his hand was there and he'd already started his apologies, he not only failed to move it, but gently squeezed.
Then again, he wasn't that much of a dweeb, and, pushing him to the ground, Tenten didn't object too strongly. She could always kill him after.
---
"Just a sip," Temari'd said, perched like a mother hawk above Kankurou. Their father had ignored her and handed the entire cup to Kankurou, who clapped his chubby hands with glee and drained it down, then offered it up wordlessly for more.
That moment was what Temari remembered back to, years later, as Kankurou's first baby steps toward alcoholism. The half-empty bottle clutched in his hands as he waved his arms and spoke in a rushed, unhappy slur, was another. It would stop here.
"I don't care what you walked in on Gaara doing to whom, you will give me that damn bottle."
---
"You keep your damn fleas away from my Akamaru!"
"If you'll keep your mutt away from me," Shino replied coolly.
"Um, um, maybe you shouldn't," Hinata hesitantly took a step forward, then moved back again, twisting her hands worriedly together.
Kurenai stared at them and thought, this is what I have to turn into proper shinobi?
---
The first time he scraped his arm After, two hours into training, he stared at the dirt and dripping blood until it congealed, letting himself feel the pain and wishing desperately for his mother to come and kiss it better, for his father's watchful eyes to give him the strength to stand and carry on, for--and then he stood, because there were some things he couldn't wish for anymore.
Years later, when he skidded along the ground for twenty feet and scraped wrist to elbow, he didn't feel the pain at all. His resolve carried him up and he turned back to Naruto, smirked a little, and attacked again.
---
But what does it do?" she asked.
"It's a spare," her father explained. "See, if this gets broken, I can simply replace it with that. Understand?"
"Yes," Yotsuba replied.
When he came back later to find the original keyboard smashed and the new one in its place, he didn't really look surprised.
---
Initially, Kakashi wouldn't have called his old team a precursor, really, to his genin team now. Sasuke is less like Obito than himself, and Naruto is nothing like Kakashi as a child. If you switched them, they might fit, barely, into their assigned roles, but Sakura's pink hair and initially sweet demeanor would have clashed horribly with Rin's rough and tumble ways.
Only years later, when they're not his team at all, can Kakashi match them up. Sasuke's obsession with family, his drive and genius--perhaps Kakashi's fate if he hadn't had a better teacher to show him another path, because Naruto, Obito, wouldn't have been enough.
Naruto's obsession with friends above all else, and Kakashi didn't doubt now that Naruto would have given an eye or his life if that's what it would have taken.
Even Sakura, her cool competence as a med-nin and her fiery anger when Naruto riled her up, reminded him so much of Rin it was almost unsettling, such that he spent more and more time at the memorial stone, aware of his failures and parallels, and wishing that this generation did something drastically different.
"You," he told it. "Why couldn't she have chosen you, Obito?"
---
They live very far apart and they don't know one another very well. Temari vaguely remembers Tenten as the girl she easily overcame in the chuunin exams, and Tenten tends to think of her as Shikamaru's on-again/off-again girlfriend.
But the summer night is warm and the scent of honeysuckle and sake strong, and Shikamaru and Temari are at an off point. It doesn't matter so much if she stretches out a hand and touches Tenten's soft skin and hair (and are all Konoha people so soft, living in such a lush place outside the desert sun?), slips her fingers up Tenten's shirt.
When Tenten grins and pulls Temari forward into a lazy kiss, lips and tongue tasting of rice wine and raspberries, Temari smiles back. In this, at least, there are no worries about tomorrow, her return, or even the light of morning. There is only the night and their skin sliding together in the dark.
---
Nature's first green is gold
Tenten smiled, gentle, bitter, like she'd bitten into a underripe peach. "Remember when we were that young?" she asked Neji, watching the genin at play and leaning into his shoulder in an unusual display of affection. He allowed it, shifted to take her weight.
He thought of Lee's too bright smile and hundreds of challenges issued, the way he never gave up for anything, even inspired Neji to keep training on long past he was exhausted and had so little chakra left he was left swaying on his feet in the end and barely able to walk back to the Hyuuga compound. He remembered how Lee had shone when he'd pulled open the eighth gate, burning bright in that instant like a star gone supernova.
"No," Neji said, words like weights dropping from his mouth as he curled a hand around her shoulder. "I don't."
---
The first time, Rodney was five and had been given a lemon drop by the baby-sitter as a bribe to be good, stay quiet, and stop asking "why" so much. His parents threw her out of the emergency room when they arrived, and he never saw her again.
When he was twenty, the server had forgotten and he hadn't stressed the importance of "deathly allergic" enough, apparently, because the moron had simply fished it out and it was too late when his throat started to clench and he couldn't get his epi-pen out of his briefcase, at which point someone with at least a speck of intelligence and allergies of their own had stabbed him with their own epi-pen. The police wouldn't let him press charges of "attempted murder by lemon," but at least the restaurant had the good sense to fire the guy.
Rodney has explained again and again and again just how important it is, how until the Pegasus Galaxy five out of seven of his near-death experiences involved citrus, so it takes him several moments, after the initial fear dies down, to realize that it was Sheppard who'd given Cam the damn thing, and then it takes him days to really calm down. Hacking into all of Sheppard's files and changing his name to "Asshole" and "Fuckface" helps.
---
"What did you just say?" It was less a question than an exclamation, but Kakashi was unfazed.
"I'm fucking Guy, and you really need to leave so I can get back to that."
Guy had not removed his hands from his face, but what was visible of it was the color of overripe cherries. "This was not what I meant when I said I wished you'd be more open with people about our relationship," he said.
Genma, however, failed to hear this, as he was already out the door.
---
"AND SO IN CONCLUSION, G-U-Y. GUY. G-A-Y. GAY. THESE ARE NOT THE SAME. ANY QUESTIONS?" Naruto's terrified genin team huddled before Guy-sensei. This was not the lecture they were expecting when they'd defaced his house, inspired by one of Naruto-sensei's offhand comments and gone terribly, terribly wrong.
One timidly raised her hand and pointed at where Kakashi-sensei somehow managed to lounge--LOUNGE--out of the window, and had a hand up of his own.
"I, Kakashi, I didn't see you there!"
Despite the mask, his smirk was obvious. "So if you're not gay, Guy, then what was last night about?"
The students took the impending fight as an opportunity to flee.
---
Her name was Candy, and her eyes were limpid red pools the color of cherries, and her lips, and her hair, and her rosy cheeks, and she sparkled like a just-licked sucker in the sun. "Oh, Gaara!" she said. "I, too, have one of the Tails in me, and my parents abandoned me as a child, and I have a special, magic power jutsu, too, the jutsu of LOVE. Come with me, and I can heal your wounded heart and sou--"
"Desert coffin," said Gaara, clenching both fists together and watching without satisfaction as she disappeared beneath the sand.
"But, but why?" asked Lee.
Gaara took Lee's wrist and led him calmly away. "She had to die."
And somehow, deep inside, even Lee knew this to be true.
---
Gaara was five when he decided to be a ballerina. "Twirl!" he demanded. Kankurou did so, wondering what it would take to kill the little fucker and not die himself.
When Gaara moved on to mass murder again, Kankurou was never quite so relieved.
---
"Uh, and so that's what 'faggot' means, though I really wish you wouldn't use that word ever, ever again." Naruto's face was squinched up in a way that was probably meant to impress upon Sai how seriously he was taking this conversation, but really only served to make Sai wonder if there was not some bit of amphibian ancestry Naruto's family tree. For someone who was supposed to have fox qualities, Naruto was one of the least sleek and graceful people Sai knew.
"Yes," Sai calmly replied. "But that still doesn't explain why people keep calling you that."
---
Kiba might keep complaining about how the number of "freaky smart" fleas had increased since Shino had started visiting the Inuzuka family's compound, but Shino had worse to deal with.
For one, there was the constant smell of wet dogs that seemed to hang about the air, and clung to Kiba's skin even when he bothered to visit Shino for once. For another, even when all they did was sleep, Shino's troubles increased because Kiba couldn't imagine sleeping alone, never mind that Shino's presence indicated by the very meaning of the word that Kiba was not, in fact along, and so he had to share his bed with not just Kiba and his tendency for stealing all the blankets, but also with Akamaru's large bulk and tendency to be a overly friendly in the night and overenthusiastic in waking them for his morning walk. Dog spit was not what Shino considered a proper prelude to the regular morning ablutions.
And worst of all, Shino had to interact with those freakishly intelligent fleas, who tended to follow him home in the mornings, even after threatening them with his own hive, as sad and puppyish and unable to not take refusal personally as Kiba became on the few nights Shino refused to visit or let him come over.
---
It was meant to be a prank, really, taking all of Guy's clothing. Somehow, though, it had all gone horribly wrong. At some point, puberty had hit, and Guy had filled out his once scrawny frame with muscle, his fish-pale skin had darkened into a bronzed tan, and he'd grown into his freaky eyelashes such that they brought out the ocean blue of his eyes, and Kakashi couldn't get away fast enough, quite literally, because Guy had dropped the weights and at some point he'd become faster than Kakashi. Guy's hands closed around his shoulders, drawing him close to Guy's entirely-too-naked body.
It was at this point that Kakashi pulled out the sharingan.
---
Not that Shizune usually complained about her role in Tsunade's life now that she was Hokage, but Shizune was getting really tired of using sex as a bribe to get the paperwork done.
Tenten's voice rose high and wavering, and Neji's joined it, steady and low. After a minute or so, Lee joined them with a somber note balanced in between, his fingers digging into their shoulders as they closed ranks. Naruto added in his own voice, then Sakura, then others, flowers and melody spilling together to be tossed in with the dirt.
If Guy could have seen them standing there with their straight backs and strong voices, Kakashi knew, his own throat clenched shut, he would have been proud.
---
"What do you mean they don't have tea?" asked Touya, voice burning like dry ice.
"Touya, this is a Starbucks," Hikaru said, pleading.
"Fine," Touya said. "FINE. But from now on, I'm picking where we go."
Hikaru hung his head. It was going to be traditional food and a distinct lack of McDonalds for years to come.
---
Lee's hand had slipped--that much was obvious by his flushed face and mortified expression. Tenten knew he was too much of a polite dweeb to ever try groping her on purpose. That did not, however, explain why once his hand was there and he'd already started his apologies, he not only failed to move it, but gently squeezed.
Then again, he wasn't that much of a dweeb, and, pushing him to the ground, Tenten didn't object too strongly. She could always kill him after.
---
"Just a sip," Temari'd said, perched like a mother hawk above Kankurou. Their father had ignored her and handed the entire cup to Kankurou, who clapped his chubby hands with glee and drained it down, then offered it up wordlessly for more.
That moment was what Temari remembered back to, years later, as Kankurou's first baby steps toward alcoholism. The half-empty bottle clutched in his hands as he waved his arms and spoke in a rushed, unhappy slur, was another. It would stop here.
"I don't care what you walked in on Gaara doing to whom, you will give me that damn bottle."
---
"You keep your damn fleas away from my Akamaru!"
"If you'll keep your mutt away from me," Shino replied coolly.
"Um, um, maybe you shouldn't," Hinata hesitantly took a step forward, then moved back again, twisting her hands worriedly together.
Kurenai stared at them and thought, this is what I have to turn into proper shinobi?
---
The first time he scraped his arm After, two hours into training, he stared at the dirt and dripping blood until it congealed, letting himself feel the pain and wishing desperately for his mother to come and kiss it better, for his father's watchful eyes to give him the strength to stand and carry on, for--and then he stood, because there were some things he couldn't wish for anymore.
Years later, when he skidded along the ground for twenty feet and scraped wrist to elbow, he didn't feel the pain at all. His resolve carried him up and he turned back to Naruto, smirked a little, and attacked again.
---
But what does it do?" she asked.
"It's a spare," her father explained. "See, if this gets broken, I can simply replace it with that. Understand?"
"Yes," Yotsuba replied.
When he came back later to find the original keyboard smashed and the new one in its place, he didn't really look surprised.
---
Initially, Kakashi wouldn't have called his old team a precursor, really, to his genin team now. Sasuke is less like Obito than himself, and Naruto is nothing like Kakashi as a child. If you switched them, they might fit, barely, into their assigned roles, but Sakura's pink hair and initially sweet demeanor would have clashed horribly with Rin's rough and tumble ways.
Only years later, when they're not his team at all, can Kakashi match them up. Sasuke's obsession with family, his drive and genius--perhaps Kakashi's fate if he hadn't had a better teacher to show him another path, because Naruto, Obito, wouldn't have been enough.
Naruto's obsession with friends above all else, and Kakashi didn't doubt now that Naruto would have given an eye or his life if that's what it would have taken.
Even Sakura, her cool competence as a med-nin and her fiery anger when Naruto riled her up, reminded him so much of Rin it was almost unsettling, such that he spent more and more time at the memorial stone, aware of his failures and parallels, and wishing that this generation did something drastically different.
"You," he told it. "Why couldn't she have chosen you, Obito?"
---
They live very far apart and they don't know one another very well. Temari vaguely remembers Tenten as the girl she easily overcame in the chuunin exams, and Tenten tends to think of her as Shikamaru's on-again/off-again girlfriend.
But the summer night is warm and the scent of honeysuckle and sake strong, and Shikamaru and Temari are at an off point. It doesn't matter so much if she stretches out a hand and touches Tenten's soft skin and hair (and are all Konoha people so soft, living in such a lush place outside the desert sun?), slips her fingers up Tenten's shirt.
When Tenten grins and pulls Temari forward into a lazy kiss, lips and tongue tasting of rice wine and raspberries, Temari smiles back. In this, at least, there are no worries about tomorrow, her return, or even the light of morning. There is only the night and their skin sliding together in the dark.
---
Nature's first green is gold
Tenten smiled, gentle, bitter, like she'd bitten into a underripe peach. "Remember when we were that young?" she asked Neji, watching the genin at play and leaning into his shoulder in an unusual display of affection. He allowed it, shifted to take her weight.
He thought of Lee's too bright smile and hundreds of challenges issued, the way he never gave up for anything, even inspired Neji to keep training on long past he was exhausted and had so little chakra left he was left swaying on his feet in the end and barely able to walk back to the Hyuuga compound. He remembered how Lee had shone when he'd pulled open the eighth gate, burning bright in that instant like a star gone supernova.
"No," Neji said, words like weights dropping from his mouth as he curled a hand around her shoulder. "I don't."
---
The first time, Rodney was five and had been given a lemon drop by the baby-sitter as a bribe to be good, stay quiet, and stop asking "why" so much. His parents threw her out of the emergency room when they arrived, and he never saw her again.
When he was twenty, the server had forgotten and he hadn't stressed the importance of "deathly allergic" enough, apparently, because the moron had simply fished it out and it was too late when his throat started to clench and he couldn't get his epi-pen out of his briefcase, at which point someone with at least a speck of intelligence and allergies of their own had stabbed him with their own epi-pen. The police wouldn't let him press charges of "attempted murder by lemon," but at least the restaurant had the good sense to fire the guy.
Rodney has explained again and again and again just how important it is, how until the Pegasus Galaxy five out of seven of his near-death experiences involved citrus, so it takes him several moments, after the initial fear dies down, to realize that it was Sheppard who'd given Cam the damn thing, and then it takes him days to really calm down. Hacking into all of Sheppard's files and changing his name to "Asshole" and "Fuckface" helps.
---
"What did you just say?" It was less a question than an exclamation, but Kakashi was unfazed.
"I'm fucking Guy, and you really need to leave so I can get back to that."
Guy had not removed his hands from his face, but what was visible of it was the color of overripe cherries. "This was not what I meant when I said I wished you'd be more open with people about our relationship," he said.
Genma, however, failed to hear this, as he was already out the door.
---
"AND SO IN CONCLUSION, G-U-Y. GUY. G-A-Y. GAY. THESE ARE NOT THE SAME. ANY QUESTIONS?" Naruto's terrified genin team huddled before Guy-sensei. This was not the lecture they were expecting when they'd defaced his house, inspired by one of Naruto-sensei's offhand comments and gone terribly, terribly wrong.
One timidly raised her hand and pointed at where Kakashi-sensei somehow managed to lounge--LOUNGE--out of the window, and had a hand up of his own.
"I, Kakashi, I didn't see you there!"
Despite the mask, his smirk was obvious. "So if you're not gay, Guy, then what was last night about?"
The students took the impending fight as an opportunity to flee.
---
Her name was Candy, and her eyes were limpid red pools the color of cherries, and her lips, and her hair, and her rosy cheeks, and she sparkled like a just-licked sucker in the sun. "Oh, Gaara!" she said. "I, too, have one of the Tails in me, and my parents abandoned me as a child, and I have a special, magic power jutsu, too, the jutsu of LOVE. Come with me, and I can heal your wounded heart and sou--"
"Desert coffin," said Gaara, clenching both fists together and watching without satisfaction as she disappeared beneath the sand.
"But, but why?" asked Lee.
Gaara took Lee's wrist and led him calmly away. "She had to die."
And somehow, deep inside, even Lee knew this to be true.
---
Gaara was five when he decided to be a ballerina. "Twirl!" he demanded. Kankurou did so, wondering what it would take to kill the little fucker and not die himself.
When Gaara moved on to mass murder again, Kankurou was never quite so relieved.
---
"Uh, and so that's what 'faggot' means, though I really wish you wouldn't use that word ever, ever again." Naruto's face was squinched up in a way that was probably meant to impress upon Sai how seriously he was taking this conversation, but really only served to make Sai wonder if there was not some bit of amphibian ancestry Naruto's family tree. For someone who was supposed to have fox qualities, Naruto was one of the least sleek and graceful people Sai knew.
"Yes," Sai calmly replied. "But that still doesn't explain why people keep calling you that."
---
Kiba might keep complaining about how the number of "freaky smart" fleas had increased since Shino had started visiting the Inuzuka family's compound, but Shino had worse to deal with.
For one, there was the constant smell of wet dogs that seemed to hang about the air, and clung to Kiba's skin even when he bothered to visit Shino for once. For another, even when all they did was sleep, Shino's troubles increased because Kiba couldn't imagine sleeping alone, never mind that Shino's presence indicated by the very meaning of the word that Kiba was not, in fact along, and so he had to share his bed with not just Kiba and his tendency for stealing all the blankets, but also with Akamaru's large bulk and tendency to be a overly friendly in the night and overenthusiastic in waking them for his morning walk. Dog spit was not what Shino considered a proper prelude to the regular morning ablutions.
And worst of all, Shino had to interact with those freakishly intelligent fleas, who tended to follow him home in the mornings, even after threatening them with his own hive, as sad and puppyish and unable to not take refusal personally as Kiba became on the few nights Shino refused to visit or let him come over.
---
It was meant to be a prank, really, taking all of Guy's clothing. Somehow, though, it had all gone horribly wrong. At some point, puberty had hit, and Guy had filled out his once scrawny frame with muscle, his fish-pale skin had darkened into a bronzed tan, and he'd grown into his freaky eyelashes such that they brought out the ocean blue of his eyes, and Kakashi couldn't get away fast enough, quite literally, because Guy had dropped the weights and at some point he'd become faster than Kakashi. Guy's hands closed around his shoulders, drawing him close to Guy's entirely-too-naked body.
It was at this point that Kakashi pulled out the sharingan.
---
Not that Shizune usually complained about her role in Tsunade's life now that she was Hokage, but Shizune was getting really tired of using sex as a bribe to get the paperwork done.