I Don't Think You Understand

Part of the tangent for today is going to go up here, since a reviewer made an interesting point about the way I use the suffixes of respect. Given that we-as-English speakers have no real synonym for some of suffixes used in Japanese, we have to make do with the usual "Mr." or "Ms." thing for the suffix of "-san," as well as for the others (like saying "Lady Tsunade" instead of "Tsunade-sama"). That's what we're more or less used to seeing now.

However, the proper use of "-kun" is actually something of a matter of debate. It's true that it's mostly used for boys (ie. the highly overused "Sasuke-KUN!"), but the way I was taught and the notes I've read in the manga translation notes point to the use of "-kun" as a title to use to someone of lower (for lack of a better word) status, age, or experience also. Since Iruka can technically still be called Sakura's teacher, he calls her "Sakura-kun," because even if she's of an equivalent rank with him, he is still older and therefore, still her superior, but as he knows her personally, the use of "-kun" can be seen as affectionate. As I have said, it is a matter open for speculation, but I thank you anyway for bringing it to my attention.

As usual, I don't own Naruto, but the idea OF owning him gives me nosebleeds. Please enjoy.

***||***

Few things were as strange or ironic as the failure to communicate. Most things, which could have been solved with a few words or an appropriate gesture, remained unsettled because so few people possessed the courage needed to just back down off of an issue.

Maybe it was pig-headedness. Maybe it came from a conviction that no matter what, the other person should just come to you.

In any case, Naruto was more or less convinced that he’d never seen such a silly situation in his short life as the one that was right in front of him, looking into a window watching Sakura-chan running her hands up and down a preoccupied Iruka.

Iruka-niichan’s voice echoed in his head, their last meeting at Ichiraku (but by no means their last visit); ”Why the hell is he doing this? Why can’t he just come up and ask me what’s on his mind?!”

Shaking his head, Naruto leapt off the building he had been sitting on, getting away from the pathetic scene before him. “The same goes for you, Iruka-nii,” he muttered as he absently hopped from wall to crenelation to roof. “You could just ask him too.”

Blinking a few times, Naruto suddenly laughed. “But what’s the fun in that?” He yelled cheerfully, grinning as he headed homewards.

The way they were going about it now, though done with excruciating slowness, still didn’t fail to entertain.

***||***

“Very good, Iruka-san!” Sakura enthused as her former teacher reigned in his chakra with great precision for the third consecutive time. “I am sure Tsunade-sensei will be more than happy to pass my idea into effect if all the results are like what you’re giving me.”

Iruka nodded, panting a bit as the effort to so meticulously control his life-force suddenly caught up to him. “It was a brilliant idea on your part, Sakura-kun,” he replied when he had his breath back. “I don’t know of anyone who would have thought that academy teachers could double as medico-nin.”

“I just remembered that one of the stipulations for becoming a teacher is perfect chakra control, is all,” the young woman said with a blush. “I couldn’t have even brought it up to her if you hadn’t so graciously volunteered your time.”

Smiling warmly, Iruka hugged his former student, ignoring her embarrassed squeak at being pressed up against a bare chest. “When it comes to the advancement of my students, especially when they have such quick minds, I’ll do whatever I can,” he said warmly, releasing her with a pat on the back. Blushing a bit as he remembered that he wasn’t wearing a shirt, he quickly donned the mesh and zippered ones.

“All I have to do now is test at least two more Academy teachers, and she’ll implement my idea,” Sakura declared, jumping up and down a little in her glee. “Thank you again, Iruka-sensei!”

Replacing the vest and hitae-ate, Iruka grinned at her. “My pleasure.”

Leaving then, he did a covert scan of the area around him...and sensed nothing. Disguising his raised eyebrow with a well-timed head scratch, he switched to sensing absences of life.

Exiting Hokage Tower, he found one at four o’clock and a little up, just outside his peripheral vision. Turning away, he rolled his eyes. The man still doesn’t have a clue, does he? Well, might as well not let him know I know he’s there.

Some of his inner prankster welled up in his mind with a shout. Can’t we at least make it difficult for him?

Instead of answering that inner voice, Iruka just leapt straight up and flipped backwards, landing feet-first on the vertical wall of Hokage Tower, before bounding straight off to the building in front of it.

He detected a flare from the sphere of null-chakra before it flared into being again, but by then, he was three buildings away and accelerating, a manic smile on his face.

How long has it been since I’ve had a good run, after all? A ninja, as Gai-san would say, is always in training.

***||***

Roof, wall, ground, dashdashdash, leap, stick with chakra, sense. Repeat.

Nothing.

Same thing, in another direction.

Still nothing.

If Kakashi hadn’t been so concerned about the people below him staring at him as if he was crazier than they already thought, he would have started cursing. How did I lose him this fast? Dammit! He was there a second ago!

He shook his head. Stupid. He’s jounin in ability if not in title, so it goes to show he could slip you off his trail easily. Curving his eye happily at the non-ninja folk below him (how did that tanned stinker lead him all the way to the red-light district without him noticing, anyway?), he waved and said, “Sorry folks! Continue with your highly immoral and somewhat unclean behavior at your leisure! Don’t mind me, just passing by!”

Performing a few seals, he gratefully teleported into his apartment before any of the people could see just how red the exposed bits of his face had gotten.

Suddenly, he felt entirely too clothed. It may have come from the negligent way the chuunin-in-name had stripped in front of young Sakura, or maybe from the crowd of rather scantily-clad men and women in the naughty section, but all he knew was that he had to take something off now.

The hitae-ate was first, Sharingan eye shut until an eyepatch was secured around his head. The mask came off next with a wince; he’d forgotten to shave the past two days, and the reflective material stuck unpleasantly. Vest followed it, then the dark green shirt, the specially-made armor (specially made to NOT show when he was wearing clothes), the additional stomach strap of kunai, a short sword or two attached to his back, the lock picks set against his collarbone with a skin graft, and finally, a white tank top joined the pile on the ground. He removed his shoes next.

Staring at what he had just removed, he decided against removing his pants for the moment. He didn’t feel up to the ordeal.

Striding to the bathroom, he glared in defiance at the reflection of his pale torso. The scars were far less visible on his skin than on Iruka’s, but while the majority of the imperfections on that man’s skin were more or less uniform, Kakashi’s were pitted and twisted.

Touching his side gently, he explored a whorl-like gathering of healed skin. The only things that would give it away to an observer were the slight textural difference (his skin, for a shinobi, was abnormally smooth where he hadn’t been wounded) and the way it looked under certain light.

With that same care, he explored his body, staring into his eye as he did it. Calloused hands slid up to inspect his well-muscled, hairless pectorals and the scars that decorated them, some of the old lines frighteningly close to where his heart lay. They traveled down to explore the defined ridges of abdominal muscles, the hard obliques, the concavity of his belly button, the trail of hair that disappeared under his beltline.

Why had his reflection started looking like that? He didn’t feel the slightest bit hungry.

Blinking hard, he forced himself to continue. The pads of his fingers, hypersensitive despite the years and constant abuse done to them with pointy objects of various natures, trailed upwards to his nipples, the only part of his torso without scar tissue. He circled them lightly, sucking in a bit of air when it sent a small shiver through him. Intrigued, he did it again, a little harder this time, and was rewarded with a bigger shock.

Suddenly, he put his hands down at his sides. What am I DOING?

“Touching myself,” he answered aloud, surprised. “I’m touching myself.”

And why are you doing it?

He scowled at his reflection, disliking the way that blue eye had darkened with some strange emotion, and the way the lips were slightly parted and...reflective.

Reflective?! “I don’t know,” he replied. “I just...am.”

What inspired it?

He glared, noting with disgust that the blue eye was still dark and was now slightly hooded. “How the hell should I know? I’ve never done anything like this...”

He stopped. It isn’t just that. I’ve never even thought about it before, have I?

Memory goaded him into the past gently, without the usual brutality of sadness and anger. As one of the youngest people to be made a jounin ever, his life had become an endless whirl of death, life, blood and grief. There were bright moments, precious times with precious people, but he realized, with a start, that none of the good memories had him doing anything that was remotely similar to what he was doing now.

Except....well, did it really count as a good memory?

”Kashi-kun, Kashi-kun! Are you okay?!”
“Yes, yes I’m fine. And you?”
“Some scratches, I think.” Pause. “I think you somehow managed to scare those horrible men off! Thank you so much!”

Kakashi smiled at her, grimacing when he felt the absence of the mask against his cheeks. Damn the mission requirement that people be allowed to see his face!

His thoughts also tried to get him to damn the piece of blue fluff currently attached to his arm, but since said burr was part of his mission (his brain chose to remind him that he was supposed to steal back the research books a cronie of hers had given to her), he found he couldn’t really give it that much force.

Oh, wait, the burr was speaking. “Well, Kashi-kun,” she crooned softly, looking adoringly into his eyes. “You were so brave and wonderful that I think you should be rewarded with something.” A speculative gleam came into her eyes.

Crinkling one eye in confusion as her gaze swept down his body (he didn’t see what the big deal was; he was just wearing close-fitting pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and the vest), he responded to her even as he tried to make sense of the situation. “No, not really, I was just trying to help--”

She cut him off by mashing her lips to his. He was so shocked that he didn’t even hear his instincts clamoring to shove a kunai into several vital areas she was presenting to him, and continued in that state until he found himself being dragged off the road, into some bushes.

“Wait! What are you--” He was cut off by her lips on his again, and was that her TONGUE?! Weird. Breaking away with a gasp, he again tried to figure out what the hell was going on. “I said wait! Why are you doing this?!”

She was panting harder than she should have been. “I want you,” she growled, and for one of the first times in his life, Kakashi felt threatened. “I want you NOW. It’s been too long--”

She reached for him again, and since Kakashi was still clueless as to just what was going on, he let her drag him down onto the floor, unfasten his pants, and--WHAT THE HELL WAS SHE DOING?!

“Hey!” He yelped as her hand started stroking him. To his further shock, his penis hardened under her touch, and he heard her croon, “well, that’s a nice one.”

In front of a seventeen year-old Kakashi, the blue haired woman stripped herself of all lower garments, exposing the juncture of her thighs to him (a distant part of himself noted that he’d never seen a woman naked from the waist down before) before she straddled him and sank onto his erection.

He hissed; why was it warm, slick and tight? How strange, but it felt so goood...no, wait, don’t go, oh gods no...oh, you’re back, good...wait, why are you going again? He realized that she was fucking him around then, or was it him fucking her? He wasn’t sure, but between each bounce of her body on his cock, causing shocks of pleasant lightning to go through him, she was muttering strange things...”Good, so big, just right...too fucking long!” She groaned then, and the sheath around his cock tightened as she howled and drove down onto him. Pausing a minute, she resumed her bouncing and talking. “Oh, this is good, so good...that fucking, thieving kid two weeks ago was great too, but this, ohgodohgod, THIS!”

Somewhere around that time, he stopped listening and just felt.

He knew what they had done (for sure), now. Later, when he had gone to turn in his mission report to Sandaime-sama (rest in peace, old fart), he’d directly asked what that was all about, and the old man had blushed and stammered so much that Kakashi had thought, with alarm, that he had had a heart attack or something. After getting over the fit, the man had done his best to explain to the young man that he had had sex with the woman.

“For nearly a whole day?” He’d asked, incredulously, at the time. “How is that possible?”

Kakashi had gotten a week’s worth of recuperation time after that mission. Sandaime-sama had needed about two after recovering from his second, much worse fit.

He didn’t know why it was, after that time, he never even thought about sex. Sure, he read the Icha books, but it was more out of a sense to discover why people did things like that at all than because he was a pervert (though the pictures were awesome and the plot kicked ass).

Young men were supposed to be horny, he’d heard. He had never had that problem. During his whole time with that strange woman (the mission had been easy after she’d passed out from exhaustion; all he’d had to do was take the books from their hiding place in her bra and teleport back to Konoha), he hadn’t felt any real interest in the act aside from the strange way it was making him feel. She had aroused him, but she...hadn’t excited him. He’d never masterbated before having sex, and after having lost his virginity, he didn’t either; he never felt the need. He figured he was just...not sexual.

He’d never had a fascination with bodies before this. He’d never felt the urge to stare at himself in the mirror, watching his hands touch his own flesh. Blinking, he started in surprise when his pale skin, in his mind’s eye, became warmly golden, lined with white scars, with pale hands kneading unconscious patterns into it...

Gasping, his knees buckled as an intense wave of something passed through him at the hallucination. That wasn’t my skin! That was...

He stilled. Iruka’s....skin. “I was thinking about touching Iruka’s skin just now,” he said slowly. He recalled the moment where his knees buckled. What had that strange emotion been?

Unbidden, a scene from one of the Icha books came to his mind. The dashing, incredibly strong, outrageously fashionable hero had just finished kissing the fainting, delicate, slenderly voluptuous heroine’s cherry-red lips, and she had gasped in...desire.

“Is that it?!” He asked his reflection, feeling totally flabbergasted. “Is that why my mouth goes dry around him?”

His rational part called up several more snippets of the Icha books to support his hypothesis. In all of them, each time the hero saw the heroine, or the heroine saw the hero, there was always a mention...of a mouth going dry!

“That’s it!” He enthused with a smile, glad to have finally figured out why he felt so strange around the scarred teacher. Slowly, though, bit by bit, his smile faded.

Now that I know what the hell’s up with me...what the fuck am I supposed to do now?

***||***

Well, there you have it, ladies and gents. Kakashi finally got a clue.

I have a hard time believe I actually wrote that sex scene up there...and considering that I was writing from the wrong point of view, geez! It's really tough to write sex scenes from the opposite gender!

To my mind, it would take Kakashi a long time to even think about sex, because someone who's killed at the time where most children are jumping around throwing sand and teasing each other isn't exactly going to be a "normal kid." There's really no such thing as "normal," but I think we can all agree that a six year old kid who can stab, slice, maim, and brutally disembowel someone before that person can even offer said kid some candy is most decidedly NOT normal.

What I may not have made very clear is that I also doubt his teachers taught him about sexual relations for a few reasons:
(1) They died (parents included)
(2) They figured that because Kakashi was so smart, he wouldn't need them to teach him about the mysterious allures of sensual pleasures.

...I also think they chickened out, but I digress.

I continue to enjoy and love reviews, so I'd be very happy if you could leave me one on your way out. :-)