Naruto – Masashi Kishimoto. This story and original
characters – Mine.
A Working Knot.
The metal band slipped down over his eyes, and he
cursed under his breath. The damn forehead protector was defective, he was sure
of it. It wouldn’t stay on his forehead like the thing was supposed to.
Untying it, he took it off and looked at
it. Cautiously sneaking a glance at the other graduates around him, he saw that
most of them had gotten their hitai-ate around their
head like it was supposed to be worn. Hinata had hers around her neck, he noted
dryly. She had obviously already given up on getting hers to stay. Maybe he
should copy her and put it around his neck as well?
He’d be damned if he let this piece of
cloth and scrap metal get the best of him, though. Knotting it tightly around
his forehead, he felt his skull begin to pound slowly with the pressure. The
headband stayed in place for the customary graduate photo, which made him
happy. As soon as the flash flashed, however, it fell down around his eyes
again and he took it off in disgust. He headed home after the ceremony, he was in no mood to chat with any of his
classmates. He wanted dinner and something to help him relax. And he wanted to
figure out how he was going to wear that damn forehead thing, as well.
“I’m proud of you for graduating, son. You
came in second lowest in the class, but that doesn’t matter. I know you’ll do
better if you want to, so let’s celebrate!!”
To emphasize his words, Shikato cheered
loudly and popped a bottle of sake, pouring some for himself and some for his
son. He was plainly ignoring the drinking regulations of the village.
“Hey, why aren’t you wearing your forehead
protector? That’s what marks you as a ninja, you know. When I got mine, I slept
with the thing on for three weeks.”
Shikamaru mumbled a response and sipped at
his sake. He didn’t want to be drinking, but he wanted to explain why he wasn’t
wearing his badge of adulthood even less. He was supposed to be smart. So why
the hell couldn’t he figure out how to fasten a piece of cloth to his head?
“It’s getting late, dad. I’m meeting with
my team tomorrow, and I want to be at my best. I’m gonna go to bed. Night!” Quickly, Shikamaru set down his almost full sake cup
and headed off towards his room. His father was already too drunk to argue, so
Shikato set himself to making sure that the sake which had been opened didn’t
go to waste.
“So we’ll meet again tomorrow, and do some
training exercises, just so we can see where we are. Sound good to everybody?” Asuma
finished his address to his new team, and they nodded. “Good. Then we’ll meet
here tomorrow, same place, same time.”
Asuma wandered off, leaving his team to
chat about their future together. Chouji wandered off as well, although Asuma
had gone towards Kurenai and Chouji had gone toward Ichiraku.
Ino stayed with Shikamaru.
“Why aren’t you wearing your forehead
protector?” She asked curiously. “You’re not really a ninja unless you have
one, you know.” Shikamaru nodded, although he didn’t provide an answer. He
pulled out his headband to show that he had it, and Ino motioned for him to put
it on.
“come on,” she
huffed. “You need to put it on, we’re a team of
ninja.”
Shikamaru groaned, but tied it around his
forehead. As soon as his hands left the knot, it fell down over his eyes, just
like he knew it would. Ino snickered.
“You didn’t tie it tight enough,” she
informed him. “Let me try”. She took the headband from him, and began tying it
around his forehead again. He was amazed at her simple, businesslike competence,
although he never would have told her that. It wasn’t like he liked her, right?
She finished the knot and stepped back,
critically appraising her handiwork. As if on cue, it slumped down again, and
Shikamaru laughed at the utter futility of it. What sort of a ninja was he, if
he couldn’t get a headband to stay around his head?
Ino stamped her foot angrily. “I will make
this work!” She declared, upset that something so simple could be defying her. She
grabbed the hitai-ate from his head, inspecting it to
find flaws.
For fifteen minutes, she tied it around
Shikamaru’s head, using a variety of different knots, all far too complex for
Shikamaru to know about, understand how to tie, or even care about. All of them
failed. Ino’s tongue inched its way out of her mouth, a sure sign that she was
thinking.
Struck by a flash of inspiration, Ino
removed the forehead protector from Shikamaru’s forehead and began manipulating
it in her hands, bending the metal band this way and that, all the while
humming softly to herself. Shikashi made a few
tentative inquiries as to why she was mangling his badge of ninja hood, but she
ignored him with a haughty toss of her head, apparently baffled that somebody
wouldn’t understand what she was doing.
After several moments of impromptu
metalworking, Ino presented Shikamaru with his new forehead protector, glowing
with pride in her work. Shikamaru picked it up cautiously, treating it like a
bomb about to explode at the slightest jostle. That was silly, he knew. If it
was going to explode at the slightest jostle, then A) it wouldn’t be given to
ninja jostled things almost constantly and efficiently, with an air of
professionalism, and B) Ino would have set the damn thing off a hundred times
over with her futzing.
Seeing that Ino was about to tear his head
off if he didn’t put it on, he attempted to tie the thing onto his forehead
again.
“Ouch!” She had bent the damn thing so it
was too round to go around his forehead!
Ino sighed at Shikamaru’s incompetence
with life, and took the forehead protecter from him. “I
swear, sometimes you’re such a dummy. It’s supposed to go around your arm, now.
I made it into a forearm protector. So it’ll protect your forearm, see?”
Quickly, Ino wrapped the armband around
his left bicep, knotting it snugly. He flexed, expecting it to bind his
muscles. Suprisingly, the knot allowed for plenty of
stretch while still taking up the slack when needed. It was a good knot. A good
fit around his arm, he concluded finally.
“Thank you…” he muttered automatically, still
moving his arm to see if he was limited in motion somehow. Ino smiled
radiantly, and untied it quickly. “Now you do it,” she informed him, placing
the hitai-ate in his hand. Their fingers met for a
moment, and she blushed slightly.
He placed the metal band around his arm
with one hand, and quickly discovered that he lacked the proper placement of
joints to tie it around his forearm like Ino had. He looked at her helplessly,
and she giggled at his plight.
“I can’t tie it by myself.” He informed
her redundantly, “So I guess we’ll need to find another solution. Good idea,
though.” Ino stamped her foot again, pouting like only a twelve year old girl
can.
“It still is a good idea! You just need to
get me to tie it for you every day. Besides, you probably don’t know the knot
to use, anyway. If I didn’t do it for you, you’d probably end up tying it too
tight and cutting off circulation to your arm. That’s the sort of thing a boy
like you would do.” The tone of her voice indicated with no doubt her opinion
as to the general intelligence of boys. Her deft fingers reached for the ends
of the cloth and quickly knotted it again. She cautioned him about how to wear
it as she did so.
“Now, don’t take it off until you finish
practice, okay? And then just bring it in tomorrow morning, and I’ll tie it for
you again.” She looked him in the eye, now. “And don’t do anything stupid like
try to bend it, okay? It’s perfect right now, and I don’t want you to screw it
up or something.”
Shikamaru nodded, deciding that blind
agreement was probably easier than attempting to show Ino that he wasn’t stupid
and wasn’t about to do something bizarre and inexplicable like shove the
forehead protector up his nose, or something.
“Don’t do something stupid like shove it
up your nose, or something, either.”
Shikamaru glared at the blond girl. “I
think I’m smart enough to keep things bigger than a chestnut away from my nasal
cavities, thank you very much.”
Ino snorted, once again silently stating
her opinion about the intelligence of men, and of Shikamaru in particular. She’d
known him for a while and knew that he was educated, but there was a difference
between being educated and being intelligent. Shikamaru sighed again, accepting
the futility of arguing with a girl.
Adjusting the position of the band one
last time, Ino stepped back and looked at her latest project. Satisfied, she
smiled and swiveled on her heel, waving goodbye to
her teammate. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, and
I’ll tie it for you again, okay?” she called over her shoulder.
Shikamaru waved slowly at her departing
back, before turning around and heading towards his own home. He dragged his
feet, thinking of a way to explain his new fashion in armband wearing to his
father.
“Lemme guess…Ino
did it?”
Shikato looked plenty drunk still, but he
managed to focus his bleary eyes on the headband fastened around his son’s arm.
Not only did he identify the item for what it was, he managed to dredge up some
vague, correct, drunken idea about who had put it there.
Shikamaru nodded, before going over to the
fridge to prepare the
“Is she going to tie it for you tomorrow,
as well?”
Shikamaru nodded, then
vocalized his answer. “Yeah. She said that she was
afraid that if I tied it myself, I’d cut off my circulation, or shove the
entire thing up my nose.”
Shikato clapped a calloused hand on his
son’s shoulder. “Someday,” he intoned seriously, “You’ll be glad that she’s
showing such an interest in your health. Until that day, keep that thing the
hell away from your nose, and I’d learn how to tie that knot as quickly as I
could. Who knows when Ino’s not going to be around to tie it for you, you
know.”
Shikamaru nodded assent, but in his heart,
he knew that he would delay learning how to tie that knot for as long as he
could. After all, as long as Ino had to tie the knot for him for each practice,
that meant that at least once a day, she’d have to pay attention to him, right?
And who knows, Shikamaru reasoned. Maybe
he could interest her in something other than tying knots for him, someday. Something
other than that Sasuke she was always going on about, too.
“Mom, I can’t get this tied around my arm
like dad has it! Can you do it for me?” At twelve years old, Inoka had just graduated from
But Inoka wasn’t
interested in tying it around her forehead, like it was supposed to go. In that
little girl’s mind, there was only one way to tie something like this, and that
was around her left arm, just like her dad did it.
Ino clucked softly at her daughter,
reaching for the metal plate. “First, you need to bend it a bit, so that it
will fit around your arm, see?” As Ino demonstrated for her daughter, Shikamaru
transferred the hand of his son from his right to his left and began to rub his
own forehead protecter, bent the same way all those
years ago. He smiled at the memories, and watched his wife go through the same
warnings with her daughter that she had gone through with her future husband,
save for one important one.
Shikamaru broke into the conversation,
much to the dismay of his wife and daughter. “Remember, Inoka.
Keep the forehead protector out of your nose, that’s not where it’s supposed to
go.” Ino laughed gaily, remembering when she had made that same statement to
her husband. Inoka didn’t find it quite as funny.
“Dad, I’m a ninja just like you are! You
don’t need to tell me things like that, okay?” She stomped her foot in an
unconscious parody of her mother, and Shikamaru hugged her.
“I know, baby girl. But it’s a lesson that
your mother passed on to me, and I’m passing it on to you. So when you have
children, if they want to wear their badge of ninjahood
like this, I trust that you’ll give them the same
Inoka smiled, and promised her father that she would warn her children about
proper and improper things to insert within their nasal cavities. Running off
to join her friends from the academy for a group picture, Shikamaru brought his
wife to his side, watching their child together.
“You know, I figured out how to tie the
knot in about a week after you used it.” He informed his wife softly. She
smiled at him.
“I know.” She told him.
“And I figured out how to tie it by
myself, as well. If you didn’t want to, I could have done it by myself.”
“I know”, she told him. “But I wanted to.
Because I hoped that something like this would happen. And it has.”
He hugged her fiercely, smelling the
subtle wisp of perfume that she wore for special occasions. Pulling away, Ino
smiled at Shikamaru. “And besides,” she told him. “You’re a man. If I had let
you do it, you would have screwed up at the worst possible time, and it would
have fallen off. And I would feel responsible, because I should have known that
you need me to do simple things like that for you.”
He hugged her again, and she accepted that
as a reasonable response.
Author’s note: Rumors
of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Well, a rumor.
If there was a rumor. And if
the rumor said that I died…I didn’t.
Sorry. What happened was that I got very
busy. And when I wasn’t busy, I had no inspiration to write. But I’m about
eleven pages through Chapter 8 of Last Step right now, and it’s looking like I
still have another 9 or 10 to go. So at the very least, I can promise you that
it’ll be a long chapter.
And I’ll have it out by this Friday, as
well. I promise you that. It’s been an inexcusable amount of time since my last
update, and I really feel bad. So by the end of this week, I’ll have a new 20
page chapter for you guys to read. Hopefully, it’ll be worth the wait.
This started out as a small scene with Ino
tying Shikamaru’s forehead protector to his arm, because when I bought one for
my birthday, I tried to tie it myself and discovered that it was quite hard. So
I wrote the scene, in order to get my creative juices flowing. Then it turned
out that it wasn’t actually a scene, it was actually a short Shika-Ino one shot thing. I think it fell apart a bit near
the ending, but the first five pages are pretty good. I like Ino when she’s
trying to figure out how to tie it. She’s fun to write for, all angry and pouty and convinced she’s right.
The thing about putting things in your
nose is my own little joke. When I was teaching somebody how to make sushi
rolls, I cautioned them not to do something stupid like put the rice in their
nose. They say they weren’t going to, but I know them. They were thinking it.
Gemin16, you’re awesome and you know it. Clap
your hands or something, cause you’re my greatest help
during all of these.