Drabbledump
Can't. Stop. Writing. Drabbles. OHGOD.



Ino knew the dryness of the desert, but she didn’t know drought. She thought she knew what intolerable dryness was, what heat felt like that made the grass brittle and hard as horsehair, but she could see the difference between a mere lack of water and a drought mapped out in Kankurou’s body.

It’d been two months since one of Suna’s major rivers had turned to dust, three months since the last heavy rainfall, and four months since the last time Ino had seen him. His entire body spoke of drought. Ino kissed him and winced at how chapped his lips were, tough and dry to the point of cracking, tiny striations of blood lining each of their kisses. Her fingers trailed down tanned skin so dark and dry as to feel strangely soft, like some great sun god had scrubbed the blemishes out of his hide. This same sun god had left kisses, clusters of little freckles, and had brought the laugh-wrinkles and frown wrinkles into high relief. His hands and feet cracked until they bled.

Drought aged everyone, he explained as Ino wrapped his hands in bandages and salve and the first soft patters of rain fell on the roof. He dragged her out of bed to go stand in the rain, the life and strength pumping back into him as the shy drizzle turned into a storm, heat and cold meeting with a growl of thunder. The rain fell in dark curtains, pounding on tin roofs and clay houses, and within seconds they were both soaked.

Kankurou had lost weight, Ino realized as he lifted his arms above his head and howled up at the rain. His ribs showed with each gasping laugh, all that reddish-blond sunbleached hair hanging down into his eyes.

He was so like the desert, tied inherently to the waxing and waning of the harsh lifestyle, that Ino was somewhat afraid that this stupid tumbleweed of a man would wither up and move on if she didn’t keep bringing the rain with her. She wrapped her arms around him from behind, the rainwater creating a slick connection between their hot, bare skin, and listened to him laugh out the end out the drought.




For being such an accomplished puppeteer, Kankurou could be a bit clumsy when angry. Things got to his head far too easily; he was a hugely emotional person, and when they fought he carried the anger in a little hole in his chest until it eventually hurt him. This fight was a big one, one rife with slamming doors and screaming and the south wall of Ino’s bedroom definitely had some new punctures and kunai-holes in it, but it’d simmered down into something quiet and subversively horrible. Usually, their fights were loud and short, fire-crackers set off in the living room, but this one had just fizzled low, banked coals as Ino and Kankurou skirted each other and fumed at how wrong the other was.

It was Kankurou’s fault, but he’d had the right intentions. This was the perfect mix for failure. Ino hadn’t known anything was up, had missed the papers that had passed hands, the deals that had been made, until Kankurou’s dogtags winked at her. He’d been brushing his teeth, hunched over the sink with his back turned to her, bright new dogtags turned to get out of his way, dangling between his shoulderblades.

His old dogtags had been dull, scratched and worn from hanging under his clothes since age twelve.

His new dogtags, pressed with the stamp of Konoha’s seal, were shiny as newly minted coins, dazzling and begging to be noticed. When she realized what he’d done---and why---the fight had erupted.

Two days later, they were still fighting, and that knot of anger in Kankurou’s chest felt like it weighed tons, and he could hardly see straight. Had he been in his right mind, he wouldn’t have dropped the glass, and if he hadn’t dropped the glass and attempted to roughly gather the pieces, he wouldn’t have cut himself.

Stupid goddamn oaf was lucky he hadn’t cut off his precious fingers, Ino raged inwardly, sizing him up as he quietly cursed and licked at the blood like some pathetic little dog. They stood at opposite ends of the kitchen, the broken glass between them, and waited for the other to say something, to move, to finally apologize.

It didn’t happen.

Kankurou sucked hard on the side of his hand, the uneven look in his eyes just as brittle and broken-up as the glass on the floor. Ino felt the worry lodge and she took a mental step back, seeing one large and ungainly child trying hard to do right standing in the place of that bullheaded foreign man who almost seemed to try to fuck up, sometimes. It suddenly dawned on her that he was sorry, that he’d been serious, that he was fucking sincere, that he wanted to be with her, and her lower-lip wobbled.

“You---you stupid…come here. I’ll heal it up.”

Sometimes, love was an exercise in masochism and pain, but they both needed it.



Moegi’s hair was slick and almost black, streaming cold water as she flung herself out of the dark lake and back to the rock she had carefully folded her clothes on. Konohamaru followed her out, shaking out his hair like a sopping dog. He took his time finding his clothes, unashamed as ever. After they’d dressed again and the high was starting to wind down into comfortable coolness and stifled giggles, Konohamaru stamped out a nest for them in the long grass. Moegi wrung out her hair, loudly bemoaning the cold and her sniffles and how Konohamaru was so mean to drag her out here in the middle of the night and what was it that was in that smoke, anyway?

Chuckling, he dragged her into his grass nest and peppered her cold, damp skin with kisses. Moegi shrieked, her voice hanging shrill on the night air, but it fell again to desperate, gasping giggles as he found her hands and his lips whispered nonsense against her palms.

“Poppies for sleep,” Konohamaru grinned, his fingers tangling in her mess of gingery hair. Even if he was talking about laudanum and the easiest way to remember the mixture: a tincture of alcohol and opium and sugar, used for sedation and pain relief, he was thinking about the sweet red of Moegi’s hair. She pouted whenever he mentioned her hair or freckles, but that was just her own insecurities speaking.

“Huh?” Moegi yawned, draping an arm over Konohamaru’s warm side. She could feel his warm breath ruffle her damp bangs, smoky from the ganja. Her legs tangled with his in their little summer nest, and she sighed contentedly.

“Nothin’,” he murmured, yawning reflexively with her.

These were the kinds of nights they’d look back on fondly when they grew up.



Being a father was the scariest thing in the world. Kankurou had successfully lived through poisoning, political plots, working in recon, and marriage to Ino, and he would have thought that these kinds of things would ready him for such a task as reproducing. Besides, he’d fooled himself into thinking, Ino did all the real hard work. She was the one that had to tote around a belly full of growing, kicking baby for nine months and then push out the squirming little bundle of barely-human; he’d just had to deal with her monumental mood swings and the progressively more aggressive threats to his manhood.

But then Inori was born, and Kankurou had faced the realization that he loved him, despite the fact that he smelled and looked more like some kind of cross between a rat and a tomato. He loved Inori horribly and obsessively and the baby hadn’t done anything to deserve it other than cry in his arms and have his goddamn nose. If someone had told him either he lived or the baby, he would have given his life for his son right then and there. Inori was his little blue-eyed rat-tomato, and he loved him so much it had the potential to be destructive.

Nobody had told him that being a father would be anything like this. At least everyone else was too concerned with cooing over the exhausted mother to notice the big scary jounin crying soundlessly over his newborn son, too full of fear and love and everything else to know which way was up anymore.




Inori was sick and Ino was on a mission, so Kankurou hadn’t slept for two days. It wasn’t that his three-year-old son was dying or anything, or even that it was anything more voracious than the common flu, but he was feverish and Kankurou worried. Inori was a tiny little thing still, mostly made up of moppish blond hair and entirely too large blue eyes, and he was just too tiny to be so hot. The fever had been low at first but it’d escalated through the afternoon, peaking after midnight and not breaking until the wee hours of the morning.

Kankurou was no medic, so his cures consisted of worrying, calling Sakura every couple of hours---and usually arguing with her as she had to reassure him AGAIN that Inori would be fine, and yes, it’s two am you jackass---and a lot of frozen juice pops. He sat on the floor by Inori’s bed, flipping through picture books and mission scrolls as the little boy slept, and supplying juice pops and crayons when he was awake.

Taking care of sick babies was serious business. He treated it as he would a high-ranking mission, not realizing that sickness was natural and it would abate with time and patience. Kankurou had never really been allowed around children before he’d had one of his own, so he had no point of reference at all. Besides, this was HIS son---he had every reason to worry and expounded on them all.

Despite his best intentions, he fell asleep on the third day, propped up against the side of the bed with Where’s ANBU? open in his lap. Inori woke up to his daddy’s snores, round-eyed and curious. He sighed---and really, it was one of Ino’s dramatic sighs, monkey-see monkey-do---and crawled out of bed, sliding into his father’s comfortable lap. Thumb jammed firmly in his little mouth and blanket tucked in around him, he sniffled a little before falling back asleep.

Ino could hardly contain her awww reflex when she found them that way, a very tired and irritated Sakura leaning over her shoulder.