Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation. ~ Vannevar Bush
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"I'm okay," I said, repeating the mantra that had been falling from my lips for days. The syllables were starting to become meaningless.
Shikamaru tapped a shogi piece into position. I made my move without giving it that much thought. It was a sloppy, haphazard play that I saw fault with almost immediately.
Too late, keep moving.
Shikamaru sighed, long and long, as if it came from his very bones. "No, you're not," he refuted. "You're not okay, 'Kako."
"I am," I countered. "I'm perfectly fine, see?" I lifted my arms in a little demonstration.
"That's not what I mean, and you know it," he said, but he seemed defeated, so I hoped he would give up this line or argument soon. I wasn't sure how much longer I'd be able to fight it without agreeing that he was right.
I really didn't want to do that.
We played silently for a while longer. The game was very lopsided, and I knew Shikamaru would wipe me off the board with no effort. It made me irritated, like an itch under the skin. I usually played better than this.
"You know," Shikamaru said, then stopped.
He clicked his piece into place, and I spent a few minutes studying it, half to avoid his eyes and half to try and salvage the game.
"You know that if you want to-" he started again. Stopped. He was looking at the board too. "You don't have to do field work. There's plenty of-"
My head jerked up. I glared at him. "I made a mistake, okay?" I said, and my voice wobbled a little bit. "I know I did. But that doesn't mean I… It doesn't mean I'm bad at this. I can do this. Shikamaru."
"I didn't say you couldn't," he said. "I just… you got hurt. You got really, really hurt, Shikako." He ran a hand through his hair. "Do you know how lucky we were? You nearly didn't walk away from that. What if… next time you're not so lucky?"
My breath caught. "There won't be a next time," I said, as firmly as I could. I could hear the emptiness of the assertion, though. That wasn't something I could promise. "I won't make the same mistake again. I'll train harder. It won't happen again."
"What if it does?" he persisted.
"It won't."
He looked frustrated.
I felt frustrated.
"I can't just quit," I said.
"Why not?"
I stared at him, feeling my throat constrict around the words, suffocating them. "Why don't you?" I choked out. "You could get hurt next mission. It's all the same."
How could I argue, when I couldn't explain why it was so important? When I couldn't share everything I knew? And the thing was, it wasn't about trust, not really. I'd known for years that I could tell them if I had to. I hadn't kept silent because I thought they would turn on me. I didn't think they would turn me in. If nothing else, I knew Shikamaru was on my side.
After Gelel, how could I not know that?
I kept silent, because to tell them the truth now, would be to tell them that I had lied. I had lied every day they had known me, every word and every action overshadowed by omission.
I wasn't the Shikako Nara they thought I was.
I didn't keep silent because I didn't trust them.
I kept silent because they would no longer trust me.
"It's not the same," Shikamaru muttered. "I don't get missions like you do."
Which… was true. But not really the issue. "You could," I said. "It only takes one."
He sighed.
I bit my lip and tried not to feel too hurt. I could see his point. I could. I knew what he was trying to do. That didn't mean it didn't hurt when it sounded like he didn't think I could make it as a ninja. That I wasn't good enough. That all I was going to do was get myself killed.
I clicked a piece into place on the shogi board, not caring if it was a good move or not. I didn't even care if it was a legal move. It was just something to do.
Our standoff was broken by a knock on the door.
"Am I interrupting?" Ino asked cautiously.
I forced a smile. "No, of course not. Come on in."
"Right," Ino agreed, awkwardly edging into the room. She passed me a leather necklace strap, just like I'd asked for. I twisted it around my fingers and didn't put the stone on it immediately, because I thought Shikamaru might recognize it, and after that conversation I just… didn't want to.
"Thanks," I murmured. "I owe you."
"No problem," Ino said, eyes flicking from one of us to the other. "Is everything okay?"
Shikamaru sighed and stood up. "Yeah, it's fine," he said dully. "I should probably go. Mum wants me to help sort out the fortnightly orders."
Given that dad wasn't here, and mum was handling a lot of the clan matters, it wasn't so strange that she wanted his help with it.
It still seemed like a retreat.
"Have fun," I said, idly, starting to pick up all the shogi pieces from our terrible game. I didn't look up as he left.
"Okay, that was not 'fine'," Ino said, sinking into the vacant chair. "That might be the very definition of 'not fine'."
"It's fine," I stressed. "Just leave it alone, okay?"
She leveled a serious look at me. "I want to help you. I know you don't like it so much when you need help, not like this. Not when it's for real. But … I am here for you, okay?"
Ino was in the middle of her own identity crisis. Ino had been hurt in a way that even my near death experience didn't match. And she was still trying to help.
It wasn't fair to dump that on her. It wasn't fair in the way that Sakura expecting me to reassure her wasn't fair.
"I know that," I said quietly. "But… I'm okay, yeah?"
"Yeah," she agreed seriously. "You are."
I sagged. Until she said it, I hadn't realized how much I needed someone else to verbalize it. To agree with me.
Yes. You are okay. You will be okay.
Everyone was so insistent that I wasn't. They were tearing down the foundations that I was using to keep myself steady, the walls and defenses that I had built. And Ino… Ino had just pitched in to help fortify them.
I made a muffled sound, that might have been a sob, and covered my eyes.
Arms wrapped around me. My chin dug awkwardly into her shoulder. "You're okay," she whispered. "You're so strong, you know that? This isn't going to be what takes you down."
I focused on breathing, and let the words settle in.
Yes. You are okay. You will be okay.
Then I chuckled and drew back, a wry smile tugging at my lips. "Sneaky," I said.
She feigned innocence. "I'm here to help. That's all."
And that was a huge part of who Ino was. Someone who wanted to help. Who wanted people to be happy and healthy and confident in their own skin. Who liked fixing things.
"I had a fight with Sakura," I admitted, slightly abruptly. "Yesterday when she visited me."
It was a simple problem, something that would probably blow over by the next time Sakura and I saw each other if we ignored it. But it was also something that would be so, so easy for Ino to fix.
"What about?" she asked, because Sakura and I didn't really argue. We didn't always get on, but I didn't like arguing and Sakura hadn't always been so assertive.
"I made a joke," I said, shrugging a little, and looking up at the ceiling. "Okay, it was a bad joke but still." I told her about it.
"Shikabane," Ino said, shaking her head. But she snickered. She understood, at least, why I'd said it. "That is bad. Please tell me no one in your family was that bad at names."
I considered. "Well there was Shikatsu. Which could mean 'Life or Death'. But she picked that one out herself, I think. Her birth name was Amago." She hadn't been the heir, but it had been … not uncommon for heirs to die. Whoever took over as clan head usually picked a traditional 'shika' name to go with the role even if they hadn't been born with one. Dad had kinda bent the rules with giving both Shikamaru and I the same name, even if I suspected he just didn't want to come up with another one.
Ino snorted. "Trout. Like that's much better."
"Like you have room to talk, Ino."
She shoved me in the shoulder. We grinned at each other.
It occurred to me, that just as I knew what she had done, she knew exactly what I had done in telling her about that fight. Was this what ninja friendships were like? Knowing what each other needed, and giving just that and no more? And each of you knowing, all the while? It seemed manipulative, almost. And yet… was it really that different?
It was just … more deliberate than before. That was all.
"We should all get together again," I suggested. "Study group."
"Absolutely," Ino agreed easily. "I think we're all in the village at the moment, anyway. We should take advantage of it."
"As soon as I get out of here." I stretched. "Hopefully soon."
.
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Tsunade did discharge me from hospital in the end, even if she seemed slightly concerned about the rate that my chakra was returning.
I didn't tell her I had used some of it. That would have got me far worse than 'slight concern'.
It was good to get home, even if the first thing I did was clean out my mission bag. I was so glad that ninja became so paranoid about packing their own mission gear. No one had touched mine. It was all really gross by now, and everything would need cleaning, but no one had touched it.
The book was safe. No one had seen the bloody remains of my clothes. Because there was a difference between hearing that I'd been hurt while seeing me perfectly fine in the hospital, and seeing the physical evidence of just how bad it had actually been. I didn't want mum to have to come face to face with that.
I shoved the book into a sealing scroll, feeling the bite of chakra as it activated much more than I usually would, and hid it amidst my other scrolls. It wouldn't do as a permanent hiding place, but for now…
Then I emptied out the pockets of my bloodstained jacketed, rolled it up and binned it. I wasn't keeping it. Everything was thoroughly unpacked, cleaned, replaced and repacked. Tsunade had said two weeks, but I felt much better having my stuff ready now.
The fact that it hadn't been ready had been a minor but persistent nagging in the back of my brain the entire time I was at the hospital.
Then I cast a critical eye around my bedroom and decided it needed tidying too.
There was a shine of productivity that came from making progress, even if it wasn't on the things that you should have been doing.
"Cleaning?" Shikamaru asked quizzically, leaning on the doorframe to my room, hands tucked casually in his pockets.
I shrugged, and ran a hand through my hair. It was sweaty. Yuck. "Seemed messy," I said.
He shrugged, because it wasn't like mess bothered him. It usually didn't bother me either. "Mum's making gyoza for dinner."
I liked gyoza, don't get me wrong. They were lovely little steam fried dumpling things, and I would happily eat them all. But they were a ridiculous amount of effort to make, and I could never see the point of putting that much work into something you were only going to eat.
No, that wasn't an opinion I would ever voice in the hearing of an Akimichi. I wasn't an idiot.
"I guess that was a hint to come downstairs and help out?" I asked, standing. I sighed. I didn't really feel like either cooking or socializing but giving in the first time mum asked would probably give me some leeway down the road. If she really wanted us downstairs, it would escalate from 'hint' to 'order' to 'nagging' and I didn't want to deal with that either.
In the kitchen, mum had already made the dough and filling, so all that was really left was putting it all together. The three of us sat around the table in comfortable familiarity.
I scooped a ball of filling mince out of the bowl, pressed it into the center of the dough wrapping and pinched the edges shut. My hand twinged, still stiff and awkward. Even though the Gelel had healed it, it would likely never be as good as new. The initial damage, that Kimimaro had caused, had been nearly healed before I'd gone out on the mission. It was better than anyone expected it would be, and with training I could probably get it to a level where no one would never notice it had been hurt, but it would never reach the level of speed and flexibility that it could have if it had never been damaged in the first place.
Think of it as PT,I thought, carefully pinching the edges of another dumpling shut. Productive PT even. Much better than 'move your finger twenty times'.
It wasn't silent – we did talk. It was just nothing that struck me as important. 'You should be more sociable', 'don't just shut yourself away in your room', 'have you cleaned up' all made an appearance.
"I'm plenty sociable," I protested lightly, mostly focused on my hands. "I might go visit Hinata tomorrow, or Kiba. He promised to show me the new puppies." Not recently, mind you, but if there was an excuse I would take it. I wasn't quite sure how I'd manage to get from 'invite Hinata to study group' to 'ask Neji about the Kurama girl without making him suspicious' either. It wasn't like Neji and I were friends.
"You can take the fortnightly delivery to the Inuzuka clinic then," Mum said. "If you're going that way."
Even better.
I made a grumbling sound, just so she didn't get suspicious. Somehow, she always seemed to be when we agreed to do things without complaining.
"So Sasuke said there was some excitement while we were gone?" I asked vaguely at a later point. Surely a lightning strike to the tower wouldn't have gone unnoticed.
Mum hummed. "Yes, there was an emergency drill. I suppose with all the things that have been happening lately, Hokage-sama has been refining the response system. And, well." She looked at us both and sighed. "The situation with Hidden Cloud… it could escalate at any time."
"What happened?" Shikamaru frowned.
"The Kurama clan provided a genjutsu," Mum elaborated. "Lightning striking the Hokage Tower, in order to simulate an attack by Hidden Cloud shinobi. It was only a short response drill, two or three hours at the most, but it does show she is taking things very seriously, doesn't it?" She frowned, looking worried.
Oh. Wow. Because that was all kinds of brilliant, wasn't it? Disguising an actual attack as a drill, using the actual enemy outside our boarders as an explanation… and yes I could see why 'lightning strike' and 'Cloud Ninja' went together without elaboration. The fact that that kind of attack was a legitimate worry and people were wondering if we were going to be stepping up onto war footing... Tsunade wouldn't want to compound matters by revealing that our own shinobi were turning on us.
"The Kurama," I repeated, with a frown. "Wasn't there a thing about them, a few years ago?" That was a risk. I had no idea what happened.
"A few… oh, yes. The Clan Head and his wife were killed in a house fire," Mum said, trying to recall. "It was suspicious, but it was just after the Uchiha… well. There wasn't anyone to look into it. Their daughter survived it, though. She must have been around the same age as you two, come to think of it. Was she at the Academy with you?"
I frowned. "I can't remember," I said. Not in our class, I didn't think. I would have recognized the surname.
Shikamaru shrugged when I looked at him. No, he wouldn't have really noticed either.
That was good information, though. Something concrete to look into.