And they settle 'neath your skin
Kept on the inside and no sunlight
Sometimes a shadow wins
~Sarah Bareilles; Brave
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"Were you waiting for me?" Sasuke asked, dropping to sit beside me on the edge of the roof. Given that it was the top of his apartment building we were perched on, I assumed that was a rhetorical question.
I swung my legs idly, heels drumming against the brick wall below us. "I just wanted some peace and quiet," I said, closing my book.
"Peace and quiet," Sasuke repeated, deadpan, with a look at the bustling street below us. It was residential district, not commercial, but there was still a decent number of people coming and going. And that didn't even count the traffic on the roof tops behind us.
"Mmm," I agreed, because it might be there, but I didn't have to interact with it and that was good enough. Home, my usual bastion of quiet, meant Shikamaru. Meant mom. Meant research.
I was perfectly aware that hiding from my problems didn't fix them. I knew that. But sometimes it just took a bit of time to work up the motivation and energy to do anything about them.
"You should walk me home," I said.
Sasuke blinked at me, drawing a knee up and hooking his forearm over it. "I should, should I?"
Given what I'd learnt, it probably wasn't essential to drag Sasuke to the Nara grounds to talk about Yakumo, but at the same time, I hardly wanted to talk about it here.
"Unless you've got something better to do?" I slid backwards, stood up and offered him a hand.
Sasuke sighed, but took it and let me haul him to his feet. "You never used to be this bossy."
"You were fooled by my calm and pleasant demeanour," I said, deadpan. "Now that you know the truth you shall never be allowed to escape. Mwahaha. Ha."
He rolled his eyes at me.
We roof hopped towards the Nara compound. Once upon a time, I would have looked at the distances between the roofs and gone 'no way', but now it barely even seemed like an obstacle. A quick application of chakra into a Leaping Monkey technique that was drilled into us well before we left the Academy, and you were bouncing over the gaps like they weren't even there.
Shikamaru was sitting out on the veranda, playing solo shogi, when we got home. I gave him a half-hearted wave and proceeded to drag Sasuke around the house and towards the forest rather than say hi.
It didn't go unnoticed.
"What was that about?" Sasuke asked.
I shrugged. "He doubts my ability to make valid life choices."
"I doubt your ability to make valid life choices," Sasuke said dryly.
I shoved him with my shoulder. "You would make the exact same ones, so you don't even get to voice an opinion." The idea that Sasuke would quit being a ninja because it was dangerous and he got hurt was laughable.
"Alright," Sasuke said, once we were in the forest. "What's wrong now?"
I dropped down to sit with my back against a tree trunk. "Listen closely, this is probably going to be the only time I say this." I took a deep breath. I hated to admit it, but even if I explained he was going to call me on it. "I was wrong."
"Can I get that in writing?" Sasuke smirked.
"No." I waggled my finger at him. "I was wrong. Yakumo was wrong. The actual truth is something like this. Yakumo had a very strong expression of her clan's bloodlimit, but she was otherwise pretty sick as a kid. She still wanted to be a ninja, but it didn't look like it was possible. And then the Kurama clan started declining in strength right at the point where the village needed more genjutsu users, so people were looking to Yakumo's talent to restore them. That put a lot of stress on her, as you can imagine. She then developed a secondary personality to protect herself," I summarised. "I don't know if the Kurama have a secondary bloodlimit, or if it was just an odd manifestation of the main one, but it was able to take control with a transformation not unlike the curse seal."
Sasuke blinked at me.
"Not like-like," I clarified. "But the whole demonic appearance thing. Anyway. Said personality was trying to protect her from all that stress, and was maybe fuelled by resentment against the clan for putting it there in the first place, and used her genjutsu abilities to cast a fire."
"That killed her parents," Sasuke said quietly, filling in the blanks.
"Yeah," I agreed. "The Third apparently was aware of it, and organised Kurenai-sensei to either teach her to control it or seal it away along with all her memories of the event. She chose the latter option, obviously. Then they put Yakumo under house arrest and observation. Only, the seal started breaking down recently, and she was recovering her powers, hence the attack on the Tower."
"So she knows now?"
"She knows now," I confirmed. "Anko took her away again. I hope she's okay."
Sasuke shook his head, staring out into the trees. "That's crazy," he said quietly. "How awful would it be…"
I wasn't sure I was supposed to hear that. I leant back and waited.
"But," he said after a moment. "I don't get why you believed her in the first place. I mean, maybe not guessing all of that but it makes more sense if you just assumed she didn't know what she was talking about. But you didn't. You believed her. You never even met her and you believed her."
It was hard to defend myself while knowing I had been wrong. Anything I said now was just going to sound paranoid. I huffed. "Because that's the kind of accusation you take seriously?"
"This is Konoha," Sasuke said with a bite of impatience. "Not Hidden Mist. Do you really think that kind of thing goes on here?"
Oh, Sasuke. My heart ached for him.
But maybe it was better if he didn't believe it. If he thought Konoha just wasn't capable of that level of treachery. Maybe then, when the other shoe dropped, when the truth was revealed, he would doubt it. Maybe it would take away one weapon that Tobi had to use against him. Maybe.
Or maybe it would just make the betrayal all that much greater.
I ran a hand through my hair, ruffling my fringe. "Sorry." I swallowed. "Maybe I'm just paranoid."
I didn't look at him, so I didn't know how that went over. But he didn't say anything.
"How'd you find all this out anyway?" Sasuke asked, after a beat. "Did she get out again?"
"Oh, I invited her sparring," I said. "The seal broke while we were fighting."
There was a long silence.
"What?" he asked incredulously.
"I… invited her sparring?" I repeated uncertainly.
"That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard," Sasuke said flatly. "You invited her sparring? She wanted to destroy Konoha! I told you what her genjutsu were like! And you just thought 'oh, no, that sounds absolutely perfect, I'll let her cast one on me'?"
"I-" I stammered, eyes wide. "It wasn't that bad," I muttered defensively.
Sasuke breathed very deeply through his nose. "No. Shikako. I thought Naruto was supposed to be the one that leapt into things without thinking about them."
"Hey," I objected. "I thought about it."
"Really?" he asked. "And it still seemed like a good idea after that?"
I didn't really appreciate this. "It all worked out in the end!"
"That doesn't mean it was clever," Sasuke argued. "You have to see that that was a moronic plan."
I stopped myself from snapping at him. The fact that I wanted to snap meant he was probably closer to the truth than I wanted to admit. I was feeling cornered – I hated feeling cornered – and it was because he was right. "It… wasn't the best plan I could have made?" I admitted in a small voice. It wasn't. Even the 'ask Tsunade' stage of the plan hadn't been brilliant. I'd been scrambling from start to finish, and I was really lucky that nothing had backfired on me.
"And you did it alone," Sasuke said. "I wish you'd..."
"Look, Anko was there as her guard, okay?" I said. "And Sakura. It wasn't like I was completely alone."
Sasuke gave me a baleful look that said the minor concession to safety did not impress him at all. "I just- Why?"
I drummed my fingers against my thigh, and ordered my words carefully. "We haven't really fought any serious genjutsu users. It's a rare art to do well."
"There was-" And he cut himself off, scowling.
"There was Itachi," I finished softly. "Yeah. But… Itachi is Itachi. Saying he uses genjutsu is like saying a Jounin and a Genin are both ninja so you can fight either one. He's in a different league." I struggled to put it into words. "Yakumo is like us. She's our age, with the same or less training. Strong bloodlimit or not… I thought that… it would be good practice…"
"Yeah," Sasuke said, and he looked suddenly tired. Drained. I thought that this was probably the most that we had ever discussed about Itachi. Maybe we should have talked about it, but what was there to say?
I felt pretty drained too. "If," I said, "I meet her again, do you want to come too? Maybe not spar, but just… exchange notes or whatever." I shrugged. It sounded like a neat solution, but I was clearly not having as many great ideas as I thought I was.
But he wasn't wrong. And… I didn't really want to do this alone if I didn't have to.
"Maybe," Sasuke said.
That was good enough for me.
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Shikamaru rapped his knuckles against my open door. "Naruto is here," he said, tone bored.
I closed the book on chakra theory that Takatori had sourced for me, and looked at him. "He's back already?"
Well, it had been almost a week... It seemed much shorter than that somehow.
"Hey, Shikako!" Naruto cheered as I came down the stairs. "Are you okay? Is your medical leave over? Can you come back to training now? I hope we can do a mission together soon, that would be awesome! Not that it was bad to do a mission with Lee's team, but I missed you and Sasuke."
I paused under the barrage of words for a second, and tried to parse them. "Uh, nearly over, yeah," I agreed. "How was your mission?"
"It was okay," he said, and shrugged. "There was this curry restaurant that we stayed at that Lee knew – he trained near there with Gai-sensei last year, he said, and baa-chan remembered him so she made us special curry, but it was so hot. And the town was being controlled and stuff by this missing-nin guy called Raiga, and he used to be one of the Seven Swordsmen. I asked if he knew Zabuza, but then he just got mad at me."
"Raiga Kurosuki?" Shikamaru asked, looking a little poleaxed.
"Mmm, I guess so." Naruto shrugged. "He was really nuts though. Like, crazy-nuts. He had a cool apprentice though. His name was Ranmaru. Hey, do you think all the swordsmen had apprentices? Like, Zabuza had Haku?"
"I don't think so," I said, amused. "Kisame didn't have one." That I knew of, at least.
"Oh, hey, he was one of them too! I forgot. I should have asked if he knew him." Naruto punched a fist into his other hand. "Rats. I coulda, like, gathered information. Then next time we saw him, we could have kicked his ass. Stupid blue fish guy!"
Well, at least he was considering gathering information. That was something. "So Ranmaru?" I prompted.
"Oh, yeah, he had some weird doujutsu," Naruto said. "And he was sick so he couldn't move very much? Raiga basically carried him around all the time. And he was kinda like Haku, too, because he only wanted to be acknowledged and useful to the person he cared about. Except Raiga was even more of a jerk than Zabuza."
Naruto even sounded disappointed, like that was a serious level of jerkiness to achieve.
"We had to fight him. He had a lightning sword too. But it wasn't as cool as yours," he added generously. "We were awesome though, and he didn't stand a chance! Ranmaru even helped us out."
I wondered if it had truly been that easy, given that Raiga was in fact a Jounin member of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist. On the other hand, if he wasn't injured, no one on the team was dead or massively hurt, then did I really need a play by play?
"But you can come to the hospital tomorrow and meet him, right?" Naruto added. "Baa-chan said she could probably even heal him and stuff."
"Wait," I said, confused. "Heal who? Who's at the hospital?"
"Ranmaru," Naruto said, as if I should have followed that.
"He… came back with you?" I repeated faintly. More surprising than Naruto befriending an enemy was that Tsunade would let him in the village. Even for a doujutsu.
"Yeah! You'll come and meet him, right?" Naruto said.
I shared a long look with Shikamaru, both of us on the same wavelength for now, just so we could communicate our disbelief with someone that understood.
"Sure, why not?" I sighed.
"Awesome!" Naruto beamed. "So, uh, what have you guys been doing?"
"Nothing really." I shrugged. "Hanging out, taking things easy. Doing a lot of reading."
Naruto made a face. "I suppose that's good," he said, clearly of the opinion that it was very boring.
"And playing shogi," I said thoughtfully, struck by a little spark of inspiration.
"Oh yeah?" Naruto perked up. "I haven't played in ages." He folded his arms behind his head. "Can we play the cool way? Please?"
"The cool way?" Shikamaru asked sardonically.
"Let's go outside." I grinned, sliding open the door and stepping out onto the veranda. There was more than enough space in the backyard. "The floor is yours, Naruto."
He clapped his hands together, fingers twisting into a cross seal. There was a surge of chakra, and the yard filled with clones, already arrayed in varied outfits of black and white.
Shikamaru made a sound of surprise.
"Hey," I said, as if it had just occurred to me. "Why don't we add some more rules to keep it interesting?" Naruto was better at it this way, where it was actually people rather than just game pieces, but Shikamaru would still wipe him away. Not only did he know the game inside and out, he also had experience. Shogi was a game with a lot of history, a lot of set plays that you could make and counter.
I could throw a curveball into that.
"We can give the Genin elemental affinities. Then each one can only defeat the affinities that it's advantaged against. Fire beats wind beats lightning beats earth beats water beats fire," I rattled off quickly. "There are only nine of them, though, so two of everything except wind? Because it's so rare in Konoha."
I actually had no idea how this change would impact the game. But it would impact it big time.
"You can't just add rules to shogi," Shikamaru said.
"Can," I replied, very maturely. "Did."
"Hehe, that sounds fun!" Naruto said, and the front row of players altered their transformations so that their headbands showed an element sign rather than the Konoha symbol.
Shikamaru narrowed his eyes at us, and folded his hands into a circle.
The game was on.
It was messy and it was chaotic. Naruto and I played off each other, argued, and occasionally got in the way of move sets the other was planning. Shikamaru plotted and planned, succeeded and was foiled time and time again. The change to the pawns, the genin, really did upset the whole thing quite a bit. His carefully learnt stratagems were obsolete, and he had to adapt to new and changing circumstances, just like we did.
I was quite pleased with that.
"Checkmate," I said, as the last clone moved into place. Naruto punched a fist into the air.
Shikamaru considered the field, eyes sparking. "Again."