Saying 'I don't have time right now; I'll think about it later' was exactly the kind of thing that got me into this mess in the first place. And in some circumstances, it had been the right decision.
It wasn't the right one now, I could see that. Guarding Yakumo was more about being a friend, reintroducing her to Konoha, and being on lookout for the worst case scenario than it was about keeping an exact twenty four hour watch.
That didn't mean I could fix everything now. This wasn't going to be something that I could just decide and do – it was going to require careful management for the rest of my life.
I flopped backwards onto the floor, sprawled out, and listened to Yakumo humming while she painted. I hoped I'd done the right thing for her, even if some of my advice amounted to little more than 'breathe deeply', 'count to ten' and 'evaluate how important it is'. It probably did me good to go over all the lessons I'd been given about being in control and about feeling in control, because they were things that I'd been forgetting to apply.
Stress was a downwards spiral. You stressed, and you stressed about being stressed, and then that gave you more stress… very unproductive.
"Hey, you want to help me with something today?" I asked, rolling my head vaguely in Yakumo's direction.
She looked at me quizzically, apparently a little bemused for my penchant for lying on the floor when there were perfectly acceptable chairs around. I felt like we had skipped the step in our friendship where proper guest behaviour was required though, and I liked to stretch out.
I rolled over, laying a piece of A4 paper on the ground, and kicking my feet into the air behind me. "See, I'm doing some research," I explained. "About people storing chakra into things. Say, if I take a rock and put chakra into it… how much chakra, and how long does it stay, and things like that. And if someone else takes an identical rock and does the same thing, how much changes." Research was only really good if it were repeatable, after all. "Measuring the chakra is no biggy. We already have things that do that. But obviously, there are things that will affect how two different people go about the same exercise, and one of those things is chakra control." And elemental affinity, probably. There were ways to measure that, but chakra paper was expensive and I didn't think my research budget would cover that for everyone involved, but it probably wouldn't be that difficult to come up with a seal that would indicate affinity-
I waved that thought off for later. "I made this seal which should help measure control, but I need people to help me test it," I concluded. "See the Fibonacci Spiral? I've put LED's – Light Emitting Diagrams – at intervals along the spiral, and the closer they get to the center, the more accurate you need to be with your chakra to activate them."
I demonstrated, threading my chakra along the path. The lights lit up, one by one. They weren't especially big or bright, and clustered tightly together as the spiral got smaller. It took a particular twist and curl to get the last ones, but all ten lit up in the end.
That was the problem. I didn't have perfect chakra control. I knew that. But I'd made the seal, and I knew how it worked, and I'd had quite a few repetitions to get it working correctly. Practice made perfect, after all. Which indicated that repeated use would invalidate the results, but that was a hurdle for a later stage.
Yakumo looked intrigued. "And you want me to have a try?"
"Yeah," I said. "If you don't mind. It's not dangerous or anything, and I'm not recording the results. It's just difficult to do myself now. I was wondering if I should make it cover only the top, say, fifty percent of the spectrum instead of the whole thing; it would make it more accurate and the most important part is clearly the top twenty to thirty percent…"
She looked a little lost, but gamely came over to sit beside me.
I withdrew my chakra from the seal, making the lights fade and scooted it over so she could try.
"Oh, I see," Yakumo said, peering into the seal as the lights lit up. "As the spiral gets smaller you have less margin for error."
She got the seventh light easily enough, but the eighth flickered before stabilising. The ninth refused to light.
"So probably somewhere between eighty and ninety percent efficiency," I said. You could calculate for chakra control efficiency – and did for medical jutsu – but as far as I was aware it was more of a theoretical thing than anything. "Of course, it's only really measuring one type of external manipulation, rather than anything inherent…"
"Why is the top thirty percent more important?" Yakumo asked, following what I'd said earlier. She withdrew her chakra from the seal and started again.
"That's the place where most shinobi are going to fall, I think," I said. "Anything below fifty percent is… well, you wouldn't be able to achieve very much. Maybe that's where the Academy students who're just learning would be, but I don't think anyone who actually works with chakra would have control so low."
Naruto had famously low control, but even he was probably not under about seventy percent. He could do the Rasengan. Even if you considered that he could bear a bigger chakra loss than most people, he wouldn't be able to do it at all if his control was truly so bad.
"The people that have the highest control would be the medical ninja, or genjutsu users," I continued. "And at those levels, it would probably be more useful to have a more exact measure."
I took out another paper and used a ruler to divide in the squares that would let me draw a perfect spiral. "If I use ten squares, for twenty percent, each light can be worth a two percent increase…"
As far as seals went? This was really damn simple. The spiral channelled the chakra around, and the LED's were triangles on a line, just like they would be in a circuit diagram. The trickiest part was setting the 'limit' that would require certain values of control to activate, and even that wasn't really difficult. In a way, the seal itself was 'incomplete'. It didn't hold chakra, and it didn't do anything. The LED required constant application of chakra to light up – in effect, you were completing the circuit with your own chakra like closing a switch – rather than running off the natural energy in the air.
Again, when I channelled chakra into it, all ten of the lights lit up. Yakumo got three of them, which meant eighty six percent. Not bad.
"Are you going to test it with others?" she asked, fascinated.
"I'll have to," I said. "I was going to ask Sakura… she has the best control out of our group. Though the more people I ask, the better my results will be."
"Okay, let's go!"
I hadn't meant now but, okay, why not? There was no reason to stay in the mansion all day.
Sakura wasn't at her house, so I waved hello to her parents and we headed off to the hospital instead, where she was in class. We had to wait till that was finished, so I grabbed some dango from a nearby stall and took Yakumo to visit Ranmaru, since he was the only person I knew currently in hospital. We must have been getting better at this ninja thing.
Poor kid looked horribly surprised to see us.
Surprisingly, after an awkward start, the two of them started to bond over being sickly kids and using genjutsu. Huh. I thought about throwing in my own two cents, but I'd never been sick like that.
"Did you do that on purpose?" Yakumo asked, as we left.
"Actually," I admitted. "I had no idea that he was a genjutsu user. Naruto ran into him on a mission a little a while ago, and brought him back to Konoha. I've only met him once. I just thought we could kill a little bit of time while we were waiting for Sakura."
"I see," Yakumo said softly.
I eyed her a little curiously, wondering what it was she saw, but she didn't elaborate.
We hovered in the corridor as the med students trickled past, waiting for that distinctive flash of pink hair.
"Shikako," Sakura said, surprised. She hefted a massive looking textbook on her hip. "What are you doing here?"
"I can't visit a friend?" I asked, hand over my heart.
She snorted. "Okay, now I know you want something."
"Ouch," I said, good naturedly, falling into step beside her as we headed for the gardens. "You got me. I kinda want your help with something."
"I knew it," Sakura said, claiming a picnic table. "It's not the…" her eyes flickered to Yakumo a little nervously. "The technique you gave me last time."
The subterfuge of it amused the hell out of me. Oh, Sakura. "Nah," I said. "Although, have you made any progress on that? Wait, nevermind. This first." If I let myself get distracted, we'd never get back on topic. It had only been a month, anyway; I didn't really expect her to have done much more than thought about it.
I took out the two seals and explained what they were.
"So I just put chakra into them?" she asked, laying a hand on top of the first.
I nodded.
On the first seal, she got nine lights, and frowned.
"Ninety percent is good," I said.
But there was a determined light in her eyes as she laid a hand on the second seal. Right, Sakura was incredibly competitive.
This was either going to be great, or terrible.
One by one, the lights flickered on. Her forehead creased in concentration. Ninety two. Ninety four. Ninety six. Ninety eight.
There was a tiny surge of chakra. Ninety eight flickered and died. She'd tried to brute force it and that was the exact opposite of what you needed to do.
It came back on.
And-
"One hundred percent," I said, shaking my head. "Way to go, Sakura."
She nodded, looking satisfied. And then hesitated. "Is this really accurate?"
"Hard to say," I said evasively. "That's why I'm testing it. But… to the best of my abilities… yes, it is."
"I wonder what the others have…" That competitive gleam returned to her eye.
And somehow, that lead to a whole posse of medical students clustered around our table, trying out the seal, with Sakura presiding over the lot. I faded to the back of the group and observed.
.
.
Afterwards, I took Yakumo to our training grounds to work on some taijutsu.
"Even if it's not your primary method of fighting, it's good to have as a fall back," I said. "It's a good way to build up stamina, and knowing that you can fight if you have to can help you to feel in control."
Which, I didn't need to clarify, was especially important for Yakumo.
She was an eager pupil, I had to give her that. It was only Academy style Shorin-ryu, so it wasn't the most exciting lessons ever, but she didn't complain.
"Maybe we should stop here," I said, once we'd done roughly as much as the Academy teachers would have made us do.
"No," Yakumo protested, but she was panting pretty heavily. "We can continue." She braced her hands against her thighs and gasped for breath. "I just need… to catch my breath."
I was actually a little worried. "Twenty minutes," I said. "Walk around a little to cool down, otherwise your muscles will seize up."
Was I pushing her too hard? She was – or had been – sickly, though I didn't know exactly what that entailed. But physical fitness was a huge part of being a ninja, even if it was just in the travelling. She wouldn't get far if she couldn't run.
I hadn't made a decision either way by the time the twenty minutes were up, but in the end, I didn't have to because Sasuke turned up.
"Really, Shikako?" He asked me, after taking a good long look around the clearing. Mostly, I assumed he meant Yakumo.
"Tsunade-sama gave me the mission," I said in defence of myself. "And we're not sparring. I was showing her some taijutsu."
Sasuke sighed, sounding very put upon. "I've been looking for you," he said. "We need to practice."
I blinked at him. "Practice what?"
"Blind fighting."
He wasn't wrong. We'd been seriously caught off guard by Genno and his flash bomb, and even before that fighting at night had put us at a disadvantage.
"I'm kind of on a mission..." I trailed off. "You could start training and I'll catch up later?"
"Lee already knows," Sasuke said, crossing his arms. His pride probably drew the line at getting totally kicked around in the name of training. Mine did, unless there was no other option.
It made sense, that Lee was already experienced, if Gai-sensei was training him to fight against Sharingan. And if Lee could, then Tenten was probably a little trained too, and good luck ever blinding the Byakugan. And that probably applied to Hinata too, and Kiba and Shino had clan advantages with other senses. So the only teams that had problems were us and team ten…
I grimaced.
"Hey, Yakumo, wanna see something cool?" I asked.
Sasuke helpfully held a bandanna out towards me. He'd planned this. Jerk. For himself, he simply retied his headband lower, across his eyes.
I waited for Yakumo to take a seat near the posts, so we didn't accidentally run into her, and put on the blindfold.
"Taijutsu only," I warned. "Otherwise we'll damage ourselves."
Sasuke grunted in confirmation. Then his chakra rushed forward, straight at me.
I closed my eyes and focused on it. Feeling it get closer and closer.
I dodged to the side. Lashed out with a kick. But he must have anticipated? Because he twisted and, instead of slamming into his side, it connected solidly with his elbow.
I wasn't sure which of us yelped louder.
Oh boy. This was going to be so great.
I staggered back a pace or two, mood unhelped by the sound of soft giggling from Yakumo's direction.
It didn't really get any better from there.
.
.
By the time I got home, I mostly just wanted a shower and to sleep.
But the instant I walked through the front door, I knew it wasn't to be. The house was dark. Neither mum nor Shikamaru were home. But Kofuku-oba was sitting at the table, drinking a cup of green tea, despite the late hour.
I felt unease creeping up my spine, the beat of my heart starting to pick up in anticipation, nerves jangling tightly with the sheer abnormality of it.
This was out of the ordinary. It couldn't mean anything good.
And that was before she opened her mouth.
"Shikako Nara. You are in so much trouble."
I gaped. "What?"
She didn't look like she was kidding either. There was a tight pinch to the corners of her mouth.
"What for?" I swallowed. My mind raced. Why? Because I could think of a whole lot of things that I had done – things that I knew – that could get me in trouble, but the kind of trouble that would come from those things wasn't the kind that ended with a quiet talk in my own house.
No. If it were those things then I'd know.
Something to do with the Nara Research and Development, clearly, if Kofuku-oba was the one here. But what? I'd barely done anything with them at all. There was a scroll on the table and she motioned at it. Hesitantly, I padded forward, feeling unreal in the utter stillness of the house, to unroll it.
It was stamped with the official mark of the tower. My trepidation rose. Looking at Kofuku-oba gave exactly no reassurance.
Holy shit. It's an official reprimand. I read on, eyes widening. That was bad news. That was the kind of thing that went on your permanent record, and led to fines, restrictions or friggin court martial.
And it had my name on it.
I swallowed.
"What were you thinking?" Kofuku-oba's voice cracked. "Testing seals on Konoha shinobi!"
"I wasn't!" I protested immediately, because it sounded so bad when she said it like that. "I didn't!" Panic was clawing at my chest, squeezing my heart. I gripped the scroll tightly, the words on it hammering into my mind with their severity.
"Then explain this to me!" She actually slapped the table. "If this is how you act, then I will ban you from the department and bar you from the libraries. This is not a game, and these are not toys! There are laws against this for a reason! Do you understand the damage you've done to the clan? The kind of penalties we'll face from the village for this?"
"I didn't!" I said, wide-eyed and almost panicked, under the barrage of condemnation. "It doesn't even do anything! I just wanted Sakura to see it."
"Explain," Kofuku-oba ordered, thankfully halting in her lecture and letting me actually do so.
I pulled out the seals, showed them, explained what they did and what had happened. It was those fucking medical students that had got me in trouble – and they'd been the ones who wanted to try it out. So eager to compare their scores against each other.
"We need to get this registered, now," Kofuku-oba decided. "That'll eliminate the problem of it being untested… but you cannot do this again, do you understand? I don't care if your friends agree – any seals you want to test on anyone other than yourself? You do through the official channels. At least that way we can cover you if things go wrong."
"Yes, oba-san," I said meekly, eyes down, shoulders hunched; the perfect appearance of submission. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," she said grimly. "We have a long night ahead of us."
She was right. She dragged me out of the house, to the main R&D office, and dropped a stack of paperwork in front of me.
"Fill that out. I have damage control to run," she said briskly. "And don't even think about going anywhere."
I didn't. I felt like I was physically bound in place by the weight of disappointment and disapproval. I could barely breathe with it. And when I lifted my hand to grasp the pen, it shook like I was coming down off an adrenaline high.
I swallowed, and began to fill out the papers. There were problems almost immediately – it was clear they were designed with the main pharmaceutical staple of the clan in mind, all the terminology geared towards drugs, and did not crossover well to seals.
Name? I penned in 'Chakra Control Measurement Gauge Seal' then wanted to cross it out because it was needlessly complicated and redundant but didn't because I only had one copy of the form and didn't want to make a mess.
I didn't want to do anything that would make Kofuku-oba more upset at me.
But the contents were only paper and chakra ink, and that meant I couldn't answer the next three questions or provide supporting documentation as to their purity. It wasn't a pharmaceutical product. It was just ink. Just paper.
I spent close to an hour filling it out, thinking and rethinking my answers and nearly gnawing my lip right through out of nervous biting.
"I've rounded up several ninja who are willing to assess and vouch for your seal," Kofuku-oba said, appearing out of the hallway and snapping up the papers. "You're going to owe them very large favours for the foreseeable future. Come."
I scrambled after her.
I was a little relieved to see that Takatori was one of them, even if I didn't especially want him to also be disappointed. The others, I didn't really know personally. Ryosen Nara, who worked in Analytics. Todai Nara who did something relating to quality control approval.
"Is this the seal?" Ryosen asked immediately. "Is it accurate? How much chakra does it take to run? Can it be mass produced? Is the scale consistent from person to person? What's the margin of error? How much does individual repeatability vary?"
"More importantly," Takatori said. "Is it safe? What's the output? What's the input and where does the difference go? What happens if it gets overloaded?"
I wilted back under the barrage of focused questioning. "Umm," I said, intelligently, holding the seal almost like a shield in front of me. No one came to my rescue.
I decided to focus on Takatori's questions first, which sounded, at the heart of it, more important.
"The output of the seal is ten points of blue light, that is electromagnetic waves of approximately 500 nanometers and about the same intensity as a single candle," I started, clearing my throat.
I had a feeling this was going to take a while.
I was right. Once they ran out of questions for me – and that took a long while – then we moved into testing the seal. Firstly they wanted to prove that it was safe, which, okay, fine, and measure the chakra input and output and the intensity of the light and I had to draw up about ten identical seals for repeatability testing. Then there were more questions and more testing, and by the end of it, I was mostly just following commands on autopilot.
"Form and function are both very simple," Ryosen said, eventually. "The ability to accurately and easily measure chakra control of test subjects will come in extremely handy for large survey groups, especially as the seal is reusable and reproducible. Medical might find it useful as well." She nodded. "I'll sign off on it."
"It passes the safety tests," Takatori said, covering a yawn.
"I'm not happy with the rush testing," Todai said, crossing his arms. "I'll sign, but I'm putting a month long sale restriction on it – I want a full test completed before we even think about producing these."
Kofuku nodded crisply. "That's fair. I'll get the paperwork completed and submitted to the Hokage's office in response to their complaint. Thank you all for your time." She dropped a hand to my shoulder and gripped. "Come along, Shikako. You aren't finished yet. I want a proposal for intended uses, benefits and advantages of this seal."
My eyes flicked to the clock. "I have a mission in the morning."
Her voice was unyielding. "Then you had better write quickly."
I hunched over the desk, sullenly filling pages with bullshit explanations on the 'real world applications' on a seal that had taken me no more than an idle thought to design. Ryosen had provided more than a few potential uses in her own field, and had seemed legitimately interested in the field, so that was something.
But the more I considered the situation, the more it burnt.
Everything I'd done, the secrets I held, the decisions I'd made in the field – and this was the thing that got me punished?
It was ridiculous.
I stretched by arms above my head and bent backwards until my spine cracked. The clock told me that it was nearly four o'clock in the morning, which meant I wasn't getting any sleep tonight no matter what.
I bared my teeth in a move that no one would mistake for a smile, and found my original proposal for the chakra stone project. Then, with lines of my pen so savage that the nib scored holes in the paper, lined the whole thing out.
'Amendment to Proposal SN-012610-01' I penned neatly, at the top of a new page. And then proceeded to outline a study into chakra matrixes that was completely divorced from the idea of user variance and thus required no fucking chakra control analysis.
If I could do it, and no one else could, fine. Great. Fantastic even.
Clearly no one wanted it anyway.
"You don't have to re-design that now," Takatori said, leaning against the door. "Kofuku-oba isn't that angry. She was just worried and trying to get enough paperwork together to prove your case. She is fighting this on your behalf."
I shrugged stiffly, not looking up at him. "I'm minimising the chances of a repeat occurrence by eliminating the need for outside participants."
"Oh. I see," Takatori said, sounding far too shrewd and knowing. "This isn't about appeasing anyone at all. This is about tanking the seal that got you in trouble so that it never sees the light of day and no one ever benefits from it at all. That's a little petty, Shikako-chan."
I couldn't stop the reflexive flinch of my shoulders. I refused to look up at him.
"You know that you won't be allowed to work on anything outside the scope of your project until you can prove trustworthy again. And that, if there's no one to take charge and pushing it through the testing, that seal will just linger indefinitely in quarantine." He plucked the proposal off my desk and skimmed it. "And that if it ever did get to the point of sale, the hospital would probably be a big purchaser. My, my. No one quite does passive-aggressive like a Nara."
I said nothing.
"Ryosen will be disappointed," he added lightly. "She's already quite excited about the possibilities of adding it to her population surveys. Something about kicking the myth of kunoichi being better at control?"
I didn't rise to that bait either.
He sighed. The paper fluttered back to the desk, and his hand landed heavy but friendly on my head. "It's not the end of the world kid," he said kindly, fluffing my hair. "We all fuck up sometimes."
My throat closed, leaving me speechless. I wasn't sure what I would have said, if it hadn't, but I doubted it would have been pretty.
That wasn't the point.
When I'd fucked up, I'd gotten myself killed. This wasn't a fuck up. This wasn't anything. It meant nothing, it did nothing, and it was so fucking unfair.
I breathed in through my nose, muscles so tense that they shook.
"Get some rest," Takatori said gently. "It'll look better in the morning."
.
.
I didn't get sleep, and it didn't look better in the morning.
I washed my face in the office bathroom, combing wet fingers through my hair and trying to look a little less like how I felt. It would do no good to show up at Yakumo's like that.
It felt like it took herculean effort to straighten my shoulders, and smooth my face into something that looked calm and happy.
Good enough.
"Good morning," I said to Yakumo, voice carefully bright but not chirpy.
She smiled in return, not appearing to notice anything out of the ordinary. "Good morning."
I felt myself relax a fraction. "Did you have plans for today?"
Yakumo shrugged. "Could we do some more training?" She asked. "I promise I'll try harder."
"Of course," I said. "I think I can come up with something."