"Hey, Naruto," I asked, at our next team training. "Do you think you could teach us the Shadow Clone Jutsu?"
I'd seen it done often enough – felt it done, when I'd been trying to help him with summoning jutsu – that I thought I could probably do it myself. And Sasuke had almost certainly copied it at one point or the other. But it was politer to ask.
"Sure!" Naruto agreed. Then he hesitated. "It takes a lot of chakra, though…"
"I know," I said. "But I'm pretty sure if we only make one, then we'll be fine." Half our chakra to the clone, plus the initial jutsu cost… Sasuke would be fine for sure. He probably would have been fine all along – shadow clone wasn't more intensive than chidori. Me? I'd felt how much it had taken Naruto to use it, and as long as I wasn't much worse than that (and I didn't think I would be, honestly) then I'd be fine too. It was unlikely to be a staple of my combat jutsu's, but I could think of many benefits to being in two places at once.
"Okay," Naruto agreed. "Uhm. Well the hand seal is like this… and you just kind of let the chakra go." His hands twisted with familiarity, and a second Naruto appeared with ease. "It's a really easy jutsu. I don't know what else to say."
It probably wasn't teaching on a very grand level, and probably wouldn't have worked if we hadn't known how already… but it was good enough.
"It has to be easy if you can do it," Sasuke scoffed. But I noticed his Sharingan was on, and he looked focused and intent as he made the hand seal. There was a slightly messy puff of chakra smoke, and then there were two Sasuke blinking at each other.
"Awesome!" Naruto cheered. "Now you do it, Shikako!"
I nodded. "Alright, here goes." The hardest part was just letting the jutsu take my chakra and not trying to manipulate it and control it… but it worked.
The sudden loss of so much chakra was disorientating, and so was the appearance of the clone. She looked…
Well. Obviously she looked like me. But you know, normally? You never see your own face. You see reflections, and pictures, but never yourself in 3d, and that's different. You look different.
If I'd walked past her on the street, I probably would have assumed she was one of my cousins – not that she was me.
"This is so weird," we both said, in unison.
I winced. Was that really what my voice sounded like? That was terrible.
It was also interesting that she clearly had my chakra, not her own. But it was… discrete and separate. I tried to reach out and manipulate it, like I might chakra in any other jutsu.
She shivered and made a face. "Don't do that."
"So how do you dispel them?" Sasuke asked.
"They can do it themselves," Naruto said. "Or you just stop the jutsu like this, and all the clones will dispel." He did something, and yes, actually, I could feel the way that the jutsu was still running. It didn't need constant attention and maintenance, like transformation, but it wasn't finished after you created the clones.
Well obviously not. The memory transfer function tended to indicate that.
"You want to…" I asked my clone.
She shrugged, but pressed her hands together. "Dispel." I had a sense of chakra rushing towards me –
And I blinked up at the blue sky.
" – medic over here as fast as possible. Tell them it was a training accident," Sasuke said rapidly, voice flat and controlled. He was kneeling beside me, looking across at someone. Naruto.
I reached up and grabbed his shoulder. "Wait," I rasped. "I'm fine. There's no need."
"Shikako-chan!" Naruto exclaimed. He dropped down on my other side in a flurry of movement. "Are you hurt? What happened? You just fell over!"
I tried to sit up. Sasuke's hands on my shoulders very firmly pressed me back down again.
I sighed. Everything ached. It kind of felt like I had been slammed by a truck. A truck made of chakra that wanted to go through me.
My chakra had returned. But I hadn't been… ready for it. It had wanted to go into my coils, and they'd been full and unprepared to expand. It had fit, but I felt stretched tight, my skin pulling up goosebumps, and jittery.
"I felt my chakra come back," I said. "It took me by surprise."
"Surprise," Sasuke repeated flatly. Yeah, okay, 'surprise' was a weak descriptor for something that made you pass out. Faint. Faint with surprise. Oh, man, I hope they didn't tell this story to everyone.
"I wasn't ready for it," I said. "It'll be better next time."
Sasuke didn't look like he agreed. "I still think you should see a medic."
I really did not want to see a medic. The amount of time I'd spent in the hospital was ludicrous. And they were going to start to think I just couldn't take care of myself.
"It's fine," I insisted. "They'll just tell you it was my hypersensitivity anyway." Because I had a diagnosis that would explain this – sort of – and that would be the easiest conclusion to jump to. "If you really insist, then we can send for Sakura."
Naruto brightened, but Sasuke did not. "She's not fully trained," he argued, but it was weak. I was fairly confident that I had won.
He didn't protest when I sat up this time.
"I didn't think it would hurt you," Naruto said lowly.
"I'm not hurt," I said, quickly. "It just felt strange, that was all. I wasn't expecting it." I pushed myself to my feet and hid the fact that I felt a little shaky. "See? Perfectly fine."
Sasuke shrugged, but didn't rise. "Why don't you tell us more about what the jutsu does?" he suggested to Naruto. "We can practice another day."
That was a good suggestion. The idea of trying to repeat the shadow clone jutsu right now had dread curling in my stomach. I just knew it was going to hurt.
This jutsu was probably going to be beyond me, unless I could find some way to control the return of the chakra afterwards. Which was a real pain, because it could have been so useful.
"Okay," Naruto said. "Well, you know about the memory stuff, right? Oh, but if you don't want to make a whole clone to send it, then you can just make the memory into a clone and dispel that."
I blinked. "What."
"Like…" Naruto searched for words. "You just stop the jutsu before it actually makes a clone? But it still forms and dispels, so you can still pass information along." He nodded. "Yeah. That's it."
He might have described it as simple but that was definitely high level chakra manipulation. I was pretty sure that even counted as mastery of the jutsu.
Naruto really was the most unpredictable ninja.
"You idiot," Sasuke said. It almost sounded fond. "You don't even see why that's impossible, do you?"
.
.
"There you are," Ino said. "I've been looking for you."
I blinked at her. There was a small lizard – less than the size of my hand – perched on her shoulder. A chameleon. One of her new summons, almost certainly. It was completely still and unmoving, like a little ornament. Or a toy.
She also had a purple aster tucked into her hair, which was a habit I was starting to notice more and more with her. If it wasn't an actual flower, it was a clip, or hair tie… some kind of decoration. And I knew Ino liked flowers, but she hadn't always felt the need to dress like it. To have a constant reminder of the fact.
I wondered if I was reading too deeply into that.
"I'm at home," I said. "Where else would I be?"
"That's my question," she shot back, hands on hips. "You're so busy these days."
I tucked my pen into the pages of my notebook and set it down on the veranda beside me. "I guess I can't argue with that," I admitted. "But it looks like you've been pretty busy yourself." I made a vague motion to the chameleon on her shoulder.
Ino dropped down to sit beside me. "It's a work in progress," she admitted. "I'm negotiating with them. Apparently signing the scroll in the middle of combat isn't how it's typically done."
"Who would have thought?" I said dryly.
She smirked. "Exactly. They're a bit wary." She didn't seem too upset by it, and the fact that there was a summon clinging to her shoulder meant that it couldn't be going too badly. "They were really loyal to Kubisaki, you know? Even at the end there…"
Staying for fifty years, for a man that was already dead? Carrying out his dying wish? Yeah, they'd been loyal. That was good if she could win them over, but not so good if she couldn't.
"But it's going well?" I asked.
She smiled. "Yeah. This little guy is a Watcher. I agreed to keep him with me for a few days, so he can see where I live. The kind of person I am. That kind of thing."
A show of trust. The Watcher wasn't a combat summons, so it was unlikely to turn on her by itself, but I of all people knew the value of information. If they decided that they didn't want Ino as their summoner… well… There wasn't that much they could do with it without another one – as far as I knew – but it was still something to hold over her head.
Ino probably knew that too. But at some point, you had to take the risk and give trust in order to get it back.
"Ah," I said. "Much further to go?"
"A little," she said. "I was going to go see Sakura and Isaribi next."
The name rang a bell, but it took me a few minutes to place it. Isaribi was the girl that Ino and Naruto had brought home from the Land of Sea, who I suspected had been part of some of Orochimaru's experiments.
"I haven't seen Sakura in a while," I offered. "I'll come with you."
It meant taking a trip to the hospital, but at least it was as a visitor, not a patient. I'd take what I could get.
We decided to stop by and see Isaribi first, which turned out to be a good choice. Sakura was there, after all, and she wasn't the only one, either. Even though Isaribi had a little hotel-esque room all to herself, it was a little crowded.
"I hope we aren't interrupting," Ino said, knocking gently on the open door.
"Only slightly," Anko drawled. She leant against the wall and tucked her hands into her pockets.
"No, not at all!" Yakumo countered, clapping her hands together in excitement. "Anko-sensei was just saying that Isaribi is going to start training with me. Now we only need one more person for a proper team!"
That explains why she's here, I thought, because Sakura worked here, so her I could understand, and Anko had been the leader of the team that brought her back, but Yakumo had no connection.
She looked thrilled at the news. The girl that could only be Isaribi looked slightly less so, eyes down, fingers fidgeting with the fabric of her pants. She was dark haired and dark eyed, but wearing bandages across her face and shoulder. That was barely worth mentioning as far as ninja fashion went, even less so when the person in question was actually in a hospital.
"That sounds great," Ino said. "What do you think?" She perched herself on the bed next to Isaribi.
I hovered awkwardly around the edge of the room, next to Sakura. I hoped she wasn't too upset to see Isaribi being folded into a ninja team, when she herself hadn't made the cut. The circumstances were different, and I suspected that Anko was going to be doing a lot more supervision than training, as she was doing with Yakumo.
It wasn't actually a bad set up. As with Yakumo, Anko had a lot of skills that made her ideal for helping to integrate someone that had been on the bad side of Orochimaru's experiments. If Isaribi really did want to be a ninja, then it was killing two birds with one stone.
"So, ah," I said to Sakura awkwardly, seeing that Ino had already made herself the centre of attention. "Had much time for training?"
"A little," Sakura said, tucking her bangs behind her ear. "I've been working on the, uhm. The thing you gave me." She darted a glance at Anko, which. Didn't so much avoid suspicion as the complete opposite. Nothing quite got a ninja's attention like people with secrets.
I made a humming noise. "Working on it theoretically or 'working on it' working on it?"
"Both," Sakura said, surprising me. "I mean, I redid some of the theory according to medical ninjutsu… I'll show you it later. It's at home."
"Sounds good," I said.
Sakura rubbed at the knuckles on one hand. I noticed they were slightly… pinkish, as though the skin had been damaged and healed. "It's a work in progress," she admitted.
I huffed a laugh, and made a mental note to get her some gloves or something. "Everything is," I said. "Don't feel too bad. The last time I tried to learn a new jutsu I knocked myself out. If you're doing better than that, then you're fine."
Sakura spluttered, halfway between shock and laughter. "You did not."
I grinned. "You think I'd make that up?"
"Probably not," she allowed and rolled her eyes. "You're ridiculous."
.
.
I sat very quietly, and very still, under Kasuga's eye, and practiced bending my shadow to my will. I wasn't doing anything particularly advanced or new – just exercises I'd done more than a thousand times before.
Yet for some reason, he was watching with an intently focused look.
"And how are your other exercises going?" he asked, eventually.
I paused. Oh. Right. "I haven't had any problems since," I said.
It wasn't even a lie. I'd just changed my definition of 'problem'. Being able to separate myself into two wasn't a problem as long as I could control it.
It was a technique. Nothing more. Nothing less.
"Is that so," Kasuga said, and it was less a question than a statement.
I smiled at him, the expression as open as I could make it when I was being less than truthful. "I panicked before," I said. "In hindsight, the situation seems much less dire than I thought it to be."
The look he gave me was assessing and piercing.
I went back to my exercise, splaying shadow tendrils on the ground around me. In my own practices with the stone, I'd learnt that the chakra imbued-and-retrieved in it came out thicker and darker than any of my own truly was – as though it was purified to some perfect level of shadow jutsu. It could turn me to shadow, yes, but I could also use it as chakra for my jutsu and they would be stronger for it. But the imbuing took time, so I wasn't content to simply add that step to any use of my jutsu in combat. It would be too much of a liability.
I'd used it instead as a baseline - a comparison - to help strengthen my own chakra, holding it in one hand and continuing with the path dad had shown us to strength our shadow affinities, trying to match that level with my own abilities.
Not something I could do under the watchful eye of Kasuga, given that I couldn't explain where the Gelel stone came from, but ironically, the stone itself provided a safeguard against falling into the black.
If I went too far, stretched myself too fast… then I lost the balance in imbuing the stone and would simply transform into shadow.
It was almost difficult to remember how frightened I had been the first time that had happened, when now it was so reassuring.
"You have progressed… significantly," Kasuga said, the words weighty.
I threaded six tendrils through the loops of six kunai and lifted them into the air. One jerked higher than the others, the kunai slipping loose, until I made a last minute correction and turned the tip of the tendril into a hook.
Sloppy.
It was hard to exert pressure when you couldn't feel anything in response. Or not nothing. But the feeling I got through my shadow was very vague. Being able to judge how hard to pull or push was simply a matter of experience here.
I spread my fingers out, then slowly turned my hands over. The shadow tendrils curled over, an orbital ballet, the kunai swinging around. One came too close to my arms. They were blunt training ones, thankfully, but it still showed a lack of precision that annoyed me.
"Thank you," I said, too much of my attention focused on my training to try and guess whether or not that had truly been a compliment.
I looped the tendrils around, rotating them in a circle around my body, moving them right from the base where they touched the ground. Too often I treated them like arms, fixed at a point, but they were not. The bottom was as free to move as the top.
I could feel the strain of it now, tension creeping between my shoulder blades, as they took more and more concentration to control. Mental fatigue and nothing more, though the chakra cost itself was nothing to sneeze at.
I breathed carefully, in and out, and drew forth a seventh tendril from the ground, reaching it up to circle around and loop through the hooks of all six kunai. Then, one by one, I withdrew the others, until it was the only one remaining, and brought my kunai back to the ground.
"Kai," I said, tiredly. The metal clattered in the dirt.
I flexed my shoulders and rubbed at the back of my neck where the tension had built up. I nearly had it. But nearly was not good enough.
"Do it again," Kasuga said.
I ran through the seals. "Shadow Stitching Jutsu."