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The radio crackled in Shikamaru’s eat as he watched the dots that represented his teammates blip slowly across the GPS screen.
“ Akamaru’s hot on a trail, ” Kiba said, his voice crackly through the radio system. “ I think he might have found something big. We might might be into something this time!”
“Good work, Kiba,” Shikamaru murmured indistinctly, following the officer’s dot in the screen. “How close, do you think?”
“ It’s impossible to tell right now, but based on how Akamaru’s acting, it’s either really big or it’s all over this entire shipping yard.”
“ Which is much more likely,” Naruto muttered. “ When is this going to be over? I just want to run in and beat up some bad guys! ”
“ Because we all know how well it turned out the last time you tried that .” Sasuke sighed mockingly down the line. “ But then again, what can you expect from an idiot?”
“What did you say about me, bastard!?”
With a grimace, Shikamaru cut in, muting their chatter. “Focus, guys. Orochimaru has gotten away from us twice before. We need to nail him this time, and that means no infighting.”
“ Sorry, Shikamaru.”
“He’s crossing his fingers.”
“Oi, bastard! No, I’m not!”
With a sigh, Shikamaru pushed his mic away from his face and pulled one of the ear cups on his headphones away from his head. “Remind me again why I have the most infantile team in the entire precinct?”
“Because you’re a rookie, and so are they,” Asuma answered from his seat next to Shikamaru, taking a drag from his cigarette. “Also because you’re the only one who can keep them in line, but that’s unofficial. You didn’t hear it from me and don’t let it go to your head.”
Shikamaru barely hid a smile from his mentor, letting the smell of smoke roll over him. Technically, the older officer wasn’t supposed to be smoking in the back of the van that hid their surveillance equipment, but no one had ever ratted him out. “Didn’t hear what from you?”
“That’s my boy.”
“ Uh, Shikamaru, something’s not right here. ”
Shikamaru instantly righted his headset. “Report, Inuzuka. What’s wrong?”
“ Akamaru’s been following something pretty steady, but he’s suddenly gone stiff. He won’t go any further.”
“Where are you? What’s around you?”
“ We’re two hundred feet inside the fence, about a quarter mile from the gate, and hidden between a few of the shipping containers, ” Sasuke interjected. “ Naruto and I are flanking. ”
“ We’ve got him covered, but- ” Naturo managed to get out before he was cut off by a loud noise.
A gunshot suddenly cracked through Shikamaru’s headset, impossible to pinpoint in location because it was equally as loud in all three lines he was receiving. A sound of yells and rustling cloth shocked his ears before all three lines simultaneously went dead, leaving him with nothing but static.
On the screen before him, the three dots that had once represented their teammates vanished before reappearing all at different points on the map, moving far more rapidly than should have been humanly possible. In the split second it took for Shikamaru’s jaw to drop open, his analytical mind calculated all the reasons for the monitor's strange behavior and each probable outcome, moving before his body had a chance to catch up. In one smooth manuveur, he tacked his mentor out of his chair and through the doors at the end of the van, using his momentum to roll them twenty feet away from the van before they came to a stop.
“What’s gotten into you-?” Asuma yelled, but Shikamaru only pressed himself flatter to the ground, his hands coming up to cover his ears.
“Get down!”
In the silent second that followed, Shikamaru almost doubted his lightening fast mind’s split-second calculations. But then the van exploded, sending a plume of fire into the air that would have melted the flesh off their bones had they still been inside and expelling twisted hunks of metal in every direction. Miraculously, most of the shrapnel thudded around Shikamaru’s tall prone form, but he heard a grunt from next to him and when he looked up, he saw that Asuma was pushing himself into a sitting position, nursing a bleeding shoulder with a twisted screw sticking out of a place metal should never be.
“Asuma!” Shikamaru gasped, instantly going to his mentor’s side. “It didn’t pierce any major arteries, thank goodness, but you’re going to need medical attention for that very soon. Don’t try to take it out yourself. It’s best if you leave it in for now because it’s blocking a lot of the bleeding.”
“Probably could have figured most of that out for myself,” Asume grunted. “What I can’t figure out is how you knew that was going to happen. Care to elaborate?”
“Our feed was cut, and the GPS was being messed with,” Shikamaru said quickly, ripping off a piece of his mentor’s shirt to tie around his shoulder, giving the wound a little bit of pressure. “That meant either our communications had been shorted somehow or that the van itself had been hacked. I’d heard something underneath the van earlier but dismissed it as an animal. It was a higher probability that the van had been hacked for multiple reasons, though not by very much, so I acted.”
“You never cease to amaze me,” Asuma said with a shake of his head, wincing when Shikamaru tightened the makeshift bandage. “You’ll have to explain to me those details of your reasoning.”
“Later.” Shikamaru glanced around them, trying not to let his nervousness show in case they were being watched. “There’s a good chance someone will drop by soon to make sure we didn’t survive that little present. We need to get out of here.”
He stood and tried to pull Asuma up after him, but his mentor just pushed his hands away. “No. Leave me here.”
“But, sir, you’re injured and-”
“That’s an order, Nara,” Asuma snapped, the rare look of authority on his face quelling any further arguments. “Go find your team. I’ll call for backup from here- and an ambulance. God knows we’ll be lucky if I’m the only one who’s going to ride away in it after this.”
It took Shikamaru only a second to decide. By leaving the injured Asuma alone in the aftermath of what clearly had been a trap, his chances of survival dwindled down close to - but not quite - zero. But, on the flip side of that coin, the chances of his team’s survival quadrupled.
The sound of machine gun fire ripped through the abandoned shipping yard, and Shikamaru winced, knocking the figure down to only triple of what it had been before.
He only took a second to glance back at his injured mentor. “You owe me a smoke and a game of chess when this is over.”
Asuma gave him a smile. “I think that’s my line.”
“No. It’s motivation for you to survive.” And then Shikamaru took off into the darkness, heading to where his team had last radioed him their position.
☽☾
His gun raised and ready to fire, Shikamaru crept around the shipping containers that littered the otherwise empty courtyard several miles long and even more miles wide. Most of the containers, they had learned from their intelligence, were either empty or had various traps set to spring on anyone who tried to open them. Only a few out of this entire yard - at most five - held the stash of the potent new drug that had been flooding the market and bringing people to the hospital in thousands. The drug Shikamaru and his team had spent the past four months tracking down until they had traced it all back to one supplier and one location: the thus-far untouchable drug lord Orochimaru and this very yard of shipping containers.
The drug had been nicknamed Fairy Dust for its unpleasant side effect of tricking people into thinking that they had wings and convincing them to jump off tall structures while they were high. Luckily, most of them were only coherent enough to stumble to the top of the slide at the nearest playground or out the second story window of a building if they were feeling particularly ambitious, but Shikamaru and his team had no way of knowing how many of the recent spike in suicides by jumping off the tops of buildings were real and how many were Fairy Dust victims.
Once the crime lab had analyzed a sample of the drug that had been confiscated from a hospitalized user, they had been able to determine that it was just regular old cocaine, except with a little something extra added to the mix. What that something extra was, however, they had been unable to figure out as of yet. They had been able to isolate it and even figure out its chemical makeup and structure, but all efforts thus far to replicate it, or even determine any naturally-occurring sources, had been a bust.
Whatever it was, it made Fairy Dust extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than regular cocaine. The unknown substance changed how the drug interacted with a human’s brain, making it far more potent. A normal person could take several doses of cocaine over a time period and not develop a chemical dependency, but one hit of Fairy Dust had a druggie strung out with painful withdrawal symptoms within a week. Add that surefire way of getting a repeat customer to the particular high caused by Fairy Dust that usually led to people flapping their arms midair as if they were wings, and the new drug quickly became one of the most dangerous - and most lucrative - ones on the market.
Which was why Shikamaru’s team had received the order to track down its source and cut it off. So far, everything they had come up against had been straw men and diversions from the real operation, but tonight they were sure they were closing in, and the events that had transpired only served to further that surety. Orochimaru could feel that they were closing in on him but he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. And if it was a fight he was looking for, it was a fight Shikamaru’s team would give him.
Shikamaru’s footsteps slowed to a crawl as he approached the area he had last received signals from his men. A few minutes back, floodlights had started to sweep the area and he carefully avoided them, ducking around corners just in time to prevent himself from being illuminated. Despite how much they slowed his progress, Shikamaru was actually grateful for them, because it meant that their enemies were searching for someone. He could only hope that that ‘someone’ was actually multiple someones and not just him, and the rest of his team was still out there.
Ducking to avoid another floodlight, Shikamaru kept his eyes trained firmly on the ground in front of him, but they widened when the light illuminated something he hadn’t noticed in the dark before: churned up earth and blood soaked into it. There were no bodies, which mean that either his men had escaped or Orochimaru’s minions had taken them alive. Either way, they weren’t dead, so Shikamaru allowed a little bit of the tension to drain from his shoulders.
At a nearby sound, though, he tensed again, his finger curling more firmly around the trigger of his gun. Had he missed something during the initial sweep of the area? Then his gaze refocused closer towards the ground, and he saw the tip of a snout sticking out from behind a nearby shipping container.
“Akamaru,” he whispered, and at the sound of his name the dog perked his ears up, peeking a little further around the edge of the metal container.
A floodlight swept towards them, so Shikamaru quickly ducked into the hiding spot with the dog, who weakly licked at the back of his hand. A cursory glance told Shikamaru that he was uninjured, but his training had been that if his Master ever left him somewhere, he was to stay there until someone came for him. Meaning that this was the right spot and Kiba had managed to hide his dog before the fighting started.
Not that that would help him track down his team. With a sigh, Shikamaru ruffled Akamaru’s ears. “Where’s your Master, huh, boy? Where did he go?”
Akamaru’s ears perked up, and he jumped to his feet, his nose pointing down a nearby alley as if he understood Shikamaru’s question.
“Well, now,” Shikamaru mused. “You are a good tracker. Can you find him?”
Akamaru only pointed more forcefully.
“Haven’t got anything to lose,” Shikamaru sighed as he took ahold of the drug-sniffing dog’s collar and was immediately pulled forward so hard it almost dislocated his elbow.
Doing his best to calm the hyper dog into moving at a stealthier pace, Shikamaru followed the dog’s nose across the compound until Akamaru came to an abrupt and sudden stop, almost causing him to trip over his small frame. Looking up eagerly, Shikamaru expected to find Kiba, or at the very least one of his teammates, but all he saw was another nondescript shipping container, exactly the same as all the other shipping containers in the yard.
With a frown, Shikamaru leaned down to pat the dog’s neck. “What is it, boy? Is he in there? Is your Master in there?”
At the word Master , Akamaru snapped to attention again, whining and pawing at the corner of the shipping container. His eyebrows creasing, Shikamaru leaned down to see what he had been looking at. Pushing aside the grass, he found nothing, but when he withdrew his hand, he saw that his fingers were covered in a fine powder.
His eyes widening, Shikamaru quickly wiped the drug off his hand and back onto the grass, careful not to get any near his face. Sighing, he scratched behind Akamaru’s ears.
“Right. You’re a drug-sniffing dog, not search and rescue. I bet you don’t even know how to find Kiba, do you?”
Akamaru stiffened again at his words, though this time it was the phrase find Kiba , and before Shikamaru had a chance to grab ahold of his collar he took off into the night. Unwilling to shout after him and risk giving away his location, Shikamaru sighed and watched him go.
Well, at least he’d found a shipping container had the Fairy Dust in it, though it might only be one of several. It looked identical to every single other shipping container in the yard, though, so if he wanted to find it again later after he found his team he had to mark it. Shikamaru drew a Sharpie out of his pocket and slashed a giant X across the front of the metal container in black ink that stood out even in the faint moonlight. Now he’d be able to find it again.
Just as he was about to walk away and resume the search for his companions, Shikamaru heard something from inside the shipping container that made his blood run cold and his heart stop: the sound of metal against metal. Were there guards inside the container itself, guns trained on the door to shoot anyone who was foolish enough to try to open it? Shikamaru internally cursed himself; if there was anyone inside the shipping container, they had already heard Shikamaru talking to Akamaru and so knew he was there. He couldn’t turn his back and walk away now, otherwise he’d be presenting a prime target and all the shooter would have to do is crack open the door and blow his head off.
There really was only one logical option, despite how illogical it was. Holding his breath, Shikamaru took several deliberately loud steps away from the shipping container before padding back as silently as a ghost in the darkness, gun drawn and aimed at the container door. There was no lock on the outside and the whole thing looked ready to fall apart at the seams from rust degradation, so Shikamaru aimed a single kick at it that shattered the hinges of the door and sent it backwards, plowing into anyone who might have been standing behind it before flattening them to the ground.
Shikamaru instantly trained his gun on the inky blackness inside the container while hiding as much of his body as he could off to the side as the sound of metal crashing against metal echoed throughout the entire yard, but no gunfire began to pepper him. Additionally, there was no body underneath the plate of metal that had once been the door to the container, crushed or otherwise. Still keeping his gun carefully trained on the darkness, Shikamaru slipped a torch of his pocket and held it with his gun without turning on the light.
“Who’s in there?” He called gruffly. “Show yourself!”
No words answered him, but a hint of a suffering groan floated out to his ears along with that same clink of metal on metal. Now that he could hear it better, however, unmuffled by the walls of the shipping container, he could instantly identify it: not the sound of a gun being cocked, but shackles moving across the floor.
With a silent curse, Shikamaru lit the torch to see inside the shipping container, revealing the body that was hung from the ceiling from his wrists with just enough slack for him to drop onto his knees. There were bags of white powder, both the shade of cocaine and that particular pearlescent sheen of Fairy Dust, stacked haphazardly around the inside of the container, but it was clear that its main function was to hold this man and not to store the drug. Either that, or Orochimaru had been tipped off that they were coming - likely, considering the trap-like nature the rest of the events of the night had followed - and moved it all already, or this was the place where they added the strange chemical to turn the cocaine into Fairy Dust. But there was no other equipment in the container, just the man and the drugs, so Shikamaru quickly dismissed the idea.
Moving both quickly and quietly, Shikamaru jumped into the shipping container and propped the cracked door back in place to hide the fact that he’d broken in. It wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but it was enough for now. After that, he turned to face the shackled man and scrutinized him head to toe.
He was motionless but breathing, unconscious but not dead. In addition to the shackles around his wrists, each of which tied to the other wrist and the ceiling at two seperate locations, his feet were bound together and bolted into the floor at two locations and the back wall of the container. He was also wearing a muzzle that was chained to a coller which was chained to both the shackles on his hands and feet, making it impossible for him to either stand up or extend his arms to their full length.
“Jesus Christ,” Shikamaru whispered as he slowly approached the chained creature. Whoever had put him here had clearly not wanted him to escape. And he must have been there for quite some time, too, because his wrists had been rubbed raw from the manacles enough that they had scarred and his hair had grown out well past his shoulders.
As he got closer, Shikamaru’s eyes got even wider when he saw the IV in the man’s arm. So they wanted to keep him here, and they wanted to keep him alive. Were they torturing him for information? Did he owe them money? Was he an unfortunate druggie who hadn’t been able to pay up and had become an example, or was his situation more complicated?
The man shifted and let out the tiniest hint of a groan that was almost covered up by the clanking of his chains on the floor. By now Shikamaru was close enough to see the flickering of his eyes behind his eyelids, a reaction to the light he was shining in his face. Taking one more careful step forward and slipping his gun back into the holster inside his jacket, Shikamaru shone the light directly into the man’s face to get a better look at it. To his surprise, under a layer of dried sweat and blood that led him to believe the man hadn’t had a shower in at least several months, the man was ethereally beautiful, with pale skin, arched eyebrows, and a thin nose over a mouth that could probably send a man to his knees if it were twitched upwards in a smile instead of contorted in a grimace.
Lost in the man’s face, Shikamaru kneeled before him to get a better look, brushing up against the curtain of hair that half-hid his features by mistake. That movement was all it took for the man’s eyes to snap open, revealing pale lavender irises barely a shade darker than the whites of his eyes. Pupils permanently dilated, the man instantly began to fight against his restraints, snapping forward to try and grapple Shikamaru in the excess lengths of chain.
“Shit!”
Barely able to dodge back in time, Shikamaru dropped the torch, which skittered off to the side and reflected against the wall, bathing them both in a faint illumination that was just enough to see each other by. The man gave one more lunge towards Shikamaru before his eyes rolled back up into his head, revealing nothing but white for a few seconds, and he went limp in his restraints again, breathing heavily.
Pushing himself up off the ground, Shikamaru took a cautious step towards the man again. “Hey. Don’t do that. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The man’s eyes snapped to Shikamaru again, narrowing in suspicion. They were a little vague, but the laser-like focus they still managed to exuded in spite of that sent shivers up his spine. The man very obviously looked him up and down before giving him a slight nod, though the distrust still didn’t drain from his face.
“My name is Shikamaru Nara. I’m a Special Investigator.” Shikamaru pulled out his badge and held it out so the chained man could glance down and see his photo and name. “I’m going to help get you out of here. Do you understand?”
When the man seemed almost afronted at his question, Shikamaru pushed his badge back into his inside jacket pocket and took a step inside the radius of the circle where the man could reach him. This time, the man did nothing, just watched him more closely as Shikamaru ran his gaze over his bonds once again.
“They really didn’t want you getting away, did they?” He asked more of himself than the chained man, running his hand up the chain that bound his hands to the ceiling to check for weaknesses. Predictably, there were none.
To his surprise, the man caught the corner of Shikamaru’s sleeve with two fingers of his right hand, drawing his attention back to the man’s face.
“What is it?”
He looked pointedly at the IV in his arm, then back to Shikamaru, who shook his head. “I can’t take that out until I know what it is. I don’t want to make things any worse for you.”
Irritation quickly flashed across the man’s face, a little spacey but present, and he yanked his arm to the side, causing the bag attached to the IV to sway dangerously close to Shikamaru’s face. To his surprise, in the dim light he was able to make out a hospital label on the bag.
“They’re pumping straight morphine into you? How are you awake?! How are you even alive?!”
With a roll of his eyes, the man tugged on the line again, his request clear.
“I know, but…” Shikamaru bit his lip. “But your body could start going through withdrawals if it’s been too dependant on it for too long, and those might be more dangerous than the drug itself-”
He was cut off by the man grabbing a handful of the only thing he could reach from his position, which was his hair, and pulling on it with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible after being chained up as long as he appeared to have been. Yelping, Shikamaru disentangled himself from his grasp.
“Alright, alright, I get it! I’ll take it out.”
Very carefully, he slid the needle out of the man’s arm, letting it drip onto the floor instead. A few drops of blood followed the needle, but they soon began to dry and scab over the tiny wound. Much quicker than they should have.
“I don’t suppose you’d happen to know where the key is to any of this?” He asked, looking hopelessly at the monumental task ahead of him now.
With another roll of his eyes that looked somehow clearer than before, the man pushed his interlocked hands closer to Shikamaru’s face, showing him that they had somehow been welded together while on him instead of locked. Trying not to show his shock, Shikamaru said weakly, “Well, that makes this a little more difficult.”
The look the man gave him did everything but say aloud you think ?
“Alright, I get it,” Shikamaru muttered as he bent to examine the man’s ankles only to realize that they were welded together as well. “What did you do to piss someone off this badly?”
The man, predictably, was silent, though Shikamaru felt the increased tension radiating off him at the question. Leaning back, he surveyed the room to see if there was anything that would help him, but there was nothing but drugs, the IV stand, and the man himself, none of which was going to be much help. Increasingly, he was also aware of the passing minutes, each one holding the potential death of one of his teammates.
But if he didn’t get this man out of here now, there was a good chance that someone else would get to him first, someone who wasn’t afraid to damage him to either get him out or shut him up for good. If that happened, Shikamaru would lose one of the biggest pieces of incriminating evidence they’d managed to find on Orochimaru yet, as well as a strangely beautiful man who didn’t deserve this fate.
Well, he did have one more option, but it was ridiculously cinematic and unlikely to work, not to mention would leave him defenseless. Plus, there were seven locations where the chains were welded to the metal walls of the shipping container, and Shikamaru’s gun only had six bullets. Shooting any closer to the man would be dangerous to both of them.
If he started making a continuing racket, Shikamaru knew it was likely that someone would hear and find them quickly, so whatever he did, he needed to make a plan and execute it quickly. Glancing around the container one last time, he sighed and drew out his gun. Cinematic and messy it was, at least for the first part.
The man’s eyes widened at the sight of the gun and he started struggling against his bonds harder than before. Throwing himself forward, he tried to knock the gun out of Shikamaru’s hands, but the investigator was too far away.
“Wait, stop, stop! I’m not going to hurt you!”
The man’s body went limp again, but from the anger dripping from his lavender eyes Shikamaru guessed it was more to do with exhaustion than listening to anything he was saying. Kneeling down in front of the man again, Shikamaru held the gun up without pointing it at the man, then laid it on the ground next to him. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve been through, but not everyone in this world is like the people who did this to you. I can get you out of here, but you have to trust me. Can you do that?”
If the expression on the man’s face was anything to go by, the answer to that was a resounding no . Then his expression shifted as though contemplating something before refocusing with a laser-like intensity, flicking back and forth between Shikamaru’s face and his own bound hands as if trying to draw his attention to them. Looking closer at his fingers, Shikamaru saw that he was tapping out a strange, rhythmic pattern that only took him a second to recognize: Morse Code.
Hopeless , the man tapped. Shoot me.
“What? No!” Shikamaru stumbled back as if he’d been burned. “I’m not going to kill you! I’m an officer of the law- you’re a victim, and my job is to protect you and bring you into custody so we can put the people who did this to you behind bars!”
Something almost like pity flashed behind the man’s eyes. Hopeless , he communicated again. Can’t break. You leave, they come, take. Dishonored. Defiled. Rather be dead. Kill me.
“Absolutely not,” Shikamaru growled, and the man’s eyes widened as if he hadn’t been expecting any more resistance. “I won’t let those scumbags do anything else to you.”
Don’t know me, owe me.
“I don’t have to.” Shikamaru picked up the IV stand and ripped the bag of morphine off, sending the contents splashing to the floor, before smashing it against the floor to knock the legs off, creating a sharp point. “I’m a human being.”
Then, shoving the thoughts that the man was far too knowledgeable and far too calm in the current situation, morphine included, into the back of his mind, Shikamaru stalked behind the man and shoved the pole through the weakest looking link in the chain that bound his muzzle to his feet, forcing him into that subservient position. With a twist, the chain shattered along with the pole, leaving him with much two shorter segments. One of them he shoved into the loop that was used to hold all three of the chains attached to his foot shackled together, and the other he cast aside. Grabbing his gun, he warned the man, “this will be loud,” before he fired.
The loop jerked and Shikamaru leveraged it open with the shortened pole, ripping it away from the chains it was attached too. When he turned back to the man’s face, he smirked at the shock he found there.
“I said I was getting you out, and I’m getting you out,” he announced.
For a moment, shock was all that reflected on the man’s face, then something changed in his expression and he lunged upwards, trying to stand up on his own. His legs were too weak, however, and he only crashed downwards again, wincing as the manacles dug into his wrists. With an almost-maniacal fire burning in his eyes, he tried again, this time tilting his wrists so that when the force of gravity snapped his body back to the ground, it cut into the skin that was already scabbed over from chaffing. Realizing just in time what he was trying to do, Shikamaru dropped his gun and wrapped his arms around the man’s torso, preventing him from getting enough weight on his wrists to shatter the bones to get his hands through the manaces.
“No,” he repeated with more surety than he felt. “I will get you out of here. You don’t need to do that.”
His face much closer to Shikamaru’s than it had been before, the man looked at him for a moment as if considering before he swung his chained legs around and knocked Shikamaru off balance. With the added weight of Shikamaru’s body, the man’s hands gave frightening sounds of shattering bone before they gave way and sent them both sprawling to the floor - or, at least, sent Shikamaru sprawling to the floor. Now the only restraint left was the chain that connected the back of the man’s muzzle to his wrist shackles, smeared in his blood. With nothing else to hold him up, the chain pulled the collar deep into the man’s throat, cutting off his breath into a terrifying wheeze before Shikamaru could get his hands under him and relieve the pressure by lifting him up by his armpits.
“Jesus, you crazy bastard,” Shikamaru gasped as he looked at the man’s mangled and bloody hands. “I said you didn’t have to do that!”
The look the man gave Shikamaru told him that it had been the only way, and that both of them knew it. Grimacing because he didn’t want to admit that the man was right, Shikamaru pulled the man’s arms over his shoulders and stood under his weight.
“What’s done is done, but we still have one left. I don’t know if I can get it and hold you up at the same time. Can you stand?”
The man tried his legs again, then shook his head ruefully as they once again failed him. His mind racing, Shikamaru ran through every possibility until he found the one that he thought might possibly work.
“New plan. Here, come like this.”
He pulled the man’s arms around his neck, suddenly bringing their faces a lot closer, close enough that Shikamaru could have touched their noses together if he’d wanted. Ignoring the man’s deep pale eyes, like shallow basins of water filled with flower petals, he wrapped one arm securely around the man’s waist and raised the gun with the other, placing the business end of the barrel directly against the chain.
“This will either work, or both of us will end up in a lot more pain than you are right now,” he warned. The man nodded, tightening the grip of his biceps around Shikamaru’s neck. He could feel blood drip down the back of his shirt from the man’s wounded hands, but he gritted his teeth and ignored the sensation, focusing on his aim as he pulled the trigger.
There was a screech of metal against metal as the bullet slammed directly into the chain link and a spray of sparks and tiny shards of metal shrapnel, then the man was falling forward onto Shikamaru, knocking both of them to the floor.
Shikamaru gasped, first from getting the wind knocked out of him by the surprisingly heavy body that landed on top of him - too heavy , his mind supplied, for a man who should be emaciated from confinement - then from the proximity of their faces as the man looked down at him, his eyes at once dark and bright and his face full of some intangible emotion that Shikamaru couldn’t name.
His hair, so long and lustrous, despite how dirty it was, fell around them, locking out the outside world until it was just them. For a moment, Shikamaru felt like there was no one after them, that there were no bad guys and no team to rescue, and for the most fleeting of seconds, he felt the strangest urge to kiss the man above him. He might have, too, if the man’s mouth hadn’t been covered by that damn muzzle.
Taking great care not to disturb the man’s shattered wrists further, Shikamaru sat up, pulling his newly freed prisoner with him. “Are you alright?” He asked, watching the man’s expression close off as their proximity decreased.
A pained shrug was the only response he got as he carefully shifted the man unto the floor next to him to grab the gun he’d dropped in the explosion and retrieved the torch, extinguishing it. In the sudden darkness, lit only intermittently by the passing flood lights that meant at least someone from his team was still alive for them to be searching, he moved back to the man and crouched down in front of him.
“I’m going to need to carry you.”
He could tell that the man was not thrilled with the prospect, but he nodded nonetheless. Cocking his head to the side, he tried to figure out how best to do it and carry his gun at the same time before he stowed it, deciding that it was worth the risk. Carefully arranging the man’s arms around his neck again, Shikamaru picked him up in a bridal carry and stood up, pushing aside the broken shipping container door with his foot.
Quickly disembarking the container, Shikamaru laid the man down outside of the entrance to reaffix the door before picking him up again and jogging as quickly and silently as he could away from the scene of the crime. And not a moment too soon: a floodlight swept after them, followed by the sound of boots clamping against dirt accompanied with the jagles that meant heavily armored men. Pressing himself as thin against the wall of a nearby shipping container as he could, Shikamaru hid in the shadows to watch five burly men in full Kevlar body armor aim machine guns at the obviously cocked and marked shipping container door.
“You in there! Come out with your hands over your head right now, or we shoot!”
When no answer from the shipping container was forthcoming, the one who had spoken gave a hand signal and all five opened fire on the container, bullets punching through the corrugated steel as if it was nothing more than cardboard. Wincing at the sound and the sparks, Shikamaru could only watch in mounting horror as the spray of bullets continued. If they had been in there, the rounds would probably have killed both of them. Under the cover of the gunfire, Shikamaru slowly started backing up. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that place when they discovered that the man currently in his arms was gone.
After a minute, the leader signaled again and the spray stopped. Stepping forward without caution, he ripped the door away and threw it to the ground. Shikamaru by this time was too far away to see them as they shined light into the shipping container, but he was able to catch snippets of their conversation as he turned and jogged away quietly before their voices faded into obscurity.
“There’s no one in here!”
“No one? Are you sure?”
“Look for yourselves! Tinkerbell’s gone!”
“Shit, he’s gone? The boss is going to kill us…!”
Tinkerbell? Shikamaru wondered, looking down at the man in his arms, who had hidden his face in the crook of Shikamaru’s neck, but whether from exhaustion or embarrassment, it was impossible to tell. Was what they called Tinkerbell and this man the one and the same? But why have such a code name for a man kept chained and muzzled, the exact opposite of a flying ball of light? They had clearly referred to Tinkerbell as a he…. But that only brought Shikamaru back to his initial question: why was he there, in that shipping container, and why was he locked up as tightly as he had been?
He was so lost in his thoughts, explanations drifting from every part of his mind from the most mundane to the craziest of conspiracy theories, that he didn’t notice the gun until it was pointed at him from shadows.
“Hands in the air and weapons on the floor! I’m arresting you in the name of the law!”
The panic at seeing the gun quicky abated as he recognized the voice. “Inuzuka, it’s me,” Shikamaru hissed, profoundly glad that he’d been lucky enough to run into a friendly gun instead of one of the semi-automatics that had mowed down the container he’d barely escaped from. “Are you really going to point a weapon at your commanding officer?”
“Shit- Nara, is that you?” Kiba came out of the shadows in shock, his gun lowering to the ground and Akamaru close at his heels. Shikamaru couldn’t make out his face and the dog trainer was likely in the same boat, but he had obviously recognized his voice. “Where have you been? Asuma said you went in after us ages ago! We all thought you were dead!”
“Then Uzumaki and Uchiha are safe, too?”
“Yeah, all three of us managed to fight our way back out to the van only to find it in ruins. Asuma was hurt badly, but the ambulance came and got him before it got to be too dangerous. I left Akamaru and when I went back for him he was gone and so were you. I only just found him wandering around, looking for me. What the hell is going on? Did you find him?”
“You really need to teach us his commands. He started dragging me around this place until he found something, then ran off again at something I said,” Shikamaru said, hefting the man’s body more firmly against his chest as it began to slip. Idly, he noticed that as soon as Kiba had appeared, the man had allowed his head to lol against his neck as if unconscious, his hair hiding his face, but if his breathing and heart rate were anything to go by, the man was certainly anything but unconscious.
“See, that’s the point! If only I know how to control him, then our enemy will never be able to get the codes out of any of you.” Then his eyes widened. “Wait, you found something? Akamaru wasn’t able to get to the right container in time with us! Were you able to tag it so we can confiscate the Fairy Dust? Can you show me-?”
“We’re not going back,” Shikamaru snapped. “We’re getting out of here right now. They knew I was there and they’re going to sweep this place now. Probably burn it to the ground.”
“What do you mean they know you were there-?”
“Because I took the most important piece of evidence with me.”
“What do you mean by that? Nara-!”
Just then, a floodlight passed over the top of them, illuminating them both briefly, and Shikamaru heard Kiba gasp in a stunned breath of air as he finally comprehended what was in Shikamaru’s arms. “What the hell is going on…?”
“That’s what I’m hoping he can answer for us,” Shikamaru said grimly. “But first we need to get out of here. Whatever reason he was there, they certainly didn’t want him getting away and I’m guessing we have about five more minutes before they start burning this entire place to the ground to destroy the evidence and catch us if they can.”
The sudden sound of helicopter rotors cut through the air in the distance, growing steadily louder as they got closer. With a swallow to get the bad taste out of his mouth, Shikamaru asked, “We… didn’t get cleared for air backup, did we?”
“Not as far as I know, no. Why?”
“Because now we have about a minute and a half before they start torching this place. We should probably start running.”
☽☾
Shikamaru stared at the man in the hospital bed who was staunchly refusing everything the nurses were trying to give him. Fluids, an IV, painkillers, sleep, food, even a haircut- he refused them all, staring at the far wall with a look of concentration on his face as if trying to either remember something important or set the hospital in fire with only the power of his mind. It was only under Shikamaru’s direct watch that he’d allowed his hands to be bandaged, though the nurses had whispered to him that they almost hadn’t needed it. It was an enigma; he’d known for certain that they bones had broken from the way the shattered appendages had hung from the man’s wrists back in the shipping container, but now they were only mildly bruised and bloody, the scars shrinking from day to day until there was almost nothing left.
With a sigh, Shikamaru rubbed the back of his head and grimaced. How long had it been since he’d last slept? He’d dozed off several times just staring at the man, who was still refusing to talk despite having his muzzle removed. Of the few clipped words that they’d managed to squeeze out of him, he’d told them that he didn’t want or need any help, that he didn’t have anything to tell them about their investigation and that his name was “John Smith”. Shikamaru had barely hidden his disdain at that one; the clipped superiority with which the man had said it made it an obvious lie.
Finally fed up with their waiting game, Shikamaru snapped and opened a small plastic container of applesauce that was sitting on the once again untouched tray of food. The man’s gaze was suddenly fixated on him as he grabbed a spoon and held them up together menacingly.
“We’re only trying to help you, you know. You’re not doing yourself any favors by not eating.”
“I don’t need eat that,” the man said quietly. “You can just stop trying, like your comrades. I don’t need your help.”
“Maybe not, but you’re going to get it,” Shikamaru said resolutely, stabbing the spoon into the applesauce and almost threatening the bedridden man with the spoonful of applesauce. “Eat the goddamn applesauce.”
“No,” the man answered just as firmly. “I don’t eat processed foods.”
“You don’t eat- look, the side of the container says that the only things in here are mushed up apples and a little bit of sugar. Is that unprocessed enough for you?”
“Allow me to rephrase.” The man cleared his throat. “I don’t eat pre packaged foods. They’re far too easy to slip a needle of something into, to catch someone off guard.”
Stunned, Shikamaru lowered the spoon. A drip of applesauce fell off and landed on his pants, but he paid it no mind. “Are you afraid of your food being drugged? Don’t you trust us?”
The look he got make it very clear to Shikamaru that no matter that he had gotten the man out of those chains, he was still not trusted. “How do you think I was caught in the first place?”
Shikamaru held the man’s gaze for a few seconds before resolutely popping the spoonful of applesauce into his own mouth. “There,” he announced after swallowing. “It’s not drugged, or poisoned, or whatever. Now will you eat it?”
The man stared at him for a couple of seconds before crossing his bandaged arms over his chest. “Eat half the container, then wait fifteen minutes.”
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly serious. Most drugs are not fast-acting. I’m going against my better judgement by not insisting on a full hour instead of a mere quarter.”
Sighing, Shikamaru shoveled a few more spoonfuls of the food into his mouth before setting the container down. The second passed into minutes as he studied the man’s impassive, ethereal face before he spoke again. “You’re not going to tell us anything, are you.”
“A very astute observation.”
“But why? We’re trying to help you, but we can’t do that if you won’t even give us your name!”
The man’s lips - strangely beautiful and more captivating than Shikamaru would have liked to admit - thinned. “I gave you my name.”
“I’m not stupid, Mr. John Smith . In fact, most people would call me a genius.” Shikamaru sat back. “We can help you if you let us, but even if you don’t, know that you’re an important part of our investigation right now and even if you refuse to tell us anything, we will have to keep tabs on you for the foreseeable future.”
The man’s eyes flashed. “I will not escape from one prison only to rush blindly into another.”
“We aren’t keeping you a prisoner. We just need to know where you are, so your rescue can be used against Orochimaru in court. Don’t you want to make that man pay for what he did to you?”
To Shikamaru’s surprise, the man’s face contorted into an angry snarl. “That man will face his reckoning one day, mark me, but it will not be by any of your investigative teams or in the court of your law.”
“And that’s exactly the kind of thing you should avoid saying in front of a police officer, because it makes it sound like you’re going to go track him down yourself to exact your revenge.” Shikamaru hesitated briefly. “You’re not going to track him down to exact your revenge, are you?”
“I’m not that stupid. Someone much more powerful than me will make him pay- and not just for what he did to me. For all his crimes against all he has crossed.”
For a minute, Shikamaru was silent, just watching the play of emotions, from anger to sorrow, guilt to relief, pass through the man’s normally impassive face. The he shook himself and offered the applesauce once more.
“Are you convinced it’s not going to kill you now?”
“Not nearly enough,” the man sighed, “but I suppose it will do. Give it here.” He held his bandaged hands outstretched, but Shikamaru only shook his head.
“Your hands are bandaged all to hell. Let me feed you.”
A blush rose up the man’s cheeks. “You don’t need to-”
“No, but I’m going to.” Shikamaru held the spoonful of applesauce to the man’s mouth. “Open up or it’s going down your shirt.”
The man gave him a dirty look, but opened his mouth. Shikamaru had to force himself not to focus on the way his tongue curled around the spoon as he fed him.
“So,” he managed conversationally, keeping his gaze focused on the container in his hand, “are you ever going to tell me your real name, Mr. John Smith?”
The man was silent, accepting the last spoonful of applesauce, before speaking quietly. “Neji.”
“What was that?”
“My name.” He cleared his throat. “Neji. Neji Hyuuga. You can call me that, if you want.”
“Neji Hyuuga, huh?” Shikamaru drawled, trying not to show how much elation he was feeling at the man’s - Neji’s - words. “Well, Neji, can I interest you in some Jello?”