Chapter Text
Shikazu hadn’t quite realized how easy his eldest daughter had made his life before his second daughter was born.
Shikako had been a quiet child, a deliberate child. She had cried rarely. She slept well through the night. She looked upon the world as if it was something she already knew. She didn’t fuss. She didn’t mind being held. She liked being read to. She picked up concepts and leap ahead in a way that made him proud to watch. This was his little girl, and she would lead the clan after him. A Nara ideal, fit for a lazy Nara to parent. She had made fatherhood seem easy.
When Shikako was three, Amago was born. Amago had cried through the night or until she got what she wanted. Amago demanded to be entertained at different times in different ways every day. Amago wanted to be carried, spun around, or put down according to her whims, thank you very much, and wasn’t afraid to make her opinions known. By the time Amago had mostly settled into a routine, Shikako had been five.
Shikazu wonders now if letting his precious elder daughter escape from the baby’s tantrums at will for that long was the worst decision or best mistake of his life.
Amago had been unusually compliant, allowing herself to be put down for an afternoon nap early, so Shikazu had sought out his elder daughter. He had spent an increasingly frantic half-hour searching before locating her up in the branches of a tall pine, scribbling away into a notebook with paper thinner than the clan could make and a stick that dribbled fine lines of ink.
His relief was short-lived. She was doodling fuinjutsu.
It turns out, after panic--entirely his--had run its course and explanations--mostly Shikako explaining things as if they were self-evidient--had been made, Shikako was not copying fuinjutsu. No, Shikako was creating new seals.
Six days later, after the girls had been put to bed, he goes to the Clan Shrine, for a meeting with the Clan’s Chief Archivist, Chief Researcher, and Quartermaster. They debate into the night about the myriad of tests and demonstrations Shikako’s seals had been put through, which and how to integrate them into the clan at large, and what to share with their alliance. They each go home to bed at dawn with a jug of sake to drink. Shadows, his five-year-old had just more than doubled the fuinjutsu of the clan.