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He feels a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his forehead, chakra burning quickly, too quickly, feeding his split shadow on the ground. He just has to hold for another couple of seconds, the time for Inoichi to catch one of the two older Ame Genin in front of them in his Mind-Body Switch Technique.
From the corner of his field of view, he can pick up the vague shape of their third assailant struggling inside Chouza’s enlarged palms, but he doesn’t seem anywhere near being able to get out.
When Inoichi’s body falls limp on his lap, his target disappears in a puff of smoke.
Crap.
Adrenaline starts rushing through his veins, vision tunnelling as his heart rate increases in his chest. He needs to think efficiently, and he needs to do it fast.
Chouza’s opponent can’t be a clone as well, he’s been too roughed up already for him not to have been dispelled yet if he were. Which means this is not a decoy operation meant for the real team to escape, it’s an ambush. And they’ve got at least one hidden enemy around.
Crap.
His first reflex when he senses the flare of chakra coming from behind him is to grab Inoichi by the shoulders and jump on the side, rolling over him as a cover. He won’t be back for another few minutes and the number one priority at this stage is to cover for him, so, it’s not a bad reaction. It’s just too slow by half a second. Their assailant’s kunai digs through his thigh before hitting the dirt.
Somewhere that sounds way too far away for how it actually is, Chouza screams their names. It’s followed by the sound of bones breaking and the muted thump of a body hitting the ground.
That’s at least one enemy they won’t have to worry about, but he doesn’t have the time to enjoy that small victory.
The two remaining members of the opposite team look only mildly affected by the sight of their third teammate unconscious on the ground when they reunite in front of them, but something still shifts. Suddenly it becomes evident that this has just turned into a battle to the death.
Killing has never been prohibited during this round of the exam, but, evidently, the growing tension between the Five Great Shinobi Country and others, every month bordering closer to breaking into an all-out war, is feeding into how many of the contestants are considering that option as something more than a last resort solution. Each Shinobi that dies in the forest is one less they’ll have to face on the battlefield by what will probably be the end of the summer.
If the look Chouza gives him in the second their eyes cross is anything to go by, he’s come to the same conclusion.
It’s two against two now. He would like to say it’s manageable, but their opponents are at least 3 years older, and although it doesn’t necessarily mean their technique is better, the fact that they are taller, larger, heavier, and way less short on chakra reserves than maybe Chouza and for sure himself is not something that any amount of training can change.
He lays Inoichi against a tree, squatting before him with a wince at the throbbing pain in his thigh becoming harder to ignore at every shift of his weight. No nerves or tendons have been touched in a way that he can’t move his leg, but he’s already lost too much blood to afford to make it worse, and the cut is too deep not to, at the very least, slow him down and mess up his balance. He needs to move as little as possible until they’re safe enough that he can properly dress the wound, but evidently, the two teenagers before him are not about to let that happen so easily. No need to be a genius to realize the injured and the unconscious are the easy targets here.
Chouza lands the first blow. Or tries to. Their enemy is too quick, hopping over his hand and using it as a platform to jump higher to throw a swarm of shuriken down towards Shikaku.
No.
Down toward Inoichi.
Crap.
He knows he won’t be able to deflect all of them in time with one kunai, so he’ll have to shield for the two lefts. The one that cuts through his side before hitting the trunk behind him won’t be much of a bother. The scratch stings, but it’s superficial. The one that digs into his shoulder is a bigger problem. The warm blood squirting out of the wound on his leg from the weight he put on it, dampening his pants and sticking the fabric to his skin, much more even.
His opponent smirks.
“This right here is why you won’t get out of here alive,” he comments, drawing a kunai out of his pouch and making it spin around his finger before getting a firm hold of it. “Choosing to cause further harm to one of your two remaining soldiers to protect a useless one. The Shinobi of the Leaf are like that. Too soft.”
And for all that he would do the same again if he had to, because he can’t just lay low and watch Inoichi getting stabbed – or worse – he knows the boy is right.
In the background, he can hear the sound of the battle between Chouza and the third Shinobi of the group, and he knows he can’t expect any help coming from there just yet. He widens his stance a tad, eyes fixed on the enemy in front of him, trying to find the most stable position his injured leg can hold for him.
When his own assailant moves again, the blow he’s bracing himself for never comes.
Inoichi’s leg swings in between his to sweep their opponent off his feet, effectively forcing him to back down and winning them a precious couple of seconds.
“I owe you one. It’s nice having you back ‘Ichi,” he says with a half-smirk to cover for the pain.
His friend gasps at the sight of his leg, and for the first time, he dares take a second to glance at it.
It’s way worse than he thought.
His pants are lacerated over a good ten centimetres, the wound still throwing up fresh blood over clotting one, and the pulsating flesh inside of it showing through when he moves the slightest.
“I’m alright,” he says – lies - but he has to be, has to think about anything else but that if he wants to hold long enough for him and his teammates to make it out alive. “Not enough to use my shadows though,” he adds.
Maybe he could focus enough for it – although the blood loss-induced brain fog is getting heavier and heavier by the minute – but he definitely can’t waste any of the little energy he’s got left.
“That’s fine,” Inoichi states. “There’s two of us. Surely, we can take him in hand-to-hand, can’t we?”
They both know Shikaku only accounts for half a man at this stage, of course, and they both also realize that if Chouza isn’t done with his own opponent yet, this team’s taijutsu must be worth something, but they can’t afford not to believe there’s an out possible for them, so he deepens his stance, and nods.
From there, everything starts blurring out on the edges, his body working on reflex and muscle memory much more than thoughts and intentions at this point: Inoichi’s mudra next to him, the earth coming to grip around their opponent’s foot as he’s about to run towards them, the swear it drags out of his lips and the crack of his ankle breaking in his fall, his own movement when he jumps to pin their target’s dominant arm in his back and the other under his knee before he can try and escape from Inoichi’s Doton, the agonizing pain in his leg as he does, and the disgusting semi-soft semi-hard feeling of the Genin’s throat against the edge of his blade.
He doesn’t see their third enemy catching a glimpse of the scene and turning around while dodging a punch from Chouza to throw a kunai in his direction.
Inoichi does, and runs. His hands leave the ground and the mud trap around their opponent’s foot crumbles down, then everything happens in an instant. There’s the distinctive sound of a kunai piercing in between two ribs, and the choked-out one that comes just after that, the bloodcurdling crack of a neck breaking in Chouza’s hands, and the stilling of the body under him when he slits the boy’s throat before he can escape.
“INOICHI!”
---
“I’m fine Chouza, really,” he insists with a wave of the hand towards the menu his friend is pushing in front of him.
“Come on Shikaku, this one’s on me!” he presses, and despite the frivolity of his tone, there’s something heavier in his eyes, something that says “Don’t make me say out loud that you shouldn’t drink that much on an empty stomach.” and, as a matter of fact, Shikaku doesn’t want him to say that, so he draws out his best smile and plays along with the unsaid game.
“In that case then!”
---
For a moment, once it’s been made evident that Inoichi is still breathing and conscious, once it’s been made evident that their opponents are not (dead is what they are, and every time that this realization sinks deeper in his chest it also feels more and more weirdly distant), once he’s wiped most of the blood covering his hands on the corpse’s jacket under him and made a makeshift compression bandage with a torn-out strip of his trousers to hopefully save himself from completely bleeding out from the wound on his leg, he finds himself thinking they might actually make it.
Chouza, for his part, has dressed Inoichi’s cut in the meantime, helping him on his knees and assessing his ability to walk. He’s wheezing, obviously, the cut in his chest too deep not to require further care as soon as possible, as the one in his own leg does, but both are probably still manageable enough that they can reach the tower before any of them collapses.
He first protests when Chouza comes to pass an arm under his shoulder for support (“Help Inoichi, I can walk.”) but eventually has to admit that at this stage Chouza has become the brains of the trio, the main reason for that being that he’s the one who has the most blood remaining there for it to actually function. (“Inoichi has a punctured lung, he needs to be careful with his breathing and being carried around against me isn’t going to help that. You, on the other hand, are on the verge of fainting from blood loss and you really should stop asking anything of that leg before you’re sewed back in one piece.”)
Would they be able to run, they would have reached the tower within a good ten minutes. They are, however, in no way shape or form in a state to do so, and the pace at which the building grows closer to them drags slower and slower, time distorting as Shikaku’s ability to stay conscious decays further by the minute and his body starts replacing blinks by intermittent fainting.
Then the sound of Inoichi’s increasingly struggling breathing, faint through the brain fog but ever-present on the other side of Chouza, suddenly changes.
An anxious “Inoichi, we’re almost there, stay with us!” echoes next to him before their teammate stumbles on his feet. Chouza immediately lets go of Shikaku’s arm to bend down and catch the other boy before he hits the ground, and he can’t fully help the reflex of doing so as well, pain jolting through his leg anew as he does, tearing a hiss out of his lips.
The sight of Inoichi’s face sobers him up from it in a fraction of a second. He’s pale, deadly so, skin sweat-damped, lips bordering on blueish, eyes bloodshot, glassy, and evidently not able to look at either of them anymore.
“Inoichi!” Chouza repeats, trying to pull him back on his legs but finding himself faced with the fact that this is for sure not going to happen anytime soon – or ever again at all if they don’t act very quickly.
“He’s going into shock. We need to run.”
---
Chouza was right, of course, as always. Anyone who thinks Shikaku is the smart one of the trio doesn’t realize that there are many types of smart, and that his is not the only one needed to stay alive. He does feel better with food in his stomach and the diffuse feeling of discomfort, unease, and disgust that always comes back stirring in his gut around the Chuunin Exam is a little quieter. Though maybe this can be pinned as much on the alcohol making its way into his bloodstream and on the presence of his teammates as on the beef skewers.
It’s absurd, really. He’s killed dozens, maybe hundreds of people by now, risked his life a good handful of times too, but there’s always something different, deeper, filled with a thick and sticky dread he’d rather not fully analyze in those precise memories.
Maybe it’s because it was his first kill, and the first time he really thought it might end there, for him, for them. Maybe it marked him in another way because he was younger, too much so. Maybe it’s the never-ending escalation of fear and injury and panic and humiliation that never let him breathe one second before it hit him yet another time that dug into his brain in a much harder-to-ignore way than all the other gruesome battle scenes he’s been faced with since then.
He shakes his head. There’s no use in dwelling on the question. Shinobi inflict and suffer violence and death. That’s what they do, all of them. And the price for being on the surviving end of a fight is this one. There’s nothing unique, strange, surprising, or even notable about those feelings. It’s a non-topic as much as obeying orders is. It’s behind the line of things you shouldn’t interrogate or even think about if you don’t want the questions (or the answers) to eat you alive.
He turns his gaze towards Inoichi next to him, and as his hand comes to rest mindlessly on his thigh for grounding, their fingers intertwine without a look, his friend still very engaged in an apparently intense conversation with Chouza about a matter he’s lost track of already, both men all movement and shouts and snarky laughs and life, and the malaise in his chest eases the slightest.
---
He doesn’t know how they got to the tower. The only thing he can remember is the pain and the exhaustion, the nausea, the full-body shiver and cold sweat, and over it, constricting his gut and throat and making his mind rush in circles under it, the unshakable sense of impending doom and the utter impossibility to produce any other thought than, “We’re going to die here.”
He didn’t expect to have his father visit him at the hospital when he woke up, but apparently enough for his absence to still sting.
He didn’t expect him to look relieved to see him coming back to the compound either, and rightfully so.
He did, however, somewhat hope for him to express, if not pride, at least some level of acknowledgement that, although it’s not anything more than the bare minimum that was expected of him and he knows it, his team has passed the second round of the exam while being amongst the youngest to participate.
When he steps through the door, Shikahiko is kneeling down at the low table next to an open shouji, wind ruffling the tip of the hair tied up on his head, hand mindlessly stroking through his beard as he reads the scroll placed before him with knitted brows, and, for a moment, he doesn’t make the slightest movement that could indicate he’s even aware that his son has entered the room.
He is, obviously. One doesn’t become the head of the Nara clan (or a Shinobi at all, really) without being able to pick up new presences in their surroundings in a fraction of a second.
It’s fine. Shikaku understands. One doesn’t become the head of the Nara clan without being able to prioritize either. He will still be there in fifteen minutes. The concentration and thought his father is putting into his work right now, on the other hand, will alter if he pauses. So, he ignores the growing pain in his bad leg, and he waits.
After a moment, at last, Shikahiko puts his hands down to carefully close the scroll, ties the red string around it neatly and placing it back on the table before slowly turning towards his son.
His gaze is heavy and silent as it drags over him, lingering on every tear in his clothes and freshly closed cuts on his skin, on the dirt covering his shoes and pants, on the dry blood under his fingernails.
“You’ve killed.”
The words are mostly a neutral observation, certainly not said with any sort of fear or disgust, but maybe, although it might only be a projection of what Shikaku hopes to find there, with a faint hint of pride.
He swallows back the stirring in his gut at the flashing memory of the Ame boy’s flesh under his blade.
“Yes.”
His father nods.
“Good,” he comments, and for a moment it sounds like the conversation might end there.
Then he lets out a sigh, picks up the scroll on the table, and slides it back into his pouch before unfolding his legs to get up.
“It’s important that you are ready,” he adds eventually once he’s standing straight, the width of his frame enhanced by the evening sun falling behind him, his silhouette cutting through it as his shadows would. Shikaku finds himself thinking he looks like the deer spirits painted on the wall over the altar in the forest’s temple. He has that same energy, that same aura, one that makes him realize how small, how fragile, how mortal he is. He’s 11 now, way older than he was the first time he remembers his father bringing him there, and yet.
“The war is coming,” Shikahiko continues. It sounds like the voice Motoe uses to announce the results of the bone readings. Low, deep, and filled with the assurance certainty gives. There is no divination there though. It’s just the evident conclusion a man who has access to most of the village’s military intel has come to. To be fair, this isn’t even needed anymore. Tensions have reached the point where every Shinobi in town knows the conflict is inevitable. “And at the rate things have been escalating for the past year, Lord Third might have to send Genin on the front lines as well.”
“I’m not-” disqualified is where his sentence is going, but it doesn’t get the time to reach its end.
“I don’t hold any hope you’ll pass the third round in that state, Shikaku. The only reason you even passed the second was Choujou’s son. Ambition can be good, but delusion is not. You will fight this war as a Genin, get used to the idea. I’m not happier about it than you are. War, with all the horrors it comes with, is also the opportunity for us to shine, and our clan cannot afford not to get its fair share of honours if we want to secure our place in the village. I know you were born here. I know you don’t realize how fragile all this is. But you need to. Whatever they tell you about the Will of Fire at the Academy, no one here is friends. The village doesn’t hold because we like each other, it holds because we need each other. You need to make yourself needed, we need to make our clan needed, or we’re out. Do you understand that?”
He nods.
He knows the story. He’s been told, of course, how the alliance of the Senju and Uchiha clans and the foundation of Konoha created a shift in the Shinobi world. How the imbalance it created forced every other clan to either attempt to join them, or create their own alliance to face them, because no single clan would have been able to face them. How, upon asking to be part of Konoha, the Nara, Yamanaka, and Akimichi clans had first been denied entrance, on the basis that, having joined forces repeatedly in the past - nothing like the alliance the village was creating, but still having maintained consistent peace and repeatedly found themselves teaming up during conflict, which was much more than most of the clan until that point had ever achieved over the past generations - the risk of them supporting each other more than the other clans, of them becoming an alliance within the alliance, and between the lines, of them being able to pull up a coup if they wanted, was too high to be taken.
He also knows the deal had been sealed eventually, under the condition of what would eventually generalise into the four-man cells system and the academy later: that the heirs to the military leadership, while still authorised to be taught their clan techniques by their peers, would be primarily trained and led in mission and battle by an outsider.
At the academy, it’s taught that this structure is a mean for future generations to create bonds between clans and inherit the Will of Fire: the desire to protect one’s village and the people within it before anything else.
At home, his father says the Will of Fire is horseshit, pretty words to lessen the connection of the younger Shinobi to their clans, propaganda meant to diminish the leaders’ power, and an assimilation tool.
Evidently, Shikahiko doesn’t really hold Konoha in his heart.
As much as Shikaku can understand the reason behind his father’s words, and the importance for him, as a clan member, but even more so as the heir to the military leadership of the clan, to do his best to stay connected, first and foremost, to the clan, its culture, its structure and internal life, and its people, there’s still something that doesn’t sit right with him in the idea that every and each relationship built within the village is purely transactional.
He’s noticed, of course, how different the relationship between his father and his teammates is from the one he shares with Inoichi and Chouza. They know each other well, for sure, one can’t afford it any other way in battle. But it’s what it is. A battle strategy, a reasonable alliance, relying on each other’s abilities and talents. And of course, he shares that with his own team as well. But what made him take a blade for Inoichi, and would make him do the same for Chouza in the blink of an eye is not, not just, the thought that he needs them at his side on the battlefield. It’s the thought that he needs them at his side, period.
Sometimes, he wonders if there’s anyone in his father’s life that he ever had the opportunity to see in that light, and if it’s wrong that he does.
“This right here is why you won’t get out of here alive. The Shinobi of the Leaf are like that. Too soft.”
Surely, his father would have approved of the Ame boy’s words.
He swallows, and straightens his shoulders.
“I will fight the third round, and I will bring honour to the clan.”
---
“Reinforcements are here!” Chouza happily shouts from where he’s sitting in front of what Shikaku would reasonably consider to be way too much meat for the three of them. Inoichi and he, at least, should for sure not take one more bite out of it if they don’t want their gut to explode.
He leans down over the counter to glance at the silhouette slouched in the middle of the setting sunlight passing through the door frame, much smaller, much leaner than whatever he has been expecting.
“Shikamaru?”
The kid raises a limp hand in an attempt at a greeting.
“Chouza-jisan, Inoichi-jisan, hi, I’m coming to fetch my dad.”
Chouza’s ever-bright laugh echoes inside the small room.
“What a considerate son! Are you sure you don’t want to grab a skewer first? Your poor father’s appetite is not what it used to be, but you are well into your growing years, surely you can put some more energy to good use, pump up this little frame of yours, come here.”
Shikamaru isn’t given much of a chance to protest as he’s pulled onto a stool by one large arm and meat is shoved into his hands before he can realise it. He sighs and takes a bite. Evidently, he’s been around Chouza long enough by now to know he won’t get out of this if he insists on keeping his stomach empty.
With all the awkwardness and obvious teenage boredom his son is exulting right now, there is, as always, something that makes Shikaku soft in the sight of his offspring sharing a moment with his teammates or their children. Something familiar, not because it resembles any of his own childhood memory (it doesn’t, Shikahiko’s relationship to his team, or mostly anyone outside of the clan for that matter, could hardly be described as any sort of camaraderie, and shared meal were rarely something more than shared silence or political concerns) but because it’s breathing and living with the feeling of home, and he likes to hope that, maybe, those warmer experiences will bring something down along the way.
---
He can’t repress a shout of pain when his opponent’s foot comes crashing against his hand seal with a loud crack. He’s been too distracted. Or too focused, rather: on his own plan, on his shadow, on the urgency of “I need to catch her or I’m done.” He didn’t notice she swapped herself for a clone during the second he winced after landing on his bad leg, didn’t notice her circular kick from behind until a few seconds too late, once again, until jumping out of the way wasn’t enough to dodge it anymore.
His shadow comes back to shelter under his feet as the seal breaks (and his fingers, too, at least two of them, maybe three).
“This is going to be less fun now that you can’t make your little jutsu do the dirty work for you, isn’t it?” she teases, eyes turning red again.
She’s taller, quicker, uninjured and although she doesn’t seem to be able to maintain it for long periods at a time yet, her Sharingan still weighs heavily on his ability to successfully land a blow on her. There’s no way on earth he’s going to come out victorious of this if it turns into a hand-to-hand fight.
He glances at his father’s silhouette from the corner of his field of view, arms crossed and perfectly immobile in the shadow of the spectators’ gallery, clenches his jaw, and draws out a kunai with a hiss at the movement of his injured fingers. They’re already starting to swell.
She smirks.
“Better.”
They stay still for a few seconds, both of them gauging one another, but it’s clear already that Shikaku’s mind is rushing under way more stress than his opponent’s.
While he does realize he has better chances in the short-term playing defence and standing his ground waiting for her assault than trying to land the first hit when she can read him as she does, he also knows he will never win this fight if he confines himself to reaction, and he might not get another chance at attacking if he’s not the first one to move.
The effortlessness with which she dodges his attempt at a hit is almost as painful as her left hand raising a kunai through his temple and forehead and her right fist crashing against his sternum a second later, throwing him meters away on the ground.
The show doesn’t live up to the public’s expectations if their yelling is anything to go by. The more the fight draws, the more acutely aware he becomes that he is, in all regards, looking like a child getting beaten up because he insisted on playing against someone stronger than him, fully unable to pull out a move that would at least make him look like he put up a good fight.
He can’t see his father anymore, but the heaviness of his gaze on him doesn’t lessen.
She turns her head towards their referee without a look at him.
“I think we’re done here.”
“We’re not!”
It’s said through gritted teeth and a swallowed-back whine of pain as he pushes himself back on legs that threaten every second to fail him. He’s used way too much chakra.
She doesn’t go back to a fighting stance.
“This is ridiculous and you know it. I thought Naras were supposed to be smart. You’ve lost your shadows for this round, at least hold on to that and give up.”
Something burns in his chest, harder than the pain even. Humiliation.
“Our clan cannot afford not to get its fair share of honours.” his fathers voice rings under his skull.
“You know the rules: we fight until one of us is dead, unconscious, or surrendering,” he says, spits. “And I’m not surrendering.”
She turns back towards him but doesn’t make a move to get back into an offensive (or even defensive) position. Her intentions are as clear as daylight: “If you think you can come at me, do so, but you’re not worth putting any more effort into this.”
The blade bites back into his jaw and up through his cheek the second he’s onto her again, followed by a kick to his side this time, that punches the air out of his lung when he hits the ground.
“You should stop here if you want your face to still look like one by the end of this,” she says when he’s got enough oxygen back into his brain to look at her with not-too-glassy eyes, and it’s only then that it hits him how milder this second cut is compared to the first.
It doesn’t need to be deep, he realises, because she doesn’t need it to win. It’s not an attack, it’s a threat. And a punishment.
“I’m not going to cripple you,” she comments like as if she reading his thoughts. “The war is going to break out anytime now and we need all the men we can get. Give up. Get out. And get fucking stronger.”
Her eyes have turned back to black for a long time already, but it’s not what makes them so cold. He knew, enrolling for the exam, that most of the contestants would be older than him, but he hadn’t realized exactly what it meant until this moment, hadn’t realized it would be more than a physical disadvantage. He understands, now, how it only took a handful of seconds of his father looking at him for him to notice he’d done his first kill during the second round. Everything in the way she stands in front of him, straight, distant, emotionless except for what he can only guess is disdain, disappointment, or maybe disgust, makes it evident she has stood there before, in front of someone that didn’t have the chance to be another konohan Shinobi.
Somewhere over her shoulder, something moves, far worse than if it has been her blade. Even at this distance, he can distinctively see the last look his father gives him before getting off the pillar he was leaning against, and leaving the arena.
He pushes himself on his elbow with an emergency and clumsiness that makes him want to disappear, ignoring the pain in his broken fingers, ignoring the pain in his bruised ribs, ignoring the pain in his leg when he tries to put weight on it but ultimately fails and falls back down before her.
“I’m not surrendering until I’m dead,” he repeats, and as much as he wants it to be a demonstration of bravery, righteousness, and perseverance, he can hear, in his own voice as much as in the frustrated chatter in the galleries over the arena, that it’s nothing but a broken whine.
“I’m not killing you either,” she answers with mild annoyance in her voice. “I don’t have to. I don’t need to. And we’ll have to deal with way enough dead Shinobi in the months to come. Your obstinacy is pathetic and a shame to the village.”
For the love of all that’s holy, may the burning in his eyes be only pain and not tears.
She turns to the referee again to ask for the end of the fight, only to earn a shake of the head in return.
“You know the rules.”
She lets out a sigh before swinging her kunai in the air to catch it backwards. He barely gets the time to take another breath in before the hilt of it crashes against his temple.
The last thing he sees before blacking out is her silhouette turning around without another look at him.
“Winner by knock-out: Uchiha Akane!”
---
“Okay that’s enough, if I can’t eat anything from Mom tonight, she’s going to yell at me.”
Shikamaru states in a tone that does sound firm and decided, but is ultimately still somewhat comical when said by a 12 years old boy with a barely breaking voice in front of the head of the Akimichi clan and his 120 kilos of bonhomie.
“She’s the one who sent you looking for me, isn’t she?” Shikaku asks, in part because he’s realizing he almost hasn’t talked to the kid for the twenty minutes he’s been here – not that he seems to be lacking interaction, per se, Chouza doing a very good job at keeping everyone entertained and busy, and lifting spirits, but the guilt starting to grow in his gut is telling him that maybe it should be his job when it comes down to his own child – and in part because it genuinely feels like the boy needs an out from his father’s overzealous friend.
“No, but she’s going to eventually and I’m not doing the walk back to the compound twice today. Plus, I’d like to catch early sleep if I can.”
It stings, somewhere, that Shikamaru doesn’t seem to doubt one instant that he would need to come to pick his father up eventually, but Shikaku can’t say he’s entirely wrong.
“Got a hard day, son?”
Although he can't say exactly what else yet, the way Shikamaru frowns at him is filled with much more than his usual irritation and “Stop, Dad, you’re embarrassing.” attitude.
“I got the Chuunin Exam tomorrow,” he deadpans.
When he looks for support in his teammates’ gazes, he’s only met with looks that say a sorry “I thought you knew.” for Inoichi’s and a gentle but judgmental “Shikaku, come on.” for Chouza’s.
“You-”
He’s not sure what his next words were meant to be, but they die in his throat before he can figure it out.
Shikamaru rolls his eyes.
“Urg, let’s just go.”
---
“What did you hope for, embarrassing yourself like that?”
“That you would see me,” is, he realizes in that very moment, the answer burning his lips. He doesn’t say it.
“I didn’t want to be a coward,” is what he tries out instead, which isn’t entirely a lie either.
“And you thought being dead would be better? You do realize the only reason she spared you was that you were a Konoha Shinobi, right? Would you have done the same thing facing a foreign Genin?”
His eyes wander around the tatami under their feet for a moment, lingering over the signs of wear here and there, over the shifting shadows projected by the light of the candles on the fibres, over the dark silhouette of his father spreading across the floor in every direction.
“I-”
“There’s nothing honourable about dying in a fight, Shikaku.”
It’s not what the memorial stone says, he wants to argue, but his father is not done.
“Protecting your people is honourable. Dying doing so is honourable, and a risk we are fully and willingly taking as Shinobi. But who would you have protected dying there?”
His mouth opens in a protest that never crosses his lips as the truth suddenly sinks inside his chest.
“No one,” he admits after a moment.
He’s not entirely sure if the burning in his face is from the shame or the fresh wounds anymore.
“You’re my only heir,” his father continues. “You can’t keep on being that reckless with your life. You have a duty to fulfil.”
“I know that.”
The stinging in his cheek at the slap and, somehow even more, the silence that follows it, tells him how wrong the voice he just used was.
There’s something extremely unsettling in his father’s eyes when he gets like that. Something like the way he still vividly remembers his grandfather being - cold, angry, dangerous - but also, at the same time and maybe more so even, something like the way he remembers his father being, acting, looking like whenever he was around. Animalistic, but not in a predatory way, in a hurt prey crawling on the floor for its survival kind of way; wounded, and scared.
He’s not sure what his father is scared of now. Certainly not him.
He doesn’t ask.
“Act like it.”
---
The walk back to the compound is silent, and although he would maybe call it heavy, he suspects that might just be his own projection.
He wonders when is the last time he had an actual conversation with his son that wasn’t about training or shogi. Not that those don’t matter, they do and, truly, if they’re most of what they share these days, it’s also because it feels like it’s a type of connection his son is much more comfortable with than long talks. Yet, he also knows wordless exchanges can’t always be enough.
“I’m sorry I didn’t follow your exam so far, Shikamaru.”
Shrug.
“You were on a mission.”
“I should have asked when I came back.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
They fall back to silently walking side by side for a while, the streets and buildings giving way to dirt paths, trees, and empty training grounds as they exit the more urban area of the village and get closer to the forest.
“I’m proud of you,” he states eventually, and Shikamaru turns his head away with a snort, hands burying themselves deeper in his pockets. It’s mostly endearing. “I mean it,” he still adds. “Whatever happens in your third round, you did great.”
Shikamaru’s elbow digging into his side tears a shout out of him. It’s mostly the surprise, but the kid sure has also been toughening up.
“Hey, since when do you hit your old man like that!” he exclaims with way more playful disconcertment than anger.
“Since when are you so touchy-feely and troublesome?” Shikamaru answers, but Shikaku would bet the pinkish tone his cheeks have taken is, at least in part, also genuinely from the compliment. “I get it, you’re sorry. No need to get all emotional like that, it’s weird and embarrassing.”
Sometimes, between thinking of him as a kid, and thinking of him as a Shinobi, he forgets his son is mostly just a teenage boy who thinks his dad is lame.
“You’re a brat.”
Shikamaru huffs again but doesn’t stop blushing, and Shikaku would swear his chest is, maybe not swelling, but somewhat less slouched than it was before.
He didn’t make all the good choices with that kid, for sure, he can’t help but think, gazing at him as they resume walking without a word, but if, somewhere along the way, he managed to turn whatever his relationship with his own father was into something that allowed for mutual teasing and adolescent rebellion, he must have been doing at least some things right.
Shikamaru only speaks again once they’re reaching the borders of the Nara compound, without stopping or even glancing at Shikaku, but with something still emotional in his voice.
“Thanks, Dad.”