Work Text:
Shikamaru remembers the first time logic failed him.
When he was six years old, he encountered a deer in the woods.
Not an uncommon thing on Nara land, but this deer was different.
It looked like something that used to be a deer.
It had a shambling gait to its step. Unsteady, its head turned side to side as if it couldn't quite hold its head up.
It was walking in circles when he found it.
He froze as he watched it, unsure how to help it- what to do. Unsure if it even was a deer.
The deer lifted its head, its eyes unseeing looked at him, and began to walk toward him.
Shikamaru stepped back.
The animal stepped forward as if to run but fell into a bow and stumbled back up.
Shikamaru ran.
He ran back home to his father.
Terrified.
His father told him to breathe before he asked what had happened.
The deer, Shikamaru said, the deer.
After finally pulling a description out of Shikamaru's mouth his father looked him sternly in the eyes, more serious than his son had ever seen him, and asked,
Did you touch it?
Shikamaru shook his head.
Still, his father instructed him to remove his shoes and jacket and set them on the porch. He briefly told his wife where he was going, and then he was gone.
The forest burned hotter than the sun that year.
Half the herd was killed off and never seen again.
Shikamaru dreams of that deer sometimes.
but in his dreams,
it always catches up.