Archive of Our Own

They’d both been sitting in silence for a fair while now. How long they’d been there had completely slipped his mind- had it been ten minutes? Twenty? It didn’t really matter. They were both bundled up warm, but he could’ve sworn he felt the wind cutting through the layers and straight into his skin.

Shikamaru’s eyes stung whenever he blinked, red and puffy and glassy. His face wasn’t really wet with tears anymore, but his nose was still running and his hands trembled as he ran his fingertips over the fawn’s coat. When they’d found her, she’d already been here like this; cold and wet and curled up in the foliage. The sensation of wet fur normally would have made him recoil, but the repulsion was dampened by the situation at hand.

It had just been a routine wander through the forest. The deer in the forest weren’t livestock, and they certainly weren’t tamed animals. Members of the Nara clan were, of course, assumed to care for them as such- but all they really did was make sure everything stayed running smoothly within the forest. Shikamaru, being only a child, hadn’t actually taken the mantle of becoming a carer of the forest yet, but even so he often accompanied his father on his walks.

As the head of their clan, of course, most of the work of the forest fell to Shikaku. Everyone pitched in when and where they could, but Shikaku had the final say in whatever happened to the forest and the wildlife within.

The boy’s father did nothing beyond sit with his child, legs crossed and hands in his lap. The earth below them was wet and it was soaking into his pants, but as long as his boy needed to sit here and let it sink in, he would wait. Shikamaru’s hand continued to absently pet the neck of the spot-pelted fawn, the other covering her nose and intermittently searching up to touch other parts of her face. She was only a few days old. It almost surprised the man when Shikamaru finally spoke up, not pulling his gaze from the deer in his lap.

“Why?”

Shikaku took a moment to think; Shikamaru wasn’t particularly good with specifics yet and sometimes it was a guessing game as to what he actually meant when he posed a question. He took in a breath and sighed it out in a puff of mist, before reaching over and laying his large hand behind his son’s shoulders.

“It’s barely spring, Shikamaru. Fawns aren’t built to battle the harshness of winter.” He paused, giving the boy a moment to let the words sink in. “It’s unfortunate, but it was inevitable.” There was a pause in the movement of Shikamaru’s hand and Shikaku cleared his throat. “It was going to happen, no matter what we did.”

“Deer aren’t supposed to be born in winter,” the boy agreed, before finally raising his head to look up at his father. It hurt somewhere cold and deep in his chest to see the look on Shikamaru’s face; it wasn’t often that the child managed to examine and express his emotions but there was something uncomfortable and raw written on his young features and it was the last thing in the world that Shikaku wanted to see. But he couldn’t keep these things from Shikamaru forever, especially not when the boy insisted on accompanying him through the forest so often. Shikamaru swallowed, sniffled, and then looked back down to the baby deer. “But why? She was a baby.”

Ah. That was it.

“I know, Shikamaru.” He heaved a sigh and moved his hand, now placing it on the fawn’s side and touching her matted fur. She didn’t seem to have any injuries at a cursory glance- she had probably succumbed to the elements just as he had assumed. “It doesn’t matter how old someone is, though. Unfortunate things like this happen often, and there isn’t much we can do about it.”

Shikamaru was quiet. The cogs in his little brain were grinding against each other and whining with the effort as he tried to wrap his head around the information he’d been given. Death wasn’t something he’d been faced with the thought of very often to begin with, but the death of a fawn- a child- someone like him- wasn’t something he’d ever really considered.

“Does it happen a lot?”

“Not to the deer born later in spring.” Shikaku sighed again as he turned his eyes skyward- the canopy of the forest provided some shelter, but the early seasonal rain was never far at bay and it was preparing to catch them if they weren’t careful. Noticing his father shifting, Shikamaru looked back up and tensed.

“Do we take her with us?”

Pushing himself up and getting to his feet with a grunt, the man wiped the grime off his hands on the front of his jacket, before reaching down to help his son up. Shikamaru was very careful to move the poor deer’s head out of his lap as he moved, as gently as he possibly could. “I think it would be better for us to leave her be, Shikamaru,” Shikaku soothed, wrapping his arms around his son’s waist and hoisting him up onto his hip. He had to stop the boy from habitually shoving his hand into his mouth- as loathe as he was to keep him from stimming, Shikamaru needed to wash his hands first.

“Will she be okay?”

“It’s best that we just let nature take its course with this, Shikamaru. I’m sure she’ll be fine. I think that’s enough of a walk through the forest for today.”

He offered his son a smile and Shikamaru nodded, pulling the hood on his little jacket up before resting his head against his father’s shoulder, tugging at the drawstrings on Shikaku’s jacket with one tiny hand.