I wrote this ages ago for Juno, who wanted a Shisui+Shikako team up. It's been slow-going but I love it so much and am constantly blessed by her ideas. Shout-out to Dona for her Shisui+Shikako team up which was, uh, not nearly as fluffy as this has turned out to be — search "Shisui and Shikako, BFFs" on the index.
The usual squad — Math, SQ, and Pepper — probably helped helped with this? My mind is a sieve. And thanks to anyone who corrected typos for me when it was living in a google doc, and also I appreciate all the support I got when this was on the forums. This has had minor edits since then, just a little more scene and dialogue to break up the summary, no big changes in information or plot.
TIMELINE NOTE:
I always use SQ's rough timeline for ages and things BUT I'm going a little off for this AU because having Yoshino have Shikako at fifteen was too much for me. In this AU Yoshino is the same age as Shikaku. They still didn't meet until way after the Academy, though, probably because in wartime (and, you know, before Itachi) classes were organized more for skill and politics than just straight age.
Also... Shisui has no canon age, so for the record Shikako and Shisui are born 8 years before the Kyuubi attack in this AU which means the year of the Uchiha Massacre, the Rookie Nine turn 8, Itachi turns 13, and Shikako and Shisui turn 16.
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Shadow Under Water
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Maybe in another life, Shikako could have had a childhood full of acute but generally formless fear. And a twin to act as a shield, and pace herself against. She could have been eased into her understanding of which universe, exactly, she'd been born into and what her place there would be. She would have cried for weeks straight and then she would have been silenced by the Kyuubi attack.
But this is not that life. This life... in this life, Shikaku and Yoshino are 17 and interference from a jutsu Yoshino got hit with on a mission makes her contraceptive jutsu falter and then words like "honeypot" and "disowned" are being thrown around, not that Shikako was aware of that part. Still, it happened. Shikako comes into the world a Kinokawa.
Kinokawa Kako, although they call her 'Shikako' in private, still.
"My deerheart," her father groans under the sound of her wailing.
She cries and cries. There's no twin to curl up against. Her parents are exhausted teenagers, taking responsibility for their mistake. Her grandparents — her maternal grandparents — let them use the second bedroom in their apartment, the one that used to be Yoshino's. Namikaze Minato, on leave from the front lines of the Third War, writes out a silencing seal for them as a belated baby shower gift to keep from bothering the neighbors and they go slowly crazy. They take a lot of time off to care for their new baby. They avoid the Nara.
Sleep is a relief from the constant choking, the inexplicable itch, the knowledge that everything she's known is gone. Several months into her new life as the world's most unhappy baby, when she's managed to cut down on the screaming a little and understand the new language being spoken just a bit, a man comes to visit.
Is invited in by her grandmother.
Her father calls him "Shimura" and a title she'll later guess was probably "councilman" and her grandmother says, "Danzō-sama" and when Danzō speaks his tone is so reasonable, so calm and helpful.
He could take that fussy, loud baby off their hands, he probably says, he has a special program for fostering promising young shinobi. ROOT would be perfect for young Kako. You could go back to your careers. You could get a good night's rest! Young people shouldn't be burdened so heavily from one mistake.
Her mother holds her tighter and says, probably, "No. No, thank you."
Her father smoothes this over a little — but not much. Danzō is hurried out.
Shikako doesn't understand most of the words. Shikako can't be sure of what happened, but Shikako does hear 'Danzō' and she does recognize that old man. A villain. Shikako tries to stop crying. She tries so hard, although she still chokes and chokes on the air, feeling like she's drowning. Danzō visits several more times, each time a little more insistent.
Her grandmother thinks it's a good idea.
Her parents move into a small studio apartment.
He visits once more and then she is finally, blessedly diagnosed with chakra hypersensitivity. Useless to him. Safe, for now.
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Years down the line, her Uncle Ikoma dies. Her paternal grandfather, Shikano, dies. The Nara clan is kind of out of clan head options except for Shikaku, who's already a shoe-in for Jōnin Commander, to replace his father. There's a debate at the dinner table, Shikako watching quietly. She's quiet as often as possible; she remembers what a terrible baby she was and how her parents kept her anyway.
"They won't accept Shikako as heir," her father says, mouth twisting unhappily. He has no scars on his face, but he probably should. He did in canon. She thinks.
"There's nothing wrong with her," her mother says.
Her father sighs. "I know. But clan law is clear. She can't use chakra, which means she won't be able to learn even the most basic of the clan jutsu..."
Normally, Shikako wouldn't contradict her parents. It's so much work — everything is so much work — and she hasn't forgotten Danzō. But, well, it sounds like maybe she had misunderstood something. It's best to investigate.
"I... can't use chakra?" Shikako asks, sharing at the both of them carefully. If she can't, then... what has she been doing?
"No, honey," her mother says, turning to her. Pained to have this discussion, seemingly. "Because of your hypersensitivity. It would hurt."
"Okay..." Shikako says slowly, setting down the milk she was drinking. "Um, I thought that that's what this probably was, though, so...?" She lights her hand up, like she does under the blankets at night when the darkness starts pressing in a little too much but she doesn't want to go crawl into her parent's bed and bother them with what would seem to be silly childhood fears.
It turns out that it is chakra, so it's a relief not to be wrong about that, and she will be Nara clan heir. Her father will be clan head, like he was supposed to be, before she ruined his and her mother's life for a couple years.
Oh, also, she gets sent to the Academy. This all turns out to probably be for the best, despite her terror that Danzō might take notice.
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The Nara Compound is relaxed and quiet. It's full of people who ostensibly are Shikako's family. They all seem very glad to have Shikaku back, her father taking the clan in hand easily, but their reception to Shikako and her mother is... less warm.
No one is outright rude; no one is foolish enough to want to bring the full force of her father's wrath down on them. But Yoshino is not their ideal matriarch, and Shikako not their ideal heir. Sure, she can use chakra and is attending the Academy, but she's still considered sickly. The clan knows about her bad days, the ones where she can barely haul herself out of bed, the ones the doctors at the hospital say are probably a side-effect of her hypersensitivity.
"Sometimes the body just gets overwhelmed with pain signals and has to shut down," a medic had explained to Yoshino and Shikaku when she was a toddler. "It seems like they've been getting less and less frequent since she was an infant, so hopefully it's a defense mechanism that she'll grow out of."
And yeah, that kind of medical information should be secure. But there are Nara all over the hospital and the Nara are a ninja clan. Of course they find out. Of course they blame her mother with sly words and non-accusations that Yoshino must ignore while she tries to prove herself up to the task of being the Nara clan head's wife.
But it's not Yoshino's fault. The medic was wrong. Everyone is wrong.
It's true she gets overwhelmed, but it's not about her ability to sense chakra; that's just a constant sensation, eventually faded into the background. Rather, she gets overwhelmed by everything she's lost. Everything she once had that now no longer exists. Culture and family and knowledge, a grief so deep and so vast that sometimes she just has to go away for awhile.
And the clan compound — the clan compound just makes it all worse. It's big. Sprawling. The main house itself, the house they move in to, has a living room and kitchen almost as big as the whole two-bedroom apartment they just moved out of. There are clan archives and pastures for the deer and a meeting house. There are aunts and uncles and cousins. There's less time for her parents to spend with her.
There are Nara children, of course, but they're all either older or younger at an age where just a year is a vast difference almost too deep to cross. Kyougi is two years older and always irritated. Takatori is three years older and doesn't have time 'for babies' when there are so many books to read.
Shikako is not a baby, she's five, but she's more than content to spend her free time hiding from the clan. She doesn't like how they look at her. She doesn't like how they look at her mother. She doesn't like the hint of condescension and frustration in Kofuku-oba's tone when she explains yet another Nara matriarch duty to Shikako's exhausted mother.
Better to spend her time playing with her chakra — which is literally magic — and devouring books.
The Academy is fine. She doesn't talk to people if she can help it, both at the Academy and in the clan compound, and it helps that no one is much interested in talking to her.
On the first day, anxiety making her palms sweat, Shikako goes out to lunch with the other children and she... falters.
The Yamanaka-Nara-Akimichi allianceship depends on familiarity leading to friendship, rather than forced introductions, and if Shikako doesn't approach any of the Yamanaka or Akimichi kids, no one will force her to.
Two girls she'll later learn are Akimichi Tatsumi and Akimichi Chinatsu are comparing lunches. A Yamanaka — Santa, she knows from the sensei's roll call — coaxes a laugh out of Kyougi. Everyone already knows everyone else, and she suspects many of them know about the scandal of her conception.
She approaches them and — and — she finds she's easily upset by the casual cruelty of other children, despite ostensibly being an adult, mentally.
Shikako retreats. An Aburame boy is sitting neatly by himself under the shade of some trees, and she mumbles a request to sit. He nods. She sits with her back against the tree just to the right of the one he's leaning against and pulls out the book she's reading about human anatomy, requested during an excruciating conversation with Igaku-oba that had involved a lot of encouragement to become a medic.
The next tree over, to Shikako's mind, is close enough that she's not sitting alone but far enough away that no one could say they were sitting together. It seems safe. Unobtrusive.
Maybe she could push through and make friends, but that would take so much energy. Momentum she doesn't have. Shikako has to hold on to herself. She can't collapse. The clan is looking at her, and her mother, and expecting them to falter. Shikako must succeed. She owes that to her little family.
Friends will hopefully come along with teammates. For now, easier to read, and read, and read.
When the war ends; the academy slows down a little. Namikaze Minato is going to be the Yondaime Hokage. The day Shikako hears, she has to go to the bathroom and throw up twice. They send her home sick. She can't explain that it's just anxiety. Terror, crawling up through her, paralyzing her.
The year she turns eight, her mom gives birth to a little boy they name Kinokawa. The name puts a lump in her throat, both because she misses being a Kinokawa and their safe cramped little civilian apartment and because this boy should be named Shikamaru. She's sure of it. Another thing that's different, that she might have ruined. Will her little brother still end up best friends with Akimichi Chouji? Will he still be taught by the same teachers, placed on the same team, achieve the same victories? Can there be an Ino-Kino-Chou team?
The baby she privately thinks of as Shikamaru is important. And he's going to be clan head, if she has anything to say about it, because she's not going to steal that from him. Also because it will be a lot of work. Shikako is marshalling her arguments about it already.
He was born in the clan. He'll be raised in it. They'll trust him, love him, he won't be so sickly.
Canon is approaching. The Kyuubi. Her father and Namikaze Minato are friends, although Shikako has only met him two or three times and very, very briefly. Still. He's probably the reason Shikaku was made Jōnin Commander despite the scandal of his young shotgun wedding to Yoshino and brief stint as a Kinokawa. And he's going to save the village.
He's going to die.
There's nothing I can do, she tells herself. No one would believe me. I don't even remember the specifics, if there were any. He saves the village. It's fine. Naruto turns out okay. Things turn out okay. It probably won't even be that upon excuses.
It happens at night. Kinokawa-chan is only a few weeks old, and he hasn't been screaming the way she did as a baby, which is probably a relief to her parents. He's a quiet, lazy baby and Shikako avoids holding him because babies are weird.
Shikako and her mother have cleaned up from dinner. Her father is still working, which is unusual, so Shikako is doing extra work for the Academy to excuse staying up and waiting for him to get home. When the chakra hits, her pencil tumbles from her hand because she can no longer grip it.
"Oh," her mother says, as if nothing in the world is wrong, looking at where Shikako's pencil has rolled. "I'll get that for you, honey. Did you nod off? It's late."
Shikako can't respond. Her vision blurs. The chakra is so loud. And it hurts, it burns and corrodes and Shikako is on the floor. Shikako needs to hide.
Her mother is above her, clutching Kinokawa, saying, "Shikako? Shikako...!" and kneeling down to help her, somehow, although Shikako doesn't know how anything could possibly help this.
But... it does help, actually. Weirdly.
In that other life, Shikako would have been a helpless, selfish, terrified, confused baby. In this life, she's eight and she knows what this is, has been expecting it for months. And she loves her mom. She talks to her mom more than anyone else.
She couldn't have gotten off the floor for herself, not even to save her own life, but to help her mother calm down? To reassure someone she loves?
Everything in her shakes, but she pushes herself up. She's crying, she doesn't know why but she is, and she can't do much more than crawl up onto the couch beside her mother and cuddle into her side, looking down at the crying, wailing Kinokawa. The loudest he's ever been, completely shameless.
"It's okay, honey, it's okay," her mother says. With one arm, she bounces Kino-chan in a desperate bid to soothe him. With her other, she presses Shikako into her side, rubbing her back.
Shikako can't speak a word. She can only squeeze her chakra in tighter and tighter, stuff it all away, scrape every shred of it out of her system and tuck it away. She wishes she could tell Yoshino to do the same.
A few times, her mom checks her pulse.
When it's over and her father comes home... she's never seen such dread on his face. He doesn't even slip his shoes off, he just calls, "Yoshino?" into the house and stumbles towards them when her mother calls back. He's covered in mud and dust and blood. There's a line of dried blood down one side of his face from a wound up past his hairline.
The moment he's in view he asks, "Shikako...?" like the world is ending.
Shikako realizes that she's looking in the vague direction of the door with a thousand-yard stare, unblinking, and she still has her chakra suppressed. She must look and feel dead. She almost wishes she were, so that she wouldn't have to go out into a world with things like the Kyūbi in it.
"She hasn't spoken since the chakra hit us," Yoshino says. Her voice is thin and it cracks. "I think she felt it before I did, she just fell to the floor..."
Her father is probably supposed to go back out and help right away. There are alarms blaring from the village, codes they haven't learned yet in school, and Nara Shikaku is the Jōnin Commander, and Shikako knows without a doubt that the Yondaime is dead. Died when the Kyūbi's chakra faded from the air.
But Shikako is selfish and her dad must be too, because he just settles onto the couch and holds her tight until she can hold back.
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It takes awhile for new classes to be put together at the Academy, which suits Shikako just fine because she wants nothing more than to hide at home. She doesn't want to see what's happened to the village. She doesn't want to know who will be missing at school. She could have prevented this and she didn't even try.
She has nightmares. Her father has to come looking for her because she pulls her chakra in too tight and he wakes up, thinking she's gone.
In the end the classes do get reassigned, and Shikako never gets a chance to hand in the extra Academy work she was doing the night of the attack; her old sensei died in the Kyuubi attack and her new sensei doesn't accept extra work. The class is about half kids from her old class, half kids she didn't even share lunch with, before. This is a new set of people to learn to avoid... and comes with one person she can't ignore.
Shikako failed Namikaze Minato, and that means she failed the whole village. But meeting Uchiha Shisui? It's so much worse.
He introduces himself to everyone new to the class. To Shikako, he says, "Hi!" and bounces on his heels and grins at her. "I'm Uchiha Shisui," he adds when she looks up but doesn't say anything. "What're you reading? Is it fun? It looks boring. Not that you're boring!"
She thinks about saying: I know how you die.
She thinks about saying: This village is already unsafe, I've heard them start to talk about your clan.
What she says is: "Nara Shikako. It's about the chakra system. I am boring."
She speaks just as quietly as always. She doesn't want to invite others to join in. She doesn't want Shisui talking to her in the first place. She doesn't want the teacher getting the idea that they're friends and assigning them to work together for the next two years until they graduate.
"No!" gasps Shisui, as if she's said something scandalous. "That sounds way cool! Your clan does, like, um, medical stuff, right?"
Shikako nods. "Not with chakra, though," she offers, because she wants this conversation to be over but she doesn't want to be rude. Snubbing even a fellow eight year old seems like a bad plan. Maybe even especially a fellow eight year old. Shisui seems popular.
Shisui slides into the empty chair next to her without invite, looking at her with bright eyes. "What kind of stuff do you use, then?"
"Ah... we produce medicines and do research..." Shikako lets her eyes drift down to look at the book in front of her, no longer looking at Shisui.
"Is that what you want to do?" Shisui asks. "Research? Fixing people?"
Research would be safe. She could work in the clan compound or even out in one of their research compounds elsewhere in the Land of Fire. The entire canon plot would probably miss her, at least up until that whole zombie war thing, and at that point she'd have lived at least as long as she made it in her last life. Dedicating herself to research would even be a pretty good reason to not be clan heir.
She's looking at him from under her eyelashes, through the wispy bangs that have escaped her braid, and although the wide-collared Uchiha shirts always looked kind of silly on Sasuke in the anime... Shisui's wide-collared shirt is a dark charcoal and makes him look soft and young. His hair is wild and a little curly. She looks back down at her book, not seeing the words on the page.
She can't help but think about how he's going to kill himself.
Can she stop it?
Shikako shrugs. "I don't know," she says, shoulders hunching, quiet. She's eight years old. She doesn't have enough information — she doesn't even have a set timeline. She doesn't even know if the show is accurate anymore. Nara Shikamaru never had an older sister.
"You'll figure it out!" Shisui says. And he's going to say something else ("Hey, do you think—?") but someone calls his name and soon after class is starting and the teacher has assigned seats.
On one side of her, Shikako has Shiga Kosei, a close cousin of Sarutobi Biwako. On the other side, Nohara Mayaso, the granddaughter of the Nohara clan head. Both of them were in her class before the Kyuubi attack, although she hadn't associated with them on account of not associating with... anyone.
Elsewhere around Shikako are the Aburame boy she eats lunch near — his name is Muta — and several members of other minor but important clans, including Ise Washi, whose father managers the Mission Desk and often works with Shikako's father, and Utatane Natsuki. The sort of people who will be going places. Who will be on genin teams, or get apprenticeships.
Shisui is sitting far to the right of the classroom, the wall with its high, long windows on one side and an orphan answering to the name Urushi. In front of him are the academically gifted students who will go into the genin corps and eventually ride desks or man lonely outposts, attending to messenger hawks and gathering information. Behind him, a mix of students who won't last the year or who are sure to be held back.
Her class has been maneuvered.
Their sensei likes to assign teams for their class just like he likes to assign seats. Shisui is rarely paired with the other clan children for any exercise lasting longer than ten minutes. Shikako doesn't mind the team assignments, herself — she's often paired with Muta and Uzuki Yūgao and it saves her the anxiety of having to find her own partners for group projects — but she gets the impression Shisui's experiences are... a little different.
Who you work with in class impacts who your genin teammates might be, and groups are always in threes. Shisui's likely teammates are people who will make him fail his team test, or at least who will slow him down on his way to chūnin, and more often than not Shikako notices that he's the odd man out, stuck onto an establish three-kid team or paired with only one other person.
None of the kids Shisui is forced into contact with will want to talk to him, or if they do they won't understand him. They're civilian kids and orphans. No ninja parents, no idea what clan life is like, probably have never spoken to a ninja except for the Academy sensei. Shisui already has callouses from weapons-work. And civilian-born kids are exposed to the kind of rampant rumors Shikako overhears flying around the market when she goes shopping for groceries with her mother without parents invested in explaining how rumors actually work.
The market has only just been rebuilt, and Shikako hasn't been yet. She doesn't know what they're saying. But surely there was some kind of pressure on the Uchiha leading up to the Massacre.
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Her mother comes home from the market later in the week complaining that several civilian women had apparently forgotten that the Uchiha and Hyuuga were in charge of civilian evacuation and rescue during the attack. That they were ordered not to fight, ordered to focus on reducing civilian casualties.
"They're saying the Uchiha did nothing," Yoshino tells her husband, gesturing with her paring knife to emphasize how stupid she thinks this is. "Like they just hid in their compound or something!"
It makes Shikako feel a chill, although it's no different from dozens of other deeply misguided rumors that her mother has reported flying around the marketplace in years past. She looks down at her math assignment and can't focus, even as her mother moves on to other news and observations from the market.
For months, things get worse and worse and still, Shikako stays silent. For a whole year. Two years.
She sits quietly in class, she eats lunch quietly with other people, and at the end of the day she goes home quietly. Shikako hasn't missed the glances the Uchiha police officers get in the village. She's listened sharply.
They had to rebuild the police station, which implies it was destroyed. Surely there were people inside, Uchiha coordinating the evacuation of the civilians. No one escaped the Kyuubi attack without losing someone, and just because the Uchiha are private about their mourning doesn't mean it's not happening, but Shikako hears people complaining that the Uchiha lost nothing.
The Uchiha are in charge of identifying remains and finding missing persons, and everyone has an opinion about that, too: too slow, people need closure; too fast, they'll get sloppy.
No one holds their tongue about anything. It can't all be true, not just because it's all awful but because it contradicts itself, and yet surely that makes it worse. There stop being facts to refute; the rumors and gossip is all just self-enforcing judgement. If the Uchiha say nothing and ignore the rumors, then they're as much as admitting that they're true. If they try to refute them, then they're too defensive and must be hiding something even worse.
Shisui only becomes louder and more cheerful as Shikako watches the people and places around him get colder and colder. He plays less, then not at all. The Uchiha all sit together at lunch. At first in a mixed group with other friends... and then slowly only with other Uchiha.
Shisui's six year old cousin is advanced up past several years of material until he shares lunch with them. Uchiha Itachi. Shikako stops even glancing at the Uchiha, because it feels like seeing ghosts.
For the week around the anniversary of the attack Shisui doesn't even come to class, and when he comes back he's a little wrong. Jagged in all his social interactions for days. It's none of her business who he lost and it's not like he's the only one, but it stands out to her clearly.
She has to do something about it. Something about the Uchiha.
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OC and minor character notes:
Yamanaka Santa, Aburame Muta, and Urushi are minor canon characters. In DoS, Shikako met Muta on that surprise bunker mission with Tsume.
Nara Kyougi, Nara Takatori, and Nara Kofuku are SQ's.
Akimichi Chinatsu is Dona's from a forum post back when this was there.
Akimichi Tatsumi, Shiga Kosei, Nohara Mayaso, Ise Washi, Utatane Natsuki are mine.