Lightening in the Shadows

Chapter One

Another Year

It was the end of the year. Shikamaru had watched the days come and go in a dizzy blur of semi-consciousness, waiting for this moment.

Kakashi had sat disinterested, reclining into his chair while he observed the young lives of a half dozen generations flash before him. Every one the same or similar. The achiever, the genius, the comedian, the bully. The overly happy and the overly emo. The Narutos and Sasukes, that passed by his desk with a Konoha headband strapped on with pride at the end of the school year around this time. There was something terribly redundant about the years. Perhaps he wasn't reading into them enough.

Still this year, Kakashi managed to balance himself on the verge of concentration. His acute senses were being summoned by something he would never admit to himself could be capturing him. One student, who by some aberrancy, had managed to stand out from the legions of others.

Shikamaru Nara turned his head as he reached the end desk, his perky thirteen year old eyes bounding up into Kakashi's with sudden expectancy. "Am I signing?"

Kakashi collected himself in time, replying haltingly. "Um…yeah." His hands passed the board he'd been hoarding over with careful precision, as though the youth might drop it. "Here"

With the look Shikamaru cast its apparently unwanted weight, his fears weren't unprecedented. A signature was scrawled in lazy handwriting. "There. Am I ninja now sensei?" Shikamaru asked, willingly returning the board to its keeper.

Kakashi couldn't help but to fixate himself on Shikamaru. There was something in the familiar manner in which he carried himself- as though he'd woken up tired-that Kakashi was relating to. "Well…almost. You're just…a little ninja."

"A Genin, you mean?" Shikamaru asked his nameless elder casually. He shrugged as one of the next students in line, some kid with his dog, started nudging him onwards in excited impatience. "Sigh. That means another lot of years to appease my parents." Shikamaru wandered away with tragic steps that marked his journey to great places, if he'd ever carry himself over to them. Kakashi watched in fond amusement as he detected the boy's final trailing off on the words: "How troublesome…"

"Kakashi…" Iruka suddenly berated him as he swept up out of nowhere. "You're holding the line up. Next! Hello Kiba…"

The kid with the puppy materialized at the edge of the 'You Passed! Collect your Konoha Headband here!' signboard. Between him and his adorable snuffling white fur ball, it was hard to discern whose tail was thumping faster. "I did it! I passed! I'm awesome!"

"Kiba, was it?" Kakashi posed the rhetorical question as he scanned the kid's page from under Shikamaru's."Well done, you passed. Hey Iruka…" The kid was tossed his blue headband, which he snatched up like a gold award. "D'ya know that Nara kid cleared with an aggregate of 98%?"

"You wouldn't believe it." Iruka suddenly cracked a smile, warmly smiling at Kiba before hailing the next kid over. "He slept through study classes."

"Slept through them?" Kakashi asked incredulously, reminiscent of his younger days. Iruka busied himself with sorting through Kakashi's pile of papers for the next Genin he was supposed to award a headband to. "You mean, all of them?"

"Pretty much." Iruka offered him, still immersed in their task. "He wasn't supposed to ace like that, it sends a bad message to all the other kids. I mean…I think the slacker beat the Uchiha boy."

Kakashi stilled on the thought, musing it over as he sifted through the pile of papers already signed. He fumbled until he'd landed on the student's in question. "Uchiha Sasuke. Well, he missed it by just barely. Kid's sitting on a 96."

Iruka bit the side of his lip at that, prompting Kakashi to pry with, "What?"

"Don't think he was so happy about the 4%. But I had to penalize him for teamwork."

"What was wrong with his teamwork?"

Iruke rotated his slow and deliberate gaze towards him. "It doesn't exist."

Once more, Kakashi found himself fetching the memories of his own childhood days. "Well, 96 ain't bad. Sure isn't half as alarming as what some of them scraped on."

"Naruto. May the Hokages of past and present be with that boy." And Iruka returned himself to his duty before Kakashi could ask him to elaborate.

He was curious at himself for even having taken any noticeable interest in the year's Genins. Soon, they'd be allocated Jonins who could steer them towards even more promising futures. Kakashi knew he himself was going to be one of those Jonins. Who was he going to be assigned to that year? Kids bordering on full color passes? Or…kids like whoever Naruto was supposed to be.

"Ahem!" A persistent voice piercing with its adamancy tainted the calm air. "I'd like my headband now!" Kakashi peered down wondrously at the child bearing a grin that extended into felicity, bobbing up and down on his feet with his strident orange jumpsuit shifting in rhythm. There was something interesting about his eager eyes and his prickling yellow hair that captivated Kakashi for a moment before answering, as the Nara boy had done to him. "Um…here. You are…"

"Uzamaki Naruto!" The kid was proud to announce, thundering the words to be sure that even the dead Hokages were listening. "I'm going to be Hokage!"

"Aww. Now isn't that sweet." Kakashi humored him, indulging enough to steal a look at his results. "Let's just see here what you got for…" And then he remembered why the name had tolled through his head like bells. After absorbing the mark score sheet, he tossed his concerned gaze back at Naruto with Iruka's forewarning in mind. The kid seemed to have little to be beaming back about as things stood with his below minimum pass rate. "You…passed." Kakashi finally offered him, glad for the mask he wore to hide his horror. "Well-Well done kid."

"Yes! I passed! Dattebay-"

"Next!" Kakashi called quickly, before he could be expected to concoct any further praise. Meanwhile, Iruka left to finish stacking paperwork. Kakashi tilted his head up to view the rest of the disjointed line still due up front, as it trailed back all the way down a mass of small persons who wanted headbands. He sighed unwillingly. "What is with the need for recognition?"

Gaze easily distracted in his reluctance to work, Kakashi stumbled onto the distant sight of the Nara boy. So his father was Shikaku: go figure. With grades like those, who else's son? Kakashi smiled as he wondered why he hadn't drawn the parallels.

Then he reminded himself it was because Shikaku was an activist, Shikamaru inclined to a sedentary style of living. Much like he himself was, perched up at his desk without the faintest motivation to carry out his work until Iruka returned to the scene and forced him.

Shikamaru in the near distance was fussing about the headband his father had wrestled onto his forehead, complaining words too out of earshot for Kakashi to be sure of, but with lip movements he interpreted as: "Dad, it's ruining me." Shikaku was laughing warmly as he doted on his little whiner, readjusting the headband up and down as best he could trying to fix his apparent dilemma. Eventually, Shikamaru resorted to just pulling it off his head. He seemed to be swearing he'd find a place for the encumbering thing, which his dad settled on with a proud tap on his son's head. When Shikaku had drifted away to find someone or something, Shikamaru leant back on a support beam with eyes wary of the headband in his hands. He seemed to be reluctant to carry its added weight around with him, which Kakashi emphasized with. Without realizing, Kakashi had gotten to his feet and abandoned his post with mindless negligence.

A frowning Neji watched him proceed away from the front with his headband set in his mind's eye.

Kakashi had reached Shikamaru's side and been removed from anyone's range of protest too quickly to be halted. He smiled with unexpected ease, devoid of the usual revulsion he felt towards the unfamiliar children he encountered every year. "Shikamaru, was it?"

Shikamaru's eyes crossed him warily. "Yeah?" He asked with distrusting stare. "Who's asking?"

"I'm Kakashi, by the way."

"Oh." Was all Shikamaru offered him, fidgeting with the steel disc on his headband.

Kakashi ventured further still despite the stranger barrier. "Uh, hey. You know those headbands seem kind of heavy right? Ya know, when you're young."

Shikamaru shrugged, evidently unfazed with being deemed young. "I guess so."

"So…why don't you wear it…on your arm?" Kakashi randomized, recalling past students in all their numerous ways of trying something different with the headband.

"My arm?" Shikamaru repeated unthinkingly, staring blankly as Kakashi slipped the soft blue cloth of the headband from his fingers.

"Here, like this." Kakashi wasn't surprised at himself until after he'd done it. The headband was successfully bound with great care and accuracy around the boy's shoulder, winking at the overhead sun from the metal part bearing the Leaf symbol.

Shikamaru's nose angled over at it. "Um…yeah." He didn't rush to remove it though. "Thanks, I guess."

Kakashi felt the awkwardness rise until it flushed his face red. He hastened to extract himself from the scene before it showed straight through his grey mask. "Anyway, I have a job to be at. You remember me when you carry that band around, alright? Alright." Kakashi was glad for his unmatched speed as he dissipated right before Shikamaru's hanging open mouth, his response lost to his elder's decision.

When Kakashi arrived at his desk it was, without satisfaction, moments before Iruka did. He didn't even have the reassuring reproaching to fall back on as distraction. Instead he sat hot with uninterrupted embarrassment.

Taken an interest? In this year's students? In this year's one particular student?

Why though…what was it about the Nara boy?

Without meaning to, Kakashi risked a glance back in the direction he'd left the boy, steeped back against the wooden beam. His eyes had not yet traced Kakashi back to the desk, or otherwise he was preoccupied with something.

It was the headband, Kakashi realized with somewhat satisfaction. He was fiddling with it again, still making a hassle of it, still uncertain he was willing about it. And then with eventual relent, he took his hand from the bound up thing as though he liked it there. There, strapped to his thin shoulder. There where Kakashi had placed it for him.

Kakashi smiled with a sense of smugness that he'd achieved the impossible: appeased one of his kind.

"Neji passed with like a million percent, mister. Please, give him a headband." Iruka said, dropping one down into Kakashi's unsuspecting hands.

With half a glance diverted from Neji, Kakashi handed him the object with most of his attention settled a few steps away, on the boy with a headband already bound to his arm. On the even less suspecting Shikamaru Nara.

This year was going to be different, he could already tell.

Lightening in the Shadows~