Inspired by Silver Queen's Dreaming of Sunshine series. My own little take on why and how Shikako came to be in the Naruto Universe.

I don't own Naruto, or Silver Queen's OC Shikako Nara.

Beyond the Stars

It's finally begun again, Hagoromo Otsutsuki wearily mused. As the Sage of Six Paths and a god among men, his soul and chakra had infused itself with the natural chakra of the world after the death of his mortal body. Making him still alive in some cases, though not in any physical sense. Still, this state of being allowed him to feel and see everything of the world, all of its trials and triumphs, beginnings and endings.

And it was just such a beginning that had caught his attention.

Indra.

He had no actual body to sigh with, but the winds in a far off canyon in Wind Country picked up in answer to his need to.

His son, his firstborn, his father's pride, his Indra. But also his problem child. He could sense it now, the familiar feeling of his son's otherworldly chakra reappearing once again in the realm of mortals. Within a new body, a new form, yes, conceived only hours ago, but heralding a new era in the world of Shinobi. Signaling another beginning and another end.

Because where one son was, the other was soon to follow.

Asura. His second son, his bright, shining bundle of joy. For where Indra was the son that never failed to instill in him a sense of pride, Asura as the joy of his heart. And it was the warm and caring soul that made Hagoromo choose his youngest as his heir. He could not sense him in a vessel yet, his heir's sunshine chakra still free-flowing about the world. But he knew, sure as the sky is blue, that Asura will be reborn once again soon – following, always following ever since they were small children, after his older brother.

And therein laid the problem.

This had already happened once before, many moons ago. Hagoromo had held out hope for his children in that first reincarnation, hope that his mother's servant wouldn't be able to sway his eldest son's reincarnation the same way he had Indra so many millennia ago. But that hope had fizzled into nothingness when Hashirama Senju, his precious heir's previous incarnation, was forced to kill his best friend and soul brother, Madara Uchiha.

Perfectly mirroring the tragedy that had befallen his children in their last lifetime.

And now, Indra's soul had once again been conceived into the Uchiha clan – a clan of his own creation yes, one with infinite potential, but with the unfortunate drawback of an increased risk of madness induced by their own powerful dojutsu.

For unlike the Byakugan, which was able to be activated at any point after their birth, the Sharingan must be unlocked when the user of the dojutsu feels the fear of losing something precious. The Uchiha clan – the descendants of his Indra – had all therefore been infused with his astral chakra of the moon, forcing them to feel emotions nearly twice the amount as normal mortals. They all felt things too keenly – and as a ninja clan, nothing scared them more than the sense of loss that came with death. So they hid away from their emotions, only letting a special few into their hearts – and when those few were in danger, the Sharingan was able to activate from their intense need to protect, which was also heightened to an abnormal level from their over-influenced emotions. And it was also why, when the one person they cared for most was killed, then their dojutsu then became more powerful, the Mangekyo Sharingan, as their chakra's natural instinct to get stronger to never feel the devastating loss of their loved one's again. However, there came the price that some of those of the clan who, once having lost their most important person, will lose themselves to the madness inherent in their raw emotions. Because grief, an emotion capable of breaking even the most stoutest of hearts, was a soul-shattering event to any Uchiha due to their increased emotive states, and thus far more likely to send them into the pits of insanity without the proper tethers to keep them in place.

Such was the fate that had befallen Madara Uchiha when he lost his most important person, his brother by blood. And while Hashirama had been able to bring him from his initial madness, the twisted shadow of his mother's servant, the puppet, Zetsu, had done the same to Madara as he had done to Indra and played with his mind and fertile emotions, and manipulated him away from the last light Madara had had left. His brother of the soul.

And so they had fought, a war had raged, and people had died. Both his sons included – though Madara had used his intelligence to save himself after his death, he was less of a man after the battle, too weak to do much more than plot and fester in a dark cave with the empty vessel of the Gedo Mazo. He had died not too long ago, but not before setting the next pieces for his plan. A plan that would ultimately throw the world into a state of chaos the world has not seen since the time of Hagoromo himself when he and his brother sealed away their mother and split her great beast into the nine chakra constructs he had loved and raised as his other children.

The tides were shifting, the winds carrying the shiver of dreadful anticipation through the natural chakra of the world and straight to Hagoromo himself. He had held hope with their last incarnations. But now he knew the truth – his son had once again been reincarnated into the Uchiha clan, and he was not safe from the machinations of Zetsu. The deformed shadow of his mother's will had proven last time that being reborn into a new body would not change anything – it would always find his son, and he was no longer a part of the world to guide him. He had no physical manifestation in the realm of humans to help his eldest son, and Asura's soul alone could not help him. It had already been proven with the previous disaster of Madara and Hashirama. And so history would repeat itself because Asura could not be the guide Indra needed.

But, for the life of him, he could not figure out why.

In each incarnation, Asura's soul always managed to draw the hearts and loyalties of others to him. Unsurprising considering Asura and Indra had been created with the chakra of the sun and moon. Hagoromo wasn't shy to admit that he was a little vain, so when his sons had been conceived he had infused them with the astral energies of the moon and sun – otherworldly chakra, because they were his sons. Not mere mortals, but his sons, created with the energies of the heavens themselves. Therefore, his children had power beyond their earthly brethren and certain traits inherent with the planetary bodies their energies resonate with.

Indra – intuitive, laden with overwhelming emotions, and heavy with natural talent and abilities. But also cold and solitary, and rocky and jagged and unapproachable. And like the moon, seemingly inhospitable and barren of warmth on the outside, but with a surprising amount of life just beneath the surface; as was the case with the real moon, seeing as its core held the lush home of the rest of Hagoromo's mother's clan, the Otsutsuki.

And Asura – bright, warm, and shining. Capable of indescribably heat when emotions run high, but also capable of bringing the source of life and warmth to all of those around him – even to those that weren't looking for it. He draws everyone to him so that their world revolves around him, caught in the gravitational pull of his universal sun. And also incredibly stubborn, unsurprising considering that the sun itself only moves very slightly in a tight orbit as everything else revolves around it.

So therefore, by all accounts, Indra, just like everything else caught in Asura's force, should have fallen into his pull. But he didn't. Instead, he often went spiraling off into the void of space, forcing the sun to fall out of its stationary role and go chasing after him, throwing all of the other planetary bodies into chaos.

But if he substituted Indra for the moon then it isn't too surprising that he would move around so much. The moon itself is a very versatile body since it both spins and revolves around the sun. But then why would Indra not do as his planetary source does?

The answer hit him like a Lightning jutsu to a steel rod.

The answer is simply that the moon doesn't revolve around the sun – not by itself.

The moon revolves around the Earth which revolves around the sun.

That's the correlation – his missing piece. He had completely forgotten the fact that the precious balance between astral bodies was not part of a duo. No, it was a trio. Sun, Moon, and Earth. It needed a base. Without the Earth, the moon would have nothing to keep up their momentum and so it would just go careening off into the cosmos.

Just like Madara and Indra.

But, Hagoromo suddenly realized. It wasn't just the moon that needs the Earth. The sun needs it too. Maybe not in a true planetary sense, but the Earth is truly the one body in the entire solar system that benefits the most from the sun. No other planet sustains life, completely dependent on the sun, like the Earth does. It grows and thrives under the influence of the sun, not just a lifeless rock like the other planets. So if you put the planets into the context of people, then the Earth would therefore be the most important person to the sun as well – especially if he knows his youngest son as well as he does. Asura, in the beginning, was always seen as the inferior brother next to Indra's natural talent, and it wasn't until he reached adulthood that he would ever get the recognition that he deserved – leaving him and his incarnations with lonely, overlooked childhoods. But with an Earth, a person that would thrive while in his presence, Asura's soul would also naturally grow with them – stabilized by the Earth's steady presence, and boosted with a confidence and assurance that he wouldn't normally get until later in his life.

He had been waiting and hoping that Asura or one of his incarnations would be able to get through to his eldest son, but it hadn't been enough. So what his sons needed was an Earth. But what could he possibly do? Hagoromo thought furiously, his mind racing at the speed of light.

He had no physical body, but he was not without his power. And in the world of chakra, the natural world order was his to command. But if he was going to add a third member to their interplay, he would have to do to them what he did with his own children – take a soul and infuse it with the energies of the earth itself to make them on the same level as his sons. Because nothing else would do - not just for the balance of it all, but for the sake of the soul itself in order to keep up with the life their brothers would have to live. And Asura and Indra would be the soul's new brothers; they would be connected in an astral way.

But Hagoromo had no physical body to sire another child, so he would have to take someone else's child.

Or, his mind whispered, you could bring one here. Yes, that could work. There were many other worlds, ones he could tap into due to his deity-like abilities – each Rinnengan Path and Mangekyo Sharingan eye variation, including Kamui, he has as well. Taking a soul from another realm was hardly a difficulty.

And he knew just from which world to choose from.

There was one, if he recalled correctly, that had had a seer in their world – a seer that had witnessed everything regarding his sons, their previous incarnations, and the ones that would be their newest reincarnations. The seer had even decided to publish their history into what was a fictional tale in their world – a manga called Naruto if he wasn't mistaken. It had amused him when he found the world, though he had despaired of the fate that would befall his eldest son's newest incarnation, Sasuke.

But, if he broke the cycle, added in a new player to help stabilize his sons now, while he still had the chance, there was a chance that his sons – and he included his chakra construct sons in that term as well – would not have to suffer as deeply as the seer had foreseen. Especially if he chose a soul that had already witnessed what the seer had published.

Focusing his will into that far-off cosmos, the Sage of Six Paths searched through the free-floating souls and energies of the dead within that realm – there was no chakra in their world, which was odd to him, and made things a bit more difficult to navigate than Hagoromo had imagined, but there was still a sense of energy to their world that he could manipulate and flow through. He sifted carefully through the souls of the dead, looking for one suitable to gain the title of his child – many of the souls there were waiting to be reborn and it would be needlessly cruel to take a soul already inhabited in a live body. Souls in this world were strange, as they did not have a Pure World, but instead just floated in the aether of that world's energy and waited to be reborn. Though, like his own world, the souls did not lose their memories of their previous life until they are reborn again – a welcome thing in the Pure World where friends and family could once again reunite with each other before choosing to forget it all and start life again, though he didn't know what the purpose was to the souls in this world with no Pure Land. But the vague curiosity was pushed aside in favor of his current mission.

Only a comparatively small handful of the dead had seen the seer's work, which was his first requirement. He also required a soul that was relatively light in spirit and not bogged down by negative emotions or experiences that could linger in them in their next life – after all, they needed to remember everything in order to be of help in his world, so their other memories had to stay as well. He also needed a soul that was caring, empathetic, fiercely protective, and wouldn't be deterred at the prospect of working hard to reach their goal; surprisingly rare traits to have as a human in this world, but necessary to help his sons and survive in the world of Shinobi he was bringing them into. Picking out and letting go those that didn't meet those requirements, Hagoromo was left with less than a dozen.

Looking at the mental and emotional traits of the ten souls left, he searched for a strong mental capacity – someone that wouldn't break under all the pressure placed upon them, even though they would undoubtedly stumble and make a mess of the seer's preordained vision. That left only six.

As an additional requirement, he discarded those that had no interest in the pursuit of knowledge – as the Sage of Six Paths he had already learned the virtue of knowledge, which was something his sons were sorely lacking. Indra hadn't minded digging deep for knowledge when it served him, but he didn't find joy in it like Hagoromo did – and Asura was a lost cause in the theoretical aspect of knowledge, having always been more instinct-based in his regard on life. After that, there were only three.

He paused for a moment, searching the wills and minds of the final three and found something within one of them that caught his interest – the only female.

I want to be special, the inner reaches of her heart whispered.

She had lived an ordinary life, something commonplace among a world of civilians. It was an uninteresting dimension, where beauty and peace were corrupted by those who didn't know its worth and where wonder had no place to flourish. It was a world where the fantastical happened only in fiction, where things as commonplace in his world as walking on water was seen as a miracle. It was little wonder that this chakra-less world would house little places for the adventurous and far-reaching to truly shine.

But this little soul wanted that, she wanted the bright magical world where she could find a place to make her mark. So make her mark she would – it was the one thing that separated her from the rest. Ambition. After all, what use was all the resolve, all the raw talent in the world, when they didn't have the ambition to reach for it?

Carefully gathering the soul of the young girl closer, Hagoromo flowed through the dimensions of their worlds and settled their energy above the home of his soon-to-be-born sons – the home they had carved out for themselves in their previous lifetime, Konoha.

Gathering the chakra of the Earth itself was as natural to him as breathing, something he barely had to think about as he channeled the chakra into the girl's soul at a steady trickle, careful to not overload her otherworldly soul with too much energy too quickly. As he continued the slow process of infusing her soul with natural Earth energy, changing her into a being that was half-deity like his sons – his new daughter – he swept his attention through the village, looking for a suitable family to host his new child.

Again, he had no physical body, so he could not sire her himself, so he would have to infuse her soul into a woman's body just as she was conceiving her own child.

He had a fleeting wish that he could have added her with Indra's new incarnation into the womb, but Mikoto Uchiha's body was already past the point of her pregnancy to conceive a second child. And while Hagoromo wishes he could place her close to his problem child in the Uchiha clan, thus giving her a higher chance to gain his friendship and respect, he also knew that the Uchiha Massacre would leave only Sasuke and his older brother Itachi alive, and his daughter was of no use to his current plans dead.

So the Uchiha Clan was out of the question. But maybe he could put her in with Asura's reincarnation, Naruto? But no, if Naruto was a twin then there was no telling how drastically events would be changed. The Yondaime would undoubtedly seal the two halves into both of them, instead of turning himself into the Jinchuriki of the Yin half of Kurama and sealing the two of them away into the Shinigami's belly – and Minato Namikaze needed to be there so he wasn't brought back in Orochimaru's Edo Tensei during the Naruto's Chunin Exams. Not to mention, one of the two would run the risk of being taken by Danzo Shimura – and he wouldn't wish any of his children to become Root. So no, there were too many unknown factors that could be changed just from being born as Naruto's twin.

So who then? Not a civilian's child – his daughter will need to be a ninja if she's to be able to stand up to what's coming in the Fourth Shinobi War. Not to mention, as she grows older, she will naturally have a larger than average chakra capacity due to her spiritual connection to the earth, which was completely out of the ordinary for a civilian child and would gain unwanted attention on her. A clan child then, someone who would naturally have larger chakra reserves and wouldn't catch attention. There were multiple that the seer mentioned in his story within Sasuke and Naruto's generation; all of whom were proven in the seer's fiction to live and survive through the war. So the Sage decided that she should be the twin to one of them then.

Shino Aburame, Chouji Akimichi, Hinata Hyuga, Kiba Inuzuka, Shikamaru Nara, and Ino Yamanaka.

The Aburame, Akimichi, and Inuzuka were out since they had all already been conceived prior to Sasuke, meaning their mothers were no more able to conceive a second child in their pregnancies than Mikoto was at this time. Leaving Shikamaru Nara, Ino Yamanaka, and Hinata Hyuga.

The answer came easily to him – the Nara's were perfect for hosting his one and only daughter. They were an emotionally stable family and were well known for their intelligence – one of the very aspects Hagoromo had chosen his daughter for. It would be to no one's surprise when she showed her higher than average intelligence, as she would inevitably show seeing as she had over twenty years worth of previous knowledge. Nor would anyone raise an eyebrow when she grew into her natural Earth affinity when Yoshino Nara also had an Earth affinity, uncommon in the Land of Fire but not so out of the ordinary. But best of all, Shikaku Nara was the Jounin Commander of Konoha. So if, for any reason , his daughter slipped up with her otherworldly knowledge, her blood father would be there to protect her – both as a political and military figure that outranked everyone in the Land of Fire save for a handful of people, and as a genius capable of outwitting anyone whose suspicions she accidentally rouses.

His youngest child, his only daughter, completed her basking in the Earth's natural chakra several days later. She was now his daughter, a half-deity, just like his sons. And from now on she would be forever tied to the Earth's chakra, just like Indra was to the Moon and Asura was to the Sun; it was a bond that would never disappear, even after a thousand deaths and rebirths. Even when she went to the Pure Land and chose to forget her previous lifetimes and live again in this world, she would be forever tied with this world and this Earth – and her two brothers, the three revolving around each other just as it always should have been.

He kept their chakra close to Konoha as he waited for the right time until a blank soul finally took root in Yoshino Nara's body – the soul which would eventually grow into Shikamaru Nara – about two months later. Quick to strike, the Sage of Six Paths directed his daughter's now-astrally-infused soul into Yoshino Nara as well and watched with satisfaction as another egg floated free to accompany the first, induced to be released from the additional chakra of the added soul in order to accommodate the two souls.

Now, Hagoromo thought, feeling a new surge of renewed hope as he slipped back into his own realm where he could watch everything unfold, how shall you be changing the tapestry of fate, my little daughter from beyond the stars?

Wow, seven pages and almost four thousand words long. I honestly didn't expect it to be this long. I might touch up on this a bit later, but that's about it.

Again, don't own Naruto or Silver Queen's amazing fanfic Dreaming of Sunshine series, this is just a possible explanation that I came up with for Shikako's presence in the Naruto Verse (though, the idea actually started only as an analysis to Sasuke, Shikako, and Naruto's, Moon, Earth, and Sun similarities – which somehow evolved into this).