Dedicated to those little children and adults whose lives were lost on December 14, 2012 at the tragic school shooting and those lives of the stabbing victims in China.

Description: The war is over. A new age in the shinobi world has begun. Naruto is in training to become the new Hokage. Konoha would be rebuilt. Everything should be perfect, but you don't come out of war without scars. Growing up doesn't mean becoming an adult, not in the real sense. It means learning to understand. Oneshot.

Genre: Drama/Hurt/Comfort

Pairings?: General fic.

Reasoning: I suppose you could say I'm in a kind of "mood." This needed to be written and right away. Especially after certain events in chapter 613 in the manga and after certain events that occurred recently in Connecticut, USA while connecting them to particular personal life experiences. This is also a kind of character exploration for Shikamaru.

Disclaimer: Masashi Kishimoto created and owns Naruto. I do not.

And We Grow Up
I saw the world for what it was: continued…

"Time is like a wasteland. It has grandeur but no beauty." —Abraham Heschel

"Everyone listen to me." The words echoed eerily in their minds, like a static ridden headpiece. He didn't know at the time that those would be one of the last he ever heard from him…

Shikamaru shook his head slightly, trying not to gather all the attention upon him. He was supposed to be listening, damn it. Now was neither the time nor the place for his thoughts to wander off. It would set off the wrong impression for one, and he was not quite sure that the other occupants in the room would exactly appreciate the reminder.

"And then your old man, you know," said Chouza Akimichi with an oddly tinged giddiness interwoven in his voice, "He goes and says that it was all too troublesome for him to explain that our sensei was hiding under a genjutsu the whole time we were testing. So he told Inoichi to mind swap with me without telling me to try and confuse the poor guy! It did work for a while until Shikaku decided he worked for long enough and he sat down and stared at the clouds like we were nothing…"

Chouza's voice boomed loudly in the dining room area, his round belly bouncing up and down with mirth and his red hair somehow managing to stay still. A fist clenched tightly onto a pair of bamboo chopsticks that held a piece of steak stuck between them, dripping with teriyaki sauce, and if anyone else did not already recognize the obvious smell, he was piss drunk.

The man's son, Chouji, sat to his immediate right with Shikamaru Nara, the teen's best friend and lazy-genius-companion, to his left. Both of them were trying to pay attention, really. It was just difficult to keep a straight face without all the random and discombobulated emotions bubbling up to the surface to rest plainly in sight.

The group was in the middle of eating a hearty dinner at the Akimichi Clan compound, and the clan head was regaling the two with various tales from his childhood adventures, most of which had to do with previous comrades and teammates. Notably speaking were stories of his two closest friends, the fathers of his own son's teammates, Inoichi Yamanaka and Shikaku Nara.

The duo had decided to entertain the thought, but honestly, all of them were raw from it all. The war had just ended, the Akatsuki were finally defeated, the dreaded Moon's Eye Plan was thrown to the dogs, Konoha would be rebuilt, and Naruto was even in training to become the village's Sixth Hokage. Everything should be perfect. They should be happy and celebrating like everyone else, but things like that honestly only felt superficial, and so they sat here as they temporarily attempted to assuage their conflicting feelings with stories from the past, but only just.

The terrible truth was that no one comes out of a war without any scars.

Everything may have seemed joyful on the surface, but there were plenty of other issues that tipped the scales rather toward the negative side of things as well. Homes were destroyed, thousands had lost their lives, there were small remnants of people who were still partially trapped in the genjutsu of the Moon's Eye and were trying to get specialists to help them get out, even though Konoha was being built again it was mostly in ruins from Pein's attack, and Naruto would only become Hokage so soon because their Fifth Hokage, Tsunade of the Sannin, had died saving the lives of the other four kages on the battlefield. Naturally the Uzumaki would be the first choice since Tsunade had left her final request that he lead in her stead to Gaara of the Sand Village who had subsequently relayed that message to the ninja of the Leaf.

"…but then Hizashi would come in and smack poor Minato upside the head! Said that he couldn't see what was right in front of him! He already had the hat in the palm of his hand, might as well get married and knock that Uzumaki woman up! Have a kid or two he said…" And there was Chouza again. Apparently the stories had switched to people that Shakamaru had barely heard talk of. They must have been people that were long dead, and he meant it in the nicest way possible. They were probably people that were gone long before he obtained the presence of mind unique enough to care.

The clan head laughed. "You know the Uchihas didn't always have those ridiculously large sticks up their asses and they weren't so crazy and evil! They were good people once! Even were in good relations with the Hokage! Fugaku, that man though…he might have always been a prick, but Mikoto! Fine woman! Great friend!"

So everything was not necessarily rainbows and daisies. That did not mean that he had to sit there and wallow in his own self-pity. Instead he would try and sit there and wallow in laughter and kindness and make the best effort in the world to remember that humanity was good. Some people probably did not deserve to live though. Some people were horrible sadistic tyrants that enjoyed watching as people and victims and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and sisters and brothers and friends and teachers squirmed.

The Nara tried. He really did.

Something was off though, and he almost felt as if there was no particular reason to point it out. Technically he had been here before. He had lost his sensei a while ago. The feeling wasn't new, then, or so he thought. But what made it so…different?

The hours ticked on and soon the eldest that sat at the dining table collapsed in a pathetic heap upon the floor. The younger Akimichi sighed and went to pluck his wasted father off of the ground. He was secretly thankful that his mother was not home so that she could leave them to their "men-only business." Both friends knew that was code for leaving the trio alone for a good while. She was a caring woman. She knew when they needed their space for a bit.

The remaining duo nodded to one of the clansmen that walked in a few seconds later and they decided that it would be safer for him to clean up the mess. It was probably the best time to leave.

They took their sweet time in exiting the compound, and they observed the various sliding doors and rice paper panels that rustled in the mid-autumn air. The sun was only just setting, and that made Shikamaru wonder just how long he had outlasted his welcome there. He must have been there for a couple hours at the least, hoping to just take a peek in and maybe have a few bites of a late lunch. He didn't mean to stay there for too long after all.

But then again he truthfully never anticipated for Chouza to yank out multiple bottles of pure sake from underneath the table and voraciously insist that the three gratefully indulge in the phenomena of alcohol in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. The Nara supposed he should have seen it coming though, but with his brilliant mind still miles offshore and wandering in the far recesses of outer space, maybe it was not such a huge surprise for him to figure out that something so admittedly obvious in the aftermath had flown over his head so easily. But then perhaps it was just hindsight bias speaking.

"I haven't seen him so out of it in a while," commented Chouji once they had found their way to the exit and now they were walking side-by-side on the dusty streets of Konoha. "Might be good for him to let loose. We're Akimichis, but I don't think I've seen anyone eat that much before."

The dark-haired chuunin made a futile attempt to smirk. "What, you lose your appetite?"

"Yeah," the larger male solemnly responded. Shikamaru did not have an answer to that one.

An appetite for hunger was one of the things that really defined the Akimichi Clan. They were raised that way for purposes mostly specifically know by them, but that the general public was privy to. It was like an open secret. They would eat so that they could train properly for their shinobi techniques, mostly requiring tactics that involved literal big-boned maneuvers, and the shadow technique user supposed that since he was now technically the Nara Clan head, he might as well get used to the idea of working with them and knowing every single one of them more intimately than before.

But the thing was that even though he now held a seat on the Council, even though it was his turn to lead his family, and even though some people had started to see him as a sort of "war hero," he was so sure that he was nowhere near ready.

So he knew then, that an appetite for hunger and an appetite to fess up and take hold of adulthood had somehow become intricately entwined in his brain. Maybe he was a masochist, or maybe he had gone insane some time ago. He didn't care to find out.

"The Tailed-Beast Bomb is headed for HQ," the voice resounded firmly. "But before that happens I'm going to tell you what all of you have to do to defeat the enemy. Listen carefully…"

Ever since the war ended, Shikamaru kept finding himself locked in a battle between the past and the present. Sometimes he could not distinguish between the two. It was a frustrating situation to say the least, but then there were those other times where he desperately wished he could stop time, really stop it. Not just as an illusion or as some fantasy in which the world was grand and tidy.

In a sense he wanted redemption for the things he could not do in a past that he could not change.

"Damn," the teenager muttered out loud without noticing it, "I'm pathetic."

His companion raised an eyebrow. "What was that?" he asked curiously.

"Troublesome," was said as a reply. "It's nothing important."

But it was important, at least to him. Shikamaru had just spent more than half of a perfectly good day sitting down and listening to stories from years previously, from a time where the thought of yet another war was the farthest thing from everyone's mind. There was the promise of peace in those stories. The Tailed Beasts were all supposedly safely locked away. There was the prospect of new families and of raising children, of a new era in the Leaf with a new Hokage.

He supposed that somehow everything came full circle. They were back to that point again but damn, did it have to be this way? So unfinished and with underlying tragedy? Was this how Chouza felt at the end of the Third War? Was this how his own father felt? Did he walk throughout the village thinking of how good things seemed to be while at the same time, he was still trying to convince himself that humanity was indeed still good?

And how the heck was it good anyway? War took away friends and family and people that were important, no matter what side you were on. War was pointless hatred that only continued the cycle, as Naruto had pointed out rather eloquently once before, and he agreed wholeheartedly.

So what was it that Shikamaru did not understand at all? The answer was time.

He walked quietly with his best friend at his side. They passed the playground nearest to the partially rebuilt Academy, saw children run happily in endless circles as they played an innocent game of tag, saw young parents nearby watching over their offspring with keen eyes, ready for anything. Out of the corner of the chuunin's eye he saw the hidden figure of Kakashi Hatake, his silver hair waving silently in the breeze as he discreetly stared at the Hokage Monument and at the five—almost six—faces that were carefully carved onto the rock face. For once the man was not reading out of that green mature-audiences-only book.

But, damn it, Shikamaru wished more than anything that the jounin was reading from it. Then that would mean that time had not decided to flow all around them like nothing, that their lives actually were not insignificant, and that the clock would stop making that annoying tick tock noise every second of every day.

"Hey guys!" There came the enthusiastic greeting of Naruto, the new Hokage-to-be. His golden hair shone brightly in the fading sunlight and the red-orange shadows upon the contours of the ground looked only more exemplified by his radiant presence. And for that moment, time really did stop because Shikamaru saw someone else walking towards them entirely.

For a moment there was that blond idiot in this older version's place that didn't know anything about anything, that dead-last in his Academy class that was actually more of a bottom feeder than he was, and Sasuke was still there with his usual pretentious self, the elderly Third Hokage was still breathing and acting grandfatherly to everyone in the village, and Asuma-sensei was there complaining about how Kurenai-sensei had banned him from his cigarette box again, and his mom was being a troublesome woman because she had bellowed at his father to pick him up from Chouji's house so that he would not have to walk home alone at night, but he was definitely old enough to do simple things like that…

So that was it; that was time. He finally understood a bit of it.

How could he be so stupid? That was why Chouza was telling them those semi-interesting tales before, because he didn't quite want to understand time himself.

"You're alone," Shikamaru told Naruto in order to break out of his strangely racing thoughts. The blond tilted his head and he continued, "How do you do it?"

"Eh," the Hokage-to-be blinked and scratched the back of his head. "Huh?"

"I'm not as strong as you, so maybe it's harder for me to accept it. So how do you do it? How do you accept it?"

It was totally possible that Shikamaru was not playing fair, especially when Chouji looked so absolutely lost, and he could not blame him. Even though nothing seemed random to him personally, Chouji would be caught in the figurative crossfire without any sort of former notification that he was invited. He would stand there with is mouth open like a gaping fish without water for a while, but as a loyal friend he would assent to it.

But he knew then, as he glimpsed at the Akimichi for a brief second that this is exactly how Chouza felt. He gathered with flawless clarity that the man had watched time as it made its way across the world with an adamant and unkind wrath, and that he was forced to accept that former friends and allies would die before he did, that he would be left behind to watch as his world began to burn.

So he told his own son and his friend's son his past because he wanted to feel like they were there again, that his friends were still there, even if only for those precious few minutes. Chouza wanted to pretend in his thoughts that he did not have to watch them go one by one, that each friend in the picture did not die only to leave him all alone.

Because first he spoke of Minato and Hizashi, the first to go, then of Fugaku and his wife Mikoto, then of Inoichi and Shikaku…all of them were friends once, and all of them were gone. But Shikamaru had been through loss before, twice now. He wanted something different to go by. He wanted to understand something completely dissimilar rather than watch his own friends die while he was left with survivor's guilt.

Shikamaru did not want to end up like Chouza, blasted off of sake and knocked out upon the floorboards. He did not want to have to pretend, not anymore. So he turned to the only other person he knew that had experienced the most comparable kind of loss, the only other person he knew of that had lost a teacher and a parent that probably wouldn't be as troublesome and cry out like Ino.

"I don't get it," Chouji asked Naruto. "What are you guys talking about?"

Understanding suddenly engulfed Naruto's blue eyes and he looked to Shikamaru as if peering at an utterly new person. "I lost my parents a long time ago. I've always been alone," the blond replied without really answering the question. "At first I kept asking the Old Man who they were…you know, try to figure out who I was and stuff." He grimaced at that thought and then went on, "But then I kind of gave up and I found out who they were and that they really loved me.

"I thought I didn't get it, but I did I guess. I'm here because my dad and my mom decided to protect their precious person."

The Akimichi frowned, rubbing his hair as he glanced over at Shikamaru who appeared to be listening intently which was already a bizarre concept by itself. The dark-haired teen simply smirked, albeit with a hint of sadness and nodded in thanks to Naruto who nodded back in return. The trio parted ways and then it was just the two of them again in the middle of an intersection.

Somehow, the boys had found themselves in front of the newly rebuilt memorial stone, facing the freshly carved names of those lost years ago and fairly recently in combat. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums lay at the base of the rock, a likely tribute from Ino Yamanaka to her father. Shikamaru sighed as he stared at the name of his own father who lost his life while transmitting his final order through Inoichi from the seemingly far-off headquarters, an order that eventually would assist them with the culmination of the Fourth Shinobi World War in the end.

"What was that about?" questioned the Akimichi after a few seconds of silence.

"He's an idiot and he looks pretty dense, but he gets the important things. It might be troublesome at first but after a while you really do get it," remarked Shikamaru.

"I don't get it," the redhead bit his lip with a confused countenance.

"All those people, including my dad, sensei, Tsunade-sama…they died to protect the king," the other stated observantly to his friend. "You think the Fourth died just because he was the Hokage and just to protect his village? If it was that simple then he wouldn't be much of a Hokage at all. He died to protect his son…the king."

Chouji pouted and a knit formed between his thick eyebrows. "But what does that have to do with anything?"

He did not have to understand time completely because that was an entity that could never be really, truly understood. Time would always be valuable because there was a limited amount of it, but that was a lie and the Nara knew it inside his gut.

Time, no matter how final it gave the impression of being, was infinite. And it did not have to be beautiful to be forever ongoing.

"But they're…they died. I mean, they're gone. How can you just accept that they died? And Asuma-sensei—"

He did not have to be a genius to know what his companion meant by "they."

"Because that's what people do, Choiji," explained Shikamaru as he stuck his hands in his pockets in a characteristic gesture and inaudibly walked away after taking a good look at the shiny surface of the polished stone that symbolized those who embodied the Will of Fire. "We move on."

"I'm sorry," his father's voice rang out in a whisper. All the shinobi on the field could barely hear it, but somehow, the boy knew. He knew that out of all the words that the HQ Commander said in the span of that single minute, those two words were meant just for him.

He didn't have to say anything out loud to understand that at that moment, he was the king. And he turned to see Ino's tearstained face. She tried to keep strong and he needed to also, so he kept that façade, but just because he was a ninja never meant that it was not supposed to hurt, because in the end they were all human, whether they liked it or not. None of them were born as all-powerful entities that watched over their imperfect creations from the top of some mountain. They weren't gods and none of them were perfect. In fact, you could say that at the second in time, Shikamaru was the epitome of imperfection.

If he hadn't grown up before, he knew that he grew up then.

And in that moment he understood things that he would rather not understand. In that moment he really got it. He really knew what it was like to be a grown-up, to be a true adult. Because growing up never meant that he had to age and change and physically become full grown in the real sense. Not at all.

It meant learning to understand and learning to accept the things that are difficult to. It meant that no matter what, no matter how cruel it seemed, life would go on and the world would go on, because time never stopped for anyone and the earth would continue to spin on its axis. Time never stopped to mourn the one, and that's the truth of it all. Time only froze for the person that left.

But never does it mean that they stopped living.

"That's what Naruto was trying to tell us," the chuunin added with his back still turned and his mind left his personal reverie. "They gave up their lives to protect us. They're still alive because we're still here."

People don't die in the real sense because that's just an illusion. They die when those left behind decide to forget them, and by that time it would not really matter because those people would be gone as well. And then their loved ones would remember them and because they remembered their own loved ones, those people that they thought they lost would find solace in living through memories.

And Shikamaru grew up when he understood this because that feeling was familiar as well. Because memories and shared experiences are the true reason people are alive, because they are the real reason the dead never die.

He wasn't a boy anymore. He was a man.

"It's troublesome," he murmured softly, "But people do that too. We grow up."

Fin.