Two

Shikaku

Seven days and seven nights, all I had of my son was the rubber-band his mother made him. It was weaved from the fibers of a plant that only grew on Nara soil, and before Shikamaru was born we had gone to our family forest and created a hundred for him.

At age sixteen, Shikamaru had never broken one.

I had stretched and worn the rubber band over my own while waiting for reports from Shizune. I had stared at it while drinking my coffee at two o'clock in the morning. I had rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger while praying that, by some miracle, Shikamaru would wake up the same.

When, finally, Shizune tapped on my shoulder and said, 'he's awake, sir', a trickle of water oozed from the inner corner of my left eye and skated down my nose. The teardrop ran down my upper lip and fell on my tongue. Surprisingly, it was sweet.

Lady Tsunade had entered and left the intensive care unit so quickly, I thought she only came out to tell me that my son had died. Instead, she smiled, sighed, and said, "Shikamaru's still high on the drug. Let's wait an hour, and then you can see him. Don't worry, Shikaku, your son is a strong man like you. An hour and we'll start his interrogation."

All I could do was bob my head and hold myself upright like the man she described me to be. Once she had turned the corner of the hallway, I bent to my knees and pressed my hand to my face.

Shikamaru was alive.

The relief that befell me when I first saw him was stronger. Thinner, paler, sadder…but he was alive. Our eyes met, and his gaze was so similar to the time he came home with his first serious injury. Yoshino yelled for me, and Shikamaru laid out his fractured leg for me to scrutinize and he said, 'dad, this really hurts.' I had replied that it wasn't going to kill him, and that we should bring his mother to the hospital instead.

Right there and then I saw my little boy, laying out all his injuries, although now he was telling me, 'hey, dad, It's troublesome, but I think I'll live through this. What a pain.'

This sensation I felt, akin to when he was born and he slobbered on my face for the first time, assured me that despite the many facts presented during our initial investigation that persuaded us he would have abnormalities upon waking, my Shikamaru was the same.

On the day their team was brought back to Konoha, Kakashi had come to me with a sketch of all the seals he had copied using his Sharingan.

"I've never seen anything like this before," he had told me.

It had taken thirteen hours for the Hokage and my team to check all scrolls and come up with a sensible theory on the seals in the cave, and all they had in common was the motive of reincarnation through a vessel. I had checked and rechecked the elements transcribed in the seals, hoping they would change and I could tell them we had concluded wrongly, but my eyes would not lie. I simply could not accept someone could take away my only son apart from death.

My worries proved futile; with every correct answer Shikamaru gave as I showed him one photo after another, it was obvious our theories did not apply to him.

The trouble of it all did not begin until Sakura Haruno woke up. Before marching to our next interrogation, I took Shikamaru's rubber band from my pocket and tossed it to him. Good thing I removed it from my hair before coming in; I wouldn't want my son to think I was being sentimental. He would speculate it was only either because I was drunk or I was old.

I wasn't old.

While the Hokage and I waited for the go signal to enter Sakura's intensive care unit, she tapped her foot and checked the clock overhead like an academy student waiting for the annual marathon to begin. "You can smile," she said. "I'm happy Shikamaru's alive."

"If my loaf of a son is alive and well," I said, "I'm sure your apprentice is as well. Maybe even better."

The intensive care unit that contained Sakura made me shiver. Machines lined the divider between the medic's station and the patient's quarters. They beeped in the background in a continual reminder that every little detail about her health was under monitored and under control. Inoichi was convinced they were all the Hokage heard sometimes. She was here every day, but it seemed to him that she still spent her first few seconds inside engulfed in shock.

If a veteran medical kunoichi was appalled by this, I could not imagine how Yoshino could cope had this been Shikamaru's unit.

I walked around with Shizune's supervision and she explained the scripts they combined in order to form the seals which they painted in black ink on the floor and on the walls. These had not been used since the Third ordered Orochimaru's research to be concealed permanently.

With the cooperation of four senior medics, they reduced the vortex of scripts into a spiral surrounding Sakura's bed. They allowed us to come near.

"Okay." Lady Tsunade removed her green robe and marched past the division.

Sakura hefted herself to her elbows and browsed her environment with half-open eyes. Her complexion struck me as too pale, but I was sure in her case the doctors would classify that as normal.

"How are you feeling?" The Fifth sat on the edge of the mattress. "Sakura?"

"I'm dizzy…oh, Shika-" She blinked at me and nodded once. "Hello. Where's Shikamaru and Sai?"

Good, I thought. If she had the sense to worry, it meant she knew something went wrong. We interrogated her slowly, in a slightly different manner than we did with Shikamaru. She took longer to respond after seeing the photographs of her friends but she answered each one correctly.

I revealed Sai's picture.

Sakura glimpsed me, then Lady Tsunade. "I've never seen him before."

"Look again."

She arched her neck, chewing her bottom lip. "Wait…It's Sai. It's Sai. I'm sorry, I must have been…confused for a moment. I went out on a mission with him, but previously and more often, we're with Captain Yamato and Naruto. Who's next?"

I flicked up the last photograph. "Do you know who this is?"

Sakura reached for her back and scratched it. "Shikamaru Nara, your son. He was my partner in the mission we were last in."

Nothing was wrong, the Hokage and I were convinced. Shikamaru and Sakura recognized their family, their friends, their teachers, and their superiors in Konoha.

Lady Tsunade briefed her on the ambush, and we drifted to the interrogation at her pace. I could not blame her. She could deny it all she wanted, but to her, Sakura was more than an apprentice.

"And what happened when you found out Kana was kidnapped?"

"I searched for Shikamaru and Sai."

"Then?" I asked. Her recollections were more detailed than Shikamaru's.

Sakura stared at me, as though waiting for me to give her the answers. "Well, I told them that Kana's lover, Ryo, took her and promised he was going to be with her."

"Ryo is only a lover?"

"Yes, Kana told me herself," she said. "Ryo and Kana met when they were eleven – they were training under a former ANBU squad leader called…ah, I can't remember. You must know, Lady Tsunade; it was supposedly under the Fourth's rule that children falling under a certain category and passing certain qualifications were trained in this program."

The Fifth's posture stiffened. She looked at me through the corner of her eye. "What did Kana say this program's goal was?"

"…Penetration? A spy in every hidden village to warn us of a plot against Konoha? Something like that."

I studied Sakura: the slight crease of her brow, the tilt of her head, the pitch of her voice, the twitch of her wrists while she gestured.

"And this Kana and Ryo were students in that program?" asked the Fifth.

"But Ryo was against it, believing Konoha separated them from their parents and made them believe lies while growing up," she explained. "Kana tried to stop him from leaving but failed. Around ten years later, the day I was preparing her body for the stress of the operation using a triangular seal, Ryo returned for her. He attacked me, accused me of attempting to murder Kana, and asked her to leave with him. Kana agreed, but I assumed she only did so to try and pull him back to his senses. Once I had regained control of my body, I ran out to find Shikamaru and Sai."

"Did Ryo tell you where they were headed?"

"There's a seal I put on our wrists so she can draw chakra from me during the operation, assuring her stability and my control of the energy she releases." Sakura showed us her wrist.

"You altered it without consulting me?" Lady Tsunade inspected the seal, grazing her thumb across the faded ink. "If her disease turned out to be viral, you could have died!"

"I increased her chances of her survival by three percent!" she said. "Besides, Kana has a background on medicine. She's tried it out before. When I painted this on us, I felt the seal was working fine. That's how I found her."

Lady Tsunade paced the room, holding her forehead.

I understood her frustration. If we shared the same understanding, that program was as ticking time bomb. Anything Kana persuaded her into doing or taking could have been a fatal assault.

I proceeded to question her so as to divert her attention from the Hokage. "What was Shikamaru's plan of action?"

Sakura paled. "We argued about it, I think, right after he ordered Sai to ask for back-up as quickly as possible. Why we argued, I still can't recall, but I…I'm sorry. I went out by myself and found Kana in the cave. That's as much as I remember. Although, there were things in my dreams that bothered me. Like…I don't know if this happened, but I was in water, cold, naked, and I was calling out to someone and when I opened my eyes to search, I saw Shikamaru. By the way, where is he?"

I didn't feel right that moment and I immediately stopped from rearranging the photos and notes in the folder. Her tone suggested something different, implemented something more sentimental; hence I averted the subject to see her reaction. "Shikamaru's okay. Sai is in the next room. He's recovering, but it might take another day before he wakes. Would you like to see Sai?"

Sakura blinked at me. "Yes, Shizune told me about Sai, but I want to know where Shikamaru is. Is he all right? Is he awake yet?"

Lady Tsunade finally ceased pacing. "Sakura, we'll inform you all about their condition later. Right now, I want to know if there's anything out of normal in your body. You were badly injured, and –"

"Please!" Sakura scratched her back some more. "Why won't you answer my questions now? How is Shikamaru? Is he alive? Is he awake yet? Can't I see my husband yet?"

I fell back down on my way up from the chair. My initial thought was to dislocate Shikamaru's fingers, but the better half of me could not believe my son would do such a stupid thing as to marry without my blessing.

Silence spilled into the room while oxygen oozed out. Nobody moved. We all stared.

I stared harder at Sakura, and the credence in her expression burdened my soul.

"Your husband?" Lady Tsunade repeated to Sakura.

Sakura and I looked at each other again; she had the decency to lower her head. "Why does it feel as though nobody knows? We've been married for fifteen years."

She was only sixteen, I reminded myself. Without warning, Lady Tsunade yanked my arm down and put her mouth next to my ear. "Let's see where this goes."

The worse we had expected was Shikamaru identifying Sakura as his wife. They were both in the pond circled by a forbidden jutsu and restrained by an untested blood seal. Perhaps the effect on Shikamaru was delayed, but there all the same, as was the case when Sakura recognized him only as my son in the beginning and then claimed he was her husband just forty-eight minutes later.

While I lowered her to a wheelchair, I realized with a jolt that this young woman was the person my son risked his life for. A thousand pointed ideas resurrected my migraines, and I distanced myself from her while she was being prepared to leave intensive care.

There had to be a more logical explanation.

"Did they share a romantic relationship beforehand or is this simply the result of a faulty rebirth jutsu?" Lady Tsunade asked. The bite in her intonation impaired my eardrums.

"It could be either," I hated to admit.

She hugged herself, unconscious of the faces she was making. "Didn't Shikamaru hint anything relating to her or…wait, don't answer that. Knowing him, he would have let you figure it out on your own."

"I know my son," I said. "I know him."

As we walked out intensive care and saw Shikamaru talking to Kakashi, I vouched this was the rebirth jutsu's doing.

We approached him. He saw us.

Then those two young shinobis shared a few seconds when it was as if only they existed in this hall. I recognized the relief on his face as a mirror image of mine sixteen years ago, after the Kyuubi attacked Konoha and I searched for my wife and found her, with our baby still in her arms.

The horror and guilt that mixed and sank in his visage while Sakura clung to him was so apparent, I saw all the hints without trying. I saw him accept her embrace. I saw his confusion when none of us spoke. I saw his worry over this girl.

The notion that I failed as a father - that I failed to recognize my son had grown up - weighed on me. Maybe he did not marry her but he did share something special with her, and I didn't know.

Sakura's outburst brought me back to the present.

"Where's my ring? I never lose our wedding ring!"

"W-wedding ring?" Shikamaru spat.

Sakura scratched her back.

Lady Tsunade twisted the steel of the wheelchair's backrest into a helix. "Shikaku, do you see the tattoo on the base of her back? Take a good look at it. Call three of our best ANBUs. We'll have to contain her."