Ino had told Shikamaru to meet her in her office at noon the next day. She was going to get reassigned to a mission and then go down to the House of Records that morning. She would inform him of her findings.

He was ascending the stairs to her office on the lower levels of the Interrogation and Holding building when alarms began to go off. This either meant that someone was trying to get into the building or out of the building that wasn't supposed.

He had a feeling it was the latter.

Shikamaru quickened his pace downward, reaching the foot of the stairs and looking over the 3rd floor hallway. Red lights flashed, illuminating the walls in an eerie crimson and the blare of the alarm echoed everywhere. He stepped into the passageway as the heavy emergency door started slowly closing behind him, to block off the stairwell he had just come from.

He saw motion at the end of the hallway, a quickly moving figure skidded into the main corridor and began to run towards him. They were washed out in red light, lit periodically by the flashing alarm system. The figure was moving frantically so Shikamaru assumed it to be foe and not friend, pulling a kunai out of his green flak jacket.

The figure moved closer at an alarming speed. It was her. That sly little fox. It was Mist. As soon as she saw Shikamaru she stopped and looked from him to the slowly closing door behind him and he knew what was going to happen next. He was simply an obstacle on her way to freedom.

She ran straight at him, determined, as he pocketed the kunai and his hands moved rapidly to form signs. Shikamaru's shadows quickly moved across the floor towards Mist, but the second before they reached her she pushed off the ground jumping back and forth between the small hallway's walls. She had learned from their first experience that his shadows would stop her in her tracks, but Shikamaru knew she couldn't keep herself off the floor for very long and when she came down his shadows recoiled on her like a springed trap.

Before Shikamaru didn't get the chance to sense victory, instead he felt his world go very dark, as if he was engulfed in his own shadows. Then there was searing pain in his temples. He heard screaming, at first thinking it was his own, but quickly realizing it was ringing in his head. He felt his whole body become hot as if he was standing over an open flame. Shikamaru's mind was burdened as he experienced an overwhelming amount of powerful emotions in what felt like a split second; hate, rage, anguish, suffering. His sense of time dissipated as the emotions continued to overpower him.

Slowly he began to feel something physical again as his shadows retreated and his sanity returned. He could feel his hands pressing tight on his temples and his eyes opened to find that Mist had reached him, steps away from passing him. It felt like he had been disconnected from body for hours, but it was only seconds. He swung out an arm to stop her, which was a feeble attempt and a bad idea considering the state he was in. She grabbed it easily and swung it quickly behind his back, bringing him to his knees.

"Sorry." She said with a sweetness the bounced around in his brain.

Then she pushed hard between his shoulder blades and he felt his joints dislocate.

There was nothing Shikamaru could really do after that. Mist swiftly slipped through the closing steel door, not a centimeter to spare. He saw the flash of a smile and then she was gone.

"Fuck" he breathed out in frustration and pain as he leaned into the wall next to him and raising himself off of the ground.

He could hear weighted footsteps coming his way and turned to find three guards trotting down the hallway. They stopped in front of him.

"She made it out." Shikamaru said simply, not thinking it necessary to explain his quick defeat.

"Rogue X has escaped level 3. Inform the ANBU and can you get Ino to the western stairs." One of them spoke into a headset.

The sound of the alarm had stopped, but there was a ringing in Shikamaru's head like he had taken a hard blow to it. The red flashing lights on the walls didn't cease so he closed his eyes and leaned back against the steel door that remained closed, using his good shoulder to prop himself up as he let the past 5 minutes of chaos fester in his mind. He tried to piece information together, but it seemed that the mess Mist had made in his head had aftereffects. He didn't open his eyes until he heard Ino's voice sounding frantic.

"What happened? Are you okay?" Ino said breathily, coming close to Shikamaru and stopping as he stared down at her a silly grin on his face.

"Yeah I'm fine but, could you do me a huge favor and put your medical nin skills to work. Mist may have dislocated my shoulder."

"Shika." Ino said in an unnecessary scolding tone.

Her blue eyes staring into him with compassion as she furrowed her brow and shifted her gaze to his left arm. Her hands glowed blue with chakra and he closed his eyes as his shoulder went numb. Shikamaru felt her put one hand around his wrist and the other at his elbow. In two quick motions he heard his shoulder pop back into place and then felt Ino's cool chakra slowly repairing his tissues.

"Thanks." He said smiling down at her as she pulled her hands and moved out of reach.

She smiled and shook her head, and he thought he saw her blush, but it could have been the emergency lights.

"Come on, let's go to my office. They probably won't open the emergency doors for a while."

On their way there they saw three men being carried away on stretchers. Mist must have done some real damage before she left. They had no obvious superficial wounds, but one whimpered in agony as his hands clung tight to his face.

When the door to Ino's office finally shut she moved in close to him, lifting a hand up to the side of his face. She had held herself back from this intimate interaction in front of the guards, but once they were alone a worried look plague her crystal eyes and pulled a frown down on her lips.

"Did she use her mind jutsu? Are you okay?" She said with an innocent look of concern.

"She can make a connection through chakra, she got to me through my shadows." Shikamaru spoke low. "But that doesn't matter, we already knew she was dangerous. What did you find?"

Ino hesitated, she knew a shade of what he experienced, and she was surprised to find he didn't have anything else to say about it. That he brushed it off so quickly.

They constantly circled one another trying to figure out what the other was thinking. Ino was normally pretty forthcoming with her words, but he knew she always hide something bellow what she said, sometimes for the sake of mystery and other times he thought she was protecting him from her words, or maybe protecting herself. Shikamaru on the other had never really bothered to voice his thoughts unless it was absolutely necessary. At that time he only looked inconvenience by the experience and bothered by Ino's inquiries.

She quickly drew her hand away from him, like his skin was a hot iron. He thought he saw a look of anger on her face, but she turned too quickly to catch anything.

"Well, I found a village." Ino said pulling a folder from a locked drawer in her desk. She handed it to Shikamaru. "It's a very vague report. It says it was a forest fire that killed 21 people on May 19th thirteen years ago."

He looked down at the date stamped on the front, brushing his fingers over it, before he opened the folder and pulled out a single piece of parchment.

Disaster Report: Fire

Village: Hiboshi, Fire Country

Damage report: 90% of village burned down in a forest fire. Presumably started at 21:00, the blaze was not extinguished until 5:00. Resulted in 27 civilian deaths and 1 Konoha ninja death. 0 survivors from said village.

The names of the Shinobi involved, redacted. The names of the villagers, trickled down in a tidy list.

"This doesn't make sense." Shikamaru mumbled in frustration, closing his eyes as pain pierced his temples, his thoughts feeling fragmented. "This couldn't be it. There were no survivors."

"It was the only fire reported during Mist's possible life time in the area you circled. This has to be it." Ino said an inflection of annoyance in her voice. "They don't always do much investigating when these things happen. It was a small village, it probably didn't have very many records on its residents, so they wouldn't have sifted through the ashes to identify bodies, especially if everyone was dead. She could have slipped through the cracks."

"The mission report said she was between 16 and 20. That would have made her somewhere between 3 and 7. There's no way she would have survived that long on her own. The villages are so sparse in that area there probably wasn't another village within 20 miles of this place. This can't be it."

"Well I don't know what you want me to do Shikamaru. This was what I found." Ino said, throwing her hands up in defeat.

Shikamaru slammed his fists down hard on Ino's desk. She jumped a little and moved towards him, a concerned look on her face. She shifted back remembering she was angry with him. He was so exasperated. They were on to something, he knew it and now they came to a dead end before it had even begun to make sense.

"What do you want to do?" Ino forgot herself and put a comforting hand on Shikamaru's shoulder trying to let her anger subside.

"I don't know."

After the steel doors had finally opened Shikamaru was summoned to make a report with Tsunade about what had occurred. She informed him of what happened leading up to his interaction with Mist.

Apparently, she had used strips of her clothing to fake an attempted suicide hanging. When the guard came in, she knocked him out cold and bolted, only running into two other guards before she met him. She had managed to get to the ground floor before an ANBU stopped her, which she subdued before any back up had made it and then she was gone.

They didn't have any idea of her whereabouts, but she had not been seen leaving Konoha's walls, so they assumed she hadn't yet left the village. The guards on the wall were being doubled and the ANBU were now scouring the village for her.

Everyone was able to leave after the building had been swept as a precaution, and Shikamaru made his way home with little on his mind, but the feelings of the horrible headache he was enduring. It was like Mist had dipped a whisk in his brain and violently stirred causing his emotions to swirl in and out of focus and making it impossible to grasp a solid thought.