Yup, mass-posting. That means you're not allowed to complain about the shortness of chapters.


IV

It was Something To Do.

Everyone Shikamaru had constantly thought of as young were becoming hardened, calloused. Lee and Sakura could sit over a cup of tea and talk about the easiest way to shatter bone, Hinata kept fighting through a few broken ribs and Kiba learnt to tell the different characteristics of blood via taste and smell.

And with this sudden growing-up that everyone was doing, came a more gradual loss of infinity. Chouji no longer sat with Shikamaru and stared at the sky, sharing food with Ino, upwind from Asuma-sensei's cigarettes. Ino was off training young kunoichi, Chouji was working full-time in his family's restaurant/lab. Asuma, set free from his charges as a full-time sensei, was off killing people like all the other jounin. Like Shikamaru.

So, when Shikamaru didn't have a mission to do, or prepare for, or recover from, nor a message to carry, or memorize, or dictate, he sat on the hill between Kakashi's house and his own, and watched the sky.

It was Something To Do.

Sometimes Kakashi showed up and they talked, or just sat. Sometimes Kakashi didn't show up for weeks at a time, and Shikamaru heard from Naruto, when he wasn't out on a mission with Kakashi, that he was being enlisted to do very high-class missions directly from the Hokage herself. Naruto would always act annoyed and irritable that his "super-pervert lazy-sensei" was taking such high-up missions all by himself, but Shikamaru could see the looks of worry that slipped behind his eyes, an unwelcome knowledge of what these missions betokened.

On one night that Kakashi showed up after a long sojourn, his hitake headband was replaced by a swath of white bandages.

Shikamaru had yet to see the famed sharigan eye of Kakashi the copy-nin, but that didn't stop him knowing it was there. Rumors of the story behind it drifted around the village from time to allay boredom and warn children, as if Kakashi was some sort of bogey-man who could come to eat you whole if you didn't grow up proper.

"I guess I don't get out enough," Kakashi said in an awkward confirmation of a fact he knew Shikamaru would absorb.

"I guess the rumors are true then," Shikamaru said, not knowing whether there were rumors. It softened the fact that he knew.

"Well, I guess that depends on what rumors you are listening to," Kakashi said half-jokingly.

"You are taking classified missions from the Hokage again?"

"Aa."

Kakashi didn't say any more. It was a bit of a betrayal to them both. The ANBU alone were directly responsible for the Hokage. Other missions were given out impartially according to ability. ANBU missions were never filed or kept on record. Kakashi had been the one who had said that ANBU made you inhuman.

"Ah well, if you think it's necessary..."

The question hovered in the air, both questioning and accepting Kakashi's decision. The famed ninja relaxed and scratched his scar under the bandages absent-mindedly, watching lights flicker down the little grassy hill in the village.

When the moon came up and Shikamaru decided to go to bed, Kakashi handed him a small, rectangular, paper-wrapped packet.

"For the nights I'm not here," he said with a cheerful smile, waving Shikamaru on his way home.

Shikamaru put the packet in his vest and didn't have the time to open it until a few days later, when sitting on the roof of some dignitary's office, waiting for a response to the scroll he had just dropped off.

A crisp new copy of Icha Icha Paradise, volume one, signed by the author himself, unmarked except for a few inkblots on a few corners, marking the important bits.

From Kakashi, to speed you on your way. Read carefully.


Critisize. Think.