Blood Breakdown
Part 3
By Juno42
Shikamaru wondered why on earth he was this agitated. Since when had he ever been intense about anything, except clouds?
He was lying on his back in his favorite spot, watching them now. It was getting on sunset in an hour or so, and there was a swath of fishbone clumps of cloud spreading across the sky. But for once Shikamaru wasn't in the mindset to enjoy the sight. He was dismayed at this project he's been set on. He knew he was on the right track, he was sure of it. But things just refused to fall into place. That, and the reply he had received from Temari had been cryptically dismaying.
:Shikamaru,
Here are a couple of samples. I hope they are enough. Is condition hasn't really changed. He doesn't seem to be getting better, but he's not getting worse. There was an incident, and he mentioned that killing made his pain go away. Or it used to, but not anymore. I don't know what that means, but I don't think he meant physically. In fact, he said he didn't want to kill. Any ideas?
Temari
P.S. I don't know what testing you're going to do, but if you find something like kitchen cleanser in the samples, don't worry, I took care of that.:
Shikamaru had run several different chemical tests on the first sample, and had indeed found traces of cleaning chemicals. But not enough to account for Gaara's prolonged illness. Temari's note also left him wondering if whatever was happing to Gaara was psychological. If it was he was definitely not equipped to handle it. But he wasn't giving up on it yet, by God!
And again he wondered why he was so fixated on solving this problem. This whole thing fell under his usual definition of Troublesome. Why was he bothering? Was it was Temari asked him to? He felt a bit of heat in his face at that idea. He suppressed in annoyance. Was it because, finally, something had come along that was somewhat challenging? Possibly. But who said he wanted any challenges?
In the end, he decided that, for now, the answer was that he was just bored. If it nagged at him after the fact, he'd find a different solution. Back to the task at hand.
"Hi, Shikamaru." Chouji's voice said from his two-o'clock. "Boy, you look upset."
He did? He hadn't realized he it was visible. "Just frustrated," he replied.
"You didn't find anything wrong?" Chouji asked, sitting down next to him, bag of chips rustling.
"Not a damn thing," Shikamaru said. "There is nothing in his blood that shouldn't be there. He's clean as a whistle."
"Hm…" Chouji said thoughtfully, crunching away. After some moments he said, "Want some?" and held the bag out to Shikamaru.
Shikamaru pulled out a chip. "What kind are they?" he asked.
"It's a new flavor, fish, of some kind. I like them."
Crunch! "Not bad."
"This is my first bag and thing I'm already addicted." Chouji said with a grin.
Shikamaru smirked. "You're addicted to anything with flavor in…." He suddenly sat up so fast is startled Chouji.
"Whoa!" he exclaimed. "What?"
Shikamaru wasn't listening. A bomb had just gone off in his head. He had just remembered the other affliction he knew that displayed the symptoms Gaara had been having.
Withdrawal.
"Excuse me," he said quietly.
Chouji was in the middle of a blink at the time, so he didn't see Shikamaru get up, but he was halfway down the road when his reflexes caught up, and gave chase.
He caught up to Shikamaru at the messaging aviary. Shikamaru went straight to the desk, pulled a sheaf of paper from the box, a pen from his pouch, and scribbled a hasty note:
:Temari,
I think I know what's wrong now. I have to test it. Whatever you do, DO NOT LET GAARA KILL ANYTHING! If I'm right, the longer you keep him from killing, the easier things will get.
Shikamaru:
He enveloped the note, paid extra for a faster bird, and sent it off. Then he turned on his heel and took the shortest route to his home at a dead run, Chouji working to keep up. He burst into his father's study. "Dad, I need a peptide chart," he said to a nonplussed Shikato.
His dad frowned. "First the blood seals, now you want a peptide chart."
Shikamaru looked ready to tear his hair out. "Take it out of my salary!" he half yelled. "Can I have the chart please?"
Shikato blinked in bemusement at his agitated offspring. Chouji couldn't blame him. It had probably been a long time since he's seen Shikamaru that worked up, if he ever had. Finally, Shikato pulled out a key, unlocked a draw in the desk, and removed a long, rolled scroll. It wasn't particularly thick, but the roll was half-again as long as a forearm.
Shikamaru snatched it with a hasty "thank you" and fled to his room. Chouji gave Shikato a shrug before following.
In his bedroom, Shikamaru had already unrolled the chart across his desk and pulled out some supplies from a draw, along with the last blood sample seal. He uncorked a small vial of clear liquid, rolled the seal up and dropped it in, resealed the vial and shook it. When he stopped, the seal had been dissolved, and the beaker was half full of reconstituted blood. He set the vial down and began pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
Chouji took a look at the chart. On it was drawn an elaborate circle, with a set of important looking characters spaced evenly around the outside. He counted twenty of them, closest to the circle, then a ring of six more outside of that. He had no clue what they stood for.
Shikamaru was now carefully preparing a small amount of ink. It had a very strange scent.
Okay, I give up," said Chouji. "What gives?"
"I'm checking to se if Gaara's problem might be an inside job." Shikamaru said absently.
"…Meaning what?" asked Chouji.
"This chart," Shikamaru explained, "lists the all six essential elements a person needs to live." He paused in his ink prep and pointed at the outer ring of characters on the chart. "Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur." He pointed at the inner ring of characters. "These are the twenty amino acids essential to humans. The names aren't really important."
"And what are we doing with them?" asked Chouji.
"When you said you were addicted to the chips," Shikamaru explained. "It occurred to me that that's what Gaara's symptoms reminded me of."
Chouji blinked at him. "What?" he said. "Chips?"
Shikamaru's turn to blink.
Pause. "Oh!" said Chouji as it dawned on him. "An addiction!"
Shikamaru had to chuckle. Chouji wasn't stupid, but sometimes he had trouble hooking complicated sentences into conversations the right way up. It was rather endearing. "Yeah."
Chouji chuckled as well at his own faux pas. Then frowned. "But you said he was clean, didn't you?"
"Sure," said Shikamaru. "Of drugs."
"What else is there?" asked Chouji.
"Peptides." Shikamaru said. "Basically anything you're addicted to is facilitated by peptides. Peptides are small protein molecules that fit into your cells, and basically give it messages. The more places on your cells that these peptides can fit into, the more addicted you are to them. And to whatever it is that makes your body produce the peptide in the first place." Shikamaru picked up a calligraphy brush from the stuff on the desk and began, with extreme care to write along the outside of the great seal.
"That doesn't sound good." Chouji said.
"Only in excess, like most things." Shikamaru replied. "If we didn't have those little addictions then we wouldn't know how to survive."
"That kind of addiction is okay?" Chouji asked doubtfully.
"It's like the reason you need to eat so much." Shikamaru went on. "You particularly, I mean. Your family line uses jutsus that need an incredible amount of power. Over time, your clan has adapted in such a way that they are more addicted to food than is necessary for most people. By being addicted to eating a lot, your body makes sure that it's keeping itself supplied with the large amounts of energy it might need to use. If you and your family were to stop eating the way you do, you would lose energy far too quickly, and that could kill you. Addiction is how the body and brain motivate you to do what you need to do to stay alive, whatever that may be."
Chouji was impressed. "Wow," he said. "How come you know all that?"
Shikamaru pause in his work and looked a bit chagrined. "When I first met you, it kinda scared me seeing how much you ate. I asked Dad if you really okay, and he explained it to me."
Chouji was a bit touched by the concern. "I never thought to ask my dad about it." he said.
"Well for you it's perfectly normal, so you don't need to wonder about it." said Shikamaru. "Now, if someone eats a lot for the sake of eating, that's gluttony, and that is a bad addiction. Bad addiction is when the motivation is so powerful that it's all you focus on, and it lessens your other motivations. Like they say, everything in moderation."
Chouji just took a few moments to absorb all that. Then he said. "So what do you think Gaara's addicted to? Killing people?"
"I think that's what he does to fulfill his addiction, yes." Shikamaru said. "But I don't know how it works. Temari said that Gaara told her he didn't want to kill, so it's not something he likes. But it definitely became his fix somehow."
He finished his calligraphy and set the brush down on the ink stone. Then he stared into space for a moment or two, with a troubled frown.
"What?" Chouji asked.
"During the Chuunin Exams," Shikamaru said, remembering. "Naruto and I saw Gaara kill two Grass ninja. Afterward, he looked like he'd been completely doped. It was…pretty freaky." He shuddered and shook his head.
Chouji tried to think of something to change the subject. "So what's that you wrote?"
Shikamaru gestured at the drying scrawls. "That's just stuff to tell the chart what to look for and where. I want to look at his neuropeptides, the stuff coming out of his brain. That should be dry now."
Shikamaru picked up the vial of blood, and filled a long glass pipette with it. Then, very slowly, squeezed it out into the intricate design of the circle part of the chart seal.
The blood flowed around the pattern of the circle, meeting itself again at the far edge from the pipette. Shikamaru set the empty utensil down, Formed a complex set of hand seals, muttered something at the chart, and blood in the circle began to glow molten red. Characters began to fade up inside the circle, miniatures of the ones ringing the circle; the ones Shikamaru said were amino acids. They seemed to bubble into existence on the page, like drops of olive oil poured into a pot of water. It was a bit hard to recognize them at first, because they were smaller, and overlapping each other in small clumps or chains. Chouji did know a bit about molecules, from when the ninja classes were teaching how to mix field potions, and the overlapping patterns reminded him very much of the pictures Iruka-sensei would draw on the blackboard.
After several moments, the red glow faded, and the circle was now empty of blood. The character chains inside the circle were crimson, though, and in various states of boldness. Shikamaru bent to peer at them. He scanned them, making small, thoughtful grunts, which, after a while became more and more grim, along with his expression.
"What the hell is that…?" he muttered eventually. Chouji followed his eyes to a rather large, spidery looking cluster, in a particularly thick, angry dark red, almost black.
"See how some of these are clear and some are kinda faded?" Shikamaru said, before Chouji asked. "That tells me how frequently those peptide receptors are found on his cells. But I've never seen anything like that before." He sounded a bit spooked about it. "Which means it's probably what we're looking for."
He continued to frown at the chart. He ran his finger over some of the more faded clusters, and tapped a couple times of one very weak one, so weak it could barely be made out. "Oxytocin," Shikamaru murmured, more to himself that to Chouji. "Hardly anything…poor bastard." He sighed, then straightened up and began rolling the chart. "Well, let's clean up, and go see what Dad thinks.
Continued in our next…
A/N: Hello again. I know, quite a bit technical, this chapter. I get a bit exited about biosciences. I tried to make this as realistic to the science as I could. So what Shikamaru is telling Chouji is the truth, as far as I understand it. And I'm sure I probably misunderstood some stuff, but I can get away with that because this is fiction. For those that may actually be interested, try going to Wikipedia (they know everything I swear!) and look up amino acids, peptides, and addiction, and surf around from there. (Tried putting the addresses up in this, FF editer does seem to like that : ) There will be more science in the next chapter. I'll try to make it short, and I'll be getting back to the Sand team. Trust me, this is relevant to the plot, it's not just a huge diversion.
Once again, thank you to all who read and reviewed. I'm too tired to address anyone directly at the moment, sorry. Ask any questions in the review section, if you have any, I'll see if I can answer them.
Stay Frosty:3