I should have put it together faster. If Shikaku had sent someone new to my mother, and they were going to meet us in the morning during our normal training time, there was only one possible reason. Shikaku had been watching me all too closely of late. That incident with the puzzle box was just the first time of many, and, like I'd mentioned before, the frequency with which my secondary vision was activating had increased exponentially since then.
It didn't take a genius to know that he was keeping track of all the times I had seemed a little off. Every headache, every bout of nausea, and every time I did something unexpected or improbable, all of these were systematically filed away in that man's brain. Of course, it wasn't exactly a secret that there was something wrong with me. I tried to hide and downplay the problem as much as I could, but when your mother starts taking you to the hospital for unexplained symptoms you've graduated to a whole new level. The only thing the adults around me weren't aware of at this point was the exact cause of my symptoms. I hadn't bothered to explain it. I had enough trouble grasping the right words to explain it even in my own head, much less to someone else.
I found myself standing in front of my mirror as I braided my hair, muttering to myself, "Do not meddle in the affairs of ninjas - especially Shikaku - for they are subtle and quick." I paused mid-styling just after the words left my mouth and slowly shook my head. I felt like I had heard that phrase somewhere before, but, as was true with so many of these half-remembered things, I couldn't quite place where or when I had heard it before.
"Were you saying something, Nora?" Hana asked from above.
I looked up the mirror to see my older sister just behind me. She, too, was braiding her hair like we were some kind of matched set. As I had gotten older, I often shared the bathroom with her. It had started out of necessity because of a host of little things I couldn't do on my own. Everything from getting up on the toilet to reaching for a toothbrush was a struggle. Even now that I was mostly self-sufficient, Hana would still help me with various small things. Being three foot tall and balancing on a kiddie stool while trying to reach something in the cabinet over the sink wasn't exactly fun.
"Just talking to myself. I'm kind of nervous."
"Ugh, so am I… It's kind of nerve-racking having Itachi of all people coming over this early in the morning."
"Why?" I asked, playing the innocent kid card in hopes of getting some more information.
"Well, he's a genius. Like the smartest of the smart. He was in my class at the academy, and he graduated after just a year." Hana sighed and rolled her eyes. "And if the girls at school learn that he's coming over to my house, there's going to be so much hell to pay. They'll definitely draw the wrong conclusion and be all like… Hana, no one can exclusively date Itachi because he's for all of us, blah, blah…"
"Well, he is kind of handsome - for a nine-year-old, I mean."
Hana snorted and grinned at my reflection in the mirror. "Well, I'll agree with that. All the other boys in my year group kind of look like warmed over dog turds in comparison."
"Do you like him?"
Hana fiddled with her hair some more, first pulling a strand of hair out to hang loosely around her face, and then grimacing and tucking it back in. "Eh, I dunno. Maybe if he didn't have so many stupid fangirls. Honestly, I don't give a damn. I don't really care what he thinks about me." Scrunching up her nose, she looked down at me. "Do I look okay?"
My elder sister was a terrible liar. "Lip gloss?" I offered the suggestion and watched with barely contained amusement as my sister's face lit up at the suggestion. "Great idea!"
Hana didn't stop at the lip gloss. In fact, by the time she was done, she was wearing more makeup than she ever did. Unfortunately, it wasn't terribly well applied, and she just looked kind of weird. Even Hana knew her makeup job was pretty lousy because she kept asking me, the child who was a couple months from her fourth birthday, how to fix it.
Somehow, I finally convinced her to just wash her face. It was in this moment right after, with her face still damp from scrubbing off the makeup that the doorbell rang.
"Crap, Nora! He's here! What do I do?"
Pounding down the hallway, I watched Kiba flash by on his way to the front door, a yell following behind him, "I've got dibs on the door!" He could make anything into a competition.
"Just the lip gloss and book it! It'll look even less cool to be seen coming out of the bathroom!"
"Ugh." Hana grabbed the tube of lip gloss, slathering it on as she pulled me out of the bathroom by the hand. I happily followed along in her wake, giggling as she palmed the tube of gloss closed with her other hand and chucked it back into the bathroom like she was hurling a kunai. With the amount of force she put behind it, we would probably find the tube lodged in the wall of the bathroom sometime that evening.
"Yo, yo! It's the whole freaking nerd squad." Tsume called from the kitchen as she stuck her head out to greet our newcomers. "You losers gotten some breakfast?"
Hana and I rounded the corner to find that we didn't just have Itachi and Shikaku invading our house this morning. No, for some reason we had Shikaku, Shikamaru, Itachi, and his younger brother Sasuke all standing in the entryway.
"Yeah, but you got some extra coffee, Tsume? I think I could stand a second cup." The request came from Shikaku. Frankly, neither of the Nara's looked fully awake.
"Yup. Just a second." Tsume disappeared back into the kitchen.
Kiba, meanwhile, was talking circles around Sasuke who had a dazed and faintly confused look on his face. We had bumped into Sasuke a few times before, just as we had met most of the other clan kids at some point either thanks to simple encounters while playing or the occasional birthday party.
Sasuke was a quiet and sweet-tempered kid with a hesitant but bright smile. Still, he wasn't exactly the most outgoing child, and my brother was basically word vomit personified.
Itachi, on the other hand, seemed detached from everything going on around him, calmly and quietly staring at the crazy array of family photos Tsume had haphazardly hung on the wall. A good half of them had us making goofy faces or trying to do something like touching our noses with our tongues. The Inuzuka's didn't really do formal family portraits.
My elder sister had begun to go red as she realized just what Itachi was looking at. Crouching down next to me, she muttered quietly enough for only me to hear, "Nora, if I die of embarrassment, you can have my stuff."
"It's okay, Hana. You don't need him. Mom does just great without a guy."
Hana sighed at me and rolled her eyes, "It's not like that..."
"No, no." I beamed at her. "I understand, and since I'm the best baby sister eveeeer…" I flashed my sister a wide smile and released her hand, bouncing over to Itachi.
I was prepared to tug his shirt, wriggle about like a loon, or do whatever else needed to be done to get his attention off our questionable family photos, but there was no need. His eyes just calmly shifted to me as I approached him.
"Good morning, Nora-san."
"Hi hi, Itachi-san!"
Meanwhile, Tsume had emerged from the kitchen with a cup of coffee for Shikaku. Before he'd hardly had a sip of the coffee, Tsume was questioning him in a quiet voice, "So what's the plan here?"
"I've got a theory," Shikaku replied softly to my mother. Then paused and drank several gulps of the hot, bitter liquid, wrinkling his nose as he did so. Rubbing his hand across his mouth, the man cleared his throat before continuing. "Something that needs to be tested, and, well, it was either an Uchiha or a Yamanaka. Figured Inoichi would be completely overkill. Plus, well, the man's our friend, but he's still bound to report in anything he thinks ANBU or that new T&I unit needs to know."
They were trying to have one of those adult conversations on the sly, trusting that, if they kept their voices down, the rest of us would be sufficiently preoccupied with the activity around us. For the most part, it was working. Hana had taken my intervention and rolled with it, coming over to give Itachi a friendly if awkward greeting. Kiba and Sasuke definitely weren't paying attention to the adults, and Shikamaru had fallen asleep while leaning against his father's leg. I was trying to not make it obvious that I was listening in, but when Itachi gave me an amused smirk, I knew that I hadn't been subtle enough in my spying.
"Frankly, I don't want to get intelligence involved in this. It may be nothing, and some of them are already a bit too uptight about, well, you know what I mean without me saying more. None of it's the kid's fault that's for sure. Anyhow, had a chat with the Third and decided that pulling in a genin the Hokage trusts from the Uchiha clan on the premise of helping some youngsters with their training seemed like the most low key way to get things done." Shikaku shrugged and then knocked back the last of the coffee in the mug, swallowing and running his tongue along his teeth as he sucked in air.
"I hope this theory pans out. The hospital turned out to be a huge freaking waste of time, and, at this point, I'm willing to try just about anything. I need to figure out what's causing her headaches. Even so, you'd better take good care of my baby, Shikaku."
The man winced and gave Tsume a firm nod. "Don't worry. I've got a healthy fear of what you might do to me if I screw up… And that's before Yoshino kills me."
A/N: For the record, later that evening, Hana got stuck patching the wall in the bathroom. Who knew you could use lip gloss as an effective projectile? Next chapter's looking like it's going to be a long one!
