Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Kishimoto.
AN: This is not a continuation of Tessen; I put this in here, because this will basically become my gathering chest for oneshots.
Synopsis: An alternate take in an alternate world at Naruto's and Shikamaru's friendship.
Smile
I had always been prone to rash behavior. Sometimes it felt as if the name Uzumaki left me few options.
All the more it had been important to surround myself with people who did the opposite when I became Hokage all those years ago. And what great friends those people had become. They taught me how to listen, though, and how to watch. They taught me how to appreciate not just the listless wind on my skin as I leaped between the trees, but also the stillness of a single moment.
And among all my friends there had been none who taught me more than Shikamaru. Shikamaru, who now lay before me on the verge of handing his soul to the Shinigami, smiling though, ever smiling. And in the curve of his lip the implied challenge: observe the moment, and pay attention to the details. Near death, honor me by doing my teaching justice.
He did not need to challenge me; I would have done this on my own.
So I looked at his pale face, hair sweaty on his brow, looked at his smile, watched.
And I saw history flow by, because in the way it gently mocked me, his smile had never changed a bit from when we still listened to Iruka about the necessity of preparation before a mission; when we heard of the innumerable feats of past Hokage that I could recite from memory – a feat that would have gotten me far in the Academy, had I only applied it to other venues; and also when I looked on, amazed, as Shikamaru – who knew none of the great shinobi's feats – solved problem after problem that made my head hurt back then.
He had an air of effortlessness about him when it came to using his mind. Throughout my life I remained convinced that he slept half the time not because he was lazy, but because he ran out of problems to solve. I envied him, and that he was my friend only made it more difficult. Back then, in times where I admittedly was not the most studious person, he impressed me precisely because he combined the level of involvement I wished to have, with the level of smarts I expected from that. Such distinctions were trivial now, but back then they seemed terribly important to me.
In that smile of his, that gently mocking smile, I also saw pain, however. I saw the events that made our paths cross after they had diverged during our early careers as Genin. It was so rare to see him that until the Chūnin Exams I had lost track of him altogether. He was vapor, because metal, blood, ice, a searing heat and turning windmills filled every available nook inside my head.
Friendship was important, but under Kakashi I learned to regard my team as my family, and wasn't that even more important? I would have never abandoned a friend, but there was a hierarchy in my mind back then, Sasuke, Sakura and Kakashi right at the top of the pyramid, because I yearned for family. Only later did I learn that between family and friend lay no discernible distinction anymore, and that the duty of the Hokage meant everyone was both to me.
And when, during the Chūnin Exams, an explosion knocked me out as I leapt through the city on my way to the Ichibi's form, what I had learned with Team Seven reaffirmed itself with Shikamaru. There was nothing that kitted you closer together than fighting side by side against innumerable odds. No idea how things could have turned out had I reached Gaara back then, but someone else took that duty from me.
When I woke up, it was to the sound of clashing metal and gargled screams. There was the feeling of blood sprayed on my face. An incredible heat seemed to carry the stench of Konoha's sewers with it as it licked up my nose. Shikamaru stood above me. He held up fingers and asked me how many, and when I answered he smiled, more juvenile and less secure than now, his lips drawn in relief and undercut with horror at once. I had no idea how or why Kusa was attacking us, why anyone was attacking us at all. The world had made little sense for most of my life, and that day it verged on being unintelligible altogether.
But we clawed our way out of Death's grizzly stomach, unwilling to die we made him spit us out again, whole – at least in body. And I appreciated Shikamaru's dry wit as we kept ourselves sane during the insane hours of the attack; and I appreciated his muted words and his silence after it became known that the Third had died; and lastly I appreciated the all too human tears he shed as we buried our friends and let flowers sail into their graves. Chōji, Ino, Kiba, too many to name who surprise had killed that day.
In that smile of his, that gently mocking, pained smile, I saw a glint of insanity. A spark that would resurface many times in the years after the Chūnin Exams, mirrored in a thousand faces, as all of Konoha held onto a last, tiny string of sanity while the world around us dissolved into war and bloodshed. We learned, all of us, that keeping your mind was hard when alliances were made and broken in the same breath. When today you shared your meal with people you killed come morning, because once more the missive came in that the borders had shifted, a treaty had been broken, the strategy changed, and we were now allied with so and so, instead of so and so.
Life became worth nothing, people were interchangeable. For every day your sense of morality rebelled against this state, a week followed in which you witnessed atrocities that were a testament to the despicable depths to which humanity could fall. In no time of my life had I felt as much in tune with Jiraiya's wish for peace, and at the same time as removed from it in reality.
Team members died, changed, got promoted; until it was my turn and I became a leader, and in all hours tried to make sure the people under me survived, and in all hours faced the impossibility of such a wish – until my squad and Shikaramu's collided on a mission and we made ourselves a name, and were, from then on, without dying, without failure, the one unit the big wigs in Konoha kept together at all costs.
When I was young, the office of Hokage had supreme worth. It was the goal, the focal point of my ambition. As war engulfed us, Hokage, too, became interchangeable. They died, no matter their strength. Some held out longer than others: Danzō, Kakashi, Shikamaru's father – all of them intelligence, grit and skill personified. And yet all were offered up at the altar of war.
Each time a Hokage died, we were thrown into chaos. The message devastated us at the front, jumbled our structures of power at home. After the third change that decimated our morale to such a degree we lost vital strategic key points, the higher ups put a Hokage in place who wasn't to go to the battlefield at all; a Hokage in name, so that the order would not be disrupted; but who agreed in all matters with the honorable Elders. The title of Hokage became a laughing stock, and in those tides of blood drowned my dream, nothing more than a piece of flotsam in a storm.
Yet we persisted. Because us Konoha folk had always been hardy and tenacious. As the war went on, and no one died under my command, I kept listening to Shikamaru. My friendship to him kept me anchored, and his wisdom tethered me to sanity. I came to make a name for myself, as did he. Names we would have exchanged willingly for none of this to ever have happened. But that was an illusion. It happened, and we were the eye of the storm while the war intensified. With his strategies we took fortress after fortress; our names began to resound with power, and behind us we left a trail of corpses, and walked, dulled in mind and soul, onward – where to?
We had no idea.
Team leader became unit leader, unit leader became troop commander, and on it went, until I held in my palms the lives of hundreds as I planned advances on one front and prepared an ambush at another – always guided by him, who had by then become the chief strategist, and who declined any offer to take up the general's badge himself. Too much responsibility he used to say. He was right.
I looked at his smile, gentle, pained, and specked with insanity, and saw in it an unquenchable pride. A feeling I shared, as we – tired from war and now with enough power under our command – made to change reality, made Jiraiya's dream our goal, no matter what we had to do.
It started with a single decision. It was dissent. But at that point we did not care anymore. The orders came from a Hokage we only knew by name, who had never seen the frontlines, who knew neither us nor our tradition. Because it was strategically expedient, we were to abandon a Kiri position we had helped defend against Kumo. They were only short term allies, and we didn't know them very much, but at that point enough was enough. And if we died because of this, so we told ourselves, then at least we would have died with a last moment of honor and dignity, and not running away from those you had made a pact with. It could have been any country – it did not matter.
So we ignored the order, stayed, and gnawed our way through wave after wave, until we were left standing. It was a surreal feeling. We were free, afterwards. Because no order of Konoha, no troops they had were strong enough to dictate terms to us. Was it a military putsch? Yes, it was. We held the border, advanced, and our newfound allies stayed with us.
As we consolidated our blossoming alliance, I came to value Shikamaru's diplomatic skills even more than his strategic ones. I had none, and he mostly did the talking while I sat and looked important, with a stern groove in my brow. It was a small joke between us that they found him to be more intimidating than me, even if I had killed vastly more people. And what always amused me the most was that I actually found it to be true, that he was the more dangerous of us two – even if he didn't see it that way.
Often we neared destruction – and from Konoha neither supplies nor troops were forthcoming: none of us had entertained the notion to take it by force; none of us wanted to. But nature and our allies kept us fed. As we advanced, Kiri supplied us by the crates with canned shrimp. They said they kept the good fish for themselves, and canned shrimp had a longer shelf life. I got sick from them a few times, but it was better than nothing.
Later, as our alliance grew, other nations chipped in, too. Iron Country gave us boar pelts to keep us warm; Kusa had sake to lift our spirits. Shikamaru and I made it a point not to have our shinobi loot the country side. If ever there was supposed to be a peace on earth, it could not be founded on columns of a starved and devastated people. And sometimes, with nothing but our dignity and canned shrimps to feast on, we persisted, moved forward, and demanded – country by country by country – that this madness stop.
I looked at his smile now, and saw triumph, unveiled.
And how could we have felt any different? When, in the aftermath of the war, all nations south of Iwa and Kumo were bound by a single creed: no more war, for the world will end if this continues. How could we have felt anything but triumph, when we met, later, with the Tsuchikage and the Raikage, discussing terms for an armistice? There was no other possibility. The memory electrified even now, because at that moment, for the first time in almost fifteen years the world was free of war.
Days of peace turned into weeks, turned into months; and after half a year, the armistice became a full-blown peace as armies drew away from the border, came back home to their families. We had made it, we celebrated, and yet we knew not how to continue after war. It was all we had known.
Lost, and full knowing that a military tribunal would await us, we too brought the army back home, and stood with hundreds of shinobi in front of Konoha's gates. We expected punishment. Not for the simple shinobi, but for us – the general and his crafty accomplice. We had, after all, lit the fire in our troops.
At the gates, the figurehead wearing the robe took one look at us and almost threw the hat at me. The elders kept mum, too. I was named the Tenth Hokage within the day, got an office, and was promptly assaulted by all those tasks necessary to lift a war-torn country out of destitution.
And so I did, with Shikamaru at my side, who – if you were honest – headed almost every important position. Sure, the official heads were different: Sasuke for ANBU, Sakura for our Intelligence, Hinata for the Oi-nin, and so forth – but they all answered to him, and it would be a mistake to say that he answered to me. Never had the term Shadow Hokage been as apt.
I looked at this smile, and saw love and happiness.
Frantically we rebuilt Fire Country; frantically we kept a lid on war and combat wherever we could. Our children should not have to grow up in the same world as us, that was what we swore ourselves as we arrived back in Konoha – even before we had children.
He had it surprisingly easy. He was the most intelligent man I knew, and yet the least complicated. One evening as we relaxed at the river after a long day of administrative duties, we saw a group of Genin came by with their Jōnin instructor. We knew the Jōnin: she had fought beside us for several years. Shikamaru yawned into the setting sun, chugged the rest of his bottle, walked over to her, and asked if she'd like to get a drink later. Half a year later they married.
Conversely, I had some trouble. I was the Hokage, and if ever there was a job that at the same time attracts and repels women it's that one. It would be more accurate to say that love found me, not the other way around. I literally stumbled into it, ironically on the day Shikamaru got married, when I was so drunk that I kept running at ridiculous speed through Konoha at night, to prove to myself that I still had it.
I first thought I had crashed into a lamp post, but it turned out to be Kiba's older sister, Hana. The rest, as they say, was history. And so I too got to taste joy, because a woman in your life, a child to call your own: those things could lift your head into the clouds even when the goings got tough; and nothing beat the feeling of seeing your daughter crush it in the Chūnin Exam.
I looked at his smile, and tying all of it together – the gentle mocking, the pain, the insanity, the triumph, the joy – I saw friendship, the kind that lasted for a lifetime and if there was an afterlife I knew I would see it there again, because too often it had felt as if we were two sides of one soul.
FIN