Chapter 142 - Mulligan Stew

Shikake had given Takeru fair warning about her leaving him.

It was her routine, and there was no way she was giving it up. Every year, a week before New Year's Eve, she would take a transport down to the Land of Wind and spend the holidays with her mother and uncles, and stay there until the middle of January. It was the highlight of her year, and she'd already received letters from Morizuru expressing sarcastic delight at her imminent presence.

Through her deliberate and dry persuasion, she managed to get him to allow Ino to take over for her in her absence, when it came to physical therapy. "Hey, it'll mean she's not ignoring you, right? You won't have to talk to her or anything." Shikake was massaging his ankles over the subject. "Like, at least that."

"Sure, sure." Takeru, she'd noticed, had been far less short with his mother since the birthday incident, so she suspected he'd either had a change of heart or she'd done something for him to bring that about. Either way, it was a relief for her, since that meant less complaining overall.

She also gave him the address of Temari's house in Sand, so he could write to her, as well as her phone number. "I mean, if you're really so pathetic as to need to actually talk to me."

"Don't count on me making use of it, shrew." He'd smiled as he took the piece of paper from her. "Not like I don't have other things to do."

"Sure, cripple."

But the last of her preparations was a request. "Come to my place the day I leave. I could use a bit of help moving some stuff."

"You think I could help you?"

"You're getting pretty damn good at lifting stuff with chakra threads." And this was true, since he'd gotten to the point where he could lift and maneuver one of her adult-sized puppets with ease, though he was far from being able to use it as fluidly as Shikake. "Plus it's probably easier to carry a suitcase in your lap than to lug it all the way by hand."

Takeru's smile in reply surprised her—not the fact that he was smiling, but there was something new in the quality of it. "If you say so."

He showed up, as promised, at the Nara house, dressed impeccably and carrying a strange, long case at the back of his wheelchair.

Shikake was immediately curious as she opened the door for him. "What's that you got there, a goodbye present?"

"Something like that. Can you lift my chair up?"

"Please." Shikake's fingers curled as she attached threads to the arm rests and back of the chair, and slowly and carefully lifted it up the foyer step and into the house proper. "Gentle enough for you?"

"It was passable."

"So what's on the chair?"

Takeru's smile was full of that mysterious fire again as he reached behind him and unzipped the thin black case. Inside were a set of aluminum canes—walking braces. Carefully, he pushed himself to his feet, and balanced himself as he attached the cuffs to his wrists and arms.

Shikake was absolutely silent as she watched him unfold.

And then he began, slowly, to walk. He leaned heavily against his braces, and was obviously making a great effort to even move his feet slightly, but he was walking.

"Well—look at you."

"Not bad for a cripple, huh?" He was starting to lose his breath. "I wanted to show you before you left. Can't get very far, but I'm way ahead of schedule. People like me tend to still be drooling in wheelchairs this far out, not here."

"Expected nothing less from the—boy wonder." There was something caught in her throat, and she coughed. "Well, that and all that help I've been giving you."

"It's your help that's gotten me this far, shrew. My therapist says I've only been able to get this far because we were working at it every day." He had gotten close enough to her so that they were only a few feet apart. "So I have you to thank. Hope you're proud of me."

"Come on, you think I'm not happy to see my hard work pay off?" She put her hands on her hips. "Got a ways to go, but I gotta say, cripple, that's pretty great."

"Pretty soon I'll be getting around as fast as the rest of you." His arms were trembling with effort, now. "Probably won't get rid of these… braces 'cos of my damn back, but I'll at least be able to walk normally."

"Yes, yes, we're all very impressed, now sit your ass down before you fall over." Shikake walked behind him and pushed his chair closer. "I'm not picking you up, you know."

Takeru sat back down in the chair as if he were falling, and got to work taking the braces off. "Please, I'm better than that."

"Sure."

Once the braces were back in their case, he returned them to the back of his chair. "So where's this stuff I'm supposed to be hauling?"

She shrugged noncommittally. "I ended up taking care of it myself. Most of my stuff's already at the house, anyways."

His face lowered. "Then what do you need me here for? An excuse to say goodbye?"

"No, there's something I gotta foist off onto you, f'you'll take it."

His distaste turned to suspicion. "'Foist off'?"

"Yeah. Gimme a minute, I'll go get it."

Takeru folded his arms in the chair. "I'll give you a minute."

Shikake carried a secret smile with her as she went to her room, and carried a child-sized form out in her arms, draped in a black cloth.

Takeru's suspicion only deepened. "What is that."

"Try lifting it. Don't worry, s'not a joke or a trap or whatever."

A host of exploratory blue feelers snaked forth from Takeru's thin, elegant hands, and wandered over the black cloth, looking for places to attach.

And then it lifted itself out of Shikake's arms, uncurling and becoming more human in form.

"Is this a puppet?"

"Yup." It was a gnarled, human-type puppet, hunched over and with slender, gangly limbs. The face was carved with thin eyes, and hair crafted from wool that curled and surrounded it like black cloud.

"I haven't seen this one before." Takeru, now that he'd found the limbs, began lifting them up and down experimentally. "One of yours?"

"Not really."

"Don't tell me you stole it."

"Nah. I made it. For you."

Takeru stopped what he was doing. "You made this?"

"For you. Don't leave that part out."

Genuine confusion entered his eyes. "Why would you do that?"

"Well, one reason is because you were sort of the inspiration after a while. I carved the back crooked so it would be easier to collapse and carry around or hide. I ended up making it lighter to lift an' use than most puppets 'cos you're only starting out." She tried to sound as uninterested as possible. "The other reason is 'cos you didn't get anything for your birthday, so I figured, better late than never, huh?"

"This is… a birthday present?"

"Yeah."

Takeru's smile spread slowly. "So you felt sorry for me."

"Don't flatter yourself. I'm just giving this to you so you'll owe me and give me something for my birthday." Her smirk turned genuine. "I don't really get that many presents, if you know what I mean. So I might as well force you."

He folded the puppet into itself, legs perfectly folded against the curved spine. It was an unconventional, but clever design. "When's your birthday, then?"

"April twenty-eighth. And you'd better not forget."

Takeru transferred the puppet to his lap, and smiled in return. "I won't. There's no way I'll keep myself in the debt of a shrew like you."

"Don't disappoint me, cripple."

When the time came, they went, together, to the transport station, and Takeru waved her off from the platform.

Once a week, in place of their old routine, he wrote to her, and her reply would always arrive within the same week. Though he never stooped so low as to call her himself, and she compensated by making the effort when she could.

Gossip was so much easier to discuss with talking rather than writing, after all. And she wasn't going to stay away from any of that.

And there was excellent gossip within the first week of Shikake's leaving, as it happened.

The day before New Year's Eve, Takeru received a visitor. He'd been working with his new puppet—he'd named it Hunchback, to Shikake's approval—and would have asked not to be bothered, had Ino not told him who it was.

"I'm abandoned! I can't believe she would do this!" Gyosei looked very much unlike himself, there in Takeru's room, his coffee-creamer hair loosened messily. His clothes were wrinkled.

Takeru let him rant as he continued his puppet exercises, and he learned the whole story quite quickly.

To Gyosei's utter horror, his "adorable whore" of a little sister, Furawa, had finally decided to take a stand and move out so she could live with her girlfriend, Haruno Sakari.

"And I'd even gone so far as to sleep with that—that dwarf woman to keep her away! I mean, I don't care who she's with normally, I'll let her sleep with anyone, that's no issue, but that girl was giving her ideas! Telling her to—to move out, and think for herself!"

Sakari, once she'd gotten over the hormones and the lies, was more than a little angry at Gyosei's seduction of her, and went so far as to march to his home, punch him in the face and stomach, and give him a severe talking-to before leaving with his sister.

"Furawa was happy with me! Oh, what am I going to do…"

It was there that Takeru finally said something. "Oh, grow up. You know the only reason you kept your sister around like that was because she did all the housework for you so you could sleep around. And the only reason she never left was because you either stole or ruined everything she liked outside the house."

Gyosei blinked a few times. "Excuse me…?"

"You really should have known better than to mess with that Haruno woman. You say she gave Furawa ideas? Good for her, then. The world needs more independent people."

Gyosei was starting to pout. "H-How can you be so insensitive…?"

"Insensitive? You're acting like a toddler whose toy got taken away. And from the way you treated your sister, she might as well have been your toy." He kept his eyes up, returning to the puppet. "Go somewhere else if you want sympathy, because I'm done with you."

Gyosei left, and never visited Takeru again. But this was an obvious result, considering that Gyosei still considered people to be nothing better than resources.

Takeru, obviously, was moving beyond that. He was an adult, after all. Well beyond that childish kind of thinking.

There was more gossip and more news in Shikake's absence, which Takeru, of course, passed on to her.

Around the same time that Takeru heard it from Gyosei, Sakari showed up at her house with her girlfriend, gasping delightedly for air, and loudly informing her family that they were going to get married. Lee, of course, was immediately behind the idea, though Sakura (after making sure they were serious) had to make sure with Naruto that such a thing was legally okay. Since there weren't any laws that said otherwise—and in Naruto's definition, a lack of law was as good as permission—the announcement went out that the marriage was to happen in the spring.

But the biggest piece of news—and the only time Takeru ever called Shikake first to share—was when Hajime's baby was finally born.