CHAPTER 4

INTERROGATION

She ran so far Sakura thought she might have reached a completely different section of Konoha. The circular village which would take about two hours to walk a straight line across (if she could ever find a bunch of streets in a straight line) meant walking along the circumference of it would take anybody a lot longer. Sakura kept running. Her legs sprinted as fast as they could go with chakra, pushing the muscles which shouldn't be able to do this. Even so she didn't get 1/8 of the way around the wall before someone found her. When the next person appeared in front of her, she swung her arm back, and with another scream Sakura lunged at them.

His body flickered one step to the right. Her fist met air. He stepped back to avoid her next adrenaline induced hit.

"Woah woah, calm down, it's me."

She swung again, almost fell off the wall, and only saw through the sweat and blood crusting over her eyes when a hand grabbed the back of her ragged dress in a familiar hold. He slung her up and held her high enough she looked him straight in the face. Her mouth was so very dry.

She croaked out, "Shisui?"

His eyes narrowed, he looked at her civilian dress, her cheap shinobi sandals, and finally landing on her school purchased hip pouch all students got their first week. Then he let out a bitter, sad laugh, "A little academy student knows my name. How do you know my name?"

"They mention you in books."

"Those wouldn't have pictures. Did someone send you to target me?"

"No!" Sakura pleaded.

She felt creeping horror at how this was turning out. He didn't like her answer. He shook her, the jerking motion made her limbs knock back and forth in the air. Her toes dangled above the far away apartment buildings. How he held her so far out from the wall, she thought he might get sick of her and drop her off the edge.

Her voice came out quiet, "Please stop. I'm an academy student."

"A little academy student hiding in the trees and getting in fights she should have well stayed out of."

"You're a hero. I couldn't let him hurt you. Even if he hurt me. At least you'd be okay," Her lip was trembling by the end of it.

Today had been too much: the bullying, the temper of the one girl she thought might eventually be her friend, running through the trees, attacking the councilman, the chase, the fireball jutsu which nearly incinerated her. Sakura's breathing started to shudder. It turned into big gulping intakes.

The assassination and dismemberment of their pursuing masked ninja. The one who'd remembered her and chased after her. The sound he made as she broke his leg and left him to fall over the wall. If she hadn't killed three people today, her actions had led to their deaths. The man she'd punched in the forest, she'd seen his eyes roll as the nose collapsed and punctured into his head. Her lip trembled harder.

Shisui was so sad and angry already she didn't want to cry in front of him. What did she have to worry about? He was the one who people wanted to steal parts from.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make it worse."

He heaved a sigh. With this sound his arm lowered her body so she dangled around the height of his chest. He seemed to be thinking heavily about something. His arm lowered again, this time swinging her body back over the wall. Her toes barely brushed the surface. He continued to let her dangle as he muttered.

"It was going to be bad no matter what. You saved me."

"You don't seem happy about that. I'm sorry you're sad."

He let her go and her legs collapsed under her. Her cheeks, already flushed and sweated from her run, they flamed with her embarrassment. She tried to stand and discovered the muscles of her legs shook so bad she wouldn't be able to do anything more than sit down right where she was. He sighed again. A reaction, she could only assume, to the pathetic failure of her limbs. Her lip trembled harder and she had to wipe her eyes before they released all the tears she'd been holding back.

"Hey none of that."

She hid her face.

"Kami I'm such a dobe. Please. Please stop."

She sensed him moving back and forth in front of her. But the tears, no matter how her hands tried to hold them in, they just kept coming. She wished she wasn't here. She wished she was anywhere else. Sakura pulled up the torn and singed collar of her ruined dress and buried her face inside it. Another presence full of chakra appeared beside Shisui, the hero who'd rather she hadn't saved him. She cried harder.

"Who's this?"

"No idea. The girl who saved me when the councilman tried to take my eye. He almost got it too, see?"

There were a few quiet words she couldn't hear above her own balling and only the order, "Calm her down. We'll need to talk with her."

Then the presence was gone and she was alone with Shisui again. She felt the teenager move from his stance above her, felt his presence lower till he was smaller, not so looming as before. He still had that hardness to him which made him as dangerous as a kunai. He looked small now and with less bright colors, but he'd just killed people and shook her over the edge of a 100 meter wall. This had all been so scary.

"Hey can you look at me? I promise everything will be ok. At least tonight. No one will hurt you."

She snapped her face up, disbelieving he'd just said that. If he was trying to make her feel better he was terrible at it. The moment of her incredulity made her tears lesson to a dull stream. Still holding her dress collar to her leaking nose, she peered at him. He really was terrible at this. He'd made his chakra go away, it no longer burned bright as an inferno, but looked as small as an academy student's.

Her next question was muffled by her dirty dress collar, "Why are you angry?"

"So many reasons." Shisui looked at her, really looked at her, his eyes flaring bright, dangerous red. But then they flickered back to black and his shoulders slumped, defeated, "None of them have anything to do with you. I'm sorry I took it out on you. I'm not used to talking to people, not honestly."

"If you're nice you can talk to me."

That sad, broken smile was back. All the anger was gone and in its place this shell remained.

She didn't know what to say, so offered what her okaasan always did, "Do you want a hug?"

He looked as if she'd fed him old food from the fridge. Not daring to wait she lunged at him. From his crouched position next to her he caught her and when she wrapped her arms around him he stiffened. She clung on as gently as she could around his neck. His hands fell as if he'd no idea what to do with them, they stayed that way for a minute before he began to pat her back.

She loosened her hold. Sakura leaned back to look at the teenager's still bleeding face. The eye partially dislodged had been put back inside the socket but it was bloody and still oozing. Damaged. Just like her scratches, she thought about the way green chakra could come from her hands if she was real careful. Sakura raised her left hand and stared at it. Her brow squished with the effort, but when the green appeared the flow of the color was stronger and more steady than it'd ever been before. The boy stiffened again under her. She looked up, raising her hand to cover that small part of his face. His bloody eye under the glowing green of her hand. He didn't move. She pressed her palm as gently as possible over it and held it there as long as she thought she could control the chakra. When it began to sputter and her arm was shaking she lowered it.

She examined the eye. It was still crusted with blood, but didn't appear to be actively bleeding so much. Perhaps not at all. It was hard to tell. She stared so intently at the injury she didn't immediately react when that chakra presence from before returned. The eye was more interesting than anything else in that moment. She'd never seen eyes flash different colors before, and his when he'd done it had flared with a swirling flow of chakra, a flow which had dimmed and snuffed out the red. He might be a sad boy who had to kill people, who was bad at talking, but he'd taken her away from the bad people. He could have run and left her alone in the forest. He hadn't left her there. He was still a hero. The idea took root in Sakura and she felt it all the way to her core. That place her own colors flowed from.

It was the boy she still clung to who greeted the man's return, "Hokage-sama."

"Are you both ready to report?"

"I believe so."

Shisui stood up. With her arm still flung around his neck he simply lifted her as well.

"She knows my identity Hokage-sama."

"And she saw you with the councilman."

"Unfortunately."

She didn't know why seeing Uchiha Shisui meeting in the forest with the councilman was bad. Besides the man attacking him. That shouldn't cause trouble for Shisui should it? Sakura twisted to see an old man with a short cropped white beard, a hard face, and penetrating eyes. He nodded and gave his shinobi directions. Sakura heard these, but in that very minute she didn't understand what they truly meant. They spoke words she knew, but without any context to understand their true meaning. It was another code she realized.

"Take her for questioning at T and I. If she's above board she can stay under lock in the ANBU's joint headquarters and barracks."

Sakura was too shocked to ask why she couldn't go home. She was too tired to cry. Despite what the man in white said, she hadn't expected to be taken to the depths of a concrete building. Shisui disappeared, she watched the empty place he'd been standing a moment before. Her wide eyes hoping he'd come back. He didn't, he'd been ordered to leave her here, she realized. She wished he'd come back. He might be scary, but she felt better having him with her.

This place was worse. No one smiled. Their colors were as muted as the grey uniforms they wore and the walls they worked in. It's like the colors couldn't survive past the building's threshold. The feeling got worse when they escorted her to a room with a big, shiny window. She couldn't see any colors outside of the room. It was cold and the metal table they placed her at was colder. When they strapped her to the chair she shivered and it was as if all the colors inside her were frozen. They couldn't move, they couldn't flow or grow.

Her mouth felt so scratchy and dry now she coughed. But her hands weren't free so she just coughed onto the surface of the table. She could see the reflection of the people in it. The one who'd strapped her down stepped aside, made way for two older, more serious men. One was blonde. He was the blonde man she'd seen speaking to the Jōnin Commander outside of the academy on the first day. Ino's relative, her dad? Sakura stared at him, feeling mulish, tired, and not at all liking the way he looked down at her.

"You are an academy student." He looked at her and it took Sakura a moment to realize he wanted her to respond.

"Yes."

It didn't come out smooth and nice. Her throat was scratchy and tickled in a bad way. She didn't think they'd give her water if she asked for it. Not with the way they'd looked at the burn on the side of her neck and shoulder and done nothing. Sakura was beginning to think she didn't like Ino's dad.

"You come from a civilian family, but you have the top marks of any student in your year."

Another statement. He waited for her to answer. Why was he doing this? She didn't understand.

"Yes?"

He had a stack of files next to him. He flipped through them, picked one out and opened it. She saw a flash of her own picture.

"Your instructor writes you excelled in the chakra control exercise. Sub-par forms shown in class, not even attempting to hit or kick back." He lowered the file, her academy record, she realized. Then he picked up another paper, "Yet it says here you were seen channeling chakra to trunk walk, to run, to channel it to your fists the same way Tsunade of the Sannin would. You've been hiding your abilities."

She burst out, "I haven't."

"You have. Who trained you?"

"No one trained me!" She burst out again. She looked back and forth between them. They didn't believe her. An edge of panic crawled through her. She rushed to explain, "I read it in a library book and figured it out. I've been practicing on my own, but I can't make it so it won't hurt people. I couldn't hit my classmates."

She'd never felt miserable, not the thing people describe it as. She did now. It got worse the longer Sakura talked to the blonde man and the man with that wide, mean looking face with scars peaking out of his bandana. They questioned her. Demanded to know why she'd been in the forest, why she'd attacked the councilman, why she felt Uchiha Shisui was a hero. At this question she'd stared at the blonde interrogator as if he'd lost his head, just like those people on top of the wall, he may as well have had it cut off if he couldn't understand why Uchiha Shisui was a hero. She probably shouldn't have told him that in so many words.

After that little outburst big man had grabbed her arm and lifted her up. A lot of people had been lifting her up today. With her legs dangling in the air he towed her down a twisting passage, snapped an order at a man in a grey uniform who quickly unlocked a metal door and shuffled ahead to open a set of bars. Sakura was dropped on the floor and when she turned around she found she'd been placed into a cell with bars blocking her from an equally cold and grey hallway. No one stayed with her. Once the two men left with the heavy bang of a door the hallway light dimmed. It was so dark and quiet, she curled her arms around herself. The floor beneath her too hard and chilled to let her truly rest, she spent hours holding onto herself.

Sakura wondered what her parents had done when she hadn't shown up at home. She hoped they weren't worried. She hoped they would let her go home soon. With a half-hearted sniff she realized she could see her own colors again. Sakura stared at them, stared so long she nodded in and out of sleep. The night shifted around her form shivering in that cell.

In Shikamaru's brief assessment, he'd decided the Nara's veranda was the most peaceful place in the village. Surrounded by kilometers of trees it was secluded from most of the population. The nearby tokonoma sunk into the wall, displaying a wide painting, some fresh flowers from the Yamanakas, and the place his dad hid his favorite alcohol and shogi board.

It was on these nights out on the veranda, when his dad would pull out his drink that Shikamaru knew they would play as long as he could keep his eyes open. His dad, in Shikamaru's opinion, was one of the few nin truly worthy of emulating. He didn't try to make people know how far he could think ahead, he just lived and did his job well. He was content. So few people could keep up with the 6 year old. Grown adults shrank away from his statements, and largely avoided him. It was worse in his own age group. Growing up and attending clan functions where the other kids weren't scared of him, not like the adults, but neither seemed to have the capacity to realize much of anything which happened. It was... Discouraging. So he clung to his dad. Cherished his friendship.

Warm light of the engawa reflected off the carved bone board. The flat shogi pieces positioned around the board, protected strongly on one side, giving the appearance of an opening on the other. In 6 moves he'd make his first assault. The tall man across from him drank from a short glass smelling of sweet dark liquor. His long legs bent as he leaned in to assess the available spaces.

Then the pieces shook. He had a split second to register the solid molecules, being so close together, transmitted the energy quicker than their less dense counterparts in the air. Then the air blew warm on his face, pushing Shikamaru's loose hair across his forehead. The sound left his ears echoing a high pitch.

"Otousa-"

"Stay here."

His dad shot off. Only with quick motions of throwing his shadow after him, stretching it further and further as his dad ran into the deep forest, was the small boy able to follow. He ran, knowing he couldn't do much, but also knowing the likelihood of an attacker getting this deep into Konoha's patrolled territory without being seen by the patrols. Another wave of vibrations shook the ground beneath him. Loose branches fell from above. One nearly hit him and as the massive branch scraped his shoulder before crashing his heart pounded harder than it ever had in training. The village was being attacked. His dad was far ahead of him, alone and without backup besides his 6 year old son. Then Shikamaru had nearly been taken out by a tree branch. He ran harder. For the first time in his life putting real effort into how his legs moved, streamlined the movement, pushed chakra through them so they'd push farther and farther. He flew and it felt good.

Scary too, but good. He didn't catch his dad, but he passed gouges in the trees, three dead bodies sprawled in a crevice near the Naka River. Kunai, ninja wire, blood on the white exposed trunks of broken trees. His shadow clung tight to his dad's shirt, stretched thin and long and weak, but it held. His father had stopped moving for a moment, then he was moving every direction in a sequence of jerks which could only be fighting, launching, defending.

He ran faster, cursing himself for never really trying each time his mom showed him the tree climbing exercise. He'd fallen asleep halfway through her explanation. Running on the ground as he was, it's too slow. The next large tree he saw, he sped up, focusing just the chakra he needed to his core and to the soles of his feet. Then he ran up, straight across one of the larger tree branches calculated to get him the best chance of reaching the next tree. It did. Tree after tree, it allowed him to catch up with his otousan. He came upon three blank masks surrounding the tall Nara head. One lunged, the tip of his Kunai cut into his dad's arm, who unarmed and somehow already gotten one of them, didn't move in time. Shikamaru felt when his dad used his shadow to grab the man, lift his arm, and slit his own throat.

The other two converged at the same time. Utilizing their teammate's last gurgling breaths to flank the shadow user. Shikamaru, panicking, grabbed one with his shadow. He didn't have enough control to move the limbs, but he held him from slicing a tantō across his dad's exposed back. He trembled under the effort. He'd never caught someone before. Never felt them fight against his hold, getting more vicious and desperate. It wasn't a good feeling.

Then the man on his hold went slack, limbs jerking but in weakening spasms. Shikamaru stared wide-eyed as he felt the man stop moving. Dead in his grasp. The ANBU-like uniform of the man who'd almost gotten his dad. The blank mask looked wrong, but the black Konoha swirl on the man's uniform marked him as some form of village shinobi. A threat from within their own village. His dad had almost died and he almost hadn't been there. Almost hadn't been fast enough.

A large hand settled on his shoulder, the warmth seeping in at odds with the chill of the family jutsu leaking out of him. He hadn't realized he was trembling till his dad squeezed his shoulder.

"You can let go now."

He startled, promptly dropped the dead weight straining against his shadows in a completely different way than the vicious struggle before. He let his chakra go. Watched as the dark coils faded with his jutsu.

Shikamaru swallowed and turned to see his dad next to him. He'd never seen the Nara Clan Head so disheveled. He stood with a bleeding arm holding the stolen kunai.

"You alright?"

"I didn't think it would be so-" Shikamaru trailed off, face darkening. He'd sacrificed so many pieces, thought it wouldn't ever matter to him so much, but the man struggling nearly beat him...it shifted his perspective. The idea they'd fight back, might succeed, and if he didn't do more it would cost his pieces. His dad. It almost cost him his dad. He hadn't imagined this sort of struggle. Why hadn't he? His dad was the Jōnin Hanchō. The highest rank a Jōnin could be while still retaining status as a normal shinobi. The man almost died. He shoved that thought and the surge of guilt it brought far away to be analyzed later.

His dad reached down to remove the tantō from the dead man.

Another explosion shook the ground, the sound coming faster and much louder than what they'd heard at the house.

"Come on," His dad picked him up and ran them towards the sound.

It wasn't hard to find, not when two bodies thudded with surprising force at the base of the wall. His dad ran them up, with a speed and agility which surprised him. Shikamaru looked at his dad and for the first time realized he'd underestimated him. It was an uncomfortable feeling full of some emotion which lodged tight in his throat. If his eyes watered, he blinked that nonsense away fast enough his dad didn't seem to notice.

When they arrived atop the wall, the part bordering just above the cheap civilian apartments, he saw a crying girl. Seeing her bloody and crying seemed to stop everything and for once his head was completely silent. He knew that shade of hair. The pink shown on top of the wall and amidst the dead sprawled across it.

He only saw her for a moment before his dad was moving again, moved to speak quietly with a tall man with the Taichou insignia over his ANBU tattoo. They spoke in a code Shikamaru listened, picked patterns from, and just as he felt he might crack the code they finished and his dad moved on to speak with the Hokage. Infuriatingly, they used a different and vastly more complex coded language.

Shikamaru sat through their long winded conversation with a mulish draw on his face. He didn't get anything until much later that night, when his dad convinced him to change into pajamas and someone knocked on their door. Shikamaru, who'd just been tucked in, snuck down the hall as quiet as the shadows themselves. His sock covered feet sliding on the polished, expensive hard wood which didn't creak so long as he stepped in the precise pattern his grandfather had designed for the house. One no intruder could hope to anticipate, a pattern of steps and counted distances it'd taken him a month to memorize from the drawings in his dad's study.

It had paid off many times in the past year, sneaking away from his mother who loved to harp and shrill about the smallest things. Who had much harder time catching him if he woke up early and slipped out of the house without a sound. It meant he had to catch up on sleep elsewhere, but it was a cost he willingly paid. Better even because Choji never minded when he slept.

He crept closer to hear the muffled words. It was Choji's dad's voice. However, what he heard made him freeze.

"That girl saved the Uchiha's life and Inoichi has her locked up. She's 6. Her parents were good, of course she's good too. Locked up in interrogation and you know what they'll probably threaten her family with?"

"It won't get that far. They're loyal."

"You know that. I know that. Inoichi should too."

"He never has been rational, he's embarrassed his girl isn't scoring as high. Apparently all the Sensei were speaking how good of an analyst she'll be, that she could eventually lead the Information Division."

"Oh I bet he hated that. Wanted it for his girl."

He could almost hear his dad shrug, "If the clanless kid outscores the inbreeding maybe it wasn't working as intended. Maybe she should get the spot."

When he heard their empty glasses hit the table and the Akimichi head yawn, Shikamaru quickly and quietly backed away. His dreams that night full of blank masks around the Nara forest, a tantō lowering on his dad, and a crying pink haired girl strapped to a table. In the morning he woke up to find his sheets soaked in sweat. His breathing faster and slightly hitched. He showered, ate breakfast as his mother chattered on about what Ino's mom found at the newest clothing store. Her voice and words droned in the back of his thoughts.

At school a completely different story floated around. Apparently the entire village heard the chunk of the wall bordering the Nara forest when it blew sky high. It was all the kids could talk about, chattering and guessing and switching seats to hear new stories of how the village had been attacked. How one of the Councilmen died defending it. No one noticed the empty seat next to him. Not even the teacher looked twice. They all just assumed the smart civilian-born girl had quit.

Shikamaru felt sick.