I'm back! Remember how I thought this chapter would be done soon after the last one? Jokes on me. My life got turned upside down and I wasn't able to write for ages. And then, when I finally returned, I decided to change a lot of what I had written even though I had writer's block...
But enough rambling. I hope the struggles I had writing this chapter are not too noticeable in the text. Thank you for continuing to supporting this story!
Chapter 23
In the void beyond life…
"Medic to 408! She's crashing—someone get a doctor!"
"That's three times in two days. At this rate she might—"
…lies Chaos.
"Just do it!"
.
.
.
It is a quiet Chaos, an infinite Chaos.
"Status unchanged. Here's her chart."
A space where matter is not information, but meaningless detritus.
"She's lying on her side. Who's been turning her, then?"
Where there is no direction, no design, no desire.
"The Nara heir. Good friend—"
No light.
"Wait. Check chakra again, layer three."
"What—"
"Now! There's a small anomaly on page six—"
Where there is nothing…
"Chakra's still stagnant, nothing new."
"The blip is very subtle. Move up—try the forehead. I think it might be the Third Eye."
"I don't see anythi—"
…but potential.
"...What? What'd you find?"
"Oh, Kami-sama."
"Damnit Miyu, if you don't tell me what's going on right now—"
"It's…shivering."
.
.
.
The first thing to reform in the vast darkness is a consciousness. It is not yet a thought, merely the faintest awareness of self. But it creates a small light in the gloom, a flame which does not spark so much as bloom into being and, slowly, begin to grow. Like the birth of a new star, it unfurls and spins and draws mental debris from the surrounding nebulae into its fold, glowing brighter and brighter until, by a force of will—
She awakens.
The world is still dark, but Sakura is moving now, flying, floating, falling through the air, and perhaps she should be scared or confused, but she feels nothing but curiosity and wonder. In what little light there is, she can just make out faint wispy outlines of what could be clouds, but she is moving too fast to be sure. And finally, up in the distance, a small speck of color appears, a warm gold-green, growing fast and filling the horizon with a soft radiance.
But just as she is about to get close enough to make out the details within that pool of color, something strikes her from above, strong and hard. Suddenly, Sakura is no longer flying, but tumbling through the air, arms akimbo as she careens down, down, down, an angel, cast from heaven and into the abyss. The last thing she sees is a giant, barren tree, its roots a network of scars stretching across a pool of inky darkness, its branches reaching up out of the void as if grasping for the light, as if in preparation to pluck her out of the sky, a fallen star.
Hiruzen is frowning down at a letter on his desk when his thoughts are interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Hokage-sama, apologies for the intrusion," Ibiki Morino intones in his deep baritone, though Hiruzen had been the one to summon him. The two men share a wry smile. "Inoichi confirmed this morning that her mind is back, though she's still in some sort of coma. But the strange thing is—" here he breaks off, as if suddenly unsure of his verbal footing, and a grim look settles onto Hiruzen's wizened face at the uncharacteristic action.
"—is that it's completely locked." Ibiki squares his jaw. "Inoichi couldn't get in, and I've had all of my best people pay the kid a visit." He sighs heavily, and Hiruzen gravely speaks for him: "You found nothing."
"Absolutely none." He sighs again, rubbing the crown of his cloth-covered head. "I even dragged in some of the retired folks."
"And no new insight as to the cause?"
"Best theory is still an S-ranked genjutsu of some sort, though we haven't found any that fits the symptoms perfectly—probably an Uchiha secret. But the theory itself also has a glaring problem: if he did lock her in a genjutsu intricate enough to make her mind appear to vanish altogether, why make her mind visible again now?"
"And still inaccessible."
"Maybe the bastard's just taunting us." Ibiki scowls. "It could be that the jutsu is weakening from time and distance, though that's not a top theory for obvious reasons. We've also considered that it could be another type of technique altogether—fuuinjutsu, for instance. But that hasn't given us any leads either."
"I see." Hiruzen casts his gaze outside the window, squinting at the distant forests as he considers whether to light his pipe. "Any other options?"
"Well, the sudden visibility might be caused by the kid herself. It's possible that she's started to resist the illusion. Very unlikely, of course, considering the complexity of the technique if our best guess is correct. The other possibility…"
For the second time that conversation, Ibiki hesitates. "The thing is, her current condition matches the symptoms of a self-cast genjutsu almost exactly, from what we know."
"A self-cast genjutsu?" Hiruzen looks at him sharply from beneath the brim of his hat. "That's…creative."
Ibiki snorts. "Yes, well, we needed more ideas. There are obvious problems with this hypothesis of course—she'd have to be a pretty advanced genjutsu practitioner to cast one and it wouldn't explain why her mind disappeared for a week, but…the symptoms really are quite similar. Kurenai's taken several looks."
"I hope, for her sake, that you are wrong, Ibiki." Hiruzen's voice is solemn, heavy with a sadness gained only through age. "For there is no cure to a self-cast genjutsu."
"I hope so too. If only someone else had been there at the time. But Kakashi was still inside the house, and Pakkun's view of the Uchiha was blocked by a fence. She's the only one who knows."
"Hm." Silence briefly overtakes the room as Hiruzen mulls over the situation. "And do we have any information as to why he was there?"
"Very little." Ibiki grits his teeth. "Most likely he knows her through his little brother, who is her classmate. We've asked the brother, and it turns out he had been at her house that morning—he said it was for a minor training injury, but wouldn't tell us more. Due to the current fragility of his mental state, we did not conduct a direct investigation."
"No, that is for the best," Hiruzen agrees. "One mental intrusion is more than enough for the boy. How is he faring?"
"Poorly. Everyone lost someone, but he lost the most."
"Indeed…" Hiruzen closes his eyes, as if staving off a sudden pain. For he, too, had lost many. So many…
"Well, Ibiki, I had better let you go," he says abruptly, gathering himself and offering the shinobi a kind smile. "I know how busy you must be with the psych evaluations now, on top of this case." It is a clear dismissal and Ibiki graciously takes the cue, nodding respectfully before disappearing in a swirl of leaves.
Alone once more, Hiruzen finally gives in to the overwhelming urge to smoke, lighting his pipe with a small burst of fire. Leaning back in his chair, he returns his attention to the letter lying innocuously on his desk. It is a small piece of paper, no bigger than a child's palm. On it sits a single line of text:
He has joined A—.
Closing his eyes again, Hiruzen inhales a deep lungful of smoke, releasing it in a deep sigh. "Itachi…" he says into the empty room, a deep sorrow soaked into the word. It lingers in the air long after the smoke dissipates.
Shikamaru's mother finds him in the Stag Pavilion, huddled in a corner with a pile of open books scattered around him and a blanket pulled up to his ears to ward off the chill. He doesn't notice. Scrubbing a hand over his eyes, he flips the page of the book in front of him and squints anew at the text. The Effect of Chakra-Induced Coma on Chakra Flow, he makes out with great difficulty.
"You have a visitor," Yoshino informs him from the doorway.
But he doesn't hear her. His eyes sting with a feeling of both dryness and stickiness, a condition born from too many nights of too little sleep, impervious to the palliative treatments of rapid blinking and ferocious rubbing. In the stillness of the room, he cannot block out the dull throb of his heart. Words twinkle and swim across the page before him, shades dancing.
"Shika-kun!" His mother's voice is sharp. Jerking out of his daze, Shikamaru peers across the pavilion with the momentary incomprehension of one teetering on the precipice between sleep and delirium.
"Okaa-san." There's nothing else to say: they both know fully well that he'd ensconced himself in the furthest pavilion from the main compound for the sole purpose of avoiding his parents. A dozen meters away, a small herd of deer leisurely graze amongst the early spring grass, their presence and unbreakable command for quiet. The last dregs of sunset seem to shimmer as they soak into umber fur, and Shikamaru blinks at the sight, belatedly tamping down his surprise at the speed with which another day has slipped away.
His mother notices, of course. She narrows her eyes at him. "I said you have a visitor, Shika-kun. And dinner is in an hour. I thought it would be nice if you got dressed and joined us."
"Whoever could be here to visit me?" Shikamaru asks in utter bafflement. Even Choji had understood to stay away. "And whyever would I join them for dinner? You know I don't have the time." He winces even as the words form in his mouth, but his mind churns too slowly to stop them from tumbling out. Belatedly, he notices the tense set of his mother's shoulders, the tips of her nails digging slightly into her palms. She is the focal point of a spinning room, a figure set in stone.
"Shika-kun," she says in the calm, tight tone of one swallowing back their true sentiments, "it's Naruto-kun. Don't you want to see how he's doing?"
And Shikamaru sees the significance in her gaze, the weight in her words, but he cannot think, and his attempts to grasp the meaning are futile. "Naruto doesn't know," he says dumbly. "He'll be fine if you just don't tell him—"
Yoshino shunshins across the room in an instant to fix him with a deadly stare. "I found him looking like a lost dog on the porch," she says, enunciating each word. "He thinks you and Sakura have abandoned him—he's cried himself to sleep in the living room! And you won't even join us for one measly dinner when he wakes?" Her voice rises, chest heaving with the effort of restraining herself. "Did you know that he came here today to apologize?" she asks quietly. "To plead for forgiveness."
She stops and looks at him for a moment, her face a blank mask.
"Will you accept that?"
Shikamaru gapes up at her, feeling slow and dumb and incompetent. "I–," he mumbles. The pages of his book flutter restlessly in the shadows of his vision and his brain pounds against his skull. The urge to sleep and escape for several hours from this conversation, this moment, this world—it is nearly unbearable. But he has a dozen more chapters to get through, and a dozen books after that. "Could…could you tell him I'm sick?" he asks plaintively.
"Shikamaru!" His mother looks angrier than he's ever seen her—an anger rooted in her care for him, he knows, but unpleasant all the same. "Have you no decency, no self-respect?" She's nearly shouting now, and the deer outside scatters into the nearby trees. Shikamaru shrinks into the comfort of his blanket. Exhaustion makes the room fuzzy around the edges, and his attention wavers.
"—skipping meals, failing classes," Yoshino is saying, arms planted firmly upon her hips. "Shikamaru, you can't keep doing this. You're falling apart. I know you care about Sakura, and I completely understand your sentiment in wanting to help, but you have to understand that you are not going to help her this way." Bone-deep worry colors her voice and, for the first time that night, Shikamaru meets her eye.
"But they found a current—"
"—a current in her chakra pathways doesn't change much when her mind is locked so tightly that not even Inoichi can get in!" She cuts herself off, the ensuing silence heavy with words unsaid. Together, they count the quiet breaths darkening the air between them.
"Shikamaru," his mother says evenly. Compassion and austerity war across her face. "Believe me when I say that nothing you'll read in these books will help. Do you know what will? Taking care of the things she's always cared about." She leans down, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. "That means taking care of yourself. And it means not breaking Naruto's heart."
Shikamaru looks at the ground, eyes stinging with wetness—whether from emotion or fatigue, he does not know. "Sakura will fix it when she comes back." The words tremble lightly over his lips, borne aloft by hope and sheer stubbornness. He feels as if his is the heart that is breaking. The corners of his vision flicker like black flames.
"I know you know better than that." Yoshino's voice is hard even though she wishes it did not have to be. But the words need to be said. "Shikamaru, I know this is difficult, but you are smart, and now I need you to be strong, too. You know things may always be different, even if she does wake up. She might never be the same."
She had gentled her tone at that last sentence, unconsciously shifting forward in a vain attempt to shield her son from that devastating truth which she also knew he had to accept, but the blow strikes him square in the chest nevertheless, its intangibility evading all physical defenses. It knocks the air out of his lungs, filling them instead with ice. Dark spots explode behind his eyes, and for a moment he cannot breathe, cannot see at all.
And then the world goes black, and everything freezes with him.
For Shikamaru, it is as if an eternity passes in the next few seconds. All warmth, all substance is suddenly gone from his body, pushed out by some invisible force and leaving behind nothing but empty space, dry and gaping and fossilized. He cannot struggle, cannot even make a sound, pinned in place by a pressure so immense it feels like a stake lodged through his torso.
When light returns, it is in a slow progression as the shadows cloaking every inch of the pavilion lazily relinquish their grasp on the furniture and slide back to their point of origination, grasping tendrils returning to their abode inside his body. The retreating tide reveals his mother, the slackness of her jaw, the whites of her eyes—but only for a moment. In one swift motion, she sweeps her arms around him and draws the shaking bundle of blankets into a fierce embrace.
"I am such a fool," she murmurs into his ear. "I did not realize." In a clan with a bloodline unlocked through grief and suffering, she had never wanted her son to be exceptional in this way. Wrapping her arms still more tightly around him, she rocks them slowly back and forth as he begins to cry.
"She'll come back," Yoshino whispers into her child's soft hair. "It's Sakura. She will find a way." And then she lets silence provide its own mellow comfort as she cradles him gently into the night.
It would be an understatement to say that Naruto is surprised when, upon arriving home from the Academy, he finds Shikamaru propped against the rusty railing outside his front door. The other boy has a backpack slung over his shoulder and an open book in his hands; he looks as if he's just come from the Academy—except that he hasn't gone in weeks. Naruto had looked.
"O-oi, Pinecone! What are you doing here?" He grimaces as his attempt at confidence falls flat, the words sounding unsure even to his own ears. But he had clearly startled Shikamaru, for the boy jerks up at the greeting, book snapping shut.
Something is off, Naruto notices. It's blatantly obvious. Shikamaru looks pale and gaunt, the bruises beneath his eyes severely swollen. And he hadn't heard Naruto coming up the metal staircase even though the structure clanks loudly enough to be heard inside the apartments. Instead of replying to Naruto with his usual eye-roll and 'baka,' he merely opens and closes his mouth several times and then settles for staring at Naruto, a disconcerting intensity in his normally lazy gaze.
When Yoshino had woken Naruto up from his embarrassing post-cry nap the night before and informed him that Shikamaru had been too ill for visitors but definitely held no negative sentiment towards him, Naruto hadn't believed her. But Shikamaru does look sick, his slouch more pronounced than usual and a feverish light in his eyes. Naruto feels a sudden urge to invite him inside for some hot tea and a snack, except he doesn't have any tea and his apartment is a wreck. He grimaces again.
"H-hey, look, I'm sorry if you guys—"
"Don't apologize," Shikamaru abruptly cuts in. "We're not mad at you."
Taken aback, it takes Naruto several seconds to formulate a response. "Then what's wrong? Are…are you guys just not interested anymore?" A slight moisture forms unbidden in his eyes, for this is somehow even worse than anger. Anger he could do something about. He could atone, try harder, make amends. But if he hadn't done anything wrong in the first place—then there would be nothing he could do now to keep them with him. It would be the end.
A great struggle plays across Shikimaru's face for several excruciating moments, and then the boy abruptly straightens and grabs Naruto's wrist. "Come on, I'll take you to see her." Without waiting for a response, he begins to tug Naruto down the stairs and through the streets, the steely grip of his hand belying the frailty of his current appearance. It doesn't occur to Naruto to struggle.
Approaching the hospital with an aura of single-minded intensity, Shikamaru barges straight through the front doors without stopping, dragging his compatriot along in his wake.
"W-wait," Naruto tries weakly, but his soft interjection goes unheard. Or, rather, Shikamaru chooses not to hear, because if he doesn't take Naruto to the truth right now, immediately, if he were to pause or hesitate or take even one moment to reconsider—he isn't sure he could do it. He may not have the strength.
And so Shikamaru goes against his deepest instincts and forces himself not to think, to just go: up one flight, two, three…
They burst through the fourth floor stairwell doors and charge down the hallway, past carts and papers and heeled shoes clacking across the floor, past clerks and doctors and nurses in pointy hats, nurses who don't know, who eye them with annoyance, and past nurses who do. Until they reach 408. Dizzy and panting as if he has run a mile, Shikamaru gasps something—what, he doesn't know—and pushes Naruto in.
The door closes with a bang, and then there is ringing silence. It takes Naruto several moments to adjust from the frenzy outside to the utter stillness within. The room is bathed in the half-shadow of late afternoon, its windows facing away from the sun, and sterile save for a small table in the corner laden with books, a blanket thrown over a chair beside it. The lights are off. The curtains hang limp. Nothing moves.
"Sakura-chan?" he asks in a small voice, but the figure on the bed with its soft pink hair does not hear him, does not stir. It is clear she is not in the thrall of a natural sleep. "Sakura-chan?" he repeats, a bit more loudly. He stares at her body with a face twisted in a mixture of horror and bewilderment; uncomprehending. For Sakura's small form is pierced with a number of tubes and covered with seals, inky patterns swirling across every patch of visible skin. Some of the designs glow a faint green-blue in the half-light. Others seem to pulse with a slow, reverberating rhythm. Around her delicate neck winds a thick length of bandage, the cloth crisp and strangling. Naruto's fingers tremble as he reaches out to touch a doll-like hand, the skin cool against his. "What happened? What…"
"She's in a coma," Shikamaru says quietly. He dumps his book bag on the blanket-covered chair in the corner. "The seals are mostly diagnostic, though some are for monitoring or healing purposes. We're still trying to figure out the cause and the cure."
But Naruto takes no notice of his words. "What happened?" he mumbles to himself, "What happened? Who?" repeating the words like a plea until something hard and angry begins to stir in his voice and the trembling intensifies, turns into shaking. "Who?" he growls, rounding on Shikamaru. "Was it you?!"
Shikamaru involuntarily recoils at the sight of those eyes, normally so clear a blue, now wild and shining with a strange radiance. But he returns Naruto's glare with one of equal fervor. "I would never," he spits out. "It was the Uchiha murderer. Itachi."
"I'll kill him." Naruto bares his teeth in an animalistic snarl. 'Were his canines always so sharp?' a part of Shikamaru wonders distractedly. The boy's hands—claws—wrap around the hospital bed's guard rails with enough force that Shikamaru imagines the metal about to snap. Quickly, he moves forward and pulls the arm away, heedless of the potential danger.
"Stop, you idiot. Don't jerk the bed, you'll jostle her!"
The reminder seems to snap Naruto out of whatever state of mind he had been in and he backs away several steps, blinking as he watches Shikamaru fuss over the mussed sheets. For a moment, no one speaks.
"I will kill him, though," Naruto repeats—calmly, but in a tone utterly unyielding, and suddenly Shikamaru wants to tell him everything. About the sleepless nights, the neverending research, the 35 life-ending strategies he had already planned in revenge. About the fear of walking into this room each day only to see her figure as still and quiet as she had been the last. Shikamaru looks at Naruto and sees him, as if for the first time, another boy who understands: the two of them, connected by an invisible thread, their shared love for a friend.
"But why didn't you tell me?" Naruto asks softly, weakly. Hurt.
And the thread snaps. Shikamaru cannot answer, for the truth is that he had simply forgotten—coldly, callously, faultlessly. So what can he say? Swallowing hard, he turns away and begins to gently shift Sakura onto her side, taking special care not to smudge the seals covering her skin. "To prevent bedsores," he says instead, explaining without needing to be prompted, "which are a serious issue for coma patients. I've been turning her every two hours to prevent them from forming." Wordlessly holding out the blanket, he allows an uncharacteristically quiet Naruto to assist with the repositioning.
"So that's why you've stopped going to the Academy," Naruto says at length. His voice is subdued.
"I've been keeping up with the work remotely," Shikamaru mutters, shrugging a shoulder at the pile of books in the corner. "Doing some homeschooling to fill in the gaps."
"But what about at night? Do you stay?"
"Some nights, if I can get away with it. Sometimes I ask a nurse for help. There are a couple I'm on pretty good terms with."
Naruto doesn't respond immediately, his face screwing up in deep thought. Then he pins Shikamaru with a look of pure determination. "Let me help."
The offer doesn't surprise Shikamaru, but it takes him aback nonetheless. "You can't miss that much school."
"You have," Naruto retorts stubbornly. "And Sakura-chan is my friend too."
"Yes, but—that's different," Shikamaru says in exasperation. "I'm—look, Naruto, not to brag or anything, but…I'm quite smart. And I'm part of a clan. A big clan. They nearly expelled me, you know—my parents had to pull strings to get them to give me an exception. I…I don't think you should risk it."
His response is a glare. "I have to do something, Shikamaru. I can't just sit here and—I can't. I won't let you make me."
"What a drag." Raking a hand through his hair, Shikamaru considers him for a moment and then stares down at Sakura's peaceful face. 'Take care of the people she cares about,' he thinks. He's trying, but he isn't sure how. 'What do I do?' he asks the unconscious girl. For all his intelligence, he has always followed her lead, he realizes with sudden clarity. He has nothing now but blind faith.
"Fine," he finally says with a long sigh, watching as Naruto's face lights up in response. "Come after school. And not one minute earlier, you hear me?"
Naruto's whole body seems to relax at the concession. "Thanks, Shika," he says with a maturity Shikamaru hadn't thought him capable. "I know Sakura-chan's your friend first, but—"
"But nothing," Shikamaru cuts in sharply. "That makes absolutely no difference." He takes a deep breath.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier."
The blinding smile he gets in response loosens a knot Shikamaru hadn't realized had been wrapped around his heart. He turns back to Sakura, still frozen in her indeterminate slumber, and, for the first time in a while, allows the faint stirrings of hope to germinate in the newly uncovered light.
Shikamaru doesn't believe in karma, but perhaps, just this once, he'll pray anyway.
.
.
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I'm of the opinion that the modern technology displayed in the original series (e.g., hospital machines and telephones) disrupts immersion in the story, which is why Sakura is being treated with seals and other chakra-based techniques here instead of machine-based ones.