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Sasuke woke up with fire in his veins.
"Sasuke-kun!" Sakura cried. He watched her lunge towards him almost in slow motion, falling to her knees.
He looked for someone, anyone, he could fight.
"Sasuke kun! Are you alright?" she asked. There were other voices, too. Small. Contemptible.
"Get out of my way," he ordered.
Sakura said something else, but he was no longer listening. He raised an arm, intending to swipe her away-
And his hand collided with a different body. There was an audible crack, a loud cry.
"Sasuke-kun, please don't hurt them," Sakura begged, her frail arms wrapping around him. She was a fool if she thought she could stop him. "You have to stop."
No matter how hard he looked, there was nothing for him to fight, nothing at all but scared faces and a limp body at his feet. Something wet dripped down his arm. Sakura's tears?
And the fire started to subside.
He'd never given much thought to Shikako Nara. She was the second-best student in their academy class, but second-best still meant beneath him. She didn't hassle him like the other girls. She read a lot of books.
Her presence seemed almost like a non sequitur until he remembered she was friends with Sakura.
Ino and Chouji were there too, eyeing him with apprehension. His own teammates were passed out, looking banged up and filthy. Sakura's hair was shorter for some reason.
"That mark on your neck," Shikako said, walking up to him like he hadn't just broken her ribs. She was doing a decent job at pretending she wasn't in pain. "It wasn't there before we entered the forest."
"No. It wasn't."
"It looks like a seal," she said. "But I can't tell what it does - aside from inducing an altered mental state, obviously. Do you mind if I take a look?"
Altered mental state. What a funny way to put it. He'd thought it had been the power that did it, that he'd been so drunk on it that he forgot himself. She was making it sound like his attacker had made him act like this intentionally.
Sasuke had no idea. He hadn't even known it was a seal.
"Do whatever you want," he said.
She performed a series of hand seals and her hand glowed green. Like Sakura's medical jutsu. She pressed it to his neck-
-and recoiled.
"What?" he demanded. "What is it?"
On the other side of the clearing, Ino and Chouji snapped to attention.
"The chakra is… corrupted," Shikako said, regaining her composure once again, or at least trying. "It's. I think it's taking your chakra and combining it with the chakra in the air, but it poisons it in the process."
"And then it feeds it back into my body," Sasuke deduced. He still wasn't sure if it was a good or a bad thing. The bandages around the girl's ribs implied the latter, but what if the tunnel vision had been a one-time effect, what if he could learn to harness this power…
Shikako nodded. "I can't turn it off. Maybe with the right equipment, the Hokage can, but…" She bit her lip. "Sasuke, there's no way this is the work of a genin. What happened?"
He saw no reason not to tell her, so he did. Not everything, not the things the attacker had said, but enough.
"That sounds like Orochimaru," she said.
Yes, Sasuke thought. He'd said something to that effect. "How do you know his name?"
Shikako stared at him. "He's... an S-ranked missing-nin from Konoha? He's kind of famous."
"An S-rank missing nin," he echoed. Just like that man. He knew he should ask something - how she knew, how one went about finding out such information - but the words wouldn't come out.
The mark on his neck burned.
Once Naruto woke up, Shikako suggested they should team up and head for the tower together. She looked over at Ino and Chouji as though waiting for objections, but it was clear that between the three of them, she was the one in charge.
In the end, they were the second-last team to make it through the Forest of Death. The last one was a team from Hidden Sound that gave them venomous looks when they spotted them. From what he'd managed to piece together, they had attacked Sakura while he and Naruto were out and she'd subsequently been saved by both Team Ten and that Rock Lee guy.
"Too bad," Shikako said under her breath. "I'd hoped taking their scroll would get them out of the competition."
When the preliminary matches were announced, Sakura begged him to resign.
"Do you really think that's going to work?" Shikako asked her, sounding like she didn't really care one way or the other.
"How can you say that? After what he…" Sakura cut herself off, glancing guiltily down at Shikako's ribs.
Sasuke was the one who should feel guilty. But he didn't. He couldn't.
"He's not going to listen to you anyway," Shikako said, practical. Without quite looking at him, she tapped the mark half-hidden under his collar. "Just… be careful. I suspect your opponent has some sort of chakra absorption technique. And the less chakra you have..."
...the stronger the mark becomes.
Sasuke had no idea how she could possibly know any of that, but if she was right, then well - it just meant he needed to finish this quickly.
"Well, well," Kakashi said, appearing out of nowhere as always and planting a hand on Sasuke's head. "Look who's been making friends."
Sasuke won the fight. He was led away after that.
.
.
.
It was the final stage of the exam, and Kakashi wouldn't let him move.
"How long are we going to stand around here for?" he asked when his name was called. "Are you trying to get me disqualified?"
"Don't worry. I'm not going to let you be late," Kakashi said, giving him one of his annoying eye-smiles. It was made even worse by the fact that he was already an hour late, if only in the sense that he'd been hiding within sight of the stadium all along and wasn't allowed to enter.
Naruto's match ended in roaring applause. Sasuke's match was postponed and the proctor announced that Shikako and the kunoichi on Gaara's team were up instead. It was impossible to tell what was going on from here, but the fight was over quickly, culminating in a series of explosions.
Gaara's other teammate, who was supposed to fight Shino, resigned, and it was war.
"Naruto's place is in the area of high damage," Shikako noted later, after the fighting, after Naruto had defeated Gaara, after the chunin had given them permission to return to the village.
"What do we do with him?" Sakura asked, uncertainly. She always seemed to defer to Shikako when she was around. "He's not waking up."
"It's only chakra exhaustion. The hospital has enough on its hands as it is, they're only going to prescribe rest if we take him there," Shikako said. Looked over his still form, and appeared to reach a decision. "I don't want to leave him alone like this, though. I'm taking him home with me."
A part of Sasuke wanted to protest, because Naruto was his teammate, but that was stupid. His own apartment was in an area of moderate damage, and unlike her, it wasn't like he knew any medical jutsu.
"I have to go," Sakura said, looking down. "I have to go look for my parents."
Shikako nodded. "Sasuke, would you come with me, please?"
Sasuke scowled, imagining all the things she might say - that she wants to keep an eye on him too, that he's weak, that at least Naruto had ended up like this in the process of defeating Gaara, while he himself hadn't been able to do anything to him-
"That way, we can take shifts standing guard," Shikako continued. "I don't think any of my family's home and I was hoping to get some sleep tonight."
"Fine," he snapped.
They carried Naruto together through the aftermath of the invasion, all the way to the other side of the village. He realized belatedly that he'd just agreed to sleep over at her house. Thankfully, she treated it with the practicality of a mission, hauling three futons over to the living room and shoving the coffee table out of the way to make space.
"Here," she said, handing him a glass of water and a packet of some kind of powder. "It's a nutrient solution. Soldier pills supercharge your metabolism to produce all that chakra, so you can end up with deficiencies afterwards."
She dissolved a similar packet in a second glass and began very slowly pouring it down the passed-out Naruto's throat. He was pretty sure there was some kind of jutsu involved to stop him from choking.
Sasuke drank the bitter solution.
The next morning, Shikako bolted awake so quickly that Sasuke assumed she was responding to some signal that he'd missed. He followed her out of the house. What he found there was not an enemy, but a woman - one who looked remarkably like an older version of herself - and a kid.
Oh, right, he remembered. She has a family.
"Onee-chan!" the kid cried out, tackling her in a hug. Sasuke looked away.
"Shikamaru," she said, hugging him back. "Were you at the shelters?"
"Yeah, the whole academy was."
Shikako turned over to her mother. "Uhm. Mom. This is Sasuke. He's Sakura's teammate."
"Oh, hello, dear," the woman said. She was wearing a civilian dress and looked very tired. "I'm Yoshino."
"Uhm. The thing is," Shikako said, her voice higher-pitched than usual. She was standing between her mother and the front door. "Sakura's other teammate got a bit caught up in the fighting. He, uh, ended up with a pretty bad case of chakra exhaustion, so I-"
"So you brought him here?" her mother asked, walking right past her into the house. From the look on her face, Sasuke supposed she must know who 'Sakura's other teammate' was. She eyed Naruto's sleeping form in the living room and shook her head. "When did you get in last night?"
"Around eight," Shikako said.
"Then you must not have heard. The village is in a state of emergency because the Hokage is dead."
Shikako didn't even look surprised.
"How?" he heard himself asking.
"Orochimaru was disguised as the Kazekage and managed to isolate him during the battle." She stated it like a mission report. He was certain that, in spite of the civilian attire, she was a kunoichi. "They fought. Hokage-sama used, or attempted to use, a suicide jutsu. Orochimaru was heavily wounded, but managed to escape."
Sasuke resisted the urge to touch the mark on his collarbone.
The kid and her went upstairs after that.
"Come on," Shikako said and grabbed him by the arm. "Let's go make breakfast."
He hovered by her side as she did all the actual cooking. She was chopping a scallion and didn't seem like she was planning to broach the topic on her own.
"What else do you know about Orochimaru?" he asked.
She blinked like she actually hadn't expected the question. "Uhm. He's a missing-nin from Konoha? He fled the village after being caught performing horrible human experiments? He's one of the Legendary Sannin? He likes snakes?"
"How do you know all this?" he demanded.
She looked at him, unimpressed. He didn't care. "The same way people usually know about missing nin. From a bingo book."
Right. Zabuza had mentioned those. He hadn't realized Konoha had them too. "Who else do you know about? Is every missing-nin in there?"
"It depends. All the high-profile ones are. Are you," she asked, looking at him levelly, "trying to ask me about Itachi Uchiha?"
"So you do know," he managed to get out. Most ninja knew about the- about what happened four years ago. He could tell by the pity in their eyes, the way they skirted around it in conversations on the rare occasion he talked to anyone. But he didn't think the name of the culprit was common knowledge.
"Of course I do," Shikako said. "Wait a second. I'll just- wait here."
She quickly rinsed off her hands and left the kitchen. She returned with a worn little booklet and handed it over without looking him in the eye.
.
.
.
They met as a team at the usual time, but sensei wasn't there.
"Shikako said that all the Jounin are busy running the village," Sakura said. She looked like she'd actually been training, for a change. "And that they're waiting for a missive from Hidden Sand. Apparently, the man who attacked us in the Forest of Death murdered the Kazekage too, so they don't have a leader either."
This meant that Orochimaru had killed two kage and nobody had been able to stop him.
"Wow, Shikako-chan sure does know a lot," Naruto said.
"Well, she is the daughter of the Jounin commander," Sakura said.
Sasuke hadn't known that.
"What else did she say?" he asked.
"Not much," she shrugged. "Oh, right, remember Temari? She got knocked out in the exam finals and ended up in the infirmary. Turns out she was the Kazekage's daughter, so now they have to negotiate to get her back."
.
.
.
"Do you know where Naruto is?" he snapped.
Shikako looked up from her bowl of sweets, baffled. "Why on earth do you think I'd know where your teammate is?"
Because you always seem to know everything, Sasuke didn't say. "I don't have time for this. Do you or don't you?"
"I mean. Kind of," she said. "We just saw him leaving through the main gates with Jiraiya-sama. I don't know where they were headed though."
He realized belatedly that she looked like she'd just returned from a mission, road dust on her clothes and unwashed hair and all. It didn't matter. None of this mattered.
"What's the rush, Sasuke-kun?" Ino asked. "Come eat with us. This anmitsu is really good."
Sasuke's back was already turned to run.
.
.
.
She came to visit him in the hospital the day after he woke up from his coma.
"How are you doing?" she asked.
"Fine," he said, not even looking at her. The light-colored hospital blanket was clenched in his fists and he couldn't seem to let go.
"What about your sensei? We've heard he got hurt as well."
"He's fine too."
"Have your teammates come by to visit you yet? Naruto went on a mission with us while you were - you know."
"Right."
There were a few long moments of silence.
"I, uh, have team training soon. We should spar sometime, though."
At that, he finally looked up. "Yes. Yes, we should."
The thing was, she was good. She knew earth jutsu and water jutsu and genjutsu, and that was on top of her clan techniques. She lay a trap involving his own ninja wire and several fakeouts, and the only reason he managed to avoid getting captured by her shadow was that he'd spent a whole month working on his speed with Kakashi.
He remembered the power that had coursed through his veins when the Curse Mark first activated. Wondered if it would allow him to break out of the Shadow Possession Jutsu. Wondered how they really would have compared in the academy if it had tested all their skills, and not just the laughably basic ones like stationary kunai throwing or the transformation jutsu.
He won the fight, but only barely. And if he was getting pressed by someone who was just another genin - who was friends with Sakura and Ino - then he wasn't good enough.
"Do you know," he asked on the way back, "why somebody would be after Naruto?"
It felt strange, just coming out and asking like this. But she'd seemed willing enough to give him information so far. More willing than anyone else, at the very least.
This time, she hesitated. "You're talking about the man responsible for- for your family's deaths, right?"
He nodded, jaw clenching.
"Not here," she said. "Come with me."
She led him to the Nara clan grounds again - not to her house this time, but out to the forest, until the sounds of humans faded and all that remained was chirping insects and tree leaves rustling in the wind.
"Are you saying," she asked levelly, "that Itachi is after Naruto?"
"You mean you didn't know?"
"How would I?" she asked. Shook her head. "Never mind. Did he say anything? Did he want to kill him or capture him alive?"
"I... wasn't really listening," he admitted. It felt like bile on his tongue. "Wait, no. That other guy - the other man he was with - said he wanted to cut Naruto's legs off. To stop him from escaping."
"So he's working in a team," she concluded. "Or at least with a partner."
"His name is Kisame," Sasuke offered. "He's in the bingo book as well."
She nodded like that was only to be expected. "Alright. I assume that if a bunch of S-rank missing nin are specifically trying to capture Naruto, it has to have something to do with the Kyuubi."
"The Kyuubi?" he echoed.
She looked at him. And looked, and looked. He didn't know what it meant. "Haven't you ever noticed," she asked, "that people treat Naruto oddly? Haven't you ever wondered how come there are confirmed cases of every major village sealing Bijuu within people, other than Konoha?"
Sasuke had no idea what Bijuu were, but he could extrapolate. After all, hadn't Gaara had a monster inside of him?
"He turned into the Kyuubi," he said, slowly starting to understand. "When he was fighting Gaara. That's how he was able to get so strong all of a sudden."
Shikako huffed. "He didn't turn into the Kyuubi. He used a transformation jutsu on his summon. The chakra was still Naruto's."
They sparred one more time after that. He won again.
.
.
.
Sakura was the one who confronted him that night.
"It's the middle of the night. What are you hanging around here for?" he asked.
"It's the only way out of the village," she said. "I always-"
He cut her off. "Hurry up and go back home."
"I don't know why you're trying to leave," she said. "I don't know what Orochimaru promised you, but..."
"It's none of your concern. Stop shoving your nose into my business."
"So it's true," she said. "You really do intend to leave."
He walked past her.
"Shadow Possession complete," Shikako spoke from the shadows.