Chapter Text
“You’ve taken my seat,” Shikamaru said with a frown. On his first day of the academy, yesterday, he had found the most exquisite seat. The kind where you had your back to the wall, so you could see the whole room, which was decent on its own. But this one was particularly tempting, there was a pillar in front of it by a couple spaces, so that it didn’t look like you didn’t want the teacher to see you, but more often than not you would be hidden by it. It was the perfect spot to nap.
Two cat-like eyes stared up at him curiously. Their owner sat with a book in her hand and a mask drawn up to her nose, not saying a word in response. As Shikamaru continued to stare, bored, and considered if the seat next to her would still hide him appropriately, she tilted her head to the side and moved over a seat to the right. She returned to the book almost instantly.
“Oh,” he said, cringing inwardly, “ok.” The nice part about this seat had also been that people didn’t tend to sit in the row. It was hard to see, though not hard to hear, and none but Choji had grudgingly sat near. Thankfully though, it didn’t appear that this one wanted any type of conversation, so he settled himself into what he had deemed his chair. Choji followed soon after, sitting on his left.
“Who’s the chick?” Choji asked, sending a side-eyed glance to their right. Shikamaru sent a much more subtle look. She was still reading as Iruka-sensei geared up to start his lecture.
“No clue,” Shikamaru muttered back. Choji shrugged, opening a bag of chips and settling in for a long day of getting talked at. The moment Iruka began, Shikamaru’s head started creeping towards the table, his arms folding into the perfect pillow, slipping into a light nap.
Thwack , the sound of something hard hitting his head. He didn’t know how much later in the day it came, but when his eyes opened the sun outside had sunk quite a bit. The offender was nowhere in sight, but the book the girl next to him was reading looked awfully suspicious, especially when the girl herself pointed subtly to the front of the classroom.
“Ah, lets see who’s next… Shikamaru!” Iruka called, Shikamaru blinked, popping his head out to let the teacher know he had heard, “Great! Can you point out where the Land of Water is on this map?” man, what a drag… Shikamaru pointed vaguely to the cluster of islands on the Eastern side.
“Those island’s compose it.. Er- sensei,” Shikamaru said, to clarify if the academy teacher hadn’t seen. Iruka beamed in a smile that could only be characteristic of a teacher, even he must have known that this sort of geography at least was simple stuff.
“Excellent.!” Iruka said in response, then went to call another student out to find the Land of Earth. Shikamaru stared blankly, still blinking the sleep from his eyes.
“Wow, didn’t think you would wake up if he called your name,” Choji mused. His arms were crossed, a light smirk on his lips.
“You’re telling me you didn’t see me get abused by a book about,” Shikamaru stopped mid sentence to squint at the title on the cover of the book the girl was reading, How to Befriend Streetcats , “... cats?” He had been expecting something a little more well, fancy. Choji raised an eyebrow and the girl didn’t react.
“I mean, I heard some sort of thwacking sound, but I figured that was just you shaking yourself awake,” he looked back up at the front of the classroom, “I was kind of, ya know, paying attention?” Shikamaru sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose and feeling a troublesome headache coming on.
“Okay, sure. Alright. Let’s pay attention.” Choji was quietly laughing at him now, Shikamaru honestly didn’t care. He managed to hold out on napping until lunch – in some part due to Iruka going over the estimated locations of the various hidden villages and otherwise because he wanted to avoid another smack in the head.
As Iruka dismissed them to eat and Shikamaru leaned back on his chair, kicking his feet up onto the desk. Choji, despite having had several snacks in the first half of the class, was pulling out a fine looking meal for himself. Shikamaru couldn’t help but smile when he was offered some – proof that Choji’s mother had thought of him. He declined though, having received lunch from his own mother with strict instructions to eat it. He didn’t want to deal with the fall out of coming home with the food. He took his out as well, munching on the bento lazily.
The shriek of the chair beside him made Shikamaru glance to his right, the girl was getting up to leave, a small bento in hand. He was prompted to send a quick glare her way, the loud noise had obviously been made on purpose and she seemed positively pleased about it. With a moment to focus on her, he belatedly realized that not only had her book been about cats, but it seemed that was her whole personality as well. Her shirt, earrings, backpack, and bento all contained some sort of cat moniker – the backpack being shaped like a cat’s face (ears and whiskers included). She sent a polite nod toward him and Choji, then walked off. Shikamaru doubted he was rid of her, but was able to have a nice conversation with Choji in the meantime.
He was right of course, she was back after lunch, packing up an empty bento to pull out her book again. It was somehow a different book about cats, this time on how their diets should be structured. Shikamaru chose not to care, he took his afternoon nap in peace, no more smacks with the book and no interruptions except his own consciousness waking him.
~~
The academy continued in this manner for several months. Shikamaru did get smacked in the head again, but he started to notice a pattern. It was always right before Iruka called on him, or some demonstration was happening, or (god forbid) a test was rolling around. He couldn’t be bothered to really try with any of them, but it did help make him seem less incompetent around Iruka-sensei, which seemed to result in Iruka noticing his horrible habits less and less.
Though they never spoke, the girl, Choji, and Shikamaru seemed to fall into a much more companionable existence. Choji would offer her snacks that Shikamaru almost always took and she refused. It also became apparent that though she seemed to be chiding him for not paying attention, she barely paid that much attention herself. Her hearing seemed to be exclusive to listening for names and then recalling what was said a few minutes before-hand. While she did obviously have something akin to an obsession with cats, her distraction of choice were books of all kinds – ranging from history, to ninjutsu, to a literal dictionary. Her name they got from context clues when it became clear she wasn’t going to give it up, or any words for that matter: Haruka Kazumi.
“Come on man, you don’t have to leave, just eat your lunch here,” Choji whined, half-way into their first academy year. Haruka gave what Shikamaru took to be a smile, her cheeks scrunched up and eyes glittered in the universal sign of mirth, but a dark mask covered the lower half of her face and he couldn’t help but notice that it was unmoving. She shook her head, eyes searching as if to say more. Her left hand twitched upwards as if to do something, but then she turned to leave.
“Come on, we can play a game or something if you don’t want to talk,” the words came out of Shikamaru’s mouth before he could stop himself. He almost instantly regretted them, games were fun, but they could really get to be quite troublesome… Haruka stopped in her tracks and quirked her head to the side, turning around to continue a quizzical expression. Shikamaru tugged at his pockets, pulling out a pack of cards and slapping it on the table. Her eyes read as thoroughly amused.
“Hey, ya better warn her that she’s gonna lose,” Choji took another bite of the sushi that had been packed for him this time, “I mean, that’s all I ever seem to do. I just don’t care that much about it.”
“That was supposed to be the fun of playing with new people,” Shikamaru drawled, crossing his arms in a gesture of defeat, but quickly picked his chopsticks up to return to eating. It was a bit of a jest, he didn’t really care about the winning part, unless it was against his father. Haruka sat down, making the same scraping noise with her chair she always did, then gestured to the cards.
Shikamaru took out the deck and shuffled it, then set about distributing all the cards between the three of them for a game of “Slap Jack”, which Shikamaru had always called “Snap”, but Choji had insisted it was the former and Shikamaru had let him have it. He asked Haruka if she knew how to play and she nodded in the affirmative. So, he set down a card to start the game.
However much Haruka was lacking in skill she made up for with sheer competitiveness. A fierce look took over her face as she set every card down, waiting for an opening. Her speed in slapping every jack, sandwich, and double, was beyond impressive. Though Shikamaru really should have expected it at a ninja training academy. It was a tough battle, but he took the first round and the next few as well, then Haruka gained some traction and had a solid five game win streak before Choji broke it in the final round. By the end of it, he and Choji were laughing far too loud in a classroom at Haruka’s disappointed face.
“Well, I guess you didn’t need a lot of warning there, huh!” Choji said in between laughs. Haruka made some sort of motion with her hands with a smug face. Her hands went down to a necklace he wore, it was a gaudy thing – more a chain of mismatched bobbles than any kind of jewelry. Shikamaru let his forehead fall to the desk as she fiddled with it, making a few of the bobbles create a cacophony of sound.
“That was brutal, I’d like to see you play a game of speed, man,” Shikamaru agreed with a long sigh. Iruka was starting to gain the room’s attention again and Haruka was gathering the cards back up for him while he wallowed. The deck was returned to its box and slid right next to his ear before Iruka had even started his lecture. Shikamaru glanced over to see Haruka pulling back out her book – this time a Sunagakure dictionary. Her bento still laid beside her on the desk, uneaten.
The fun of the day was tinged with unease at the realization she hadn’t wanted to stay with them because she wanted to eat and she couldn’t do that without taking off her mask.
~~
Shikamaru laid on his back, the grass lightly touching the skin of the hands he held behind his head. The sunshine was just right today, showering him with warmth but not drowning him in heat and light. Even the clouds were on their best behavior, morphing into wild shapes and drifting onward in the sky. It was the perfect day to take a nap.
The academy was on break today, the year had ended a bit ago, but it would be starting up again soon. It was a brief moment of rest in the middle of his second year. Choji was nowhere to be found, though it had sounded like he had clan business to attend to yesterday. The day was too beautiful to squander helping Naruto out with a prank – one which would probably involve the effort of running to ensure they weren’t caught. So he laid here and didn’t give himself the opportunity of being bored.
Only a moment after he closed his eyes, Shikamaru felt a light poke at his shoulder. The sun was setting when he opened them though, indicating he had fallen asleep for far longer than he anticipated. The interruption had been brought by Haruka, who was now to his left in the dying light, sat down but propped up on her elbows. Her left eyebrow raised up in what he took to be an amused expression and he blinked.
“I was out cold, huh?” She nodded vigorously, her eyes closing. She made a gesture with both hands, the index fingers bending and unbending next to the corners of where her mouth would be. Haruka did that sometimes, though most of the time it seemed she tried to stop herself, he always got the impression that they were meant to mean something.
So, after a moment of companionable silence, he asked, “What do those signs mean, anyway?” Haruka turned away as if she had been caught, then she swung her backpack onto her lap, the cat face stared into his soul as she pulled something out of it. A chalkboard, then some chalk. She seemed embarrassed when he raised an eyebrow.
“They’re sign language,” she wrote, her handwriting had a neat, almost typewriter-like quality, even on a messy chalkboard. Shikamaru groaned.
“Have you just been choosing not to communicate with us all this time?”
“You don’t know the language.”
“I know how to read!”
Haruka seemed to ponder for a moment, then sighed, erasing with her arm and writing again, “It wasn’t feasible up until a few months ago.”
“You can’t tell me you didn’t know how to read. The cat one’s, sure, but there’s no way the dictionaries were picture books.”
“Would you believe me if I said I couldn’t write, then?”
Shikamaru took a moment to glance up at the sky, there were less clouds up there than there had been in the day, but they still had a calming effect on him. He tried to remember back to the academy. He had been less than focused on his own tests, what had Haruka done when they rolled around. She had certainly been able to circle the boxes for the multiple choice questions and write the numerals for any mathematical equations. But had she ever answered a long answer question? Written a paragraph in front of him? He sighed, “I guess maybe I would.” then looked back at her in expectation of a response.
“Want to learn Kazumi-sign then?” she had a sort of soft excitement in her eyes.
“Man, what a drag!” the excitement died, she started writing something quickly but Shikamaru stopped her, “Let’s wait for Choji, then you can teach us both at the same time.”
She erased whatever she had been writing and nodded, giving him one of her best close-eyed smiles. He just shook his head, then turned his attention back to the sky. She laid down too, eyes upward and chalkboard laying face down on her torso. After a while, he fell asleep again, but when he opened his eyes there was only empty darkness.