Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. ~ Joseph Campbell

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"This is awful," I said – complained, really – to mum.

There had been relief in handing Shikamaru over to the hospital, to Tsunade, to people who knew better and could help him. But it hadn't… it didn't feel like it was over. They hadn't healed him yet. And they weren't saying anything.

Surely, if they could do it… it would already been done? I could tell you the steps – reverse the transformation, stitch the pieces back together, reattach the arm – so why was the clock ticking ever longer with no word?

"How do you stand it?" I asked.

She gave me a smile that was more than a little sad. "Badly," she said and I tried not to think about how many times mum had done this. Had just… waited to know if we would be okay. And yeah, most of that had been me.

A month of that had been me.

But we weren't doing anything. I wasn't contributing, I wasn't trying to help fix it; I was just uselessly sitting around.

Wasn't there something I could do?

Everything I knew about natural energy could fit in a thimble and there was no easy way to change that. Not quickly enough to help in this situation. The medical skills required were beyond me.

I shifted, restless. Tapped my foot against the floor. Wasted time.

Would it be rude if I went training? I thought guiltily, glancing out the waiting room window. It was… proper to stay. Expected. And it meant I could hear, right away, when they were finished and Shikamaru was allowed visitors.

Only, until then, there was nothing I could do here. And it was hard to focus on my books, on thinking of something else, when our surroundings were such a reminder.

I felt caught. Pinned in place. Trapped. I wanted to just… get away from it.

"Go," Mum said, sounding almost resigned.

My eyes snapped back to her.

"You can go," she said, like she was releasing me from obligation. "Just come back, okay?"

We're always leaving, I thought, like it was something I had to realise. Like we were talking about something bigger. Maybe we were.

We were always leaving. Mum had never been one to hold us back – the one to nag us to train, to be safe, to look after ourselves and not take risks, but never to hold us back. And she was always here, a safe haven to come back to when we were finished.

I stood, then bent so I could press a kiss to her cheek. "I'll come back," I promised. "But I can't just wait."

I could fight. I could plan. I could gather information and discover how to fix things. But waiting like this… waiting and doing nothing…

I couldn't stand it. It felt helpless. I'd had too much of feeling helpless.

I swallowed the guilt I felt and walked out of the hospital. They were taking care of Shikamaru and there was nothing I could do to change the outcome. When there was a place for me, I'd come back.

Until then… there were problems I could fix.

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Kakashi-sensei was sitting at a desk in the War Operations open command room, writing busily.

I paused in the doorway, second guessing myself. If he was actually working then I probably shouldn't interrupt. It shouldn't have been a surprise because everyone was terribly busy and there was no reason Kakashi-sensei should have been an exception. Quite the opposite.

"You aren't getting it back," he said, flicking a glance up at me in acknowledgment of my presence before going back to what he was doing. "So you can consider your arguments argued."

I blinked. "Oh. That. No." To be perfectly honest, I accepted that I had been out maneuvered. No point in continuing to play a strategy that was already defeated. I'd been willing to dig my heels in against Inoichi trying to get me to change it, because that was a fight but Kakashi-sensei had just removed the battlefield entirely. Unfair, but I was grudgingly impressed by the unfairness.

"Are you… busy?" I asked, creeping forward towards his desk. He didn't block any of it from my sight, so it couldn't have been classified. Actually… I tilted my head. "Is that a jutsu?"

There was a grid of handseals and a chakra map and a balancing equation that I placed after a second as describing the mental/physical energy mix. It all looked terribly complicated.

There was a reason that learning jutsu from written descriptions were far more complicated than learning from demonstrations. It took a whole lot of writing to equal what could be covered with 'here, watch this'. I wasn't entirely sure that I could reconstruct a jutsu I'd never seen before from something like that.

One of the other ninja in the room looked up slowly and turned a glare on Kakashi-sensei. He gave a blasé eye smile to them and stood, snapping the book shut and tucking it into the inner pocket of his jacket.

Oops, not work after all.

"Something like that," Kakashi said, one hand touching down on my shoulder to turn me back towards the door.

"Sorry," I said sheepishly, stepping back out into the corridor. He came with me, though, so he couldn't have been that annoyed.

"Thought I would write some of them down," he said, slouching and tucking his hands in his pockets. "You and Sasuke are smart enough to learn them without killing yourselves." He squinted thoughtfully into the distance, like he was considering the point again. "Probably."

"Or you could, you know, teach us them?" I hazarded, frowning. "Sasuke's got this neat thing called the Sharingan that I'm told makes learning easier."

Kakashi-sensei muttered something vague about time and energy, which I supposed made sense. There was a limit to the number of jutsu he could demonstrate, based simply on chakra capacity, though that number was still probably more that we could learn through textbooks and diagrams.

Then I realized I was arguing against writing stuff down and went quiet. Written words lasted. They could reach more people.

There were probably people that would kill a non-insignificant number to get their hands on a compilation of jutsu written by Kakashi Hatake, the Copy Ninja.

"So?" he prompted, as we wove our way out of the tower.

Right. I had come for a reason. "Poison," I said. "Airborne. Contact. How do you…"

"Don't be in it?" Sensei suggested thoughtfully.

"Gee," I said drolly. "That didn't occur to me at all."

I had… some ideas, actually. My rudimentary oxygen tanks could be improved, and there were obviously ways to filter oxygen with chakra, if Kakashi's 'breathing underwater' trick was anything to go by. As for skin contact… the scent suppressing jutsu I'd been learning worked by keeping skin particles from spreading out. By containing them. If that layer could be reversed, or double sided, to make a barrier to also keep things from getting in…

"But those don't help anyone else," I finished. "If something like that happens again… we'd still have problems."

"There's always wind jutsu," Kakashi-sensei offered, as our feet took us toward the training grounds. "If you can't avoid it, then better to get rid of it as best you can. A gust should do it, if you're outside. If you're inside it might be harder."

If you were inside there wouldn't be fresh air to replace it with, and that was absolutely something to keep in mind. Otherwise, it seemed like a simple and obvious solution.

"There's also an even easier trick that works for small areas," he went on. And then raised his chakra until it flared.

Leaves on the ground danced, rising up. I felt the tug of wind as it pulled at my clothes.

Of course. I'd even seen this before, using chakra to stir air into motion. Naruto had done it, uncontrolled but powerful during his match with Neji, and Kakashi had done it even before that to get rid of Zabuza's fog in the Land of Waves.

I hadn't even thought of it.

I tried to mimic it, pulling up my chakra and letting it stir. It took a few tries to even get the briefest movement of wind – I was far more used to pulling tight and dampening it down than letting it spill out like that. This was basically the opposite of suppression techniques.

All that effort put into minimizing the mark I left on the world and now I was trying to do the very opposite. It figured.

But it felt good to work on something, to struggle and then succeed. No hidden traps. No unexpected problems. Just a simple technique to learn that would be invaluable in future.

"What else?" Kakashi-sensei asked, once I had it mostly down.

I considered. What else did I need to work on? "Taijutsu?" I suggested, and bounced lightly on my toes.

The almost painful tension in my shoulders released into a ready fluidity as I brought my hands up.

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Dad was there when I woke the next morning, talking softly to mum.

I slipped out the back door and went to feed the deer. The morning was crisp and cold and there was dew on the grass and birds were singing in the trees. It was going to be a nice day.

When I couldn't stall any longer, I went home. Breakfast was ready, but I barely picked at it.

I'd seen their faces. There was no good news here.

"The Hokage has been looking into Shikamaru's condition," Dad said, very softly, very quietly. "You did well to bring back so much information, so many resources. The hospital has studied them extensively."

I blinked, slowly and heavily. "She can't fix it," I said. It wasn't a question.

Dad sighed. I had the feeling he'd wanted to lead into it, had wanted to break the news gently. But I'd known. I'd seen it break. I'd known, since that fixed unchangable moment in time, that we would be asking for a miracle. That pinning your hopes on long odds didn't always pay off.

I didn't have anything telling me this would. No future where Shikamaru had been healed – because there had never been a future where Shikamaru had been hurt.

I'd hoped. Hoped so desperately that undoing the transformation and piecing the pieces back together was within Tsunade's ability.

"No," Dad agreed. "She can't fix it." He paused, as if waiting for me to say something then went on. "Tsunade led a team of surgeons through an attempted reversal procedure on the arm yesterday – but it was unsuccessful."

There had never been a future where Shikamaru was hurt. Never a possibility that this could have happened to him. Shikamaru didn't get hurt. He was always, always fine.

This… this was because of me. Because I lead the mission. Because I'd made a mistake. Because I existed.

Shikamaru – wounded because I existed. Ino – damaged because I existed. All I had to do now was ruin Chouji and I'd have a full set.

I swallowed, throat clicking dryly. Took a drink. "So," I said, blankly. "What happens now?"

Dad gave me a very measured look, like he was wondering if this was a conversation we should be having. It felt ridiculous, almost, to be talking so calmly. The sun was shining. The day was fine. We were discussing my brother's missing arm over breakfast.

"Shikamaru will go into surgery today," Dad said. "They'll keep him a few more days for observation and then…"

"That's up to him," Mum said, firmly. "And there doesn't have to be any kind of decision made now. If he wants to continue as a field ninja, or doesn't, or what he wants to do about it… there's plenty of time to make a choice."

I wondered if this was what they'd been talking about before, while I'd been out. I took another drink. "Okay," I said, because what else was there to say.

"It will be a difficult adjustment," Dad pointed out. "He'll need you to be here, Shikako."

I nodded, still blankly. "Okay."

I hadn't been here before. That had been a problem for him. Now he was the one hurt. Obviously I should be here. Be around. That made sense. Dad was right.

"How long will he be in the hospital?"

"Another few days," Dad answered. "He needs surgery, and Tsunade wants to keep him under observation for a while, to make sure it's healing after that and there are no other complications."

I nodded. I felt like a wind-up toy. Nod. Nod. Nod.

After breakfast I went around to Sakura's house. "Sorry to stop by so early," I said with an awkward nod to her parents. "I just wanted to catch you before you went to the hospital."

"I, um, I heard about Shikamaru," Sakura said, tucking her hair behind her ear. "I'm sorry."

I nodded at the sympathy, not really sure how to respond to that. "I guess you can tell why I'm here, then?"

"I can guess," Sakura said, a little wryly. "I was just about to go. Let me grab my books and we can talk on the way?"

I made small talk with her parents while she scuttled around, grabbing her backpack and picking up a bento from the kitchen.

"You wanted to know what … treatment plans the hospital has," Sakura said, once we were outside.

I pushed my hands into my pockets. "Yeah, something like that."

She pursed her lips in thought. "Well, I guess it depends on how bad it is? I mean, how far-"

I made a vague line across my bicep, about halfway to the elbow, without speaking.

"-oh. The Konoha transplant program is very advanced, you know," she offered. "It always has been, but with Tsunade-sama back it's even more so."

"Would it work?" I asked, quietly. "Organs… eyes… that's one thing. An arm is more complicated. Especially chakra pathways and things. If you wanted to be able to do jutsu…"

"I could look it up," Sakura offered. "I think there's prosthetics as well? I've never seen any, though."

Me neither – which might have meant a lot of things. People preferred transplants, maybe. Or prosthetics were too expensive, too complicated, too rare, not a good fit for field ninja…

"Thanks," I said, as we drifted to a stop outside the hospital. "I owe you one."

"Don't be silly," Sakura said and bit her lip. Then she stepped forward and hugged me. "It'll be okay."

I managed a weak smile back at her. "Thanks," I repeated.