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Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto.



/

This was going to be a very bad day.

Shikamaru made a summary effort of reviewing his day from the moment he woke up: more extremely resolute personal decisions to find a place of his own had been made to the loud background noise of his mother’s customary wakeup holler, but that definitely wasn’t out of the ordinary. Breakfast then (no, moving out and therefore onto a diet solely consisting of Ichiraku ramen was a very bad idea, indeed) and then a few sordid, god-forsaken hours of academy teaching. And then a nap near the banks of the Nakano river, unpleasantly interrupted by the arrival of the rest of the ex-team 10.

No, nothing unusual there either.

That was playing dirty. Everyone knew that bad days – really, really bad days – warranted some sort of sign: a shower of toads? Rains of blood? Circling vultures? First-born sons falling dead on their feet?

Nothing. The Powers That Be were mighty, might slackers indeed. But then again, it took one to know one.

“Hey, are you listening?”

When a violent nudge coaxed both his eyes open to a deceptively innocent blue sky, Shikamaru felt an unstoppable twinge of lament. Bad day clue number one.

“Chouji, you agree with me, right?”

Shikamaru glanced up at her briefly through faux-lidded eyes, careful not to show any overt signs of consciousness. Ino looked mad. Great.

“Um,” Chouji meandered, agonized. And with due cause, Shikamaru noted grimly, since she had that tone and that tone was the horrifying sound of them walking straight into a trap. “I don’t know, Ino. I…” A furtive glance at Shikamaru, who had suddenly developed a soul-consuming interesting in the back of his own eyelids. “I… don’t think there’s anything wrong with it…?”

“Ugh. Of course there’s something wrong with it. There’s no way there’s nothing wrong with it. You know, there’re actually so many things wrong with it, I don’t even know where to begin!”

Shikamaru schooled himself to wait, knowing that with Ino time was inevitably of the essence. Best case scenario, she’d tire herself out on whatever cryptic (but rest assured, scandalous) subject graced the menu today and let it drop. Worst case scenario, she’d end up dragging her two poor comrades into the selfsame mess. Shenanigans and injuries would follow. Self-loathing would be likely. Grisly demises? Why not. Shikamaru figured his chances were best if he didn’t prompt her.

“Hey Shikamaru,” came her voice, deceptively sing-song. “I know you’re awake, so don’t even think of pretending you’re sleeping.”

Caught. Oh well. “I’m up, I’m up.” Blinking wearily, he looked over at his two teammates.

After taking the time to toss him a thoroughly dirty look, Ino sat back on her heels, hand to her chin in what was apparently deep thought.

Great. Ino was /plotting/, which was a euphemistic way of saying she was likely unintentionally about to bring them all to their dooms. Meaning Shikamaru had to bite the damn bullet and intervene, lest they should all succumb to their ends in the bloodiest and most humiliating ways possible. He turned a suspicious look at Chouji and asked: “What’s she talking about?”

“Oh, you know what I’m talking about because it’s so appalling I don’t see how anyone could possibly forget. How does she think she can just up and do this? How can she think I wouldn’t know? If I don’t help her, it’ll end up one entire mess and that’s not even counting the millions of ways this could possibly go wrong on his end, seeing that men are monsters, because they just are.”

Chouji just sort of shrugged at him helplessly, clearly out of his depth and floundering.

Shikamaru rubbed the bridge of his nose and gritted his teeth. He was getting too old for this shit. “Let me get this straight,” he descried. “You’re telling us Sakura has a date.”

Blinking at him in largely undisguised awe, Chouji looked nearly about to bow but instead said: “You…How did you…?”

“Not ‘tonight’; right /now/,” Ino finished, brutally thumping a fist on the ground. “And she thinks she can hide it from us. Like she should be /embarrassed /of us!”

“Who’s /us/?” Shikamaru shifted away from her fist as surreptitiously as possible.

“—And that’s why you’re going to help me.” She looked evilly at not only Chouji, but Shikamaru as well. “Both of you.”

Struggling to restrain a long-suffering sigh, near inescapable as the urge was, Shikamaru sat back and grimly accepted his fate. In truth, the distribution of bad days over the span of his short life seemed to have a quota-spread air; a tendency towards equilibrium. Yesterday had been pretty damn decent, when you really got down to it. So today…

Well, gauging from the maniacal glint currently gracing Ino’s eyes, fire and brimstone? Would have absolutely nothing on this.




/




“Hey Shikamar—ARGH!”

Sasuke calmly glanced at the empty spot where Naruto had been standing mere milliseconds earlier, before he was tackled brutally into a connecting alleyway by a suspiciously Shikamaru-shaped shadow.

Spitting out an errant banana peel, Naruto shoved him off. “What the hell is your problem?!”

Shikamaru roughly clasped a hand over the mouth of his ungrateful friend. “I’m saving your skin,” he explained in an urgent whisper. Truthfully, he had been aiming for Sasuke, but the bastard had gracefully sidestepped and avoided his frantic lunge.
That was the main problem with living in Konoha – everybody was a damn ninja.

Standing up, Shikamaru brushed off the garbage strewn about the front of his customarily rumpled vest. The plan was totally shot anyway, what with Sasuke parading around like the walking signpost he was. Not that he would ever appreciate Shikamaru’s help even if it did go through. He had tried, despite how piss-poor his efforts had been.

“Look,” he turned towards Sasuke, who’s expression had shifted from utter boredom to even more utter boredom with a side of mild questioning. “Get out of here. Both of you. Go on vacation for a few days. Choose a long and very arduous mission and get packing.”

Naruto blinked widely at him in confusion. “… Um. What?”

Clearly, Sasuke didn’t rank this impending chaos as worth his time of day. To him, the notion of any kind of aid roughly translated to a slap in the face with a glove full of used syringes.

Ingrate. Shikamaru glanced at Naruto, who was currently deeply invested in the process of removing old leaves from his mussed hair, one at the back of his head eluding his furtive grasps. Before he could lose all possible dignity and begin chasing the back of his head in dog-tail circles, Shikamaru spoke, trying to use as many expressive hand gestures as possible. Talking to Naruto was pretty much the mixed arts of speech and interpretive dance. “Naruto, run. And avoid Ino. At all costs. Just run.”

It was too little too late. “Shikamaru!”

He winced as Ino ran up, looking out of breath and in a notoriously bad mood. “Just where the hell have you—oh, Naruto. Sasuke! I’ve been looking for you guys everywhere.”

“We’ve, uh, gotta go visit Sakura-chan,” Naruto lied robotically, blinking at her sudden arrival with a look of equal parts confusion and suspicion. Sasuke looked typically nonplussed.

“Of course,” she snapped, not-so-furtively glancing around for the pink-haired target in question. “It’s not like we’ve got tons of time here. If we don’t hurry we’ll miss him.”

Sasuke glared at her but only mildly, obviously debating whether or not the procurement of information was worth the taxing process of becoming embroiled in these undoubtedly stupid proceedings. Curiosity won out. “What are you talking about?” It was more a statement than a question.

Ino blinked. “You don’t know?”

“The operative terms were ‘run’ and ‘now’,” Shikamaru stage-whispered at Naruto. This whole thing was already blown to hell anyway; sometimes Shikamaru wondered why he even bothered.

Ino whirled on him. “You mean you haven’t told them?

He tried his best to look innocent while Sasuke tossed them both suspicious, narrow-eyed looks. Beside him, Naruto piped up. “What? What don’t we know? What’s going on?”




/



So that’s how the Save Sakura from Herself and Other Things, But Mostly Herself brigade came into existence, although Shikamaru still wasn’t really sure at exactly which point he had been added to the roster. It also didn’t explain why all five of them were currently – but not so stealthily – camped out and very badly hidden in the sparse bushes near Sakura’s front door.

“God, where are they?” Ino wondered, biting at an errant hangnail before adding: “Damn it, Shikamaru, stop fidgeting so much,” and since he wasn’t moving at all, effectively calling the kettle black.

Shikamaru diverted his eyes in the direction of the opposing bush, where a head of blonde hair poked out very obviously from a sad-looking hedge. “Remind me what we’re doing again?”

“Reconnaissance. Obviously.”

“Right. Except that, according to your sources, her date doesn’t finish for another three hours.”

Ino shrugged lightly. “He could’ve been a keener. Then they might finish early.”

Shikamaru half considered going through the effort of explaining to her that showing up early may just possibly be an indicator of a half-decent guy, but thought better of it. “Listen,” he offered, sitting back on his heels. With his luck, this bush was crawling with poison ivy. Or ticks. Or both. “We can’t sit here all night.”

“Sure we can,” Ino replied, absolutely deadpan.

“No, I mean: they can’t sit here all night,” and he gestured to the opposite bush, where a shoving contest between a disheveled blond tuft of hair and a less disheveled tuft of dark hair seemed to have erupted. Naruto had pounced on the tail-Sakura idea immediately, wanting to know exactly who the ‘stinky, sleazy, mud-eating scumbag who thinks he’s good enough for Sakura-chan [sic]’ was. Sasuke had tried to walk away, but Naruto snared him with the whole this-will-hone-our-ninja-skills thing again. You’d think he’d have learned by now.

Beside him, Chouji had already whipped out a bag of chips, settling down for the long haul. Shikamaru, decidedly, was not. He turned to Ino. “Listen, why don’t we split up into groups? If we wanted to follow the guy, we’d have to wait a little to avoid being caught, right? So, send one group out into the forest. That way we can head him off when he leaves and we won’t risk losing sight of him.” His gaze wandered towards the jostling bush across from them. “Also, those two don’t get to kill each other.”

Typically, this took approximately four seconds for Ino to jump on and claim as her own. “Isn’t that exactly what I’ve been telling you all this time?” She rolled her eyes. “I want to stretch my legs anyway.”

To this, Shikamaru said nothing, silently electing himself for forest surveillance and stalking off into the trees.



/




Finding a decently comfortable tree stump, Shikamaru knew, was a veritable art form in and of itself; a quest for the optimally ergonomic blend of slant and height. This took all of ten minutes. It took another four to utterly decimate his peace and quiet.

“You’re going the wrong way, dumbass.”

“Don’t call me that! If you think you’re so smart, then we’ll go your way and see if it gets us there.”

A long-suffering sigh. “No, that wouldn’t work, moron, because we’re lost right now. My way would’ve been right if we had taken it back at the first fork. It’s too late now.”

“Well, of course you’d say that so you look like you’re right. Just admit you’re wrong, Sasuke!”

“I’m not /wrong/. I’m /lost/. And it’s your fault.”

Predictably, Ino had failed supremely at the very simple task of separating these two, therefore defeating the purpose of the whole group idea almost entirely. Wearily, Shikamaru gave them an incredulous look. “/This/ is why it took you guys almost fifteen minutes to walk ten feet into the woods.” Once upon a time, this would be kind of amazing, but give or take five years or so and the entire rookie nine now had tolerance (and patience) down to a veritable science.

Both of them opened their mouths simultaneously – Naruto to protest and Sasuke to utter some scathing remark – but Shikamaru sadly gestured behind him to where Sakura’s house was still clearly visible through the narrow line of trees. The two must have accomplished the near-impossible feat of walking the most roundabout path ever to miss that. On the bright side, it was quite the achievement. A sad one, but an achievement nevertheless.

“Here,” Naruto coughed, reddening about the ears. “She said this was for you.”

An earpiece sat snugly in the palm of his hand, looking slightly weathered. Leave it to Ino to send old acid and base over there and restricted, mission-only equipment in the same move. He looked up at Sasuke. “Where did she get this, again?”

It crackled to staticky life.

“Shikamaru, he’s coming,” Chouji’s voice came through the set.

Sasuke tossed a casual look over his shoulder while Shikamaru lazily got his feet, both expecting some civilian idiot to come sauntering happily into the woods and straight into their arms. Naruto, however, took this warning like a call to arms and was all guns-a-blazin’, vigilant and tensely perched on a branch above them. Which meant that he was the only one ready for the veritable flash of light that suddenly flew past.

Well, that had been unexpected.

Emitting a gasp of surprise for one – and only one – moment, Naruto alighted from the branch in hot pursuit followed closely by Sasuke, never to be bested, who had gritted his teeth and moved faster than Shikamaru’s eyes could really make out.

Profoundly confused and blinking in their dusty wake, the headphone gave an abortive crackle at his side. “Sakura’s on the prowl over here, so we’ll be a while. Don’t lose him though,” came Ino’s urgent whisper. “Shikamaru. Hello?”

Shit, he thought, silencing the noise by closing his palm and taking a step forward into the thick underbrush. Now for the difficult part.



/



“Wait… So this is a bad sign?”

Naruto stared glumly at the feathered dart currently lodged in his Achilles tendon. Behind him, Sasuke let out a badly hidden cough that sounded suspiciously like typical.

“Yeah,” Shikamaru answered breathlessly, having leapt through the trees at double time to make up for their head starts. “You could say that.”

The density of forest had started lessening about four miles in, the woodland tapering off farther and farther away from the village and Shikamaru had wondered how far the chase had led the other two, secretly hoping the distance was too great. Then he unceremoniously tripped over Naruto, who had been lying face-down on the ground.

“A dart,” Sasuke gritted out, arms crossed. “You couldn’t dodge a dart?”

Naruto tried to focus his wavering senses enough to lobby. “Oh, shut up, Sasuke… you—Wait. I… what?”

Shikamaru didn’t want to admit it, but this didn’t bode well – first the mysterious swain’s super-stealthy exit, then the fact that he possessed poison-filled darts – and from the look on Sasuke’s face, which had paled only very, very slightly at the motionless form of Naruto on the ground – he knew it too.

“I didn’t… see it. Damn,” Naruto slurred, his voice hoarse and rough in his throat. “I feel pretty dizzy.”

Sure, Naruto only looked kind of wobbly on his feet, but sheer experience had taught Shikamaru that that didn’t mean anything at all. Ever since anyone could remember, Naruto had been a wicked fast healer, and Shikamaru wouldn’t bet anything that the poison lacing those darts had been intended to merely stun. If either him or Sasuke had been hit, they’d probably be dead.

This had clearly gone too far. Frowning, Shikamaru reached into his pocket, where the headset had been buzzing in protest of its neglect for the better part of the last half hour. His crazy-ass friends calling him like crazy while he was on this crazy-ass mission. He pressed the button with a vengeance.

“You’re fucking crazy, you know that?”

Affronted, Ino’s voice came to crackly life. “Excuse me? What the hell—”

“We’re done here. We’re going to wait out Naruto’s vertigo and then we’re going home. Sakura can date all the trained assassins she wants, but I’m going to enjoy my life and my day off.”

Naruto made a very wobbly attempt at standing up, bracing himself against a nearby tree lethargically – the spacey look he was wearing made Shikamaru suspicious of what was actually in the dart-load and he made a mental note to watch for more dangerous side-effects. Naruto was a fast healer – but that still didn’t mean he was invincible. The thought that this joke of night would end in bodily harm beyond sobering and made him feel bone-weary – the need for vigilance lingering, cutting through his tiredness and barring him from even/thinking/ about sleep. Which pretty much meant that if things weren’t bad yet, they’d certainly hit rock bottom very soon.

Sasuke was already eyeing a cliff above them, the peak almost eighty-feet straight up. That would keep them out of sight and they could spend the night there if they needed. Shikamaru squinted at the bare, rocky top. Home sweet home, he mused disdainfully.

“Assassin?” Chouji’s voice questioned in the background.

For a moment, Shikamaru just stared at the headpiece like it would sprout wings and fly, but knew Ino probably had Chouji paroling the back window of Sakura’s apartment in case she tried to – he didn’t know – elope or something. “Yeah,” he explained patiently, “or something really, really close. With blow-guns. And poisoned darts. Who run really, really fast – in case Ino didn’t notice.”

Her voice gave an exasperated sigh through the line. “I... drew my own conclusions,” she said, noncommittal. “Anyway. Where are you guys? We’re on our way.”

“It doesn’t matter where we are, because you’re not coming to meet us. We’re going home as soon as possible. I suggest you do the same.”

“What?! Are you serious? This is even more of a reason to tail him! I mean, I knew there was no reason why any normal guy would want to date Sakura, and here’s our proof. What if he’s trying to attack Konoha or something?”

Meanness aside, it was a possibility. For a moment, Shikamaru felt torn between telling her to screw off and some innate loyalty to his village, but at the end of the day the facts were undeniable – they were unprepared and currently one man down while this whole thing reeked of bad planning. The logical move would be to regroup and prep, then pursue this all via the official means. Which was a euphemistic way of saying Ino could kiss his ass. At least until a Hokage-issued summons appeared at his door, but Shikamaru figured he’d burn his bridges when he actually got to them.

“No,” he said with a resounding note of finality. “We’ll see you later.” And turned it off on her affronted retort.

Sasuke had distastefully slung one of Naruto’s arms over his shoulder while Shikamaru supported the other, the three beginning the long trudge up to their nighttime shelter. Evening was beginning to creep through the edges of blue sky, signaling their brief stint outdoors wouldn’t last too long, relatively speaking. Beside him, Naruto gave a narcotic-induced shiver.

“We’re not going?” He asked blearily.

Right. Two guys sneaking through an enemy base with their heavy, unconscious friend draped between them. Super stealthy. “No, we’re not.” Shikamaru hunched a shoulder against Naruto’s increasing deadweight and experimentally gave his arm a furtive pinch. No reaction. Given the upward trudge ahead of them, this would likely suck hard.

Sasuke frowned darkly at Naruto. “Stop staring at me. You’re heavy.”

“That’s right, Sasuke,” Naruto slurred at his other shoulder support. “We’re not going, so don’t be a whore.”

Ah… now the drugs were talking. Shikamaru would have been lying if he said he hadn’t been worried for a moment back there, duly noting that none of them had any marked proficiency in medical ninjutsu in the slightest. But if Naruto was babbling now, it meant the worst had luckily been bypassed. And, well, Naruto had just called Sasuke a whore.
A simultaneous feeling of lightness and weight washed through Shikamaru, partially from relief and partially from the fact that Sasuke let go of his end of Naruto and kicked him in the back of the knee.

“God!” Naruto spluttered messily at him. “You’re such an asshole!”

While this fabulous bickering was threatening to drive Shikamaru to the far reaches of his mind, admittedly it did mean that at least one thing in the universe was back to a vague semblance of normal. One night, he figured grimly. If they were lucky, they’d be so out of there at the first hint of dawn.



/




Typically, that wasn’t quite how it happened.

Shikamaru awoke to the hellish feeling of being watched, the gravewalking crackle of paranoia shifting languidly down his spine, and turned groaning, straight into the face of Sasuke, who looked his usual brand of charmingly paranoid amnesiac. Even after seven and half hours of sleeping on rocky terrain. “Jesus, what are you–?”

“They’re down there,” came his answer, like this was some kind of decent explanation if conveyed with the absolute minimum emotion required from a living, breathing being and artfully mussed hair. Then he turned and jumped off the building.

Across from him, Naruto struggled to stand up, consciousness returning in slow waves. And instead of freezing in utter shock, as one tends to do when someone wakes you up and jumps off the fucking cliff, he just weaved a little, gave a grunty sort of oh no, he didn’t and lunged down right after him.

Shikamaru was left blinking aimlessly in their wake, wondering whether or not the two would be a gory pile at the bottom of the precipice. Though knowing Sasuke’s luck, the bastard probably hit the ground running. Naruto… probably bounced.

That was the moment at which his headphone chose to crackle noisily at his side. He picked it up. “Yeah.”

“So,” came Ino’s voice. “There’s a problem.”

He sighed. “I gave you one task, and that was to safely get back to the village. And how did I know you were going to mess this up?”

“Yes, you’re very smart,” she retorted dryly. “Now are you going to hear me out?”

Which was when, she detailed flippantly, Chouji and herself had disregarded his (very rude) instructions and made for the forest, hoping to tail Sakura’s mysterious (“And apparently dangerous,” Shikamaru felt obliged to interject) beau before they had stumbled onto the campsite of said mystery man, incidentally located a mere hundred yards from the cliff Shikamaru was currently gracing in horrified disbelief.

“And you know what happened then?”

No. Shikamaru wanted a bed and a meal. He wanted gangrene more than he wanted to know.

“Then do you want to tell me why Naruto and Sasuke are now prowling around their turf?” The unsupervised?! remained unsaid but implicit.

In his heart of hearts, Shikamaru now was left utterly convinced that some (read: all) tasks were best done in the absence of all others. By one’s self. Entirely alone. ‘Backup’ was an ideological concept at best.

So, heaving a sigh (he was doing that a lot lately), he said: “Alright.”

Ino scoffed. “What do you mean, ‘alright’?”

“I mean ‘alright I’ll go get them before they forfeit not only their lives but mine’. Tell me what you see.”

“Chouji did the scouting. He’s back though—hold on.”

“Shikamaru?” The comforting feeling of Chouji’s familiar voice was very short lived, considering the circumstances. “It’s a camp,” he described. “More than one person in it, too. Let’s see… tons of sentries posted at all entrances. Armed with –”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Shikamaru chimed in. “And you said that both Naruto and Sasuke got in there?”

Ino barked a grim laugh. “You heard right.” Meaning that at /any moment now/, all hell would break loose when the terrible twosome managed to get their hands on the guy and started their interrogation.

Following Sasuke’s strangely amicable last meeting with his brother (a most unexpected happening that was really the sum of a very wacky string of events), he had returned to Konoha to ‘resume a normal life’. Team 7 interpreted this as making abortive attempts at getting things back to ‘the way they used to be’, but this was kind of hard given that ‘the way they used to be’ wasn’t exactly the kind of relationship goal sane people strived to achieve. In addition to that, Sai was bent on trying out his budding friend-skills on the new arrival on a regular basis. Shikamaru couldn’t exactly recall what had happened in the aftermath of that, but he was pretty sure it involved fire. And with sense-memories like those, he was just plain old better off not knowing.

And the fact that anyone, not to mention emotionally-constipated individuals like Sasuke, would be hard-pressed to find the right kind of response to the whole blood-sweat-tears journey the rest of his ex-team went through to find him (Sasuke had opted for a very eloquent: “Three years and you’re still genin?” Which developed into a full-fledged battle the likes of which Konoha took two weeks to repair from).

Compromise had unspokenly been found in assuming the roles of Sakura’s pseudo-protectors, which sort of equated to Naruto growling like a guard-dog around any of her new boyfriends and Sasuke pretending not to notice that her kicks roughly translated to a 7.5 on the Richter scale.

Shikamaru rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He turned to Chouji. “Armed with?” Loofas, he prayed. Stuffed animals. Loaves of French bread. It wasn’t too much to ask for, was it?

“Axes,” Chouji decided crushingly. “Definitely axes.”

Brilliant.

Shikamaru squinted at the sentries. “But the camp’s only temporary. Why pack the heavy weaponry?” Meaning that this was a one-time trip. They had a larger base – or country – from which they hailed. Therefore: shinobi. As though his day couldn’t possibly get worse.

Ino shifted. “Well, I’m getting itchy sitting in these bushes. Let’s go. We can shimmy up these trees and drop in through there.” She motioned at a pinned-back sky flap before hitching an arm over a gnarled branch and disappearing into the overhead foliage.

Chouji watched her feet disappear and Shikamaru stifled a groan. “Alright. I’m going in Chouji, but you stay here and see what you can do about those guards. If not, then let them know that this was all Ino’s fault when our mangled corpses wash up on the banks of the Nakano river.”

Chouji chuckled and Shikamaru didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was totally serious. “Don’t say that, Shikamaru. If anyone can do this, it’s you.”

“Right. Thanks.” He reached up for a branch and disappeared into the treetops.



/



“Who has sky flaps anyway?” Ino chortled, delighting in their stealthy entrance. Which she would completely blow if she kept up the gloating. “Doesn’t seem like it would be too good for rain or mosquitoes. Plus, it totally has the words ‘welcome ninja and parachutists alike’ written all over it. It’s like Naruto built this tent.”

Shikamaru held up a hand in vague assent, scouting for guards.

“Hey,” Ino stage-whispered. “Are you listening to me?”

“Okay.” No one seemed to be around. The notion reeked of suspicious.

“That’s the wrong answer,” she sniped dramatically. “You would’ve said ‘no’ if you actually were listening because you always say ‘no’ when you actually are, or at least pretend you’re sleeping or something, but you said ‘okay’ which is what you always say when you’re not listening to someone but you want them to think you are, but I know you too well so you gave yourself away.”

Shikamaru blinked at her tiredly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Dolefully, Ino answered: “Maybe if you were listening,” like she had won some sort of battle. Shikamaru opted to say nothing. A wise decision, it turned out.

“Why didn’t Sakura tell me she had a date?” She puzzled, apparently moving on. “I mean, it’s not like I would’ve judged her, or him, even though I’m sure he’s a creep.”

Ahead, the tent adjoined into another, smaller pavilion. It looked dark inside, but from what they could see, it was still empty. Then he realized what Ino had said and whirled around. “Wait. She never told you she had a date?”

“No,” Ino said bitterly. “That’s what I told you before. Like I said: thanks for listening.”

Shikamaru shook his head. “No, you told me that she tried to hide who her date was from you. Not that she had one at all.”

Grudgingly, she considered this. “Oh,” Ino agreed, all innocent-like. “I guess that’s right. Tomato, tomahto – it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” he explained slowly. “Because that leaves us with a very big question.”

Frustrated, she made little rolling movements with her hands to usher him along.

“Whether or not Sakura even had a date, Ino.”

She rolled her eyes, clearly nonplussed. “Oh god. Details, Shika. Strange guy? Sudden secrecy? Date. Obviously.”

“No, not obviously,” he moaned, slapping his forehead in frustration. “That could explain any number of scenarios. She’s a freaking ninja, for god’s sake!”

“LET’S HOPE YOU BROUGHT YOUR DANCING SHOES!!” A yell came then, a darkly shrouded figure dashing through the heavy blackness and straight at them, large weapon in hand. Ino and Shikamaru barely had time to duck before the heavy axe came along a swinging trajectory straight for their necks.



/



“An axe.”

It was more a statement than a question. Looking at the giant weapon lodged deeply into the wooden post mere inches from his nose, Shikamaru felt sorely tempted to use his holy-crap-you-almost-decapitated-me voice, but pegged Naruto for the fairly jittery sort and figured it would be in his best interests to keep the near-death experience count at one.

Ino just stared angrily. It seemed that everything Ino did was angrily. “’ /Let's hope you brought your dancing shoes/?’!?”

“Oops,” Naruto lifted the axe from the wood in a facile movement, hefting it to his other hand with everyday ease. Like he hadn’t just nearly separated their heads from shoulders and offed two of his oldest comrades. “I guess I got so worked up from the last fight and the dark and stuff… Scary, huh?”

“More than you know.”

“Anyway, when we first got in, me ‘n Sasuke were ambushed and separated and there was this really huge guy with an eyepatch who dropped down on me and was all ‘Are you ready to dance?’, then I thought it would be kinda funny to –”

Shikamaru suppressed a long-suffering sigh. “Naruto—”

“So I guess it’s really kind of like an inside joke, or something—”

“Naruto!” Ino got to her feet slowly, face dark and obscenely scrunched, veritably breathing fire. Shikamaru inched away with what he hoped was unparalleled stealth. “Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? –Wait, don’t answer that, there are so many answers to that question I don’t even want to get started, except that you need to know that we’re in the middle of a very. Serious. Mission right now and you’re just… just playing around like it’s some joke. First of all, Sakura had the absolute gall to not inform me of her little boyfriend and now you’ve gone and almost beheaded me, well, that’s not going to fly, okay? Because with friends like these, who the hell needs enemies, right?!” She punctuated the last few words with a few violent jabs to Naruto’s chest which he met with vigorous nods and various signs of faux comprehension.

Shikamaru just stared, incredulous. Because a: he swore that Ino’s trademark penchant for never-ending sentences at the absolute top of her voice were an accomplishment she shared with no one else on the planet. And b: that neither of them seemed to understand the extremely delicate nature of the situation at hand, leading him to the conclusion that yes, he was the/sole/ one keeping his entire ex-rookie year alive.

But that was old news.

Maybe it was the fact that Shikamaru’s acute ninja-born powers of perception (yes, seriously) were going absolutely haywire right now, compounded with the fact that he swore something was breathing wetly down his neck.

So when Naruto leaned over and whispered, sotto voce: “How does she breathe when she talks like that?” But totally overlooked the fact that Ino also possessed their super acute sense of hearing and she proceeded to not-so-metaphorically rip him a new one. And roughly when, give or take a few moments, their hidden mouth-breathing stalker chose to leap frighteningly from the shadows and straight down onto their little trio.

Well, that’s when Shikamaru ran. As fast as he could. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.



/



Contrary to popular belief, shinobidom was more than just martial skill and stealth. It was also about possessing sufficient wits to keep you alive and breathing until your next mission. Which was ample reason as to why our two heroes were currently running like scared little girls through the dark and twisting labyrinth of the enemy camp.

When they reached yet another entirely innocuous, sparsely lit reach of the canvas jungle, Shikamaru stopped abruptly, looking above him. The light filling the space was a soft, blurry diffusion seeping in from some source unknown; there was no sky flap that he could see and the illumination stopped a mere few inches in front of his face. Naruto whumped unceremoniously into his back.

“OW. Why did you stop?!”

“Because we’re lost,” Shikamaru explained with seasoned patience. He didn’t want to mention that the light probably meant that the great outdoors lay beyond that flap of canvas. Naruto would charge at it guns a-blazin’, and since it was likely reinforced to the teeth, they’d be screwed. Shikamaru reassessed their situation. “It looks like Ino got nabbed back there. We should get out and find Chouji, then request some backup for this mess.” That was sure going to go over swimmingly. He could see it now: oh hello Hokage-sama. See, about five of us just snuck off on this completely unauthorized and unpaid mission to tail your ex-apprentice’s date into parts unknown. Except we’ve kind of screwed it right over to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Send some backup, please?

Shikamaru was sorely banking on that fact that the information groused up about these unknown infiltrators would be enough to assuage Tsunade’s inevitable bloodlust. But their chances were frankly kind of shaky.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Shikamaru noticed Naruto rubbing his nose from the collision but opted not to say anything. “I think I can remember the path back towards our entry point, but they’ve probably closed off that flap. Use your hands to feel along the ceilings on our way back for a fault in the cloth—”

“It’s only cloth? So let’s just blast–”

“—No! We don’t want people to know where we are.”

Naruto frowned. “Why not? We’d be outta here before they knew what hit them.”

It was getting very hard to restrain himself from clutching at the throbbing ache in his temples. “No, Naruto,” he said. “Because they have darts, in case you’ve forgotten. Awful, poisoned darts. And then they would catch us. And then we would die.”

Turning to proceed back into the tented darkness, Shikamaru began to pick a path in the general direction of their arrival – or so he hoped. As far as he knew, his navigational sense wasn’t that spectacularly off yet. The light, which until then had been hanging in sparse scatters across the space, left almost suddenly, tossing the two into a blind and heady darkness.

“Damn,” Shikamaru cursed, extending both hands above his head until his fingers brushed against the rough feel of canvas. “Hey,” he whispered. “Are you feeling for the sky flaps?”

“Yeah,” came the answer, a tad louder than he would have liked and accompanied by a suspicious fumbling. “It’s just so dark in here.”

As far as Shikamaru knew, his own two hands hadn’t met any resistance against the smooth cloth overhead. He craned his neck to squint at Naruto in the darkness, trying to find what he was up to. “What’s that sound?”

Click. Click. Fumble.

A spark caught Shikamaru’s eye and he felt his heart plunge the icy drop down, down into the roiling pit of his stomach. A spark. That meant –

He wouldn’t.

Naruto made a few abortive noises of effort. “Maybe if I –”

But that sentence was doomed never to finish. Because at that exact moment, Shikamaru chose to gather his wits about him and lunged at his comrade violently, trying to wrench the unlit candle and lighter from Naruto’s stupid, stupid fingers.

“ARGH!”

Naruto, predictably, seemed to have a reflexive disagreement with being suddenly charged at in a dark room and launched himself back into the sagging wall of the tent-hall, which was when some small percentage of Shikamaru’s consciousness gave a sigh of gratitude that the walls had some give. Ferocious though it was, Shikamaru’s effort had been too little too late and Naruto’s finger flicked an accidental on, firing up the blasted lighter and flooding the once-dark room with very, very unwelcome brightness.

That was when the situation hit critical mass.

Gathered around the space were their assorted colleagues: an unconscious Ino drooling a very hilarious and ample puddle onto the dirt floor with gusto, Chouji, tossing them anguished and apologetic glances from the corner and Sasuke, looking obscenely livid behind his crumpled gag. He was also tied to a post.

“Seriously?” Naruto exclaimed, clearly not realizing that they were totally, utterly screwed. “Sasuke got captured before me!”

When the two darts came whistling out of nowhere, aimed straight for the exposed flesh of their necks, Shikamaru didn’t even have time to roll his eyes before everything fluttered to heavy black.



/



“So I hope you’ve all learned your lessons.”

Shikamaru looked up at her briefly. Sakura was perched at the edge of Ino’s hospital bed, carefully peeling an apple and doing a piss-poor job at not looking smug and happy at their various states of physical distress. Deciding it was far too early in the bloody morning for this crap, Shikamaru opted to face the wall, shrugging his tiny hospital-issue blanket closer around him.

“Like asking me first if you need to know something? Instead of running off and tailing my S-mission contact nearly to your own grim deaths?”

From two beds away, Naruto made a muffled and very vigorous noise of assent – or protest; it was kind of hard to tell given the full bodycast he was wearing. Sasuke tried to look as aloof and unaffected as one possibly could while wearing a hospital gown that showed a considerable portion of his ass – despite the fact that every single person in the room clearly suffered the super-intense inner struggle of deciding exactly whom they wanted to strangle more: Sakura or Ino. For many, careful consideration yielded the latter.

Shikamaru thought it was safe to say that later realizing that the tent-dwelling troupe in question were nomads from the outskirts of the Suna, here to deliver their secret mixed anesthetic to Sakura, their hospital contact, wasn’t that great. Discovering the hard way that the poison gracing the dart’s sharp needle-tip had been made from a special blend of various deadly herbs and the crushed liver of the ever-lethal blowfish hadn’t been fun either. Neither were the tremors, convulsions and nausea accompanying recovery that had been Shikamaru’s constant bedfellows for the better part of what he assumed were three days – it was kind of hard to tell. All he knew was waking up as one of the five newest residents of Konoha’s general hospital with Tsunade tapping a message of angry how stupid could you be/s and /I’m surrounded by idiots in frantic Morse code on his bed post. An apology was kind of hard to manage with the projectile vomiting, so he had to settle for finger pointing. Childish, but effective.

“Oh shut up, Forehead,” Ino scowled at Sakura darkly from underneath the covers. “So we were wrong—” Insert visual equivalents of oh bitch, you didn’t from the other inhabitants. “—Okay, fine. I was wrong.”

Sakura gave a scoff, prompting: “And?”


In a very sweet twist of fate, Ino had fared slightly worse than Shikamaru did (though no one had fared worse than Naruto, who had maintained consciousness following the dart and had to be beaten into submission), nursing broken ribs and an arm in addition to the less-than-enjoyable detox process. At the end of the day, it was almost enough for him to feel sorry for her. Almost.

Naruto made some sort of muffling noise in the corner. Everybody ignored him.

“I mean I should have known,” Ino said shrugging elaborately. She winced when jolts of pain shot through her ribcage. “There’s no way that you’d ever get a date –”

Sakura had finished her apple with nearly criminal relish, then snatched up her paring knife and stabbed it neatly into Ino’s arm cast.

“ARGH, you /bitch/!”

“Lesson learned,” Sakura finished for her, smiling sweetly. “The end.”

And so, face to the blank, antiseptic white shock of wall, Shikamaru let a heavy wash of tiredness drift him into heavy sleep. Despite the fact that the events of the past few days might’ve been a suicide-inducing bad string of proceedings for any other person, to him, it all seemed perfectly on-centre. This did have him doubting his sanity, but he figured that when you suddenly developed a natural disaster-status quo, you were completely beyond help anyway. It was the kind of feeling you could only fully appreciate crammed into a six-occupant room with a medley of broken bones, using blankets and gowns that had to have been made during some sort of fabric shortage.

Shikamaru snorted inwardly. Now he knew he was going crazy.



/

END

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