Looking Through the Mist (Old Version)

Shikamaru couldn’t deny he was excited to see his sister when his dad had first hinted she might be visiting. But he also knew Riko. She was a survivor, and if surviving meant becoming Akagi Ren and losing Nara Riko, she would do it. She might not like it, but that wouldn’t factor into her decision-making process.

Maybe that’s why he started to wander into the refugee quarter more frequently. Maybe that’s why, when he had met Kim Na-Ri, he had asked her to teach him Korean. His time in the refugee quarter had taught him a word or two, a phrase or three, but nothing he could communicate with. He hadn’t been learning for too long – only the few months since he heard Riko was staying longer in Kiri, and even that was disparate lessons here and there spaced out based on his mission schedule and Na-Ri’s availability. She had a family to feed and had started up a small tailor’s shop. Her oldest daughter, Go-Eun, had started a restaurant with her husband next door that served authentic Kirigakure cuisine to help pay the family bills. Shikamaru had enjoyed it the few times he had gone, and he had taken Chouji with him, which won it an Akimichi seal of approval.

Na-Ri was around his mom’s age, probably a little older, if he had to guess, but soft and sweet where his mom was a hardened shinobi and a taskmaster. He supposed part of it was that his mother lived with two Nara, whereas Na-Ri’s family was extremely motivated on their own.

“Ah, Shika-shi!”

The youngest son in the family, Jae-suk, had entered the Academy recently. He had just turned nine, talked about an older sister that he missed almost constantly, and had asked Shikamaru to help him with his Japanese as soon as he had met him. The kid was definitely sharp, Shikamaru would give him that, but he lost himself in his own head periodically.

But, he had caught onto Japanese very quickly. He had picked up some of the spoken language quickly once his family had settled in Konoha almost three years ago (according to Na-Ri), and even faster once he had joined the Academy. Reading took longer, but the longer he worked with Shikamaru the faster he seemed to pick up new characters and words.

“Hey.”

The kid’s smile was bright, particularly after considering the things Shikamaru had heard about why his family left. What had happened in his village.

To his sister.

And yeah. Maybe he understood why Riko had liked teaching so much. If kids were this happy to see teachers and it was always this rewarding to see someone succeed after helping them, it made sense.

It was still troublesome, though, and he was never going to call it anything else. 

“Look! My sensei’s been giving me extra tests for my reading and writing, since it’s so bad, but I got a hundred on this one!”

It was a short test, only four and a half pages, and Jae-Suk had to read a long passage and then answer two questions and write a few responses. Nothing too involved, but there were a few parts Shikamaru could have seen him getting tripped up on. Questions that were worded to mask their original point, and similar. All things a shinobi had to learn to decipher, no matter the language.

But he had done it. He had aced the test, and even caught on to what his sensei was after in some of the less obvious questions.

“Nice work, kid.”

“Can we start working on harder stuff?”

Shikamaru sighed. “You’re so troublesome. But sure, kid. We can do some harder stuff. What do you want to work on?”

Jae-Suk just grabbed his hand before dragging him to the library.

*

Chae-Seon had teamed up with her father to go after Neji. The Genin, according to Hiashi, had fewer guards around them and in the surrounding areas. He had agreed, after some mild prodding, to retrieve the other two Genin and head toward the area Chae-Seon had left her partner, charge, and Aimi.

As for her and Shikaku, they were trying to find a way towards Neji.

“Do you think you could get in, take care of whatever bastards are in there with him, then run him out while I distract these assholes?”

She recognized one of the faces in the small group of mercenaries outside of where they were holding Neji. He was a tough son of a bitch, and she had gone toe-to-toe with him once before. He had tried to interfere with her mission, and by that she meant she had been caught mid-assassination and had to flee when he started pulling dirty tricks with seals.

Park Dong-Il.

He had been featured in one of Kiri’s less official Bingo Books, which were mostly mercenaries like him, for each of whom whom there was at least one Kiri shinobi with a grudge. Out of spite, none of them were ranked above C, though Dong-Il could easily have made a high B-Rank, and with better training he could easily have matched her.

“Why are you distracting them?” The glance Shikaku gave her told her she was less than subtle about her grudge.

“It’s absolutely not because I have a score to settle with one of those assholes, and entirely because I am confident enough in my abilities to distract them long enough for you to get Neji out of there.”

“You’re lying to me aren’t you.”

“I wouldn’t tell you that, even if I were.”

She was, and they both knew it, which was irritating in and of itself, but she hadn’t even tried to hide it, which irked Shikaku even more. She could at least pretend.

“Fine, but you better not get hurt too badly. We’re travelling back with you now, and I don’t want to deal with your mother’s lectures if you come home covered in blood.”

“That’s perfect, because I don’t want to deal with Suigetsu’s.”

Shikaku leaned back into the hallway they were currently occupying. “Go on, then.”

*

Shikaku didn’t want to let his daughter fight on her own, but there was something to be said for distracting the guards first.

She was a quick shot with her techniques, the kind he saw on battlefields during the war. The kind he had been when he was younger. She didn’t linger either, she had become desensitized to battle.

“Go, you idiot!”

Shikaku didn’t bother responding, ducking instead into the room while she covered him, sliding a sword between him and an enemy as she huffed in irritation. “Hurry the fuck up, you hear me? Get him, get out.”

Shikaku nodded, quickly crossing the room to where Neji was being held. The younger man was worse for wear, several wounds dug into non-lethal areas, blood all over his face. “Come on, Hyuuga. We’re getting out of here.”

“I can’t see very well. I’m afraid I won’t be of much help.”

There was blood in his eyes stemming from a wound along his hairline, but beyond that, Shikaku couldn’t tell if there was anymore damage than that.

He worried he might have missed something. The Caged Bird Seal was an open secret in Konoha, but Shikaku didn’t know enough about it to look for damage. It was still covered by the bandage Neji wore under his headband, but there were no guarantees. It didn’t look like they were after the Byakugan, though. Just trying to get information on Konoha, then?

“They’re informally trained.”

That didn’t mean they didn’t know how to use seals or modify them. He would have to pass the boy over to Hiashi to be checked over once he got the chance.

Pulling Neji’s arm over his shoulder, Shikaku positioned him into something workable. Hopefully, Chae-Seon would have the fighting taken care of, but just in case, he wanted to be prepared.

“Agh!” That was Riko. That was his daughter, and she had just been hurt.

There was some screaming, but there were so many people doing so it was hard to tell who it was. Shikaku made an effort not to look as he dragged Neji out of the line of fire, setting him against a wall. He turned the corner to where the fighting was just in time to see his daughter, who had been thrown to the ground, take a kick to the face.

“Son of a bitch!” She didn't stay down long. 

*

Chae-Seon rocked back from the next foot that came towards her face, slamming her hands to the ground and pushing herself up.

“That’s it. I’ve had it with you fuckers.”

Dong-Il smirked. The bastard remembered her, made some comments about her being hard to forget before he took to using his shitty sealwork to push her down.

“I’ve never liked you, Choi-shi. You’re like a gnat.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Chae-Seon ducked the incoming blade of one of the remaining men, responding with her own katana across her opponent’s abdomen before switching out for a water whip. Using it to pull Dong-Il’s lieutenant towards her, she placed a kunai at the man’s throat. “I walk or he dies.”

“Blackmail. How shinobi of you.”

“Being a nuisance. How mercenary of you.” Ren pulled the kunai closer to the man’s throat. He had gone still, knowing he would have to play his cards right to get out of this.

Her dad was off to the side, creeping up on Dong-Il, and she was suddenly so glad the bastard had limited chakra capabilities. Yeah, he could use seals, and it was rumored he was a descendant of the Uzumaki, but she had fought him, and he never shut up. He had bragged before about how he didn’t need to use chakra for fancy jutsu, or to sense it. He didn’t need it, because he wasn’t a shinobi. All he needed were his seals and his sub-par skills with manipulation.

Thank fuck for that nonsense.

Shaking her head slightly at her father, she knew she had to time this right. From the small glimpse she had seen, Neji needed medical attention, meaning she couldn’t afford to be more injured than she already was. A slash to her arm was still bleeding, but she wasn’t going to pay it much attention.

She had other priorities, one of which was the comrade that was in the nearby hallway and wouldn’t Shikaku just fucking listen and follow the fucking plan?

Scoffing, she gave up on her blackmail plan, Shikaku coming steadily closer to Dong-Il.

She admitted it. She was worried he was getting in over his head, underestimating an opponent because she had said he didn’t have formal training. Chae-Seon was just as much Ren as she was Riko, and no matter who she was, her family was important to her.

No matter how angry she got, her father was important to her.

In one quick motion she left her hostage bleeding on the ground, pulling out the Kiba and spiraling towards Dong-Il. Her arm felt like it was ripping apart as she charged the swords with lightning chakra, embedding them both into Dong-Il while also forcing Shikaku away. She had probably made the scarring on her arms worse, forcing lightning through a wound like that, but she didn’t exactly care at the moment.

Dong-Il, for his part, had a seal ready. It was haphazard and poorly made, as most of his seals were, but it did the trick in redirecting the lightning chakra into the water on the ground, pushing it back at Ren. It burned, and she cursed at him until she had enough control of her body to move out of the way of an attack.

An attack that should have come, but was blocked by her father, who was taking up Dong-Il’s attention.

“I’ll never get it with you damn ninja. You never fucking give up.” Dong-Il tried to push his way past Shikaku to Chae-Seon.

Shikaku dived to meet him, slicing at his stomach with a kunai. Chae-Seon stood up, pulling the Kiba to her sides. “You son of a bitch. You don’t get to attack the people I care about. Not anymore!”

She had never lost a comrade in battle. But she had lost a friend. A sweet civilian girl who would make her drop her weapons at the door before having her in for tea, where they weren’t allowed to talk about the war.

She had been inside the base, a skilled herbalist and medic, even without chakra. She should have been safe. But she had enough friends in high places, that when Dong-Il wanted information, he went after her. He took her from within the base while most of the higher-level shinobi were away on a joint mission, and Ren hadn’t seen her after that. She had only seen pieces of remains or possessions. A piece of cloth, an earring, maybe, but never a full body.

Never enough to know if she was actually dead. Only enough to assume.

Ren dodged the seal this time, and she pushed her blade as far into Dong-Il as she could, screaming as he used some chakra to try and throw it back into her. The difference, however, was that she had trained to control lightning, whereas he hadn’t.

It made not passing out much easier, as the lightning around them went haywire. Quickly cancelling the chakra to her swords, Ren sent them back into the seal on her shoulder. Instead, she pulled water towards her, focusing it. Condensing it.

It had been Suigetsu’s idea, once she had come clean after a long and grueling session with the Kiba, to adapt the jutsu into something smaller and usable. Something that could get her out of a tough spot if need be. His reasoning, she knew, had another layer to it.

It would force her to face it. She would have to take responsibility for the attack that had killed forty-some people.

Now, she was more than grateful as she jabbed it into the hand and knife that were coming towards her. The knife started to warp from the pressure, and over Dong-Il's screams, she could hear the bones in the hand break as its flesh squelched, leaving his hand up to the wrist badly disfigured with an open would bleeding quickly steadily as she backed away, grabbing her father’s arm and running towards Neji.

“I told you to take him and run!”

“And leave you to get hurt?”

“Yes! I can handle myself!”

“Those wounds would suggest otherwise.”

Chae-Seon yanked Neji towards her, throwing an arm over her shoulder, ignoring the cries of pain. She had a few moments to get them ahead of Dong-Il, and she couldn’t waste that on comfort at the moment. “I’m fine.”

“Should we worry about him?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to wait around to find out.”

Shikaku huffed. “Pass him here, Chae-Seon. You’re injured.”

“I’ve had worse, I’ve got him.” Chae-Seon glanced behind her. There was a small trickle of blood on the floor, likely from his hand.

Maybe he’d passed out from blood loss. Maybe they could get out of there. Even if he hadn’t, she could hope he was slowed down.

Chae-Seon pushed herself faster. “Come on!”

*

“She’s going to come back bleeding, and I’m going to have to fight her to actually let me treat her, and it’s gonna be a thing.

“Why the fuck does she always do this?”

Kakashi laughed as Suigetsu paced. “Nice to know some things never change.”

“What do you mean?” Suigetsu perked. If this meant learning more about a young Chae-Seon, it was more than worth it to put his worry aside for a moment.

“She’s always been reckless.” Kakashi shrugged.

“And…” Suigetsu had to fight the urge to kill his charge. One, he knew he would need Ren to really beat him. Two, there was a certain amount of fun for him in trying to pry stories and the like out of the man.

“And what?” That damn eye smile.

He was going to win this man over eventually. For now, though, he was going to go back to the girl he was supposed to be watching. The girl that was currently looking at his sword intently, as though she could figure out how he used it just from looking at it.

“How do you use this?”

“Like a sword.”

“But it doesn’t look like one. It looks like one of those big paper crop things that Iruka-sensei uses sometimes!”

So Umino had been a teacher before he came to Kiri… interesting.

 “Well it is one. It’s a special sword.”

“Special? Is that why it has all those papers on it?”

“Those papers are explosion tags, kid. Be careful around them.”

“Why so many different ones, then?”

“They’ve got their own effects.”

Her eyes were alight as she asked more questions about his sword, pointing to different papers and asking questions, before finally asking to hold it.

*

Hiashi had gotten Hanabi and Chie out, and he was keeping them safe, but he didn’t want to leave yet. He had promised the Hokage to make sure all members of the team made it out, and that included Neji.

And beyond that, as much as he loathed to admit it, he was worried for the Nara still inside the base. Shikaku hadn’t been out in the field, as far as Hiashi knew, since the scuffles at the border two years ago. RIko… He would admit, she had been an excellent influence on his younger daughter, encouraging her to have some spirit. He might not have liked her particular brand of attitude or teaching techniques, but his daughter cared for her teammates. That was something worthy of respect, and he knew it in large part had come from Riko.

But she had been gone for two years, meaning  he had no clue the full scope of her abilities. Perhaps he should have been keeping a better eye on the Kirigakure section of the Bingo Books that crossed his desk every so often.

His musing (and worrying over his daughter) was broken by the shouting of Nara Riko, still disguised as Choi Chae-Seon, as she pulled Neji alongside her. It was somewhat comical, given Neji was no small amount taller than her, so she was essentially dragging him along.

As they came closer, he noticed the twitch in her hands, the blood on her sleeve, and the gritted teeth. She had been hurt, and it looked bad.

He really didn’t want to know what had happened in Kiri to the spunky girl that he had begrudgingly respected.

*

Shikaku insisted on taking Neji once Chae-Seon tripped, her leg locking as part of her body spasmed.

“You need medical attention, Choi-san.” Hiashi, he noticed, refused to word it as a question. Good, he needed someone else to help him gang up on his daughter. It turned out Kiri hadn’t gotten rid of her stubborn streak. If anything, the independence of being completely cut off from everyone and stranded in a foreign country had made it worse.

“Nope. Not until those three are safe and have been treated.”

“And how are you going to treat them if you don’t have decent chakra control?” Shikaku raised an eyebrow. He had been electrocuted before. He knew how hard it could be to keep everything under control until the body healed.

“Eh. Suigetsu’s got some basic healing knowledge. First aid, and the like. He might not know actual jutsu for it, but if I can’t take care of it, he can.”

“And why would I trust a foreigner to treat my family?” It was Hiashi asking, but there was a small part of Shikaku that wondered the same thing. He had read about the young man before, and he seemed to have a violent streak and a tendency towards reckless behavior. Shikaku wasn’t sure he trusted the amount of confidence Chae-Seon placed in him either. This was a shinobi that went off the grid for years before being showing up in the middle of a war.

Either way, he had little choice. Chae-Seon wasn’t going to be deterred, and at least this way he might learn a thing or two about her life in Kiri.

*

Chae-Seon regarded Suigetsu like a brother. She really did.

But that came with the territory of having him be a goddamn mother-hen when he wanted to be, which was whenever one of their team was bleeding at all. She could understand, to some extent. He was pretty damn hard to injure, so to him bleeding was a rarity. It had to freak him out sometimes that his teammates were so fragile comparatively.

Still. The first words he said when she walked in (hiding the fact that she had been electrocuted pretty damn well in her opinion) didn’t have to be “Don’t fucking lie to me this time. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit, and you know it.”

Hiashi scowled. “Do you have to use such language?”

Suigetsu, never one to take a comment like that lying down unless it was from Haku, snarled at him. “Look man, I know I’m supposed to be diplomatic and all, but what I say to my teammate doesn’t concern you.” He rounded back to Chae-Seon. “Now spill. What happened?”

“Nothing! Just a fight, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Yeah, and your hand just happens to be shaking like a little pre-genin during their first real sparring match because you want it to.”

She had thought her hands were clenched. Apparently not.

“Absolutely.”

Suigetsu pulled a medical kit out of his supplies, pushing her down on the ground. “Pull your damn sleeve up. I’m going to stitch your arm up, and then I’ll drag what happened out of you. I don’t care if I have to use some of Haku’s methods.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

Her dad laughed from where he sat, evidently enjoying her suffering.

“Do you have something to contribute, Old Man?”

“Hey, that’s my dad. Have some respect.”

“Oh. My bad. Have something to contribute, Senile Old Man?”

“Senile?” Shikaku’s brow furrowed as he regarded Suigetsu. “Where do you get ‘senile’?”

“I figured that’s what you had to be to send your – ouch!” Chae-Seon threw a punch at him, aggravating her cut, but stopping what could devolve into an argument. “What the hell, Deongsaeng? First when your teacher shows up, and now this?”

“This is my battle to fight, asshole. Stay out of it.”

“But you’re my Deongsaeng.” Suigetsu scowled. “What else am I supposed to do?”

“I said stay out of it, Oppa.” She yanked the needle from him, suturing her own arm, much to the disgust of the three genin. And probably her father, if she thought about it. “I’m gonna take care of it when we get to the village.”

“Fine, whatever. Just stop punching me.”

“Stop getting in my business and I’ll stop punching you.” Chae-Seon froze before her head rocketed from her arm towards Suigetsu. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare.”

The evil glint in his eyes was enough to tell her she was fighting a losing battle.

“So, Nara-san. You’re Chae-Seon’s dad, right?” Shikaku nodded in response, apprehensive. Good. As far as Chae-Seon was concerned, right now Suigetsu could not be trusted. “Do you have any funny stories from when she was younger?”

Chae-Seon scowled as her father’s eyes lit up. Evidently, despite Suigetsu’s anger with the man and her dad’s trepidation with a foreign shinobi he barely knew, a friendship was forming.

“Oppa, I swear to God, I’m going to gut you like a fish and leave your remains in a river.”

“Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it, Deongsaeng.” Suigetsu turned back to Shikaku, who had offered up a story from when she was still in the Academy. “Now shut up, I want to hear this.”

"Well, I can tell you a couple from when she was in the Academy..."

"Dad! You're supposed to be on my side!" 

*

Chae-Seon had insisted they stay a night in a nearby town to give the Genin and Neji a chance to recuperate before they were running back to Konoha.

Shikaku had watched her carefully all night, but something still bugged him. He only made the decision to ask about it once they were alone.

“You can ask for help when you’re injured.”

“I know.”

“Just because you’ve had worse, that doesn’t mean you have to deal with things alone.”

Chae-Seon looked him in the eye. “What are you getting at?”

Shikaku sat down next to her. “You refused to take help when getting Neji out of there. You refused help during the fight, even though you knew he was dangerous. You knew even more about him than I did, but you wouldn’t take any help.”

“It’s not that I wouldn’t take help. It’s that I wasn’t going to let you get hurt when you were the best shot at making sure Neji got out alive. Park Dong-Il was going to go after me the second he saw me, and that was a given. He doesn’t know you, he couldn’t care less about you. He probably went for the first Konoha headband he saw, and didn’t give a shit about who it was, just that he knew the oldest on that particular squad probably had the information he wanted.

“I’ve fought this guy before, and yeah he’s a merc, but he’s not your average merc. He’s got some kind of shinobi training, as far as I can tell, but nothing concrete enough for actual jutsu.”

“But you wouldn’t let Suigetsu help you when you got back. You wouldn’t let someone treat you.” Shikaku set a hand on her shoulder. It wounded him a little when she tensed up. “Riko…”

“Chae-Seon.”

“Chae-Seon. You can’t go through life as a shinobi pushing people away.”

“That’s what you thought I was doing?” Chae-Seon laughed. “Suigetsu hates blood. He can stitch people up if he has to, and he does a bang-up job with first-aid, but he only learned it because Haku insisted we all know it.

“He’ll do anything for one of us, and that means dealing with seeing us bleed if it means helping us. The least I could do was make sure he didn’t have to.”

“You care for your team a lot.”

“Of course I do. Those three have my back, no matter what. There’s a reason we rent an apartment together, and it’s not just because it’s cheaper that way.”

“You trust them? All of them?”

“With my life.”

He could live with that.

*

The young boy clinging to her son’s side was a welcome distraction from her husband’s late return. Jae-Suk was short, had light pink hair, and a large smile. He was chattering at Shikamaru, asking him about different words and characters throughout the text they were looking over.

“And you said that one means ‘income credit’, right?”

“Shikamaru,” Yoshino peaked at the book. It was a drab one about the Konoha tax system. “Why are you making him read a book about taxes?”

“Don’t look at me, he picked it out.” Shikamaru shrugged. “Kid was all over the damn law and economics books. Couldn’t get him to give them up, so I made him pick one topic and stick to it.”

Yoshino laughed. “Well, as long as you’re enjoying yourself, Jae-Suk-kun. Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“My mom doesn’t know where I am, though.” Jae-Suk fidgeted in his seat. “I don’t want her to worry… After my sister…”

“Your sister?”

Jae-Suk shook his head, standing and heading toward the door. “I should head home.”

“Jae-Suk-kun, wait!”

Jae-Suk paused. “What?”

Yoshino glanced at Shikamaru before looking back at Jae-Suk. She grabbed some of the dinner she had prepared, putting it into a box. “Well, if you’re not staying, you could at least take some food.

“It’s late. It’s entirely possible your family has already eaten.”

“Ah…” Jae-Suk took the box. He smiled as the smells within met his nostrils. “Thank you, Nara-shi!”