part 2
Shikako’s sense of time is off, firstly on account of being locked in a windowless, featureless room and secondly because zoning out and tracking the movement of people in the building around her is a much better way to spend her time than being aware of how long she’s been held in this room. It doesn’t really matter how much time has passed, though, and worrying about it is just letting this universe’s version of Tsunade win.
Eventually people return to the observation room. Shikako wonders, idly, if there’s some way to tell who they are — the hint of chakra that she can sense doesn’t have the sort of variety she’s used to, the kind her mind associates with texture and color. It’s only a sort of brightness setting that sets one person aside from another.
Tsunade had been fairly dim. Ibiki had been a sort of midrange. Maybe the difference has something to do with chakra range, or chakra control? But while she’s a prisoner, there’s no way to test that or see if she can learn to recognize people by how bright their signature is, so it’s a useless thing to think about.
Better to try and return to pondering what all exactly she’d put into that teardrop-seal and how she might see the seal again and figure out how to reverse it so that she can go home. Returning to the temple in Hot Springs is probably the first step, although Shikako really doesn’t want to and doubts she’ll find anything. If there’d been a seal there powerful enough to send her from one universe to another, she thinks would have sensed it while she was there.
But, then, she had been pretty preoccupied with vomiting blood and passing out and everything. So maybe not. She’ll have to check to make sure.
One of the brighter people in the observation room moves. It’s very, very hard not to sit up and look at where the person is as they move out of the observation room and around the corner to the door of Shikako’s interrogation room, but Shikako knows that giving away that she can still sense something would be stupid.
The doorknob turns, and Shikako sits up to look at the door.
Shikako suspects that there’s some kind of key-in system at work in the seals on the doorknob, so that the last person who opened the door from the outside is the only one who can open it from the inside, and she wonders what happens if you kill that person while they’re in the room, although she doesn’t seriously consider doing so. This isn’t her village and these aren’t her allies, but she’d really prefer to escape without killing anyone and without having to break the seals on this room.
The door opens. Chakra floods in and Shikako holds her breath because it’s easier. She manages to get more chakra into the Gelel stone, but more importantly her visitor is Sai and she gets a much better feel for his chakra.
The Sai she knows is a deliberate stroke made with a steady hand, the rasp of the brush against the paper as the mark is made. This Sai is different. It might be the same mark, but it’s completed, the brush lifted, and now one must guess if the ink is dry or if it will smear at the slightest touch.
Is that better? Is that worse? Does it mean anything at all? Shikako has never been sure if her impressions of people’s chakra had any informative value, and Tonbo-senpai hadn’t been much help. It just feels like chakra, he’d said, so she’d thought maybe she was just imagining it. Maybe it was only a reflection of her opinion of a person.
The door closes. All the chakra slips away and Shikako can breathe again.
Sai is still an Uchiha, dressed in dark blue. Unarmed, probably because he’s entering her interrogation cell, and carrying a wrapped ration bar in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. His hair, she sees now, is a little longer than she’d expect. He has a scar along one forearm that her Sai doesn’t have.
“Hello. Ibiki feels he wouldn’t get much more out of you, and also that you will appreciate transparency,” Sai says. He sounds like her Sai, mostly. He places the ration bar and the water down on the table. “These are for you. I hope you will speak with me, but we could sit silently instead. Or I could stand.”
“You... don’t have to stand,” Shikako says. She can practically hear the words in Ibiki’s voice, explaining why Sai would be a better interrogator than Ibiki, who Shikako supposes she was probably not responsive to in the right way, although she wouldn’t have minded more interviews with him.
The fact that she’s able to think of a conversation with Ibiki in a room like this as an interview is... probably why they switched her interrogator.
“I apologize for my anger at the gate.” Sai says, sliding into the chair across from Shikako. “I leapt to conclusions, and was not... hospitable. And then you were arrested, although you surely would have been arrested even if I had been very welcoming.”
“It’s fine.” Shikako reaches for the water and the ration bar, not hungry but hell if she’s going to seem to reject the food. The water bottle is cold to the touch, wetting her hands with condensation. The ration package crinkles. “I wasn’t really thinking clearly, so you’re right that I...” Shikako trails off, looking at the ration bar she’s holding.
Sai waits a little longer than most people would for her to continue, and when she doesn’t he asks, “Is this not your preferred flavor?”
“No one has a preferred flavor of ration bar,” Shikako says absently. She sets the water down and turns the ration bar over, studying every line of the packaging. “Where did you get this?”
“It was provided for me,” Sai says.
It’s an Akimichi ration bar. Sai is an Uchiha, apparently, so of course it was ‘provided’ for him. He must be under orders not to say by who, but... the list is short. Maybe it was Ibiki’s idea, of course, but... this universe’s version of Inoichi would have the clearance. And Shikako is fairly sure that this universe’s version of her father had watched her talk with Ibiki.
“Thank you,” Shikako says. She opens the ration bar, and the crinkling of the foil it’s sealed in is just like the ones from home. It’s weirdly reassuring.
“I only carried it into the room, but you’re welcome,” Sai says. His body language is perfectly blank — sitting straight in his chair, his posture perfect, his hands resting idle in his lap — which Shikako is pretty sure is Sai’s way of showing stress. “You did not ask, but my name is Uchiha Hikaku.”
“Oh,” Shikako says. She hadn’t considered that Sai might have a name other than ‘Sai’ although... of course he would. “You probably already know, but my name is Nara Shikako.”
“Yes,” Sai — still ‘Sai’ — says, slowly. “I heard. I must ask you some questions. Ibiki had a list.”
“Sure,” says Shikako. She breaks off part of the ration bar and pops it into her mouth. It doesn’t taste good, exactly, but it tastes familiar.
Sai pauses. “His list wasn’t good,” Sai says. “It would be a waste of my time. And your time. I have my own questions.”
Ibiki must be one of the people in the mirror room watching, and Shikako wishes she could see his face. It’s probably priceless, and she’s jealous of whoever is in there with him.
“You can ask me whatever you want,” Shikako says.
He looks more carefully at her now, a tension settling over the room. A short pause that drags out into something meaningful.
Sai asks, “How do you master death?”
Maybe the audience thinks it’s a sign of Sai blurring the lines between herself and the native Shikako, but...
“The wand, the ring, and the cloak,” Shikako says immediately. And then she struggles for a moment with the translation — she’s never actually told anyone this story in this life — and adds, “The Deathly Hallows.”
Sai leans forward. “Tell me the story,” he requests. He looks almost hungry for it. Ibiki must be dying in the observation room.
it’s lucky for Shikako that the story is easy to remember, although that was probably by design. Sai’s version of her would have had to remember it off the top of her head to tell it to him, after all.
“Three brothers come to a river and win boons from the god of death by cheating. Each asks for a different tool,” Shikako says. “The eldest wanted a powerful weapon, but was murdered for it by a stronger man. Death claimed him. The middle brother wanted a ring to bring his dead lover back to him, but she was still cold and dead and he killed himself. Death claimed him, too.
“The youngest wanted a cloak that could hide him even from the god of death, and he used it to live a long life. He and Death met again as old friends.”
Short, specific, and not subversive. Of course she’d pick the Tale of the Three Brothers to tell Sai. Shikako skipped some of the details — doesn’t know how she translated wizards cheating death to ninja cheating death, or if maybe she just described wizards to Sai or what — but it’s clearly satisfied Sai. He sits back in his chair.
“The name you used for me at the gate,” says Sai. “Is that what you know me by?”
Shikako says, “Yes,” but doesn’t elaborate because if Sai wanted their audience to hear the name ‘Sai’ he would have said it himself. Shikako can’t actually imagine why that’d be a problem, but this isn’t the time or place to dig.
“How did you meet him?” Sai asks. Without letting her reply, he continues on to say, “How could we possibly have met?”
“You were assigned to a mission with myself and my teammate to the Land of Stone,” Shikako says. “To fill out our team, because our usual third member was... not available.”
“One mission,” Sai repeats.
This is, it seems, a disappointment to him. But Shikako can fix that! She reaches for her water.
“No, that’s just how we met. You came with us to Land of Birds, too, and then... a mission to Land of Moon.” Normally you’d never just tell your mission history to someone while sitting in an interrogation room, but that seemed like a non-issue. None of the missions were even classified and none of them had happened here.
“We were occasional teammates, then.”
Shikako frowns at him. “We were friends. We’d have after-mission team dinners. You came to Naruto’s going away party.”
“I... attended a party.”
“Yep.”
“But my name was...” Sai trails off, not completing his thought.
“It was,” Shikako agrees. “It might have been a code name or something? We were under the impression that you were, uh, checking up on us or something during that first mission. Looking out for... village interests. Or something. We’d just gotten back from a mission that went way worse and way weirder than normal.”
“You’re referring to Shimura Danzō,” Sai says bluntly.
Shikako is a ninja, so she doesn’t do a spit take, but she does swallow a little more carefully than usual and put her water down.
“I never had any proof,” Shikako says. “And I couldn’t risk asking you directly.”
“I was informing on you.” Sai is bitter, eyes flat. “And you knew it. I was your enemy. Why did you look pleased to see me at the gate?”
“You aren’t my enemy,” Shikako says firmly.
“You — my friend — she would have disposed of me immediately if she knew I was betraying her, even after working with me for years. Especially after working with me for years.”
“No, she wouldn’t have,” snaps Shikako, a little too fast and loud to be anything even approaching calm. “Not you. You’re important.”
She doesn’t like to think about that side of herself, the ruthless part of her that decided that the lives of three hundred or so Uchiha were worth less than getting to stay safe and sound with her own family. The part of her who killed three genin in the Forest of Death because it was easy and she had really, really needed something to be easy. But she can say with certainty that if she’d recognized Sai as Sai — and clearly she had — she would never have chosen her life over his. Naruto will need him.
Sai stares at her.
Shikako looks back. And has to push some hair out of her face. Stupid hair.
Sai says, “She’d say the same thing. But why am I important? What made me important?”
“You just are,” Shikako says. “That’s how friendship works. You decide the other person is important and you follow through.”
“I did not follow through,” Sai says softly. There’s a slight slump to his shoulders. Defeat.
“She’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“And...” Shikako swallows. “And how did she really die? Not the way Ibiki thinks, right?”
It’s a morbid question to ask, and not really one that Shikako wants answered, but Sai led her to it. He practically begged her to ask it.
“She thought the only way to have Danzō removed from power and therefore be safe from him was to out him as a bloodline thief.” Sai’s gaze has drifted down, looking at his lap. At his hands. “So we attacked him. In public.”
She’s always had that plan on the backburner, a sort of last-resort blunt-force move to be pulled out in the event she was sure to die whether or not she made a move against Danzō... of course an alternate version of her would have the same idea.
“The kamikaze protocol,” Shikako says. “I’m sorry it came to that.”
Sai’s eyes widen, just barely. “That’s what she called it,” he says, “but she would never tell me what it was from. What she meant for it.” His brow creases. “Is it a metaphor?”
Oh.
“I... don’t really remember what it’s from anymore,” Shikako says. “It’s not a metaphor, though.” She doesn’t know how to explain, really, hasn’t prepared a fictionalized version to explain the origins of a term she hadn’t really thought she’d ever use out loud anymore.
“But what does it mean?”
Is it better to not tell him? To leave him blaming himself? Probably not.
“It means she didn’t think either of you were going to survive,” Shikako says, and keeps her voice soft and gentle in recognition of how very, very hard this will be to hear. “It means... she might even have thought that her death was necessary to succeed, and she thought that that was a fair trade.”
Sai is just... watching her. Yeah, okay, maybe knowing isn’t better. But it’s definitely not worse, at least.
“You already had your sharingan when you confronted Danzō, didn’t you?” Shikako prods.
Sai nods, a jerky and unnatural movement. He looks as though he couldn’t speak even if he wanted to.
“She knew what she was doing. She wanted you to live.” Shikako looks down at the table, at the empty ration bar wrapper and half-full bottle of water. She can’t say much more than that. She won’t give away Uchiha clan secrets to an unknown audience.
Her hair is in her face again. It always is. She’d almost have preferred they’d shaved it off instead of having to leave it loose. She tucks it back as best she can and feels ridiculous. Maybe when she gets out of here she can use a strip of paper and a pen from her hammer space and make something that will at least keep it in a low ponytail.
“She always kept her hair braided,” Sai says — almost suddenly, after what felt like a long and horrible pause.
Shikako looks back up at him. “I usually do, but I...” Shikako trails off. She doesn’t want to get into what, exactly, happened to the braid fastener that Ino got her.
“I will bring a hair tie for you,” Sai promises.
“Thank you,” Shikako says, and doesn’t bother hiding the relief she feels. It’s a small thing, the smallest, but she kind of desperately needs it.
Sai nods and then he’s leaving, taking her empty water bottle and the ration wrapper with him. When the door opens, Shikako feels that Ibiki is definitely one of the three people in the observation room. The other two are probably Shikaku and Inoichi. A fourth person is joining them, the tense, fragile chakra of this universe’s Tsunade trailed by several ANBU-suppressed chakra signatures.
The door closes.
Shikako waits, tense and trying not to look it, and then waits some more.
An hour or so later, Tsunade comes in and Inoichi follows her. Tsunade takes up her place leaning against the wall, arms crossed. Inoichi...
He looks like he should, and feels like he should, except for... the seals. He’s missing his usual arm guards, clearly to allow for the seal array sprawled across his hands, up his arms, disappearing under his shirt. Given that his chakra isn’t suppressed, Shikako can guess both what the seals do and why he’s here fairly easily.
Her itching need to get a look at the seals on Inoichi and how they interact with the seals at work in this interrogation cell is tampered a lot by Inoichi’s obvious purpose.
Ibiki had eventually gotten around to asking, Can you prove it? and Shikako had said she probably couldn’t, but maybe she should have pulled out some things from hammerspace and tried anyway. She might even have pictures in there, left over from moving downstairs to make room for Kino. Most of her array of childhood photos and team candids hadn’t made it back up on a wall.
It’s too late for that now, obviously.
Tsunade doesn’t say anything, just watches as Inoichi comes to stand next to her chair.
Inoichi says, “I hope you’ll cooperate.” He sounds perfectly neutral, which on Inoichi means he’s probably not very pleased to be doing this.
Shikako can’t say she’ll actually cooperate. She wants absolutely nothing to do with someone messing around in her memories, even if it will prove her story true, and is pretty sure fighting it will be an uncontrollable instinct. On the other hand, Inoichi has chakra and she doesn’t. Physically resisting is impossible unless she wants to try out shadow state while the door is closed and Inoichi and Tsunade are in the room.
So Shikako says nothing, merely pushing her chair back and turning to face Inoichi.
“You’ll want to turn the chair, too,” Inoichi says, with just that hint of that good-as-an-uncle comfort Shikako is used to. “People tend to need the support of the chair back to keep from ending up on the floor when the technique ends.” Manipulative, yeah, and maybe partially a test to see if she’ll react to it, but not unkind. Shikako would, after all, like to avoid falling out of her chair.
“Just do it,” Tsunade orders. She sounds even less happy than earlier and Inoichi’s neutral expression cracks just a little, the corners of his mouth turning down.
Shikako doesn’t really think that’s necessary or that Inoichi will start in the middle of her moving the chair — and even if he does, it will be worth it to spite Tsunade. Shikako stands, turns the chair, and sits back down without even looking at Tsunade, whose orders are meaningless.
Inoichi does hand seals for a technique Shikako has never seen before while she’s moving the chair and he has his hands on her head the moment she’s seated, taking her off-guard.
She’s so tired. She’s been tired and working through it as best as possible. It’s not a physical thing, it doesn’t even seem to have anything to do with the Jashinist’s life-draining seal, it’s just... there are so many thoughts that hurt now. So many fresh memories with edges Shikako can only just stand to skirt around. The worst of them is the sight of Jashin, the feel of it, the way it had twisted through her and around her.
Inoichi’s mind reaches for hers and it’s an intrusion. A violation. She can feel the chakra of the technique, the spun-sugar barbed wire feel that echos Ino’s chakra so closely. It’s not the poisonous hot oil that Itachi’s chakra was or the rotting slime of Jashin, but it hurts just the same and Shikako hates it.
“No!” she says, although she’s not sure if she really manages to say it out loud. Shikako doesn’t have any chakra to resist, it slips through her fingers just like before, but she’d defeated a god yesterday without a drop of chakra. What is the mind if not the domain of the will?
NO. It thrums through her. It shakes lose some of Inoichi’s hooks and handholds, and Shikako knows that her mind is full of things with teeth and claws and there are places to hide, places so deep Inoichi will never be able to tell that anything was ever in her brain at all.
She will not give up her secrets.
She will not let this happen to her again.
The sweet-sharp threads of Inoichi’s chakra pull back. The technique ends. Inoichi’s hands pull away from her head. Shikako does not slump back into the chair — she continues sitting up straight, back tense.
“Well?” Tsunade asks.
Inoichi shakes his head. “She’s recently gone through some kind of mental attack. I won’t read her without the department’s equipment.”
That’s not an answer Tsunade likes. “The equipment might be damaged by her seals,” Tsunade says. “What if I don’t care about if she’s hurt or not? It’s not like she’s one of ours.”
“ I wouldn’t come out of hurting her unscathed,” Inoichi says flatly. That’s probably the most rude Shikako’s ever heard Inoichi be with anyone, ever, and certainly the closest to insubordination Shikako imagines he can get without crossing the kind of line you can’t come back from.
“Fine,” Tsunade says. “We’ll wait for Jiraiya to get here.”
They leave, and Inoichi still looks unhappy. That’s all very interesting, and Shikako should maybe be worried about Jiraiya, but instead she’s just very very glad to be alone.
There’s no way she’s going to be able to sleep, but she’s tired of sitting in this chair. Stiff. Shikako stands and starts through her normal morning stretches, the ones her mom had started teaching her and Shikamaru, moving through them slowly until her pulse slows and the tension leaves her.
She’d had no idea she could do that. That she’d be able to resist. She has no idea if she’ll be able to do it again when they break out the special Tobirama-designed technique amplifying equipment, and she really doesn’t want to find out. She’ll have to escape. Maybe when Sai brings her a hair tie.
Shikako abandons the idea of sitting in the chair. She hates the chair. She also hates that she’s been consistently watched, although knowing about her audience is better than not knowing. Shikako really needs some privacy and about 16 hours of dead sleep and to be home or maybe in Sasuke’s apartment but definitely anywhere but here.
She’ll settle for lying on her back on top of the table. If she were an adult, it would surely be too short for that, but Shikako is just shy of fourteen and she fits quite neatly. When she folds her arms behind her head her elbows hang off the table. She can’t sleep, not with a brain that feels like raw, overworked dough, though at least the ceiling is satisfyingly blank. It’s not as great to look at as the mountain vista the Fire Temple monks had provided, but it’s useful in its own way.
This is the longest wait yet. Idly, a few times, she comes out of her vacant daze to wonder if Inoichi and Tsunade had argued, if this universe’s Nara Shikaku had an opinion he’d cared to lodge. Once, her mind accidentally snags on the knowledge that Naruto had lost his first friend less than halfway through the Academy, that Sasuke probably doesn’t remember native Shikako’s name, and that Hatake Kakashi has probably never had even an idle, passing thought about her.
She still has Sai, sort of, but she’s going to use him to escape. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, so she tries to plan it without thinking about what kind of effect it will have on Sai. Sai, who always deserves better than she can give him.
The door opens, chakra rushes in. Tsunade and someone Shikako doesn’t recognize.
Of course, she shouldn’t have assumed Tsunade would actually just give up like that. Shikako propers herself up on her elbows to look down the table at the Tsunade and her new interrogation.
The interrogator is a man with orange hair in a high ponytail, bangs parted in the center. He has chakra with the same kind of spun and spooled feel that all Yamanaka have, but.... His chakra is cheap wire, kinked and tangled, twisted and weak. He has the same dead-eyed look that Sai had had when she and Naruto met him, the one that had only really faded during their time in Land of Birds.
None of this exactly inspires confidence.
Neither does the lack of observers in the mirror room, all of them having left moments ago, presumably ordered out.
Shikako lowers herself back down to lay on the table, not feeling cooperative this time.
“Fū, get her in the chair,” Tsunade says. This time she doesn’t go to lean up against the wall, presumably because she doesn’t intend to have this session lead by a former ROOT agent. Well, hopefully former — Danzō is dead, after all. Maybe this version of Tsunade has kept it up in one form or another, or just transferred people like Fū to ANBU.
Fū crosses the room in a handful of quick strides, grabs the front of Shikako’s shirt, and hauls her up off the table like she weighs nothing. Shikako can feel the chakra in his limbs in detail, can feel the way his chakra-reinforcement bolsters his muscles.
But he makes a mistake.
Fū’s not-quite-refined chakra control isn’t so clumsy that he couldn’t, under normal circumstances, instinctively reinforce her shirt a little when he grabs her. Except that the room wicks the chakra away almost as fast as Fū can put it out. Shikako’s sure that Fū has never been to the Dead Wastes, and if he’s been in a room like this one previously has never had the exemption seals on before.
Using chakra outside your body is even harder than reinforcing your body with it. Maybe someone with control like Tsunade would have a chance, or maybe if this were a technique, but it’s not. It’s not even something Fū is doing consciously, so of course he can’t stop his chakra loss and neither can the seals on his hands, once the chakra is beyond his skin.
Shikako’s flimsy shirt, provided by T&I, tears in the middle of Fū yanking her off the table, right when she’s in midair and he’s getting ready to shove her into the chair. Shikako’s quick reflexes save her from braining herself on the table or the chair-back but the only way to save herself is to grab on to Fū’s arm before she can drop.
Fū pushes her back into the chair so roughly that Shikako’s sure she’ll bruise from it, considering her lack of chakra reinforcement. The chair scrapes across the floor with an awful sound.
“Ugh,” Shikako complains, nonverbally, wind knocked out of her a little. Her shirt is missing a chunk, no worse than a low-cut top.
She barely has time to prepare before Fū is running through handseals, his hands on her temples before the scrap of her shirt hits the floor.
Unlike Inoichi, Fū’s chakra isn’t even slightly familiar. Fū is a stranger, a blank-faced enemy, and is almost certainly doing this against Inoichi’s wishes. His technique is a rough, unyielding net casting through her brain — a firmer and more aggressive search for information than Inoichi’s delicate touch.
Memories work by association, one thing leading to another to another. This intrusion feels like Jashin’s brutal squirming and thinking of what Fū’s technique reminds her of makes her think of what saved her and the field of stars that’s been on her mind, the tuneless song.
The memory unfolds like the inescapable maw of some terrible beast, mindless and full of teeth, and breaks Fū’s technique like an eldritch kraken tearing through a fishing net.
The swell of it, washing over her, washing through her. Scraping her clean, trimming the unclean edges and replacing them like new. Like a wave breaking against your legs, like being grabbed by the riptide, subsumed by Gelel.
Every part of you set alight.
Every part of you a part of it until you’re barely you at all.
This isn’t even the full experience. The real thing would melt Fū’s stiff wire mind into molten slag.
Fū stumbles back. Actually stumbles, like he’s forgotten what his body is doing, and trips over his own feet. He goes down, clutching his head and twisting until he’s on his knees bent over, elbows resting on the floor. Shikako has to wonder how much of that was pure, thoughtless reflex because Fū seems insensate.
“The sky,” he says, voice choked and aimless. “The sky, the sky.”
There’s blood — dripping from his nose, hopefully, but she can’t actually see his face, just the droplets of blood hitting the floor. It could be coming from his mouth or eyes. She doesn’t know much about the backlash of Yamanaka jutsu except for what she saw happen to Ino when they fought Kidomaru, and this is... not like that situation. Or maybe Fū just doesn’t know any of the mantras.
“What did you do?” Tsunade snaps. She’d been standing close at hand and now she steps forward and crouches to check Fū — clearly realizing at the last moment that she’s unable to use chakra and going with a physical assessment, fingers searching for Fū’s pulse, hands trying to guide him up off the floor so she can look at his face.
It doesn’t work, though. Fū is unwilling to straighten and Tsunade is literally powerless to make him as long as the door is closed.
“Inoichi said it was dangerous,” Shikako says. “What did you think would happen?” She swallows useless nausea over the thought of what this might mean for Yamanaka Fū. This isn’t Shikako’s fault; it’s on Tsunade.
Tsunade doesn’t reply, already moving for the door.
“The lights!” Fū cries. His entire body shudders.
The door swings open, chakra rushing in, reassuring and abrasive. This might actually be a half-decent time to escape if Shikako herself weren’t still reeling from her third mental intrusion in as little as two days.
“Get him out of here,” Tsunade snaps to someone outside, one of the ANBU-hidden chakra signatures that’s been loitering in the hall.
The ninja who comes in is wearing a strange mask that only lets his mouth and chin show, and no real ANBU gear to speak of. The chakra-masking must be habitual, rather than a part of his duties like it is for ANBU. It’s hard to tell his age, but Shikako thinks he’s younger than Fū. He kneels next to Fū and drags him upright.
Fū’s nose and eyes are bleeding.
“Torune, Torune,” Fū whispers hurriedly. “Don’t listen to the sound of the stars grinding together.”
Torune’s mouth is a grim, flat line as he leads Fū out of the room, mostly carrying him because Fū stumbles and lists like he’s not sure where exactly his body and the floor connect.
Tsunade leaves after them without saying anything else to Shikako, and medical chakra is spilling from Tsunade’s hands before the door even closes.
Shikako looks down at the blood. She curls forward, rests her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands and lets her hair fall in a loose curtain around her. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. She hadn’t meant to hurt him, hadn’t even realized she could, really. Not with that memory. If she’d been reaching for something to stop him in his tracks, she’d have reached for memory of the Kyūbi attack, memory of falling into the black, memory of Jashin looking at her, through her, and being unable to not look back.
Gelel’s field of stars had worn away into something vast but ultimately comforting, the view from inside a god that’s saved Shikako twice now. She hadn’t thought about how it would seem to other people. How incomprehensible it might be if you didn’t first meet it with one foot in the grave.
It’s probably not much more than half an hour later when the door opens again.
Sai.
She looks up at him.
“I did not think to bring tissues,” Sai says, which is how Shikako realizes that she’s crying.
Embarrassing. Awful. Shikako scrubs her face with her hands and is both immensely grateful that no one had shown up in the observation room since Tsunade had left and mortified that Sai came in and found her like this.
“It’s fine,” she tells Sai.
It isn’t convincing, but Sai is a good friend who doesn’t contradict her.
“I brought you a hair tie,” Sai says, holding up said elastic. It’s red. Kunoichi-grade. “I used to...” Sai falters, shifting awkwardly. “I could braid it for you.”
Shikako blinks. Having her hair braided by someone else... by this version of Sai... maybe it should put her hackles up. This Sai is technically a stranger. But instead she nods, and Sai approaches.
He combs her hair out with his fingers. Shikako wonders if she got all the blood out, although if she didn’t Sai doesn’t seem to mind. His fingers move in a steady, practiced rhythm to plait her hair and then ties the end off. Despite crying only minutes beforehand, Shikako finally feels put together. Like a ninja.
“Thank you,” Shikako says when Sai steps away. Now would be the time to make her move, probably, to turn on Sai. There’s no one watching. She just has to get past Sai, and he’ll probably hesitate to hurt her. Would Shadow Possession work to make Sai open the door? Will the seals whip the chakra from her shadow state away too fast for that?
She’ll have to risk it. She can’t be here when Tsunade comes back a fourth time.
“Also,” Sai says. “The hair tie was only a pretense. I’ve come help you exfiltrate the village, as remaining in custody is not safe.”