Authority and influence
Cousin Hayato was… troublesome. The whole clan was pretty much agreed on that. Shikamaru personally had deep dark suspicions that he was an actual hell demon cunningly disguised as a small child to wreak terrible havoc upon the clan. It was like he’d declared a one child war on peace and tranquillity within Nara clan grounds. Shikamaru had taken to hiding at Chouji’s every time he wanted a decent nap, it was exhausting.
If they hadn’t known better they’d have suspected Hayato wasn’t really a Nara, but they’d run DNA tests when they first brought little three year old Hayato back to the clan. There had been a bit of a fuss about it at the time, at least among the adults. Four year old Shikamaru really couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Something to do with Cousin Shikaren being in deep trouble with the clan generally and his wife specifically. Anyway the upshot of that was they were very, very sure Hayato was a Nara. Whether he was human or not was up for debate, but he was definitely family.
He didn’t look much like family to be honest. White hair, green eyes, and the most vicious scowl any of them had ever seen on a three year old, not the classic Nara look. The clan had mostly shaken it off and put it down to him taking after his mother that way. His looks weren’t the issue, though. It was his personality.
It hadn’t taken long for them to realise he hadn’t inherited the standard Nara personality either. Hayato was possibly the angriest small child in the entire world. Shikamaru certainly hadn’t met any that were angrier, and he went to school with Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura. It was almost a shame because Hayato would probably have been quite a cute child if he stopped trying to bite people for five minutes at a time. Shikamaru had been so glad that he was four, and that cousin Hayato was therefore not his problem. Right up until he realised that since he was the future clan head, Hayato eventually would be his problem. Maybe he should try and catch his father out with some sort of immortality jutsu, for the greater good.
He did have the Nara intelligence though. And not just a little of it, he was one of the only kids his own age that could actually give Shikamaru a challenge at shougi. Whatever his other faults, Hayato was a genius. Honestly Shikamaru suspected that made it worse. Hayato was vindictive and violent enough to wreak havoc, and intelligent enough to be very, very good at it. It was really the worst possible combination.
Hayato had put the clan through a solid year of truly nightmarish behaviour, before the adults, in their infinite wisdom, packed him off to the academy. Where he became at least in theory Shikamaru’s problem, a whole lot earlier than Shikamaru had hoped for. The idea, as far as Shikamaru had been able to make out was that a. maybe school would teach him to behave where all other attempts had failed, b. maybe the physical training would wear him out to the point that he at least had less energy to be a menace, and c. at the very least he’d be out of the compound for a few hours while he was at the academy. It wasn’t actually a terrible plan, Shikamaru’s personal preferences aside, it just happened to backfire particularly spectacularly.
Most of the clan thought the explosives fixation was the worst thing, to come out of sending Hayato to the academy. Certainly it was the most immediate problem, none of them were pleased with having the sound of heavy property damage interrupting their daily naps, and Hayato had turned out to be horrifyingly good at explosive seals. Good enough to write his own and start making improvements, within about a week of learning how to use them. The clan would have been impressed if it wasn’t such a nightmare, with the boy practicing all hours of the day and night, seemingly without the need for sleep. The explosives were terrible, Shikamaru fully agreed. But Shikamaru went to school with his cousin, and he could see a much bigger problem waiting down the line.
Not that anyone believed him. Sawada Tsunayoshi was by all appearances, a perfectly nice, polite, well-mannered young boy. He didn’t make trouble in class, he was genuinely nice to everyone around him, and he even managed to rein in cousin Hayato’s explosives practice to something almost tolerable. As far as the adults were concerned Sawada Tsunayoshi was an angel. A saviour that could do no wrong. They actually encouraged Hayato’s association with him.
The thing was, Shikamaru went to school with them, and he saw things the adults didn’t see. Little details, like the fact that his cousin the uncontrollable rage demon turned into an overenthusiastic hero worshipping puppy around Sawada. Or the fact that at the end of Hayato’s first year, some civilian kid with a Samurai background randomly transferred to the ninja academy, apparently for the sole reason of following Sawada around. Or there was the deeply disturbing genjutsu expert who even the teachers flinched at but for some reason listened to Sawada, and nobody remembered exactly where he came from. There were others too. Quite a lot of others, all of them violent, unstable, or in some other way deeply disturbing, and all of them answered to Sawada.
In fact the whole class was under Sawada’s thumb to some extent, but it seemed to be mostly the really disturbing ones, his cousin included, that were part of what Shikamaru had started mentally labelling the “inner circle”. He had this horrible suspicion his cousin might have joined a cult. He caught Hayato referring to Sawada as Juudaime once, they had secret meetings, and codes, and titles (apparently his cousin was Storm). They kept recruiting as well, every time Shikamaru turned around it looked like their network had grown, they even had adult ninja that seemed peripherally attached, and as for their fellow students. No-one was safe. They’d picked up one of the two surviving Uchiha right after the massacre, and they kept looking speculatively at Hayato’s older sister, cousin Bianchi.
It was concerning. Shikamaru was concerned. And in a few years this whole mess was going to be his problem. He could just feel it in his bones.