Concern and suspicion
Shino was half convinced his cousin Haru was crazy. He just didn’t understand her, her logic at right angles to the world as he understood it. He couldn’t predict her, couldn’t understand why she did things, and things that he didn’t understand had always bothered him.
It wasn’t that there was no logic to her actions. There was definitely some kind of rational thought process at work, warped and twisted though it was. She was like all of his family in that at least, but where usually he could unravel the reasoning his kin were using, with Haru, understanding simply eluded him. He couldn’t predict her.
There were the costumes, the performances, the strange friends that could show up at any hour of the day or night. She seemed at once older and younger than she was, with the way she’d play tea party with their youngest cousins far beyond the age where most girls would have deemed it beneath them, and the hours she spent doing esoteric research on her kikkaichu with creepy uncle Shamal.
She was his cousin, and yet the calm stoicism common to his clan was almost entirely absent in her. Her moods were mercurial, wild, she felt everything so strongly and expressed it without reserve. Joy, and anger, and frustration, and love. Not that his clansmen were unfeeling, they were not, Shino was not, but to share his heart so freely clear for the world to see, the very idea off it was strange to him, uncomfortable, inappropriate, overwhelming. She put him off balance, and it was a terrible thing to resent your own relatives, but sometimes when it came to Haru, he couldn’t help himself.
Because for all her obvious instability Haru had friends, was an inseparable part of the close knit group that was her academy class, she had Kyouko, and Hana, and Tsuna, and a good dozen others. She was happy. While Shino, Shino sometimes felt invisible, adrift in the fractured social landscape of his classmates, and he didn’t know quite how to make himself a part of it. He was lonely, and she was not, and he didn’t know how to fix it.
But then, maybe that was as much to do with the differing social structures of their year groups as it was to do with their differing personalities. Because Shino’s class just didn’t have the cohesiveness that Haru’s class had. They were fractured into a dozen smaller friendship groups and he was far from the only one left on the outside, while Haru’s class was united. Yes there were different friendship groups within it but they were all part of one whole, centred around Sawada Tsunayoshi.
It was a year after Haru started at the academy that Nara Shikamaru told him his suspicions about Sawada and his class. Shino listened. When a Nara offered a warning, smart people paid attention, and Shikamaru was a Nara right down to his bones. When he realised Shino wasn’t dismissing him out of hand Shikamaru had taken him back to his house to show him the evidence he’d gathered, and what he’d put together was… alarming. Why, because it indicated a level of influence that no-one should have been able to gain in a ninja village without ringing all sorts of alarm bells and yet the only people who seemed to have noticed were Shikamaru, and Shino himself. Shino was worried, and yet somehow, he also felt a little excited, thrilled at the thought of protecting the village in secret with a new friend who had trusted him with his findings.
According to Shikamaru’s records it seemed to have started on Sawada’s first day of the academy, when he met Shikamaru’s cousin Hayato, and it only escalated from there. The whole class was under Sawada’s thumb by this point, as well as plenty of others up to and including adult jounin. The whole class was under his thumb, but not all to the same extent. Shikamaru had profiles on all of what he called the “inner circle”, Shino wished he could say he was surprised that Haru’s name was on the list. On the one hand she was family, and he should trust in her, on the other hand, he knew she was unstable and cults liked to take advantage of unstable people. He wasn’t surprised, but he was worried. He might not understand Haru but she was family, and his responsibility, he didn’t want to see her involved in that kind of trouble.
At least she wasn’t one of Sawada’s core enforcers the way Shikamaru’s cousin seemed to be. According to the colour coded charts Shikamaru had shown him she was part of a trusted, but semi-independent group within a group led by the civilian born girl Sasagawa Kyouko, who was apparently the distant relative of their classmate Haruno Sakura. She was in deep, but not as deep as Shikamaru’s own cousin, who appeared to be one of Sawada’s closest confidants.
The whole situation was alarming really and Shino still wasn’t sure why none of the adults had noticed all this. That is until Shikamaru turned the page over to a particular profile.
Rokudo Mukuro, genjutsu expert. And now that Shikamaru was pointing it out to him, Shino realised that he had no idea where Rokudo came from, or where he lived, or even when his birthday was. Shino felt an icy chill down his back as he realised how thoroughly not only he, but dozens of competent adult ninja had been manipulated.
And it really was only him and Shikamaru who realised it. Shikamaru had tried to draw their other classmates attention to it, but none of them had taken him seriously. Some had humoured him, but none appreciated the full gravity of the situation, not even Yamanaka Ino, whose family were famous for their ability to read people. It was terrifying. He found himself spending more and more time with Shikamaru, trying to document the spread of Sawada’s influence.
He wasn’t sure it served much of a practical purpose, but he felt like he ought to be doing something. And if a part of him felt a little flutter of happiness at the chance to spend time and do something with a friend, well it was a good thing. After all team bonds were valued in Konoha.