“When you’re alone and you still manage to take down an enemy you could only defeat in multi before, it feels pretty sweet.”
“Huh. So then you do have fun with it?”
“I guess,” Shikadai said and laughed.
The game lecture ended, and the conversation petered out. Silent, father and son looked out on the twilight-colored garden.
Shikamaru broke the silence with the words he had readied earlier. “About that S-rank mission.”
Shikadai listened silently. Shikamaru saw that his son was not rejecting him or this conversation like he had the other night wrapped in his futon with his back turned, and so he mustered up the courage to continue. “I heard about what happened. Looks like you had to deal with a hassle on account of me.”
His son remained quiet.
“Sorry about that.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Dad.”
Shikadai was exactly right. The fact was this client had tried to get close to Shikadai with their eye on Shikamaru. And Shikamaru had had absolutely no idea that any of it was going on. He wasn’t directly involved.
“I never dreamed that my position would have an impact on you,” he said. “My very existence has cast a shadow on your ninja path. I can’t not apologize for that.”
“Cast a shadow on my ninja path?” Shikadai smiled, still looking out into the garden. His smile seemed almost sad somehow. “It’s not such a big deal as all that. An S-rank mission out of the blue, it was just too much of a drag, so I said no. That’s it.”
“A drag, huh?”
“Yeah, total drag. Basically. Just ’cause I looked good in the chunin exams, all these people come out of the woodwork and make this huge fuss over me. But I’m totally not that great. If it means more headaches and more hassles, then I’d rather not be a chunin at all.”
“I know a guy who used to think the same thing.”
“Who?”
Shikamaru pointed to himself.
“You, Dad?” Shikadai’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
Maybe he couldn’t imagine Shikamaru like that, given how hard he worked now, how much hassle he willingly took on. But his own boyhood had been one of annoyance at anything and everything, of satisfaction with middling results. That old Shikamaru had still had a dream, though: the dream of a just-right life.
“And I was way worse than you.” He smiled as he spoke. “At any rate, doing anything at all was a total drag, and just right was basically good enough for me. My dream was to live a lazy, just-right life and then die. I wasn’t interested in standing out at all, and I never dreamed of trying to get ahead. If anyone complimented me, I’d always brush it off with ‘what a drag.’ Anyway, my whole life revolved around trying desperately not to get dragged into any fresh hassles.”
“Really?”
“I’m your dad,” he told his son. “You get that personality from me. Makes sense when you think about it like that, I bet.”
It was a curious logic, but it did make sense. Shikadai could only nod in agreement.
“But…” As the empty sky darkened into night, he saw a vision of his comrades there, injured during the mission to bring back Sasuke. “All that annoying stuff I tried to run from changed me. I always wanted to turn my eyes away from every hassle that popped up before me, but I couldn’t. And every time I overcame one, this feeling grew stronger inside of me, like I couldn’t just keep drifting along the way I was. I started to feel like I had to stand and face whatever came at me without averting my eyes, no matter how much of a drag it was. I felt like if I did that, I’d be able to find my true self.”
“So then the old you wasn’t the real you?”
“At the time, I thought it was. I thought strolling along through a just-right life was very me, but it looks like I was wrong. Now, though, I can hold my head high and say this is the real me.”
Shikadai stayed silent. He pursed his lips like he was thinking hard about something. Shikamaru gently touched his back, suddenly noticing how much larger it was.
“I still say things are a drag, though, don’t I?”
His son nodded.
“But it means something different now,” he said. “When I was a kid, I said everything was a drag without actually putting any real thought into it. But that’s not how it is now.”
“How is it now?”
“You have to be ready to put your life on the line for whatever it is before you can call that thing a drag. You can’t use the word as an excuse to run away. Once you admit that it’s a serious drag, you have to do whatever it takes to overcome it. Otherwise, this little verbal tic of ours is just a convenient means of escape.”
“You have to be ready to put your life on the line for whatever it is before you can call that thing a drag,” Shikadai repeated slowly.
“That’s right.”
His son took a deep breath and then stood up as he exhaled. He looked down on his still-seated father and smiled shyly. “Teach me shogi sometime.”
“What a drag.”
Father and son smiled at each other, and the son gave the father a playful look. “I’m gonna jump in the bath.”
“You bet.”
Shikadai headed back to his own room.
“Woh-kay,” Shikamaru muttered to himself, and then looked back into the living room. “Whoa!”
At some point, Temari had come to sit at the low table. She’d apparently overheard their conversation just now.
“What a drag…hm?” she said slowly, staring at Shikamaru with cold eyes.
Without moving from the veranda, Shikamaru waited for his wife to speak.
“Do you remember the first time you asked me out on a date?” She was talking about the Land of Silence. Shikamaru had asked Temari out after the mission. “Do you remember my answer?”
“What a draaaag,” he replied immediately.
And for the first time in a long time, Temari smiled at him. “An uninspired phrase, but I think it’s a good one.”
Shikamaru looked away, embarrassed. He chuckled quietly before once again turning his eyes toward his wife. “What a drag.”
The couple laughed together.