So much arrogance…
He’d finished work in the middle of the night again, but he still didn’t feel like going home. To release the heat trapped inside him, Shikamaru let his feet carry him to the empty forest. The moon hung in the sky, full tonight. The silhouettes of shadows popped up crisp and clear at his feet.
He wove his sign, the sign he had woven since he was a small boy, far too many times to count. When he crossed both arms, his hands took on the shape before the thought had time to reach his conscious mind. He allowed his chakra to accumulate in the pit of his stomach and released it all at once.
The shadow at his feet shuddered and stretched out to the tree ahead of him. Now transformed into an inky black snake, the shadow crawled along the navy-blue ground, and when it reached a thick trunk with exposed roots, it began to climb, winding its way around the tree. When it got to the place where branches stretched out in all directions, the chakra that filled the shadow suddenly grew stronger, and the shadow began to tighten around the dark blue trunk. The tree squealed and creaked. When he infused the jutsu with maximum chakra, Suffocating Darkness would have an effect on physical objects.
Not enough… It’s still not enough.
He pushed every scrap of chakra he could muster into the shadow. The tree trunk shrieked. Unable to withstand the pressure of the shadow, the wood started to split in places.
And…
He cut off the flow of chakra, and the shadow that snaked around the tree vanished like mist. A fatigue almost too much to endure overcame him.
“Phew.” He kneeled down with a heavy sigh.
More than ten years had passed since he had left the frontlines of battle. His jutsu had languished to the point where he couldn’t even smash a single tree. Pathetic, if he did say so himself. When he thought about what would have happened if Naruto hadn’t let his anger carry him away at the meeting of the Five Kages and broken Shikamaru’s Suffocating Darkness, he shuddered. Just imagining his chakra running out, the jutsu disappearing to leave behind only the animosity of everyone gathered there, the sub-zero icy air of the venue, Shikamaru could hardly stand it.
He sometimes had the thought that it wasn’t supposed to have been like this. He was supposed to have carried out just-right missions, married the just-right girl, and lived with their just-right children, followed by a just-right death. That had been the ideal of his childhood.
But reality had led Shikamaru to an unexpected place. A job that was wasted on him, a wife who was wasted on him, a child who was wasted on him… He had it too good.
Worrying that it was too much for him was a luxury; Shikamaru himself knew that better than anyone. Even so, sometimes he longed for that other life, the lazy, laid-back life. The life with no real worries, the one where he grumbled about his just-right wife over a drink with a friend on his way home after a just-right mission, and then took a look at the faces of his sleeping just-right children once he got home before going to bed satisfied. Rinse and repeat. At some point, he’d get old and die with just the right amount of satisfaction. His heart would have been a whole lot lighter if he’d lived that life instead of this one.
What a drag what a drag what a drag what a drag…
“What a drag!” he shouted. He clutched at the ground and dug up the earth with his fingers. He was about to be crushed under this pressure.
“Strange,” a voice said, and he lifted his eyes from his hands. At some point, a figure had appeared behind the tree he’d been strangling.
All in black…
“I suppose no one in the village knows you get like this.”
The shadow slowly drew near and was gradually lit up by the moon: black hair, black cloak. Cold eyes in a pale face looked down on Shikamaru.
“You’re back already?” Shikamaru asked.
The man nodded wordlessly.
Uchiha Sasuke. Naruto’s rival and best friend. His older brother had killed his entire clan when he was younger, and he’d left the village seeking revenge. Right up until the final stages of the Fourth Great Ninja War, he had walked a different path from Shikamaru, Naruto, and their comrades, moving together with the Akatsuki who’d started the war against the Five Kages. In the last part of the great war, however, Sasuke had fought alongside Naruto, and it was no exaggeration to say that the conflict had ended due to the combined might of Naruto and Sasuke. The two ninja had then reconciled after a one-on-one fight. Now Sasuke was a Konoha shinobi. But his actions during his time as a rogue ninja were far from deserving of praise. He’d fallen so low that at one point his name was in the Bingo Book, a serious criminal. Now he refused to work openly for the village, instead wandering the continent and undertaking missions as the Hokage’s shadow.
“I was just on my way to see Naruto,” Sasuke said.
This was the last person Shikamaru would have wanted to witness this ugly moment of his. Yanking up whatever meager energy he had in his core, he stood and faced Sasuke.
“Looks like rough times,” Sasuke remarked coolly, looking at Shikamaru out of the corner of his eye.
Shikamaru frowned. “We called you back because the situation’s dicey as all get-out.”