Hello, everyone!

Have you ever wondered what made Nara Shikaku tick, and how he became the man and Shinobi he was? This is my take on that...

Have fun reading!

Asuka~

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Nara Shikaku, Ningen Shikaku

Did anyone ever share these very same feelings and thoughts he had been harbouring all his life? Anyone at all?

Sometimes he wondered if his parents had already discarded him and labelled him unworthy upon clasping their eyes on him for the first time and naming him, thus sealing his fate. If they had already figured him out back then, shrewd as they naturally were...

Oh, his name certainly seemed to fall perfectly in line with the apparent clan tradition, and at first glance you would not think much of it, deeming it an affectionate homage to the animals under the clan’s esteemed care and the guardians of the forest.

But he’d figured it out alright, the underlying ugly truth, the branding he was carrying for life, the mark of disgrace and divergence, the stain to the family name – no, the entirety of humankind…

They named him Nara Shikaku, disqualified as a Nara.

He had instinctively felt it from a very young age, his difference, his...alienness amongst the humans who made up his clan. And it didn’t take long after learning how to read to find this hidden meaning.

It explained a lot: the emotional gap he sensed between him and the people he shared a last name with, the feelings of being estranged from everyone around him – not just his family, but the entire village –, the bubbling dread creeping up from his gullet every time he had to awkwardly interact with others, the sensation of knowing eyes staring at him as if they could perceive the very wretchedness of his soul by just one single glance. This revelation had the hair at the back of his neck stand on end, a shiver ran down his spine and settled as a permanent lump of coldness in his gut, heavy as a rock and acidic as bile.

It had shaped his development from thereon after. The premise that his entire existence was a failure from the getgo, that his nature ‘disqualified’ him from belonging with the ones meant to take care of him and provide him with a loving home, set him on his path and cemented his mindset. He became extremely wary and guarded, feared for any wrong reaction that heralded the merciless expulsion or even termination of the merely tolerated parasite that he deemed himself to be, as his sharp mind was very well capable of imagining a multitude of the most horrible scenarios how they would put him out of his misery for the good of humanity. Inwardly it terrified him, but he dared not show it in any way lest he be struck by the consequences.

And while the men appeared to regard him with the reserved indifference you would deign a desp1cable spider just out of reach in the corner on the ceiling – only barely tolerated for the purpose of catching mosquitoes and instantly squashed once it was no longer useful or dared crawl too close for one’s liking--, he was most afraid of the women, who seemed to be able to sense his true nature as if it clung to him like a faint but foul odour of burnt rubber he couldn’t possibly wash off even if he decided to henceforth live in a bathtub and scrubbed himself raw for an eternity.

Their apprehensive glances scared him so much that he could feel the very same constant lump of coldness in his gut rise all the way up to his throat every time he had to face them, fearing he would invariably vomit all of his ugliness inside at their pretty feet if he so much as dared to open his mouth.

It was no surprise that he thus became a most taciturn child who only gave off non-committal noises as responses if pressed for answers; it was his only route of defence, he concluded, and in order to maintain his usefulness and therefore the right to continue to dwell in the presence of these humans of this clan – and by extension, the whole village – he had to prove his worth constantly while keeping the lowest of profile at the same time.

His path was that of walking the tightrope of excelling at everything his ingenious mind was possibly capable of and staying almost invisible as to not provoke any form of backlash that might justify them to chase him out of the gentle halo of their lives like a flea-bitten plague-carrying rat, he decided. Making all of the internal effort while pretending to not even bat an eyelash on the outside. Doing everything he possibly and impossibly could to render the label branded onto his very being undone. To erase the invisible stain from his given name.

What would it take to ‘qualify’ him as a Nara, as a human being even?

What would it take, what would it take?!

This question haunted him constantly, thieved his sleep at night when he lay unmoving and alone on his futon; eyes closed, senses alert, pretending to meditate when in reality his mind found neither rest nor reprieve, and the coldness of mortal dread poured freely from his gut up to his brain like an icky, rancid liquid flowed from the bottom of an 4lmost empty bottle all the way up to the cap when tipped over to the side.

Invariantly he time and again nodded off during class at the Academy due to exhaustion from his sleep-deprivation; the tasks asked by the teachers posed no challenge whatsoever for his mind, and it was occupied with finding means to survive anyway. Luckily, it also kept him afloat and helped evade the brunt of all possible trouble as he still remained able to solve the problems in a jiffy, even if he was caught napping, quite literally and metaphorically.

But as soon as he carefully trod the path laid out for him by his venerable family – the path of a Shinobi – he needed to learn how to interact with people properly without raising susp1cion, to anticipate their every reaction to his every move, to emulate appropriate behaviour according to their expectations, and to pose as one of them… to pretend to be ‘normal’ without being found out and have his deficiency be exposed for everyone to see. That in itself birthed a new level of inner terror for him.

But it also taught him how to be a true Shinobi: he needed to ‘kill his heart’ in order to survive in a society of humans as one who was by birth ‘disqualified’ as such, he needed to steel himself, hide his true thoughts and feelings and instead donned a mask of impenetrable boredom and indifference at all times. Living in a world of make-believe and pretence, always afraid of being figured out, always afraid of being cast out, he needed to master his secret art at all cost. Becoming the living shadow of a human so he could pretend to be one, that was the goal.

Ironically, this fit right in with the image of what he perceived might ‘qualify’ him as a Nara – his clan was that of the shadow wielders after all! And seemingly effortlessly, he was quite apt at these signature Ninjutsus. He made sure not to show anyone how much and how hard he really practised to achieve as much, or what he was truly capable of, though.

A shadow only stood out as much as it contrasted to the intensity of the light shone onto the object or person it was cast by. That was a principle his clan lived by. So he never voiced any ambitions he might or might not have entertained, much less those others (as in: his classmates and teachers) thought he might be suitable to pursue once they caught a glimpse of the sheer capacity of his mind.

When after graduation he then – like many Nara Shinobi before him – was placed on a team with the heirs of the Akimichi and Yamanaka clans, a new kind of perpetual dread entered his sore excuse of an existence. For if his teammate Inoichi was to glimpse even a fraction of what he kept hidden inside his mind, his life would be over in a heartbeat.

He knew it the very moment their eyes met for the first time: this was a most dangerous situation that could tear asunder all of his efforts up to this point. There was an extremely skilled enemy right before him, and he was not at all sure how to fool him even for a split-second! All Inoichi had to do was use his d4mnable Shintenshin no Jutsu on him and the ugly truth hidden inside the shadows of his soul would be dragged to light.

So what was he supposed to do? What could he even do to keep it from happening?

The answer, he deduced, was to ‘befriend’ his enemy, even though he didn’t know how to make friends yet, much less convincingly pretend to be one without disclosing his secret. But his observational skills and the conclusions he drew from them had yet to let him down, so he steeled his resolve and fuelled it with his desire to survive.

As it turned out, Inoichi was as easy-going as it got, and, as the Yamanaka boy was a walking, talking one-man-entertainment-show all by himself, he didn’t even have to put that much more effort into making awkward conversation than he already did; seemingly his non-committal noises now and then were enough response for Inoichi to keep his incessant chatter going for hours.

And yet he had to stay wary of Inoichi’s curiosity and remained inwardly on edge every second of every minute of every hour he had to spend with his teammates, always second-guessing every move he made and every syllable he uttered if they might make the other boy susp1cious of him. He didn’t dare sleep in his presence for fear he might exploit the situation of his lowered defences and dive into his nightmares. So instead he sneaked off whenever he could during the day to meditate, maybe take the shallowest of naps in order to replenish the resources of his keen mind and keep functioning. But Inoichi managed to find him every time and without fail, regardless, like a hound on the scent of fresh blood. It was truly troublesome.

This was also the time when he picked up Shougi –much to his family’s delight--, and soon used it as a defence mechanism to shield his mind from prying eyes: if he focused hard enough on game strategies, moving the pieces on the board of his imagination and solidifying the image of doing so in his mind, it might rebuke Inoichi from prodding further. For he was not the least bit interested in such ‘complicated and boring things’, as he’d put it with the most displeased mien and a thwarting gesture as if he was swatting an annoying fly. This definitely made life easier when dealing with the Yamanaka, and also scr4ped the barrel for some illusion of approval from his clan, even if it did hardly anything to ease his general dread when dealing with other people.

In the following years on the infamous ‘Ino-Shika-Cho’-team he gradually learnt how to deal with these situations, how to behave like a ‘normal’ human being without any indication that Inoichi had figured him out so far. Thus he became quite confident in his act: if he could fool a ‘friend’, one with frightening capabilities such as the Yamanaka’s no less, he could be a little more comfortable around people, and maybe, eventually, one day become ‘qualified’ as a Nara if only he could keep it up until the very end…

That was when out of the blue he received a low bl0w to the gut with the force of a Bijuudama: in his fear of being discovered by Inoichi he had made the fatal mistake to overlook and thus underestimate his other ‘friend’, Chouza! One day, right before the usual training time, the two of them were waiting on their teammate and their Sensei at the appointed place, and he was lost in thought, already preparing himself for the encounter with Inoichi, when Chouza leaned over and muttered into his ear with his disarmingly kind and soft voice: “Shikaku, relax. There really is no need to be on edge so much around us all the time.”

Shikaku snapped his head around, staring at Chouza wide-eyed like the proverbial deer caught in torchlights right before mercilessly splatted by the oncoming wagon, his mind blank with horrified turmoil on overdrive and icy cold panic rising to br1mming. This was an even more formidable foe if he’d managed to pretend to be harmless enough for Shikaku to lower his guard around him while seemingly easily seeing right through him in turn; a true master of deception he could learn so much from! He was rendered speechless.

Yet Chouza only smiled friendly at him and nibbled on his snack as if he couldn’t hurt a fly even if his life depended on it. “We’re friends after all,” he added offhandedly as if he truly meant it, even if his crescent moon eyes held a knowing glint as he kept smiling. And yet... this was the most cruel bl0w of them all, and it knocked the wind out of everything he could have replied.

And when he finally did answer, he felt like a mechanic doll helplessly puppeteered by this master-manipulator, flapping his mouth to replay a pre-recorded sentence that sounded as hollow to him as the gaping abyss of dread yawning its maws inside him: “Right. Best friends even.”

Seemingly contented, Chouza nodded slightly to himself and continued eating his snacks without mentioning anything else during the wait, all the while only one maddenlingly frightening thought reverberated and bounced off the imaginary walls of Shikaku’s mind: ‘he knew!’

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