wafflelate:

• untitled
• summary: Shikako is born six years earlier than in canon, to a Yoshino and Shikaku who aren’t quite ready for a baby, and is raised a Kinokawa. Things go awry.
• word count: 1,799      warnings: murder, i guess?
• originally posted on the forums, rehomed here with some edits
• shikako being born six years early is a Big Thing on the forums. check around for the “pre!kako” and “care!kako” stuff. most of it is better than this lmao.
• OC notes at the bottom

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Her mother had sung to her. Soft, quiet things that Kako hadn’t known the language well enough to understand and later in life struggles to remember. She had been so small, in her mother’s arms, and scared, and loved. When the attack came, neither of them had stood a chance. Yoshino had kept in shape after the birth, but she had only been a chūnin. Kako had only recently realized where, exactly, she’d been reborn, only recently begun grasping a handful of words.

The attack threw her from her mother’s arms. Laying on the floor, dazed, Shikako watched it happen. Kinokawa Yoshino had died trying to protect her.

The ANBU-masked murderers did not speak as they worked. All that had passed between them were strange flicks of the hands. They’d sprinkled a little dirt around. They’d left their first several volleys of kunai embedded into the kitchen wall and the little nook where the family shrine lived.

One of the kunai had sliced an unlit, upright stick of incense in half.

When the murders had finished, they’d looked down at Shikako, cleaned their blades on her mother’s corpse, and left.

By the time the neighbors could bust in, Shikako too had tried to leave. Too scared to be there anymore. Too scared to do anything. She’d known the village wasn’t safe, but this had been a brutal lesson, even so. She hasn’t been started on learning any Nara clan techniques, but she retreats as far as she can. 

Later, when her dad has been called back from the front and has drawn her out of where she was hiding inside herself, she can at least spare her father the pain of trying to explain death to a toddler.

“Mom gone,” she says when he starts trying to explain, child voice cracking with emotion, her whole body shuddering.

She doesn’t know why someone in Konoha wanted to kill her mom — the Kinokawas were definitely not in the story she remembers from Before, or were background characters at best — but they had killed her. And Shikako is the only witness, left alive because she should be too young to understand or implicate anyone. And her dad is all she has left, and she’s all he has left.

She’d go on to have screaming nightmares about it well into her childhood, but she could never, ever tell anyone that she remembers.

       ——————————————

As far as childcare for a working single father went after that, the Nara aren’t any help, although it’d take Shikako years to figure that particular, scandalous quagmire out. Her mother hadn’t had many friends, and the friends she had had were mostly busy dying in the war. Her father’s friends are busy winning it. Shikako doesn’t meet Yamanaka Inoichi or Akimichi Chouza or anyone else who might have clued her into who Shikaku had been in the story from Before until she’s in the academy.

Before then, there’s mostly Inuzuka Tsume, and her dog, and her daughter Hana. At her mom’s funeral, Shikako had hidden her face in Kuromaru’s fur. Tsume is clan heir, and she makes a generous offer: the Inuzuka compound has started spilling out into the surrounding residential district and they just purchased an apartment building down the block from the compound. 

They’re intending to rent it to younger members of the clan as apartments open up, but Tsume says, “You and your little girl should move in to the caretaker’s suite. It’s got all the maintenance shit in it, so you’ll have Inuzuka dropping by all the time, but you can’t stay where you are now, Shikaku, and someone’s gotta look after your kid so you can go back to missions, right?” She has a girl of her own on her hip. 

Inuzuka Hana, Kiba’s older sister, eventually, although Kiba isn’t born yet.

“Right,” Shikaku says, and Shikako’s relief is mirrored in his voice. 

For years after, Hana is someone to match her growth against and hide behind. Mother and daughter both are loud, Tsume especially, but it’s better than being alone. There are play dates and sleepovers and lots and lots of dogs.

She runs and runs and runs after Hana. She’s terrible at it. She eventually figures out she should probably be using chakra for running, even this young.

“Do that again,” she asks Hana, the day this occurs to her, the day she notices the chakra in Hana’s legs when Hana evades her again in their game of day.

“Do what?” Hana asks.

Shikako makes a vague gesture. “You do — you do a thing when you run.”

“Move my legs?”

That startles a laugh out of Shikako. “No! With your chakra. You’re doing a think I’m not doing, so you always win! I gotta learn to do it too.”

“Are you saying I’m cheating?” Hana demands. In a few years she’ll be pleased to cheat, of course, but they’re both four and cheating is bad in games when you’re four.

Shikako is quick to explain that that’s not what she meant, and then coax Hana into running while Shikako focuses on Hana’s unconscious chakra usage. Shikako knows she has to learn this. To fit in, if nothing else, and stop people from thinking she’s such a sickly child.

Soon after, Tsume starts going out to the border and coming back a lot, doing missions she can’t tell kids about. It always takes awhile, but after Tsume comes home, every time, Shikako manages to work up to asking Tsume if she saw her dad.

Sometimes she has and sometimes she hasn’t, but eventually it becomes apparent that Kinokawa Shikaku is in such high demand not just for his strategies but because he’s a full-fledged war hero. A monster from Iwa and Kumo’s point of view, Shikako assumes, although not as much as the Yellow Flash. Her father isn’t winning battles single-handed, but it’s a near thing. He turns tables. He drags people towards victory.

“He never slows down,” Tsume says, and then… she looks sad.

Shikako doesn’t ask why, but she has a good idea: I should have been there, Shikaku had muttered to her, to himself, in the aftermath of her mother’s murder. Maybe it seemed strange to others that he’d turn right around after that and throw himself into the war, but… well. The investigation said it had been an Iwa team, which was motivation enough for Shikako, but her father struggles often when he’s home to explain to her.

He says it feels like protecting her, to help the war end. It puts him in place to protect his comrades. It makes him stronger, and the stronger he is the safer everyone is — well, everyone except Iwa.

Shikako knows he won’t really be able to protect her, not from the village and not from the villains in the story from Before, but maybe he won’t have to. Maybe she’ll be safe like he wants.

       ——————————————

When her father comes home from the war for good, he takes her to meet Namikaze Minato, who crouches down and smiles when he talks to her. He’s going to be Hokage. He’s going to die. Uzumaki Kushina is there, too, and she’s even louder than Tsume, and she’s going to die, too. Everyone is going to die, really, Shikako tries to comfort herself, but that doesn’t really help. These two are going to die extra.

“I want to join the Academy,” she tells her father after the next nightmare, huddled against his side in bed. “I have to.”

Her father tries to explain what the doctors have said, that she can’t use chakra, that she’s damaged — although he bends his words, sneakily, to avoid calling her damaged, not that the Nara doctor who’d diagnosed her had been so kind.

Shikako is definitely damaged, but not like that. Probably. She hardly ever even chokes on nothing anymore. She peeks her hand out from under the blanket just enough to make it glow, cool white light throwing her face and her father’s face into strange, sharp relief until she can’t quite make out his expression.

“…Okay, deerheart,” he sighs. “We’ll sign you up for the academy.”

When Minato takes the hat, Shikako sits on her dad’s shoulders and cheers so that she doesn’t cry. She hates the passing of time.

       ——————————————

When the Kyuubi comes, Shikako doesn’t think about Naruto or his parents at all. She can’t think. Moving feels like it would draw the eyes of the vast, evil predator whose corrosive energy is abrading her skin, scraping down her throat. Thinking feels like a kind of moving. Shikako is home alone, should go to the civilian shelters, and does nothing but huddle on the floor, hiding her face in her knees.

Out in the hall, a man says, “This one. She’s in here.”

A woman says, “Okay, I’ll get the door.”

The man says — the faintest hint of exasperation in his voice — “No, you animal, you’ll just scare her worse.”

The woman says, “No one could actually be scared worse than they already are in this,” but the man doesn’t respond. Instead there’s a sudden, bright spike of chakra at the door handle and then the deadbolt, drawing Shikako’s eyes. The door is pushed open.

The man is a Hyuuga, his forehead covered. The woman is an Uchiha, Sharingan spinning. They approach slowly. The woman crouches.

“I’m Uzume, and this is Amano. We’re gonna get you out of here, okay?” says the woman. She’s kind of sweaty. There’s stress around her mouth, around her eyes.

Looking into her Sharingan, Shikako remembers two things: the first is that the woman’s Sharingan will give her a perfect memory of this entire awful night, and the second is that this woman will be dead in a few years no matter what. Neither of these things are helpful. Neither of these things are things Shikako can help with. She can’t help with anything.

She manages to nod, but can’t speak. The woman looks proud of her for that much, at least.

“Hey, you’re a tough kid, compared to most we’ve found,” she say. “Even the adults are screaming today.”

“Uzume,” hissies the man, Amano. “Could you please at least try and be professional?”

To the man, Uzume says, “They literally won’t let me be a police officer because of my people skills, so no. If they wanted professional people they shouldn’t have sent all the Uchiha to look for stragglers, okay?” and Amano huffs like she has a point but he doesn’t want to admit it.

To Shikako, Uzume says, “Think you can manage a piggyback? Might need my arms free.”

Shikako does manage a piggyback. It’s the best piggyback of her entire life. Lives. It’s great. Uzume and Amano bicker all the way through checking the rest of the building — which is empty except for a very terrified cat on the next floor up. So terrified it’s limp and pliant when Amano picks it up.

He cradles it to his chest, carefully, in the manner of someone who’s only ever seen other people pick up cats. “This should be your job,” he tells Uzume.

“You’re the one that spotted it,” she says. “No one would have blamed us for ignoring it.”

“We were already in the building,” Amano mutters, and holds the cat a little closer as they roof hop to the nearest shelter.

Shikako does not see the Kyuubi. She presses her face to the back of Uzume’s neck, even though that means hair kind of gets in her mouth. Things aren’t less terrifying in the civilian shelter they take her to — she can’t speak to tell them she should probably be with the Inuzuka — but Amano does put the cat in her lap and it slowly warms to cuddling her once she can make her limbs function well enough to pet it.

       ——————————————

Her father can’t come to get her for a long time.

Shikako has to stay in the shelter with the rest of the civilians. By the time he comes for her, Shikako’s heard a lot of rumors about the fight: that the Yondaime is dead, that it was an inside job, that Kinokawa Shikaku held the Kyuubi in shadow paralysis for precious, precious minutes during the evacuation.

Their apartment is totally fine except for the broken locks on the door. She would have been perfectly safe staying there, alone, but Shikako is glad Uzume and Amano came for her. She tells her father about them, when he asks about the door.

Her father says, “I’m glad they came for you too. I’ll have to thank them.”

A week later and Shikako is a little too old to be sitting on shoulders, but she doesn’t need help seeing over the crowd when the Godaime takes the hat; Shikaku has her standing in front, flanked by Uchiha Uzume and Hyuuga Amano, and he delivers most of his speech looking right at her.

“Everything I’ve ever done,” he says in his speech, “has been to protect what I love. That is the Will of Fire.”

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• OC notes: Uzume and Amano are @pepperdoken‘s and I love them.