Cap1:)

"Shikaku! Why are you always like this?"

"Like what?"

"You know what I'm talking about, Shikaku! Lazy – lazy – lazy! I'm willing to put up with your limp-sack-of-meal attitude, but I will NOT allow you to impede Shikamaru in the same way!"

"I would never block Shikamaru from – "

"Then why are you so against his – "

My father shot out of his chair, his warped, twisting shadow towering over my mother and stretching across the whole kitchen, and for once, my mother, who I had always regarded as the more forceful of the two, was at a loss for words.

I had never seen him look so angry before. Hell, I had never even seen him angry in any manner before, ever. Annoyed, yes – but the only indication he ever gave to being annoyed was just to shove a pillow over his own head and roll over. That, I could deal with.

But this man was something else entirely, something I could not, for all my expanded six-year-old vocabulary, figure out how to describe. What I did know was that this being was clearly dangerous – and at that moment, my apparently "genius" mind finally grasped the true meaning of a shinobi. Somewhere underneath his sleepy attitude, the man who had killed his way to survival through a whole entire shinobi world war was finally resurfacing, scars and all. The deep streak running down his face, the lumpy layer of skin that I always used to have fun poking at as a baby while he chuckled – that was nothing compared to the scores of pain that radiated from his eyes now.

I had never been so scared in all my six-year-old life.

One thing was for sure – I knew from that point on, that while I could anger my mother all I wanted and get away with little more than a relatively painless scolding and a few minutes in the corner, driving my father to his breaking point was a very unwise course of action and most likely the last one I would ever take.

There were things to be said about the fury of a patient man.

My mother's face was frozen, pale white against the flickering lamp; she could not speak. I was still hiding behind the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. They had not noticed me yet; my parents were so caught up in their argument, and anyway, I was a Nara. Unlike most children, I was not afraid of the darkness – rather, I loved it for the cover and peacefulness it could provide. I was prone to a disposition of the shadows, and I had always been good at hiding. Besides that, I was so small already, even compared to other children my age, and my chakra reserves were still so little, that it was likely my presence had faded in with the increasingly flaring aura of my father's. With every word he spoke, his anger became greater, and so the dark cloud of energy around him grew, working himself into a frenzy that I never thought he was capable of.

My father – such a solemn, quiet, calm man – and this person in our kitchen right now, yelling at my mother – could not possibly be the same person…

And yet he was.

The pictures on our family shrine were rattling alongside his rumbling voice and glowing chakra now. I imagined my two-dimensional family ancestors with their glossy photographed eyes behind the glass panes and carven frames shaking with just as much terror as I was.

If Father could hear their trembling over the sound of his own yelling, he didn't seem to care.

"The three Sannin – one a wayward pervert, one a hedonistic drunk, and one in Kami knows where, rendered so completely inhuman by his own genius!" With each sentence, his voice rose exponentially. "The Fourth Hokage – praise – greatness – bestowed with so many nicknames and titles he'd drown in ink writing them all down! And for what? Dead before he even hit thirty!" He just kept going and going and going and would not stop. "Kakashi Hatake – so completely screwed up in the head that it's not even funny – and don't give me that look, Yoshino, you and I both know that it's true, that that poor man isthe worst head case anyone who knows anything about psychology will ever see short of insanity itself – who wouldn't be when you've spent your whole life since you could walk risking your life for a village that only saw to smash everything and everyone you've ever cared about to pieces – that's why he wears ten masks on top of each other and evades every personal question like oil evades water and reads thatIcha Icha filth in public and purposely arrives late to everything and spends hours and hours upon hours standing outside in the sun, the rain, the snow, whatever in front of that accursed stone, and fucks around with people's minds like he doesn't even care every chance he gets, because it's such an obvious coping mechanism to deal with all the shit life has dealt him, and no one, not even Inoichi Yamanaka, can do anything about it!"

My mother didn't cry. She was a brave, hardened woman, not like the soft little princesses in stories. She had never waited for any man to come and rescue her. Everything she had ever accomplished, from her first mission to grabbing my father's attention, had been entirely of her own merit.

So why was there all this water running down her cheeks now?

"Shikaku, please – "

My father did not hear her, and just kept mercilessly listing every single predecessor of the Konoha Prodigies Legacy, until, finally, he punctuated his argument with such a great volume that I wondered why the whole village hadn't awoken and come by our house to see what was going on already.

Maybe it was because they knew that when the noise was coming from Shikaku Nara's home of all places, it was best to stay away.

"Do you want me to get started on the brilliant, undefeatable, infamous Itachi Uchiha – genin at seven, chunin at eight, and already murdering grown men in their beds as an ANBU captain when he was but thirteen? Completely snapped and gone mad, leaving his beloved younger brother to pick up the pieces! But I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, oh, no, send a little kid out to snap his first neck and slice his first jugulars before his age has even exited the single digits; everything will be fine, won't it? I'm surprised he didn't try pulling some stunt like this earlier! Just think, Yoshino! His entire family, the largest clan in all of Konoha, MURDERED, SLAUGHTERED in cold blood, reduced from over a hundred men to only two, in ONE night! I WAS THERE, YOSHINO! I WAS ONE OF THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE CALLED IN FOR THE INITIAL INVESTIGATION AFTER THE UCHIHA MASSACRE WAS OVER, AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT I SAW? AN ENTIREWATERFALL OF BLOOD, RUNNING DOWN THE FRONT STEPS AND SPILLING OUT INTO THE BOULEVARD BEYOND! AND YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE I SAW? ITACHI UCHIHA'S FOOTPRINTS IN THE SEA OF RED! AND NOT A SINGLE ONE WAS SMUDGED OR POOLED! HE DID NOT HESITATE NOR DID HE RUN OUT OF THERE! HE WALKED CALMLY AND COOLLY AS ONE MIGHT STROLL THROUGH THE PARK ON A HAPPY AND BRIGHT SUMMER'S DAY AS IF NOTHING WAS WRONG – "

"Shikaku!"

And then the anger broke, and the beast was gone, replaced by a man seemingly too old to be my grandfather. Aged, not only with wisdom, but with pain…

His yelling had ceased, replaced with something slow and sorrowful instead. And yet it was these sentiments, born, once again, of a beast different from my father this time, another beast of fear rather than anger, that terrified me more than any of his fury. Even years from now, when I would be confronted with enemies, my memory would revert to this one moment, and I would remember his painful sighs…

"Oh, what next, Yoshino? What fate are we to assign this next one? Shall we make him Shikamaru Nara, the boogeyman himself? The cautionary tale to all future generations of our clan, about he who treaded in the shadows for so long that he ended up becoming one of them himself?"

My mother did not say a word. I did not, either. I simply sat frozen, unable to even breathe, as I watched the dark silhouettes on the wall curl into a most familiar shape.

Me.