damned_institute | Nightshift 41: M31-M40 Hallway

Despite his roommate's seemingly friendly nature, Shikamaru had trouble holding up his end of the conversation. He also found it difficult to force down more than half his food, and even that left him somewhere between queasy and sleepy as hell. He nodded vaguely before setting down his plastic fork and rolling onto his stomach, chin resting on his crossed wrists while he stared at the wall a few inches away. He didn't seem miserable, but almost nothing of his carefree nature remained. He didn't seem anything at all.

Sai and Kakashi would be here soon, and elsewhere, Naruto and Sakura and Jiraiya would be meeting to take on the second task. He didn't second-guess his decision to divide an already fragile group into two teams, nor did he second-guess the chosen missions or the constitution of the teams themselves. He didn't second-guess his ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the other Leaf-nin, nor his ability to determine how much they'd been damaged by recent revelations. Shikamaru seemed to have to avoid second-guessing way more often than most of his peers. Of all the jobs he could have ended up with in the grand scheme of ninja-dom, how the hell had he gotten stuck with this one?

And it would only get harder from here. Like his father pointed out, Shikamaru had a long way to go before he'd be able to protect the people of his village, and as long as women weren't involved, his dad's judgment was usually sound.

Sai knocked on the door when he arrived, looking tired but ready to get down to business. Shikamaru would probably know it was him before he said anything, but a greeting was only polite.

"Shikamaru-san. It's Sai."

He hadn't needed to walk past Usopp's room, or rather his old room, thankfully. That made coming down this hallway that much easier. He wouldn't look to the right, wouldn't focus on anything but the task at hand.

When he heard Sai's voice outside of his door, Shikamaru gave a half-groan more out of reflex than anything else. "Yeah, come on in," he said, sounding about as put-out as usual. He had to stick to some part of his routine.

Sai didn't look much more enthusiastic than himself, but then, that was why he'd divided the Leaf-nin the way he had: the three of them were less likely to be controlled by emotion. Shikamaru sat up, stretching, then reached under his mattress for his notebook. "We're still waiting on Kakashi," he said, though the jounin's absence made that obvious. He held out a folded sheet. "Here's the code."

Sai, like Kakashi, had somehow ended up with his usual clothing, so he probably had a pocket for it somewhere. Maybe. Not in the places normal people had pockets, but whatever. Shikamaru didn't see the strategic advantage of a bare stomach. Maybe it worked to distract girls. Ino and Sakura seemed to appreciate it, whatever that was worth.

It wasn't really unexpected that Kakashi wouldn't have arrived yet. The jounin being late was common. He just hoped that nothing had happened to the man. Sai took the paper from Shikamaru with a nod, stepping further into the room.

A glance at the opposite bed caused the ninja to freeze and the look to Shikamaru again with a baffled expression. "You share a room with Luffy-kun?" The pirate was sleeping, it appeared. He wasn't about to wake him, as much as he wanted to speak with him.

"Huh? Yeah," Shikamaru said, glancing towards the focus of Sai's interest. "I just met him, but he's a nice enough guy." They'd only spoken twice, but Luffy had been friendly enough, especially after Shikamaru handed over the food he hadn't planned to eat.

He stood up, leaving his flashlight on the mattress to cast a misshapen orange oval on the opposite wall. From the closet he pulled out the scalpels Sakura and Naruto had given him, then yanked a cotton shirt from its hanger and returned to his bed. Sai's non-institutional clothing reminded him how much he disliked the idea of sharp blades in his pocket, so once seated, he slit the fabric of the spare shirt and began tearing off a strip. "Friend of yours?" Shikamaru remembered the pirates Sai talked about earlier, but after last night, he was less concerned about the ninja's dedication to the Leaf-nin.

"Yes." Sai nodded, still watching the sleeping figure. "He's Usopp's captain." And he hoped he woke up soon. For him to disappear right after his crewmate... He looked to Shikamaru, something slightly strained in his otherwise flat expression. "Usopp is... no longer in the Institute."

If Kakashi wasn't there yet, then they had no other choice but to wait. Sai took a seat at one of the desks, carefully adjusting the trowels at his side. His kunai was currently stuck in one shoe. These gardening tools weren't going to last forever. He should probably get something better at some point. Or new ones.

Shikamaru exhaled through his teeth, a sigh with a very slight undercurrent of tension. He looked away, back towards the watery orange light that painted the opposite wall, unwilling to get involved.

Once he'd ripped off a suitable length of cotton, he leaned back against the wall as he wrapped it around his thigh and tied a knot tight enough to keep the knit fabric from shifting. Satisfied, he stretched his legs across the mattress, crossing them at the ankles, then rubbed his neck and reached for his flashlight with his other hand. When he spoke, his voice was matter-of-fact and aloof.

"I split groups the way I did because we're the ones least likely to be overwhelmed by recent events." It was an oversimplification, but he didn't bother explaining further. Shikamaru knew he didn't need to tell Sai to keep himself in check, but now that 'recent events' included the sudden absence of a personal friend, he figured it couldn't hurt to remind the ninja what particular strengths qualified him for this mission.

"I understand." Sai nodded. This wasn't the time to allow resurfacing emotions to get in the way of things. It was partially for this reason that he would make no effort to wake or say goodbye to Luffy before they left. (If he woke up on his own, that was a different matter.)

He gave Shikamaru his usual fake smile to get this answer across further. "Don't worry. There's only the mission." If repeating some of the ROOT mantra helped at this point, then so be it.

Shikamaru doubted that Sai's particular brand of smile would ever stop being unnerving, but in this situation, it was exactly what he wanted to see. He'd only known Sai for a few days and had only seen him fight once, but right now, it was safest (not to mention least troublesome on other fronts) to deal with people capable of singleminded focus, even if he wasn't familiar with all of their techniques.

Which brought him to the next point. "I don't know much about you," Shikamaru said, shifting his gaze from the flashlight to Sai. "I don't care about your personality or history or any of that junk, but I need to know what you're capable of. We might have to make some quick decisions." He frowned, briefly thinking, but then sank deeper into the pillow behind him until he was closer to lying on the bed than sitting on it. "I can bind people with my family's jutsu; but not for long: maybe fifteen, thirty seconds tops. I don't know if I can do it more than once." There was no way to test it that didn't risk leaving him and his teammates vulnerable later in the evening. "Aside from that, I'm the same as always," he added with a shrug. He had no idea how much Sai knew about him, but beyond his intelligence and unique ninjutsu, Shikamaru was unremarkable by chuunin standards.

[From here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/628236.html?thread=53823756#t53823756)]

Even if he had to rush, Kakashi at least knew that he had some cushion of time thanks to his reputation for being late. Not that he wanted to make any of his teammates worry, but he was thankful for that little window. And if luck was really on his side for once, it'd turn out that Shikamaru's room was exactly where he was supposed to have ended up. He'd much rather be right and have less questioning about his own stability since he'd gotten here, emotional or otherwise. Despite being the most recent cause of the group's emotional trauma (at least until word of Itachi's death spread among the ninja), Kakashi knew he still had a role to play as the one who could hold everything together in spite of the chaos around them.

And hopefully, that'd be what he'd end up doing, in spite of his own mistakes.

Glad that he'd gotten the room numbers when he had, Kakashi came to a stop before M37, and took a moment to listen before he did anything else. There wasn't much he could make out, but he did catch the tail end of what Shikamaru was saying. It sounded like he was explaining his new limitations to whoever it was, which meant that Shikamaru was talking to Sai or Jiraiya. Well, that still left Kakashi with a fifty-fifty chance; he doubted Shikamaru would have the two eldest Leaf-nin in the same group. And if it was Sai in there, then Kakashi really had lucked out. Of the six, Shikamaru, Sai, and Kakashi had the most obvious control over their feelings. That was something he figured the chuunin would take into account when splitting the groups.

Well, only one way to find out. Kakashi knocked on the door, then went ahead and pushed it open so he could look inside. "Sorry I'm late." It might not be so common to Shikamaru and Sai, who were indeed the ones in the room, but the old routine had its charms. "I must have overslept."

Listening closely to Shikamaru's explanation, Sai was about to respond when they were interrupted by Kakashi's entrance. The pale ninja didn't skip a beat as he arrived, smiling up at their superior as though he was used to him arriving late. "Good evening, Kakashi-san. We were just discussing our current limitations."

Shikamaru's response interested him as he went on to explain his own. "Until recently, it was impossible for me to access my chakra at all. However, a couple nights ago I found that I could call upon small amounts of it for short periods of time - enough to get up a wall, for example. I haven't tested any of my other abilities yet, though I was gifted ink and a brush from my visitor this past week."

It was because of this that he wondered if the visitors weren't actually the real thing, just brainwashed further than anyone else. If they were really on the same side as their captors, then why would they hand over something that could become a weapon in the right hands?

Shikamaru glanced to the opening door and gave the elder ninja's excuse a quiet snort. Although he rolled his eyes, he didn't hide his relief: Kakashi seemed to be his usual self, which meant that Shikamaru's judgment had been sound when dividing the Leaf-nin into compatible teams.

He sat up to reach for his journal while Sai spoke to Kakashi, then ripped out a page and held it out along with a second folded sheet. "The code, and a map of the outdoors just in case," he explained. He didn't elaborate on what that case might be. Shikamaru hadn't bothered to rewrite his more detailed notes about the monsters beyond the institute walls, since their team wasn't heading into that territory, but since the map was hard to come by, he didn't want to be the only Leaf-nin with it committed to memory. After that, he grabbed his scalpels from the mattress and stood up, ready to get this thing over with as quickly as possible.

Sai's answer, however, made him pause. Their access to chakra wasn't steady? Fantastic. Just what he needed. Changing rules in a game that was troublesome enough on its own. But then, this place didn't even obey death...he'd been an idiot to expect reliability in anything. Shikamaru groaned as he slid the scalpels into the band around his leg. "What's this visitor thing?"

It seemed like things couldn't have worked out any better for Kakashi, and silently he was glad for it. Not only had neither of the ninja shown any signs of surprise that would have indicated Kakashi was in the wrong place, but they hadn't shown any concern about the other absent ninja. That confirmed for Kakashi that he was indeed the last one expected in this room. It was a bit of good fortune that didn't come close to balancing out all the crap the group had gone through since Kakashi had gotten there, but he would take it all the same.

When Sai continued on about his powers, the jounin listened with interest. So something had changed in terms of their limitations; Kakashi of course immediately wondered if the same was true for the other ninja that had been there, along with something else. "That's good to know." He was tempted to ask Sai to demonstrate, so he could test out the limitations of his Sharingan. But Kakashi also knew how precious the little chakra they could utilize in this place was, and he wasn't going to waste Sai's supply in such a way.

He'd already told Shikamaru about his own limitations, but for the sake of being able to make quick decisions in battle, Kakashi decided to tell Sai as well. "I have at least some use of my Sharingan here, but nothing else. I know I have the sight it grants, but I haven't had a chance to try copying any abilities just yet. And that's only during the night; I'm blind in my left eye otherwise."

The mention of visitors also peaked Kakashi's interest, and the jounin thought back to the first conversations he'd had when he arrived as he took the papers Shikamaru had offered. "They'll take people that we care about and send them here to visit us. But those people will believe the lies the nurses tell us, right?" Renamon had hinted at it, and Jiraiya had all but explained it when he warned Kakashi about Naruto's visitor. It was probably a good time to warn Shikamaru about that particular possibility, since he wouldn't be surprised to hear that Asuma had come to call. "Naruto's had one too: the Fourth Hokage. So it's safe to say that we should expect anyone."

But Kakashi knew it wouldn't do much good to dwell on the topic then. He gave the papers a brief look before putting them away; obviously Shikamaru had been busy during the day. For the second time in only a few minutes, he found himself thinking of Asuma, this time to note that the man would no doubt be proud of just how much his student had grown. Suspecting that Sai had been ready before leaving his room, and seeing Shikamaru tucking away his weapons, he nodded to the two.

"I take it we're ready to head out then?" Which was for the best; there was no way of knowing just how much time had already passed during the night. Kakashi didn't exactly want to get to the same point without any success yet again.

"Yes." Sai nodded at Kakashi's mention of the visitors. The jounin hadn't been around long enough to have been a part of the last visitation period, but he must have gotten an explanation from somebody. "It seems to happen once a week. The first instance it happened while I was here, I wasn't called to meet anyone. The second time, this previous time, I..." Another crack in the usual mask. Sai shook his head, quickly shoving back any reaction to the memories of that event. "I was visited by Danzo, and another member of ROOT that I had been particularly close to before his death. Those that run the asylum seem to have very intimate knowledge of us. It can't be said whether these visitors are fakes, or people like us who have been brainwashed beyond all recollection of their former lives."

But that was enough about that. Sai stood as Kakashi suggested they get ready to leave. The sooner they were out and engaged in important activities, the sooner he could get these weighty thoughts off his mind. "I'm prepared."

"They can't force us into that, though," Shikamaru said as he walked to his desk and pulled open the top drawer. After three nights of continuous use, his flashlight had dimmed from stark white to a shaded orange, and he wasn't taking any chances. The spare batteries fit neatly in his pocket, but after walking to the door, he reconsidered and unscrewed the light's cap to replace them and leave the old ones behind. "We can just refuse to go, right? At worst, they'll sedate us or lock us back in our rooms or something." There was no way he'd deal with something like that if he didn't have to.

Shikamaru tossed the weak batteries onto his mattress and tucked the flashlight under his arm to open the door into the nearly empty hallway.

[to here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/629246.html?thread=53835006#t53835006)]

Nightshift 41: M31-M40 Hallway

M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37

Re: M37