Chapter Text
Shikamaru creeps through the dark of his home.
Small feet make no noise as he pads across the tatami, coming to stand in a shadow at the doorway. His father is resting. His mother is reading.
Yoshino doesn’t look up as she addresses him, more than familiar with her son’s sneaking. “What is it, Shikamaru?”
“I think I’m an alien parasite.”
“That’s nice dear.”
“I had another dream,” he says quickly, eager to get the words out before he forgets, “it was about big metal buildings and people walked really fast. It was snowing. There were lights everywhere.”
“Sounds like Ame,” Shikaku grunts, eyes still closed. Yoshino flips the page. “Minus the lights.”
“Ame?”
“It borders Lightning and Fire.”
“A country then,” the boy nods. He waits for his father to open his eyes before asking his second question. “Do they know Jesus?”
“What?”
“Do you know Jesus?”
“No son, I do not know Jesus.”
“Oh. He seemed like a big deal in my dream.”
“You dreamt of a person?” Yoshino asks then, looking up from her book, “you’ve never done that before.”
In the dark of the hour, she can’t see her son make a face and shrug. She knows the mannerism well enough to sense it, though. “Not really. It was still just a place, but it looked like we were about to celebrate something, or we were celebrating. Probably Jesus.”
Since the boy turned three he’s been recalling odd dreams. They’re of places he’s never seen before and no books in the house contain things quite like he describes. Inoichi had already told them it was the active imagination of a young boy and nothing more, but Shikamaru has a tendency to get in his own head. He’s been convinced he’s not a human for the past month. Yoshino never thought raising a four year old would require constant reassurance that he wasn’t a changeling.
“That sounds very interesting,” she says, looking back to her book. “I’m sure he was swell.”
“We put trees up for him. I think so too.”
Shikaku knows his son well. “What kind of trees?”
“Evergreen!” he says brightly, bouncing out of the shadow and into his parents’ room. The boy jumps onto the bed uninvited, settling between the two. Shikaku lifts an arm for his son to wiggle under. “Evergreen Conifers, all of them. There was a giant one in front of a frozen lake covered in lights and glass balls. It was a spruce. Did you know they don’t grow well in clay soil?”
“Hm, how come?”
“Clay in soil prevents drainage and makes it alkaline. Spruce trees grow best in acidic soil that drains well. Oh! And the resin that comes from Spruce trees is flammable. We don’t have many evergreens here, but I read that Lightning country has a bunch. Maybe that’s why they have so many forest fires.”
“It doesn’t rain as much in the far north as it does here,” Yoshino explains, “I’m sure your spruce theory has some weight, but it’s ultimately an issue of climate. When winter doesn’t bring strong snow, Lightning’s summers are too dry to prevent fires.”
“Oh,” her son blinks, leaning into his father’s warmth, “like Colorado.”
She hums. “Sure. Like Colorado.”
“Have you ever seen a shark?”
Shikamaru falls asleep mid-sentence ten minutes later.
When he wakes up, he’s a bit disappointed that neither of his parents want him to finish explaining the wonders of dermal denticles.
He’ll tell Choji about it later.