intellectual

Babies were troublesome.

This is why the first, proper visit Shikamaru paid to sensei's kid was when it was already four years old, old enough to blabber out a few words and appease his grudgingly stubborn intolerance for stupidity. After four years of taking nice, long missions in nice, cloudy villages, he rapped sharply on the door of Kurenai-sensei's small apartment.

"Shikamaru! It's been so long," she greeted from the open doorway.

"Hey, Kurenai-sensei." He walked in carrying his shogi board under one arm, "so where's the kid? I heard you weren't on a mission, and I timed it so I didn't arrive while Gai-sensei was watching her."

"Saki-chan is in the sitting room, she'll be happy to see you after so long," Kurenai told him, ushering him into the sitting room and slipping a cup of tea into his hands before he could open his mouth.

From the other side of the kotatsu, a small girl peered back at him.

She was achingly familiar, the very image of a shinobi child. Most of her looks resembled her father's, complemented by the typical androgyny of childhood. Her black curls were cut short to her chin and they made her look strangely innocent, although her face held a type of awareness that was undoubtedly Kurenai-sensei's doing. Good. He didn't want Asuma-sensei's child to be an innocent little thing. He wanted her to become worthy of her father.

He'd already heard promising things about her. She could throw a kunai straight while most children were only just learning to hold theirs. She could run as fast as someone twice her age. Common, if exalted, shinobi traits. But he wondered if she knew how to formulate a plan, or how to calculate the angle of a kunai's flight. To him, the mind was more important.

"Shikamaru-nii," she said in childish solemnity, "oka-san said you'd come to visit soon. Do you want to see my garden in the yard? We can play catch there!"

"No," he said firmly. "We're going to play a better game. Those idiots at the academy will teach you how to be strong, but someone needs to teach you to be smart." He laid the board down between them. "You're going to learn how to play shogi."

"She's a little too young," Kurenai smiled. "She only learned to read last year, and she has a little trouble with her kanji. She won't understand."

"She'd better understand," he glowered at the small girl. "Because Asuma-sensei was absolutely pitiful at this and if I leave her alone she'll be like that too." He slid the board open and towards her. "Here, read these pieces out loud, troublesome kid."

"Um … will this take long?" Saki asked. "I have to go to Ai's house later. I left my hair ribbon there."

Shikamaru gave her a withering look. "Ch. Girls," he droned.

.

To everyone else, the kid's name was Saki-chan. Not to Shikamaru. This girl was Yuuhi Saki and she would be referred to as such whether she liked it or not.

"Saki," he said with an exasperated look that was beginning to look startlingly at home on his face, "these are all wrong. Redo them." He thrust the papers back to her, watching her face fall.

"But I worked really hard on them," she complained with her tiny hands fisted indignantly. "And I'm only starting the academy next week. It's not fair, the other kids barely know what numbers are and you're always yelling at me for not doing my fractions right!"

"Ch. I thought you were ok with me teaching you. Don't you want to become a great shinobi?"

The small hands waved around. "Great shinobi are the ones that go out and fight people, nii-san. Couldn't I practice that instead? I bet I'd be really good!"

He fisted one hand in the collar of her red shirt and brought her to eye-level. "Sure," he said, "of course you'd be good at that. But there's a reason so many of those die young. You are going to learn how to live to a good old age whether you want to or not."

Some of the indignation fled from her face at those words, because there had been a compliment somewhere in there. "Ok," she said, sitting down beside him on the park bench. "But nii-san has to take me out for dango later if I do them all right, ok?"

He looked at the sheets she clutched in her small hands. "Ch. Sure. I'll hand you to Chouji and you two can do whatever. Now let's see how quickly you can finish those."

.

Surrogate father.

The words had a strange feeling to them. In the midst of his early twenties, Shikamaru still wasn't sure he could be a father, let alone one for someone else's child.

He was in the Yamanaka Flower Shop figuring out what kind of flowers to get the troublesome woman he was supposed to pursue. Saki was tagging along because she was a troublesome, annoying little academy kid who could.

"You can never go wrong with these," Ino told him, handing him a bouquet of roses. "You've got to be careful with her, though. She's on Suna's council and you're on Konoha's, and neither the Hokage nor the Kazekage is willing to relinquish anything." Ino had been studying politics recently, to help her in her preparation to take her father's place as head of intelligence. She was becoming more troublesome by the day.

"Shikamaru-nii's not buying anything for anyone from Suna," said Saki, who was still in denial. She was standing by his leg and admiring an expensive, elaborate arrangement of tropical flowers.

"Then who exactly am I getting flowers for?" He droned.

"Me, of course!" Saki beamed.

Shikamaru begrudgingly removed a single rose from the bouquet and held it out to her, just to appease the kid.

"No, she said. "I want those ones," she pointed to the tropical flowers.

.

Even if the girl was as stubborn as her father, he had to admit that there was a certain brutal grace to the way she fought. She moved with the feeling of someone who knew where every piece of her body was, in a mix of Chouji's unrelenting strength and Kakashi-sensei's nimbleness. He watched as she easily beat her last opponent down, standing over him with a wide grin splattered across her grime-covered face.

She walked over to him excitedly after they'd announced that she'd singlehanded won the taijutsu tournament held by her graduating class. "Shikamaru-nii, did you see that? Did you? I mean, one moment he was all 'I'm gonna beat your ass' and then, POW, I was all over that butt-head!"

"You were," he told her dryly. "Maybe I should hand you off to Gai-sensei. Stubborn man wants another genin team this year."

It was slightly disappointing, how she's turned out to be someone so incompatible with his style. All he'd really wanted was a quiet, clever kid to teach. Instead he was thrust this bundle of life. It didn't help that she always wore bright red. What kind of shinobi wore a color that introduced their presence to everyone in sight?

Oh, it wasn't that she wasn't smart. She was plenty smart on her exam papers. He only worried that she wouldn't know how to use those smarts anywhere else.

Saki frowned. "Aren't you going to be my jonin-sensei? I though you were applying this year. I want to be nii-san's student!"

"I'm not sure if they'll let me," he told her. "They might recognize me as a family relation, and that will create bias in the system."

"Aww! But I'm at the top of my class, and you're the top jonin-sensei this year …" She paused, and then looked down at her fingers, moving them with her mental calculations.

"There are thirty-four people in my class, and twenty-seven have passed. Of the scores, the highest is mine, in the hundredth percentile. Then there's Ai, whose scores are all over the place. But I peeked at the weighting earlier, and I know she'll end up dead last." She had two fingers down, and the others were still mentally going through weighting values. "Ryou and Jio both have ninety-fifth in taijutsu, but Ryo's ninjutsu is slightly better by three percentile by weighting, which means that he'll be on our team as second-place." She looked up proudly.

After standing there staring at her while she'd rattled though, Shikamaru felt a small smile pull at his lips.

The next day, she was announced to be on his genin team and the pleased smile went with him all day.

Then he paused, and groaned. "I'm going to have two girls to teach?"

.

Sometimes, he scared himself with the thought that Saki would be the only one he'd ever be able to play father with. He'd invested so much time and effort in this kid that he didn't feel like he'd ever be able to do it all over again.

Saki was his, and his alone. She was his almost more than she was her mother's.

"It's fine," Temari told him as they sat around the kotatsu. He was at Kurenai-sensei's house watching the kid while her mother was away on a mission, and the troublesome girl herself was in her room reading. Temari liked to visit him at times like these; maybe she appreciated his fatherly instincts. Ch, women.

He didn't know how to tell her that he wouldn't be able to do it again.

"What do you mean," he drawled, one elbow balanced against the table. "What's fine?"

She absently played with the ring on her finger, "it's fine that you can't come live in Suna. I was thinking they could just share us, and we could switch villages now and then. It'll be fun, won't it? Travelling all the time."

He raised an eyebrow.

"I mean, I'm not one for settling down anyway," Temari shrugged. "I have Kankuro's children to spoil, and maybe you could help me get to know your sensei's kid sometime."

Shikamaru remained speechless for a while, simply allowing the slight tension to fade from his mind, allowing himself to believe that his troublesome future wife could really be so …

Without thinking, he allowed his hand to slide over and grasp her ringed one.

"Sure," he said. "I'll tell you all about her. It'll be a drag, but what else can I do?"

She laughed and leaned over the kotatsu to pull him into a kiss, tangling her hands into his standard-issue jonin shirt. There was a quick patter of footsteps down the hall of the apartment.

"Nii-san, nii-san look I finished all the logic problems you gave – ew!" Saki covered her eyes and pointed blindly. "Do that pervy stuff somewhere else! I like to sleep there!"

.

That year, Shikamaru learnt that being the top jonin-sensei was far worse than he'd expected. Putting Asuma-sensei's daughter, the dead last, and Hyuuga Ryou on the same team had been the most disastrous decision the academy had ever made.

So he sat at Yakiniku-Q and watched silently as Chouji and Ino gulped down their barbeque. Outside the window, the sky was a cloud-splattered orange and the Hokage's office building with it's brand, sparkling new Rokudaime held inside gleamed in the distance.

"I always knew Naruto would make it," Chouji said fondly between bites of meat. "Right Shikamaru?"

"Hn," he managed, plate untouched.

"Shika's having some problems with his team," Ino said matter-of-factly. "He's probably wondering if our new Hokage will let him defect to anbu."

She was a brilliant girl sometimes, his blond teammate.

With the look of one with a thousand aches, Shikamaru reached up to slowly rub the swollen part of his forehead. "Ch. I wish they'd all drown. Stupid brats."

"No you don't," Chouji told him fondly. "You like them, and you've inherited all sensei's teaching skill. I mean, remember what we used to do to Asuma-sensei? He went through hell and back with us."

He glared, "this is worse. They're thirteen. Things happen at thirteen. I'm happy to say that it seems Saki will stay a little girl forever, but Ai isn't so lucky. The poor Hyuuga kid can't take his eyes off her and she's actually liking it. Which makes everything even worse." He paused, "add that to the fact that Saki is still in denial that I'm married to Temari, and my life is hell."

Ino gave him a look of amused sympathy. "Oh, is she testing things on you? Don't worry, I think I once did the same to sensei. She'll find other targets once she realizes that they actually respond."

"Um … I don't think Shikamaru will be ok with Saki seeing boys," Chouji said hesitantly.

"No, it's fine. I want to see. It'll be interesting to watch her pound them," he said thoughtfully. "But they don't respond, for the same reason I mentioned earlier; she seems like a late bloomer, which I thank my stars for on a daily basis. Those idiot thirteen-year-old boys have no idea what they're missing."

"A … a pounding?"

"Exactly."

.

After Saki became a chunin, it was really only a matter of time until she had to perform her first mission kill. Shikamaru wasn't sure if he'd been lucky not to see it. He simply approached her later on while she stood tapping her foot in front of the Iwa-nin's prone body.

"It was a success, then," he stated, laying a hand on her shoulder. "It's alright this time, capture or kill permits killing too. The mission is still complete."

She looked up at him with a slight smile, and he was strangely surprised to see the complete lack of worry on her face. For the first time, he realized what his teachings had really done for her.

The kid had learnt well. She never cried like her teammates did, she never complained, she was a vibrant girl but she knew when to tone down her unlimited reserves of emotion. This was why she stood there feeling completely at ease, knowing that her very first A-rank led by Shikamaru nii-san had succeeded because of her, and that even though she questioned what she'd done like any sane person would she didn't seem broken by it at all.

Beyond her brash exterior, it was the mark of an intellectual at heart.

"I know, nii-san," she told him. She reached up to retie her black curls into her ponytail. "You don't need to tell me that, I'm the first one in my class to finish an A-rank. I'm going to be a great shinobi, just like oka-san and otou-san."

Shikamaru didn't miss the purposeful ambiguity, the slight reference that may or may not have been him. Those words were stored away securely in his mind as proof of his final exoneration.

"But now we can go back, right?" She frowned. "My hair is all tangled, I need to comb it."

"Ch. Women." With a sort of quiet pride, he permitted his hand to drift over and lazily ruffle her dark hair.

Saki crossed her arms and raised her nose in a half-mocking semblance of her almost-father. "Ch, men."

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Just a short idea, typed down on a rainy day. I understand that Kurenai's child is actually a boy, but given Shikamaru's fond dryness towards girls this seemed more appropriate. Feedback?