Second Time's The Charm

Chapter 15

"SHIKAKU!"

Kanoko opened her eyes lazily.

Team 7 had completed their mission in the Land of Waves and had been back of a few weeks now. The first thing Kanoko did when she was dismissed from the Hokage's office was grab her fuinjutsu supplies and run to her spot in the Nara forest.

She spent that evening and the rest of the next day running through calculations and test, trying to understand why her seal acted the way it did. The amount of chakra she absorbed from Naruto should have burned her chakra points. Actually, it did burn them, Kanoko was quite sure of that – the pain was horrific. The bigger question was how or why did the chakra points heal after being burned?

Kanoko's first thought was that she was her seal was more impressive than she first thought. It wouldn't be the first time she created something that turned out to have more benefits than originally designed. Example: The Shadow Clone Jutsu.

After several rounds of testing, she knew this wasn't the case.

That lead to the only one other possible option: The chakra was what burned and healed her simultaneously. Kanoko knew sage chakra had the potential to behave in this way, but there was no way that Naruto was using sage chakra.

However.

There was one close relative to sage chakra: Demonic chakra. Not just any demonic chakra either. The kind that come from a tailed beast.

With this information, Kanoko went back to the only tailed beast she knew of in Konoha: The Nine-Tailed Fox. Plugging in the pieces from there was so easy, that Kanoko wondered why it even was a secret. In Kanoko's opinion, a secret was something only known by a few and was difficult to discover. Thinking back, it was clear that anyone over the age of 13 knew Naruto was contained the tail beast. Even if only a few people knew, it's a tail beast. You can't hide chakra like that forever.

It just comes out.

Point: The Land of Waves mission.

The only reason that Kanoko didn't think about the nine-tails when Naruto lost control was she was busy: Screaming her head off in pain.

It was a reasonable excuse.

.

Back to the seal on her arm.

Kanoko took some time to store some of the left over chakra into a scroll for later use. She wondered if it would burn and heal her again when she pulled it from a scroll...

...Now she's not sure that she wanted to use it.

.

Drifting back to the present...

Kanoko turned towards the side of the bed and started to crawl out.

Tried to crawl out.

Wrapped around her, like an octopus, was her brother.

When she got home, still confused by her seal's mechanics, she was immediately welcomed with a dark aura. She tried to sneak upstairs, thinking her mother was angry at her father or brother again, when she was suddenly attacked from behind.

She fell to the floor with a thud and felt arms clasp around her torso. She turned her head to the side, and saw Shikamaru, completely asleep on her back.

.

He hadn't let go since.

.

Thankfully, by the second day, when Shikamaru followed Kanoko to the training grounds of Team 7, Ino had stomped over and dragged him by the collar back to Team 10's training grounds.