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Playing the Game

Summary:

The world of Naruto only had a fraction of a percent of the history and population of Shikako's original world, meaning that, despite being filled with murderous mercenary killers, there were countless horrors in her brain never even conceived of in her new world. Sometimes these horrors escaped. She managed to keep a lid on the important stuff like nuclear fission, but Sasuke might argue that what got out was worse.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Work Text:

Sasuke wasn't terribly fond of Grass. He was even less fond of the idea of letting Shikako set one foot back in the nation, but he had been overruled on that count. Still, after their messy civil war, Grass was even less likely to start something that might provoke Konoha. They simply couldn't afford it. Unfortunately, they also couldn't afford to protest too much about the Iwa nin that were crawling around their country, which led to Sasuke, Shikako and Ino poking around and helping to ruin Iwa's operations in Grass.

Well, actually, they weren't supposed to be on the mission proper. They were supposed to be the big, shiny distraction for the real team, but what was supposed to happen was never what actually happened on any mission where they left Konoha, so they were here interrogating an Iwa nin for information.

Ino shook her head. "It's no good. He's using the Mental Fortress technique."

Sasuke furrowed his brow. "You sound annoyed, but on a professional level."

Ino frowned. "It is annoying. Iwa complains about how Konoha keeps producing geniuses but then they go around teaching their ninja inferior techniques like Mental Fortress. Maybe if they trained their people right, they'd have more capable jounin."

"It's stopping you," he pointed out.

Ino scowled. "It's a new-ish technique to stop field interrogations - strong but brittle. He's hanging his mental defenses on the idea that he can't break. Put the smallest fracture in that and the mental defenses fall apart. Most of T&I could crack him in a day or two. My dad could do it in a couple hours."

"We don't have a day or two, and probably not a couple of hours."

"That's pretty much the idea. Since our track record of successful long term interrogations is so good, they pretty much have given up on protecting their men from T&I proper and have been focused on stopping their men from giving up anything in the field."

"The smallest fracture?" Shikako said thoughtfully.

Ino gave Shikako a wary look. "Yes…. Mental Fortress builds the defenses around the idea that while we might be able to break his body we can't break his mind. As long as he believes he will win against us mentally, it will remain true."

Sasuke frowned as that implied that torture was employed as a training technique. He didn't really care if Iwa tortured their own men, but it seemed inefficient.

Shikako rubbed her lower lip with her index finger. It would have been rather distracting for Sasuke if she wasn't using her crimes against humanity tone of voice. "I wonder if The Game would work," she said, pronouncing the capital letters.

"What's The Game?" Sasuke asked warily.

"I lost The Game."

Sasuke blinked. "What?"

"The first rule of The Game is that once you know about The Game, you're always playing it. The second rule of The Game is that if you think about The Game, you've lost it."

Sasuke and Ino waited for her to continue, but she didn't. "That's it?" Ino asked.

"I mean, it's traditional when you lose the game to announce it, but that's usually out of spite rather than anything else." Shikako shrugged. "You know, so that everyone else loses as well."

Sasuke scowled and wondered how traditional it could be if he'd never heard of it before. "Is it possible to win The Game?"

"Nope," Shikako sang happily. "The best you can do is avoid losing for a while."

Sasuke tried thinking of something else, anything else. "Dammit. I just lost The Game."

Shikako nodded. "And the rules are simple enough that you really can't think of The Game at all without remembering that thinking about it makes you lose."

Ino frowned. "If we ever needed evidence that you had Yamanaka's in your family tree…."

To the side, the tied up Iwa nin made an annoyed sound with his eyes squeezed shut, probably having lost The Game.

"Dammit, I just lost The Game," Sasuke muttered.

"It's like trying not to think about pink elephants," Shikako commented.

"Why would you think about pink elephants?" Sasuke asked.

Shikako shrugged. "I don't know. It's just one of those things that's hard to not think of when someone tells you not to think about it. Sort of like your parents having sex."

"Gah!" Sasuke called out and tried to think of anything else.

"I just lost The Game," Ino said.

Shikako shrugged again. "Probably better than thinking about your parents having sex."

"Dammit, Kako!"

"Think of anything else, like the location of the safe house we're looking for!"

Sasuke noticed Ino holding her hands out in the circular hand seal the Yamanaka used for the mental techniques. "Got it!" the blonde called out.

Shikako responded by smacking the Iwa nin on the forehead, causing the sign of her knockout seal to bloom on his forehead, and the three of them did a quick double check of the room before following Ino towards where the safe house was. After exiting the building, Ino walked slowly at a civilian pace, so it was likely nearby and somewhere that a subtle entrance would be preferred.

Ino shook her head and turned to walk backwards for a bit. "I can't believe you broke his technique that quickly."

"Despite all the murder and death, the ninja world still isn't quite as messed up as the inside of my head," Shikako said seriously.

Sasuke agreed. He was about to say that he couldn't believe that Shikako would invent a game where just thinking about it would make you lose, but then he remembered who her brother was. Shikamaru had a well disguised competitive streak that could be very annoying when it came up in those few areas that he cared about.

Sure, Shikako was physically capable of losing gracefully. For example, there was her fight with Gaara in the Grass Chunin Exams, but he was half convinced that losing was her objective in that fight. However, most of the time, she went with the attitude that if she was going to lose, she was going to make sure the other guy lost as well, like when she blew off the head of her kidnapper that same day.

Actually, now that he thought about it, having Shikamaru as her brother probably explained a lot about her attitude towards defeat.

Shikako giggled in a surprisingly girlish manner, making Sasuke pray that this was just part of the disguise of three young people out for a casual walk. "Just imagine what his debrief is going to be like."

Sasuke froze. "Did you just unleash some sort of mental virus on their entire anti-Yamanaka program?" No wonder she was ignoring the fact they were in public. Iwa would find out about this soon enough and the more questions the rank and file asked about it, the farther her mind poison would spread.

Ino shook her head. "My dad is going to get all weird about dropping hints about not minding if my kids come out of a test tube again."

Sasuke didn't know what was more concerning: a straight up clone of Shikako being raised by the Yamanaka or a genetic child of both Shikako and Ino being raised by pretty much anyone.

No, the genetic child idea was definitely worse.

Besides…. "Didn't Tsunade put that project under like five different security restrictions?"

"Yeah, but Ino doesn't have the Sharingan so half of them don't apply," Shikako pointed out. "Then there's one we can bypass because of the agreements the alliance made when we joined Konoha, which only leaves the 'I'm not drunk enough to deal with this' restriction-"

Ino laughed. "She seriously filled out the paperwork for that?"

"So if your dad is serious about it, he just needs to send her a crate of the good stuff."

"I thought I had dibs on any cloned abominations against nature you were going to create," Sasuke said with mock hurt.

"Any abominations I produce for Ino will be prototypes. The first production run of a thousand clones will be for the Uchiha clan," Shikako joked as they walked up to a rundown building.

With a practiced motion, Ino picked the lock to the door with no more effort than a civilian using a key and they slipped in. As they split up to search for the mission objective, Ino announced, "I just lost The Game."

"Dammit, Ino," Sasuke muttered.

Shikako frowned. "It was maybe a mistake to introduce The Game to a Yamanaka."

"Yes, Kako, give Ino a brand new mind game to play. What could possibly go wrong?" Sasuke wondered if no one had ever thought of something like this before or if everyone who had come up with the idea decided not to share it in case a Yamanaka would run with it.

All of Sasuke's teammates caused problems for him. Kakashi was the worst because he did so deliberately and with malicious glee. Naruto was the worst because he caused more problems than all the rest of them combined, and Shikako was the worst because the troubles she caused had a blast radius - literal, metaphorical or, quite frequently, both.

Coming home to get told that rumors of a cloned Uchiha army were spreading through Grass only reinforced that idea.

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