(Several years before the Chūnin exams...)
Spring bled out across the sky like a long, thin wound.
The sun was already gone, leaving a red band slashed above the dark line of trees. The woods behind the Aburame compound were busy swallowing the light: damp earth, blue-black trunks, that wet moss smell that clung to your sandals. Little points of yellow-green clicked on one by one as lantern bugs crawled out of knotholes and under bark, bellies glowing like someone had tucked tiny candles into them.
Shino stood in the middle of all that, small and straight-backed, coat half a size too big. His collar was up around his cheeks. His round glasses caught the last smear of red like someone had painted a horizon across them.
His hands were bare.
A slow ripple moved under the skin of his forearms, the kind of motion that made most civilians queasy if they watched too long. Kikaichū poured out of his sleeves in a steady, disciplined flow, marching along the bark of the nearest tree and swarming over a cluster of lantern bugs.
Shino watched them in silence.
The bugs fed for exactly three seconds.
"Too much," he said quietly.
The kikaichū shivered, felt the intent in his chakra, and peeled away. They came humming back to his skin, sinking into his pores and vanishing like ink into paper.
"Their wings will be weak," he told them. "You took more than their surplus."
They prickled against his nerves—faint apology, faint hunger. The next wave flowed out thinner, in a narrow band like an ink stroke, feelers tasting the air before they climbed.
"Talking to them again?"
The voice came from the shadow of a tree on the edge of the clearing.
Shino glanced over his shoulder.
Torune leaned back against the trunk, half-swallowed by its shade. The last strip of sunset turned his goggles into twin coins of ember light. Bandages wrapped his hands and wrists and disappeared under his sleeves; cloth, cloth, cloth, as if he were trying to erase every possible bit of exposed skin.
He was close enough to watch. Far enough that a stumble or careless step wouldn't make them touch.
Shino turned back to the tree.
"Yes," he said. "If I do not correct them, they will learn bad habits."
Torune huffed a quiet not-quite laugh.
"Bad habits," he repeated. "They're bugs, Shino."
"They are a colony," Shino said, mild. "They remember patterns."
The next ripple of kikaichū poured down his fingers, thin and controlled. They climbed onto a lantern bug's thorax, settled around its glowing abdomen, and pulsed once—just enough to sip at the light inside, not enough to snuff it.
The lantern bug's glow dimmed for a heartbeat, then steadied.
"Better," Shino murmured. "You may go back now."
The insects obeyed, flowing between his knuckles and disappearing beneath his cuffs. The lantern bug twitched its wings and stayed firmly attached to the bark.
"See?" Shino said, almost satisfied. "They feed, and the host survives. Mutually beneficial."
Torune pushed his shoulders harder into the tree, eyes following the little flickers of light.
"Must be nice," he said. "Having bugs that listen when you say 'gentle'."
Shino tilted his head a little, thinking.
"Father says intention shapes response," he said. "Even wild colonies will adjust, if you are consistent. Your insects will adapt as well, if you invest enough time."
"Invest," Torune echoed. "Listen to you. You talk like an old man already."
"I talk like Father," Shino said.
To him that was the entire point.
Torune's gaze dropped to his own bandaged hands.
"My insects don't understand 'gentle'," he said slowly. "They understand contact. Dissolve. Empty."
Something hissed faintly under the wraps, like distant sand sliding through a glass throat.
"If I sent them onto your lantern bugs," Torune went on, "you wouldn't have a tree left. Just soft wood and dust."
Shino's kikaichū stirred at the edges of his sleeves, tasting the unease in his chakra. He soothed them down with a thought.
"Even dangerous colonies can serve the village," Shino said. He wasn't trying to be comforting; he was stating a fact. "Father says the value of a technique is not in whether it frightens civilians, but in whether it can be aimed."
"That's what everyone keeps saying," Torune muttered.
He pushed away from the tree and came a few steps closer, stopping at the invisible line both boys had built by repetition. Close enough to talk. Not close enough to ever bump into each other by accident.
Lantern bugs drifted between them like lazy sparks. The air was thick with plant-sap and river-mud and the faint electricity of evening chakra.
The woods exhaled.
For a moment, all the lantern bugs on the nearest trunks flickered in unison, their bellies dimming to embers, then flaring bright. Shino's kikaichū froze mid-crawl, antennae lifted as if listening to a sound only they could hear.
Shino blinked.
He felt something pass over them—a hum through a much larger lattice, the ghost of a pattern.
"You felt that," he said softly.
Torune tilted his head back, staring up at the strip of red sky between the branches.
"Spring," he said. "Even the ghosts wake up. That's what the old ladies say."
Old ghosts. Old hives. For half a breath Shino saw something that wasn't there: air full of stacked combs, resin corridors climbing into a sky that bent the wrong way. Then it was gone, leaving only the woods and the lantern bugs and the hair standing up along his arms.
A deeper rustle brushed the edge of his senses. Not the scratchy, scatter-brained noise of wild insects; something heavier, layered, disciplined. Clan chakra.
Shino straightened. The kikaichū slipped under his skin in a whisper, all at once.
Two shapes detached themselves from the trees.
One was tall, hooded, round glasses glinting pale. Insects coiled around him like a second, invisible cloak, a constant low pressure at the edge of Shino's awareness.
"Father," Shino said, bowing.
Shibi Aburame inclined his head in acknowledgment, expression unreadable behind his lenses.
The other man walked half a step behind Shibi, cane tapping softly against the roots. His hair was the gray of old ash. A bandage hid his right eye. The lines in his face looked like they'd been carved there with the same knife that cut the village's memorial stone.
He did not feel like a civilian.
Shino had never seen Shimura Danzō this close, but every Aburame child knew the name. The way adults' voices bent around it. The pause.
"Shino. Torune." Shibi's voice was low and smooth. "You are still training."
"Yes, Father," Shino said. "We were…practicing control."
Shibi's gaze flicked to Shino's bare hands, then to the lantern bugs, then back.
"There is no need to apologise for diligence," the other man said.
He took another step into the clearing, and the air seemed to thin around him without actually changing. His smile, such as it was, barely moved his mouth.
"I requested this visit," Danzō said. "A small intrusion on your family's evening, Shibi-dono."
"They are young," Shibi said.
The swarm under his cloak stirred; Shino felt the vibration along the clan channels.
"We were younger when the last war called us," Danzō replied, almost mild. "Better they hear certain things now, as a story, rather than as their final sight."
Shino's first instinct was to edge backward, out of the direct line of the conversation. Adults plus war talk almost never meant good things for children. He shifted his weight, a tiny step—
"Stay," Danzō said, lifting his bandaged hand.
Shino stopped.
"This concerns your clan," Danzō went on. "You, most of all."
Torune's shoulders went stiff beside him. He didn't move either.
Danzō turned, positioning himself so both boys were in front of him and Shibi stood just off to the side. The lantern bugs made a halo of drifting lights around the scene, little yellow eyes blinking in the dark.
"The Aburame," Danzō said, "are one of Konoha's pillars. Your insects are more than weapons. They are a wound and an answer both."
His bandaged hand sketched a faint circle in the air, taking in the forest, the compound behind them, the unseen dead patch of land further out where even the birds refused to nest.
"You know of the Locust Field," he said. "The place where nothing grows properly. Where the air feels…wrong."
Shino's throat tightened. He had never stepped into the Field itself—children were not allowed—but he'd seen the edge of it from a distance. The way the tree line broke. The way sound seemed to stop half a meter before it should.
"Yes, Danzō-sama," he said.
Torune gave a small nod.
"That scar," Danzō said, "is part of your clan's history. They have told you fragments, I'm sure. Whispers of a name. Aburame Jōken."
The name itself made the kikaichū under Shino's skin twitch, the way they sometimes reacted to thunder underground, before human ears heard it.
"I have heard," Shino said slowly, "that he was…strong. And that something went wrong."
"The comforting version," Danzō said. "Useful for festivals and stone tablets."
He planted his cane into the soft earth. The sound was soft, almost polite. It still carried.
"In the last Great War," Danzō said, "your clan was pressed from all sides. The Beetle Gate had already been broken in Madara's time. The insects you host are shards of a larger realm, cut loose, clinging to human anchors so they do not fall apart entirely."
Shino couldn't stop the small, involuntary swallow. His insects pressed closer to his bones, as if to be sure they were still anchored to anything at all.
"Aburame Jōken," Danzō continued, "looked at that wound and saw an opportunity. He believed the Aburame should become a single living Hive, great enough to stand alongside Uchiha and Senju. Great enough that no enemy could step on the Leaf without being eaten to the bone."
Torune's fingers twitched inside the bandages.
"On a certain front," Danzō said, "Fire's forces were cornered. Earth's shinobi closing in. No reinforcements. The kind of situation that ends clans."
His voice didn't rise. He didn't add any dramatic weight. If anything, that made the details worse.
"Jōken proposed a solution," he said. "He had been building toward it for years. A ritual and a swarm-field to draw more of the Beetle realm down around him. To let his insects devour every chakra thread in reach. Enemy jutsu, enemy bodies, even the air their lungs depended on."
Shino's brain, tidy and literal, pictured concentric rings of insects, a dome of shadow, jutsu unraveling mid-sign.
"It worked," Danzō said. "Partly. The enemy units were destroyed. Their jutsu died on their tongues. Their bodies emptied."
He looked down at the soil between the roots.
"And so were your own," he said. "Aburame. Leaf shinobi. Allies within the radius. Jōken's hive no longer knew friend from foe. It knew only fuel."
The word landed like a weight on Shino's sternum.
"In the end," Danzō went on, "Jōken himself was eaten from the inside out. His body collapsed into insects and ash. The land there has not forgiven him. Perhaps it never will."
Shino tasted dust that wasn't there.
He'd heard rumors: a battlefield where even weeds gave up, a patch of forest where birds flew around, not over. Adults didn't take children there. The ones who did go came back quieter.
Danzō's tone stayed even.
"Afterward," he said, "people did what they always do with ugly truths. They painted over them. They called him a martyr. They said, 'He sacrificed himself for Konoha.'" He studied the boys. "It is a comfortable story."
Lantern bugs pulsed, whole clusters dim-bright, dim-bright. Shino's kikaichū huddled in against his chakra coils.
"The truth," Danzō said, "is simpler. Aburame Jōken was a tool with no hand to steer him. He reached for power beyond his discipline. He forgot that a shield must be aimed as carefully as a blade. He stopped seeing the shinobi around him as people, and in that instant, his Hive had no reason left to spare them."
His eye hardened, the lines around it sharpening.
"His death was not sacrifice," he finished. "It was waste."
The word hung there. Heavy. Chemical.
Waste.
Shino realized he was holding his breath.
"That," Danzō said after a moment, voice soft again, "is why we created Root. To give those willing to walk under the village the structure they need. To make sure their deaths are not wasted. To take men like Jōken and put a hand on the hilt before they swing."
Silence stretched.
Shibi's jaw was set hard enough that the muscles in his cheek jumped. The swarm under his cloak hissed like distant rain.
Danzō looked from one boy to the other.
"Two heirs of the Hive," he said. "Tell me. What is the lesson of Aburame Jōken?"
Shino's mind did what it always did with new information: lined it up, took it apart, weighted the pieces.
Power drawn faster than control. A field that ate allies first because they were closest. Seeing people as fuel. Forgetting that each body carried a colony and a history, not just chakra numbers on a board.
He straightened a fraction.
"Power and control should scale together, Danzō-sama," he said. His voice sounded very small next to Danzō's, but it didn't shake. "Jōken-dono increased one and not the other. He treated the shinobi around him as…extensions of his technique. Interchangeable."
He picked his words with care.
"A jutsu that devours those it is meant to protect is a failure," Shino said. "Calling it sacrifice is…incorrect."
He didn't say "dishonest." That seemed unwise.
Something almost like amusement touched the corner of Danzō's mouth.
"You think like your father," he said. "Measure twice, cut once."
His gaze slid to Torune.
"And you?" he asked. "What did you hear?"
Torune had gone very still while Danzō spoke, like a man trying not to disturb a nest under his ribs.
Now his bandaged fingers flexed once, the faint hiss under the cloth louder in Shino's ears than the wind.
"…I think he hesitated about the wrong thing," Torune said.
Shino looked at him, startled. Danzō waited.
Torune's goggles were turned toward the tree line, toward the direction of the Locust Field.
"If Jōken-dono meant to give himself," Torune said slowly, "he should have given all of himself first. Let the Hive eat him down to nothing before it touched anyone else. Made himself…empty. Just a shape for the technique to wear."
The words came out flat, like he'd dragged them up from somewhere deeper than his lungs.
"People like me can't stand near others," he went on. "Not safely. My insects kill on skin contact. I can't sit in a classroom without gloves and long sleeves and distance. I can't hold hands without thinking about…rotting."
Shino's bugs recoiled hard enough that his hands twitched. He kept them still by force.
"So I think the lesson is," Torune said, "if you're born with a technique that cuts you off anyway, you shouldn't keep one foot in normal life and call it balance. If you decide to be a shield"—he swallowed—"you shouldn't be afraid to vanish."
He said it like it wasn't hypothetical. Like it was already quietly decided.
Danzō watched him for a long, humming second. Something approving flickered behind the single visible eye.
"You understand," Danzō said, "what most adults never do. To protect the many, a few must accept being erased completely."
He turned to Shibi.
"I had considered your son Shino," he said, as if they were discussing grain storage. "His analysis is sharp. His control, impressive for his age. But this one already thinks as Root must think. And his secret technique is…uniquely suited to our work."
The swarm under Shibi's cloak roared in a way only Aburame really heard. The hair on Shino's arms tried to stand up again.
"Torune is my son as well," Shibi said.
No raised voice. No visible anger. Just iron under silk.
"And the village will rely on him as such," Danzō replied, tone still smooth. "His burden is heavy. Better it is put to use than left to rot in some dark corner, unspent. You, of all people, know how waste offends me."
Before Shibi could answer, Torune stepped forward.
Not enough to cross into arm's-reach of anyone. Just enough that his choice was obvious.
"Lord Danzō," he said.
Danzō regarded him.
"Shino can stand in the light," Torune said. "He can sit in a classroom. Argue about food. Complain about loud teammates. He's…good at it. Or he will be."
He didn't look at Shino while he said it.
"I'm not," he went on. "My father was Shikuro Aburame. You know what our line carries. You know what my insects do."
Danzō's eye narrowed, calculating. Of course he knew. Root tracked rare techniques like other people tracked storms.
"My bugs are perfect for killing quietly," Torune said. "For making sure no one walks away. For work that doesn't need company. If Jōken-dono needed something like Root to aim him, then…someone like me should stand where he should have stood."
He drew in a breath, slow and careful around the edges.
"Take me," he said. "Let Shino stay."
Every insect in the clearing seemed to go silent at once.
Danzō watched him, then nodded, tiny and decisive, as if a seal had just been stamped.
"Very well," he said. "Torune Aburame, of Shikuro's blood. From tomorrow, you will enter Root's training. You will become the shield Jōken failed to be."
Shino's kikaichū surged under his skin, a panicked cloud. He stepped forward without meaning to.
"Torune—"
Torune lifted a gloved hand between them, palm outward. A barrier made of cloth and everything under it.
"It's fine, Shino," he said. His voice was softer now, edges filed down. "You'll go to the Academy. Spend missions complaining about civilians who don't understand bugs. Make teammates roll their eyes when you explain everything."
He tried to smile. It wobbled.
"I'll do the work that doesn't need a team," he said. "Somebody has to."
"That is not a fair division," Shino blurted, before he could stop himself. "I have not agreed to—"
"When is anything fair?" Torune asked. Not cruel. Just…tired.
Shibi stepped between them, cloak whispering.
"You will not take Shino," he said to Danzō, crisp and clear.
Danzō inclined his head.
"I have no need of both," he said. "One tool, honed properly, is enough."
He tapped his cane once.
"Dawn," he told Torune. "The old granary at the base of the cliff. From there, your path will be below the village's roots."
He turned and walked back into the trees, the darkness swallowing him one step at a time. No sound except the faint tap of the cane and the low, constant murmur of his own inner swarm.
For a while, no one moved.
Lantern bugs drifted between trunks, blinking. Somewhere off in the safer part of the forest, an owl called, decided this conversation involved too much chakra, and went elsewhere.
Shibi's shoulders dropped by a millimeter.
"Torune," he said quietly, without looking back. "We will speak at home."
Torune bowed his head.
"Yes, Father."
Shibi turned his gaze on Shino. There was something in the tiny angle of his chin that Shino had never seen before, not directed at him.
Regret, maybe.
"Shino," he said, "finish your practice and return. We will discuss what you heard."
"Yes, Father," Shino said automatically.
Shibi set a hand just above Torune's bandaged shoulder, fingers hovering a fraction of an inch from the cloth, close enough to guide, not quite touching. Together they left the clearing, shapes bleeding into the darkness under the trees.
The woods felt larger after that. Hollower.
A lone lantern bug drifted down and bumped lightly against Shino's sleeve, its tiny feet skittering over the fabric. He raised his hand. It crawled onto his palm, abdomen pulsing with soft light, wings folded.
His kikaichū stirred, hungry but waiting.
Shino watched the small glow for a long breath.
"Power eats," he said finally, as much to the colony in his bloodstream as to the insect on his skin. "But I will not let mine eat the people around me."
The word he wanted was bigger than his mouth knew how to form yet. Friends. He settled for the shape he could manage.
He let a thin ring of kikaichū slip from his sleeve. They touched the lantern bug's glow, drank just enough of the extra chakra to take the strain off its tiny system, then flowed back under his skin before the light could falter.
The bug shivered once, shook out its wings, and took off. Its little lamp stayed steady as it joined the others.
Shino watched it go until it was just another drifting spark in the dark.
Above the trees, stars were coming out, one after another, cold pinpricks in a sky that—for a heartbeat—looked like the underside of some vast, invisible Hive: cells on cells stretching into forever.
He pulled his sleeves back down over his hands, felt the quiet weight of his insects settle along his bones, and went back to work.