A/N: I hope you enjoy this, and that you'll want to continue reading, because it's going to be a multi-chaptered story.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto
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Smoke twists in the air, out of the amber tip of the cigarette and the soft pads of his lips. It blows back into his face, a suffocating mask lying over his nose, but quickly dissipating. It leaves a sting to his eyes, one that matches the prickling of tears that is already ever present.
Shikamaru blinks and peers past the smoke that lingers in the space in front of him still, and lowers the cigarette. There is someone here. Sharp brown eyes make out the slender figure of a girl and strands of pale pink hair.
He relaxes back against the cool headstone, releasing the tension that straightens his spine and tightens his jaw.
It's just Sakura.
The girl came here often, like him, sitting by the graves of her precious people, and like him, stared at the memorial stone with dead eyes.
Sakura moves slowly, carefully, as she places the fresh flowers on each of the three headstones. She can feel the heavy weight of his gaze on her, but she remains unaffected – Shikamaru would not bother her.
After she makes sure that everything is the way it should be, she leans against the trunk of the tree that arcs over the tombstones and turns her eyes to the village beneath her.
The cemetery lies on a cliff, high above the village. She watches the people that are as small and insignificant as ants from where she stands.
The sky dims and clouds begin to gather, forming a thin layer of mist. She continues to watch. She watches them with empty eyes. It is busy, bustling down below. But everything up here is still. It's grey, desolate and clouded. Nobody would peer into the bleakness. Nobody would try to decipher her.
Shikamaru notes the way she sometimes brings sake up onto the hill with her, and he looks on as she continues to toss back alcohol, and continues to let tears well up in her eyes and then sink back half a minute later.
He would like to know why, but at the same time, he would not. It is easier to be oblivious and empty of thoughts than to be informed and full of knowledge. It must be strange, coming from a Nara, whose brains are supposedly filled with things.
He catches her eyes one day and she offers him a grin. Her lips are cracked, dry, like she doesn't even have the energy to lick them. The smile is brittle and laced with a little too much desperation. Shikamaru tries to smile back, but he knows that his expression mirrors hers. So he turns away and lights another cigarette.
When his eyes slide back to her, she has her back to him, and is looking down at the village once more. He stares at her waif-like form with half-lidded eyes. He thinks that when standing at the edge of a cliff, whether a person looks up or down, says a lot about how they are.
Sakura has never been very familiar with the boy. In her genin days, she blatantly ignored him, in her chunnin days; she spoke a handful of times with him, delivering messages and such.
And even now, her jounin days – she did not connect with him on a personal level, she merely respected him as a fellow shinobi, as a capable nin.
So she thinks it's funny how receptive Shikamaru is. It is funny how he seems to know. It is funny how he truly understands.
She supposes it's because they were both a part of the Shinobi war that ended only a year ago. It was a long war that dragged out for five exhausting years. She guesses that it's because they were both thirteen and young when it begun, and she thinks it may be because they both lost their teams in that very war.
Sakura likes to be away from the chaos below and near the clouds, near the sky. And he does too. But she is glad that she doesn't have to stay up here, with death and fog curling around her. She is glad for his silent, but solid presence.
The two figures reside on the cliff nearly every hour of their day aside from the work they have to do, and they have a way of existing that shows their weariness of the world and it's sad.
It's sad because these are teenagers with cold hands and dull eyes, who were once children with light in their eyes and hope in their hearts. It's sad because there's nothing worse than a child who has barely seen the world, yet seen enough to know that they do not wish to be a part of it.
And the two figures keep each other company.
They carry on like that for days, weeks, and months. It is an unsaid, unwritten rule. It is how they work. It is what they do.
Then one day, he makes a dent in their dynamics by asking her a question. And he speaks as if he were asking about the weather, and it's an almost impersonal question.
"What are you doing here?"
All at once, she feels her hollow chest fill with something disconcerting, and somewhat shocking. Her heart thumps. It reverberates around her body and she returns his gaze easily.
"I do not know."
Her answer is not a lackluster answer, nor is it a blatant dismissal. Her voice is not indifferent. It holds something in between the notes on its stave, a secret message that he catches.
It is a thing of progression.
They begin to speak more, and it maybe makes things better, just a little bit.
Even though there are still purple hollows under his intelligent brown eyes that just smolder like dying embers these days compared to the way they used to glow. Even though her dark jounin pants hang loose around her too thin hips, and she is made of delicate bird-bones that stretch the pale skin.
Almost a week later, when the sky has been stroked by navy-inked fingers that remind her all too much of someone, and the darkness is pinpricked with droplets silver that adds to the weight of her burdened heart, she decides to speak to him on a whim.
She observes the way the smoke turns back and settles on his face before fading off, "Your nose must be choked with the scent of ash."
That is what she says. It is something spoken on an impulse, but before she can retract her statement, he replies with a husky voice that rolls across the space between them, "I can smell more than the smoke."
He tells her he smells the calm of the night. He describes it through slow, drawled sentences that are barely strung together with clarity. She nods as he explains the throat-catching chill of the stars and as he expresses the vast expanse of blackened air.
And Shikamaru can see it in her eyes.
She understands.
. . . . . . .
Then Sakura decides to tell him her story.
And Shikamaru tells her his.
Their perfect facades begin to show cracks and something like love begins to seep into those gaps.
A/N: Chapter 2 will be up in a few days, maybe a week. Please review and favorite/follow!