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The Desert
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"Listen: the desert is my home, Shikamaru," she said once, before things became serious, back when there was still room for escape. He was never a believer in Fate like Neji was; he always believed in infinitely shifting opportunity dependent on the uncertain outcome of each successive moment. It was because he understood this so well that he was considered a genius. Yet when he looked back on that statement years later, he realized that he had unconsciously taken everything about her for granted.
"Listen" meant "understand," but although he was a genius who should have been able to recognize a solid fact, he ignored the truth of it. Even with his ploys and schemes and his mind that operated on logical equations, to convince her to leave her home was no small thing. He had managed it only after years of patience and plotting. The folly came in thinking he had succeeded just because she had left the Sand behind her to start a life with him.
Although she had walked away from it, her heart was always in Suna. Through the years of its decline, when the Wind daimyo cut off all means of support and Suna scrambled for mercenary work just to keep afloat, when the civilians began to abandon it and the streets slowly emptied, when the most recent ninja war began with the death of Kankurou, when Gaara's eyes grew dark again not from bloodlust but from defeat – through these years she would return to it, again and again, and every time she would stay longer and afterwards return to Konoha more battle-weary. It wasn't because she didn't love them, she told her children in Konoha. It was because she was needed at home.
Still he didn't understand. Home was what you returned to, wasn't it? And she always returned to him. Defying logic, he fixated on that fact and ignored all other evidence. She made her future in Konoha. Her children were born in Konoha. Konoha, where everything was green and growing, then regrowing; even after heavy losses Konoha would sprout up again from the earth and spread its branches and unfold its leaves.
He didn't understand until the very end, after having begged the mission off the Hokage, after the siege had ended, Konoha's attackers were decimated, and the Hokage could finally spare ninja to send to Suna in support of the battle there. He didn't understand until the day they came upon an empty, ghostly wall of rock from which drifts of Sand were no longer cleared away by guards and attendees. He didn't understand until they walked through the wreckage, the hollow bones of buildings, the barren lifeless streets, which were piled high with sand unleashed by the Kazekage in the fury of last defense, so that the village was barely discernable from a natural canyon on the plain. The invaders hadn't outlasted this final attack from the sand-wielder, but even so the graves of Suna ninja blended together under drifts of sand, one indistinguishable from the next, and only one of the legion was left unburied, his form dry and unmoving, nearly mummified where he sat alone by his empty gourd. They could not say if he had died from thirst or from some unknown jutsu or if perhaps he had simply let the desert take him after the rest of his charges were gone.
Their best trackers could not discover where the remaining shinobi had fled to, and just when they all began to realize that no one had fled at all from the ship sinking in the sea of sand, his son, who was sixteen then and had refused to be left behind, called him over to a protected courtyard whose walls somehow had withstood the destruction. The graves there were all unmarked, but for one: a fan, wind-battered, protruding from the ground like a stake. Like a tombstone. Shikamaru understood, then: the final place to which she returned, the desert, was her home.
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Author's Note. 666 words: a devil's drabble? Sorry to be so depressing. It's backlash from my recent fluff.