La Meterenigue
The Rookie Eight always went to the bar together, Saturday night. Clockwork. More often than not one of them would be missing, off on some mission, but nevertheless the two four-seater tables remained forever reserved on the halfway point of the weekend. Everybody paid for themselves, of course, except for Ino, who would sucker one of the other guys into catching her tab for her. Since dipping into the ANBU Kunoichi seduction unit, she'd been devastating to the male race on a wholly unprecedented level.
'Other guys' did not include Shikamaru, who was more or less immune to her charms. He would turn and look at her, deadpan, and let out a pithy, tailor-made one-liner that never failed to make her head steam. Somehow he had managed to join Shino as the most silent members of the eight, mostly speaking when spoken to and not much else. He nursed his pink margarita (Ino never failed to make fun of him for that) and stared out the minuscule window that always sat directly opposite his seat, across the room.
Kiba cracked once that he was just cloud-gazing without the clouds, and Shikamaru mm'ed and went on watching, not bothering to dignify the dog-boy's shot with a real response. If he did the mutt would trouble him some more. Kiba didn't take well to being ignored, so he leaned over and cracked Shikamaru once on the head with his fist.
Maybe the dog was just used to hanging out with the rest of the heavy combat unit, Uzumaki and Lee and all those other outrageous stamina machines that could take a Fire Dragon to the head and keep on ticking, or maybe he was just pissed enough that he forgot Shikamaru was just a guy, really, with no special durability to speak of. In any case Kiba's fist connected with the side of Shikamaru's head and smacked it off to the side, drawing some blood from the scrapes in his bangs.
Shikamaru had stumbled slightly, fallen out of his chair, while Kiba had started to backpedal again, as he always did when he did something stupid; but the Nara just waved his hand, put his seat back up, and said, "S'okay."
It didn't matter, and Kiba picked up on that real quick and grinned wide, saying "You're all right, Shika."
Shikamaru shrugged, waved at Uzumaki, got him to blowdry the table clean from his spilled margarita, and ordered another one. It came and Shikamaru took it and went right back to drinking it.
Life went on.
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Sometimes he thought that those Saturday night bar meetings were the only thing he had to look forward to anymore, when the door of his apartment closed shut behind him and he was once again confronted with four walls of plaster and a flat spring bed. Shikamaru didn't go in for amenities. He had perfected the art of entertaining himself a very long time ago. Did anyone seriously think he looked at clouds because they were interesting?
The sounds and stirrings of the bar kept his mind from whirring, the endless click-clock of shogi pieces and kunai dullers in prep for another night mission. Sometimes he found himself reaching for a shogi piece instead of the other when he had an enemy ninja in his sight. Once he even threw a piece. It clunked off the back of his skull and sent him unconscious. He didn't even have to look to tell. They really were the same thing when you got right down to it.
Kunai were pawns in a shinobi war. Maybe a katana was a knight, or a jutsu, queen. All you had to do was move your pieces in the right way, and connect with that other king. Knock him off the board.
The board might change, but the spaces between his tools and the enemy's tools were always the same, and he crossed it just as easily. No one thought anymore. It was just a game. And those that screamed, that kicked as they went down and howled threats at him, they were the worst players of all.
Then the waffle light blinked on, and Shikamaru let his thoughts scatter like marbles over the floor as he walked over to the machine and his newly-done food. They had been burnt black in some places, but he ate them anyway.
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It surprised no one that Shikamaru and the Hokage disliked each other; but it went farther than anyone outside of Neji realized. The Branch House Hyuuga, so intimately familiar with the mechanics of hate and enforced superiority, saw the problem right away. It was a rehash of his own match with Hinata, long ago in the Chunin exams, so maybe that was why she had stopped talking to Shikamaru.
No matter what Tsunade-sama did, someone usually got killed. And every time a new black paper came in, the kanji bit deep into the paper with slashing strokes and jabs from a pen, the Sannin could feel Shikamaru stabbing her with his eyes. There was no way to respond to it, to the utter disappointment in his gaze, until finally she snapped and had the ANBU entrance test given to Shikamaru. He didn't volunteer, but in a military dictatorship, there are no need for volunteers.
The Nara both survived and passed, and ANBU was ecstatic at finally having another Nara, a shadow user, included among their numbers. Despite their obvious affinity for Black Ops and nighttime runs, the clan had habitually avoided the elite ranks out of some instinct or just plain laziness. Whatever the case, Shikamaru vanished into the ranks, and Tsunade took a bitter, awful enjoyment in assigning raw recruit Pig every difficult, dangerous, and suicidal mission she could find. He couldn't refuse them, after all. Not in ANBU.
Her only relief, and why she began to hate Shikamaru, was that he never mentioned it to Naruto, one of her two remaining precious persons. Because she knew that Naruto would never forgive this; never forgive her deliberate, spiteful attempts to get the genius of the Rookie Eight killed just because he knew that she knew that Shikamaru, even at fourteen, would have made a better Hokage than she ever had. Even a better one than Naruto would have.
She was allowed, however, to hate Shikamaru, because he didn't want to be that better Hokage. Instead he chose to remain in ANBU, the star of the shadows. So Tsunade never bothered to regret putting him in there, and never bothered to take him back out.
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The one time Neji, in all his constricting distance and poise, attempted to talk to Shikamaru about it, it hadn't ended. Not really.
"Shikamaru." he had said solemnly, after everyone else had left the bar and they had drawn straws to see who would carry Kiba home. The brash ninja always drank himself into a stupor when he got a chance, and this time had gone straight to unconsciousness. The Nara had been stumbling along, Kiba's weight slung over one shoulder and holding steady with Neji's help.
"Do you . . . dislike the Hokage?" he had asked, almost tentatively. It was an utterly alien feeling, but so was this entire situation. This was Uzumaki's forte; why wasn't he here, with one of those damn speeches?
Shikamaru had tilted his head, considering the question, and stumbled again. Kiba almost fell off, but the Nara adjusted his weight and managed to hold onto his unconscious comrade. He sighed, a classic "Troublesome." escaping him, before he finally replied, "No. Not really."
Anyone could have spotted the evasion, and Neji was about to ask again when Shikamaru interrupted, "She's kind of like Naruto. That's all."
The Hyuuga couldn't disagree with that, but by the time he had thought to ask how Tsunade was akin to Naruto, Shikamaru had already dumped off his burden onto the Inuzuka doorstep, and had turned to step away.
"It's no big deal." he had said dismissively to Neji, and vanished soundlessly and perfectly into the shadow of the awning.
In response, Neji shrugged, and went home to the Hyuuga.
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At some point Shikamaru had stolen an umbrella from an enemy Nin, or bought it somewhere, or made it himself somehow, or had it made. The end result was that regardless of weather he now carried a large, black and sun-spotted umbrella with him all the time, hooked onto his back. No one ever made fun of it - the very first mission he had taken it on had left the target pinned to a wall with six dozen needles propelled from the point of the umbrella - but it still drew a lot of curious stares.
At some point, one of the Rookie Eight (Kiba) had realized that Shikamaru never used the damn thing, not in a fight, not in the rain, not even as a beach umbrella to block out the rain. Shino had explained to him that the amount of shade it created when opened was invaluable to the Nara, but he never did open it, so Kiba immediately ruled that out. Finally, he had stormed up to Shikamaru one day, after he had beaten Chouji soundly in a friendly sparring match, and demanded, "What's wrong with that damn umbrella?"
Shikamaru raised an eyebrow, and responded, "Nothing."
"Then why don't you use it?" Kiba cried, aggravated beyond what little tact he had in the first place.
"Would you freak out about it so much if you knew exactly what I could do with it?" Shikamaru said, without lowering that eyebrow. After a quick introduction to psychological warfare, the Inuzuka had finally laughed, clapped Shikamaru on the shoulder again, and left, singing off-key.
Irrepressibly reminded of another headstrong shinobi, Shikamaru had shook his head and turned away, watching Chouji spar with Ino now, as the other teams slowly began to drift away. Hinata, waving her hand desperately, ran after Kiba, finally catching up with him and began to berate him, however softly. Shino strolled after, as imperturbable as ever.
Shikamaru wondered if he was the only person that saw these patterns forming; the whorls of a failed Team Seven, of the failed Sannin, painted onto a brand-new target.
He shrugged. Then he turned to watch Chouji and Ino spar, laughing, while he stared up and off at nothing, or clouds, if it hadn't been one of those bright blue cloudless days.
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He was always ready for a mission. It didn't matter where he was, or what he was doing. It was always unimportant compared to 'the mission'. In short order he became the most heavily-traveled ANBU outside of the so-called Sharingan prodigies - Itachi, and Kakashi.
Three out of any five days he was gone on one mission or another; typically assassination. It bothered him less than most because he never strained. After he finally learned to manipulate someone else's shadow without using his own as a connecting line, killing became a remarkably easy affair.
He did have an odd habit of strangling his victims to death with his old Shadow Neck Bind jutsu when he had the chance, but since it was both more chakra efficient and easier, only the commander ever questioned him about it.
Shikamaru had just shrugged, staring at the lamp behind the Commander's shoulder, and eventually the man got the hint and turned it off.
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Ino and Chouji grew more and more distant, until one day he came to the group meeting and Ino called him "Nara."
It was kind of like being punched hard in the gut, how all of his breath flew away and his eyes turned unavoidably to Ino's, just like every other person at the table. But Ino just demurely ate her food, watching her plate alone, and Chouji scowled at everyone that looked like they were going to say something. With Chouji now a full-sized Akimichi, a 6' sumo weighing somewhere between three hundred and four hundred pounds, no one bothered to open their mouth.
Bothered by the fact he hadn't seen it coming, Shikamaru took another sip of his margarita. He guessed that he needed to find a new seat at the table.
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A week later, he didn't show up for the weekly meeting. Ino and Chouji failed to comment, but Shikamaru had never been a big player in the conversations, and hadn't really teamed up for a mission with any of the Eight since his induction into ANBU. The conversation regained its normal levels, and life went on.
Pig reported all of this with a blank expression, and Tsunade couldn't help the tiny, bitter smile that crept up one side of her face. She had wondered when it would happen.
"Lonely, isn't it." She said, for one moment relishing the agony he must have been feeling.
She never did bother to order him to take off his mask, because frankly, she didn't want to see his face anyway. Instead she gave him two weeks vacation, in thanks for his near-perfect mission record and availability. It was a petty and vicious revenge.
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Reportedly, he spent most of that time in his room, watching the walls. For a while Tsunade considered placing him on suicide watch, but realized that he did that anyway.
No one came to visit, and Ino never did ask about him when she came in for her missions, her eyes more and more turned towards her remaining teammate, who had only ever bothered looking at her. No one could figure out the chemistry there, but it was obvious enough.
Naruto himself, the great inspirer, made exactly one visit, midway through the second week. He walked up to the door, kicked it in, and swaggered in, waving his arms and spouting.
Shikamaru wasn't there.
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Two weeks later, Pig came back, and requested his first mission be an assassination mission. Tsunade turned him down. "We need you to protect the Daimyo." she said. "It's a long-term, two-year assignment."
Truthfully they did need another ninja around the Daimyo, if more just for information purposes than to actually protect him. The Slug Princess gave Pig a secondary objective of influencing him to support Konoha of course, but didn't make it a primary. She figured that would work as a sort of olive branch. If not, she didn't really care anyway.
"It's your choice whether or not to accept it, operative." she said solemnly.
Pig didn't call her on the lie. He also didn't come back from the Capital, when his term was up. Tsunade tried to recall him and was slapped down by the Daimyo himself, who had 'taken the young Nara under his wing, as he an aspiring young man with uncommon good sense'.
Kiba was Chouji's best man at his wedding, halfway through the term. Shikamaru was invited. The invitation came back; the invitee did not. Ino took that as perfect permission to forget about him near permanently, and Chouji had long since picked sides, anyway.
The ANBU did a little negotiating and got a new Nara, at the price of a few forbidden scrolls for the family.
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Four years afterward, Tsunade looked up into the face of the new Daimyo and could do nothing but bite her lip as he looked down on her, face as clear and cold as the wind beyond the clouds.
"I think politics suited me better." he said softly. "Ironic."