Written for the gaanaru livejournal community~
Title: Valentine's in Konoha
Author: Panur
Rating: T is for Teenage fun (even thought there are in they are mid twenties)
Warnings: Obviously written way before Itachi's death. Mostly mentions GaaNaru rather than centering on it. Also strongly Shika/Tem flavored.
Summary: Valentine's has somehow always ended up being a complicated date for the The Konoha nins. Mentions of Gaara/Naruto, one sided Sasuke/Naruto. Yaoi, crack, OOC and some Shikatema fanbabies XD
Special thanks for my beta Nef!
Valentine's in Konoha:
Valentine's has somehow always ended up being a traumatizing event for the shinobi in Konoha.
It happened like clockwork: Naruto, invariably, would be thinking how much groveling it would take to get Gaara to forgive him for canceling at the last moment for yet another year in a row.
Sakura, almost as invariably, would have her attention evenly split between tending to the wounded, breaking every bone of any sound nin who made the mistake of getting near her and wishing to get Sasuke-kun in just the right angle to deliver a solid punch to his crotch (by now considering that ridding the world of the Uchiha bloodline would be doing it a favor).
Shikamaru, more often than not, would be meditating the best course of action. He had it pretty much narrowed it to killing his mother, killing his children, killing his wife and committing suicide; the only detail remaining was to sort out what exact order to do all of this.
It was to be expected, what with the Uchiha heir deciding February was the best time in the world to show up and fuck a little with their lives, because no one in Konoha could possibly have anything better to do than hear the conceited-ass speeches about becoming stronger and defeating Naruto and who knew what else, given how everyone but the Hokage himself had pretty much stopped paying attention and started considering it white noise around year three.
Still… even the Hokage was getting pretty suspicious –not to mention fed up- of Sasuke's obscure intentions, especially because most of them consisted in cornering him someplace that would end up with Naruto soaking wet and then invade his personal space while taunting him. Naruto had tried to tell himself otherwise, but he was pretty sure that one of Sasuke's most favoured jutsu was a groping technique in disguise.
And considering his morphed form had giant hands for wings, that was a lot of groping.
It usually started with Shikamaru swiftly entering a phase secretly referred to by those closest to him as 'bitch mode'.
As much as he would have liked to tell anyone otherwise, his mother's genes ran in his genetic make up and, dominating as the Nara laziness gene could be, bitchyness was a close second; it's just it rarely had a time to shine through to its full potential.
It was sort of a seasonal thing. The twisted tree of bitchyness started showing its tender fruits around mid-January and was in full bloom and singing odes to spring that would put Gai to tearful shame around the time was when he saw his wife packing for her trip.
The lazy gene would tell him that getting into another needless argument would accomplish nothing other than sleeping in the couch until she left, and then the inner bitch would howl and rage and threaten with bodily harm- which the lazy gene found definitely too troublesome and potentially lethal, so it wasn't exactly insistent on the topic.
It usually went something like:
"What are you doing?"
"Packing."
"For what?"
"My trip."
"What trip? You can't trip anywhere- you're pregnant."
"Sure, I can. See, I've been doing it for 7 years in a row. All it takes is my backpack, my fan, and three days worth of trekking."
"You haven't been pregnant all those times."
"No, just three of those."
"Not this far up!"
"Funny, I distinctly recall having the second one while in Suna… So either your mathematical skills are a bit off or I have the gestation period of a cat."
"Wouldn't surprise me if you had the gestation period of a bitch-"
"What was that, baby?" Temari would purr, tenderly caressing the hand-sized fan strapped to her tight. The one with the serrated edges.
"That you always leave me in a ditch! You did it on purpose. You specifically planned it so I would miss the birth of our second son."
"You ran like a little girl on the first one and didn't even bother to show up for the last one because it was 'too troublesome'. What do you care where are they born?"
"You tried to castrate me for the first; did you really expect me to show up again for any other? And do you know how much blackmail material Hikaru has accumulated on me? Apparently I owe the brat an extra present for every birthday because I wasn't even in the same time zone when he was born and so I need to celebrate both village's birthdays."
"…Aren't you supposed to be a genius strategist? One would imagine countering a three year old would be a piece o cake for you…. and besides, shouldn't you be happy you get rid of my large, round, mood-swinging self?"
And that usually settled the matter because if he answered, he'd have to talk about mushy things like needs and feelings and wanting to make sure his woman would be appropriately pampered in ways younger brothers and drought-ridden countries were completely unprepared to handle …and other things that were so unmanly and troublesome that they just made him feel dirty in the sense that he didn't need his father to be present to imagine his "I told you so" face.
A desperate attempt to regain his pride would occur:
"My mother warned me about you!"
"Of course she did, Shika. Otherwise you wouldn't have gone through the trouble of marrying me."
And off she went, not only disregarding his concerns and their brats and their relationship but spewing vile lies about how he'd turned his marriage into a personal vendetta against his mother for trying to meddle into his life.
Which he absolutely hadn't done and wasn't actively doing and planned to continue doing until she was dead.
So, there he was, left all alone in the village, abandoned to the mercy of three brats blessed with his intelligence, their grandmother's temperament, and Temari's terrifying brute strength; then again, that was when he wasn't busy redirecting groups of ninja to the areas that needed more help or making sure his Hokage wasn't in the process of being sexually harassed by the remaining Uchiha wonder.
Oh, how he regretted ever making jounin. He could have lived a happy, fulfilling life as chuunin for the rest of his days, but hospital bills born from kids that broke, split or ripped something open and bled profusely the moment you blinked had taught him it took two very well paid jounin to make months end. He had even asked Sakura once if he could just get a monthly pass to lessen their expenses, or perhaps a "pay for two MRI´s for concussions and we'll sew the little one's fingers back on for free" type of discount.
She had though Shikamaru to be joking. He hadn't.
Even so, he preferred to be in the battlefield instead of at home. Between bloodthirsty sound ninja and his kids' accusing faces, he'd take the ninja any day of the week. You could kill enemy ninja and even be considered a hero for it. If you killed your children, like it or not, you'd go to prison..
He had wanted one daughter and one son. Temari had given him three sons (each of them a perfect mini-me of her, down to the blonde hair and penchant for driving him insane) and if this time he didn't get a girl, Shikamaru was calling it quits and getting her a hysterectomy.
In her sleep.
Hopefully before she thought of giving him the male equivalent with her teeth.
He wanted to have someone sympathize with him and not keep hearing the same old "Where is mom?" "Why did she leave? It's your fault, dad!" And more recently, the ever tearful "Are you two going to get a divorce?"
Shikamaru utterly refused to even consider that idea- Where would he find another woman that he could carry an intelligent conversation with? What kind of person other than Temari would be able to beat him on shogi one out of three times? Was there any other female in this world who would understand the importance of silence and would not feel the overwhelming urge to start talking about their feelings when he just wanted to be cloud gazing?
More importantly, where else would he find a woman that his mother disapproved of as strongly as she did of Temari?
No way. He was not going to let such a jewel go away that easily. Temari would remain his wife if it killed her. Though the odds were that this marriage and consequential family-forming would probably lead to his inevitable and likely gruesome demise. He knew about it.
He'd even made a chart.
Or maybe he'd die a lot sooner.
"Bastard!"
A whole lot sooner, if he didn't manage to get that stupid shark-toothed, freakish-sword toting idiot off his back and get to Naruto before Uchiha was done with what seriously – disturbingly- looked like using his sword to make choice cuts in Naruto's pants. It was costing him a pretty steady diet of knuckle sandwiches, and Naruto might not be Sakura, but that didn't mean he wasn't perfectly capable of breaking that flawless nose several times over without even trying… But at the same, Sasuke kept taking hits that were provably costing him a tooth or two and dicing Naruto's gaudy orange pants into something more fit to something he'd seen Ino wear once in a club.
"Sasuke, stop playing and fight me straight!"
If Shikamaru hadn't been trying very hard to keep all his limbs attached as opposed to sliced and diced by shark teeth, he would have laughed- possibly even wept- at the irony of such a sentence. Sasuke just "hnn"ed, spat what looked like a molar and made another cut that was a little too high on the blonde's thigh for his safety of mind. The part of the mind that wondered how much would having his skin rubbed off with sand would hurt.
"Sasuke, what are you trying to do?"
Then again, he wasn't that attached to the first layers of his skin. In fact, he was pretty confidant he could survive have the two or three first layers removed, and by then Temari and Kankuro would provably have managed to calm Gaara enough for him to explain that it was entirely Naruto's fault for stubbornly insisting on saving someone that was seriously beyond any sort of help someone without access to insane amounts of Prozac (and possibly chemical castration) could provide. He was sure Gaara would see it his way- he usually was a reasonable person when he wasn't in the middle of an homicidal rage.
Besides, he was sure he'd see that with Shikamaru dead, Temari would move right back to Suna and take their children with them, and that would be the least Gaara would know of a sex life. The Kazekage wasn't that far away from the genius department.
It was exactly while the lazy genius was pondering whether he actually wanted to survive explaining the Kazekage why he had failed to protect his beloved's virtue that the unexpected -as it tended to do in ninja life- happened.
One moment everyone was fighting for their life; the next, an orange and black hurricane had literally run over half of the remaining enemy army, only to blow the Uchiha some good several dozen meters away with a well-placed fist.
While Shikamaru vaguely wished he had thought of bringing a camera, Toothy swore and promptly ran after his friend, presumably to help him pick up missing dental pieces.
"Oh, it's you!" the Hokage cried then, stopping the gawking to give his clone a wide smile. "You're back! Did Gaara like the gif-mffph?"
One moment the clone was walking decidedly towards his original, the next he had the Hokage into a precarious dip while he seemed to be taking an exhaustive exam on the wholeness of his tonsils. Naruto flailed noisily at this for a moment, before suddenly relaxing and seeming to melt in his copy's arms.
Apparently he had a sleeper hold in his buttocks or something, because that's where the clone's hands had gone. Where Shikamaru's mind didn't dare to follow.
A dead silence ran through the bloodied battlefield, which was all of the sudden much more bloodied because over half of the shinobi erupted into spontaneous and rather abundant bloody noses. Nothing seemed to move. It was like a train wreck; you just couldn't look away.
This held especially true for Shikamaru. He kind of had Sai right next to him, and he was afraid of finding out what the raven was doing with his hands at the moment. Just in case, he had decided to do something else with them not related to art.
"Oh…" a very dazed blonde murmured after the clone finally released him with a wet, filthy smack of lips. "Oh, that was just so-"
"Mhh~" his clone agreed, nodding happily. "He told me to give you that. He says 'Happy Valentines' back."
Naruto blushed bright red at that, beamed a similarly filthy grin…. Then started getting teary eyed, his lower lip trembling in a way that suddenly clued Shikamaru on where the hell had he seen his baby's begging expression in some other blonde.
"….I miss him so much!"
"I know, I miss him too!" The clone cried, immediately bursting into similar theatrics. Then they went right back to sucking face
"So youthful!" someone bellowed in the background. He was willing to bet his firstborn on the fact that someone wore green spandex, not that the had much time to ponder about such things.
"Usuratonkachi!" the angry bellow erupted from an Uchiha-shaped hole on the hill, the dark-haired young man appearing in a glorious shower of lighting, murderous chakra, and concentrated vengeance. It kind of died at the sight of his lifelong rival and not too secret stalkee being shamelessly groped by his identical copy.
In slow motion, like a nightmare from which there was no waking, Shikamaru saw the young man swallow, dark eyes narrowing to slits that turned into a black and red atom-shaped symbol not two seconds later. Then he took his katana out and started walking toward their Hokage.
Shikamaru wasn't a hero.
He was just a young man who wanted an easy life, a so-so wife -hot enough to bed, not hot enough to make him question what she did while he was away on missions. He wanted to have an easy life- a little girl, a little boy. Days spent cloud-gazing, feeding the deer and putting out cigarettes on the talking head buried in his backyard.
Simple pleasures of life normal people had.
Instead he had somehow landed the most dangerous job on the country, married a hotter-than-hell girl from another country -who forced him to constantly reassure himself that no other man would be suicidal enough to try to bed her, let alone take her away- three kids that tired him more than week's worth of siege and a meddling mother who lived two houses down the compounds.
No, Nara Shikamaru wasn't anyone's hero nor was he a man who practiced heroics. So what if the blonde man he was running towards was one of his closest friends, a person he had learnt to appreciate and who he would sincerely mourn should something happen to him? There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for what he was doing.
Suicidal tendencies. He saw a blade and he ran for it. It would make more sense if you had his family to share breathing space with.
It was an honest desire to end his life that got him running and curiosity for what awaited on the other side that got him to jump just, and lust for the blade that made him scream his friend's name in the cheesiest of drama movie reenactments- just as the Uchiha raised his weapon-
Only to bring it down to the blonde's waistband, where it did short work of the clone's pants.
"Hey you-!"
"Bastard, what's your problem-?"
Clone's pants fell down to the floor in a heap of gaudy orange and loose sand while both original and copied blonde cursed at their enemy childishly, one hiding behind the other, and the Uchiha just gave an overly long 'hn' and smiled in a way that would have made Orochimaru proud.
If Shikamaru hadn't been busy trying to rearrange himself from the ungraceful heap he had landed in, he would provably have crying. Or filling a restraining order.
And then the unexpected happened again.
The sand on the clone's pants slowly started reforming itself into a sphere. Then the sphere sprouted a pupil and an iris and settled themselves on the clones. Somehow the narrowing of the eye-shaped sand was even worse than the Uchiha's smile. It floated closer, looking at the pair up and down, narrowed even more, then turned towards the Uchiha.
What happened next wasn't quite so unexpected, but the good news was that Naruto finally got his wish to get Sasuke back to the village. The problem was going to be able to peel him off of it, but with a little goodwill, he was sure it could be achieved, give or take a week of good scrubbing.
"-and that's how your uncle Gaara saved Valentine's Day."
"And what happened next, daddy?"
It was a little crowded with one small blonde to each side and a third nestled on his lap, and he kind of should have showered or at least bothered to get a few bandages on the cuts and bruises littering his body, but that sixth sense all parents developed had called him back home just in time to prevent Yoshikazu and Hikaru from playing 'hit the target' with their little brother. Absently frowning, he licked at his thumb and tried to wipe some of the bull's-eye-shaped paint off the toddler's face, earning him a loud, displeased whine and some quite angry glaring. Mommy would be so proud.
"Well… then we rounded up all the remaining Otonin, wrapped them up in a big pink bow and gave it to Baki as an early retirement gift, just in case he got bored -He liked it very much- And then Hokage-sama realized he was finally free to go see uncle Gaara as much as he wanted, dumped all the details of reconstruction on me, and ran off into the sunset. But before leaving…."
Just a feet away from them, three packages of cookies wrapped in bright purple cellophane rested, as innocent and harmless as anything made by Temari could be. The wind rushed through the trees, making it creak ominously, the older children huddling together to his sides. Hiruko made a slightly frightened noise as he curled closer to his chest, peeking carefully over one chubby arm. Shika patted his back consolingly.
"I know, baby. Daddy's scared too."
"Couldn't he forget to bring us mom's cookies?"
That's exactly what Shikamaru himself was wondering, what had happened to 'bro's before ho's'? Couldn't the stupid clone just say they had been crushed to death on the way here or something? The again, he was running back to Suna, where a very pregnant Temari would demand a report. Apparently Naruto had better survival instincts than he was credited for.
"Now, don't be like that. Your mother worked very hard on these-" If the work consisted of making them as inedible as possible or not might be up for the debate, but the work part, at least, he was sure- his woman didn't half-ass things, ever. "-and she just wants us to know she's thinking of us."
"Of course she's thinking of us. She's mommy!" Hikaru said, giving him a wide grin that was already one tooth short of all the ones he had had when he'd last seen him just three days ago "Who else is she gonna think of?"
Shikamaru made some vague noise of agreement, refusing to explain his kids how he wondered the exact same thing, usually while leafing through chastity belt catalogs.
"And there are a lot of people who don't have anyone," Yoshikazu said wisely, nodding to himself. "We are very lucky mom thinks of us with all the problems she has."
Yeah, Shikamaru thought, so very lucky he had married a demon of vengeance.
"I feel sad for people who don't have anyone," Hikaru continued, looking up at him with sea green eyes, wide open in the most innocent of expressions. "Maybe we can give 'em to someone who won't get any!"
"Son… who could possibly want something like your mother's Valentine's cookies?"
The cellophane creaked again, making them huddle in fear.
"… I know someone who can't say no to them," Yoshikazu said oh so very innocently
" 'Idan!" the toddler said, throwing up his arms and smiling at him widely. A very, truly scary smile that his other brothers mimicked to perfection.
Shikamaru gaped. Cheeky little bastards. His children were geniuses.
Evil little geniuses. If only their mother could see them now….
Maybe he'd have them take over the village and rule with iron fist (fan?) and then Naruto could finally move in with his beloved and drive his in-law insane instead of doing that to him.
And maybe- he thought as he picked his children and walked hand in hand in the search of the defenseless disembodied head- if his soon-to-arrive new child was another boy, he'd still give having a little girl another try. He was, after all, an established suicidal Jounin (who might or not be just the tiniest bit heroic) and if all his male children were this frightening, his future daughter would be a sweet, sensible girl who would hopefully be strong enough to help him keep all her siblings in line and wild enough to drive his mother insane- just like her mommy.
There were good chances. He would know.
He had made a chart.
END
Hope anyone who bothers to read enjoys~
I'll be thankfull for all comments. This has been a pretty sad day...
