ENDGAME
"I am one who loved not wisely, but too well." -Othello
"This is what you wanted from me, isn't it?" she said, her face impassive. She quirked an eyebrow at him, ignoring the kunai at her throat and the robe-clad arm around her waist as though they were mere pieces of jewelry. "To win. To get me out of the way where I wouldn't intervene with your ego. Well, you did it. As always. I even have to say I was surprised." She laughed. " That's genius for you."
The robed Akatsuki tightened his grip on her, pressing the metal against her tanned skin, and looked vaguely surprised at the half-smile that quirked on her lips.
"Almost done with your little speech, girl? Because I can always just kill this guy now," the tall figure growled
"Almost," she replied. "Just one more thing." She stared right into him then, her eyes stabbing him the way no one else ever could, reading all his darkest desires and picking the perfect words to use against him. It was his fault. He could do nothing for her. He could give nothing. Not even sound, because he couldn't form the words in his mouth to apologize.
"Bastard," she said softly, and spit on the ground before him. "There. That's the only thing I ever taught you to do."
That night, he reported her as dead to the Godaime Hokage.
Shikamaru woke in an icy panic from dreamless sleep, sitting up so fast in the silent darkness that he saw spots on the black canvas of his eyelids. Nothing moved. In the window he could see the soft reflection of silvery moonlight on the tree branches, illuminating the folds of thin hospital sheets twisted around his legs. He leaned over and rested his forehead on his knees, gasping lightly.
Drunk. That was the last thing he remembered. He had been very drunk.
Something brushed against leg that made a soft swishing sound, like fabric running over the cheap hospital pajamas he wore. Shikamaru frowned and held his hand up to the moonlight. A bandage was wrapped around his wrist, just where the artery ran close to the skin. He touched it lightly.
Drunk, and irrational too, apparently.
Shikamaru dropped his arm onto the mattress and stared in silence at the dark as though he could find the answers to his questions hiding somewhere in the sterilized corners of this room. He didn't remember what had happened, but he could guess:
He came home from the party drunk. It hadn't been a really crazy party, but he'd found himself at the bar for an extended period of time, his ANBU mask tossed lazily on the counter. When they had staggered back and opened the creaky door to the apartment building Shikamaru had told Chouji to fuck off, the way he had taken to doing recently. After that he wasn't sure, but he had probably walked into his room and found the handprint still pressed in the paint beside his bed, and lost it.
Yeah, he could envision what had happened.
Spit on the stupid thing. Maybe vomit too, he didn't care. And then stumble off to the bathroom for a nice razor before deciding a kunai would be more appropriate, and god damn it, he was sick of doing cliché thing.
He supposed he was lucky he'd landed here, now that the drink had worn off. But still, there was going to be hell to pay. He could see the report now as it must have landed on the Hokage's desk last night: Medical notice: ANBU strategist Nara Shikamaru hospitalized last night due to severe arterial blood loss at the wrists. Suicide attempt is suspected. Patient received blood transfusion type A positive. See below for details. There was no way he'd be out of here without some serious counseling. Not this time.
So now the record stood at two suicide attempts in two weeks, not a pretty figure. The first time he had thrown himself into the lake in a sake-induced stupor, only to shake off the effects of the drink upon hitting the cold water. No one knew about that; it had left no mark. But this time there would be a bloody room to bear witness to his madness, and a dead-obvious slash across his wrist he hadn't bothered to disguise as a battle wound.
This could not keep happening. One of these days his luck would wear off and he'd end up dead, his death attributed to a glorious fight in the tradition of the ANBU, where they never accepted that any member was less than heroic. That bothered him more than anything else, the concept of ending up as a PR device with a lie on his gravestone. Not that it wouldn't serve him right. But it would be ugly.
So Shikamaru did the next best thing. He walked up the window and leaned his elbows on the moonlit sill, pressing his palms against the glass. He expected he'd be locked in, because he could tell from the moon that he was in the south-facing wing of the building, where security risk patients were treated. But Shikamaru had seen a maintenance worker cleaning the rooms here once, and noted how he got around the alarms that were built into the system. If one jiggled the pane just the right way, careful not to let it bounce in and out, the frame's cheap pins would come loose as easily as lifting a shogi piece.
A short moment later, he was free, staring out into the warm summer night.