Title: Hide Me In Your Spaces
Pairing: Shikamaru x Ino
Rating: M, for non-explicit sexual content and minor language
Length: One-Shot (1,523 words)
Description: There is a touch of death in her mouth that smothers him.
Disclaimer: I disclaim Naruto. It's Kishimoto's.
_ Hide Me In Your Spaces _
She is purple and blue, and cold.
His hand is lost in a sea of liquid gold, idly twining between the luminescent locks tumbling off her head. The other arm supports his weight on bended elbow as he considers her at once thoughtfully yet mindlessly. Nothing seems to move in the spaces around them.
And it's this again.
A brief look of something flashes across too-blue eyes before she flips them over easily with strength built from years of ninja life, and he is too tired and too used to this to be surprised. She straddles his stomach, looking ethereal and melancholic in a moon-kissed nanosecond-eternity when her frame catches the pale glow from outside his windowpane. Familiar heat begins to rush up, simmering low and low in their bodies, churning like water rolling to a boil. Again, there's a look, but all of a sudden all he knows is lips and flesh and skin—and all of her—pressed against him, toiling with need. Blonde locks curtain around their joined faces, as if closing off the rest of the world and stopping time where it is only the two of them. His own hair tumbles out of the usual spiked ponytail, freed by soft and slightly calloused hands that now cling to the back of his neck, the other hand weaving into loose strands, massaging his scalp.
It's not really love, not between them, not when they are too broken and too lost to ever find each other. It's not really desire either, not in that searing, Saint-Elmo's-Fire-in-your-veins sort of pure, closely-tangible, electric excitement. It's never that simple. But there's chemistry between them, of course—when has there not?—and tension—again, ever-present—and a complex need—of sorts. The need to grab, anchor, fight for slippery holds to stay not even sane but alive. To feel alive.
And it barely works.
Barely. But the real key word here is "works," in some probably cynical way, because somehow, somewhere along the line in their jaded, life-saturated lives, that has become enough. Barely enough became just enough. Just enough to feel a little further away from death.
They part for air, heavy breaths visible in the cold of his room like little puffs of smoke. Her hands move to the bottom of his shirt as she assists him in taking it off, cool fingers brushing lightly across his abdomen. Soon the garment is discarded and forgotten, sailing toward the ground like a flag in surrender. His hands slide up her sides, relishing in the feel of her small waist and smooth, lightly toned stomach beneath his fingertips. His thumbs rub in languid circles against her shivering flesh for a few moments before he hooks them underneath the hem of her top and gently pulls it open. The clasps part with light clacks, starting from the bottom up, slowly revealing her pale white and pink-tipped bosom and he can feel the anticipation building steadily in his loins. She doesn't give him a chance to slide the purple fabric off of her arms, capturing his lips again in a brazen kiss. Again the need presents itself, as if they were asphyxiating, as if resuscitating, as if exchanging hot air—warm like little puffs of smoke in their mouths—could breathe life into each other.
And Asuma's dead.
Sensei's dead.
Dead—gone—away.
The dewy pants of exhaled smoke shared within their interlocked mouths gradually take on a more literal sensation of the word, becoming dry and edged with burnt ash. He wonders if she can taste the cigarette he'd smoked an hour ago, and if she'd had one earlier too because although she is still nothing if not sweet and slightly tangy, there is a touch of death in her mouth that smothers him; the touch of dead cigarettes, dead fire, dead emotions, dead—death that all connects back to the man who had once been.
And they can't have each other.
And isn't that just a fucking surprise? In two people who are almost expected by everyone else to end up together, two people who are inextricably linked? But this relationship isn't really forbidden so much as it is, most easily, "off-limits." They are on the same team, the next generation of the unbreakable InoShikaCho. They are the childhood friends who grow up together with parents who are friends, and they are family. And yet they could never end up together because reducing InoShikaCho to only InoShika would mean the end of this formation, this long-lasting bond, this tradition. And tradition means everything because family means everything. Konoha means everything.
So yes, there is that angle, the edge of the forbidden, the romance and want in something one can never have, shading over their complex relationship. It doesn't help that sensei is dead, too, so they automatically seek comfort like a child stretching out instinctively for his mother's embrace. And who better to find solace than in each other, when misery seeks company like a desperate lover? Thankfully, Choji is spared from this disastrous dance, this mutual fall into a stagnate pocket between friends and lovers, denial and grief, because his bonds with each of them are different than the dynamics his two teammates have with each other. Because Choji is sweet, easy-going, and straightforward with his feelings, and grieves like people should, like normal people who lose one-fifth of his life's most precious people. Because Choji only wants to understand, to help, and backs down when appropriate. Because Shikamaru and Ino are hotheaded in their own ways, incompatibly compatible, and probably much more afraid than they'd ever admit to being. Because he uses and overuses his minds like a tortuous maze of over-analyzed emotions and the mind is the maze where she plays. Because the more they play and twist and consume the air around them, the more their bodies seem to forget how to breathe on its own, seemingly having to forcibly trace the paths of muscle contractions and nerve impulses and heartbeats and brain signals and—it barely even keeps them alive.
Moans fill the silence, dropping dead in the vacant air. Hands fly everywhere and their pants do too, nothing tender and almost systematically impersonal. They join together finally, and dimensions and time and molecules stop moving in that first moment like the blankness that occurs in the mind right before an epiphany.
And it's all over.
That moment alone is their emotional climax—the real one would come later—when all the twisted and tired desires and warped passages of too-much-thought amalgamate into pure nothingness, everything melting into pure, unbridled lust. The moment where all the pent up frustrations and rage and anguish are pressed into each others' skins, meeting each other halfway in explosive understanding. This is why Ino always comes to Shikamaru, during, after, and between each boyfriend and meaningless fling, why Shikamaru opens his arms every time in full knowledge of this—why they continue even in spite of everything they are not, cannot, and will not be.
And it's all over, all over again.
Not for long, and not that it mattered, of course.
They still for a heartbeat longer after they finish at almost the same time, because they both know that the second he rolls off of her or she pushes him off of her—all the agony and guilt and overall exhaustion comes flooding back threefold.
Finally, he falls on his side, sinking next to her on his full-sized mattress and exhales the breath he forgot he had. She does the same, closing her eyes to shut off the world. Shikamaru, she'll say, let's stop this and he'll make a noncommittal grunt because he's a touch more cynical and definitely more of a realist to respond affirmatively. Maybe one day it will stop, maybe one day we will snap out of it—or maybe just snap. Maybe one day we'll stop treating each other like trash, feeling like trash, throwing our hearts away like trash.
But for now they are simply purple, blue, green, and black, and so very cold, frozen in limbo between platonic and amorous love, frozen in everything unknown and everything their powerful minds could not comprehend nor decipher, hiding in the spaces of each others' brokenness.
And it will continue.
Continue even as they are battered and bruised and fallen and frozen, unrelenting because dimensions and molecules and life and Konoha cannot really stop for them, cannot stop for adolescents who are plunged much too soon into maturity and death to wipe their tears and move on. Because this is the life they both chose, knowing full well (but not understanding) the consequences. Because Asuma-sensei is fucking dead, and don't they know it and don't they know it? Because nothing can happen, so no feelings can really mix in without them pushing it aside. Because this is their respite from mind games and tunnels and emotions and not-fucking-living and that complexity of everything, everything crashing and burning around them. Because two broken people cannot possibly fix each other, but can hope to at least make each other whole.
.
.
.
~owari
Author's Notes: So...I honestly am not sure what to think about this one-shot. It's been a long time (5 years or so) since I've written Naruto fanfiction, and although I have definitely improved in my writing, I'm not sure if I entirely like this piece. These ideas definitely sound better in my head haha. Is it weird that I like ShikaIno best when they're somewhere suspended in the middle of platonic and non-platonic love? Probably :P Anyways, thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed! Please review; all comments and criticisms welcome (the constructive kind is preferable)!
Until next time,
Alice (wonderlanding)