Repost because ff took out all my paragraph breaks.
For Shikamaru, there's a loneliness to be found in company. A silence that is never more apparent than when the air is filled with people talking, doing and thinking.
And silence shouldn't be the accurate word – because opposite, because contradictory, because because – but it is. At least in his head where one plus one is zero rather than two.
He do wishes sometimes, when the skin beneath his nails wants free and the gums of his mouth ache, that it is. That the trajectory of a kunai from high up a tree to target is something you can calculate, something not tangible, instead of what it is when you're Shikamaru.
Situation.
Action.
Response.
End.
Repeat.
Infinity has no end.
People have, however. They open up and bleed red; they disappear in blue; they lose heartbeats; they close up and turn purple.
It can take a second and it can take forever.
There is a grave somewhere in Konoha, where no one visits other than to add another to the tally, where someone lays because he lost his skin. Where someone is dead – as the nail and as the stone – because he was more important as a costume than as a pulse.
And the sickest part of him – the one that he hides beneath lack of words and interest, the one that never stops, the ninja – understands. Why a person – witness turn victim – is better dead than alive.
The dead tell no tales.
Why ripping someone's skin off – they burned the leftovers, he knows, after they scavenged truths hidden in them – was the best choice to make.
The snake could have done it many ways.
This one was just the easiest.
Rip. Glue. Enter.
It's how Shikamaru would've done it.
There is a silence in his head – where everything happens and yet nothing comes to pass – because Shikamaru knows. At some point, silence is what they'll all be.