Warnings: none.
Pairings: none.
Note: Written for the ficondemand livejournal community June challenge, for sarolynne.
Shikamaru was exhausted. It was nastily familiar, a state of being that he had resolved long ago never to voluntarily put himself in again, and yet found himself inhabiting all too often. It was the middle of the night, there was no one around, and it felt like he'd been walking for hours.
"Stupid mission," he muttered, trudging along. Everything would have been fine if Asuma hadn't decided that he – on his own – was the one with the greatest chance of successfully completing the mission. True, Shikamaru couldn't actually see any reason to disagree with that assessment, but . . . it was the principle of the thing, dammit. He did not work. Not if he could avoid it.
And now he was stuck on his own in the middle of nowhere, with no chance of getting back to Konoha before dawn broke.
Sighing, Shikamaru trudged on, looking for a place to spend the night. He didn't really want to camp on the path he was walking along, as that would leave him far too exposed, but it wasn't like there was a vast amount of choice. Grassland stretched out either side of him for miles without a break. He kept walking, however, hoping that he would find a hollow he could conceal himself within.
Roughly an hour later, Shikamaru spotted a small house, set back off the path and covered in overgrown vegetation. It looked abandoned – the garden obviously hadn't been touched in a long time, and there were no lights in the house – but he knocked on the front door anyway. There was no response, so he pushed it open and made his way into the house.
The interior was neat and fully furnished, but covered with a layer of dust that suggested that it hadn't been used for quite a while. There was only one level to the house, and Shikamaru left footprints in the dust on the floor behind him as he moved from one room to another, looking for a suitable place to lay out his sleeping bag. Eventually, he settled on what must have once been a spare room, which – as it had only one door and no windows – struck him as being the most defensible part of the house.
He found himself avoiding a discoloured spot on the floor when he lay out the sleeping bag, which in the dim light, looked almost like an old, faded bloodstain. Staring at it, Shikamaru shook his head and told himself he was just being superstitious, and lay down to sleep.
oOo
When Shikamaru woke the next morning, he lay still and kept his breathing patterns even, listening intently for any sign of another human presence within the room. Even the best of shinobi had to breathe, and it was near-impossible to avoid at least some sound – however small – as the movement of their chest rustled their clothes.
When he was satisfied that there was no one else in the room, Shikamaru opened his eyes – and got the shock of his life.
Sitting at the end of his sleeping bag was a young, dark-haired boy, no more than eleven, who grinned when Shikamaru sat up. "Hello," the boy said. "I'm Takeru. Who are you?"
Shikamaru stared at him. He knew it was possible for someone to conceal their presence entirely, but it took a great deal of training and mostly he figured that anyone who could do that would have killed him already.
But there was this boy, and he didn't look old enough to have that kind of ability, and—
—and he hadn't breathed when he spoke.
Shikamaru stopped, and began paying very close attention to the boy – Takeru. "I'm Shikamaru," he said. "Is this your house?"
"Um . . . I suppose it is, now," Takeru said, looking self-conscious. Shikamaru noticed that the dust under Takeru's feet lay thick and even, without the slightest hint of disturbance.
"Are your parents dead, then?" Shikamaru asked. Takeru also wasn't casting a shadow – he looked completely solid, but there was no shadow.
The slightest tremor went through Takeru's small body, and he looked away. "Y-yes," he replied, staring into the corner of the room.
Slowly, Shikamaru turned, following the line of Takeru's gaze to the discolouration on the wood of the floor that, last night, he had thought was blood. Looking at it now in the brighter light that filtered through the open door, he realised that he wasn't mistaken.
"Is this where you died?" he asked.
Takeru's head jerked around, and the ghost scrambled backwards. "H-how did you know that?" he gasped. "Did you know them? You're here to kill me again, aren't you? Except this time you'll be killing my soul and then I'll never come back, and it'll just be over—"
Shikamaru rolled his eyes. "I'm not here to 'kill' you," he said, folding his hands in his lap. "I came across this house by chance. Even if I wanted to destroy your soul, I wouldn't know where to begin." He frowned. "And who are 'they'? Your murderers?"
"M-my aunt and uncle," Takeru said. "When my parents died, they took me in. It was my job to keep the house clean b-but I broke a vase – it wasn't my fault, there was a cat and it jumped at me and startled me—"
Shikamaru sighed and turned his eyes towards the heavens, realising that unless he calmed the ghost-boy down, he was going to be subjected to a stream of babble whenever he asked a question. A stream of babble which, at the moment, was showing no signs of stopping or slowing down.
Unfortunately, he couldn't think of a single way to calm the ghost down. It was fairly obvious from what Takeru was saying that his aunt and uncle had killed him, and – if his context was to be believed – weren't treating him particularly well before his murder. No information there about anything that would relax him.
Sighing, Shikamaru decided there was nothing for it but to bite the bullet. "Why are you still here?" he asked, bluntly cutting Takeru off mid-sentence.
"Here?" Takeru asked, eyes wide. "I . . . what do you mean?"
"You're a ghost, right?" Shikamaru said. "Ghosts don't hang around unless they have unfinished business. Do you want revenge on your aunt and uncle?"
"No!" Takeru said, looking shocked at the very idea. "I don't want anybody hurt! I just – just—"
"Just what?" Shikamaru asked, a little more gently this time.
Takeru looked away. "I was supposed to take care of the house," he said, in a very small voice. "If I didn't take care of the house, then I wasn't worth keeping. I had to keep the house clean and mended but I made a mess, and I – I couldn't clean it up. And now it's a big stain, and the rest of the house is so dirty, and I have to clean the house but I can't."
With a chill, Shikamaru realised that Takeru was talking about the stain his blood had made on the floor of the room. It seemed barbaric, to have ingrained something so ruthlessly into a child that it was all that child could think about when dying. All Takeru knew was that unless he cleaned, he was worthless – and his blood made a mess of the floor, so all Takeru wanted to do was clean up the blood, but he was a ghost, and ghosts couldn't touch things.
"Is there any water nearby?" Shikamaru asked him.
oOo
Despite knowing that he was going to get yelled at for being late, and despite knowing that attempting to get a decades-old stain out of wood was probably a lost cause, Shikamaru still spent at least an hour on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor with water from the stream outside and a rolled-up shirt. Takeru watched him the whole time with wide, awed eyes, and looked depressingly downhearted when Shikamaru finally decided he needed to get back to Konoha.
He thanked Shikamaru for his work, though, saying it meant a lot to him that someone had tried to help.
Somewhere between leaving the house and reporting to Asuma, Shikamaru decided to go back.
oOo
Four days later, Shikamaru made the trek back to the house, carrying with him every cleaning product that Ino had said would be necessary to give a house a thorough scrub from top to bottom. Thankfully, she'd bought his story of his mother going on a Spring cleaning spree and sending him out to buy things to clean with, and hadn't pried about what he would actually be using them for.
In the first three days, Shikamaru set about cleaning the small room he had slept in and the kitchen. The small room didn't take long, as it was empty and the product he'd purchased to get the bloodstain out said to apply it, then leave it for twenty-four hours. For once, it did what it said on the label – when Shikamaru wiped it off the next day, the stain was gone.
Cleaning the kitchen was arduous, not least because he had to keep hauling in buckets of water from the nearby stream, as the house's water supply had been cut off years ago. He kept seeing flashes of Takeru from the corner of his eye, but in those first three days the ghost-boy didn't approach him – it was only on the fourth that Takeru worked up the courage to do more than hide in the shadows and watch.
"Shikamaru-san," the boy said hesitantly, standing beside Shikamaru as the shinobi mopped the floor. Shikamaru had a momentary impulse to tell him not to stand in parts he'd already cleaned, but in the next instant he remembered that Takeru was a ghost and so wouldn't exactly be tracking dirt into the house.
"Shikamaru-san," Takeru repeated, more firmly. "Why are you cleaning the house?"
Shikamaru leaned the mop against the wall and stretched, hands pressing into the small of his back. When he straightened, he looked at Takeru. "Because you said you couldn't move on until the house was clean," he said. "I don't like the idea of you being stuck here forever."
Shikamaru was half-convinced that it wasn't the house that was keeping Takeru there, but he couldn't help the warm feeling in his chest at the wide-eyed expression of gratitude on the boy's face.
oOo
It took the greater part of a fortnight before the interior of the house was liveable. Shikamaru found it rather ironic that he was making a house liveable for a ghost, but didn't mention it to Takeru.
He counted himself lucky that the walls were bare wood instead of anything painted or wallpapered, as that would have greatly increased the amount of time he had to spent on the inside. As it was, Shikamaru still found himself fixing doors and repairing furniture with alarming regularity.
Takeru followed him around the whole time, watching with a pathetically grateful expression. It took some coaxing, but eventually Takeru began actually talking to Shikamaru, instead of simply following him around like a puppy.
It was interesting, having the boy talking about his life in the house – although the 'interesting' was tempered with a keen sense of disappointment that the boy's aunt and uncle had died before Shikamaru could get to them. They'd left the house after realising that it was being haunted by their dead nephew, taking most of their possessions with them – but leaving a fair amount of furniture, and one deeply traumatised ghost. As Takeru began to talk more and more, Shikamaru's feeling that it wasn't the house that was keeping the boy there was cemented.
He only hoped that he was right about what was keeping the ghost there.
oOo
Once the interior of the house was clean, Shikamaru began on the outside. The garden had been allowed to grow wild, so it meant that the outside of the house was covered in creeping vines, and the garden itself was a veritable jungle. Shikamaru anticipated this part going much quicker, as he would simply be tearing all the plants out, no matter what they were. He wasn't a gardener.
Disposing of the vegetation was a bit of a bigger problem, but Shikamaru solved it by finding a mostly-empty compost shed and compacting all of it into the small space. It took him a day and a half to clear the garden, at which point he went to work on the outside of the house.
Shikamaru counted himself lucky that nothing needed replacing. He had left the cleaning products at the house after his first visit so no one would question what he was doing lugging them around, but if he'd had to buy yet more stuff to fix the house up, it would have become increasingly hard to hide what he was doing.
And it would be even more troublesome to explain that he was helping out a ghost – and why he was helping out a ghost – than just sneaking around.
oOo
Eventually, the house was finished.
Shikamaru stood in the front garden, hands on his hips, and leaned back to survey his handiwork. It gave him a peculiar sense of accomplishment to stand and look at what he had done with his own two hands, and nothing else – although it didn't change his mind about the fact that work was something to be avoided.
It did make him think that there were times when it was justified, though.
Takeru hovered uncertainly beside him. "Thank you for your work on the house, Shikamaru-san," he said, eyes flicking nervously from the house to Shikamaru and back again. "I . . . I suppose I should be moving on, soon. . . ." he trailed off.
Shikamaru sighed and flopped onto his back, staring at the clouds. "If you were going to move on when the house was clean, you would have gone already," he said.
Takeru flinched. "But it was the house – the house had to be clean, or else I'm—"
"Or else you're worthless," Shikamaru finished for him.
Takeru sat down beside him, slouching dejectedly. "Maybe I am just worthless after all," he said. "You've worked so hard for me, and I still can't move on. Maybe I needed to do the house myself, and you – you were so kind, for no reason."
One corner of Shikamaru's mouth crooked up in a half-smile. "There was a reason," he said. "Look, Takeru. How much do you think I care about this house?"
Takeru stared down at him. "I – I don't know."
"The answer is: I don't. I don't care about the house at all. So why do you think I spent so long working on it?"
Clearly confused, Takeru cast around for an answer. "Um . . . that is— I don't know."
"Because of you," Shikamaru told him, then grinned at the utterly mystified look on the boy's face. "I don't care about the house. I cared about you."
"No, you don't," Takeru said, in a very small voice.
"Yes, I do. If you're thinking that I can't care about you because I don't know you, then all I have to say is that I don't have to know you to know that you deserved better than to be murdered by your aunt and uncle, and treated so badly by them before that," Shikamaru said. "I don't need to know you to care that you'd be stuck here forever if someone didn't clean the house. It's not much, but it's there."
Takeru stared at him. "You can't care about me," he said. "Nobody cares about me."
Shikamaru raised an eyebrow. "Wrong," he said. "I hate work, but I fixed the house. I don't know how else to show you."
"I—" Takeru began, then stopped suddenly, eyes wide and staring at something Shikamaru couldn't see. "Oh," he said. "Shikamaru-san – I think – I think I'm moving on!"
Shikamaru didn't smile, but something inside him relaxed. He'd been right after all. "Go on, then," he said gently. "Your parents are waiting."
Takeru was fading, slowly at first but getting faster and faster. "I can see them!" he said, voice high and excited. "I can see them, they're – they're smiling – Shikamaru-san, thank y—"
And then Takeru was gone. Staring at the sky, Shikamaru reflected that the reality of ghosts was less flashy than he'd been led to believe. Here one minute, gone the next, with barely anything in between.
"You're welcome," he said to a passing cloud.
End