Written for Eowyn1LJ for the March round of flashfics.
When Shikamaru was five years old, his father started to teach him the basics of playing shougi. At that age, there was only so much he could learn – five-year-olds, even genius ones, don't have the patience for a game that lasts hours – but learn it he did, the names of the pieces and how they moved, some rudimentary combinations, how to look at the board. And as he grew older, he grew more patient, and more patient, and he began to learn and love the patterns of the board, the way the strictly regimented movements of pieces could combine in an elegant, complex order to produce an almost infinite variety of strategies, escapes, traps, hidden assaults, and bluffs-within-bluffs. From shougi, he began to learn an incredible patience, the strict delineation of turns requiring him to build his strategies one at a time. In a board game, you couldn't rely on moving too fast for your enemy to see, or hiding what you were doing, or bringing in unexpected reserves; everything was laid out and your opponent could consider the board at length, and so he learned instead to build his strategies deceptively, to make his moves look random until the very moment his whole battle plan came together in a single swift motion.
It was when Shikamaru was nine that his father went away on That Mission and returned far less of a man than he had been. Shikaku never discussed it, never told his wife and son just what it was that had transpired, and his teammates held their silence as well. Akimichi Chouza would say only that it was Shikaku's choice to talk about it or not, and Yamanaka Inoichi just shook his head and said that being a jounin carried risks. And Shikaku drank. As his son grew into the greatest mind Konoha had ever seen, Nara Shikaku pickled his brain with alcohol, slowly destroying himself in a desperate race to escape the memories that haunted him. They didn't play shougi anymore; Shikaku was almost never sober enough for it, spending all his free time with sake instead of his son. Shikamaru went around to other members of the clan, searching for another shougi partner; he found games and enjoyed them, honing his skills until it was a rare and celebrated day when someone could beat him.
When he graduated the academy and was assigned to be the student of Sarutobi Asuma, it seemed like a dream come true; Asuma was a fierce shougi player and offered Shikamaru more challenge than he'd had since his father stopped playing. The way people played shougi, Shikamaru discovered, was closely related to the way they fought; most Nara shinobi, being of no particular physical strength and possessing a family jutsu that emphasized subtlety over strength, favored long complicated strategies that could be interrupted before they were completely set up. Shikamaru had been evolving something of a similar style; in their first few games, Asuma smashed his strategies with direct, forceful tactics, not taking time to build up elaborate schemes that attempted to lure Shikamaru in and take him apart. It was then that Shikamaru's true strength became to come to light; he easily abandoned the strategies of his family, adapting new styles of play to combat Asuma's abilities, observing the way his teacher played and learning to predict ahead of time what would come.
Adaptability, that was the name of the game. In shougi, the board and pieces conveyed no advantage to one side or the other; it was easy for inefficient players to get trapped into thinking that that indicated a decrease in the variety of situations that could be created. Shikamaru knew better; the board and pieces offered a blank slate upon which the wise player could enact any strategy he or she might wish, and the initial unpredictability of the board was enormous. Just like in a real battle, he had to foresee every possible move, because the one he failed to see could very well be the real thrust of the attack. And so his genius brain took the constant stimulation and turned it into rapid intellectual development. The cleverly-disguised tests Asuma had given him measured potential, but Shikamaru was turning his potential into reality.
An ordinary player formed a strategy along a line. Move, countermove, move, countermove. Shikamaru looked at all the probabilities, then factored in the way his opponent had played until that moment, determining probabilities, working out strategies and alternatives and holding them all in his mind at once. Asuma was highly amused by this trait, by the fact that someone who acted like such a lazy layabout invested so much energy in what he was doing. At one point, he'd tried to count up exactly how much information Shikamaru was holding in his head at once during a game; he'd gotten as far as two hundred moves, all neatly arranged in fractal chains and sorted by likelihood. He gave up after that, because it was making his head hurt too much, and he still didn't know how Shikamaru's brain didn't explode from all of it.
It came in handy; Shikamaru took the skills from the shougi board and transferred them into life. As a Nara, his combat ability was limited: his shadows were useful, but ultimately, it was only the most powerful Nara techniques that were of any particular use for actually damaging an enemy. He had to rely extensively on his teammates for that – Chouji in particular was good at dealing out damage. So Shikamaru took shougi to heart and cast himself as a piece, and his teammates as other pieces.
When Asuma died, Shikamaru felt as though his world had broken in two. He never gave much evidence of emotional attachments, but the bond between him and his teacher had been deep and strong. Even after they'd taken out the Akatsuki responsible, even after he'd buried the zealot deep in the forest earth, he'd felt a gaping emptiness. Even shougi lost its luster, now that he lacked an opponent who could truly challenge him. Even though Asuma hadn't actually won a game against him in years, every victory had required Shikamaru's full and intense engagement, because Asuma really wasn't so very far behind him at all. And now… now even just looking at the board reminded him painfully of his loss.
Konoha typically held seasonal shougi tournaments, yet another way for shinobi to relax from missions and concentrate on something that wasn't a matter of life and death. Anyone in the village could sign up, either to compete in the tiered levels where beginners competed against beginners, experts against experts, or in the free-for-all, where anyone in the village might play against anyone at all.
Well, with one exception. From the age of thirteen, Shikamaru had not been allowed to enter. It was felt that someone else ought to have a chance to win. However, it wouldn't be fair to exclude him altogether, and so an alternate scheme was proposed.
The free-for-all tournament would play out. Typically, the person who won that tournament would be extremely good, and they would receive due accolades. And then, having been recognized as winning the tournament, they could choose to go up against Shikamaru for a chance to prove themselves the village's best, or they could simply rest on their laurels and leave him his position unchallenged. It was an elegant system, one that Shikamaru liked because really, it wasn't intellectually stimulating to play against people who were too far below his level of ability, and everyone else liked it because when Shikamaru was in the actual tournament, no one else had a shot at winning.
This was the first tournament since Asuma's death; Shikamaru had thought long and hard about declining to play the winner, letting them simply have their title and be done with it. He wasn't sure he wanted to play. But Chouji persuaded him to give it a go. The Akimichi was worried about his friend: when Shikamaru lost interest in shougi, it felt like the world was ending.
The tournament winner was a chuunin he didn't know offhand, a girl by the name of Naomi. He hadn't watched her play – that was one of the conditions, he had to go into it without knowing her style, to give her the greatest chance possible – but he studied her opening movements and decided that she was unorthodox and probably prided herself on it. That gave her a strength – she couldn't be relied on to follow any of the traditional strategies – but also, at least in Shikamaru's eyes, a weakness.
And his determination was correct. He opened with a very traditional set of moves, and could read disappointment – even disdain, perhaps – in her eyes. This is the greatest shougi player in Konoha? her expression asked clearly. And in her disappointment – and her immediate response to make her play even more unconventional, something that would confuse a very traditionalist player – she didn't notice when Shikamaru's moves began to deviate from the traditional pattern, a single piece at a time. She responded as though he were playing the straight stratagem, and didn't realize her error until his trap began to close about her.
At that point, it was all academic. She held out for a while longer – got enough of her pieces out of his trap to keep playing – but ultimately, he'd struck too great a blow. He won, and she had to settle for the same accolade that all the other tournament winners received, instead of the great upset she'd been hoping for.
And then, two days later, she showed up on his doorstep. "Can I play you again?" she asked as soon as he'd greeted her. "What you did at the tournament… I want to see that again."
This time, as they played, she watched him the way she was supposed to, and the match lasted well over an hour. She was good. And as they finished up, as Shikamaru finally earned his victory, she smiled and asked if she could come back again the next night and play again.
The next night, and it turned into the next and the next. She would never be quite as good as Shikamaru – she simply couldn't see as far ahead as he could, couldn't hold so many possibilities in the forefront of her mind and select among them – but she challenged him continually, and he found himself once again feeling whole.