Temari sat in the shade on the terrace polishing her fan. The pervasive afternoon heat was inescapable, even in the shade. A smile tugged at the edges of Temari's lips as she felt the sweat beading on her skin. It was good to be home. She could feel the lingering chill from the weeks she had spent in almost constant rain finally leaving her body as the heat seeped back in. On her solo mission, she hadn't had the time or the energy to worry about feeling cold, and it wasn't until she had crossed Suna's border and the sun started rising in the desert as she traveled that she realized how much she had missed her home climate. She felt like she could just lie back and soak up the heat for the rest of the afternoon. Letting out a contented sigh, she let her eyes drift shut and her head rest against the wall behind her, her fan resting in her lap.
She felt a familiar chakra presence approaching but didn't bother to move. She didn't like people to catch her relaxing—she wasn't lazy after all, and didn't want anyone to think it—but the first day home after a long mission felt like a good day to make an exception.
"So I hear you're off to Konoha again," Kankuro sat down beside her.
Temari hummed in the affirmative, before straightening and turning her attention back to her fan.
The silence between them was comfortable. She enjoyed the company of her brothers and missed them when she was away on solo missions. Kankuro in particularly had been a constant presence in her young life, and though her relationship with Gaara got off to a rocky start, since the chunin exams a few years back they had grown closer. Her father felt like the Kazekage, but her brothers just felt like family.
Kankuro was also recently back from a mission, and after a while he launched into a play by play of an encounter with some bandits that had been unfortunate enough to try to rob the caravan the Sand-nin had been protecting. The heat and the feeling of being home had put her in a much better mood and she enjoyed hearing him talk about his mission. As frustrated as she was that she hadn't been getting any combat missions lately, she knew it wasn't her brother's fault and was glad that he was enjoying his work.
Finally coming to the end of his tale, he started started asking her about her latest mission. She was prepared for this turn in the conversation but still didn't really want to talk about it, giving short, vague answers to his question.
"And why exactly did that all take you, what was it… a month? Two?"
Temari felt the heat rise, and hoped that she wasn't blushing. She knew it was an innocent question but she couldn't help to hear it as an accusation of her incompetence. Given the official mission parameters on record, it probably either looked like she was either slacking, incompetent, or up to something, for it to have taken her so long.
"Well, the official timeline in the mission scroll was definitely overly optimistic, but you know how those things go…" she trailed off, wondering how much more detail her brother would ask for before he was satisfied with her response. She didn't like lying to her brother but also didn't really want him involved in what she knew would be viewed as an act of war if it ever came to light.
"… just wanted to do it right, tie up all the loose ends, you know?"
Kankuro didn't press any further. He knew that their father had been giving Temari a lot of low-profile long term missions recently, and he wasn't really sure of what to make of it. Other than her Konoha gig. That he understood 100%. She was by far the best suited among them to liaise with the Leaf-nin given her brains and her appreciation for inter-village cooperation. She could really pack a punch if you pissed her off, but she was always the most diplomatic of their small family.
"You know I've been thinking," Temari ran her hand along the edge of her fan, "What if I incorporated a sharpened edge to my tessen?"
Kankuro raised an eyebrow at her.
"I mean, that would be awesome, but when have you ever used your fan as a contact weapon in the first place?"
Temari frowned at this; it's true she didn't use her fan as a contact weapon when fighting other ninja, however…. She had found the metal fan useful as a blunt force tool occasionally, especially in her recent missions. He, of course, had never seen her in that situation. She let a smirk come to her face.
"Who said it was for contact? Maybe I'm just gonna sever your stupid little puppet strings the next time we spar, so watch out!"
They launched back into a friendly banter.
Later that evening, after a spar with her brother, she lay in her bed mentally preparing herself for the journey to Konoha.
A few rooms over, Kankuro was still thinking through their spar. He did start to see that maybe his evaluation of her fighting style was a bit outdated. When had she gotten so… Reckless? Confident? He wasn't sure what it was about her style, maybe she was just frustrated and needed to blow off some more steam than usual. She was stronger though as well, he could feel the huge potential of her chakra as she channeled it through the winds with her tessen, even though they had both been holding back (going all-out in a friendly spar was something they had both stopped doing as children, or at least started doing much more thoughtfully—if the chunin exams had taught them anything it was that an attack could come at any time, and chakra wasted wouldn't automatically replenish itself if you had been dicking around when an enemy struck). He wished that their father took her more seriously—there was some serious destructive power in her jutsu.
Temari fell into a fitful sleep. It was always hard for her to really relax into sleep, even at home, after these long solo missions. Having no one to keep watch just meant that you had to sleep with one eye open, so to speak. She always felt the edges of consciousness, never drifting to far from wakefulness. Often, she would jolt awake in the middle of the night, startled by real or imagined sounds and shadows that drifted through the night. It was no use getting to comfortable, she was off to Konoha soon anyway, and no matter how many friends she had in the village, she would always keep her guard up when she was there.
0
Shikamaru stared up at the clouds drifting above him and sighed.
Shikamaru lay supine in the bed, his arms behind his head, and allowed his eyes to wander through the room. The ceiling was a bore to stare at but he was too lazy to go outside. He just wanted to lay there in the bed, he didn't get why Temari was always rushing off as soon as the day broke. He would've almost been offended if he didn't know that it was a Suna-nin thing, not any particular problem she had with him, with them.
Or maybe she did have a problem with what was going on between the two of them. He sighed. For such an open person, she was surprisingly hard to read when it came to interpersonal relationships. She was brutally honest to a fault, but her dry humor and tough girl demeanor also hid something else that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Girls were supposed to be overly emotionally complicated about sex, but this was Temari after all, she was anything but the typical girl, and if she was feeling bashful about the sex, he doubted she would keep coming to his bed. She, of course, was always the initiator, it seemed. She was in the window after dark, out the window when the birds started chirping, and all sass in between.
He rolled onto his side to stretch and let out a yawn, scrunching his eyes closed before letting them flutter open again. When did it get so bright out?
Maybe he was overthinking things. That was pretty much the norm for the lazy genius. But as much as he liked Temari, he felt that somehow there was more distance between them then there had ever been. Regardless of the fact that somehow they had transitioned from allies and occasional teammates to… whatever they were now. The confidence that she exuded so constantly had stopped ringing true recently—like it had ceased to be a genuine expression of strength and pride and has started to be a mask that she wore to protect herself. Or to hide herself. He wasn't sure.
His eyes landed on the pack of her things that she had left at the side of the bed. Peeking out from the top he could see what looked like a bingo book, the pages wrinkled and worn. Rolling over once again so that he could grab it, he pulled it out to look at the cover.
Bingo. Suna-style. He always loved getting a look at other nations' bingo books.
As a general rule, bingo books were always full of missing-nin (or in overt wartimes, the high ranking nin from an enemy nation), but there were subtle variations in the books that revealed the more nuanced political bents of each country. Some nations listed their own missing nin prominently, indicating shame at the defection of their own ranks, and others omitted their own, out of denial perhaps. The inclusions or omissions of certain missing-nin could say a lot. These differences were arguably just an indication of nations' political priorities. However, they could also tip off shady deals between politicians and missing-nin or secret alliances between nations. They could even be a prelude to declarations of war.
Konoha's most recently issued bingo book was a good example of this. The top-priority missing-nin listed were almost all Sound-nin, missing-nin expected to have defected to the Sound, and missing-nin whose last known whereabouts were within or near the borders of the Sound. Chasing missing-nin was a good excuse for being caught within another nation's borders without authorization. While the Sound would surely not tolerate this encroachment, at least in the eyes of the international community would view the Leaf's actions as justified. It was no secret that the Sound and the Leaf were at odds with one another, and a single look at the bingo book made that exceedingly obvious.
The Kazekage was never very good a hiding his political bent… The last Suna bingo book Shikamaru had seen had been a few years out of date, but was full of Iwa-nin. Even the most low-level petty criminals had been listed, as if even the most insignificant rogue rock-nin meritted the trouble of being taken out. Shikamaru was surprised that man hadn't already declared war on Iwa, there had been so much tension between the nations that last few years. Iwas would barely stand a chance given the horrible hurricane season they'd had that had devastated their crops and local economies on the coast.
Opening the book, he half expected it to be full of just Iwa nin. What he didn't expect was for a dried flower to slip out the first page he turned. Surprised, he carefully picked up the flower—a small yellow blossom on a slender stem. He flipped over onto his stomach and set the book down flat on the bed in front of him as he lay the flower back on the page. He raised an eyebrow and turned a few more pages, only to find another, faded and pressed blossom, a different variety, between the pages. So that's why the pages were so crinkled, he thought to himself, they've been soaking up all the moisture from these plants.
He took a close look at the flower. He didn't recognize it and was sure it was not found in Fire.
He turned more pages, carefully, not to disturb the delicate pressed plants within, fascinated with the contents of the unassuming book. He'd had a hunch Temari had a thing for botany—he knew that whenever she wasn't completely busy working or training in Konoha she would often stop by the Yamanaka flower shop. Not just to buy any old thing; she would ask about what they had in stock, what was in season, where things came from, how they grew, what they symbolized. That's how she had ended up friends with Ino, even despite the deep-seated grudge Ino had initially held against the Sand-nin and her brothers long after the chunin exams. He didn't realize that she went around collecting flowers though. And a bingo book seemed like a bizarre place to store them.
As he flipped, he found strange leaves, some recognizable teas, though their scents were too muddled and musty for him to distinguish them for sure, due to having been dried in such close proximity to so many other varieties. He wondered where she had gotten them. Had she accumulated them through her travels over many missions? Were any of them cuttings from the Yamanaka shop? Were any native to Suna, or were these her way of cataloguing the wetter, more temperate places she visited? How did she pick which plants she would keep here in these pages? He suddenly wished he had paid more attention to Ino's occasional flower ramblings. He wanted to know where these plants were from, what they were used for, what they meant.
Turning another page, a particularly delicate bloom crumbled as he peeled the page back.
"Shit," he mumbled to himself, putting as much of the plant-fragments off the sheets back onto the page as he could before closing the book and tucking it back into her bag.
The sun had slipped behind some clouds, reducing the glare in the room, and he smiled to himself. Temari fascinated Shikamaru. She was full of surprises, and just got more interesting all the time.