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Smokescreen

Chapter Two: Rupture

"This is where her ending really starts. Ino knew it then, like she knows it now. Love is transient for shinobi like her." - Yamanaka Ino and Nara Shikamaru. She is losing her mind while he is losing her.

"So are you two…?" Ino lets the question hang in the air, along with her motioning hand.

Sakura sends Ino a piqued look from her side of the table, one eyebrow raised. "Are we…?"

Ino rolls her eyes and throws a thumb in Kiba's direction while he's busy grabbing drinks from the bar. "Are you two banging now, or what?"

The hiss that escapes Sakura's lips leaves Ino feeling mildly satisfied. She smirks in response, lounging back along the booth seat.

Sakura stabs her chopsticks into her bowl of ramen. "Not that it's any of your business but - "

"But you are," Ino interrupts, waggling her eyebrows.

The growl that brews in the other kunoichi's throat reminds her too much of Kiba for it not to send a clutch of tenderness to her heart. Her smirk softens out into a cheeky grin as she plops her chin into her palm, elbow resting along the table. "Do you love him?"

Yes, she hears in her head almost immediately, in a guttural, aching sort of voice that could only ever be Sakura.

But Sakura is disinterestedly twirling her chopsticks around her bowl, eyes on her noodles, and the faint dusting of pink that lines her cheeks reminds Ino that such a 'yes' was not hers to hear. She feels intrusive suddenly, her chin coming up off her palm as she leans back, lips opening as though to speak, and then closing mutely, her throat tightening.

"It's not like that," Sakura says instead of the truth that Ino already knows, and Ino wants to shake her suddenly, almost brutally.

Sakura sighs, a tender laugh falling from her lips, and her eyes are so agonizingly green and ardent and naive (always naive, Ino's known, and yet, she wouldn't change her for the world). "We're just...taking our time. You know, after Sasuke, I just… I just… "

Ino finds her center easily enough. It's called anger, and she welcomes it too often these days. Her hands clench into fists as she draws them back over her lap. "How nice that must be," she says so lowly she almost seethes it.

The other woman eyes her in startled confusion.

But Ino catches herself. She catches herself before she becomes something she hates, and this is Sakura she reminds herself - stubborn, meddlesome, blinded, tender Sakura - and this is not what she wants. This is not who she wants to be to her, because they all deserved something real, something present after the war.

They all deserved someone to come home to - Sakura more than most.

Ino knows this, even if it hurts, even if she won't admit to wishing for it desperately herself.

"Okay, who likes pineapple?" Kiba asks brightly as he arrives with three drinks in hand, and Ino stands stiffly, jostling Kiba with her suddenness so that the mixed drinks slosh over his hands. He gives her a narrowed glare but says nothing, and Ino is grateful, because she must leave. Get out and away and home (or to him, but she won't let herself think it) and -

Ino. Sakura's voice is clear once more, resonating in the space between her ears, and she puts out a hand to stall her.

"Don't - just… don't."

Sakura blinks startled eyes at her and something like understanding passes between them.

"You two - you two have fun," she says stiffly, and then she's stalking away, Kiba's faintly incredulous growl of "What? What did I say?" trailing after her and she hopes beyond all else that Sakura hadn't seen the sheen of wetness along her lids just before she turned.

She hopes, even still. Even when she knows the truth.

He tells her one day that he… he thinks this might be more than friendship.

He thinks this because he can't rightly name the color of her hair anymore, and because he knows the sound of her footsteps, even when he isn't listening for them, and because when they spar he finds his shadow reaching for hers even without his bidding and all this - all this - tells him it is more.

He'd be a fool to think otherwise, and let it be said that Nara Shikamaru is not a fool.

Ino blinks at him, her mouth parted, watching as he stands before her, panting heatedly, his words lingering in the air between them.

His hands curl and unfurl - from fist to flutter - and suddenly it seems the easiest thing in the world to kiss her.

To press lips to lips and just… breathe together. To know the warmth of her. To know the slick taste of her. To just…

He's already leaning in, one hand braced along her shoulder, tugging her gently to him, and there's a moment, a half-instant of recognition, when he's reminded why he's never kissed her before.

(And why he won't ever again - not if he plans to do right by her.)

Something shifts in her eyes, a shadow (a curse, he calls it, years later - when she is too pliant and soft to be Yamanaka ever again).

"Shikamaru," she says, a flutter of confusion lining her voice, her eyes glancing around as though unfamiliar, and he is already leaning back, already sliding his hand from her shoulder to lay limp at his side.

Because she doesn't remember. Maybe just this moment, maybe all the moments before, but it doesn't matter.

He won't take advantage of her like this. He won't kiss her unless she is present for it. He won't touch her until she asks him to (if she ever does).

He won't tell her how much he wants her until she's ready to know just how much he means it (and hopefully, to want him back as well.)

"Why are we on the training grounds?" Ino asks, glancing at their surroundings.

The thing is, it's not so difficult to blend your shadow to another's. It's when dusk comes, when twilight breaks across your forms as damning and dark as memory (this memory that she is losing), that shadows begin to lose their hold.

Shikamaru is losing his hold in such a twilight.

Even still, she smiles up at him, unaware, and in the time it takes for her to shake the momentary confusion off, she is already running across the field back toward the village, waving him after her in affectionate impatience and he -

He has already lost sight of her shadow.

He's been taking missions with other shinobi, and while he knows Ino isn't dumb enough not to notice, he also knows she's too proud to say anything about it. And so time passes, and he hasn't met her shadow in weeks now, and before he knows exactly how to get out of it, the Hokage is sending them on a mission to Suna, and Shikamaru spends more time chatting up Chouji along the way than he thinks he's ever done in his entire life with the man.

Ino stalks behind them heatedly, feigning disinterest.

(But again, he knows her just a little bit more than either would admit to, and she isn't going to be the one to point it out.)

By the time they arrive in Suna, her ire has mellowed into a low simmer, and he isn't entirely unaware of the way she rubs at her temples or blinks frantically beneath the sweltering sun. He stops them in the atrium of the Kazekage's tower and turns to her abruptly. She nearly collides with his chest in her inattention. Chouji comes to a stop beside them, a single brow raised.

Ino blinks up at Shikamaru, her lips thinning into a frown. "What?"

A frustrated huff leaves him as he stuffs his hands into his pockets. "Why don't you get some rest before we see the Kazekage?"

She narrows her eyes at him. "I'm fine."

"Except you're not."

Her frown harshens, and something overtakes him, something that never really lets go. "Ino," he says softer than he's ever said before, one hand escaping from his pocket to grasp at her elbow, holding her there before him. "It's okay if you're not. It's okay if - " And then he stops, looking down at where his fingers wind around her elbow, wondering how she hasn't shaken his touch from her yet. "You should rest. Some things can wait."

She watches him in silence, her brows furrowed, ignoring the sweat beading across her forehead that comes from something stronger than Suna's sun. Chouji takes that moment to step up to Ino, planting a hand on her forehead and gauging her temperature nervously, though she lets him, her eyes still on Shikamaru, and something in him rattles at her easy acceptance of their teammate's touch, but he will not voice it. Either way, he is grateful for Chouji

"Mmm, you don't have a fever, Ino," Chouji muses, his hand slipping away. "Why are you sweating so much? Maybe you should lie down."

Her eyes flutter against Shikamaru's determined stare, before she closes them in defeat, turning into Chouji and dropping her head to his shoulder, her arm still held in Shikamaru's tentative grip. They stand like this for many moments, until Shikamaru finds his courage and moves to brush the long strands of her golden hair past her bare shoulder, his fingers inches from her skin but then -

Across the atrium, Temari stands watching them. He catches her gaze before he can touch his fingers to Ino's hair, and Chouji shifts as well when he notices Shikamaru's pained look, glancing back over his shoulder at the kunoichi. Ino pulls from her lean against Chouji when he moves and for a moment, when her eyes lock with Temari's, she is ripe with equal amounts shame and indignation and pride and guilt and none of it makes any sense to her. Not when Shikamaru's hold tightens over her elbow and he starts pulling her along, in the opposite direction of Temari, her spluttered resistance going unheeded and for a split-right-down-the-middle second, she sees something in Temari's eyes that looks strikingly like grief.

It doesn't suit the kunoichi, and now Ino is angry again for an altogether different reason (she hasn't stopped to think about why anger tastes so familiar on her tongue these days and she doesn't really want to, truth be told). She tugs her arm from Shikamaru but he holds fast, looking ahead. "You should go to her, Shikamaru," she says, and he stills at that.

She can hear Chouji's sigh at her side.

"We have nothing left to say to each other." And then he is moving again, and this is not what he came to Suna to do, but somehow he always knew it would be this way. He'd be fooling himself, otherwise.

"What? I don't… I don't understand. Why not?" She follows dumbly behind him, trying not to notice the way his thumb brushes along the skin of her arm and how he trembles so.

"Ino," Chouji whispers, almost warningly.

She huffs in impatience. "What?"

"Shikamaru ended it with Temari weeks ago."

This has them both stopping, Shikamaru's fingers clenching tight around her elbow once, and then releasing, his hand falling limp to his side.

Ino stares at Chouji, breathless, and then she glances back at where the Suna kunoichi had last stood, only to find her suddenly gone and fuck, she hadn't expected it to hurt this much.

But she imagines that's simply an extension of knowing Shikamaru like she does. Her gaze snaps to him instantly, and he keeps his head turned, but she doesn't need to meet his eyes to understand.

He is hurting, maybe in ways she will never be able to soothe, and suddenly she feels all at once selfish and emboldened and… and keenly saddened. She reaches for him herself this time, and when her hands wind around his and hold him there, her words dying on her lips, she begins to wonder if maybe some things are worth forgetting.

But then Shikamaru pulls his shoulders back, swallowing tightly, his gaze still turned from hers. He doesn't curl his fingers around hers, and she can't rightly tell if she is grateful for that or not. But he tugs her along, nonetheless, his simple "Come on" more a croak than anything, and she falls into step behind him easily.

She means to say "I'm sorry" at some point along the way, but she never really gets there.

Maybe because she never really means it (and this is where she discovers exactly what it is she saw in Temari's gaze).

But he doesn't ask for an apology, and this she should have known from the start, even though the quiet affection of it still startles her to breathlessness.

She's tired of this. Just… absolutely and utterly done. She doesn't have the time to play these sorts of games (she doesn't have any time at all, not if the slow slip of white into her vision or the growing throb of painful heat behind her eyes is any indication).

And most of all, she's tired of being scared.

She's Yamanaka Ino, after all. And she will not live like this.

"Why isn't it me?" Ino asks, her voice thunderous as she marches into the clearing where Shikamaru is training.

He stills in his crouch, senbon held between his knuckles in preparation for a throw. He looks up at her, eyebrows rising as he stands. "Ino, what are you… ?"

"Why isn't it me?" she asks again, stopping just before him, her hands going to her hips. Yes, yes because this is easier. Anger is always easier with Shikamaru (though she never likes to linger on what that means.) Her brows angle down with a sharpness, her face pinched in frustration, but the slight quiver of her tightly pursed lips is all Shikamaru needs to see.

He sighs, turning his gaze as he stuffs his senbon into the pack on his leg before he straightens, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Can we not do this right now?"

"Then when? When I can't remember why it matters so much? When I've forgotten how this makes me feel? When I've forgotten you?"

He clenches his jaw, hand sliding from the back of his neck to hang uselessly at his side. "That's not going to happen, Ino."

"You don't know that."

He falls silent. She stares at him with her fists clenching at her sides, and then she raises a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, and Shikamaru takes a cautious step forward and she's just so fucking sick of this wary back-and-forth with him. This way he hovers around her, never letting her forget, never giving her peace, and yet, always out of reach.

"Ino, are you okay?"

"I'm not fucking okay!" she yells, dropping her hand from her face, glaring at him like this is his fault. And it is. It's entirely his fault, because she wouldn't be like this if it wasn't for him and maybe part of her is okay with that - the crazed, reckless, needful part of her that knows his shadow better than anyone, that knows just how well it bleeds into her own when he doesn't think she's looking - but more than anything she's just… she just…

She's not ready to let this go. She's not ready to give this up to madness (if she wasn't already mad before.)

"I'm not okay because I like you, Shikamaru, do you understand? I've always liked you, even when I didn't like you, and that's way too fucking often lately. And I don't know, maybe I've always just… pushed it back, you know? Never thought too much about it, because you're my friend, my teammate. You're Nara Shikamaru and I'm Yamanaka Ino and nothing in the world could ever change that. Nothing. But I still…" She stops, pulls a deep breath in, lets it sit in her lungs until she remembers how to exhale, and this - this is what she hopes (desperately and daily) that she never forgets. "I said I wouldn't wait for you, but I'm also not going to hide from you. And you can… you can take that how you will. I just… needed you to know." She swallows tightly, her shoulders slumping as she stares at him, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth. "I needed you to know before I - if I ever got to the point where I… I couldn't tell you anymore." Her voice cracks with the last words, her fists taken to trembling, and she has to look away, blink back the wetness at her lids.

God, what a stupid… stupid wish.

Ino digs the knuckles of one hand into her eye socket, huffing her frustration, and just before she pivots to walk back, to walk away - up and up and out of there, just… away -

(From this. From him.)

- Shikamaru has her by the wrist.

Ino looks down at where he holds her, watches the white stretch of skin over her taut knuckles and the determined curl of his fingers around her pulse point.

She hates the way the air stalls in her chest, but he doesn't have to know, she reminds herself, swallowing thickly, blinking up at him in practised ease.

"It is you," he says, without any other explanation, his eyes staring unnervingly into hers. As though she should have known. As though it's always been. As though it were nothing to say as such. "It is you, Ino," he repeats in answer to the question that had her storming onto the training grounds in the first place, and her throat goes dry.

She shuffles before him, blinking steadily at him. "What are you trying to say?" Because she needs to know. She needs to know.

And then he sighs, and she's angry all over again, and suddenly, she could laugh. Because isn't this just so 'them'? Isn't this them inside and out and all the way across the fucking universe? Inexplicably - he sighs, and she blusters. It is so very 'them' she thinks she might burst with the ardent affection it stirs in her, heated even as it is.

"You know what I'm trying to say."

And this is where she smirks, minute as it is. Because yes, she finally thinks she does. But even still: "No, I don't think I do, Shikamaru."

A bubble of frustration sounds in his throat. "Why are you so - "

And then she has a finger in the air to stop him. "Don't you dare say 'troublesome', Shikamaru, or I swear to God I will - "

"I'm going to kiss you," he says in exasperation, his fingers tightening on her wrist as he steps forward.

Ino clamps her mouth shut and stares at him.

He stares back, brows furrowed, eyes on her mouth. He licks his lips in anticipation and glances back at her eyes. They stand like this for longer than Ino thinks means anything good. Long enough for her heart to clench in her chest. His hand doesn't move from her wrist, but he also doesn't step closer.

Something in her flares - perhaps insecurity, or maybe desperation, but either way it has her pulling her wrist from his grasp and crossing her arms, straightening her back, steadying this rabid rage of her heart against her ribs. "Well, are you going to or not?"

Shikamaru frowns, the intensity in his features faltering for a moment in favor of aggravation. "Don't be so impatient."

"Don't be so hesitant," she quips back.

Shikamaru gives her a withered look. "I tell you I'm about to kiss you, and you antagonize me. Why is this so familiar?"

Ino rolls her eyes. "And yet you still haven't kissed me."

"Will you just… just give me a second."

"Why? You've had a lifetime, Shikamaru."

He rubs a hand down his face. "This is ridiculous."

Her skin prickles with the anxiety, her fingers clenching over her crossed arms, and the tightness in her chest is both aching and comforting, because she wants nothing more than for him to kiss her in this instant. But she isn't sure whether he'd be doing it for him, or for her. And she won't take a pity kiss. She won't accept anything less than his genuine, unfiltered affection, because she plans on giving exactly that herself and she doesn't have time to be invested in anything less.

She will have all of him, or none of him, and this she can live with - because she will have to.

"Ridiculous?" she nearly spits in question.

"Yes, ridiculous!" And she doesn't expect the harsh expel of breath that leaves him with the words, or the way he looks at her wildly, darkly (or the way her spine tingles at such a look). "I'm trying here, Ino, I really am and I - "

"I don't have time for 'try', Shikamaru. You of all people know that."

And here is where he stills, silent, probably because he does know, and she hates that she must remind him of it. But she isn't waiting anymore.

"You're either in this with me, or you're not. No 'maybe's, no 'sort of's, no… " She pauses, steadying her breath, licking her lips before continuing. "No 'trying'."

Shikamaru keeps his dark gaze on her, his chest heaving.

Ino shakes her head, her hands going into the air. "And maybe you're right. Maybe this is ridiculous. Maybe it's been crazy from the start. But I don't know how to not be this way, how to not like you, to not think about you - to not think about why you know exactly how I take my tea and exactly when to cut off my sake and exactly how many senbon I keep in my thigh-pack and exactly how to fit your shadow to mine and I don't want to not think of these things. I don't want to forget the way your hand feels in mine or how it feels to wake in the hospital with you asleep at my bedside and if you tell me that you're 'trying' one more time, or that 'maybe' you feel something for me then I don't think I could fucking take it, Shikamaru, I don't think I can - "

There is no 'maybe' to how he fits his hands to her cheeks and pulls her to him. There is no 'maybe' to how the breath shudders from him in a single swift exhale just before he presses his mouth to hers. There is no 'maybe' to the soft press of his tongue against her lips or the way he winds his hands into her hair and presses his chest so tightly and so assuredly into hers that she stumbles back from the fervency of it.

But most of all, there is no 'maybe' to the way he breaks from her, hands unforgiving in their grip, lips bruised, eyes demanding.

There is no 'maybe' when he tells her "It is you, Ino, and I'm not fucking saying it again."

She is breathless and limp in his arms when he smirks at her, before he leans in again, mouth opening over her own gasping one, tongue slipping in with a deft confidence that has her stumbling back and into the tree at her back, where he presses into her, his hands still cupping her face, so desperate in his hold, and when she finally finds herself again, her hands are already curling into his shirt, her back arching against him and now, finally -

There is no 'maybe' to them.

There is just this.

There is just…

Her sob against his lips is swallowed so tenderly and so wholly by his mouth she begins to think such madness is welcome.

It's been weeks, and even still, he doesn't know how they ended up like this, with Ino straddling him in his bed, his hands in her hair, his lips pressed to hers, and he finds the coil of desire in his gut is more ache than release because he doesn't know how they ended up like this and maybe he should have.

Maybe this is happening all wrong.

Maybe this is just her desperation, just her loneliness.

(Except he will never know what loneliness, what sorrow such insanity brings - not fully, not like she knows.)

"Wait, wait," Shikamaru says as he breaks from her mouth, one hand tugging on her hair as his other settles down to her hip, like an anchor (because some part of him is still drowning).

Ino growls impatiently above him as she braces her hands on either side of his head, her hips rolling into his meaningfully.

Shikamaru hisses in response, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips as he shuts his eyes in some semblance of control.

"What?" Ino asks, more a demand than anything.

He takes a soldiering breath, his fingers gripping at the material of her skirt lining her hip. "I just… I just want to make sure…" His eyes flutter open, dark and hooded.

Ino raises a brow, glancing at his lips - wet and pink and begging. "Of….?" she prompts, purposely baring the pale expanse of her neck, another roll of her hips punctuating the question, but this time slower, more intent.

Shikamaru bares his teeth this time, and then he is surging up, taking her with him, nearly knocking his nose into hers as she steadies herself in his lap. He sits staring at her, his hands moving to rest along her thighs as she straddles him. "Ino," he says lowly.

At some point, she knew. She knew she was living on borrowed time.

It doesn't take Tsunade's letter or Sakura's worried glances to tell her. Indeed, it doesn't even take the slowly ebbing pain or the unexpected invasion of white to her vision.

No.

It takes a memory.

Her father is looking at a picture of her mother, his fingers gracing the edge of the photoframe, and there's a smile that's all at once tender and devastated. He blinks, brows furrowing, his fingers sliding from the edge of the frame.

"Such a pretty smile," he says, and for a moment she thinks some things last. Some things stay constant.

Inoichi turns to her. "What's her name?" he asks.

This is where her ending really starts. Ino knew it then, like she knows it now.

Love is transient for shinobi like her.

(Even still, she wants him more than she's ever wanted anything in this life and she's smart enough to know it marks her downfall.)

Ino sighs, her hands settling along his shoulders. Her eyes drift between his, taking note of the way he stares at her in careful consideration, even as he pants beneath her. She smiles then, because she loves this boy - man, she reminds herself, and when did that happen?

She knows what he asks.

"I'm doing this because I want to, Shikamaru."

He furrows his brows, his lips thinning into a line.

Her hands wind into his hair and she melds closer to him. He sighs in contentment.

(It's the most beautiful sound she's ever heard and for many nights, she goes to sleep dreaming of it.)

"This isn't fear talking. This isn't… I'm not rushing into this because I'm afraid I'll lose my chance when I really… when I finally…" She swallows thickly, takes a deep breath.

It's mostly true. Somewhat. Perhaps a little.

Maybe only a touch.

(Because of fucking course she's afraid of missed chances, of time cut short. But mostly she's afraid of never even making such a memory for fear of losing it. Mostly she's afraid of regretting what she didn't do, and not what she did -

She promises to never regret him.)

"I want this because I want you, Shikamaru. I have for a long time now."

His fingers tighten along her thighs.

She looks at him beneath the shadow of fluttering lashes. "Don't you?"

Shikamaru blows a breath through his lips that rattles the air in his lungs and he leans up to kiss her, deeply, almost sloppily - definitely desperately.

He pulls away on a heated breath. "For longer than it'd probably be appropriate to admit," he answers, chuckling lowly, and then groaning when she rolls her hips into his again, her mouth going to his ear.

"Then show me."

He does. With his hands and his mouth and every part of him that is hers.

(With his heart).

Hers.

He's with her when she receives the news at the hospital. He's with her when Tsunade keeps her steady brown gaze on Ino and tells her that she has no answers for her.

Ino should have known this from the start, though. Who better to treat her failing mind than her clan members? She should have kept it in the family.

She looks at Shikamaru, her eyes watering without her bidding.

Family.

Ino swallows down the bile at the back of her throat and nods at Tsunade. "I understand," she says.

What she understands most is that this isn't going to go away with some simple chakra manipulation. What she understands is that this is far greater than her father or her grandfather or any of her other clan members have ever faced before.

(The war had done enough already, it shouldn't linger like this - it shouldn't be killing them still.)

She likes to think she has no regrets. Everything she did she did to save her friends, her village, her…

Shikamaru wraps a tentative hand around her elbow and turns her slightly. "Ino."

He says her name and she is a genin again, so young, so stubborn - a head full of Sasuke and nothing else - nothing like the horrors she wakes screaming from in her nightmares these past years.

Nothing like Asuma's eyes drifting closed beneath the soft green glow of her useless chakra, or the way her father's voice had broken when he told her he loved her just one last time.

"Ino," Shikamaru says, and she is back again, present - the room swimming into her vision.

"I'm sorry, I just… I need to…" She drops down from the medical bed, her eyes searching for the door.

Oh Ino, she hears in Tsunade's voice. You deserved so much more.

She doesn't like the sound of that. She doesn't like how definitive it sounds. She snaps her sharp blue gaze to the older woman, and in the shudder of recognition that passes over her features, Ino finally understands exactly what she meant when she said -

No answers.

There is no going back. There is no regaining of those memories. There is no escape from the coming pain.

Her mind will not be hers by the end of it.

(And even so, she still wants him more than she wants sanity and maybe that's exactly the point where madness sets in because if that isn't insanity than she doesn't know what it.)

"Please leave," she says, voice a deadened lull.

Shikamaru and Tsunade look at each other, and before he can speak, Tsunade is sighing, laying a comforting hand on Ino's shoulder and then walking from the room. In the time it takes for the door to slide shut behind her, Ino is already falling to her knees.

Shikamaru watches, rooted in place, as she wraps her arms around herself and releases that first shuddering exhale. He doesn't give her time to wail. He doesn't wait for her sobs. Instead, he's on his knees beside her, instantly, with the harsh thud of bone falling to tile and he doesn't care, doesn't grunt in pain, doesn't do anything but pull her against him, his eyes sliding shut and she's so suddenly small in his arms, so delicate, so not Ino, and her sobs sound deliriously like laughter - the kind of laughter that sets deep in your bones, thrumming, aching - and if he presses her any harder into his embrace he might just feel the way her lungs quake in her chest and her heart hammers against her ribs and then suddenly he is moving a hand over her eyes (except they weren't children anymore, never would be again, and yet - his hand has always known how to reach for her) but she doesn't push him away this time, doesn't gently pull his hand from over her eyes, and he has only a moment to breathe his relief because then he can feel the wetness of her tears along his palm and he doesn't think there is relief enough in this world for such stark sorrow, such inevitable loss, and if this is all he can do, if this is it, if this is the shadow he must play to her coming twilight then - then -

"It's okay to cry," he breathes into her hair.

Dimly, Shikamaru catches sight of the way their molded forms cast a dark shadow in the far corner.

He keeps his hand to her eyes -

"I'm here, aren't I?"

- always.