To Ten: There's definitely a lack of ShikaTen fics in the universe. huehuehue Glad you're enjoying this one. Thank you for your review!
And the lockdown continues, so here we are... Enjoy!
ASUMA
It could have been a terrible day for a funeral, Shikamaru thought, if there had been no clouds.
If nothing drifted to disappear above him, suffocated in the smoke of his cigarettes.
It could have been a great day, if she hadn't found him.
If she wasn't so terribly her. Heaven.
("We buried the father together. We had to bury the son together.")
Next to him, Tenten sprawled across the grass like a dismantled puppet, a skeleton, shaking and rearranging her limbs together. She fidgeted to mould her shoulders to the grass. She sighed contentedly, stilled, then scratched her forehead. She searched the sky, impatiently.
His jaw tightened.
Shikamaru tried to look at the clouds passively. He tried to ignore her, the hum of her skin, the brush of her clothes whenever she moved. He tried to follow the shift of the wind through each cloud.
(During the war, he tried to bury her in the sky she was named after. In the sky, they had shared since their youth.
"It would have been easier," he explains and kisses her forehead.
"You're just a lazy bastard," she sighs, her lips against his pulse.)
'Go away,' he pleaded inwardly.
Shikamaru focused on the clouds, his hands trembling and picking at strands of grass under his head. He hoped she would leave, as she often did, reckless and whining, whenever she got bored.
"What does the sky say today?" Tenten said in a sing-song voice.
She squinted. Her neck corded, she arched her back, her face headed toward the sky, the rest of her lifeless on the grass.
"There's no shape," Tenten whined and her hand reached for his side.
She poked and shook him.
Shikamaru didn't react.
He didn't answer.
'Go away!'
Her hand dropped to the grass.
"I thought they would be some awesome shapes like when we were kids. We could find meaning everywhere then," Tenten paused and sighed, holding up her hands to her eyes to form binoculars. She bent her knees and beat at the ground with her feet. "Maybe we just aren't as creative when we aren't old."
'Go away!'
With a sigh, her hands fell back on her stomach.
"Just what is there to see up there, hmm?"
He wanted to scowl.
He wanted to fight her.
(He wanted to kill Hidan again. And again. Why was she one more ghost at his side? Why was she named after the sky?)
"There's really nothing up there," Tenten drawled out each syllable, mimicking his voice.
It was about the smoke that rose, he wanted to shout at her. It was about the dizziness that came with the lack of oxygen, from smoking, the nicotine stain there would soon be on his fingers.
Death.
(It was about reviving Asuma. In his own mundane ways. Smoke. Cigarettes. Laziness. Clouds. A sky that fell before it rose.)
The sky was where the death floated, free, or chained. All the shapes, all the clouds were tombs. He believed in nothing else. Ashes rose. Wind rose. Smoke rose.
Asuma. He was up there, Shikamaru desperately wanted to believe.
"All meaningless," Tenten added flatly. "Boring."
She turned her head toward him and smiled, hollow teeth and hollower heart. Cold.
(Death was meaningless, she meant Shikamaru knew, but he still wanted her to leave. He still didn't allow himself to like the sky. To like her.
"Why did you search for me after the funeral?" Shikamaru asks her over Asuma's tomb when they came back from the war.
"Because I'm troublesome."
She bares her teeth.
He doesn't argue.)
Tenten never left.
Thank you for reading! Leave a review to tell me what you thought if you can. :)