Chapter 3

Shikamaru lay on his back looking up into the infinite blue vault of the sky overhead. Large, fluffy white cumulounimbus clouds drifted lazily across his view. He was in his spot, the field where he always came to collect his thoughts. The sheer expansiveness of the field and the sky gave him a sense of just how vast the world and the universe were and how small he was within it all. In its own way it helped him reduce what oftentimes seemed like insurmountable problems to something that he could manage and solve. In short, the place itself helped him think things through.

And if ever he faced an insurmountable problem this certainly qualified.

He tried to quantify it, Shikamaru - Temari = what? However that seemed absurd like those stupid little notes Ino used to pass to Sakura back in their academy days: Ino + Sasuke = true-love-forever.

Gah! Sometimes, girls just made him want to throw up. Why did they all have to be so damned troublesome?

But that was just it, Temari was the one woman who actually wasn't all that troublesome in those silly little school girl kind of ways. Sure, she was bossy, but he was used to that given what his own mom was like. That he could handle. But Temari wasn't ...girlish. She didn't giggle and flirt and bat her eyelashes like most of the kunoichi he knew. He hadn't known her in her school days but he couldn't ever imagine her passing a note to a boy. She probably just walked up to one she liked and told him that she liked him. Hell, she probably just walked up to the boy she liked in school and kissed him. That's what she'd certainly done with Shikamaru himself.

And that's one of the things he liked about Temari, he appreciated it. He always felt he knew where he stood with her. If she wanted him to do something she told him. If he didn't do it she nagged him. If she was angry about something she told him that, too, and in no uncertain terms about it either. She didn't sull up and act all moody and make him guess what was wrong. Temari said what was on her mind and he could deal with that. It was one of the things he...loved...about Temari.

Loved.

He let the word drift around in his head a bit like the clouds floating by above him.

That was one of the things he loved about Temari.

He loved Temari.

Wouldn't Ino laugh out loud to hear that? He pictured it now, a little note in Ino's own swoopy handwriting: Shikamaru + Temari = true-love-forever.

But the circumstances from earlier today jerked him back to reality. Now the equation would be something like:Shikamaru + Temari = baby on the way.

Or would it?

Was Temari pregnant or wasn't she? What the hell was going on with her?

Shikamaru allowed his gaze to shift over to where the sun was very much lower on the horizon.

Shit.

Things were about to get a lot more troublesome.

He sighed heavily. It was almost time for Ino to get off from working her shift at the medical clinic in Konoha. When he had left their...that isTemari's apartment he'd had lunch with Ino and Chouji just like he had originally planned. But it was obvious his two friends had known something was wrong with him. Much to Ino's surprise and his own, he had stopped her after lunch and asked her to meet him here in their old training field after she got off from work today.

It wasn't like him to act on impulse. He tried to rationalize it by arguing to himself that if he hadn't acknowledged to her something was going on then she would badger him insistently with an unrelenting chorus of what's wrong, Shika-kun? Or worse yet, she'd try to sneak inside his head and read his mind to see if she could figure out for herself what was bothering her friend and teammate.

He hated to admit it but he needed Ino's...advice.

Shit.

He saw an outline of a figure cresting the hill at the edge of the field and raised one hand in a half-hearted wave. Ino waved back as she walked toward him, her long blond ponytail swishing slightly with her gait.

"Hey," she said as she sat down beside him, crossing her long legs and placing her hands at her sides to rest on her arms as she leaned her face up to the sky herself, watching the same clouds that had held Shikamaru's attention all afternoon.

"Hey," he mumbled back in response.

A long silence passed between the two friends. Ino finally broke it with, "Sooooooo...what did you want me to stop by here for?"

Shikamaru sighed very heavily. "You're a girl, right?"

Ino giggled and swatted his arm with one hand. "Silly. Yeah, last time I checked. Not that you ever noticed, jerk."

Shikamaru struggled to a sitting position, feigning rubbing his arm as if she had really hurt him. "Professional courtesy. It would have interfered with our working relationship."

Ino threw her head back and laughed. "Hah! You never noticed any girl in Konoha until Temari came to town." Shikamaru's tight-lipped lack of response told Ino all she needed to know. "So, " she continued, "what happened between you two."

"Ino...what happens...that is how...is a pregnancy..."

Ino clapped her hands and squealed in delight. "Oh, Shikamaru!" she laughed hugging her friend, "You two are going to have a baby!"

"No, Ino," he answered softly, disentangling her arms from about him. "How is a pregnancy..."

"How do you get pregnant? Sheesh, Shikamaru, I thought you would have figured that out by now. Come on by the clinic, we've got some pamphlets we can give you," she teased then paused looking closely at the young Nara man and seeing something she was very much unused to in his eyes, confusion. "Shikamaru?" she asked softly.

"How is a pregnancy determined? How do the home tests work? How accurate are they?"

Ino sat back on her heels and looked at him then decided to answer him the same way she would a group of young kunoichi. "If a woman suspects she's pregnant she can take a home pregnancy test. The test can detect the presence of certain hormones that would be at elevated levels in a woman's body if she truly is pregnant. The accuracy depends on how soon after her last missed period, how early on in the pregnancy she's testing. Some tests aren't valid until after you've already missed a period, others claim to be valid as soon as you suspect conception has occurred. For the most part, I think they are fairly accurate, although both false positives and false negatives can occur. False negatives if she tests too early, false positives if she has some undetected hormonal imbalance or if she was pregnant but had a very early miscarriage."

Shikamaru merely nodded.

"So, is Temari pregnant or not?"

"I don't know."

Ino cocked her head to the side and furrowed her brow. "What do you mean you don't know?"

"I mean she said she was, that she'd taken a home test but that now she's not. So I don't know if she had a miscarriage or if maybe she was at the clinic and..."

Ino studied Shikamaru carefully realizing what he was going to say. "Wait, Shikamaru," she said gently, "I can tell you that I haven't seen her at the clinic. But if you're about to ask me what I think you are about to then you should know I can't answer it. There are patient confidentiality regulations and I couldn't violate a patients privacy."

The two friends sat in silence in the same field they had used to train since they were children, genin with Asuma as their sensei. It seemed as if a chasm had opened up in front of them, a chasm of all the grown-up responsibilities of adulthood that they had in front of them. They weren't genin anymore and Asuma was no longer there to help them solve their problems. But their friendship remained.

"Yeah, I know," Shikamaru admitted, grudgingly respecting Ino's ethics and understanding that hers was the right position. "I just...what do I do Ino?"

"Silly," she smiled gently, "just talk to her about it."

"Yeah, well, that's just it. She's left."

"Left? What do you mean left? She left you?"

Shikamaru sighed again. "She's left Konoha. She's going back to Suna tonight. Ino, is it safe for her to travel?"

Ino thought quickly before answering. "Well, based on what you've told me she's very early on so it should be perfectly safe for her to travel. But I still don't understand. What did she say?"

"She told me to leave so she could pack."

"Yeah, and then what?"

"I left."

"Sheesh, Shikamaru," she smacked his arm again. "For someone so smart you sure are stupid."