A/N: So this chapter is mostly shikatema and focuses a bit more on the friendship between the girls. I like strong female friendship, what can I say. Hopefully, the next discussions will be less boy-oriented, though! In any case, enjoy this chapter as you can. I promise chapter 7 will have spicy nejiten moments.
When they first met
Chapter 5 : When Temari met Shikamaru
Decades later, when asked by her grandchildren, Temari could still recall with exact precision the moment she met the love of her life.
Did she know, at that moment, that she would fall madly in love with him?
No. Absolutely not.
Actually, her first reaction was one of complete and utter astonishment.
"Is … that guy sleeping? At a funeral?" Temari muttered to herself, shaking her head, not believing what she was seeing.
Granted, this was nothing like a usual funeral. Fu's life celebration looked more like a traveling funfair, cotton candy and game stands included. People of every age and background were happily walking by, enjoying meeting new people and talking about how they know the deceased.
Even though Temari understood the concept, she still couldn't shake off the bizarre feeling this gave her. Maybe, she was more conservative, but she thought commemorating someone's death should be more solemn. She also found it quite sad for the family to bear the burden of such extravaganza, mostly when exhausted by grief's shackles.
Temari sighed for the sixth time in the couple of minutes she had spent wandering around since Tenten had left her in a hurry. She couldn't blame her friend much. She had been in a frenzy over the sudden news, the building anxiety she had at the idea of talking to her old friend and simply facing the unimagined outcomes of someone you barely knew revealing a heavy amount of information (their sudden death being one of them, and the fact they had had a hand in your unraveling friendship).
That was a lot.
So Temari just tried to keep herself busy by taking this carnival in. And that is when her eyes settled on the sleeping boy, with a hairstyle strangely resembling the green bits of a pineapple.
Fu sure made weird friends in her life. She mused.
This was probably the last straw for Temari's thin, wearing patience. She had driven for the past forty-eight hours through sun and rain, barely slept on a bumpy musty motel mattress and was forced to endure this incredibly deceptive "life-celebration."
Honestly, she thought it beyond audacious to organize something so easy-going and fun-loving when someone died, and even worse when the person who died forced this carnival-looking funeral on people whom she wrecked their lives havoc.
Namely, her best friend, Tenten.
So when she saw this man, unceremoniously sprawled on an empty table by the corner, sleeping - snoring even!- and drooling on the table cloth… Well, she simply lost it.
She had always been impulsive and irrationally fiery, so this was not anything new for her and wouldn't have shocked anyone else who knew her; when she walked with purpose towards the passed out stranger, stealing a glass containing a random drink on her way, and tossed it contents on the sleeping form of said stranger.
"What the fu-" The man gasped, standing up out of shock.
Dark brown eyes quickly found her teal ones and glared at her. "What is wrong with you!?"
Temari scoffed. "In case you haven't noticed, this is a funeral."
His glare transformed into a very bored stare, slowly appraising his surroundings. "Difficult to remind oneself of that."
The blonde fell silent.
The man in front of her shrugged. "I guess I'm too traditional for that type of thing." He scratched the back of his head.
Temari slowly nodded.
The man continued: "I don't know if it's selfish, but if I were gone, I'd like people to cry for me, you know? When my godfather died a couple years back, I thought my world had ended." He looked away, appraising the merry chatter. "I wouldn't have pulled through a funeral like this."
"I agree." The blonde sighed, looking away at the clapping crowd. Number 76 just finished their little eulogy. Some of her friends took longer than others. When they shared a more profound connection, they usually also gave some fun facts and shared a few more memories in her honour.
He turned his head to look at the girl who entered like a fury in his life and felt his mouth dry up. He certainly did not believe in love at first sight. No. That was a way too troublesome outlook to have on life and way too much pressure for one person to put on themselves. Could you imagine thinking you'd absolutely have to be instantly smitten to someone in order to taste true love?
No. All this man wanted was ordinary and average. No drama for him, no sir. His friends already gave him plenty of that.
But gazing at this woman, who had brazenly thrown juice at his face - pineapple he realized when licking his lips- he couldn't stop himself from thinking, maybe it did exist. Perhaps, it wasn't impossible for him to have the exceptional instead of the commo
n.
He didn't know what struck him first in her features, her topaz eyes, her creamy skin or her sandy blond locks. But that wasn't it. It wasn't anything physical. It was her stance, the way her eyes gleamed and the way her mouth smiled when she looked back at him and said :
"If you fall asleep again, I'll come back to beat your ass."
Well, that wasn't necessarily the most romantic thing he'd heard, but it certainly did make him laugh as he got uncharacteristically nervous and scratched the back of his head, yet again. This woman was like no other, that was for sure. She exuded confidence and charisma, and that made her all the more beautiful and intriguing.
"I always fall asleep." He replied with a lazy grin. "You'll have a hard time catching up."
Her smile grew wider. "Is this a challenge?"
He slowly shook his head, reaching for a cigarette and a lighter. "I'm smart enough," He paused to slip the cigarette in between his lips. "To know I shouldn't challenge a woman like you." He lit the cigarette and exhaled the fumes on the side, so he wouldn't smoke on the blonde in front of him.
"A sleepy head and a smoker?" Temari raised a brow. "Geez, you're a total package, aren't you." She smirked.
He was not surprised when she reached out to take his cigarette away from his lips. But he sure as hell was when instead of crushing it on the ground as he thought she would do, she wrapped her lips around it and inhaled the tobacco, releasing the smoke with a heartfelt sigh of content.
"Hard day?" The man raised a brow.
"You have no fuckin idea." She took another hit.
"Want to talk about it?" He offered, lighting himself another cigarette, surprising himself at offering his active listening to a perfect stranger. If his blond friend knew about it, she'd have fit. How come you never ask ME if I want to talk about something? He inwardly winced at the imagined voice whose whining tone felt decidedly too real.
She shook her head. "No, thanks. But I'd like to know what kind of man sleeps around in a place so nosy?"
He let out a heartfelt laugh. "A very bored man."
"Bored?" She repeated.
He shrugged. "Everything in life feels boring. Or if it's not boring, it's troublesome." He didn't know why he felt like adding more, but the conversation just felt right. "I was thirteen when they discovered I had an IQ of 200. Somehow, when you can understand how everything works around you, everything becomes predictable. For me, life feels like watching the same movie for the 80th time."
Temari's eyes widened as she let his statement sink in. "Damn," She breathed out. "This must suck."
He nodded. "Everything sucks." He stated, tapping his cigarette to shake off the ashes. "Well, almost everything." He let his glance wander on her face. She was looking at the stage where number 81 recalled with many details how she and Fu got into trouble at a museum in Belgium.
He was still staring straight at her, drinking in the soft lines of her features, when she turned around abruptly, and his eyes drowned in hers.
He knew he could kiss her right here, right there. He should have. He would have if he didn't have the certain conviction she would punch him the moment he got too close. So all he did was helplessly stare in eyes that were not quite blue and not quite green.
Now, it is a well-known fact among Temari's close friends that she had a naturally anxious persona - which people usually had difficulty believing at first when she told them because she always looked so sure of herself and was, just overall, an actual badass.
So obviously, when she found herself at the receiving end of a prolonged and uncomfortable staring session, Temari freaked the fuck out.
Which meant she couldn't bloody move or even remember how to breathe and that her cheeks were already on fire. She dropped her cigarette absent-mindedly. When the sly amused smile of the stranger graced his lips and her heart started skipping beats: Temari knew she was done for.
She couldn't even run away and hide somewhere where she could regain her crumbling dignity. No, she was at the mercy of this unknown ashy-brown-haired young man.
"Do you have a phone number?" He asked her out of the blue, surprising even himself by his unusual entrepreneurship.
She fumbled with her words, unable to utter a correctly pronounced word, even less a correctly phrased sentence. Until, finally, all that came out was a miserable:
"Why?"
He smirked, throwing his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it. "You're the least boring thing that has ever happened to me."
And probably the most troublesome, he thought.
But for once, he learned that troublesome things were sometimes very worth the trouble.
Temari smiled one year later, receiving a text from the mysterious man she was finally about to meet in a few hours.
"Received another text from Fengli?" Tenten threw her a teasing smile.
Temari bit down her bashful smile and threw her one of the decorative cushions they were unpacking in their newly rented flat in Konoha. Tenten expertly avoided the projectile while holding two moving boxes she unceremoniously dropped on the floor.
It had been one year since she had first met the guy at Fu's funeral. What a story when she thought about it. Falling in love with a stranger to the life-celebrations of the girl who basically turned her best friend's world upside down.
After he asked her number, all Temari could do in her state of panic was blink, her mouth agape, and until she silently gave him her phone so he could add his contact information. She looked as he departed to the stage, being the friend number eighty-four. By the time he was done, she had already disappeared in search of Tenten.
She had completely forgotten about him in the chaos of Tenten coming back distraught and trying to make the 18 hours drive to Konoha on very few little hours of sleep. It's only two days later, after a long bath in Tenten's bathroom at the Maitos and a long, restful night in Tenten's bed, that she woke up late in the morning to a text from him.
Sleepy guy: Hey.
Temari laughed at how he named himself. Butterflies of glee were flying freely in her abdomen, and she bit down the smile on her face when she answered back.
Sorry, too busy sleeping to talk.
Next to her, Tenten stirred awake from sleep to see her best friend with an idiotic smile plastered on her face. She rubbed her eyes and smiled at the teal-eyed girl who was transfixed by her phone.
"Ok," Tenten started, her voice still hoarse from sleep. "Who's the guy?"
Temari jumped a little, not aware until that moment that her previously sleeping friend had woken up and had been observing. "What guy?" She feigned ignorance.
Tenten raised an unbelieving brow. "The one that got you acting like the thirteen years old little sister of my friend Hinata. All giggly and excited."
"I'm not!" Temari argued, outraged.
Tenten scoffed. "Temari, the zoo called, and they want their butterflies back."
"Ha. Ha. Ha." The blond mocked-laughed.
"So?" Tenten insisted, sitting up on her bed and starting to fix her hair in her usual buns. "What's his name?"
Temari shrugged, then her eyebrows furrowed. "I don't know."
"What?"
"I don't know his name." Temari deadpanned. "I've asked him over text." She handed Tenten her phone, so she could read their conversation. "But as you can see, he said he would tell me about his name only when we met face to face."
Tenten smiled slyly. "Aw, someone wants to make sure he gets to see you again."
Temari smiled shyly. "I guess… but that's going to be a bit complicated. He went on a trip with some of his friends and is not coming back before the start of fall's term. And you know damn well once school starts, I'm not going to jeopardize my last year of pre-law for a stranger. And winter vacations well, we've been preparing our camping trip in the Rocky Mountains forever, so no way. If I were to meet him and finally have a name, it would only be next summer... It would be weird talking to a guy for a whole year, living in a different city, and never knowing even his name. No?"
Her brunette friend shrugged. "I've seen weirder, honestly. Just give it a shot. And what's a name anyway? You can always get to know everything else about him. Just don't give him your name to spite him in return and keep the mystery going." She gave her friend a malicious smile.
Temari returned her smile, still unsure at the prospect of fostering a long-distance relationship with a guy she had only seen for a couple minutes at a weird funeral. But then again, Temari had also seen more bizarre.
And also, she was getting ahead of herself. He probably didn't even like her like that. Right? Right.
Wrong. Very wrong.
Two weeks into their daily phone or video call conversations, the guy had officially asked her out. They were supposed to have an online kind of supper together, but she had that music festival trip to go to with Tenten's friends and that Ino girl had taken everyone's phones away and stacked them in the glove compartment of her car.
"We need to use this week as an opportunity to recenter ourselves and reconnect as well as deepen our friendships." Ino solemnly said, taking Tenten's and Hinata's hands because they were the nearest.
"Oh, for the love of God, Ino-pig," Sakura exclaimed exasperatedly, rolling her eyes. "Just admit you saw another celeb on Instagram doing a social media cleanse, and you know you won't last a day if we don't do it with you."
"Well," Ino flipped her hair over her shoulders. "That too."
Turns out that Ino's theatrics were pretty much useless because the reception had been so bad where the festival was held that they had to social media cleanse whether they wanted it or not. But it had indeed been a great experience. They had cherished these moments like one does when, while living it, they could tell they were going through something magical, rare and precious.
Like when time seemed to slow and suddenly you could notice the little details. Like how the light played on your friend's skin, or the smell of wet grass in the early morning and how it mingled with the ashy smell of burned-out fire logs of the previous night's fire camps. Or the strange serenity that accompanied one when you'd spent all night talking and laughing with friends.
How the discussion slowly became deep and healing around three in the morning and you start opening up on your darkest secrets to these girls that started out as strangers at the beginning of the week and ended up friends you knew you would keep for life.
"I still don't like her," Ino said, taking a puff from the joint Sakura handed her.
It was the first evening of the week and Tenten had driven for 10 hours straight and hit the bed as soon as they reached the hotel room. The four other girls went on the balcony for a smoke while their friend recuperated. They had closed the balcony door, so their chatting wouldn't wake her up.
"Ino, she is dead," Hinata said, consternated.
"So?" The long-haired blond raised a brow in defiance. "I can respect the fact she died and still be mad at what she did. Not only is anger a normal stage of grieving, but compartmentalizing is very healthy, you'd know."
She threw a pointed look at her shy friend.
Sakura shrugged. "I agree with Ino on this one. You can be both sad about her personal circumstances and disapprove of how she acted. Her illness doesn't excuse her actions. It just wasn't fair."
"Yeah, I guess…" Hinata allowed. "I just feel this isn't really anyone's fault.
All Fu wanted was to experience love…"
"By pushing Tenten out of the picture?" Ino asked dubitative.
"She could have gone other ways about it…" Hinata conceded, giving a last concerned look at her sleeping friend.
Sakura took the rolled joint back. "That doesn't mean she wasn't a nice girl," Sakura threw a pointed look at Ino, who was about to interrupt her. "Yes, Ino, we know you don't like her." The pink-haired girl rolled her eyes, drawing the fumes. "All I'm saying is that being critical of her actions is not a personal attack against her character. What she did was wrong, but she wasn't a bad person."
"Are you always this invested in their relationship?" Temari asked as she received the joint.
Sakura emitted a half-laugh. "You have no idea."
"This whole story has been very frustrating for us too," Hinata admitted.
"It's difficult to see your friends suffer so much." Ino shrugged. "We can't help but feel invested."
Temari nodded. "It wasn't easy to see Tenten when she received the letter. It was even worse when we left Neji at Fu's funeral. I had never seen her like this."
Ino bit down her lips, and Hinata lowered her eyes.
"How did she take it, the letter?" Hinata murmured. "Mine was already difficult to receive as it is, I can't imagine for Tenten…"
Temari wrapped her lips around the rolled herbs and exhaled deeply. "It was a difficult night, but she pulled through. She always does." She passed it to Hinata, who took a small inhale and gave it back to Ino. Temari smirked before adding: "She called her a bitch and threw a frame against a wall."
Ino choked on the smoke she had been inhaled. "What…" She coughed to clear her airways. "What? For real?"
Temari nodded.
"Attagirl!" Ino exclaimed, pride gleaming in her eyes. "See," She turned to Hinata. "Expressing anger in mourning is very healthy."
Hinata chuckled.
"Your stuck-up cousin should try it." Ino scowled. Turning to Temari, she supplemented: "He has been in his own self-induced purgatory over this nonsense drama. He is even more insufferable than ever."
Hinata couldn't help but chuckle a bit at Ino's statement. It was no secret that the blonde had been Neji's - as he proclaimed it himself - number one pain in his ass lately. The ever expressive girl had confronted the emotion repressed boy more times than anyone else in their friends' group since his fall out with Tenten. In the last two weeks, she had used every trick in her psych-major sleeve to make him talk about his buried guilt, which has infuriated him to no end. Sadly for Ino, her attempts were cut short when he joined his friends on their trip.
"How did he react concerning the letter?" Temari asked, genuinely curious.
"No one knows." Hinata shrugged. "We all tried, some more than others," She threw an admonishing stare at Ino. "But he has refused to talk about it. My uncle tried to book him an appointment with his psychotherapist, but he dismissed it. I think he needs some time alone."
Ino threw her hands in the air. "Honestly, this jerk is going to be the end of me. I swear as soon as I'm a certified psychologist, I'll strap his ass to a chair and psychoanalyze his ass."
"I'm not the psych major, but don't think that's how psychotherapy is supposed to works Ino…" Hinata said softly. "Aren't you supposed to be willing to do the work?"
Sakura laughed. At which Ino glared, "Why are you laughing forehead? I'm coming for your emotionally closed asshole too. Free therapy for all the jerks of our group."
"I think you already have your plate full, Ino." Sakura scoffed. She turned to Temari: "Her boyfriend, who is also my brother, is neuroatypical. " She handed Temari her phone with a picture of Sai making a peace sign next to her while she had her arm around his neck.
"Well, he's my adopted brother," Sakura explained when she saw her blond eyebrows furrow. "But I'd kill for him as if we came from the same womb. Like I mock his neuroatypical ass all the time, and he calls me ugly, but if anyone dared to say anything to him, I'd crack their skull open."
The emerald-eyed girl cracked her knuckles before adding with a shrug: "He's just seven months younger than me. Yet, I can't help but feel protective of him."
Temari nodded, a smirk on her lips. "Yeah, I can understand that."
Sakura's eyes quickly darkened when reminiscing about earlier years. "Life was not easy for Sai. My parents fostered him when he was fourteen and adopted him the year after. He was part of that weird sect that made the news a few years back. I don't know if you've heard of them? They adopted orphans and made them swear by a weird ideology of worshiping some crazy dude with one eye."
Temari's eyebrows shot up to the sky with the overload of crazy information.
"Mad, huh?" Ino interjected. "It was her boyfriend's dad who was in charge of dismantling the sect."
"He's not my boyfriend!" Sakura shouted back.
Ino rolled her eyes before filling Temari in on the brooding Uchiha who had stolen the girl's heart in their youth and had broken it a thousand times by being the worst fuckboy Konoha city had ever known.
"If being a fuckboy was a crime, his own father would be the first to arrest." Hinata grinned.
"It doesn't happen often, but catty Hinata is my favourite Hinata." Ino laced her arms around the dark-haired girl, kissing her on the cheeks.
Temari scoffed. "He'd get on well with my brother Kankuro then. If he's not partying or surfing, it's because he's sliding his tongue down a girl's throat."
"Just to be clear, we never went out together." Sakura rectified again for Temari's understanding. "It's just a silly crush that will disappear. Sasuke couldn't care less about me."
"Yeah, sure." Ino threw a look at Temari that clearly meant she didn't believe her friend and mouthed, 'He totally loves her.'
Temari chuckled with Hinata.
"In any case," Ino continued. "I find Sai refreshing. You always have it a hundred percent real with him. I couldn't be with a man that keeps secrets or that can't be bothered to express how he really feels. Sai may have difficulty with social cues and expressing emotions, but he tries, and he's the nicest and most caring man I've met."
Temari nodded, giving them a secretive smile. "Well, I don't know about that. Sometimes a drop of mystery can be nice."
"Oh, tell us more, Missy." Ino poked her arm playfully. "Did you meet a sexy summer treat?"
Sakura grinned at her, all excited. "Oh my God, I feel this is going to be romantic."
"Well, not really." Temari smiled. "We kind of met at Fu's funeral party."
"Oh, I was there too." Hinata supplied.
Temari blinked. "Yes, Tenten told me she met two of her friends." Hinata nodded.
"Ok, who cares." Ino interceded. "Tell us about the mystery boy. Do you have a picture?"
"No," She sighed. "Don't even have a name. But Tenten told me to play it mysterious too, so now it's kind of a game to get to know each other without ever revealing our name."
Sakura and Ino squealed.
"He's a real nice guy, though," Temari said with a dreamy sigh escaping her lips.
"Who's a nice guy?" A yawning voice sounded behind them and they saw Tenten, who had opened the door to join them. "Aw, y'all started smoking without me?"
"Don't worry, boo," Ino said, taking out another joint. "I waited for your ass to wake up before lighting the prime quality one."
Tenten threw her a delighted look before repeating. "So, who's the nice guy?"
"Fengli." Temari gave her a knowing smile.
"Oh, Temari's mysterious boyfriend," Tenten said excitedly, taking the first inhalation.
"Fengli?" Hinata asked.
Tenten nodded. "It means pineapple cake in Taiwanese, that's Temari's favorite dessert, and she said the guy had pineapple hair."
"Oh!" Ino exclaimed. "Like Shikamaru?"
Tenten raised a brow in a pensive manner, tapping her chin with her index. "Does he have pineapple hair?" She asked, trying to picture him. She shrugged. "I feel it's more like a spiky cactus or aloe vera."
"Let Temari be the judge of that." Ino decided, reaching for her phone. "Oh fuck, my battery died."
"Anyway, weren't you on a social media cleanse? A collective one you forced upon all of us?" Tenten reminded.
Ino groaned. "With the network being so slow, that's not going to be a problem." She wiggled her finger at Temari. "Remind me to show you a picture of him later."
Tenten's stomach growled. "Ugh, I'm getting ravenous."
"Pizza?" Hinata suggested.
"Pizza!" They all agreed in unison.
"But if someone puts pineapple on it, I'm out of this group, I swear!" Temari warned.
"We would have kicked you out first if you had proposed it." Ino tapped her arm in a reassuring way.
"It's not that bad!" Hinata interjected, blushing.
"Oh, Hinata, if only you had as much confidence talking to Naruto as defending this monstrosity of a pizza." Ino rolled her eyes. "Which reminds me, I have decided this year is the year you hook up with him. I make it my life goal. That and the therapy for Neji and Sasuke."
When her phone had charged, they had forgotten entirely about Shikamaru's pineapple hair as they were wholly invested in designing the perfect plan that would finally get the blonde boy to notice the poor girl's feelings.
"Whatever we do, we need to showcase her boobs," Tenten said with her mouth full of pizza.
Sakura clapped her hands. "Definitely! I have it on good authority -cough, Sai, cough- that Naruto is a boob guy."
"And I," Ino said with a devilish grin. "Have it on good authority -cough, Sai, cough- that Sasuke's an ass guy. So you're good, girl." She laughed when her friend threw her an empty can of 7up.
When thinking back on this trip, Temari thought of how Sakura, Ino and Hinata treated her no differently from Tenten, whom they had known since childhood. She knew they didn't do that out of courtesy. They told her so that it felt like they had known her forever. And it was very much the same for Temari. Except for Tenten, she had never as quickly clicked with other people. It was uncanny. Maybe the circumstances lead to the formation of this, albeit quick, but profound and solid friendship.
Since then, they had always thought in terms of five girls and not four. Five seats at a restaurant when they came over to Suna for a weekend. Five sleeping bags when they decided to join hers and Tenten's camping trip in the Rocky Mountains. Five members in every group chat on every social media known to men.
And as her friendship with them grew, parallelly, she started getting to know him more and more. By the end, she knew pretty much everything about him, and him, about her, from his favourite colour and foods to his biggest fears and traumas from childhood. She had even shared the stressful period she had gone through after Gaara came out. By the end of that online dating year, he knew her so well that Temari suspected he was now a male version of Tenten.
Well, they have learned everything about each other, except one another's name and everything that could help the other track them down. Thus, they did not seek each other on social media or give information like the school they went to, their family's or friends' names. The world was too small, and since they met at Fu's funeral, the chances of having similar friends were greater.
Gaara was 'little brother,' Kankuro was 'older brother,' and Tenten was 'best friend.' For Shikamaru, Ino was 'annoying best friend,' Choji 'nice best friend,' Naruto 'loud-mouthed idiot,' Sasuke 'brooding jerk' and Neji 'cold jerk.'
It had become a game for them that they had significantly enjoyed, mostly Shikamaru being a strategist, he always tried to find a way to make her slip, but Temari was in her own right very clever and astute herself.
Then, laced through it all, there was the application period for graduate programs. If last year was all about LSAT and MCAT for the two roommates, now it was all about motivation letters and personal essays. Ugh, how they had hated that.
Temari had toyed with the idea of studying law at Konoha University for a long time. Since she was a child, really, because the first-ever female judge to have been appointed by Konoha's 36th governor (and Temari's biggest idol) was a graduate of KU. On top of that, their law program was a very recognized one, and they even had a research chair for "LGBTQ+ legislation threats and opportunities." And Temari had first wanted to become a lawyer when she felt powerless to defend her little brother against societal threats made to his wellbeing.
So, all in all, both girls had applied pretty much everywhere, but their first choice was Konoha U. When they both got in, with Sakura applying in the same medical program as Tenten, it was reason enough for a weekend-long celebration. Ino was admitted to the psychology Ph.D. of her choice, and Hinata was pursuing her studies to get her MBA alongside her cousin so they could continue the family business. The collective joy of the group was at an all-time high. Next year they would be all studying in the programs of their choice at the same university.
It was such a euphoric moment they had no choice but to head straight to the beaches near Suna for an all-out weekend of debauchery. And everything that had happened during that weekend was never to be discussed again.
Never.
Now, Temari was moving into the new apartment she would share with her best friend, staring from the window at the city she would now call home and where she would finally get to know Fengli's real name.
Tenten let out a loud exhale, bringing Temari down to earth. "Ok, I think we are done." She dropped the last two boxes of their belongings on the floor and headed towards her blonde friend.
"Really?" Temari raised her eyebrows, taking in their surroundings where furniture, bags and boxes were littered around the floors and counter. She had been busy unpacking while Tenten got the last boxes out of Kankuro's car.
"Yes." Tenten stretched her back before letting herself fall on the sofa, the only piece of furniture that didn't need to be assembled.
She stared at her friend, wiggling her eyebrows to the phone Temari had been holding and looking at with an unconscious smile.
"Oh, stop it." Temari scowled.
"Are you excited to see him, finally?" Tenten poked her shoulder.
"Yeah…" The blonde tried to make it sound casual but couldn't help contain the grin stretching her mouth.
Which was a ridiculous attempt in the first place because they both knew how anxious she was to see him. Temari had spent the better part of their last week in Suna packing and walking around their apartment, scotch tape in one hand and a sharpie in the other, wavering between heavenly delight and crushing doubts. Going from the 'I can't wait to the 'What if..'
'I can't wait to hug him.'
'What if he doesn't like me touching him?'
'I can't wait to go on real dates with him.'
'What if we have nothing to say to each other when we're face to face?'
'I can't wait to meet his friends.'
'What if they don't like me."
And in a never-ending cycle, Tenten was stuck in the 'Of course' mode.
'Of course, he'll like you touching him. He probably won't be able to stop himself.'
'Of course, you'll find things to say; you maintained a long-distance relationship for a year. The talking won't be much different.'
'Of course, his friends will like you, or I'll kick their butts.'
Tenten rolled her eyes at Temari, trying to maintain her composure. "Oh, seriously, Temari, just let it out already."
The brunette laughed when her friend let out little squeals of excitement, hugging a pillow to her chest and wiggling her legs in the air in a childish manner.
"Ok, ok." Tenten breathed out her last laughter. "You still need to take a shower, though."
Temari scrunched her nose. They were sweaty and smelly. Moving out was definitely an Olympic sport.
"True." She nodded, becoming increasingly fidgety.
Tenten smiled again as she saw her normally too-cool-to-skip friend add a skip to her steps while walking towards the shower.
"Where is Kankuro, by the way?" Temari asked from the bathroom.
"He's going to go get settled in his hotel room," Tenten shouted back over the falling water of the shower. "He's too fancy for our sleeping bags on the hardwood floor."
She heard Temari laugh. "He's your problem now."
Tenten smiled to herself, content and guilty at the same time, her left hand absent-mindedly tracing the dragon's tail tattooed on her left hip.
She had gotten the tattoo a few days ago, and reminiscing about this impulsive action, she felt even more guilty. It was a silly promise Neji and she had since they were thirteen.
When they were little, her father read this bedtime story to Neji and her. It was about a princess who turned into a dragon because of a goddess jealous of her beauty. The King was convinced the dragon had stolen his daughter and was keeping her captive in his tower. So he offered his daughter's hand to whoever could kill the dragon and bring his beloved daughter home. Princes and heroes went by dozens and dozens in the hopes of rescuing the princess, but they all ended up almost charred to the bones by the blazing fires of the dragon.
Until one man came along, a warrior cursed to immortality by a Priestess whose Temple was destroyed in a war where he was the only surviving soldier. The warrior had hoped that the dragon would solve his problems and pretended to find the creature only to finally be smitten to ashes. When the day turned to night, the princess scales transformed to smooth skin and the horns on her head to silky hair.
Out of the ashes, she saw the ruffles of bright red feathers, and a bird came soaring through the sky before gently flying back to the princess. As days turned into weeks and months into years, the princess would come out of the dragon every night, and the man would transform into a phoenix. And when the sun came up, the princess transformed back into a dragon and the phoenix into a man.
Out of these curses, they developed a companionship where the soldier protected the dragon from other men from dawn to dusk, and the princess took care of the bird from dusk to dawn.
When she thought about it, Tenten thought it was a pretty bittersweet story, but they had loved it when they were kids, exhausting Gai in repeating it over hundreds of times. When they were little, all they could understand was that a man became best friends with a dragon and a girl became best friends with a phoenix, which was pretty cool for ten-year-olds.
Years later, When they entered high school, they vowed that they would get matching tattoos based on that story when they would be old enough. And according to their parents, 'old enough' was a minimum twenty-year-old for a tattoo.
Now, when thinking about that story, Tenten smiled bitterly at what she understood was a tale of impossible love. Nonetheless, she decided she would fulfill her side of the promise and got a small black dragon tattoo near her left hip bone.
She felt she was betraying herself by still giving so much importance to Neji, but she understood it was more a way for her to get closure by commemorating what has once been all love and friendship. She wanted to honor that it would always be a part of her, that the small boy who climbed her window almost every day would always have a place in her heart.
Even if he had stopped believing she existed.
Since last summer in June, she hadn't once talked to Neji. Not even a happy birthday text or a happy new year. He hurt her one too many times, and she couldn't give him other chances to disrespect her. She understood that under the whirlwind that was Fu's terminal illness and her death, Neji had not been receptive.
She didn't expect Neji to apologize. She understood his hurt and his anger. But for heaven's sake, she came only because she had a letter to deliver. And he didn't even let her finish one sentence. This infuriated Tenten so much that to this day, her hands trembled when thinking back on it.
More than being silenced, Tenten felt played like a pawn by both Fu and Neji. They had tossed her around in their relationship board, and she had to bear the burden of whatever didn't work out in their relationship. And she hated that, because of this cursed trio, she had been the only one who had asked for nothing.
She was put into an impossible situation and would have been blamed and accused of whatever she had decided. Were she to have stayed, she would have been blamed for why their couple didn't have the space to grow. And now that she went away, she was blamed for breaking Neji's heart to the point he couldn't focus on Fu enough.
There was no way to win for Tenten. The only way she could have done the right thing by them would have been to stay, make herself invisible and pretend that everything was fine. Which, to her defense, she had been willing to do at first. But how much can you ask of someone to bend at your every will? Wasn't she her own person? And not some puppet to be modeled and moved by their desires?
Tenten worked a lot in therapy to reaffirm herself, something she always had excelled in doing in every aspect of her life but became difficult when concerning Neji. She could never refuse him anything, but it usually never went against her own welfare. It was a hard-learned lesson that she had a right to put her limits up, even if it meant disappointing the one person she loved above all else.
She had worked on her healing journey. She talked about it with her psychotherapist, how hard she found it to heal without receiving an apology from Neji. Because even if she didn't expect one, she felt she deserved one. He had treated her poorly. He had ignored her whenever she reached out to him. He accused her of breaking their friendship by leaving, but when push came to shove, he's the one who turned his back on her.
He became harsh and cruel.
When they were younger, she had seen how cold and dismissive he could be of other people, even to his cousins. She had always been the one person he was always kind and gentle to. She had never been at the end of his irritable temperament because he had always cared so deeply for her; that all he could muster around her was gentle tenderness.
This is probably why it hurt Tenten so much. It wasn't just that he acted viciously, but that it also meant he didn't care for her anymore. She couldn't explain to herself how someone could care and love someone for almost all their life and woke up to despise them the morning after.
Tenten shook her head to force herself to change the channel and think about something else. And her thoughts went to Kankuro, her new boyfriend.
My, oh my, was that a hectic story. To this day, she didn't understand much what Kankuro saw in her that he had pursued her with so much perseverance, even when he knew full well - having had VIP passes to her emotional breakdowns over Neji - that he could never truly possessed her heart, that a part of it would always be in Neji's hands, even when forgotten in pockets of his memories.
Tenten let Kankuro slide his fingers in between hers as they observed Temari pacing back and forth in front of the brunch place where they were supposed to meet Fengli.
"Will it be a table for three?" A waiter asked.
Tenten shook her head. "For four people, please."
The waiter looked around. "I'll try to see what we can do… we are a bit overbooked today. But maybe we could manage another table on the terrasse if we rotate a few other ones. I'll get back to you on that."
Kankuro smiled. "Thank you."
He returned his eyes so they could roam over his lovely pensive girlfriend, appreciating every feature of her delicate face.
"What if he decided he didn't want to meet me?" Temari asked, frantic anxiety in her voice, biting down her thumb. Thank God for smudge-free lipstick. "What if he is sick? In a hospital? Lost his memory of exactly the last year and remembers nothing about me?"
Tenten laughed. "You watched way too many Korean dramas."
But her teasing fell on deaf ears, as her friend continued in her paranoiac monologue: "What if he is dead? And I have been talking to a ghost all this time and that's why he wouldn't tell me his name because if I look him up, I'll see an obituary dating from the first world war? Or what if I was talking to a robot? Or …"
"Temari, stop it. You're losing it." Tenten intervened.
Temari jumped when she heard the ring of her phone, signaling she had received a text.
Her brows furrowed. "He says his car broke down, so he had to ask for a lift from a friend. He should come soon… How's my makeup?"
"You look gorgeous, little sister." Kankuro smiled at her, and Tenten nodded.
Temari thanked her lucky stars again that Fengli had suggested a double date as their first meeting. He had grown quite used to her anxious streaks and he had known she'd be more at ease if she had a support system with her.
A few minutes later, they heard a cough and sure enough, a pineapple hair man appeared looking embarrassed and uneasy.
"Hi," He said, scratching his head.
"Hi," Temari said softly.
And before anyone else could say anything, Tenten had burst out laughing at seeing Shikamaru approaching. Her merriness was such that she almost lost balance and had to lean against Kankuro closer. He hopped on this opportunity to loop a hand around her waist and let it sit on her hip.
"What!" She managed in between laughs. "Shikamaru is Fengli?" She asked incredulously, her laughter doubled over. "Oh, Temari," She put a hand on her friend's arm. "You really don't have to worry about his friends not liking."
Tenten was wiping the tears away from her eyes, enjoying Shikamaru's embarrassed expression immensely. But then her eyes settled on something and her heart stopped.
"Neji."
The words left her lips in a soft whisper before she could even think them.
At the moment she had said his name, she felt her boyfriend's hand tighten on her hip, bringing her closer to him.
But she barely felt it. She was completely absorbed by two lilac orbs that were looking straight at her. She couldn't read his expression entirely, but there was a bit of pain, a tremendous amount of shock and even a hint of… joy?
"Tenten." He murmured her name, matching the softness of her whisper.
She felt her skin prickle at the sound of her name from his lips. When was the last time he said her name with similar tenderness? Or at least, without any hint of anger in it? She couldn't quite remember. Maybe three years ago?
She hadn't noticed Kankuro's hand around her waist, squeezing her tighter against him, until Neji's eyes lowered to it. Suddenly, Tenten felt very uncomfortable, her cheeks blazing fire.
He coughed and handed something to Shikamaru. "You forgot your wallet in the car." He said, avoiding her eyes while she solely had eyes for him.
"Thanks." Shikamaru managed the word as if he was drowning inside.
Neji's eyes briefly looked up at her again and Tenten wondered if this is how he felt when he had presented Fu to her over three years ago.
Oh, Tenten thought. How...
"The tables have turned!" The waiter behind them exclaimed.
A/N: So, not a lot of nejiten in this chapter, but it gives a base for what is coming next. Also, each side pairing gets a little moment to shine. This was Shikatema's. Any fans over here?
I was overjoyed by your reviews and it also made me grin so much whenever I got one. I'd squeal and tell my friends who have not a single clue what a fanfiction is, but they get excited with me nonetheless.
I love interacting with my readers, so I have a question for you. If you were one of the girls, how would you have reacted to the whole Fu situation?
A) Like Ino: taking Tenten's side forever, "Who does that Fu girl think she is anyway?"
B) Like Temari: does not care about anything except, "Are you ok, Tenten?"
C) Like Hinata: tries to look at every angle, "They all made choices they have to live with."
D) Like Sakura: a little bit of Ino and a little bit of Hinata. "Everybody fucked up in their own way, but Tenten was the most wronged."
Also, thank you so much for the reviews :
Argentinian guest: Omg, your review was so sweet it made me so giddy! I love your energy! And don't worry about your English, you're adorable, love you!
: I cry thank you so much, it goes straight to my heart
Kmy068: I do feel I should rewrite the summary of this fic cause it's not very tale-telling. And yes, I agree a hundred percent with you (and so does Ino!), anger is a very normal response! Thank you for your kind review!
Aritee: I shall try to deliver on the angst! I know it does not show from my last two fanfic, but really, my specialty is the fluff. It is so nice that you like it so, thank you!
Ten: you're honestly the best reviewer. You always leave a review at each chapter. You don't understand how encouraging that is! Thank you so much!
Gladkovayuliya88: IT DOES MAKE HIM LOOK BOYISH RIGHT. I have a weakness for the "boy-next-door-enters-through-her-window" trope.
SomeOne456: you were the last push I needed to finally get behind rewriting and updating Dear Heartbreaker, I hope I don't disappoint!