Title: watercolours in the rain
Chapter: 1 - C
Author: Killaurey
Rating: M
Word Count: 4,066
Summary: AU. "Don't hang up. It's about Ino."
Nothing less than the purest of loves could reel him back to the hell that had raised him. Sakura plays her cards well, when she wants to.
That it all goes desperately wrong from there is... about what he'd expected.
Shikamaru doesn't want to save the world. Maybe, just maybe though, he can save the girl.
(Don't dare me to write a love story.)
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it.
Notes: Part 1 of 18. This story is completely written and will be updated every 2 days between now and November 19th. Written for the 2022 Het Big Bang on Dreamwidth. Thanks to puffinmuffin for the beta! Hydrology 101: womb under water is the prequel to this story but is not required reading to follow what happens here!
Rain pisses down in torrents that lash the windshield so thickly that he can barely see even with the squeak-squeak-squeak of the wipers doing their damnedest to maintain visibility.
The dark offers no assistance as the sky, what little he can see of it when lightning crawls across the horizon, is set at an ominous pitch.
If there's any stars out there, well, they're all staying home tonight.
Theoretically, his headlights are helping but all they really do is illuminate the next white line to follow.
He'll never see another car coming. Not in this.
"Nice night for a joyride," Chouji says placidly from the passenger seat. There's the crinkle of a bag of chips and a sharper snap then the smell of what they call barbeque-flavour hits his nose.
Chouji has been dead for six years.
It hasn't stopped him from haunting Shikamaru.
Or maybe in the one haunting him, Shikamaru thinks, but he makes no move to ask for the truth. He'd tried once and Chouji had disappeared on him for weeks.
He'd rather not know—and keep his best friend. No matter that Chouji being with him, here and now, should have been literally impossible.
He knew. He'd been there when Chouji had died and…
"The turn's coming up," Chouji says. "You won't want to miss it."
Shikamaru makes a noise of—it could be considered agreement—in the back of his throat.
"What do you think Sakura wants?" he asks, instead, and ignores that he's asking a dead man's opinion.
Chouji eats a few chips, the crunch of them loud in the otherwise suffocating claustrophobia of the car. Usually, he likes his car. Usually, his world is larger than the wheel in front of him, white-knuckled clenched, the white lines steadily rolling on by, and an old ghost.
"She sounded pretty worried," Chouji says, finally. "About Ino. Since she actually bothered to call you, it's probably pretty serious."
"Yeah."
Sakura is good at the long game. So considerately spiteful. Sending him updates in a monotonous monthly schedule, the same day, right on the dot, and never asks him how he feels about it. He doesn't even know how she keeps track of his address. He's never told her when it changes.
He thinks he could die and she'd still keep on sending those carefully typed, lined-paper accusations that he ran away. She'd probably prop them up on his grave in lieu of flowers. Lord knows that the flowers she scrawls across the backs of the envelopes are slaps in the face.
All of Ino's favourites.
This month's had been the scattered sprawl of cherry blossoms. March. And a play on Sakura's own name, a not-so-subtle dig, as far as they went that she was still with Ino while…
He takes his turn too sharply, nearly hydroplaning across the asphalt. Shikamaru throws himself into the strain of not sending them (him) careening off the desolate road, through the guardrails, and down and down and down into the trees in the canyon below.
Through it all, Chouji eats chips with a placid serenity that ought to irritate the shit out of him but instead grounds him, anchors him.
Once they're safe, Shikamaru keeps the silence taut and hushed. The alternative is talking about-
He doesn't, can't, talk about what happened to her. Guilt spikes through him. Chouji's dead and that's easier to deal with than that.
What an asshole he is.
"We're almost there," Chouji says.
"Yeah." Shikamaru doesn't take his eyes off the view in front of him. "You... are you alright with that?"
He has the impression that Chouji is looking at him.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Chouji wonders.
"You know why," Shikamaru snaps. "You can't have forgotten."
"I haven't forgotten," Chouji says. "But I'm not the one flaying myself with it."
"Stop it," Shikamaru says and, before Chouji can reply, guns the gas.
They fly dangerously down the water-swept roads, headlights weaving madly. Sweat beads down his back—stress and tension not external heat—and he focuses on nothing. On nothing.
Then there's the long driveway, one that he knows all too well, as if it's imprinted like road rash in his brain. He slams on the breaks, pulling up just so. A miracle of unexpected precision. It's only then that he looks up and realizes his isn't the only car out front.
And there's someone on the steps.
"Fuck," he says, because he knows who it is, would know that silhouette anywhere, and if that's the case then—
Shikamaru gets out of the car and slouches towards the stairs, all sharp angles in defiance against the rain, which soaks him through immediately.
"Hinata," he says. Maybe it's a trick of acoustics but she hears him and pauses at the door. Recognition shivers through her shoulders like a winter's chill.
Hinata turns. Always pale, illuminated by the porch light and her outline fuzzed out, hushed and muted, by the rain, she looks like an apparition. He stops halfway up the stairs. Her eyes are completely washed out, nothing but white.
Had she been a stranger, he would have thought her blind. But he knows her like he knows the rest of them, like knife gashes across his soul. Her eyes have changed but her soft, empty smile is the same.
"Shikamaru, good evening," she says, and there is a seeing to her smile, the slightest widening of her eyes as she looks just beyond him. "You too, Chouji. It is... good to see you."
Great. We're all freaks here.
Shikamaru shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, fingers curling around the small box he always, always carries. He continues up the steps. "I can't get rid of him," he says, though he hasn't, and won't, try. "He showed up a few weeks after everything."
He knows the exact number of days, but he doesn't say that. He doesn't let people know his calendar re-started then, right back at zero, and that he keeps track of days. It seems obsessive. Crazy.
Chouji shrugs as he eats another chip, the rain sheeting right through him, making his outline almost imperceptible.
"Sakura called you too, huh?" Chouji says.
"Yes," Hinata says and rings the doorbell. She says nothing else, just looks away.
Shikamaru clears his throat. "Did she call all of us?"
White, white eyes slide over to him for a moment. "I don't know."
Yet, she's here.
The door swings open, a rectangle of white light, an invitation into another world. Pure, for a moment, then filled with—
"Oh. It's you jackasses."
Six years ago, Kiba would have added a belated, "And you, Hinata," but these days he doesn't bother, just keeps on talking with: "Get inside. You look like sewer rats."
Shikamaru waits for Hinata to enter before he follows. He's not much of a gentleman but some manners take longer to die than others.
She'd been there first anyway.
Inside is bright and warm and he drips all over the floor, snatching the towel that Kiba hands him with a grunt.
"I don't have anything to dry you off," Kiba says to Chouji. "Just try not to drip ectoplasm and crumbs everywhere. That'd be disgusting."
Chouji laughs.
He is the only one in a good mood.
"I'm going to my room," Hinata says, and heads up the stairs without looking at any of them.
Shikamaru considers doing the same. There will be dry clothes up there. Instead, he looks at Kiba.
"Are we the last?"
Kiba's hair has grown wilder, and his mouth is lined with sharp, inhumanly pointed teeth when he smiles. It's a savage, ugly sort of smile.
He doesn't want to be here either.
"As far as I know, we're still waiting on Shino and Naruto."
"Shino?" Shikamaru asks sharply.
Naruto is always late, always the last one to anything important, but Shino should have been here already, now that it's obvious that Sakura has called all of them back here.
"Transport issues," Kiba says, with a can-you-believe-it raise of his eyebrows. "He'll be here once the rain ends. Don't get your panties in a twist yet."
"Fuck off."
Kiba shrugs. "Just saying," he says, a hint of fang showing as he turns away. "Doesn't take a genius to know things are going to go to shit once we're all here."
Shikamaru eyes that back, broader, and bulkier than his, a wall of muscle encased in a leather jacket. "Sakura said what's going on?"
"And spill before the big reveal?" Kiba laughs, though it's not funny. "Shit, jackass, you know better. We've come running at the call of our head bitch. She doesn't have to say why to bring us to heel."
Like dogs, Shikamaru thinks, and doesn't say.
"Where is she?"
Kiba waves one hand upwards as thunder cracks overhead, the building seeming inches from shaking apart at the seams. "Get some sleep," he says. "You too, Chouji. If ghosts can dream."
Then he's gone, slamming a door behind him, deeper into the house.
"Can they?" Shikamaru asks into the silence of the foyer.
Chouji doesn't answer him, just floats over to the stairs.
"Real spoonfuls of sugar the lot of us are," Shikamaru grumbles as he follows. His footfalls echoing on each step. Up on the second floor, it's dark. The only light is what has filtered up from below. It doesn't matter.
Six years doesn't matter.
He knows the way.
The brass knob is cool to his touch when he stands outside his room. Chouji drifts past him. Shikamaru nods, watching him for a moment, then grits his teeth and pushes the door open.
He steps in, shuts the door behind him and hits the light without looking. It flickers on overhead, lighting the room up less than a washed-out moon would, but it's enough. It's just as he left it, down to the socks on the floor and the books at the desk, left open, notes half taken.
Except there's no dust. He runs his hands along the too cold wrought-iron of the bedframe (chains of thorns) and—clean. The white glove test would be no problem. Stripping, leaving his wet clothes on the floor, he heads for the attached bathroom.
On the way, he slaps his hand sharp against the edge of his dresser. It bites back, sharp and heady, and when he steps into the bathroom, turning on its anemic light, a thin red line marks his palm. Not bleeding, but close.
Good.
He marinades in scalding water until he's flushed and light-headed and can face himself in the mirror. Haggard, tired eyes. Scars scraped across his chest, hooking under his left armpit. It trails down across his back, scaling over his ass and right hip, ending near his knee.
"You look like shit," he tells his reflection. Behind him, in the uncertain light, the shadows move of their own accord, twisting and writhing languidly. He scoffs, towels out his hair, and leaves before he has to look at anything more.
His wet clothes are gone. His wallet and keys left on the desk. His cell disappeared. He'd expected that.
Can't have anyone calling for help.
But it's an old, weary thought. They're all back willingly. Furious, anxious, changed—but they came when called, unforced.
Their only aid is themselves. Their damnations too. They are well aware of the consequences of their existences.
Filching black cargo pants and a grey shirt from the drawers, he dresses. It's gone past late but he's woozy, not tired, and that's a combination that makes fools of men smarter than him.
(He's a genius, they said.)
He doesn't bother tying back his hair, leaving an elastic tight around his wrist, pressure present, and pads back into the hallway on bare feet. Everything feels muffled, his breathing loud in his ears. Trick of acoustics. He knows better.
The floor is quiet. The doors are shut, quiet little coffins, fine gilt edges glittering in the absence of life. The dark breathes against his skin, turning the damp places to ice.
He ignores it.
Ignores the doors, down to the end of the hall, where the shuttered window slaps with thundering rage, and turns up a floor.
Six below, three above, nine in all.
We thought we were so special.
And the shadows answer: but you are.
Shikamaru ignores that, takes a breath. The air up here—sweeter. Not because of the girls, though this is their floor, but because the conservatory opens up here. The floor half given over to open, empty space that screams for the sky, benches tossed about like forgotten toys, and tangled masses of riotous flowers living their best lives, unaware of the pains around them.
Beautiful, in sunny weather, and cruel.
In the house itself, Ino's favourite place. He'd watched the clouds and the hem of her skirt in about equal measure. Something bubbling between them. Her pale fingers caught in his hair, her laugh a bell.
(It still rings in his soul.)
Hinata's door he passes. Sakura's, he avoids.
Ino's…
He presses his forehead to it. Doesn't knock.
It's against the rules. Each room sacrosanct. A safe place. The laugh catches in his throat, too low to escape as anything but a subterranean moan.
The handle burns under his hand, like pressing acid to a wound (no mark will be there when he pulls away) and he waits, letting it eat through him, gnaw him to the quick, like the poisonous hope that Ino will know he's present, know and open the door.
He knows better. He does.
(But hope sustains drowning men.)
(She's not even in there.)
Time ticks through the night's clock, resonating in his bones, a strike to shake him from his stupor, how much later he doesn't know. No answer, no reprieve. He says nothing, no coercion. No begging.
(If he starts, he'll never stop.)
A soft click, sharp against the muffled air, and he pulls away from Ino's door, shaking his burning hand. Sakura's door inches open and he—
He wraps his shadow about him, sinking through it like silk, and disappears from view before she can spot him. His walk ends back in his room, the door locked with a breath, a tendril of blackness flicking the bolt fast.
"Prove it," he says, a challenge unheard.
Coward.
If it's her, his shadow, or himself—he doesn't know who calls him that, a hoarse whisper coughed up. It could be his imagination. It's true.
When he slams his hand against the edge of the table this time, his palm bleeds. Shikamaru flexes his hand around the pain, working through it, endorsing it and knowing it will be gone in an hour or two. A wound like this? Lasting here? Ha. Father had seen to it that they weren't so very fragile.
If they had been, maybe they would have been more careful. Maybe they wouldn't have been such fools.
His shadow reaches greedily for the blood and he allows it to drink, soft suction, a line of pain sliding up his arm. In and out:
A reward for good behaviour.
"Guard," he says gruffly, once it is sated. "Let nothing enter."
He cannot enter Ino's room or anyone else's. Little prisons with locks they turn themselves. (Safe spaces; what a joke.) He can't. They can't. The nine he knows.
It's the others he doesn't trust. The ones that tied the strings, turned them into puppets, and make them dance.
How much of them is left, he doesn't know, but his clothes were taken. His room is clean. The clothes that fit him now are not the size he wore six years ago. He's refined himself, become a—ha—shadow of himself.
Sakura could never have done this. Interim head bitch she may be, in Kiba's parlance, but she is, like the rest of them, bound by the rules of their nine. While most of them ran, she burrowed, buried, stayed.
Letters like knives and drawn slaps of flowers alike.
He wonders what she's like, to Kiba's coarsely hidden rage and Hinata's brittle indifference. Chouji a jovial stand out; it doesn't matter to him, he's dead.
(Do the rules still hold him?)
On his pillow he finds a note. Lavender blooms like blood across the back of it. On the front, knife-point sharp, Sakura's writing:
10:00 AM
He crumples it, crushes it. A summons, then, and he'll go. He'll go, like the rest of them, yipping and twisting against their leashes, unruly and bloodied.
Dogs.
And starving.
Dreams snatch and hold him fast no sooner than sleep stakes its claim.
Or rather, it is memories that play, technicolour splayed against the inside of his eyelids, an audience of one that's seen this film before, breathed this film before, no ending spun through the reel, just stop, rewind, repeat.
Seven, first grade, shorts, t-shirts, and suspenders. Socks folded neatly, skinned knees, and a superhero backpack. Rice crackers and apple slices, walking home from school (just a block; adults in sight the whole way), each day brand new.
(Already being catalogued by society.)
Up the steps, worn and comfortable, splinter-free. Screen door bang, shoes left at the door, he's home—
And no one answers.
Too young to know the smell of blood (iron thick, revel haunted) before he sees it. Mother. Spilled across the kitchen, a painter having gone wild with reds and browns and blacks in shades he doesn't understand. Snapshot of horror.
Then the camera clicks.
Funeral-blacks, cloying lilies, his father a stranger. Distant and unknown. (Grief sends footsteps between spaces and never reaches.) Sounds ring through his ears, large and empty, carving him out, and, with a turn—
A long drive. Dropped off without bags.
"It's best for you," the stranger-father says, his dark eyes empty, a promise to come back, once vengeance is found.
(He doesn't understand. He misses the juice-box days.)
"You'll be fine." A desperate whisper, a dreamt for absolution. At seven, not his to give, though he nods, uncertainly. "This is a good opportunity for you. A lucky one. Make the most of it."
Then the last tattered piece of sunlight and sandwiches and marbles on the school yard leaves, a scarred lap into the new normal.
No one beckons. He carries nothing but his blood and bone and flesh up the stairs. No favourite blanket, no comforting pillow. No favourite action figure or plastic toy car. Such little dreams left behind on the kitchen floor, tragedy rolled over them, sacking them.
Behind stretches out, impossible to reach. And, so, it is the only thing to do: up the stairs, through the door.
Others are there.
He doesn't know them then, but he will. Pink hair like spun cotton candy, the owner crying into their knees. A boy, blond hair in spikes, patting their shoulder awkwardly, telling them not to cry, though he looks like he wants to too.
(But weaknesses on parade are always the wrong choice.)
Near the door, a dark hair and eyed boy, lost and empty, the pale eyed girl next to him more fragile and yet more composed.
("My father sold me," she hasn't said yet. But she will.)
A fat boy, reddish brown hair, and a thinner one, clutching a broken pair of glasses, stand together yet apart. Not looking at each other but not leaving either.
Their frowns similar though the thoughts behind them aren't. He'll learn.
In the center of the room: a girl.
Her hair is a paler blonde than the boy's, a sunbeam diffused to the boy's concentrated gold, a blue clip holds it back from her face, and she is angry. Her hands on her hips and chin set like fire, staring at the door across from them, in this hall of drop offs and leavings. Across the stairways winding up are chained gates, impossible for them to climb, festooned as they are with thorns and spikes.
He wonders if the door she glares at is locked as well. It must be.
(The dreams twist uncertainly; he remembers this differently, her kicking at the door, slamming on it, inches of indignation and stubbornness.)
At seven, Shikamaru does not approach her. Her anger too bright and his confusion, grief, and longing for normal too raw. He hesitates, the door locking behind him (he doesn't notice, then, just knows that it has shut), and when no one looks towards him, not even the girl radiant with rage, a pulsing horizon all her own, he drifts over to the fat boy and the one with the glasses, joining their silent huddle, together but apart.
He cannot deal with the tears of the pink haired child or the careful, broken glass demeanour of the other two. (Their eyes frighten him.)
They wait. And wait. And wait.
Like fidgets running out of minutes, unease snakes through them, shivering them down until the tears have stopped and the only one still standing, immobile, unwavering, is the girl.
She frightens him, he realizes, because he does not understand the strength of will to stand tall against—
Even in retrospect, peeling back through the clock, reviewing their future history, and tangled in the claws of Morpheus, he is unsure if he will ever understand that untaught and untrained determination. Later, he will learn that she does fear and she does cry and that her will does falter—that she is human and, therefore, imperfect.
But then, then he did not see the way her hands trembled or how she grit her teeth to keep her lips from wobbling.
(Even if he had, he wonders, for she had still stood-)
Footsteps fall like snow, heavy and blanketing, jerking their heads up, as adults unknown drift down the stairs. They do not pass the thorns and chains, just watch, like spectators at an execution, eyes avid and avaricious. Heads veiled and uniformly garbed, he knows them now by the shapes of their bodies, these looming shades he will come to love and hate in equal measure (emotions are past a simple equation) but then, then he just watches.
Eyes huge, rabbit-like, still and a breath from bolting (but to where?), a slow-motion devastation in action.
"Who are you?" the girl demands, the last defender, final bulwark between them and them. "Why are we here? My daddy won't stand for this, so you'd better smarten up!"
His father had left him to a good opportunity. He'd said so.
The watchers do not react, the words rolling past them, no need to assuage the anxiety (he didn't notice) of a child's bluster.
The center door, the pounded one, the railed against barrier, opens silently on iron hinges.
"Are you going to answer me?" the girl demands, turning her attention to the person who walks through it.
Are they a man? Woman? At first glance, he doesn't know, just that the long hair reminds him of his mother (his father will come back for him, once his mother's killer is dealt with, he will, he will, he will) but the gold eyes are reptilian, soul-shatteringly wrong (only monsters under the bed have eyes like that), and endless.
"Of course I will," the person says genially, a perfect host's civility. "How about you all come this way and we'll talk about it over lunch?"
The girl's frown is audible. "What's your name?"
"Orochimaru," the person says, and something about that name drifts like dandelion fluff across his memory, but at seven it means nothing, really, except that it is a question answered, knowledge given freely, and that this…
At seven, shaken and stirred, he does not recognize the trap.
"Alright," the girl says, since she's only seven or thereabouts too, and just as easily unwise despite her strident attitude. "Thank you. We'll have lunch."
She speaks as if she talks for all of them and, when they begin to move, little soldiers falling into line, little hands reaching, clutching for someone who knows what to do, he also joins, falling with small steps into place. Good little puzzle pieces, ducklings as they trail into the rest of the house: "Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly.
And they buzz and they bumble and they forget that, once upon a time, the Fly had been correct:
"For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."
