Title: watercolours in the rain
Chapter: 2 - A
Author: Killaurey
Rating: M
Word Count: 3,608
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. Part 2 of 18.
Shikamaru wakes, a jack-in-a-box triggered into springing, and the ending to the poem left imprinted:
And now dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:
Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.
He scoffs.
Sympathy a patina, a whitewash of brush strokes, cheesecloth over his memories, those younger days, for even had they turned back then, it had already been too late. For children, there were no wheels and windows encased, no steel and plastic beast, no daring evasion a success. Just trees with maws and rivers that screamed.
Fisting his sheet in one hand, he forces it away, the blankets too, and tangling the spare fingers on his other hand through the war his hair has become. A bell chimes, overhead, first cry to classes. Once upon a time, the rules of his life.
He stays seated, a statute immobile, a flawed law unto himself, until the second, then the warning, chimes out. Who will punish him now?
(He is punishment enough for himself.)
No clock glows neon numbers or ticks along his walls. No need. Like a metronome, the bells will ring; time an illusion told through chime.
A shower, then, and shadows to review. Fed, still, from the night before, they come to his silent beckoning, crawling up his bare legs, ice against his scars as he dresses and cocks an ear to their sibilant litany.
All's quiet, the summation.
He trusts it not, experience makes him faithless in this forgotten land, impassive and cold. All the same, as he binds his hair up, pulling the elastic one round too tight, he knows that all he can do is accept the reprieve as the uneasy, unlooked for gift that it is.
But what price? He doesn't ask, just broods, a living shadow in reality, paging through old study guides, figures half completed, the solutions left unmarked, unblemished by fingertips and ink. Some of these, he knows now. Others, he has forgotten he once wondered about until confronted with the evidence in spikes of letters, diagrams and shorthand he has nearly buried in the soil of his mind.
When bells ring out twice more, only then does he set aside his work (despite himself, there are new notations written in pens that were freshly awaiting him; he hates that this place will always be partly home, uncomfortable and possessive) and, once he's slipped into a jacket, unneeded inside, but another layer never amiss, and braced himself, he leaves his room.
Overnight, while shadows watched, breathless and wary, the rain has ended. At the end of the hall, someone has opened the shuttered windows and pale light gleams across a patch of carpet. In the light, he shuts his room behind him, feeling oddly unencumbered as he carries no books, no binders, no schedule.
Just a time, 10:00 AM.
Sakura has not specified where. She does not need to. There is only one place where they will meet without effort, by tradition, the same as Orochimaru, Father, had begun all those years before, the first of many meals, seats assigned, silverware gleaming new and polished to a mirrored sheen.
The dining hall, built for them.
(This whole place, the instrument of their confused, hellish kingdoms.)
Tempting, and it is, to wait for the others, but he has no way of knowing if they remain in their own private prisons or if they have gone ahead.
So down he heads, his shadow seeking ahead of him, a tumultuous wave that shouldn't exist, a pool that only he has access to, a song that only hears.
(Each of them, were they tailored to their abilities or were their abilities tailored to them? He's never decided, the mystery as pointless as the chicken and the egg, and as without an answer that can satisfy.)
The foyer is empty of presence, smoothly clean, quietly elegant, worn from time, more than memory, but still richly appointed. Dustless, a soft breeze stutters through, choked by doors and frames, a featherless brush against his skin.
Beyond the door, the ducklings went, and he follows now, through the hall with the blue-royal carpet, wooden paneled walls, embossed in sigils and patterns, iconography, almost leaves of plants except that he knows some of these, the Latin and Greek and Egyptian, pieces found in dictionaries, words and concepts unused today.
Familiar, like all else.
Perhaps he's still dreaming for, as he slips down the hall, it's less him and more the person he'd been once upon a time (in a story, far away, that started on a sunny day), that lost, frightened little boy who'd trailed Orochimaru, who'd stared in awe when they'd reached the dining room with windowed walls that had the sunlight spill in like fireflies in a jar, and the view spill out. Freedom, spun far out of reach, soaring past a horizon that's been cleaved and shorn, scattered parts dancing on the waves, for the view—
The ocean, far below, full of ice and things that can swallow them whole without ever chewing. The sun, so warm in the room, frozen solid in the sky, a captured moment replayed day after day, only the waves never the same.
Like a river, ever-flowing, ever-changing, currents deeper than a soul's heartbeat, the ocean is never the same twice, whether swum in or walked upon.
(Humans aren't supposed to do that but they can, they can.)
The seats they'd taken, heavy to move, weighed down with more than their materials, their names in careful lettering embossed on the back of each chair (snake-bite green, venomous purple) and their seats, for the first time, filled and fulfilled, a belonging none of them had understood.
Orochimaru claps his hands, the sound reverberating through his flesh like he's water, the sound shaking through his bones, and food appears, out of nowhere, like magic.
His stomach growls and his is not the only one.
"Help yourselves," Orochimaru says, with a secret smile, and they do, and it will be years and years before they really understand that moment, that they're the old story of Persephone and the pomegranate only there's no Demeter to come and argue for them, to mitigate their exiles, the Underworld having claimed them in that moment.
(What happened wasn't in the food.)
Nor is he Hades, doing a job no one else wants.
Fears abated, stomachs on their way to being sated, their new god says each of their names with an unholy gentleness, then adds, "I'm so very glad all of you are here."
This, Shikamaru knows in retrospect, peering back through the chains of time, is one of the most honest things Orochimaru has ever said to them. Whatever their feelings, his are clear. This is his madhouse, his playroom, and they've been delivered to him, the dolls he's been waiting for to begin the grand theatrical game in deadly earnest.
At seven, it's just a new school, a new routine to spackle over the new bleeding scars they all have.
(He doesn't know that then either.)
"Um," the pink-haired girl says, her eyes red-rimmed and sniffly still. Such a crybaby, Sakura. "Why us? We… back home, schools are decided by where you live. But… but I don't know anyone here and—"
"Sakura, don't cry!" the blond boy says, his voice reverberating and echoing, far too loud, just like his orange t-shirt. Naruto. "It's going to be okay! I promise! We didn't know each other before but we can be friends for forever now!"
"A-ano…"
But no one listens to the small, pale-eyed girl with the stutter. Hinata.
Beside him, the fat boy just keeps on eating and eating with a single-minded determination that doesn't take the frown from his eyebrows. Chouji.
The dark, empty boy (Sasuke) just smolders a glare at anyone who looks at him while the boy who'd been holding his glasses is frowning, pushing his food around on his plate. The broken glasses are neatly set beside his plate, the lenses cracked and crazed and light bouncing off of them. Shino.
They're not really given a chance to even try, as Orochimaru gestures and the door they'd come through slams open, bouncing against the walls, and a boy their age rages through it, brown-hair furiously mussed. The air almost crackles about him.
"Kiba," Orochimaru says mildly, as delicate as a tapestry of stars. "Take your seat."
The boy bares his teeth, a grimace of threat, summarily ignored, and does so, sliding into the empty seat beside the fearless blonde girl who has watched all of this with bright eyes that give nothing away of her thoughts. Ino.
She looks at the new boy (they must be new to him; he was not in the foyer with them, falling into line), and says, "What's it like here?"
Weird, Shikamaru doesn't say, the silent watcher. He wonders what other people think of him. He wonders when he'll see his dad again. It's so weird. There's too few of us. This isn't a proper school, it can't be. Who ever heard of all of this for nine kids?
(Later, he'll wonder at how much of his mother's murder was orchestrated but, at seven, that speculation is far beyond his imagination.)
Kiba looks at Ino, meets her eyes and then looks away, a blush climbing up his neck, the anger diffusing out of him, a deflated balloon. "It'll be better," he says, shooting a glance at their… guardian? Headmaster? "Now that there's company."
"Kiba's mother dropped him off last week," Orochimaru says indulgently. "I'm afraid he's been a little lonely."
Ino frowns.
"Why were you so mad?" Shikamaru hears himself say. "Who gets angry because they're lonely?"
It comes out as an accusation, a whip of blame, shame-lined and, yes, he's angry and part of that is because he's lonely.
"Shut up," Sasuke snarls across the table at him, knife gripped tightly by white-knuckled hands. "What would you know?"
"I want to go home," Sakura says and starts crying again.
Shikamaru shakes his head, clearing the cobwebs of the past from his mind (he had not expected he would lose so much of himself in the past, here and now, the present being subsumed under the wave of—can it be called nostalgia when it's nothing simply good?
He doesn't deny the past but in the hall where he used to spend hours studying the marks and symbols on the walls and wondering what it all means (he still doesn't know all of it) he does wish it would all take the proper place, behind and beyond, where he doesn't have to look at it.
They never had gotten to go back to the homes of their memories. Sakura's tears had been only the start of it. Some of them hadn't had the homes to go back to. Some didn't want to. Some…
Six years away from here and he's never found out what happened to his father. He's been looking.
He knows his father is dead. His heart says so.
But he hasn't found any proof, any evidence, nothing tangible that he can hold, something stronger than conviction.
Like Ino had said, so long ago, that her Daddy wouldn't stand for all of this—if he still existed. He's never met the man, only heard her stories, but like with his father, he thinks death was the only way to stop him.
(But then, his father had sought revenge rather than looking after him. So what does he know?)
Pressing one hand against the wall, their secrets upraised vines, desperately unintelligible, Shikamaru sighs and shakes his head, once, twice, nearly cracking his neck, the sharpness of it slamming through him, waking him up.
He can't sleepwalk through this.
Focus comes twining back with the pain. A sprain to brace himself against, more potent and longer lasting than the sharp lines of his nightside table.
A bad habit he doesn't worry about.
Orochimaru has made sure he will survive it. They cannot kill themselves. This is nothing.
When the hurt bleeds through his mind, calm spreads like ice. Shikamaru locks it in, deepens the freeze, knowing the focus will skate alongside, a complement inseparable.
Then, before he drifts away again: the dining room door.
He enters.
Walls of windows greet him, stretching from the ground all the way up to the vaulted ceiling. The view is clear, a breathless expanse of the ocean spinning out from the cliffside the manor is perched on, a spider hunting, the prey deep beneath the waves. Then, like curtains, beginning at the capstones, are the hanging vines, long lines of twisted green, leaves half folded, hands clasped to the chest, a verdant prayer that sways, ever so slightly, moved by a breeze unfelt by human skin.
The air here is clean but heavy, the silent hush before a storm, anticipation before a dancer takes the stage, veils spinning deceits like ribbons in a young girl's hair.
As if the years never happened, as if they've dialed back the time, their chairs are where they'd left them, names as bold and bright as that very first day, the table set, elegant carvings in mahogany. Around the table, each an island in their own right, they have reassembled.
Marionettes that can never escape their strings.
To his left, Chouji sits. Like a wax paper figure, an outline drawn by in pencil lead, the rest nearly see-through, a prism under the right light, a rainbow profusion—an apparition awaiting feeding. Rounder than he'd been, back at seven, but also taller and sturdier. His red-brown hair now nothing but a shade of pale, a tick or two darker than his translucent skin. The youngest of them now, rather than one of the oldest, because the dead don't age, they stagnate, rotting shells that haven't learned to lay down and let the earth reclaim them.
And don't think he isn't grateful for that: he is, he is.
(It is still an aberration of the natural order; he knows this too.)
For now, he ignores the figure on his right.
Across from Chouji, Hinata sits, a pale-eyed princess frozen in ice. Her long, deep blue hair (deeper than the ocean's darkness) is loose about her face, hanging to her elbows, a hiding spot to keep opinions behind though she's long outgrown the stutter. She wears a simple purple dress so dark it's almost black, a pale grey shawl envelopes her shoulders. No jewelry adorns her—Hinata has never cared for bits and pieces, little things that get caught unexpectedly.
Or lost. Hinata has never cared for things that can be lost. A streamlined, careful existence, a gem that stands all on its own. No need for extraneous detailing.
Across from him, Sasuke sits. All in black, the beginning of crow's feet appearing before time has touched the rest of them. His eyes are impossible to read, dark pools, calm on the surface with wild things underneath. The stiffness of his shoulders, the way he doesn't look at anyone in particular, suggests that he is, as the rest of them, discomfited. Their moods aligning.
Sasuke has always felt things too deeply, frowned too hard, taken it all oh so very personally, an attack on him rather than on all of them—the longest to see that it wasn't, couldn't be, anything but an all of us.
There was no 'I' in team and that is, like wedding vows, forever and beyond, in health and illness, for better or worse, what they are.
It's through no fault of their own that these vows were said for them long before they were capable of understanding any of what it all meant, their humanity a sacrifice.
Naruto's seat, on the far side of Sakura, is empty. Late, again.
Shino, in defiance of the others, a quiet heresy, a pointed apostacy, wears all white. The only things dark about him are his glasses, tinted, nearly painted black with wide frames, a style clung to ferociously: No one has seen his eyes in years; his hair, cropped short about his head, the teenage spikes of rebellion having disappeared; and, finally, his gloves and books, both black leather, expensive and meticulously kept. A mad scientist, though this one, at least, has never hurt them. In the sullen, smoldering quiet of the dining room, a frenetic buzz skitters through the air.
(The hollow man.)
Beside him, Kiba lounges, tossing a knife into the air, a juggler's daring gambit, and catching it with absent grace. The blade is not for butter nor for steak; not meant to eat with, this one, but to maim, to bury. A fishnet shirt, stretched tight across his bulk (he is all muscle, corded and powerful, not an ounce of fat unnecessary) and a worn leather jacket, elbows patched, left open. Twin fangs, blood red, are tattooed across his cheeks, done back when he'd been seventeen and traded face paint for needles and Ino's steady fingers having inked him before Orochimaru had known.
They had been punished for that, he remembers, and punished harshly. Orochimaru had never cared what they wore or how they decorated their gilded prisons, obtaining whatever they recommissioned without question whether poison or pleasure, but they had been strictly, violently forbidden from making changes to themselves. Even their haircuts had been rationed, doled out under supervision.
Six years gone and most of the conditioning remains. Quite literally, they were made into dolls. Beloved and abused, exactly as he'd wanted them to be. And, worst, none of them only feel any one thing about him for he is also their father, their teacher, and love, like hate, is a mess of tangled vibes, concentric circles piled up upon each other, inches from being knocked over but never falling.
Ino's seat is also empty and, while it twists worse than thumbscrews, he'd expected it. The hoped for miracle, her back on her feet, a glory of symphony, dies unspoken and he is—
He locks it down.
He is.
And this is about Ino, it must be, he reminds himself, deep in the recesses of his soul, the places where hope springs eternal no matter how much better he knows than to trust it, to dream of it.
Despite everything, he remains, a fighting dreamer.
(Orochimaru had always been disappointed about that.)
"Alright," Sakura says, from his right. "Let's get started."
He slants a glance to his right, across the empty seat, a chasm filled by four legs and a tall, straight back, one that's never been occupied, no lettering across the back, no name to claim it. Then—
Sakura.
Eyes like chips of emeralds, frosted over, still bright underneath, and long, long pink hair, bright as bubblegum, loose against the blood red of her sweaterdress and somehow not clashing. Her leggings are the colour of cream, spilling down towards the ground. Straight, her shoulders are, and strong. No delicate flower here, power in the lines of muscle.
Monstrous strength, one that can crater earth. A walking paradox because coupled with her ability to destroy is paired the equally powerful ability to heal. Heal everything—
Except death.
Except Ino, who is not dead, but who—
"What the fuck is this all about?" Kiba demands, casually vulgar though his ever-present anger is bubbling like a pot set to simmer rather than to boil and burn. "The whole point of six years ago was to get free of this place. And now you're reeling us back in?"
The air chills, ephemeral, metaphorical, no ice actually crawls up the windows like figure skaters dancing crazed routines, but all the same, they know.
Sakura has never been free of this place.
(She'd chosen that, his mind whispers.
His heart responds, You hate her because you ran away. You're the one that should have stayed.)
"I'll get to the point then," Sakura says, in a voice he doesn't recognize, a mood he doesn't know, something ugly and bitter and shattering. "The seal is weakening."
Silence, then, like standing on the moon, the Earth a magnet and pulled along for the ride, whether wanted or not, freedom an illusion of grace and dignity, pregnant in the sky but never giving birth. It echoes in his head the silence and Sakura's proclamation both, competing for space and neither winning nor conceding, a battle of wills that only disbelief drowns.
"Chouji died for that seal," he says, a cracked, crackling croak, something ugly and unfathomable growing in him. "Ino bound herself to it and you—you—"
Sakura's judging stare doesn't even bother to flicker his way.
"Ino reached out and told me," she explains to the rest of them. "That's why, that's why I called you back."
Sasuke harumphs.
A flinty, snotty look at Kiba, an upraised chin, a hint of the girl she'd been once upon a time, and she finishes with, "I trust that reason is sufficient for the call back."
Hook, line, and sinker, they're all caught, strung up to die and no escape.
Kiba leans back, his chair a tangible support, his face pasty, his temper having been cut down by the unexpected, a problem they'd dealt with, a problem they'd looked after, something that should be a chapter already read and moved past.
Now they're back, forced to gunshot away at typewriters, a clack-clack-clack of unpalatable reality seeping through like blood from wounds (he knows what that's like) that they've got to fix. Again.
What will it cost them this time?
