Title: watercolours in the rain
Chapter: 3 - N
Author: Killaurey
Rating: M
Word Count: 3,617
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 3 of 18.
Shino reaches up with one black-clad hand, phantom fingers, and adjusts his glasses. His voice comes out breathy, unsteady, even the buzz about him shocked: "What caused this change? Our calculations were-"
"Flawed from the beginning," Sasuke says, sharp and biting, a low avalanche of blades, all the anger from back then, a fade underneath, poisoned and oozing pus. "All of us were supposed to get out. That was the whole point."
It hadn't worked out that way, the evidence a seat away, one remove, this world a television from the next. Further proof, the left of Sasuke, a chair that ought to be filled and isn't, the owner otherwise occupied.
Shino sucks in his breath, a blow slung and hitting home, a gut punch without moving, and his nod is shallow, muted, a thing of regret. "You are correct," he says, no argument possible. No insisting that they hadn't known it would turn out that way, that it shouldn't have happened that way, because they'd been confident in their work.
Shikamaru closes his eyes.
He'd been confident in their work.
Of course, he had been. The idea, a communal affair, but the construction, the movement of possibility into action—
Others had helped. All of them had helped. Ino's rounded, heart-topped I's slicing through the metaphysical. Naruto's scrawl pointing questions at things they thought solved, forcing them to re-evaluate, re-configure. Hinata's flowing script elucidating the thin lines between the seen and the unseen. Real and not real.
But it had been his work that underpinned it all. Hidden and tucked under the seams, all equations stemming from an incorrect beginning (because it certainly hadn't been the ending they'd come up with first) and that, that a misdemeanor he deserves to serve twenty-five to life for.
How could he blame the others for not noticing when it had been hand that had hefted them into disaster, no reprieve to be found, when Sasuke's stern blocky letters had chastised Naruto, every time, and then patiently worked to make it make sense? Chouji's thin, slanted lines connecting dots, making sure none were left behind—if he'd left out dots, how can he blame Chouji for not finding them? Kiba's faint impressions (he always treated paper as if it will tear the moment the pencil touches it) defining the physical impacts of Ino's metaphysical, while Sakura soldiered through, strewing facts and correcting history, validating and confirming each small detail in a careful, sparing hand, each line pressed a little too deeply.
Nine sets of eyes and nine sets of hands and nine minds—nine on nine on nine and they had failed because of him. No proof given, except the results, had he been more careful, had he gone back to the drawing board, seen what other solutions presented themselves rather than going with the first one… what might it be like now?
(Guilt ignores that the solution they'd come to had been years in the making and gnaws away at sense that contradicts its existence. He can't blame them so he must blame only himself.)
"There's no point in apportioning blame," Hinata says and, when Shikamaru opens his eyes, he is not surprised to find she's looking right at him. Her nod is unreadable, a mystery as to what she means with it. Then she looks at the rest of them. "The more important thing is, Sakura—if the seal fails entirely, do you know what will happen? Has Ino said anything? Do we have a timeline?"
Hinata hesitates a moment, then says, to Chouji, "What do you know about this? You haven't said anything so far."
"How could I know anything about it?" Chouji asks curiously. "I'm dead."
As one, they flinch, all except the ghost himself, the calmest person in the room—and why not? He's already made it past the worst of it.
"It's not like you," Shikamaru says, "to answer a question with a question. That's an evasion."
Chouji's smile is a backlit spectral thing, familiar and yet new, a patchwork quilt of complexities. "Yes," he agrees. "It is."
Maybe it was a bad idea, bringing a ghost here, where they are all haunted.
"Why?" Hinata asks, her voice a sweet, low thing. She is dangerous when she talks like that, all steel beneath a velvet glove. The little girl she'd once been would never have dreamed of such confidence. "You came when you were called, like the rest of us. You're still here, Chouji. Doesn't that mean you're still a part of all this?"
But Chouji says nothing else, just keeps smiling and smiling and smiling until Shikamaru has to look away. Unfortunately, looking away means looking at Sakura.
"What of Hinata's questions to you? Are there answers to them?" he asks, aware of the fact that Hinata has narrowed her eyes speculatively at Chouji and otherwise hasn't moved. Patience, as if she is made of stone, a hard place conflicting with the dead, one who has no sense of the conflict that rises in the air.
It will be a line of questioning taken further, it must be, they will need these answers from Chouji, no matter how little he wants to share with the class.
For now, though, there's other questions and other problems.
Sakura's eyes hold a wealth of emotions, the coin of which he doesn't dare to try and convert to his own currencies. (Their sorrows, like their angers, are ofttimes the mirrors of one another; they are too close to each other, bound by Ino, drawn in like moths to flame.)
She sighs, the sound so forlorn that it snaps Sasuke and Kiba's attention back to her. Shino's had never left, choosing the living over the dead.
"Father's still alive," she says, those strong shoulders of hers drawing in, a pale defense against a man they all love and fear in equal measure.
He created what they are, after all. Raised them, taught them, showed them—even, some days, loved them. But also: he created what they are.
"Ino… it is hard for her to speak," Sakura says, her gaze distant now, her green eyes a little glassy. "This, though, she has said-beyond the seal, he has continued his work. He has never stopped."
Grand ambitions, those things not spoken of in polite society, a madman's greatest schemes. Orochimaru—their father-took them apart and put them back together, piecing ordinary boys and girls into things more (and less) than human.
Gods, he's called them, his voice warm with affection, his hands cool and gentle on their skin. The next step in evolution, helped along, literal eons before the natural occurrence of the same, his delicate schemes inked into their very souls, the stoppers change removed, all limitations gone, and their growth taking them beyond—
Just—
Beyond.
The edge of humanity, their last towering defense but also their greatest weakness. What world can they live in, when they are no good for the one they are in? Steeped in secrets, tea-stained souls formed of their father's ambition. No strainer can catch all the leaves.
"If the seal breaks, there will be no bottling it back," Sakura says. "He will not be denied. Our so-called teenage rebellion will be snuffed out."
None of them, not a single one of them, can call her on the longing that lurks in the depths of her voice. Sakura has stayed behind, not tried to live in the world they've been made unsuited for, a world where the most of what they are must be hidden, suffocated, and kept from those who are sheerly human, with the normal breaks and bends in their hearts and minds.
(And yes, in their souls.)
Father had anticipated that disconnect. That growing chasm of his own design as his little gods aged up, their connections to the world they were born in shifted and shattered, frozen then smashed with a hammer—
So many of their bonds he had killed to get them here; a supposition, a guess, a hypothetical without proof except that yes, yes, this is their father's modus operandi, and they are his magnum opus. Nothing is beyond him, nothing.
He will burn the world down for them, his children, and that was where it had all gone wrong.
Locked in their glided cages, the chains they've created together, bound one by one to each other until they are family, hated and loved and what hurts one will hurt the others (no argument leaves only one wounded, not here, not amongst their pantheon), their world had been small, beautiful and ugly in equal measure.
And exquisitely painful as their wings came in and the nest began to be too small, as affections deepened, and dreams of the future were things they spoke of in hushed whispers, a hundred thousand divergences that were impossible, they had assumed, for what world would have them? Where could they fit in?
The only home they had was here, this nameless place, where they had left behind the children they'd been and become more.
A good opportunity, his dad had said, dropping him off here. A great chance.
Shikamaru doesn't dwell on the question of how much his birth father had known. He cannot. Madness lies that way, like his mother's blood, all over their kitchen, a polaroid snapshot of a memory he will never forget.
"And the timeline?" Shikamaru asks, his voice rough.
Sakura raises her hands, supplication unsaid, and his heart sinks like a stone even before she speaks.
"Soon," she says. "That's all Ino could say."
"Where's Naruto?" Hinata asks, her frown a delicate thing deep with displeasure. "Mother's plans—"
She hesitates, fumbles, dropping the ball, the words rolling unsaid underneath the table and not one of them goes after them.
"He already knows," Sakura says. Sasuke shifts but says nothing as Sakura continues with: "I told him a different time to meet than the rest of you. He is guarding the seal, the best one for the job."
Which means, Shikamaru knows, that he is with Ino.
The sharp unfairness of this seethes through him and he ignores it as irrational, nonsensical, and stupid. If there is a strongest one of them, when it comes to holding the end of the world back with their own hands, it really is likely Naruto.
And that's where Father had miscalculated; they wanted a world they could live in but not at the expense of the one that had born them—had he found a way to bring them to a different world, an alternate reality, they would have gone willingly.
But the devastation of this world, of six billion personal universes and more, hundreds of thousands of years of history a crust that's been built upon, destroyed and then rebuilt, tenacity beyond sense… that had been the line they'd drawn.
No.
"Can we stop this?" Kiba asks, his scowl a living thing, quite apart from the look in his eyes, the one that's a step away from screaming.
(But he won't. He knows better.)
"We have to," Shino murmurs simply.
That's the crux of it, the stair they cannot miss. There is no stepping around this point because they cannot, will not, claim ignorance of what would happen if it became a missing reason, a missing stair.
'Don't rock the boat' cannot apply if already they are sinking. There is no holding this steady, never had been, in truth.
"We need a more defined timeline," Hinata says. "Sakura, would you work with Ino on that? The rest of us can start from scratch."
Shikamaru shifts, an ugly supposition, for he knows what's coming and he—
There are some who, once failed would pick themselves up off the ground, dust off the scattered pieces, and return to the puzzle, determination ablaze anew, one incorrect answer down, so—they know what not to do, the next go around.
(But that was in another country.)
His chair, a cage without bars, the walls are closing in, he will not panic and break. He cannot. If he does, he will never find the pieces; he's already lost so many of them, held together by brittle battle lines, no support forthcoming.
(He is already breaking. Can't they see that?)
The silence suffocates. They all know what they ask and, to reprise their catastrophe they must correct it in the encore, while down a third their orchestra and the rest fatigued.
And him, the conductor of the first offense, his baton cracked in two and bleeding.
They shouldn't call upon him. They can't. Look what he wrought: Chouji, dead and Ino…
Worse than.
The world holds for a minute, silent and standing with heads bowed as the anthem blares, a spindle drop in free fall, an axis that hesitates, hesitates, hesitates, then—
"You're the only one that can," Hinata says, and leaves it at that, no other recourse, no other avenue laid bare, just that.
And he knows it's the truth. If Sakura could do it without him… she would have and, of them, those still standing, she's the only one with the unfettered drive to dive into a feat like this, beating them all, beating him, proving that she could—
protect Ino better
-solve that which they had thought straightened only for the tangles to rise up, underneath and through, their work an insignificant pincushion, a mockery of impossible' s cheeky 'I'm possible', but—
Here they are.
"I didn't," he says, as empty as his shadows, the darkness growing about him, negative space braiding portals to eternity, a farce. "I can't."
Sakura scoffs, a wretched, raging thing. If it wasn't for the chair between them, he suspects she'd have him by the shirt, lifted off the ground.
But that's one thing their father drilled into them, another, another, and that's: all fights at the dinner table may be verbal only. The rule hadn't made sense, at seven, but it had, oh it had once they'd gotten older and their changes had become them.
So.
Verbal it is, then, a lashing over a vicious tongue, all sweetness dead and buried, funeral flowers wilted, discarded.
Why are they all at the wake?
(Father hasn't said they can leave yet.)
Unlike Kiba, Sakura rejects coarse, sandpaper words, words that leave road rash in their wake, a thousand red and bleeding bumps, mute designations of skin yielding, peeling, against the velocity of cement.
"Coward," she spits, a knife-point of a single word, then carries on with: "I'd think you'd be eager for this, your one chance to make it up to Ino and Chouji by putting what they sacrificed themselves for to rights. No, though, you just want to run away again. How like your dad."
Shino chokes, a protest that doesn't make it out, a rational argument against emotional savagery that could be spoken of.
Shikamaru doesn't blame him. He cannot.
His dad had run. Oh, sure, vengeance a trill of song, a trail of kisses drenched in blood, but he'd left behind his child, his son, the last remnant and greatest gift his wife had given him, and he'd run.
Some days and some nights, and all the times betwixt and between dawn and twilight, noon and midnight, Shikamaru wonders if, perhaps, it isn't a saving grace that he has never found the man who'd left him. Dad.
("Dad, where are you?" Begging to the uncaring moon, a lunar eclipse of forgotten tides. "Dad!"
And no answer. The phone rings on and on and on and on and on. An umbilical cord he hasn't figured out how to disconnect.)
"Might as well point a neon sign at my weaknesses," he says, leaning back, one hand brushing his knee, the other unoccupied. "As if I didn't already know them. You lot already know where I started. You don't need me. You shouldn't need me."
"I came back," Sasuke says.
Shino, Kiba, and Hinata swap glances, a world of complexities between them that the lines are so blurred there's no reading between them unless you've the key to the cipher.
Sasuke's eyes burn, scorched earth, the tumultuous tintinnabulation, unified cacophony and a wealth of years. Before they'd ever tried to leave, he'd tried to set it all on fire, the eternal villain and victim, hatred in depths hauled up by pumps.
Then, when it was over, new paint on the walls, replete with tulips, daffodils, and purple hyacinth. Forgiveness accentuated by a spray of baby's breath.
Sakura bites her lip so hard it bleeds, sharp-scented iron, a flood of inhalations torching the air.
They do not talk about those days. Sasuke's reticence a crib of steel bars, the sky torn asunder, skyscrapers paring the atmosphere paper thin, a trail of split-second papercuts lining every plan in droplet stings.
"And if you had to face Itachi again," the room recoils and Shikamaru continues on, seemingly unaffected, with, "I suppose it would be oh so easy, am I right?"
No exact lines to these injuries. Ino and Chouji are not Itachi. The situations incomparable except in their tragedy. Sasuke's brother, a failed experiment, cracked and barred, tipped over the edge by helping hands. A hypnotized cleaver, catch me if you can, little brother, and the bait taken, the fish on the line.
The teenage years had been rough.
Like broken mirrors they reflect everything and nothing, rubber ducks and wagon wheels, from family to nothing, their own hands a part. In part.
Consideration his due, Sasuke thinks rather than reacts, his volcanic temper shuffled through coils of control, winding snakes of ephemeral exhalations. His sigh is a thing of sorrows, guilts unspoken, and a truth, undeniable.
"If it would give me my brother back," Sasuke says steadily, lowly. "I'd face anything."
"You really believe that," Shikamaru says, wonder a potent colorant.
Sasuke just stares at him, the silence a heavier confirmation than glib words sliding off a tongue (not Sasuke's style anyhow, he'd rather a bludgeon than a scalpel, though when he wants to be he is as precise as any neurosurgeon alive in an operating theatre).
Shikamaru rubs the back of his head, headache a scribbling doodle on every page of his mind's notebook.
"I think you should do it," Chouji says.
"As what? Penance?"
"No," Chouji says comfortably. "But because, now that it's been mentioned, you'll never be able to stop thinking about it. Besides, it's not the world you want dead, it's yourself."
And isn't that an ugly thing for his (dead) best friend to come out swinging with?
"Yeah, well," Shikamaru says, all eyes on him, now for different reasons than before. "We've seen that isn't an option for me."
"Not that you've found so far," Chouji agrees. "Valiant efforts, nonetheless."
"Chouji, fuck off." And it's as casual as Chouji's talk about his suicide attempts, cold-storage pleasantries to cover what hadn't been good times, at all, for either of them.
(Though they'd been distressed for the opposite reasons.)
"So," Shikamaru says, when no one says anything to that, and he doesn't want to bother to see what they make of it. "You see? Someone that wants to die shouldn't be in charge of saving the goddamn world. It's just good, old-fashioned, common sense."
"We need you," Hinata says, though it's like peering through frosted over windows to find any shade of concern.
Kiba's hands tap out a sequence, rat-tat-tat-tatta-tap, on the table, then again, and again. He's set his knife down. "Fuck, why didn't you say anything? You've been radio silent for six years, jackass. We could have-"
"I didn't want help," Shikamaru snarls, rising to his feet, a burst of shadowed wings haloed about him. "I didn't give a shit. Just-find someone who wants to live to solve your fucking issues. I've got nothing left."
He glances sideway, right side of wrong, past the space that's never been filled, and adds, if only because of all of them, other than Naruto, Kiba's the one that genuinely, honestly, whole-heartedly gives the most shits about this fucked up family, "Sakura knew where I was the whole time. She wrote. Every month."
"And how many of your attempts came after her monthly diatribes?" Chouji murmurs, voice low, but Sakura flinches as Kiba's betrayed expression turns first to her, then begins the slide down to rage.
Shino wraps one hand around Kiba's wrist, a hundred thousand wings buzzing in unison. Warning.
Father says no physical altercations at the dinner table!
"What. The Fuck." Kiba's diction, careful pronunciation, relish in each syllable, drowning under a rising tide. "Were you trying to—you—DON'T YOU THINK THERE'S BEEN ENOUGH SHIT FOR ALL OF US? I KNEW YOU WERE A BITCH, BUT DID YOU THINK WE WOULDN'T CARE? THAT WE WOULDN'T FIND OUT? WHAT IF HE'D SUCCEEDED YOU GODDAMN FUCKING CUNT?!"
"I'm going back to my room," Shikamaru says, an undertone easily overlooked as Kiba's temper takes center stage, no longer just the understudy, name now up in lights, shining like a diamond on stage, all dressed in—
Well, not white. Red, maybe.
All eyes are off of him and that makes it easy to just… walk out, head reeling, the world feeling floaty and fuzzy around the edges as he shuttles the argument (Sakura's cutting, rising screech, Kiba's roar, and all the words thereof) out of comprehension. He doesn't want to hear it. He won't.
Damn it all to Hell anyway. That's where they're all going.
Except Chouji, who seems to have forgotten how to move on. Or will they be forced to go in a unit, all of them together, trapped eternal and tethered fast until the last of them has breathed their last?
Fuck.
He hopes not and he doesn't hope for much these days.
