Title: watercolours in the rain
Chapter: 9 - A
Author: Killaurey
Rating: M
Word Count: 3,348
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 9 of 18.
He blinks. Frowns.
Sakura said you wanted to speak to me.
It takes… longer than it should for Shikamaru to remember why. He hadn't mentioned specifically wanting to talk to Shino but—well, he supposes this is Sakura's sop to being helpful, the white flag of truce turned into the white-clothed form of Shino. A walking, talking piece of evidence of their unlikely alliance.
(But they were never on the opposite sides of the war. It's so hard to remember that.)
"Kiba was right," Shino observes. "You drift. Restless and dazed."
Shikamaru shakes himself back into focus. Blurred lines becoming crisp and sharp. "Yeah, well…"
He doesn't finish that listless rebutting reverberation, the path the sound goes down, just allows it to die as he decides what to say now and what to say later.
"I'm in," he says. "Naruto's already gotten his assignment—he's drawing the seal. I need your expertise with a camera down there too, if you're willing. Photos taken with both analog and digital cameras would be appreciated; we need to see what the differentials are."
"You expect inconsistencies?"
"I put nothing past Father," Shikamaru says grimly.
For the span of a moment stretched to translucency, Shino is still. Then he inclines his head, motion economical.
"I will begin attendance," Shino says, then hesitates before he says: "Despite your inconsistency in presence, you are more focused than you were at breakfast."
Shikamaru is never quite sure what to make of Shino's observations. This time is no different. He ignores it, rolling his head back to stretch it out. "Do you know where Sasuke is?"
Shino's expression is unreadable. It usually is, as he's turned himself into a living ghost without a mouth visible and eyes hidden by his opaque glasses, a blotch of darkness against the white. If he squints a little, Shikamaru wonders if he'd find a marionette's strings attached to him. He decides not to go looking for them.
He's likely embraced by them as well. He doesn't need to turn it from supposition to cold, rational fact. He's bitter enough as it is.
"You should be able to figure that out yourself," Shino says. "I will see you at lunch."
It's not said as a question but, rather, something he must do, the only expected thing.
Lunch, as a concept in the strings of here and now, the wide ribbons of sane and insane, leaves him feeling nauseous. What time is it anyway?
"Probably not," Shikamaru admits. "But dinner, yeah."
One of Shino's black eyebrows creeps up over the edge of his glasses. A wordless reprimand at his lack of standards.
Rolling it off his shoulders with a shrug, Shikamaru refuses to accept judgement over that, of all things. "Besides," he says, "if I went, none of you would let me be until dinner."
"Undoubtably," Shino says, dry as a desert or the beach when the tide is out. "I wish to express that your course of action seems impudent at best and self-destructive at worst. But while this desire of yours belies understanding on my part…for the moment, I allow that it is your choice to make."
But Shino is, quite clearly, judging the shit out of him.
That's big of you, Shikamaru doesn't say. The sarcasm isn't inaccurate, but Shino has always been condescending and arguing it is not worth it. "I'll be fine," he says, with an expanse of airy insouciance instead, knowing it will irritate Shino. "I'll see you later."
A beat.
"Probably."
Given how long this day has been, Shikamaru is almost genuine in highlighting the chance that something might go terribly, nightmarishly wrong before they make to the dinner table once more, all of them assembled. Almost, but not quite.
Even here, no safe haven this, though the word 'home' is embedded deep into their souls. Father succeeded there, in his manipulations, for nowhere else can suit them, no one else can understand them. He has six years, over two thousand days, as proof of that. How could anything work when everything they start with is a lie?
"Where are you from?" My mom was murdered, and my dad left me with a mad scientist. It went about as poorly as you can imagine. "What's your family like?" It starts with the aforementioned murder and gets more complicated and fraught with disaster from there. Trauma bonds everywhere you look. My best friend and brother is dead and haunting me and I take comfort from it. "Tell me about yourself." Where to begin? My shadow feeds on blood? Yeah… how about no.
And those are just small talk. Things people ask without ever thinking about. The foundations from whence commonality are supposed to spring, new blades of grass in the Spring, a bud of potentiality.
His mind shudders away from even daring to think of these conversations, held with what his memories hold up as shades of 'normal people'. He can't do it. The headache isn't worth it, even if it stays only at that. He's no master of pageantry and has never grown capable of hiding the constellation of ashen disasters he is.
(Would they all have come back if they'd found different homes, ports from the storms wrought within them?)
Are any of them better than they'd been six years ago?
Shikamaru looks at the still, white-clad form of one of his brothers and doesn't know. Isn't sure if he wants to know either. If he did, if Shino were, what wishes would Shikamaru wind up with looped around his soul like an ugly, tainted halo?
"Sasuke's in the graveyard," Shino says. "Do at least attempt to make it to meals."
"No promises," Shikamaru says. "But I'll see what I can do."
Tomorrow. He'll work on that tomorrow. Besides, he'll be at dinner of a certainty. Elsewise, Sakura and Naruto both will likely hunt him down and that's a combination that will only end poorly for him.
("Oh, really?" Sakura asks archly.
Naruto laughs. "Oh no! Watch out!"
Even in imagination, it's more trouble than it's worth to be their punching bag.)
For now, he slips past Shino, hardly more than a shadow himself, the dark inversion to Shino's relentless white (what does it bring him, to dress so?) and heads for the graveyard. Down the stairs, through the main hallway (ignoring the ghosts of themselves who sit and cry there, never leaving, never moving, he can never completely rid himself of that, the first day), and out through a side door on the right.
Outside, he takes a moment to just be. Loathing and love and all the brittle promises he's made. Bones hollow, smashed and scattered, of dripping, molten mosaics of who he'd like to be.
The house, though that's a ridiculously nondescript word for something so large, so dark, so encompassing, looms up behind him. A spectacular spectre of red-brick covered in ivy, dark wood columns reaching up towards the sky in supplication and deliverance. He wonders if the walls themselves scream for what they have seen and, with a shake of his head, is glad he doesn't know.
The footpath to the graveyard is choked and throttled with life green in flagrant defiance of the dead around it. Jealousy comes in the colour of jade, and leaves burning with that colour scratch at his arms and legs as he walks down this living hallway, this scathing, ruinous insistence that life will and does triumph over death.
What a joke, he thinks, hands shoved deep into his pockets, fingers searching for a ring box he's given away. No longer his worry stone, his fidget spinner. Even the plants should know that death may not always come swiftly, or surely, but that it eventually will take… all of this and turn it to dust.
If the trees screaming towards the golden disc of the sun, blades sharp as razors, acknowledge that, it is only to shriek insolently that they know better. Foolishness.
But we're all fools here, he realizes, for isn't exactly what they are doing as well? Their rebellion, their rages, free form and falling. Misshapen puzzle pieces refusing to settle into place. Stubbornly ill-maintained, luminous in their defiance.
Only, they're not screaming for their lives but for the lives of everyone else in the world. Prioritizing Ino's life above all else doesn't change the redlined underpinnings that this started because, once upon a time, they had wanted to keep billions of strangers, their normal lives unknown, breathing and living those lives they cannot lead.
Father made sure of that.
The half-hearted path ends at a stone wall, black and pitted with time, yawning above him by several feet. There is no door, no entrance or exit, no gate into the abyssal darkness of eternal rest.
It's no problem. It hasn't been, not since they were eight and beginning to feel the first changes implemented in their tiny, fledging bodies. The ability to run farther, leap higher, to be able to land without injury, joints absorbing more than a human's could.
He remembers them daring each other, sidelong glances and giggles, friendly shoved and punches, to give it a go. Go on, try. Extra dessert to whomever makes it over the top first! Craning his neck back, he snorts softly. He doesn't recall who made it first (though that lack of memory suggests it wasn't him) but eventually they all had.
He flows up the side of the wall, swinging his legs over the wide, ivy overrun breadth of it and sits there, a moment, a king surveying his kingdom of corpses. His collection of macabre dominoes. Nonsense, though he's sat and thought this before, an odd bit of comfort, playing pretend that he controls something, anything instead of reaching for slippery things that never stay in his grasp.
Most of the graves are old. Older than even Father, whose age none of them know, just that his is a name that echoes down through history on repeat, every disappearance a herald of re-emergence.
Whether or not this land, these lost, buried souls, and the house behind him have followed Father through the strands of time is a mystery they've never solved.
He doubts they ever will. It doesn't seem to matter.
Though sometimes he wonders if these graves, most of them nameless, are past attempts. If they are the only generation, so to speak, to survive. Are they paving the way for the next gen to come on through?
Father loves them. He knows that.
Even still...
Shikamaru shoves himself off the wall, landing in the empty space between two tombstones, half-crumbled and nondescript. Some thoughts shouldn't be dwelled on, no use consecrating the ground an unholy union was wedded upon. Better to ignore it.
He settles for weaving through the uneven rows, searching for Sasuke though he knows he doesn't need to look. His feet know the way. The mausoleum, he ignores.
It makes his shadow shiver. He's never gone near it, though Naruto and Chouji and Kiba had explored it, finding little but more tombs, forgotten remnants of people long departed. Shino had stayed with him, during those times, his voice a murmur of caution, in case the roof should fall in.
Sasuke had spoken of curses, refusing to set foot inside, though he'd explored the outside of it happily enough. Of course, that had been before there had been anyone in this cemetery who they mourned.
Not all of the tombstones were left unmarred and nameless.
Grass reaching to his knees, thin and biting, snapping with each step gives him away as he spots Sasuke, precisely where he'd though he would, the moment Shino had mentioned the graveyard.
He doesn't come near enough to read the letters buried deep into the stone. It's not his place.
But he knows they read: UCHIHA ITACHI
He knows, too, that it's a complicated situation. Shikamaru generally tries to stay out of it though the worst of it, yeah, they all remember that. Like a slap across the face for a "Good morning!" said in the wrong tone of voice.
Sasuke has turned to look at him. In the damp stillness that comes from being surrounded by, smothered by, gloom he looks like one of the corpses.
"What is it?" he asks. His voice is soft, but it carries here and now, where it is alive. Then his eyes narrow, sharpen. "The stairs."
Shikamaru's own nod is choppy. He's painfully reminded of the saying that three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
But is he one of the living or the dead, just unburied? Where will he fall, if he speaks of this? He has no innocence to speak of.
It's always so much easier to be superstitious in a graveyard and he's prone to odd wonderings and low, near subliminal whispers of despair. Superstitious is his normal state of being. Sometimes, he's better at ignoring it. His travels today have brought it all home.
"The stairs," Shikamaru says, around the weight of the ball and chain tangled around his soul, the irredeemable worry that by speaking of it, everything will be ruined. He starts there because it's as good a place as any. "Naruto is drawing the seal and Ino's attachment to it. Shino has agreed to utilize his skill at photography for the same. Sakura has agreed that all of us, starting tomorrow, will be undergoing physical and psychological testing, much the way we did when Father ran them."
Sasuke's eyebrows are the most expressive part of him, as they raise several millimeters and he says, "And you're letting Sakura gauge your psychological state?"
"Kiba will do mine," Shikamaru says dismissively. He hasn't asked Kiba, the idea had slipped his mind, but he doubts that Kiba would refuse to do this. Kiba might even be glad to, take it as a sign that Shikamaru wants to look after himself better. What a joke. "Sakura seemed confident that she could handle the purely physical parts of the tests. Kiba or Hinata will be running hers."
He doesn't know which. He'll find out at dinner. It's a small detail but it might matter, given…
"Ino's looking to see if she can figure out exactly how narrow the deadline we're up against is. Two to three weeks is her estimation for now, but that could change," he continues, knowing that he is rambling, but also reveling in the ability to say that Ino is doing anything. It's nothing like normal but it… it makes him feel a certain kind of way. Malfeasances forgiven, guilty transferred elsewhere. Her hips tangled in his linen sheets as she laughs.
"You talked to Ino?" Sasuke says slowly.
"Yes," Shikamaru says. That one word holds nothing, nothing of the joy he feels, effervescent and soft, champagne held up to the light. "And yes, I'm aware that Sakura has difficulties getting answers from her."
Unspoken, is the fact that he doesn't. Tempting though it is to rub it in Sakura's face (and oh, it is tempting, after years of recriminations) he won't sully and slander the first rays of hope that he's been given. Ino can talk to him. He'll move every mountain he needs to, in order to save her. He will.
Sasuke just nods. "And all of that," he says carefully, "is tied to what tripped you up on the stairs?"
Shikamaru stares past Sasuke, not really seeing him, the wheels of his thoughts turning, churning, the conclusion he'd come to ugly and inescapable. He shakes his head, grimly dismissing despair, a temporary reprieve, and looks straight at Sasuke.
"Our calculations weren't wrong," he says. Behind him, his shadow has fanned out, weaving and unweaving itself wings sprawled across the grass and tombstones, dipping into the cracks and crevices. He can't see them but the scent of lilies fills his mind. A hundred million butterflies battering themselves against the glass walls of this tremulous bit of daring. His house of cards could all come tumbling down but he—
They hadn't been wrong.
He draws a breath in. Inhale. Exhale. Pedals on his body's bike and he's pushing them. He's pushing them. He can't be flagging now.
(Don't let him careen off the road, no matter how much he wants to.)
"Our calculations were right," he repeats. That's the easy part. The part that he's willing to be the surest of. It could be wrong but that doesn't make sense. Not between the glittering, bright brilliances of their minds combined. They had combed those calculations for faults for weeks until nothing had been left unironed, unstarched, old laundry washed and patched and like-new by the time they'd been done with it. "But between our final review and implementation of them, they were tampered with."
The core of him feels brittle, ice cold. So frozen that to warm him too quickly will be the end of him.
"Father," he chokes out.
For a moment, the world feels like it stops. The tilt of it turned to tumbling down because that's the thing, that's why it's so hard to look at that:
Father loves them.
Shikamaru knows this. It's etched in every sediment of his being, the very fiber of his existence, his precise creation. Father changed them for his own purposes, of course he did, but the love had been there. It would have been easier, if it hadn't been.
But Chouji dying and Ino's condition (worse than death, part of him still murmurs restlessly) and every burden each of them has faced, had forced on, even with that, he still believes that Father loves them and that's… he's always wanted what's best for them, within his own vision. The question goes begging, answerless, for what this gave Chouji, gave Ino, gave all of them in these last six years.
What goal did Father have?
"How certain of that are you?" Sasuke asks and his voice is empty, echoing. No emotion left unstripped from it.
Shikamaru can see the red, though, flitting like an echo in the back of Sasuke's eyes. Sasuke is angry.
"I'll be more certain, once we've reviewed what remains of our work," Shikamaru says, climbing back onto somewhat solid ground. Where the facts matter more than the emotions. He's grateful for the reprieve. "But... I'm willing to stand by it. We did it right. It should have worked."
"And it didn't."
Shikamaru forces his shoulders to relax. They're so tense that his fingers tingle with transferred pain. Even through the analgesic that Kiba dosed him with.
"It didn't," he agrees. "It went sideways almost immediately, the exact moment we were too far in to back out. And none of us had every bit of our work memorized. We couldn't. It was too complex."
That had been why they'd relied on each other to catch another's flaws. Why they'd been so meticulous in their calculations.
"So, any changes that would have been made…," Sasuke trails off, a snake slipping through long grass as his eyes blink red then black with each shift of the eyelids.
It's disconcerting but familiar. Old hat, really, from back when they'd been teenagers.
"A number here, a line shifted there," Shikamaru says. "It wouldn't have been hard to mess everything up. Not really."
Sasuke glances back and down, at his brother's grave. "Father's always been at least three steps ahead," he says slowly. "That he could take our work and change it to suit his needs doesn't belay belief but…"
And he stops.
Stares at Shikamaru.
Shikamaru shoves his hands further, deeper into his pockets and is thoroughly glad that—that he's brought this up here, where privacy may not be assured but is much more likely than anywhere in the house. Because.
"Yeah," Shikamaru says, the words like sandpaper in his mouth. He forces them out anyway since if he doesn't say it here, he never will, and that will just lead to worse things happening, he has no doubt of that.
"If Father did this, then he had the help of one of us."