So Dayeongi and I thought it would be fun to play at writing challenges. We picked angst fics. Two hours later, I'm crying, and this monstrosity is out in the world.

Genre was angst
Prompt was "You can't get bitter now, this was your decision"
This is unedited (aside from correcting a few typos)

Temari sat on Shikadai's bed. His room was just how he had left it: the bed unmade, his dirty laundry on the floor, a half-finished game of shogi on his desk. He'd been dead for almost a year and she hadn't been able to bring herself to change anything. She clutched one of his stuffed toys to her chest.

When Shikamaru came home late to a dark, silent house, he knew to find her there. She was always in Shikadai's room. He had been working longer and longer hours, avoiding the house more and more.

"We should clean," he said, leaning against the doorframe of their dead son's room. It wasn't the first time they had had this conversation. "Or redecorate. Or move."

"I can't." Her answer was always the same.

"We could get people in to do it."

"I said no, Shikamaru." She used her tone that meant this was the end of the discussion.

In the silence that followed, she caught him staring at the shogi table.

"Don't," she warned him, reading his mind. "It's not your turn."

It would be Shikadai's turn forever.

"Well... what if there was someone else who could finish it for him?"

She eyed him suspiciously but said nothing.

So he continued. "What if we tried to build a family again?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Temari turned away from her husband, squeezing tighter at the stuffy and staring out of the window into the darkness of the evening. She hated it when he smelled of alcohol when he got home. She didn't begrudge him for it; her anger came from resenting the fact that she hadn't thought of it first. He had somewhere to escape to while she had been caged in this room since he died.

"I think you do." He waited for her retort but none came. "Temari, there's Misoprostol in your purse."

Her head shot round for her to face him again. "What on earth gives you the right to go through my bag, Shikamaru?"

"You think I don't know what that's for?" He interrogated her, avoiding her question. "We run the pharmaceutical lab, Temari, I know damned well it's an abortion pill."

They had barely touched each other since he had left them. Neither had trusted the other, trusted themselves. Neither felt as though it was deserved. So absolute was their sudden abstinence that Temari had stopped taking any birth control. So when it did finally happen – angry and unsatisfying – they hadn't been careful. But that didn't answer the question in Shikamaru's heart.

"Have you been…" He wanted to ask if she'd been unfaithful. If she'd been seeking comfort from someone else since she could no longer bare his company. "...elsewhere?"

She looked at him horrified at his accusation. "Of course not, Shikamaru. You're my husband, how can you even ask me something like that?"

His composure wavered. He fell onto the bed beside her and held her shoulders, only just able to stop himself from physically shaking answers out of her. "Then why wouldn't you tell me? Why wouldn't you want it?" His eyes prickled, his throat tight. "Is this why you wanted to go back to Suna this weekend? To take it without me finding out?"

"I can't have another baby, Shikamaru." She thought about how it would feel like a betrayal to his memory. At one time, she might have thought about giving him a little brother or sister. Now, it would be replacing him. And that wasn't an option.

"I don't want this baby," she told him slowly, placing Shikadai's stuffy down to lift her husband's hands from her shoulders and hold them in her lap. "Because I don't want this marriage."

His gaze didn't waver from hers but the pain seemed to dissolve from his eyes and the darkness left behind in its stead was frightening.

But Temari was brave. She continued the honesty that should have come to light months ago.

"I want to go home, Shikamaru."

He snatched his hands away from her and stood from the bed. "You made a commitment."

"In different times! You think this is the life I wanted?" She stood up next to him, squaring up to him as he began to pace the room, his hands in his hair.

"I never forced you to move to Konoha for me!" He stopped pacing to look her in the eye, close enough that she could smell the alcohol on his breath. He jabbed a finger accusingly into her chest. "You can't get bitter about it now; this was your decision."

"Yes, and every day I decide not to walk away but it's getting harder and harder to convince myself there is anything worth staying for."

He gestured around them; to their dead son's room, to their marital home, to the life they had built around each other. "None of this means anything to you?"

"None of this-" she screamed, and threw the shogi board on the floor, scattering the pieces around their feet. "-means anything any more!"

She was crying now, her vision blurred. She threw her dead son's stuffed toy to the ground and stomped on it, kicking at his clothes, tearing down his posters.

Shikamaru's face was stone. Expressionless, he left the room and headed towards the door of what had once been their home. A lamp followed him, crashing against the wall, shattering the bulb. When he turned around, she was staring at him, rabid.

She picked up another weapon - his alarm clock - but Shikamaru's shadow was around her neck before she could throw it at him. He squeezed and she spluttered, releasing her grip on the clock and dropping it to the ground. He strode back across the room to where his shadow was holding her in the doorway of the shell of Shikadai's room. She couldn't breathe but continued to stare at him, defiant, as he pressed himself against her. Only when his arms were around her body, his lips on hers, did he loosen the shadows around her neck. Their kiss was urgent and violating and full of teeth. What had once been the most soothing and familiar thing in the world now felt like betrayal, the desperation of strangers.

When he stopped holding her, she fell to the cold of the wooden floor and hid her bawling face in her arms. A tiny soul was trying to take shelter in her womb but it would never be safe. She hadn't been able to keep Shikadai safe. She was no mother; they were no family.

Shikamaru could hear her crying as he left the house, closing the door behind him. He didn't look back.