Make that three pieces.

When Neji returned to his room, Shikamaru was again sitting comfortably in the center of the floor, as he had earlier that day when he first asked Neji to play a game with him, but this time, a chessboard was spread out in front of him.

"I'll offer again: would you care to play a game with me?"

This time, something was different about Neji, and something in his eyes told Shikamaru that he was actually considering the offer. It must have been Sasuke; the boy had picked up in his tactics during their game, Shikamaru could tell, and had probably warned Neji of what was to come. Either way, it didn't matter to Shikamaru; it actually made the game easier for him.

"Alright," Neji finally agreed, moving forward to stand in front of the chessboard and look down on the heavy lidded ghost, who ignored the leap in his throat. He couldn't get ahead of himself; getting Neji to play was the game before the game, and he hadn't won until the first move had been made.

"Excellent. Your move." Acting bored even though he was anything but, Shikamaru gestured to the chessboard, showing Neji that, indeed, the white piece were arrayed in front of the open spot.

"White? You chose to play with black?"

Shikamaru shrugged, moving his shoulders as little as possible. "I like black. It makes me feel like a tactician." And it makes it easier to manipulate people like you.

"You? The lazy genius?" Neji scoffed at the idea. "You'd never make it in a real fight."

"That's what you think." Shikamaru yawned delicately, shooting the well put together youth a look under his heavy lidded gaze. "A tactician doesn't have to move his body to fight; he only needs his mind."

"That's lazy."

"I am lazy." Shikamaru shrugged. "Are you going to play, or not?"

Neji regarded him with an indecipherable expression for a moment, then sat down on the other side of the chessboard. A feeling of triumph at the winning of his pre-game rushed through Shikamaru, though he didn't show it. Chess was his element; as soon as someone sat down opposite him, they had as good as lost. It was gaining that loss that was the fun part.

With a sharp click, Neji selected a pawn and moved it forward two spaces. A nod, unseen by the uptight boy, was given in approval by Shikamaru. It was a good move - bold, but not too aggressive - but not quite good enough.

Moving his own pawn with his mind, Shikamaru placed it directly in front and one over from Neji's pawn, in an obvious place to be captured. Neji's eyes immediately narrowed, and Shikamaru could practically see the gears in his head moving as he considered the implications of the move. Staring back with his face completely blank, Shikamaru gave nothing away, even as a smirk threatened to break through. It was so much fun to mess with people who were fixated on their own intelligence.

With a hard expression, Neji picked up his piece and captured Shikamaru's pawn. And just like that, the game was already won.

"Take off your tie," Shikamaru instructed in a bored tone.

"What?" Anger creased the skin between Neji's eyebrows, and he crossed his arms over his chest. "Why?"

"It's the rules."

"Rules?" Confusion took over the anger in Neji's face. "What game are you playing?"

"Chess."

"I can see that," Neji snapped. "What kind of chess?"

Shikamaru struggled to keep his facial expression innocent as he responded. "Strip chess."

"Strip chess?" Neji's jaw dropped. "What kind of chess game is that?"

"Haven't you ever played strip poker?"

"Of course not!" A red flush started to creep across Neji's cheeks.

This time, the smirk did slightly break out across Shikamaru's face. Clearly, this was making Neji uncomfortable, and the deepest and most interesting parts of one's psyche were bared at such a time. "But you have heard of it?"

The flush of Neji's cheeks deepened. "O- of course I have!" Neji stuttered. "I- I'm not completely cut off from society, you know!"

"No, not completely," Shikamaru agreed halfheartedly. "Well, strip chess is much like strip poker, except you're playing chess and not poker. Every time you capture a piece, you have to take off an article of clothing, but your opponent specifies which one."

A slightly shell shocked expression took over Neji's face. "You're joking. There's no way that's a real thing!"

"Of course it's not. I made it up."

"Wha-!" Neji spluttered indignantly. "I don't have to sit through this! Finish your game yourself!" Standing up, he marched angrily to the door and tried to open it, but Shikamaru held out a hand and kept the door firmly closed.

"Don't leave," he said, allowing a trace of cold malice to infiltrate his tone. "You cannot leave while the game is unfinished."

Twirling around angrily to confront Shikamaru, Neji yelled, "I don't want to play your twisted game! Let me out!"

Standing up himself, Shikamaru allowed a menacing aura to radiate from his body. "The game is yet unfinished. Once a game has been started, it must be completed; those are the rules." Neji made to speak, but Shikamaru cut him off. "And you always follow the rules. Don't you?"

A scowl crossed Neji's face, signaling that Shikamaru had said the right thing. He was good at pushing people's buttons, and Neji was one of the smartest people he had the pleasure of button pushing. The thrill of it left him almost breathless.

The internal struggle was evident of Neji's face and morals fought against one another, honor against propriety. An invisible smirk of triumph crept across Shikamaru's mind as honor won out over propriety and Neji returned to his seat and, scowling, removed his tie and cast it away. It land suggestively on the bed, draping across the pillow. Shikamaru followed its path with his eyes until it lay at rest, then his gaze flickered back to Neji, watching him self consciously tuck his collar back down to where it was supposed to be.

"That's not going to be worth much," he observed lazily.

"Why not?" Neji asked hotly, trying to mask his insecurity with self-righteousness.

This time, Shikamaru allowed his smirk to show on his face. "Because that's the next thing to go."

Neji's jaw dropped, but he recovered by ignoring the jibe and presenting his nose to the air. "It's your move."

"That it is," Shikamaru murmured, flicking a single finger to telepathically move a piece. "And now it's not."

"Hmph." Snorting angrily, Neji moved another pawn forward, setting it down with a sharp click. They went back and forth for a little while, neither wanting to make another major move, but Shikamaru was simply biding his time.

When the board was set to Shikamaru's liking and he was sure that he had a handle on Neji's playing strategy, he leaned back with a smile and telepathically moved a knight forward to capture Neji's bishop. Placing his hands behind his head, Shikamaru watched his opponent's reaction through lidded eyes. "Your call, Hyuuga. What am I taking off?"

Neji's face immediately froze in horror as he realized the implications of the game, obviously never having considered that Shikamaru would have to strip as well. Stripping himself would be an extreme difficulty, but instructing someone else to strip would nearly cause Neji's head to implode, which was why Shikamaru had specifically designed the rules that way.

After he had gotten over his brief fit of horrified fancy, Neji managed to croak, "Sock."

"Sock?" Shukimarushiki raised an eyebrow haughtily. "You could choose any article of clothing on my body, and you choose my sock?"

"Well, I… I…" Neji spluttered indignantly. "Just take it off!"

A seductive smirk made its appearance of Shikamaru's lips. "Of course. Anything you say."

Neji appeared to not like what he was insinuating, but let it pass in favor of letting go of the argument, instead watching silently as Shikamaru removed his sock and dropped it. The offending scrap of cloth disappeared into nothingness as soon it left the ghost's hand, and Neji jumped slightly at its sudden disappearance, but soon recovered and slid his other bishop diagonally a few spaces.

By now, Shikamaru had learned enough of Neji's strategy to know that this was a move without purpose, one absentmindedly taken to fill up a turn. A small frown tugged at his lips at that realization; if that was how the Hyuuga was going to play, it wasn't going to be much fun. To raise the stakes a little, Shikamaru used the same knight as before to capture Neji's rook.

Neji's face almost went a delicate shade of puce at this, but he kept his temper in check and cleared his throat before managing, "Your other sock."

"Really?" Shikamaru arched a delicate eyebrow. "Well, if you insist…" And the second sock was gone as fast as the first.

Neji made another absentminded move, and suddenly another realization hit Shikamaru: Neji was purposefully playing badly to end the game without him taking off most his clothes! That wouldn't do, but it was easily rectified.

Before taking his next turn, Shikamaru announced, "Oh, I forgot to mention this earlier. If you lose, you have to strip down to your underwear."

At this, Neji's face bypassed puce and turned a deep shade of magenta. "What?!" He spluttered. "How could you forget such an important rule?"

Shikamaru brushed it off with a shrug. "I'm lazy." Before Neji could answer, he slid a piece forward with his mind. "Oh, and check."

Horror overtook Neji's face as he beheld the setup on the board. The only way to avoid losing was to capture the piece threatening his King, and to do that, he would have to lose another piece of clothing, but it was still better than having to strip entirely. Would he do it? Shikamaru held his breath in anticipation.

Slowly, Neji reached for his King and rested a finger atop it, and Shikamaru though he was going to fold, to give up and strip in order to get it over faster. But then he moved his finger to the knight next to his King, and moved it forward, capturing the opposing piece.

Shikamaru grinned inside. He always liked it when people played into his hands. "Shirt."

Muttering something under his breath that might have been a curse, Neji stood and untucked his shirt, practiced fingers moving along the line of buttons to reveal creamy skin. A grunt and a heave, and the shirt flew over to crumple on the floor, and Shikamaru had to remind himself not to get distracted by the chest now on display.

With a smug expression of triumph on his face, Neji sat back down, looking as if he thought he had won some small part of the battle. "Your move."

You haven't seen anything yet.

But Shikamaru didn't say anything out loud, instead moving his queen up to capture Neji's knight. "Check."

This time, Neji moved his King out of check before Shikamaru had a chance to ask him what he was to take off. Raising an eyebrow, he asked in a dead tone, "Strip chess?"

Neji jumped self consciously, then wordlessly pointed at Shikamaru's shirt, unable to bring himself to say it aloud. Without even bothering to move his arms this time, Shikamaru willed his shirt to be gone, and he, too, was left shirtless.

He moved another piece forward, but didn't take anything this time. "Check."

Panic was starting to show on Neji's face as he realized that he was absolutely outclassed, at least on the chessboard. Hastily, he shoved a sacrificial piece in the way, not even comprehending that it was his queen, which Shikamaru took without hesitation. "Check."

The look on Neji's face was getting more panicked as he realized that Shikamaru was running out of clothes. To give him a momentary reprieve, Shikamaru remarked wearily, "I'm wearing a belt."

A look of relief drifted across Neji's face. "Take off that, then."

Well, well. So he could actually say it without stuttering now. Interesting. Shikamaru didn't let his gloating smirk show, though, instead taking off his belt with telekinesis and dismissing it. In truth, he had conjured it up after the game had started, having planned this out to the move and figured he would need another piece of clothing to take off.

Neji took another turn, a better move now that he was thinking more clearly. However, in his case it was too little, too late, and Shikamaru moved another piece forward. "Checkmate."

The move had blindsided Neji, that much was certain. He stood up, a shocked expression on his face, but Shikamaru glared at him.

"And what do you think you're doing?"

"I… lost…" Neji managed, his eyes glazing over.

"Not yet, you haven't." Shikamaru gestured to the chessboard. "The game is not won until the king is captured. Kindly return and take your move."

Still looking rather glazed, Neji sat down and moved a single piece forward in an empty move that held no strategy, and Shikamaru quickly captured his King, ending the game. Neji stood up again and pulled off his socks, not even having to be told to strip as his penalty. However, when he got to the button on his dress pants, he slowed down, and froze when Shikamaru stood as well and began to unbutton his own pants.

"What are you doing!?"

Shikamaru was careful to keep his expression blank as he answered. "I made a capture, therefore I have to take something off. This is all I have left, so you didn't need to chose it for me."

Then he pushed his pants down around his ankles and stepped out of them, leaving them to melt away against the floorboard. Neji watched in almost horrified fascination, hands still frozen at the waist of his own pants, when Shikamaru gave him a challenging glare. His face heating up in an even heavier blush than the one that had been previously on his face, he accepted the challenge without even thinking about it, tearing off his pants before he had realized what he had done.

When his brain caught up to his hands, Neji stared in horror at the fabric laying on the floor, then looked up at Shikamaru. Their gazes locked, one cocky, one nervous, and Neji started to tremble as he averted his eyes and his sight was captured by something much more interesting: Shikamaru's body. The lazy genius could practically feel the heat of the other boy's gaze as it raked over him, and he allowed the corner of his mouth to curl up in a smirk.

"Like what you see?"

Neji's eyes widened in horror as he realized that he had been staring, and he immediately spun around, severing eye contact with Shikamaru, and pressed his hands over his eyes, panting heavily. Shikamaru cocked head to the side, considering his options. He didn't often become corporeal, but this may be a special cause.

Stepping lightly on the air, Shikamaru walked over the chessboard and stopped just behind Neji. With a palm soft from years of doing nothing except playing chess, he reached out and laid his hand on the small of Neji's back. The boy stiffened at the contact, something that gave Shikamaru enough insight into his mind that he understood a couple of things about the strange stoic boy.

"You're not used to physical contact, are you?" He surmised gently, and Neji's hunching silence told him he was right. "You don't know what you're missing," he almost purred, laying his second hand against Neji's back, tracing both of them up to lay on his shoulders. "But that's alright. We'll just have to show you how it feels…"

Neji's breathing increased in tempo as Shikamaru trailed his hands up his arms until they reached his hands, when he took them in his grasp.

"Like holding hands," Shikamaru whispered. When no rejection came, he pressed his bare chest directly up against Neji's back, eliciting a gasp from the boy. "Or more…" He whispered directly into Neji's ear, enjoying the harsh, ragged breaths he was drawing from the other boy.

"What… What are you doing?" Neji asked raggedly, dropping his hands from his eyes and trying to dislodge Shikamaru's soft grasp, but the ghost refused to let go. "Let go of me!" But the order lacked heart.

"Is that what you really want…?" Shikamaru murmured, turning his head slightly to trail his nose along Neji's pale cheek. "You're trembling, Neji."

Suddenly, Neji lost all of his will to fight and slumped slightly, letting his head loll to the side and presenting his pale neck to Shikamaru's calculating gaze. "That's the first time you called me by my name, Shikamaru…"

"I do believe it is." The murmur was pressed directly against Neji's pulse, the lips brushing the light barrier. "And the first time you called me by mine."

"So, I guess we're even, then," Neji managed between hash gasps as he breath rose in tempo again.

Even. One of the only things Shikamaru hated, because it meant he hadn't won.

"If you want to be." The drawl was louder than before, and Shikamaru saw Neji flinch at the sudden harshness. That flinch brought him back to his senses; without even realizing it, he had become drunk on the feel of Neji's body in his arms, the scent of Neji's musk mixing with his own, the-

No! This had to stop. Shikamaru was the puppet master, the one who worked from the shadows. He had no business taking a role in the show himself, and he had no business holding the strange pale boy in his arms now. Abruptly, Shikamaru released Neji, stepping back for the sole purpose of clearing his mind with distance, and conjured up the clothes he had been wearing earlier. Bereft of his crutch, Neji staggered for a moment, then turned sharply to glare at Shikamaru.

Glad of the distraction the glare provided, Shikamaru cocked an eyebrow at Neji and crossed his arms. "What are you looking at?"

"What was that for?" Neji sounded incredulous rather than inflamed, too surprised and off-kilter for the anger to have much bite.

"You asked me to let you go," Shikamaru reminded him with a tone that spoke of superiority. "I was only doing what you asked."

"You… You…"

Shikamaru supposed that he could be proud of the fact that he had made Neji Hyuuga speechless, but it was a hollow victory. During the game, he had learned something about himself as well as the insight he had gained about Neji, and Shikamaru didn't like to learn things about himself. It always made things more complicated.

With a flick of his finger, Shikamaru swiftly folded up the chessboard and placed it in a nearby case, the pieces floating in peacefully on top of it. "The game is over," he said pointedly. "You no longer have to serve your penalty, so please, reclothe yourself."

And with that one sentence, Neji's face went purple. With movements jerky from anger, he snatched his pants from the floor and pulled them on, glaring at Shikamaru all the while.

Shikamaru flicked his finger again, and the box levitated behind him. At the same time, the door opened slowly, creaking slightly, and Shikamaru started towards it. "It's been fun," he commented before turning towards it. "We should do it again sometime."

And then he left, floated right out the door and closed it telepathically behind him, leaving Neji staring, wordless, after him. With a sigh, he leaned against the wall of the hallway outside Neji's room, allowing his still corporeal head to bump against the hard obstacle and his box of chess pieces to settle to the floor.

Damn. Shikamaru hated learning things about himself, especially if those things destroyed his air of mystery. He thrived on mystery; if he couldn't be mysterious, even to himself, then what point did his not-life hold? An inherently lazy person, Shikamaru had pretended to give the question thought, but had never found a game to go along with answering it, so without that motivation, he had never really gotten around to figuring it out. Now, though, the answer was staring him in the face.

If he couldn't have mystery, then perhaps he could have Neji. Finally, he had found something that he was perhaps willing to forgo his life in the shadows for. Releasing a shaky breath, Shikamaru admitted to himself that he was attracted to the dark aura of the boy, to his secrets begging to be plundered and spread out for Shikamaru's viewing pleasure. He wanted to tear Neji apart, to pull him into the smallest fibers of his being and examine them, then put them all back together again to create the creature of perfection before him, just to prove that he knew everything there was to know about Neji.

Passing a hand over his eyes, Shikamaru pushed himself away from the wall and floated down the hall, dimly remembering to levitate his box of chess pieces after him.

Damn. This was troublesome.

Neji hadn't bothered to put on a shirt after Shikamaru had left. Instead, he stared at the closed door, half wishing that it would open again to reveal Shikamaru, who would ask him to play another game, or shrug off his shirt and press their chests together again, or even just hold his hand. Or, perhaps, ask to do more than just hold hands, as he had seemed to promise in that voice that sounded more seductive than that of a incubus, and more sinful than a box of Lindt chocolate…

But that wouldn't do. The physical contact, something Neji was unused to unless it came from immediate family, had just unnerved him, that was all, and it was causing him some inner turmoil. He was still the same calm, collected Hyuuga he was expected to be. And yet…

Casting one last long look at the door, which remained firmly and disappointedly closed, Neji crawled on top of his covers, not daring to go beneath them lest he disturb the tie that he had cast so uncaringly against the pillow not long ago. Closing his eyes, Neji tried not to think about the phantom and his strange game of chess. If it was a test, as Sasuke had said it would be, he had no idea whether he had passed or failed.

Almost unconsciously, he reached up and trailed a finger his cheek where Shikamaru's breath had fanned and his nose had traced delicate patterns on the skin, tricking himself into thinking that it really was the phantom when his dreams took over reality.