a/n: this chapter was mostly drafted two years ago and was def in reference to other things (mostly me watching the french village) and was not about project 2025 but also kind of is, just as a head's up. ty (always) to appy.
FOUR
He was twelve when the war began.
He was twelve and he remembers all of it.
He remembers the before and the during and the after.
It was going to be a big event. Dignitaries from Sunagakure were visiting. They'd been preparing within the city for weeks. Shopkeepers cleaned their storefronts; they made banners in school; he was forced to practice for the games they would compete in and to rehearse the process. He remembers the ado of it.
He remembers that morning, the way the sun beat down on the earth and how, on his way out, his mother told him it'd be hot and to make sure he drank water. She told him she'd see him later at the games. His father, that morning, was already at work.
School was cancelled. People were in the street.
And there she was. She and her brothers.
She wasn't much older. She was no bigger. And they're placed in the same youth division, matched and played against each other.
It was no deal. It was nothing he cared about.
And she won. She won against him. Beat him. Fairly.
But she was angry. She thought he'd let her. He remembers. She doesn't think she deserves it. She seems so angry. She seems so hard. He doesn't like her at all. And yet, he thinks, trying hard to not think of it at all, he thinks, maybe, he really likes her, in a way he doesn't have words for yet.
He doesn't care though. He doesn't care. He's so young. It's so sunny out. He's so free.
But you never know how precarious a balance is until it tips over.
There is another game going on and he feels it like an itch in his stomach. Something has been off – wrong, awry – all day. He's only heard bad things about these people coming from Suna, but it's supposed to be a chance to stop the strong-armed animosity between the countries, an opportunity to bring true peace to their respective nations.
He's thinking this. He remembers this. He remembers this and he looks over at her and her brothers and just then there is a sound he was too young to understand for what it really was. And then another. And it's only after the second one that he knows. He knows what it is, long before most people understand what is happening.
He knows. And he looks back at her, just to see it now that he understands it. She is smiling. Her teeth, he thinks, a moment before Asuma is grabbing his hand to run, are gleaming.
He remembers it all. He remembered it for years even when he is working every day to try and forget.
Konoha was ill-prepared. Horrifically ill-prepared. They should've known better. His father, he always thought, should've known better.
It's only a matter of months before the country effectively ceases to function and Suna wholly settles themselves in power.
And everything changes. His father, once a great theoretician, has been stripped of his command. The Resistance takes up. Violence escalates. Asuma, within the third year, is killed, his role in the Resistance so unknown, even Shikamaru is surprised. And he fights and he furies, but there is nothing he can do and nothing he sees that can be done with the way things are. The rules change, in ways that seem slow, but are really just built to human adaptability. It is hard to quantify how quickly people become accustomed to something — and once they're used to a new normal, it is easy to consistently shift it further and further away from what used to be customary. It's so easy, once something is enacted into law, to justify horror by means of legality. And suddenly, it's been years. Suddenly, Konoha is under the rule of another country, and everyone seems to have gotten used to it.
Soon, even the violence stops.
After Asuma, it's quelled, mostly.
You collaborate, because if you don't, you lose everything. And that's really all there is to it.
And normalcy takes hold. Adaptation. School has long-resumed and is taught under the guidance of a Sunagakure education. Even his father, a military man, goes back to work within a matter of months, though he holds no real power. And he doesn't step out of line (out of their line, out of the line Suna has drawn and exacted) — not once.
He's weak, Shikamaru thinks, watching his father. They're all weak, really.
But he's just like them: Shikamaru too does nothing. He, himself, is weak. Always has been. Suna is such an overpowering force, it seems pointless to fight it.
So he waits. And he goes to school. And he goes home. And he does what he always does.
He's adaptable, but he's embarrassed by the way everyone around him seems to simply accept it. To just take it. To give up, even though he knows, even as he is humiliated by it, that he has done the same thing. It's easy though (too easy, he finds), to defend complacency; to justify inaction.
Every now and then, someone will get caught planting a bomb or carrying out some execution of a minor bureaucrat.
Pointless.
He thinks this for years, as people settle, as executions become more public, as resistance becomes more futile and less frequent.
He finishes school. He finds a job doing low-level cryptology. It's minor. He's mostly a line-reader.
And the world goes on. Summer still comes after Spring. There is still sunlight and green grass and big clouds: acclimation; routine. And then the royal family — he's seen her his whole life. He's always hated looking at her. He doesn't think about any of it.
He thinks about so little of it.
He just watches and waits for something even he doesn't quite understand.
So he's sixteen and it's summer and Asuma has been dead over a year and they're skinny dipping in the lake and he watches as Ino pulls her shirt over her head. Her back, usually hidden by her clothes, is littered with bruises. Most look old, but there is one, below her armpit, that is still yellowing.
He sees it so briefly — it's no more than a second before she is jumping into the water and she never turns her back to him again — that he thinks he might have imagined it.
But then, the following week, he arrives at the flower shop and, before she sees him, he watches her in the corner holding a bag of ice to her thigh.
She laughs it off when he asks, but it prompts him to follow her anyway. Within a few days, he has pursued her into the woods outside of town where she is meeting Sakura. They're talking, but in his effort to stay undetected, he stays far enough away to miss whatever they're saying. He can see when they start brawling though, falling upon the earth, kicking and punching and grappling among the twigs. Shikamaru moves to intervene — after all, they're not children anymore — but then stops before he's exposed.
He understands. She isn't fighting with Sakura. They're sparring.
He knows why they're there. Suddenly, everything makes much more sense.
Shikamaru doesn't say anything. He can't, and so he doesn't. But he can't stop thinking about it. Now that he has seen her, seen it, he can't let it go.
He doesn't want to be a part of anything — pointless — but he can't stop thinking about it, caring about it.
A few weeks later, he confronts her at the shop.
"You're passing information through here, aren't you?"
Ino doesn't blink. She doesn't deny or question him, like, maybe, she has only been waiting for him to say something. Like, maybe, she knew he was coming.
"No."
"You should." He doesn't want to be a part of it. He doesn't.
"We used to, years ago, but it was too unsafe."
He doesn't want to be a part of anything. "I've been watching the lines. You're safe now. It'd be perfect."
Ino stops him with a hand on his.
"Talk to your parents," she advises, speaking as though she is sage about something he isn't privy to, "talk to them first."
They've heard, before he gets to them.
They're sitting at the table when he arrives, looking at each other in silence.
Shikamaru stops.
His father speaks first.
"It was only a matter of time."
Shikamaru has been thinking about it for hours, replaying an entire history in his head, trying to see something there that he'd never seen the entire time, like trying to put different lighting on an old film reel to see something that might've been hidden in the shadows. Trying to remember eye movements and whispers and changes in tones.
Some things he sees, maybe, but it feels like a stretch, like he's desperate to get a certain result at the consequence of all natural conclusion. A bad scientist skews their experiments when their desire for a proven hypothesis outweighs the actual results.
Which is worse, he thinks. Worse, because they worked so hard to lie to him, worked so hard to keep this from him.
Years. Years.
"This whole time?"
"Of course!" His mother snaps, banging her fist on the table. "You think we'd take it lying down?!"
He's so angry and hurt and furious at the mendacity around him, he can feel it running through his entire body. It's pain — a split second of feeling like he is almost dying — but it is desire too. Excitement. Fury. Purpose. Something, maybe, in a whole world of nothing but falsehoods, like truth. Something true. Something real.
"Why aren't you out there protesting?" He almost shouts. He remembers rain and a final cigarette and the tears that he still wakes up with when the nightmares get too real. "Why weren't you fighting when Asuma died?"
He knows why though.
This whole time. This whole time.
Asuma's last words.
He'd always thought his father was weak. But he's —
"You let me hate you for four years."
"We had no choice," his mother says.
It'd been so long. There was Ino. Sakura. How many others? All of them, maybe.
"That's not true."
His father has stayed silent in the outbursts of anger around them, but he looks over at Shikamaru now, stern.
"It is." His voice is low, but strong, sure in its delivery. "It's the choice we made: not to betray you. To help you."
Help me?! He wants to ask, to press, but he holds his tongue. Because he knows.
Maybe, this too, he's always known. Maybe this is what he's been waiting for.
"You think marching in the street would've helped you? You think having this house branded rebel would've helped you? We did this for you. For our country. Until you realized what choice you wanted to make."
"What do you mean?"
There is a long pause.
They're still at the small table in the kitchen. It's dark outside even though it's only the afternoon. Rain clouds pile up. Only one light is on. He's still standing there. He's still shaking.
He knows its essence. He's always known, hasn't he. His father was always steps ahead of everyone around them.
Disgraced? Ha.
"The best way to take an enemy down is to become one of them. To become corrupted by them…. Your best cover is yourself."
He is a few weeks shy of seventeen when he walks into the military academy and enlists.
It's hours before they actually go into town with her youngest brother. She spends most of the morning greeting people around the palace that have recently arrived.
When they walk through town, there are more guards than he has seen. Apart from those following them, some have been stationed throughout town in advance of their arrival.
She doesn't speak much with Gaara, but she smiles at what he says.
She doesn't look at Shikamaru once.
He manages to fall asleep, but it's fitful. He writhes and wakes up sweating, her name on his lips.
It's fear.
Fear.
The following day she spends in meetings with her father. For the first time since he began guarding her, he is not allowed in this room with her.
He used to be in these rooms, back when he was in special forces, but now, as nothing more than a royal guard, he stands outside.
When she leaves, no one follows her out.
He trails behind. They keep in silence.
And then, just like that, it's his day off.
Days off.
He goes home for them, back to his parents. But he keeps his back stiff and his eyes peeled.
And then, a few days later, he goes back to work like nothing has happened.
Like nothing has happened.
Nothing happens.
What he doesn't observe on his own with the princess, Shikamaru hears of the Kazekage's comings and goings from one of the boys in the kitchen and he reports it to a girl in recreations. He hears of military movements through the princess' classes and her discussions with others before him, and sees the different members of the Kazekage's court and inner-circle come to make reports and take instruction.
He doesn't speak with Temari more than is customary.
He is terrified of her, but he has fallen into a pattern with it. It's always been habit, hasn't it? He's always been scared of what she brings. Of what she knows. Of what she could do to him.
The summer carries on.
It's not fast, but nothing drags. It's easy for him to continue acting as though nothing has happened, as though she never touched herself to thoughts of him, as though he never had his hand around her throat, as though she never figured out that, right now, she is the one with her hand around his.
One week passes and then another. And then it's June.
His shoulders are always tight. He's never really slept anyway.
She sleeps long hours. From behind, the line of her shoulders never changes.
His mouth is always dry. His joints always hurt. The back of his eyes always ache.
Nothing has happened and now it is June.
It's only Choji and him the next time she comes in.
It's not the first time he has been here since she last appeared, and it's possible she goes to this bar regularly — but, at least in the times he's come, she hasn't reappeared.
They're sitting at the bar this time and it's easy for him to order a new glass and two additional shots before she has done more than step into the entryway.
The shot glasses come before his drink does.
They're not for her. Not for Choji either. He has one and then, without pause, he has the other.
She comes with Araya, but there are two other men there too, as has been custom since her family came to town. As usual, the crowd grows quieter with her appearance.
They're not there for him. The other men don't look his way. They don't know him.
Araya lifts his chin slightly in greeting, but that is all. And Temari. The princess — she waves, lifting a hand toward him and Choji, and then lowers it and continues walking, going toward one of the private backrooms.
Shikamaru swallows. If he'd ever gotten used to her looking at him — maybe, briefly, sitting with a board between them on her bedroom floor — he's forgotten it by now.
"How is it going with her?" Choji asks once she is gone and the hum around them has taken up again, seemingly louder than before.
He wonders who she is meeting here, who she is drinking with in those secluded areas.
"Any more tolerable?" Choji continues, gesturing half-heartedly toward the two empty shot glasses now before them. It's said in jest. He's amused.
Shikamaru isn't.
He waits until the tender brings him his new glass, and then he downs it, leaning on the bar, going fast enough to cut through the burn of the alcohol down his throat.
He isn't looking at Choji when he says it. He wouldn't say it, yet, to anyone else.
"She knows."
He doesn't say anything more, but it's enough.
On Monday, rather than walking past him as she leaves her class, she stops before him.
"Will you walk with me?"
He pauses. It's not usually something she's asked of him (as though he could say no) and it's been weeks since she has asked him anything at all.
Shikamaru inhales. He wants to choke. "Your highness," he nods, moving aside and extending a hand in acquiescence.
Temari doesn't smile as she once would have.
She steps past him and doesn't wait to ensure that he follows.
They walk in silence. He'd assumed there was something she wanted to say, some further accusation she wanted to hurl, some confession she wanted to prostrate the both of them to.
It does cross his mind that it is some trap, but he lets that idea fall aside. If it were finally time, nobody would go about it this way.
Still, he wonders what new game she is continuing to play at. Is it different than before? Or has it always been this?
When it comes down to it, when he is honest with it, he thinks about her all the time. He's thought about her, all the time, for months. Years, sure, but not like that — not like this.
She's only feet from him: her familiar lines and movement and sounds.
It's been so long since it's been just the two of them. Ages, it feels like, since that night in her bedroom. Weeks, in reality, but he feels like a different person between then and now. As though he cannot recognize who he was that night (wild, he thinks, trying not to think on it too much — that was what she had made him... as he forgot who he was or why they were there: wild. Out of control. Thoroughly unlike himself — as he had walked away without doing anything to try to stop her, letting her ruin everything while he turned his back, exposed to her).
It's not easy to understand, acknowledge, or know something like that about yourself. He has some of it down — he often knows what she is asking and what she wants (though that in itself is terrifying too — knowing it). But the parts he doesn't grasp, the parts he knows he's too scared to try to grasp... that's what scares him the most. It's horrific, knowing that he's scared of it and, maybe, has always been scared of it. He's always been so scared that, maybe, maybe sometimes, it feels like... like, maybe this time, if she asked for it, if she asked for anything, he may give in.
That's what he has always been so scared of.
That he'd give in, maybe, to all of it, if she asked. One day. As though one day she may ask him to make a choice and he would choose her. He didn't know if he would — knew maybe, that he wouldn't — withstand it if she asked again. If not this time, next time, or the time after. He's always been so scared, in the long-coming end, of his answer.
His heart pounds fast. His feet are silent on the grass.
He stays a bit closer to her than he would have in the past.
There is no need to protect her. The only protection she ever needed was from him. Though, apparently, this whole time, he was the one who needed protection from her.
These days, more and more, as the seconds pass on and the sun sets and then rises again, he wants to think of more, of other, but he thinks of nothing but her.
On Tuesday she is in meetings with her father again. He does not enter these. They began before his shift, and he is half-expecting to meet Mijin again from this exact spot before she even emerges from the conference rooms. Some have come in and out, but not her.
Temari ends up exiting with her youngest brother as the staff is preparing to bring dinner into the meetings.
The prince nods to Shikamaru, and then goes off down the hall with his own guard.
"Could I interest you in another walk?"
Shikamaru looks at the princess, searching her face. He hasn't seen her all day, despite technically working as her guard throughout it. She's tired, but apart from that, he doesn't get any indication of her intention. He can't even quite gauge her general attitude. He blinks.
He's thirteen minutes from the end of his shift. If they leave now, it'll mean another hour, at least, with her.
Shikamaru pauses. She's not sharp this evening. Her eyes, usually so cutting, only rest on his, waiting for his answer.
Finally, he ducks his head and steps back. "As you will."
They walk through the western gardens, which are the most untended, the sun still clear in the sky so deep in summer. Her dress brushes the grass as they walk off the trails, her gait slow and loose. They're not quite side by side, but he's not behind her (as he should be) either. It seems a little pointless now; cruel, even, to attempt to pretend.
They've walked through these grounds, through these exact trees, dozens of times before. He's seen her in this dress, seen her hair messy and down like this, seen her silently ruminate without consideration of him dozens of times before.
It was on this very trail where, many weeks ago, he held his hand to her throat.
"My mother died when I was young," she says, breaking the long-held silence.
Shikamaru swallows. She isn't looking at him. Though whatever she is looking at, a few feet ahead of where they're walking, she's clearly seeing something else, something not there.
"The night my brother was born. There were complications. The doctors couldn't save her."
Her voice is distant and dry, as though she's simply reciting facts, like reading off a check-list to her biography.
It's unnecessary, he thinks, slowing his pace to watch her move further ahead of him — he knows all these things. Everyone does.
"I remember snippets," she continues, and he picks his pace back up, "of my brothers. Like, moments of memories. Not whole things, if that makes sense?"
He doesn't respond. She's not really asking him.
And he knows what she is reaching for, now. And he doesn't care to pursue it.
"Of my brothers. Of the light in Suna, of the way it came into my window. In the kitchen. Of laughter." She inhales sharply, still only looking ahead. "I don't mean to make excuses. I know so many, so so many, are without parents. Or loved ones. People lose their wives every day…."
There she goes, answering her own questions.
"I don't mean that. I just mean." She stops.
When he catches up, comes near her side, he can see she has bitten her tongue hard enough that when she opens her mouth again, there is blood, right in the corner. He watches her swallow. He knows how that tastes.
"He was a good man, once. He loves…." she pauses, again. Loved, she wants to say, but can't quite.
It's not quite true either.
Shikamaru shoves his hands in his pockets. No one is near, there really is no need to feign, no need to pretend.
"Power corrupts everyone," she says after a moment. She's not imploring or pleading or even asking him to understand, so he doesn't try to.
She simply talks, standing there in grass, and he listens.
He's not sympathetic, really. Everyone is only human. There is always a choice and, even though, when it comes down to it, all choices are made alone, no choice can be isolated. Others' choices, and other people, are always participants.
That's not to excuse behavior. How accountable she is for her family, or her own actions, her own lifestyle; how accountable he is for his own, is not a clear line either of them (or maybe anyone at all) can delineate.
But she talks.
She talks of her family and her childhood in short sentences and meaning much more than she is saying. And as they eventually finish their walk, he knows he is right. He knows that what he has been thinking about, with her, is right.
Shikamaru trains through the morning and then waits long enough for his hair to dry after bathing before leaving the grounds.
It's crowded downtown. The roads are crowded for a Friday afternoon before most people finish work. He has to walk around groups and brushes into more people than he is comfortable with. The streets smell of roasting meats, as it often does in the middle of winter, and he is surprised to find it as appealing in such hot weather. As it is, sweat gathers at his temples from the crowd and the unrelenting sun. His shirt, loose and light, still feels like too much. He doesn't like being hot. He never has. Suna, he remembers, was always so hot, always so incessant. Everything about it, everything, was always so unceasing. Was. Is; still.
He's only headed home. He has nowhere else he plans to go. It's only luck he catches his father first as he turns into the grocery store. Shikamaru follows, half a minute behind, ducking in and relishing the cool, crisp air for a second, before moving to find where his father disappeared.
Shikaku Nara is in conversation when Shikamaru steps beside him. His father nods at his son's arrival, not surprised to see him on his day off, and introduces Shikamaru to the older man he is speaking with. Shikamaru waits in silence, listening to them talk about the end of summer festivals coming up and the village's plans.
It's been a little while since Shikamaru stood beside his father. Their height difference is negligible, but even though Shikamaru edges ahead in height, everything about his father is more overpowering. He's always felt dwarfed by his father, physically, though in most else too. In everything else, actually.
Afterward, he follows in silence, continuing beside his father from aisle to aisle. His father has smaller exchanges with a few more people throughout the trip, but Shikamaru recognizes none of them. He recognizes no one in the store. He used to be able to name each clerk. Now the populace, even those not far from his own age, is foreign to him. He wonders, vaguely, where they've all come from.
He's been gone so long. Amazing, how quickly so much can change.
Upon exiting the store, the streets are a little emptier, as though there is a momentary lull in the bustle.
He carries a bag on his forearm, too heavy to carry by its handles, but it burns his bicep.
His mother is out. His father sets up the shogi board without being asked.
They sit on the deck as the day turns into evening and play. He makes tea and brings it out while his father concentrates too hard on his plan of attack.
For a while, when he'd been stationed abroad without anything familiar, he would comfort himself by remembering nights like these: playing shogi in the evening with his father, his mother lighting lamps for them when their eyes became too strained, all without words being exchanged.
Many nights during those years, he'd kept himself occupied remembering those nights like this. Except those images, both in his memory and in reality, were always looser, lighter; easier than now. Even in the fear of the beginning of the occupation, they always had the comfort of each other.
Shikamaru doesn't feel comfort tonight though. Just fear. Just anticipation. All weight.
While abroad, life was different. He was always moving up. Like shogi, each move was made with an end in mind. Moving further across the board. Move by move. Step by step. For so long, going wherever he was told, doing solely what he had to do to put the final piece into place. Checkmate.
He'd seen her there, over those years, in passing.
He can't distinguish between then and now. Maybe there never was a distinction. Maybe he'd known the whole time. Maybe he'd always known.
He'd hated her then, like he hates her now.
It's dark by the time his father says it.
"What did you want to tell me?"
His father knows him better than anyone.
His mother still isn't back.
Shikamaru holds his breath until his vision swims. He pauses, for longer.
He'd thought through how to phrase it; about how to approach it, but now that it's in front of him, he can't quite get there.
He thinks of her smile toward him. He thinks (keeps thinking) of what she expressed in the field three days prior; of the way, as she spoke, she shook.
"I haven't said anything," he prefaces through a dry throat; prefaces to save them both, "but I think—"
He bites his tongue. He thinks of her and the blood.
"I think she'll help us."
a/n: thank you as ever to my wonderful friends/betas, without whom i would be crying on my floor on the daily and this story would never see the light
thank you to that one anon who reminded me to update too
and of course thank you to all of you for reading and sticking with me!