[Aug. 15th] [Naruto] bitch, asshole and other pretty words

[zauberer-sirin.livejournal.com]

Title: bitch, asshole and other pretty words
Series: Naruto
Day/Theme: August 15th / air and stars
Character/Pairing: Shikamaru/Temari
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: almost none, a bit about Gaara and the current manga
Note: I swore I would never be able to write Shikamaru and now you´re about to find out why. Thanks to haibara_kun for digging up some canon bits (and for posting, of course). The story about the sand is ripped off from brilliant dinghy


He wakes up with sand up his nostrils, just like in his dreams of this place (oh, yes, he has dreamed about this journey, he often dreams of all the things he doesn´t know about her), just like in Konoha, where he wakes up wondering why his mouth is dry and his head full of dunes and realizes there are still some grains of sand in her hair.

He wakes up alone. He stands up on the bed and coughs, the air is so sour and heavy with dust and ghosts -and Shikamaru has only had one night to get used to it. Shikamaru wakes up alone and there is nothing sad or hollow about it, just his uneasiness towards new surroundings.

*

They had finally arrived to her town in the afternoon and Shikamaru had fallen on the bed almost inmediatedly, lungs heavy with dry air and dust and dehydration and when he closed his eyes -and everytime he tried to sleep in the Sand country- there was red behind his eyelids.

He opens his eyes some minutes later to discover Temari´s shadow slanting over her left shoulder.

(in the Sand shadows are as corporal and fleshed-out as people, and they often avoid its owners; in the Sand shadows can bleed and die; Shikamaru believes this should seem ironic and beautiful to him)

She had changed clothes -black and vaporous, her collarbone exposed, and her neck, down to where he could almost see the line of her breastbone- and her hair was wet.

Shikamaru closed his eyes again -the red remained-; now there was a faint and fruity smell in the room, of rotten peaches, soap and women. It turned the atmosphere more oppressive still.

"Hey," Temari protested, a shifting of the bed and suddenly she was sitting on his lap, knees at the sides of his chest, ass comfortably resting on his crotch. "Get up. I want sex."

Her lack of tact amused him, rather than anything else. At least that´s one thing he could always count on, and Temari would always be the same foul-mouthed, arrogant, impatient girl -he touched her elbow in a painful flash of sentimentalism.

"You are really a bitch," he opossed to her smug smile.

"Asshole."

She bent over him and wet, straw-coloured hair got between them.

Sex with Temari was always messy, Shikamaru reflected; her hair never fell quite in place as the rest of the girls´ do, and her skin is never quite as soft under his touch, and she swears like a man and kisses like a criminal, but she is real.

*

He finds Temari on the rooftop, and seeing her spread on the floor, her fingertips gingerly feeling the edges of the tiles, Shikamaru knows instantly she belongs to great heights.

"What are you doing here?"

He asks that in a tone that makes Temari smile inwardly, like he is contraried, there could be nothing more important than sleep right now, it implies, and she knows the tone of voice because the consonants are sharpened and the vowels high-pitched like he is angry but not really, because Shikamaru doesn´t speak when he is angry-

(this she has learned through hours and hours of inexplicable silence, of pointless strolls down Konoha´s streets, of sitting on opposite sides the bed, facing the wall

"You have your clouds; this is the same."

"You are not going to say something stupidly romantic about stars and all the crap. Uh?"

Shikamaru stares for a moment, the expression of someone searching for something in his pockets. Maybe he is waiting for an invitation, maybe he just can´t decide if he should go back to the room, and he feels so tired. But he finally sits besides her, feeling a bit awkward.

"Well, are you going to tell me the name of some of those stars or what?"

"I don´t know any," she answers wholeheartedly.

*

("So, are you on a date too?"

"That's not it."

"There's a chuunin exam soon. I'm just going back and forth between the sand and the leaf for meetings."

"And it's troublesome, but I've become an examiner, so... I was told to go and see off the messengers from the sand.")



That was one of those angry silences Temari was yet getting used to.

"You are always like that in front of people," and then he pretended he had said nothing, walking by her, like any other normal day.

"You started it."

"Are you ashamed of me?"

Temari didn´t take much time to think about it, and a moment after that words left her lips she wished she had.

"Yes."

Shikamaru didn´t look alarmed or hurt -he never does- but he buried his hands in the pockets a bit too deep and held his shoulders a bit too low.

"Okay."

And that is when Temari threw him against a wall and kissed him hard and open-mouthed, not because she wished to make up for what she had said (Shikamaru noticed her looking sideways to check if somebody could see them before grabbing his arm) but because she wanted.

*

"Here the air tastes funny," he tells her, because there is still that heaviness in his breathing and there is also something odd, metallic and sweet at the same time, sharp.

"It´s death," she answers plainly.

"What!?"

"Sand ninjas have always used sand as a weapon; decade after decade that sand has swallowed the victims, their bodies, their souls. Now the sand is filled with blood and bone. That´s why it tastes funny."

Shikamaru thinks it´s creepy but he doesn´t say because it´s her country and he is smart.

"I told Gaara. I had to ask him if we could share a room, so he had to know."

"Mmm-uh."

"He looked happy."

"How could you tell? He has no expression on the face."

She punches him in the arm. It hurts. It always hurts. Shikamaru has always wondered if she had any idea of how strong she was or maybe there´s some masochistic tendency in their relationship.

"I´m his sister, I can tell."

In any case, happy seemed too strong a word for what could be Gaara´s reaction to finding out a lazy rascal is fucking her older sister, Shikamaru reasoned to himself. Maybe Temari was just being nice but that is even an oddest possibility.

"And Kankuro?"

She nods, something in her eyes much more reflexive than when talking about Gaara; Shikamaru doesn´t have any sibilings, there are mysteries about her that will always remain outside his grasp.

"He said he was sorry for you."

He forces a nervous smile and she goes along.

"So you told them. And telling Gaara is like, well not like, it is telling your Kazekage. It´s rather official."

"I guess."

"Does it mean you are no longer ashamed of me?"

"No, I´m still ashamed of you. You are shameful."

She places a ghost kiss on his shoulder, and it´s very strange, because that is the first tender gesture Shikamaru has seen from her, only yes, she is very tender, Shikamaru thinks half-hysterically, experiencing something very much like boyfriend pride -he doesn´t like it, he wants it to go away-, only she has never showed it in a normal way.

"But we can work on that. Right?"

Her voice turns small and unsure in the exclamation mark.

Shikamaru lets out a noise that could be affirmative or merely a yawn.

"If you sleep here your back is going to hurt tomorrow."

"I know," but with his eyes already closed.

"Just try not to drool on me. You do that a lot. It´s disgusting."

"Bitch."

"Asshole."

*

Lately Shikamaru smiles whenever his parents have a fight; one day his father caught him doing it over breakfast, carelessly spooning cereals into his mouth, Shikaku asked what the hell he was grinning about. He never did it again.

*

There is so much light in the sky they barely manage to sleep.

Shikamaru, of course, drools on her.