Chapter Text
Her name was Sakura Haruno.
Shikamaru had known her since she was a little girl, though what stood out about her was her pink hair, not her large forehead as the girls of their first year liked to preach.
But whatever else Sakura Haruno was, was eclipsed by her love for Sasuke Uchiha. She was never more than Ino’s friend, and then Ino’s rival, and finally, and most aptly perhaps, the traitor’s girlfriend.
He’d pitied her from the shadows of his making, the way he knew people pitied him for having buried his mentor so young.
It was her own doing, he’d justified as he kept his distance, as they both ignored the silent judgement of their friends and fellow shinobi for what Sakura was. Her vocal support for the traitor, whatever love she harboured for him—even when the same sentiment was expressed by Naruto—rained all types of cruelty on her.
And he’d watched her bear it steadfastly, and then with bitterness, and finally with anger. He watched as she was chipped away to the burning core of her being that lashed out in scathing words, that learned to threaten with steel and fire.
What compelled him to reach out to her was stupid, a sense of misplaced guilt perhaps. He was never a fan of bullies.
It had taken a single tendril of the void stretched out between him and the strident man in her face. But it had cost the man all his teeth when he failed to dodge her punch.
“What are you doing?” Poisonous green eyes latched onto the cracks in Shikamaru’s facade.
“Nothing,” he’d offered lamely.
“This isn’t your fight,” she spat.
Oh, he was well aware of that. What no one knew was that the fight had bled out of Shikamaru long ago. It was buried six feet under, torn and bloody with the undying to rot.
He shrugged. “Duly noted.”
Sakura growled, but she spun around and continued on her way, leaving the bloodied man on the ground hurling insults and threatening to go to the Hokage.
Shikamaru crouched in front of him, a cigarette perched between his teeth. “Dude, this is pathetic,” he sighed. “Go clean up and find yourself a better hobby.”
“The Hokage—“ began the man with rage, only to be cut off.
“—will dismiss you faster than you can open your mouth.” Shikamaru finished for him. “Have you forgotten who Haruno is?”
It was ironic. Shikamaru had too, he supposed. Ino’s friend. Ino’s rival. The traitor’s girlfriend.
She was none of those things anymore, if anything at all. She was the Fists of Doom coiled with so much anger. What was Sakura but a bleeding wound?
(He would think about it a lot, to save him from thinking about who he was instead. Jaded. Tired. Wandering aimlessly through the forest of his life with one certain destination, that being his end.)
He would watch her sometimes, the way one might observe the foot traffic. Far removed, idle, looking without seeing.
Pink and red, an animation that lacked life.
Under the low hanging bar lights, she looked like a still painting behind glass. Aged but refined, locked away within the protective confines she placed around herself.
Where she was unmoving steel everywhere else, her mask splintered here in the company of her beloved bottle. It was an interesting sight, Shikamaru decided as his eyes snapped to focus on the way her throat undulated.
This was not an empty woman, though the way she consumed the amber liquid in her hold would suggest she had voids to fill.
Sakura set the empty bottle down and licked her dewy lips, a lover savouring a kiss.
He moved without thought, drawn to the splinters and the buried rage, wishing to observe what moved the still painting.
“Can I buy you a drink?” He said, well-aware that a misstep could cost him his teeth.
Her gaze swept over him, carefully shuttered. And then she shrugged. “Misery loves company.”
He bought another bottle and brazenly drank from the mouth before passing it to her. “Cheers to misery.”
Sakura drank. She drank long and deep before passing it back to him. “Whatever it is you’re doing, I’m not interested.”
“Who said I’m doing anything?”
“You pity me,” she scoffed, snatching the bottle again before he’d even drunk.
“Do I?” He muttered watching as she took another drink. “Maybe I just wanted company.”
“I don’t offer pity in return either,” she warned. “Especially to pretty boys.”
“Do you have to be so angry all the time?” Shikamaru sighed, looking away from her and ignoring the sudden burn in his stomach.
Sakura set her bottle down half empty and took a steadying breath. “I’ve got a lot to be angry about.”
“Mhm,” Shikamaru offered noncommittally, refusing to look at her again. The liquid of her eyes was a haunting green that drank in the yellow light until swamped. “Sasuke?”
Another scoff, this one distinctly closer. He turned despite himself to the pretty face hovering just out of reach. “Let me tell you something about boys,” she let out an airy, self-deprecating laugh.
He was trapped in her hazy, half-lidded gaze, lost in the fog. Shikamaru licked his lips. “What.”
Her index hooked around a loose thread in his shirt, looping it around her finger as she peered at him from below thick, dark lashes. “You think they’re harmless… they’re nice, they draw you in. Slowly, until you give in. Until you give yourself up.”
The green of her eyes hardened, like a broken bottle with the shards sticking out. “And then they burn your heart out. Until you’re left with the ashes.”
She yanked the thread out, roughly enough to jostle his body, and bore her teeth. “Then they’re gone and you’re left with their taste in your mouth and their smell on your skin even when they’ve been long gone.”
She patted his chest where the thread was snapped, as if in apology. “Is it worth it? Sometimes. Will I ever let it happen again? Fuck no.”
Swallowing tremulously, Shikamaru drew away from the fanning heat of her body. “I’m not Sasuke, Sakura.”
“Yeah?” She smiled cynically. “Good for you. You wouldn’t be here talking to me if you were.”
A part of him hated her.
It was illogical, but she chased away the numbness with frustration.
She had every reason to hold everyone at arm’s length like he did, she was a broken woman, a grand wreckage that people stopped to gawk at in passing.
Yet he wanted to unravel her, the way she took one look at him and was dismissive.
Misery loved company.
Shikamaru sought her out again. And again. And again.
Until her scathing tongue elicited want instead of rage, and he burned in his loins instead of his chest.
“You suck,” he professed to her one day.
“Only when I feel like it,” she retorted blithely.
“What do you have against friends?”
“Friends?” Her laugh was harsh. “Please. Even Ino barely hangs out with me anymore so as not to offend Kiba’s sensibilities. I don’t want your pity, Shikamaru.”
“I’m telling you, you suck, and you think I fucking pity you?” He laughed without humour.
He didn’t pity Sakura anymore. Sakura was like the deepest recesses of himself that he refused to bring to light, and Shikamaru never pitied himself.
They drank. Sakura ignored him, and he ignored her, but they drank together in silence.
Perhaps that was all he would ever gather from her. Words that attempted to slice and the poison in her eyes like hooks in his chest.
He stuck around anyway.
People glared at him sometimes.
“You’re keeping bad company,” she said beside him, her smile sharp and unkind. “Didn’t your mother caution you about mixing with bad crowds?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child,” Shikamaru dismissed her. “If I cared what people said and thought, I would be in the Hokage tower heading the jounin force.”
“Why aren’t you doing that?” She mused.
“Didn’t feel like it,” he shrugged.
“Big shoes to fill, hm?” Her words were not stabbing. Half-murmured, it sounded as if she might be talking to herself.
Shikamaru found he couldn’t swallow around the lump in his throat. “Something like that.”
Her pensive silence carried a different weight. It compressed Shikamaru until he wished to pry loose every thought in her head to investigate it.
“We should spar someday,” she said eventually.
Was that … her acceptance?
It was always him seeking her out, after all.
“We’re not very well-matched, though, are we?” He thought. “Human bulldozer and the strategist.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “It’ll be interesting to see how long you can last, and how much I’m able to out-manoeuvre you.”
He shrugged once more, ignoring the thrill racing through him. “I’m down.”
He went down, that was certain from the start. There was only so much brain power could do against unadulterated destruction. The still painting was a raging storm now, and he was caught in the blast.
She raged and raged and raged until she was spent, and he was out of breath.
“Got you,” she said, lying down next to his prone form and letting out a heavy breath.
Shikamaru turned to look at her. She was sweaty and smudged, her hair a wild, pink mess. “You’re beautiful,” he said, and painfully meant it.
“You find this beautiful?” She arched her brow mockingly.
“I do.” A weary sigh escaped him as he turned to look at the sky. “Somehow.”
“Anyone ever tell you, you’re stupid?”
“You might be the first,” he admitted. “Myself. Does that count?”
There was silence again, this one charged with her hidden thoughts.
“I think you should go home,” she said at last.
“I think you should come with me,” Shikamaru said, having abandoned all common sense and survival instincts.
Sakura barked out a shocked laugh. “Are you— are you propositioning me?”
He licked his lips, dry and chapped. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing. No. … Yes. Maybe?”
“Was it not enough to be ruined once?” A subtle laugh vibrated in her voice. The sound was heavy however, laden with meaning.
“Maybe I’m a masochist,” he decided.
“So what happens if I do go home with you?” She wondered, and he felt the weight of her gaze on him.
Shikamaru swallowed, shaken, wanting, and wondering where his renowned genius had gone. He turned to look at her and prepared for meeting his end. “Whatever you want to happen.”
“Even if it’s just tea?”
“Even if it’s just tea,” he agreed.
They had tea.
Sakura watched him over the rim of her teacup and sipped quietly, contemplative again.
Shikamaru felt naked under her searching gaze. “What?”
“Mhm, nothing,” she said, still watching him.
He drank his tea and burned his tongue. But even that didn’t distract from the different burn of her eyes on him.
“You want me,” she stated, not wondering, of course, hadn’t he become completely transparent? How embarrassing.
Slowly licking his lips, Shikamaru shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Maybe,” Sakura said.
“Maybe,” He echoed, staring down into his cup and hating himself.
Shikamaru was not stupid, despite what he told her. But what he was doing here—chasing a whim, craving an intimacy, wanting the now without considering the later—was stupid.
Yet here he was.
And there she was, considering him.
They drank tea.
She watched him, and he watched her.
And then she went home, a faint smile on her lips and he was left to burn.
It happened again.
Whatever it was, he loved and loathed it. The want that cloyed the air between them without ever being funneled was too much.
It hurt.
He wasn’t sure what he wanted, her body, or her company, or her love. Or maybe all three and some more.
Except he was sure she had nothing at all to offer. The titillating perch on the narrow precipice could be one-sided and catastrophic. He was damned.
He wanted her anyway, in spite of his best judgement. Maybe she derived pleasure out of the drawn out agony of leaving him on edge.
“Tea?” He said hoarsely, when for the fifth time she accepted his invitation to come home with him.
“Wine,” she answered. “If you have any.”
He longed to reach out and touch her.
And understood then, from a place present outside himself, that this must be how she felt, waiting on Sasuke, wanting him, being taunted to be left in the dust.
And he hated and loved her for it.
“He told me he loved me,” she disclosed when he found the courage to ask. “He promised he’d come back to me. That we’d stay in touch, in secret.”
His stomach roiled. “But he didn’t.”
“He didn’t,” she confirmed. “He used my trust, my love and my willingness to always be there for him against me.”
His silence seemed to spur her.
“He took so much from me,” she said quietly. “Things I thought I was willing to give up, but now that they’re gone … and I only have myself to blame. I was all in, no matter the consequences. I was naive and stupid, I trusted him. In the end, I’d betrayed my village, myself, everything I thought I stood for. I don’t blame those people who hate me, Shikamaru. I hate me, too.”
He licked his lips. There was a lot he could say to that, but the words lodged in his throat.
“You know the worst part?” She added, polishing off her wine in one, long sip.
“What?” He inquired, partly afraid of her answer.
“Even though I hate him, I still love him.” Sakura said, unbeknownst to her, that she was cutting deeper than he intended to let her. “Sometimes it keeps me up at night how much I miss him.”
Please, he wanted to say, stop.
She mercifully quieted.
“I didn’t mean to tell you all that,” she admitted into the silence when it stretched.
“It’s okay,” he lied.
“Misery loves company,” she repeated.
“You have to move on,” he told her, and was proud his voice didn’t waver, that the advice came from a place that was mostly unselfish. “If something makes you miserable. You have to let it go. If it proves that it’s more work than it’s worth, if it brings you more sadness than happiness… if it makes you tired, Sakura. You have to let go.”
“I have,” she said.
“You have not,” he denied and tasted poison on his tongue. “He still lives in your head.”
Her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. But she didn’t retort.
Shikamaru wished for things he couldn’t name.
Love me, he wanted to tell her, despite the utter absurdity of it. I would never do this to you.
It must burn to have heard that before only to be lied to. Just how much did she resent everything? Shikamaru would too, in her shoes.
He wanted to wash his taste out of her mouth. And his smell off her skin. He would, if she’d let him, he would mark her with his touch until he erased Sasuke from every pore in her body.
But could he ever purge him from her heart? Her head?
He dug his nails in his palms and breathed against the ache, desire and better judgement.
Shikamaru got up, suddenly so tired.
“Where are you going?” There was a hitch in her breath that he didn’t know what to make of.
“Bed. I need to lie down.”
Her expression splintered open before his eyes. Everything hurt with breathtaking intensity. “Now?”
“Yes,” he said. “Come lie down with me.”
He was truly a masochist.
Her, possibly a sadist that took pleasure from his pain because she rose to join him. Because she splayed across his sheets with her rose hair fanned over his pillows, and her scent permeating every inch of his space.
Small inches separated them, soaking her warmth and his as they silently watched each other.
“I hurt you,” she whispered, a question disguised as a statement.
“You didn’t mean to,” he murmured, forgiving. His heart raced in his chest, so much he was afraid she could hear it.
“I’m sorry,” she said sadly.
“Sakura,” he strangled. “Sleep.”
She shut her eyes, giving him reprieve from his inevitable drowning.
“Now,” he added softer. “Breathe.”
Her chest fully expanded and slowly deflated. And then again, and again.
“What do you smell?”
“You,” she whispered.
“Good,” he said hoarsely. “Breathe me, Sakura.”
Her breaths shuddered.
“Breathe me until you forget,” he continued, breathless himself now.
They breathed together to the same broken rhythm, her basking in him, and him getting drunk on her.
“I feel dizzy,” she said, sounding dazed.
“Come closer,” he commanded, soft-spoken in his sun-soaked bedroom that now smelled like her.
They nuzzled closer, forehead to forehead. “Does it make you feel better?”
“… yes.”
“Good,” he said again, trying to remember how to breathe. “Now sleep.”
She swallowed shakily. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “Sleep.”
“Okay.”
“And Sakura?”
“Yes?” Her eyes cracked open an inch.
“Dream of me,” he husked, and went against the temptation of sampling her lips with every inch of his willpower.
She was a melted thing against him, caught in a spell. He didn’t blame her, he was reduced, drowning too.
“Okay,” she said.
He would invade her, the way she invaded him.
He swore he would.