Chapter Text
Temari scoffed bitterly, fingering through the rocks in the shallow strip of river by the bank. She was searching for a nice, flat one—a good skipping stone. Something she’d come to appreciate about the leaf village in her constant back-and-forth travel was the sound of the running river, and the simple satisfaction of skipping a rock across it. During her tenure, she’d noticed several Konoha shinobi, men and women she’d find quite intimidating in battle, also enjoyed this easy pleasure.
She liked to come to the river just before the light began to shift for sunset, in the late afternoon. It wasn’t a popular stone-skipping time, so she often got her favorite riverbend to herself. She also enjoyed the way that the day-toned sunlight shifted to copper-toned dusk light, and how it filtered through the abundant leaves on the thick forest surrounding the village. The way that the constant motion of the wind in the leaves would make the light flicker in her eyes, disappearing and reappearing with every shake of the breeze, was quite relaxing to her.
She would be leaving this village for a while, come morning. She wasn’t sure when the leaf had begun to feel so much like home to her, and the thought was…aggravating. She never expected she would come to recognize so many civilians around town, to have a favorite pastry shop in konoha, to be greeted in the street by peers as she went about her day. Temari sighed and shook her head, reminding herself that he konoha shinobi her age weren’t her peers. They were just her age. They reported to different powers.
Suna and Konoha didn’t have much in common, outside of the technicality that both were major shinobi villages with comparable civilian population size. Everything in Konoha was green, bustling, alive. Neighbors said hello to each other in the streets. In Suna, the monotonous color of sand threatened to drown out everything else. Everyone walked with their heads down, trying to avoid getting sand in their eyes. She tried to remember the feeling of being out in the sidewalk as a random sandstorm hit, the feeling of sand filling her nose and eyes so forcefully that there was no choice but to curl up against a wall and hide her face until it passed.
The worse that could happen in Konoha was an afternoon rainstorm—in the coldest of winters, there might be scant snowfall, but never enough to stick to the ground and taint it white. The ground in Konoha was earthen and grassy. It smelled of life. The sand was bone dry, endless, and bleak. She’d be back there by tomorrow evening if her journey went smoothly.
She always felt sort-of depressed when it came time to leave the leaf village. The chunin exams had wrapped up a week prior, and it was time for her current extended stay to draw to a close. She’d been in Konoha for almost thirteen weeks, which was twice as long as she’d ever stayed before. She should be ready to go home. She did miss her brothers. She couldn’t convince the little twinge in her chest that she was truly glad to go back, though.
Suna was her home. She could close her eyes and see the house she’d grown up in, Kankuro grinning in the yard. She could also see dad hovering everywhere she went, the feel his eyes watching her no matter what she was doing. She could feel the exhaustion in her bones as she dragged herself from place to place, see the eyes in the sand that followed her every move.
Calm down, she told herself, sternly, in her head, willing the slight tremble in her shoulders to dispel. She knew the village wasn’t like that anymore. Gaara was the kazekage now, and he was not their father. Still, though, she preferred to support Suna from afar. She would never stop seeing eyes in the sand.
Temari finally found a stone that was the correct shape and size, pulled it out of the water, turned it over in her palm a few times, and then flicked her wrist. She watched the stone skip, four times, before bouncing into a rock on the opposite bank and breaking into small pieces that scattered on impact.
“Not bad,” a voice that was too lazy to be mocking but too sly too be supportive called from somewhere behind her.
“You could do better?” she snapped at the voice, already knowing the answer. Shikamaru could do better. If he felt like it, he could grab any old rock and prove this to be true. He’d adjust his angle, so he had a longer skipping path, or throw it so that it started skipping closer and got more skips in before reaching the other side.
He chuckled in a tone that clearly said: we both know that I can, but it would be too much of a drag to actually acknowledge your question with a verbose answer.
Shikamaru stepped up next to her by the river’s edge, looking out at the opposite bank. His posture was as casual and relaxed as usual, but he also had an unusual air around him. Temari had spent a good amount of time studying her diplomatic counterpart’s profile during the last thirteen weeks. She knew the line of his nose, the shadow of his eyelashes on his cheek, and his jagged hairline by heart. If he were to smile, she knew where little dimples would form at the corners of his eyes. When he pouted, she knew how the crease in his forehead would fold. Even the glint of his little stud earrings was familiar to Temari. He looked troubled; his brows knit together.
For a moment, Temari wanted to say something. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, but she held her breath as if words would come. When they failed her, Shikamaru spoke.
“You’ll be back soon,” he reminded her in a grunt, not glancing in her direction.
“Yeah…” she said back tiredly, her stomach doing an involuntary somersault.
Shikamaru let his weight fall beside where she crouched; sitting and then laying back in the soft Konoha grass to stare at the sky. Later, when he stood up, the imprint of his shape would be left behind. When one stood from laying the desert sand, it immediately rushed to fill the hole. The desert allowed no trace of inhabitants. “Cheer up, then,” he said, his eyelid twitching.
With a big sigh, Temari sat delicately next to him. The grass was cold, the earth beneath it a bit damp. It would certainly leave little wet spots on her shorts. “You think you know everything, don’t you?” There was too much an accusation in her tone. She wasn’t being careful with what she said.
Shikamaru slowly, lazily, blinked an eye open and looked at her. She could see the long grass, tickling his cheek. He ignored it, instead offering half of a crooked smile in her direction, accompanied by a teasing “I know you’re going to miss me.”
Temari smacked him lightly on the arm, mostly out of reflex. She didn’t deny it, though. She would miss him. He was far from perfect, of course. He was absolutely infuriating, a genius know-it-all who was both never wrong and completely confident in his mental prowess. At least, that’s what she’d thought of him at first.
Now, though, she wasn’t sure. He wasn’t her only friend in Konoha, but it was safe to say that he was her favorite. It was difficult to convince him to come out in the first place most nights, but once he’d gotten on his shoes and left the house, he was basically down for whatever. When she had a whim, or felt like checking something out, he always humored her.
That was another difference between Suna and Konoha. In Suna, she was always alone. Her brothers were around but preoccupied. She’d never been allowed to have any of her own friends. Others her age feared her for her associations in Suna. Here, her acquaintances from the hokage’s office and Shikamaru’s peers always greeted her.
She had even caught herself wondering a few times before, whether getting caught out in a sandstorm would really be as bad if Shikamaru were caught in it with her. A rainstorm had caught them one evening when they’d been out one evening having drinks. It had been a beautiful weather event, though Temari still blushed recalling the evening in its entirety.
The Rusty Shuriken happened to be one of the few bars in town that would serve Shikamaru. The drinking age in Konoha was sixteen, and at seventeen, Temari was a year beyond the requirement. Shikamaru, however, was still fifteen. Most bars would shake their heads at him point blank, but there were certain old school shinobi bars in town that honored rank over age. One of these bars happened to be The Rusty Shuriken, where the bartenders would eye Shikamaru’s hitai-ate and vest proving chunin status and serve him without a second thought.
Temari didn’t like to drink for sport, and neither did Shikamaru. They did, however, have a nice time at the old school shinobi bars together. On the night of the rainstorm, Shikamaru had bought a 600mL carafe of nigori sake at the bar—double the amount they usually drank, and they’d been nursing it in their usual corner booth for a few hours. Temari had a pleasant buzz—pushing right to the cusp of a point where she may have considered herself to be too drunk, but just barely.
Shikamaru’s cheeks were also a bit red, she could tell even in the dim after-hours lighting of the bar. They’d had an aggravating meeting that afternoon with the Hokage and Shizune and some of the Konoha intelligence corps, who were worried that they hadn’t updated their vetting system of exam candidate nations enough since the last chunin exams, when Orochimaru had infiltrated Konoha by registering a fake shinobi village. Not to mention—the ploy he’d pulled with her own village.
The conversation had been full of veiled accusations against her on the side of the intelligence corps, who disapproved of her spending so much time in the village, and were convinced that Gaara, her brother was not adequate for the role of Kazekage. They also backhandedly mentioned about five times how her father had been murdered in conjunction with the fiasco.
Of course, Temari didn’t like her father all that much in the first place, but they didn’t know that! And they way they looked at her every time they mentioned Suna, their eyes wary and taunting at the same time—they were clearly trying to piss her off. And it had worked marvelously.
Finally, she had snapped. “Deliver a decoy secret code to the village administration and a top-secret code to only the leader. If the leader goes down, they won’t have the top-secret code anymore,” she snapped, turning towards the window of the Hokage’s office instead of looking any of those assholes in the face for a moment longer.
As soon as they got downstairs, she snapped at Shikamaru. “Why didn’t you say anything?” She demanded.
He blinked at her, confused. “Anything?” He echoed, frowning, scratching his chin. “Anything about what?”
“I know you know what I’m talking about,” she accused bitterly. She hated it when he played dumb to get out of conversations.
He groaned, then said, “I hate those guys anyway. Who cares what they have to say? I don’t even remember their names.”
Temari scoffed, “Seichi, Akane, Kurozumi—” she began to list off the names of the people who had insulted her in the meeting.
“I get it, I get it,” Shikamaru said quickly, putting his hands up to get her to stop talking, then clasped them behind his neck and continued, “I dunno. I’m sorry. I thought it wouldn’t bother you.”
Temari was about to snap at him again when she realized that this was probably the first time that she’d ever heard the words “I’m sorry” pass through Shikamaru’s lips directed at her, which certainly counted for something. Usually, he pissed her off and refused to back down, she bitched at him to get it out of her system, and they moved on with their day.
“It’s fine,” she muttered, “I mean, I forgive you,” for some reason, her cheeks heated up against her will as she said the last bit. Only with Shikamaru would the base minimum from him—apologizing to her after being rude and then being forgiven—feel like flirting. She didn’t really know what flirting felt like, though. She’d only ever read about it before.
Shikamaru chuckled once at his predetermined forgiveness but didn’t say anything for the rest of the walk to the Rusty Shuriken. And then, without even asking—Temari had perceived it as some sort of apology offering—he had ordered a larger carafe of sake than they usually split. She hadn’t complained, taking over their usual table, which was a nice corner booth.
When Shikamaru sat on the other side of the corner, their knees bumped together. “It’s gonna rain tonight,” he informed her, glancing out the window as he poured them both cups of sake.
“How can you tell?” she followed his gaze. It didn’t look very cloudy outside.
Shikamaru pointed at the horizon, at a dark cloud that must have been halfway to Iwa. “That’s coming this way.” He slid Temari’s cup towards her and then took a sip from his own. “I am sorry about that meeting,” he repeated, confirming her theory that the large sake was intended as an apology.
“It’s fine. I’m over it,” she lied.
“You’re not,” she heard him murmur, and she would have thought she imagined it if she hadn’t seen his lips move. They finished their first glass of sake, and she poured them both another.
“Tell me a story,” she said, hoping that his glum mood wouldn’t infect her. “You’re bringing down the vibe,” she moved her knee away from his and then knocked their legs together again. She could feel the warmth of his leg against hers. She brushed off the idea that she should reach under the table and squeeze his thigh.
Shikamaru rolled his eyes, but she could see the little gears in his mind turning, trying to come up with a story that would entertain her in the moment—or, at least, shut her up. “Remember when we went bowling?” he settled on, the corners of his mouth turning slightly upwards. She did remember—it wasn’t just the two of them, there had been about half a dozen others in their group. “You could barely figure out how to hold the ball,” he laughed then took another sip of his sake.
“We don’t have anything like that in Suna,” Temari said defensively, drinking.
“I never said you did,” he responded as he poured them both a third glass. Usually the bottle would be empty right around now, but they had double their usual capacity
Temari watched him drink, watched his adam's apple bob as he swallowed then drank again. Shikamaru had nice, pale skin, more like that of a doll than a shinobi. There was no mistaking the dark circles around his eyes or the callouses on his hands, though. He finished taking a sip and glanced over as he lowered his head. Inevitably, since she didn't look away, they made eye contact. Her friend's gaze pierced hers and for a moment she considered looking away. The next thought that occurred to her was that he was trying to intimidate her into turning her gaze away from him, and she was never one to lose a staring contest.
Not breaking eye contact, she sipped down half of her third glass of sake. Then, she let her eyes leave Shikamaru’s, but not to look away from the boy at the table with her. She continued to examine his face, raking her eyes across his cheekbones, admiring the shadow they formed down his cheek, dragging her eyes down to the side of his neck where a tiny bead of sweat had formed beneath his ear. She took another sip of sake.
“What?” Shikamaru asked out loud and the word rang in her ears.
“What?” Temari echoed, her eyes snapping back to his.
“You…” he said, his tone accusatory, “staring at me.”
She arched an eyebrow, “am I not allowed?” She asked evenly, daring him.
“You can do whatever you want,” he slouched in his seat and his thigh rubbed against hers again, their feet doing a little dance together under the table.
Neither had moved away, and as they drank and slouched; their legs became quite entangled. They chatted and gossiped about the chunin exams, about what nations they’d been receiving applications from, and speculated about the lives of participants of the exams that they’d been a part of the previous year. It felt strangely nostalgic.
When they stood up to leave, Temari was surprised to find herself just a bit drunker than she’d thought she would be. In retrospect, she shouldn’t have been surprised at all.
Shikamaru didn’t look much better. They leaned into each other’s shoulders as they made their way down a deserted Konoha street just before two in the morning. Temari’s arm was around his waist, and his around her shoulders. She tried to focus on the sight of her feet walking along the ground, or the faint rumbling sound in the distance. The only thing she was not allowed to focus on was the warmth of Shikamaru’s waist beneath her grip and his arm around her shoulders.
She thought very briefly about the last time she’d gotten this drunk. She’d been by herself, just sixteen, in the back room of a dingy Suna dive bar. For a moment, she feared that they might be hit by a sandstorm as she had been while walking home shit-faced on that miserable night.
“It’s so funny,” she said to Shikamaru, her voice sounding tinny and drunk, “you never get sandstorms here.”
“I would hope not,” he responded, and though he was too lazy to actually laugh, she could feel the humor in his tone.
It was late summer in Konoha, the time of year when monsoons were known to hit the village. Temari had heard of these storms, but never been present for one. The indications had been there—the rumbling in the sky, and Shikamaru’s earlier prediction. Still, it came as suddenly as a single flash of lighting followed by a deafening crack of thunder. Before she could process these concurrent events, she was soaked to the core.
For a moment, she just stood there, staring at the way the rain distorted the lights of the village. Shikamaru was tugging on her wrist, trying to pull her somewhere with cover, but she was too mesmerized by the weather. She could see the water hitting his hand, yanking on her wrist, a sea of raindrops coming down upon them. She’d been drizzled on before, of course. She’d spent time in the mist village, where humidity was eternally dense and her hair was always curling at the ends and occasionally the water in the air got so heavy that it couldn’t help but fall.
This rain was different, though. The drops were big, and fat, and she could feel them individually pelting her. She could see the ricocheting droplets forming a fuzz around every surface that the water hit, and for a moment, she wished she were an artist so that she could paint the way it looked. She could see the fuzz it formed around Shikamaru as he got rained on, his hair soaked and drooping. She looked at the pond across the street. The surface of the usually-still water looked like sandpaper. The rain was so spectacular and loud.
She hadn’t realized Shikamaru trying to say something, the rainfall was so loud. She hadn’t noticed him leaning towards her, either, until he asked very close to her ear: “have you never been a monsoon before?”
She turned to look at him, to find that his face was still close to hers. His hair was soaked through, rain running in rivulets down his forehead, over his brow, along his cheeks and nose and lips. She could feel the water running down her own face in a similar manner, but all she could think about was that it looked beautiful on Shikamaru.
And then, probably because their mutual drunkenness gave her an excuse to hide behind, she placed one hand on his shoulder, leaned forward on her toes, and kissed him. Shikamaru tensed up, only for a moment, before deciding to reciprocate, his hand moving to her hip. She could feel his fingers there, on the curve of her bone, barely touching. They stood in the street, kissing slowly, for a while. It was Temari’s first kiss, and all she could think about was how warm Shikamaru’s tongue felt against hers in comparison to the cold rainwater that continued to soak them both.
Besides her hand on his shoulder and his on her hip, their lips were the only other point of contact between the two of them. Their tongues danced together exploratorily, and both of their mouths tasted like nigori sake. All at once, the volume of the rain eased up a bit and the two sprung apart as if snapped out of a genjutsu.
In fact, the glare that Shikamaru gave her as he stood several paces away with a hand in front of his mouth heavily implied that he was wondering if she had put him under a genjutsu. He stared at her with alarmed eyes from over the hand that covered his mouth. It was still raining, but not as angrily as it had been before.
That had been about four weeks ago, and they obviously had never spoken of the kiss, going so far as to avoid almost any physical contact with one another. When she closed her eyes, Temari could still see the way he’d looked at her after, and feel his sharp gaze of embarrassment and accusation. Temari wasn’t sure what she would say if he brought it up. She felt that the action sort of explained itself and was relieved to find that Shikamaru seemed to feel a similar way.
Shikamaru was still looking at her with one eye closed, waiting to hear confirmation that she was going to miss him. “It would be cool if you could come with me,” was what she settled on saying to Shikamaru. He blinked at her; both of his eyes were open now. “I could show you around Suna like you show me around here.”
Shikamaru said nothing. She was suddenly very flustered and was about to open her mouth and proclaim that whole thing a joke when he spoke: “it’d be too much of a drag for this trip, and short-notice since you leave in the morning. But you’ll be back here again. And then the next time you go visit, maybe you can invite me for real.”
Right. She had been appointed a semi-permanent ambassadorship to Konoha, requested by the Hokage and fulfilled by her brother. The next time she came back to Konoha, she would be here as a resident, with her own apartment near the center of the village.
She wasn’t expecting Shikamaru to say anything else—he usually sat quietly, and she had to start all of their conversations. So she nearly toppled over when he said, out of nowhere, “remember when you kissed me?”
Temari’s mouth fell open of its own accord. She had never predicted he would bring this up to her. She assumed it would be at least five years before either of them felt comfortable breaching the topic. Yet he mentioned it, so casually, as he rolled onto his side so that he was facing her more directly. He was clearly watching her closely, playing this conversation like a game of chess, and so she collected herself as quickly as she could. “I do,” she responded carefully.
Shikamaru exhaled, a blush rising to his cheeks. Temari could feel herself getting even more flustered even though he’d barely said anything. Was he about to say something embarrassing? He rolled onto his back, putting one arm across his eyes. “No one’s ever done that sort of thing to me before,” he said, clearly forcing himself to not speak too quickly, but the words still tumbled out of his mouth at an unprecedented pace, “and I always thought it would be boring, or a drag, or whatever, but…” he peeked at her from under his arm, maybe to see if she was even still listening. She was, and so he hid his eyes again. “I was just thinking that I wouldn’t mind if you did it again.”
“Oh, really?” Temari asked, getting pissed because that had always been the safest way for her to feel anything. “You wouldn’t mind if I did it again? Well how do you think I feel, Shikamaru? You don’t think I would like to be kissed? It’s not like that wasn’t my first kiss, too…” as soon as she said the words, she regretted them. They sounded so silly, so strange coming out of her mouth; so embarrassing directed at Shikamaru. “You’re pathetic,” she said bitterly. “You couldn’t even look at me while you said it.”
Temari wouldn’t mind another kiss either, but it was Shikamaru’s turn to take the initiative. He could come and get if, he wouldn’t mind so much.
He scoffed, reaching for her wrist. “don’t be like that,” he caught her arm, trying to tug her towards him. He was looking directly at her now, but she was worried that if she stopped being pissed, she would feel something else instead.
Though Temari fully intended to leave her spot beside Shikamaru in the grass, she suddenly found her limbs unresponsive. At first, she wondered if her subconscious was telling her to stay and talk to him. No, no, of course it wasn’t. She tried to look back over her shoulder, but her neck was stiff.
“Don’t use that jutsu on me,” she hissed, trying to see her shadow.
“You were going to leave,” Shikamaru said simply. Temari watched her right arm move, as if controlled by her brother, reaching in front of her, fingers flexing. She wondered what Shikamaru was making her do, but then she felt fingers against her own waistline, touching tentatively at the fabric of her obi belt, his thumb resting on the jersey knit of her shirt where it stretched over her ribs.
Temari’s breath caught in her throat, and she could feel her cheeks heating up. She watched her fingers in front of her, floating in the air mimicking the gestures of Shikamaru’s on her side. Suddenly, it was all too much. “Don’t use that jutsu on me,” she said again, and her voice shook.
She fell forward as Shikamaru released his hold over her. His hand fell away from her. She put both hands over her cheeks, could feel the way they burned from embarrassment. Or anger. She whirled around to tell him off.
“You—” she might have been able to ad-lib an entire rant were he not waiting, just behind her, ready for her next move. Her diatribe died on her lips as Shikamaru kissed her firmly, his teeth raking along her lower lip and fingers digging into her hips. Temari let out an unintentionally loud breath, caught by surprise, but allowed him to kiss her.
When they separated, Shikamaru laid back on the grass, his hands beside him. “How was that?” He asked, and though his tone was sarcastic she knew he wanted an answer.
“A bit rough,” she critiqued lightly, though she didn’t exactly mind.
She could feel his eyeroll. “You were being a pain.”
“It turns you on,” was her quick reply, and she didn’t know why she was being so bold. Her audacity was rewarded a few minutes later, with the feeling of Shikamaru’s slender fingers moving over hers in the grass. They lay quietly with their hands resting in a little pile between them.
They lay on the riverbank together for a while. The sun had dipped low enough in the sky that the leaves no longer dappled its rays. Copper light was fading to an evening glow as the sun kissed the horizon. Shikamaru spoke, “I’ll miss you too, of course,” he told her in a low voice, echoing his earlier prediction that Temari was going to miss him. Of course, her lack of denial had been taken for agreement, and accurately so.
Temari patted his hand once, then got up to watch the sunset properly. She would miss him, and miss Konoha, but she would also be back soon. For another long visit. There was nothing to worry about at home—her dad was dead, after all. She would be able to hang out with her brothers, if only at mealtimes and night.
She’d be drinking with Shikamaru at the Rusty Shuriken again soon. As she glanced behind her, she could see the imprint of her body, still visible in the grass beside Shikamaru.