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‘He’s sick’ she told Yoshino-san at someone’s birthday party one month after their engagement, when Shikamaru stayed home alluding to a headache.
‘He’s sick’ became something common to say to people later.
Yet, her regular visits to his remote, suburban house continued—to their future home, to be clearer.
But, as far as she was concerned, Shikamaru didn’t usually get sick, so Temari kept an eye on him.
Soon it was noticeable—his sleepy dark eyes, his too silent moments pondering things, the self-absorption during dinner time, the chain smoking inside the house when they'd agreed not to do so while she was there.
He wasn’t sick, he was just thinking, thinking, and thinking and she could see his gears grinding so loudly that it made her sick.
So they fought when she stopped believing him, keeping the volume low and counting to 10 because that’s how she was handling her anger issues; so, she didn’t scream anything when her fiance left one night his bedroom—their future bedroom—by himself and led his silent footsteps along the corridor and towards the couch down in the living room.
I swear I’m going to kill him, she thought that first time, and the next one, and soon every time she heard the noises from the TV on, Temari was so, so tired, that she simply closed her eyes.
Like that, she never heard the squeaky wood from the basement stairs.
.
Maybe what they had was actually a sad, too early engagement.
You can’t handle everything by yourself, she wanted to tell him sometimes.
Oh, well, it turned out Shikamaru has been excelling at that for a considerable number of years, if you take into account that by ‘everything’ it meant having a monster trapped down in the basement. (In the following days, Temari will wonder if Yoshino-san knew about it; if those two Shikamaru’s best-friends-actually-like-siblings knew about it. If next time it was better to wait for Shikamaru and not use the spare keys she had).
Although it wasn’t exactly a monster. By definition, monsters were ugly creatures, like man-eating big birds with beaks of bronze and a sting behind them as a tail.
And for sure, the man wasn’t, strictly speaking, ugly. Or at least his head wasn’t.
Nevertheless, Temari couldn’t even blink at the moment, and the detergent liquid along with the laundry basket in her hands fell to the floor as her heart was in her throat. Deep inside her head she understood that Shikamaru didn’t have a washing machine down the stairs.
“HOLY SHIT, I knew the fucker was hiding something from me,” said the head, a loud outburst from the lungs he hadn't, and Temari had a similar thought. “Name's Hidan,” he continued saying before giving her a chilling smile while everything in her was already screaming to turn around and run, but she couldn’t move, not even a millimeter like she was made of stone.
In a matter of seconds, everything almost turned into hell for the next two hours and a half.
Almost.
.
“There are traumas that are never going to leave him. I knew it before our engagement.”
“Whatever.” The head rolled his eyes, and with the black and white painting on his face now, he wasn’t so handsome anymore.
There was a moment of silence before Temari said something else. It was a little difficult with a painful broken rib from a first fall, but in general she was better now that the rolling head was deep down the hole it belonged to.
“But you gotta go.”
“FUCK NO!”
“Or at least out from my sight... I kept wondering why are you trapped here when you obviously don’t need him? Neither did he. I mean, you’re just a head.”
“For Jashin-sama! You haven’t seen anything of my power! I’ll kill you as I killed that man. As soon as I get my body—“
“I don’t believe it’s buried in a cemetery or behind the house. I bet he incinerated it and flushed the ashes down the toilet.” The head kept glaring at her. “And I wish I could make your head collapse violently inward…” she continued, her tongue sucking her teeth before she rose from the ground, “but apparently he wants to keep you; suffer down here.”
Then she regretted her next word: “Pitiful.”
Immediately, the head started to scream, so loudly that it only put her on alert and on the move. Then the house started shaking.
Minutes later everything finally turned into hell, or at least that was an appropriate definition for Temari after the basement went up in flames.
Due to the screams, the only neighbors next the property called the emergency number as soon as they could.
.
“Shit,” Shikamaru said, like all the world was upon his shoulders. “I shouldn’t have let you unsupervised. I should have stolen your keys back.”
The flames were extinguished faster than they would naturally take, so for Shikamaru’s brief mental relief there weren't firefighters or strangers inside his house.
Temari only observed him sideways but didn’t acknowledge his existence. Sitting in the back of the ambulance, she was in the middle of asking the paramedic for a cigarette. She deserved it, she wouldn't suck her lungs to death right now.
“Temari–”
“You mind?” Temari showed him the cigarette that the paramedic had kindly helped her to light, but still didn’t watch towards Shikamaru. Maybe she was still a little shocked.
Shikamaru needed to keep talking, understanding perfectly what had happened. If that’s why he lost Temari, then the situation was one of life and death for him.
“I… kind of forgot that thing was there for a while. But I came up with a good plan for it before... well, I mean, I was one hundred percent intended to tell you anyway.”
“Like what? Bury it deeper, Shikamaru? Well, your basement is destroyed now; maybe I did the job for you.”
“I appreciate the effort, but it can’t die.”
“It has a name.” Shikamaru made a face at her remark and she finally looked up at him.
The medical professional stopped their emergency treatment after reading the mood of the couple, and certainly they weren't interested in what ‘it’ meant.
"She needs, like, a whole week’s vacation," said the paramedic as their preliminary diagnosis. Then they passed their gaze from her eyes to those of the newcomer man, the obvious couple holding their gaze like nothing else existed. The paramedic, finally walking away, decided their job was done there.
“Good, that’s on you, right?” she asked, and Shikamaru just shrugged, perhaps a little too cowardly himself to utter any word, even an ‘Anything you want, love’. “You’re lucky. Since I still want to marry you, you must be the love of my life.”
Now, that was a big relief.