Work Text:
He smiles. “Love you.”
He climbs the stairs, noticably more limber than in recent months. She calls his name, but he only repeats it: love you . It’s his nap time, and he lies down to sleep with a smile on his face.
And then he doesn’t wake up.
She doesn’t go check on him--because at their age, sleep is essential, not to mention peaceful. He always comes back down the stairs smiling at her, claiming it’s the second-best nap he’s ever had.
She, of course, knows what he’s going to say next, knows it’s one of his tricks, but she asks anyway. “Second-best?”
“No nap can compete if it’s not with you.”
The tricks are designed to make her smile.
And she always does.
But he doesn’t come down the stairs.
And when she goes to look for him, he’s still in bed.
Only he isn’t moving. Not even his chest.
She’s smart--she knows right away that he’s dead. Passed in his sleep, the way he always wanted to.
Physically, she knows. Her heart is the heaviest it’s been in years.
Chemically, she knows. She feels the tears gathering in her eyes.
Emotionally, she doesn’t understand, because it doesn’t make any sense. She loves him, more than she’s ever loved anything, anyone (excluding their son, but that’s a different kind of love; she got to learn about so many kinds because of him), and he isn’t supposed to die. They aren’t supposed to do this to her--they, who control the fates of people, decide when it is their time to die. They still have things left to do. And maybe they were mundane and boring things, like take turns reading the same book, and compete to see who could find their glasses first, and take walks around the village and marvel at how much it has changed .
Maybe they were mundane, but they still had things to do. Days to live, with each other.
She shakes, standing in the room. She shakes watching his chest, and she sobs every time it does not rise and it should. She shakes when she tells their son, who by now has his own children and a grandchild on the way.
She happens across a mirror on the third day, and is more than startled to see that she is an old woman. They have lived their lives together. Seventy-two years of marriage, a record, maybe, or at least in the village’s top five. She isn’t young anymore. That’s why he died. He hasn’t been young for years. It just sort of escaped her notice that they were old.
Three days later, they find her, passed out in his favorite chair in the living room with her knitting. It resembles a sweater, half-made and a forest green that always made her think of him--so Shikadai describes it at the funeral.
Her death is inconclusive, no apparent cause.
Their bodies burn together, and Shikadai and his kids set the lanterns out to sea for them. That they may rejoin their respective ancestors, that they may find each other again and never have to spend another day apart.
Someone asks, just out of curiosity, what Shikamaru had inscribed into his skin. Temari couldn’t say hers without crying, in the six days she remained after her husband, but they know it just the same; they remembered to check her arm.
It’s for the newspaper article, Shikadai knows, and his first instinct is to refuse-- but some part of him feels like his parents would’ve wanted them made public. His mother’s was Love you , and his father bore his own name. Shikamaru.