Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: Part One of a three-parter. These two have overtaken me. I hope they do the same to you.

Smokescreen

Chapter One: Fissure

"He's reaching for her wrist before he even knows he's moving (because her laughter sounds eerily familiar to crying these days and Shikamaru doesn't think he can tell the difference anymore so here - here is where he makes a choice.)" - Yamanaka Ino and Nara Shikamaru. She is losing her mind while he is losing her.

"I'm telling you, they're together together," Ino urges from her spot beside him along the bridge, her legs dangling over the ledge, her arms wrapped around the guardrail as she leans forward, watching Kurenai and Asuma walking down the far street.

Shikamaru makes a disinterested face, leaning back as he plants his hands along the wood of the bridge. "What does it matter, anyway?"

Ino waggles her eyebrows at him. "It means I won the bet with Chouji."

Shikamaru chuckles softly, peering across the river to where their mentor and the kunoichi at his side are talking casually. A cigarette dangles from Asuma's lips, and Kurenai punches his shoulder good-naturedly. It's so very… intimate, in a comfortable sort of way, and Shikamaru turns to look at Ino just then, watching the wide smile that spreads across her face.

She always was a hopeless romantic. Or at the very least, hopeless.

He huffs in annoyance at the remembrance of her love for Sasuke (or rather, her infatuation, as children's love often is, though war makes such affection all the more resilient, even when it is false).

"This will only be trouble," he says on a sigh, closing his eyes to the sun above them.

Ino smacks his shoulder, and it's so very not unusual that he finds he has already braced for the hit.

"Stop being so pessimistic."

"It's my job." He opens one eye to watch her, a frown already at his lips.

"No," Ino stresses, elongating the 'o' enough to make him scoff laughingly while she levels a piqued look his way. "Your job is to be our strategist. So...strategize!"

"Come again?" He blinks both eyes open now in apprehension.

"About what to do with them," she explains, pointing across the way to where Asuma and Kurenai are slowly disappearing before their view. Shikamaru catches the way Asuma's hand lingers at the small of Kurenai's back when he leads her toward a turn in the path, and the way Kurenai inclines her head to better hear what he whispers at her ear, and then suddenly - it is all entirely too intimate and Shikamaru finds himself clearing his throat as he sits up straight and shakes his head.

"I'm not getting involved in that."

"Oh come on." Ino urges, grasping at his arm and shaking it petulantly. "They'd be perfect together."

"They're 'perfectly' fine on their own," he retorts, snorting his derision. "Stop roping me into these schemes of yours. I won't be party to it."

"God," Ino groans, releasing his arm, "this is why no one likes you. You're just so...stale." She wrinkles her nose as she says it.

Shikamaru raises his brows at her in incredulity. "Says the town gossip, who, by the way, nobody likes either."

Ino draws a hand to her chest in mock offense, a dramatic gasp leaving her. "Me? Not likable? Impossible." She bats her eyelashes at him and smirks saucily. "I'm the darling of the village, didn't you know?"

Shikamaru laughs, loud and bright and abrupt. He doesn't miss the way her cheeks flush or the way she grips at the guardrail, even when her smile is brilliant and genuine. "You're crazy," he says as he shakes his head, chuckling.

He's right though, in the end, even when neither of them know it just then. Because in this moment it is only light and laughter and them. But somewhere in the back of Ino's mind, something cracks. The rupture has already begun.

The pieces have already started to fall.

"You're crazy" he had said. And in true jest, they laugh. Because neither of them know it yet.

But when they do - when Ino's mind is in pieces around them, when it is all white light and unfamiliar faces, when she is more Yamanaka than she is Ino and they both know neither will ever return - she will remind him he said this.

She will remind him he called her crazy once, and he had been right.

(He had been so right it nearly stole the breath from her lungs.)

She will tell him, with tears in her eyes and hands gripping her head, with fractured memories and a broken, defeated voice -

She will tell him that he was right from the very start.

If she could only remember.

(They were - each of them - hopeless, afterall.)

It is a gradual loss of sanity, as insanity often goes.

"That's not what I meant," Ino fumes, arms crossing over her chest.

Shikamaru shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. As though you ever say what you mean.

Ino scoffs. "You're one to talk."

Shikamaru blinks at her, his hand falling to his side, staring at her in keen disquiet. "What?"

Ino huffs, throwing her hands into the air. "It's not like you ever say what you mean either. You're never… open with me." She eyes him darkly.

Licking his lips, Shikamaru steps closer to her. "Ino, hold on."

Rolling her eyes, Ino leans her weight to one leg, recrossing her arms. "What?" she snaps.

"I didn't say anything."

She narrows her eyes in frustration. "That's exactly the point. You never do."

"No, Ino," and here is where she pauses, because Shikamaru's eyes are focused in a way she hasn't seen in a very long time, his throat flexing imperceptibly, and suddenly she is alert - alarmed at his stillness. "I didn't say anything," he clarifies.

She doesn't understand for a moment, watching him in this breathless quiet.

And then his voice replays in her head, only the slightest bit muffled, like it came from inside, from just between her ears - this intimate near-whisper.

"Shikamaru," she breathes in the space between them, trembling without notice, her limbs going limp and she reaches for him, grabs a hold of his sleeve, eyes wide. "What's… what's happening?" She thinks maybe her father should have warned her about this (if he was still alive).

Shikamaru's frown sets deep and harsh.

Her fingers stay curled in his sleeve. "What's happening?" she croaks.

She never truly gets an answer.

"This is ridiculous. I don't need a babysitter." Ino huffs her annoyance while she sits along the medical bed, feet swaying back and forth as Sakura's fingers hover over her head, chakra threading into her temples.

Shikamaru crosses his arms over his chest and leans back along the wall. "The Hokage begs to differ."

Another huff. Sakura eyes her crossly, silently commanding the blonde kunoichi to stop fidgeting. Ino straightens at the look, but not without a roll of her eyes.

"Tsunade wants a report on your condition."

"My condition is fine," Ino defends.

He doesn't answer differently, but the fact that they're here at all says everything he doesn't bother voicing, and maybe Ino understands that as well, because she's uncharacteristically silent for the rest of Sakura's examination.

"Any headaches lately?" Sakura asks.

Ino muses for a moment. "Nothing unusual."

"So you have 'usual' headaches then?" The medic nin's brows narrow in focus.

Ino waves her off. "It's nothing serious. The Yamanaka have always had them. Comes from overuse of the clan jutsu sometimes."

Shikamaru straightens from his lean against the wall. "You've never said anything about that."

She eyes him in a strange sort of hesitance, as though this were something he should know without her even mentioning it, but she's afraid to call him on it. What's worse is that he discovers belatedly it is something he should have already known. Distantly, he wonders if Chouji was aware, if maybe he was the only one who hadn't fit the pieces together (and what a ridiculous idea.)

No wonder she'd be hurt. He sees everything else. Why couldn't he see this?

He doesn't have more time to ruminate on it however, because she's shrugging with forced disinterest, her gaze returning to Sakura. "We have ways of dealing with them, clan secrets and all. It isn't important."

"It could be," he says, stepping closer.

She eyes him warily. "It's not."

"He's right, Ino." Sakura looks at her with her soft green gaze, and Ino's back is suddenly stiff and brittle.

"Yeah, well, it's not like it's anything you'd know about, huh? So just leave me to my clan and let us clean up this mess. You can't fix everyone, Sakura."

Shikamaru recognizes the anger that suffuses the air, but he isn't about to step in the middle of this.

Sakura narrows her eyes at Ino, huffing indignantly. Her hands find purchase on her hips and she lifts her chin. "Then I'll be leaving my report to Tsunade and she can decide what to do with your mess."

"Sure, thanks a bunch." Ino is already pushing off the medical bed and heading for the door. Shikamaru turns just in time to see the regretful look sweep across Sakura's face, her arms falling uselessly to her side, before he follows his teammate out the door.

He's with her until they exit the hospital, his hands stuffed in his pockets, Ino determinedly striding through the halls. When they break out into the sun she suddenly stops, Shikamaru pulling up short just behind her. She sighs, leans her head back to look into that wide, cloudless sky, her fists curling and uncurling at her sides.

"I don't need an escort, Shikamaru, I know how to get home from here." She says it shortly, but even he can catch the crack in her voice. He's always known her just a bit more than she'd have liked, though neither of them would admit to it. So she swallows down that break and closes her eyes to the sun.

He shrugs noncommittally, and his distinct non-answer has Ino looking back at him over her shoulder.

"Isn't...Temari visiting today?"

Something constricts inside his chest at the name, but he can't be bothered to figure out exactly what. He can't be sure if the feeling is welcomed or not, and either way, this is where he needs to be right now. So he will stay.

"Yeah," he says in answer, though it tells her nothing, and himself even less, because he should be heading to meet the Suna kunoichi already and yet he can't seem to move his feet and damn if Ino isn't the most troublesome woman he knows (even still, he stays - he always does.)

Ino turns fully to him. "So…?" She motions her hands for him to continue, fully expecting him to give his farewells and be on his way.

"So let's go for a drink," he finds himself saying.

Her frown is instant. "Excuse me?"

"Let's go for a drink," he repeats, a daring smirk sliding across his face. "Or didn't you hear me?" He taps at his head meaningfully.

Ino's mouth parts to release something equally scathing and scandalized but instead it's a hoarse choke of laughter that passes her lips. She clamps her mouth shut quickly, glaring at his responding chuckle. "That's not funny," she retorts.

He shrugs again, hands still stuffed in his pockets. "It's kind of funny," he defends, his smirk staying stubbornly put.

Ino pulls her shoulders back as though in challenge, but then something passes over her face and in the moment she releases her breath, her own soft laugh coloring the air as she shakes her head at him, Shikamaru finds it isn't funny at all.

Not really. Maybe not ever.

But it is all they can do to laugh.

He's reaching for her wrist before he even knows he's moving (because her laughter sounds eerily familiar to crying these days and Shikamaru doesn't think he can tell the difference anymore so here - here is where he makes a choice.)

Temari is but a distant thought when he wraps his fingers around her wrist and tugs. "Come on."

He pulls her gently after him, and though her face is a reluctant protest, she lets him. She is staring at the space between his shoulder blades as he leads her away. Away from the hospital. Away from home.

When he hears the first sniffle leave her, he slips his hand down her wrist and links his fingers through hers, taking her by the hand.

He doesn't see the way she fiercely wipes the wetness from her eyes before the tears can fall, but her laughter still sounds like sobbing and he doesn't know which hurts worse anymore.

(It's a different kind of tightness in his chest but Shikamaru has never been one to chase trouble before.)

Months pass and nothing happens. Ino begins to think it a fluke, a mishap, a symptom of stress from the recent war. She waves off Sakura's concern and doesn't pass on missions. It's pointless to be scared of voices in her head.

It wasn't anything new anyway. She'd never been alone in there in the first place.

"Ino!" Chouji calls, dodging another attack from the enemy nin. She knows what to do on instinct, her hands moving into the appropriate sign, and when she takes the mind of the nearest nin, something jars unnaturally. She braces her feet in the dirt, rocking back with the force of it, and for a moment, all she sees is white.

But it only lasts a second, because the next thing she knows, she's using her ninjutsu to manipulate her puppet into slashing across his comrade's stomach, flipping him back into another opponent, launching a kunai at the nin barreling toward Shikamaru. She lasts nearly two full minutes in the body before his throat is cut, clean and swift, Ino's connection ruptured violently.

Another flash of white. An abrupt catch of air in her lungs. And then a ragged cough of blood spraying the air, her hand going to her throat.

Shikamaru swings sharp eyes her way, dispatching his own opponent swiftly and then bounding toward her. The last enemy nin drops to his knees in the grass before Chouji just as Ino falls herself, an unintelligible croak breaking over her blood-flecked lips.

Shikamaru catches her, bracing her against his chest, eyes wild on hers. "Ino, Ino. What happened? Ino!" He shakes her.

She screams - sharp enough to split bone - before her eyes roll back into her head and unconsciousness greets her.

It is not the first time she has woken in the hospital.

It is also not the last.

"You look like shit," he muses, slumping back in the non-comfy chair beside her hospital bed.

Ino chucks her unopened cup of pudding at him.

He dodges it easily enough, chuckling as she throws him a withered look.

"If you're just going to insult me than you can just leave already."

"Look, I won't anymore, okay?" He gives her an almost pleading look ('almost' because she doesn't think she's ever seen him plead before in the first place).

She only narrows her eyes at him.

Shikamaru rolls his eyes, and then stops, recognizing the habit as hers and why the hell is he even here?

(He knows, though he will never say.)

Silence pervades the room for long minutes, stunted by Ino's labored breathing as she lays back against the pillow, her brows furrowed, forehead sweat-slicked. Shikamaru takes the moment to watch her, to take in the sharp angle of her nose and the full lashes along her lids, the slight frown to her full lips, the way her long, brilliant hair spreads dimly along her sheets in the shuttered light from the closed blinds. This is his teammate. His friend. Ino is… she is…

Quite pretty, if he thinks too long about it. Pretty in a sharp, unconventional sense. In a way that cuts. A way that reminds you how very mortal, how very temporary you are.

Ino's beauty is the rush of air as a kunai glides past and the whisper of gliding skin when his hands form a seal.

She blinks her eyes open to watch him as his gaze flickers to her lips - where only harsh words and one single, heart-stopping scream has ever issued from - and he can think of nothing else but kissing her.

"Shikamaru."

He turns his gaze from her face, his hands clasping each other tightly in his lap. "The Hokage wants to see you," he says (instead of the many things he wants to say).

Ino shifts along the pillows, sighing as she settles. "I figured as much."

"Then I'll be… I'll be going." He stands then, his chair scraping harshly along the floor with his jarring movement.

"Okay," she breathes lowly, eyes on her hands as they clench the sheets in her lap.

He leaves before he says more. Before he does more.

Shikamaru glances back just before the door slides shut behind him, catching the way she looks to the window and the cloudless sky beyond it.

What he doesn't catch is the ragged breath that leaves her, or the way his fingers curl around the door handle, or the tightness in his chest when he realizes his words are futile.

Because Ino is -

Shikamaru closes his eyes.

(teammate, friend, pretty)

Because Ino is not his.

Ino is tipsy. The mark where her IV was injected is already faded from the back of her hand, her temples barely even sore anymore from Sakura's probing, and Tsunade's letter has been left forgotten on her desk for the night.

It's Chouji's birthday, and nothing can dampen the celebration. Not even the whispers in the back of her mind, or the subtle throb of heat behind her eyes, or the soft inkling of white at the corners of her vision. No. These things are temporary. They come and they go. It is part of being Yamanaka. She's known this from the start, or at least, known some semblance of it, from what she could glean from her father, before he had passed - his words bright in her mind, even still, the heady weight of his screams still reverberating in her mind, pushed back and back and back until it is only a faint echo in the distant reaches of her memories.

No, she reminds herself. This is a day of joy. And when she slides into the seat beside Chouji and wraps her hands around his arm, watching him turn his brilliant smile her way, she remembers that nothing can take this from her. Not even her slowly brimming insanity.

(Pushed back and back and back until -

There is no space left for such screams.)

Ino swallows back her trepidation and leans her head on Chouji's shoulder. "I miss this," she says affectionately, her smile tugging at her lips while she watches Kiba and Naruto argue over the last bowl of BBQ meat, the grill sizzling in the center of the table, and across from them, Tenten is parsoning out the cooked pork to Lee, Shino, and Hinata's bowls, the two quieter ones of the trio objecting politely while Lee energetically gobbles up all three of their portions while they're busy playing manners. Sakura and Sai are waving down the waitress for more bottles of sake and in the corner of the restaurant, Shikamaru is talking furtively with Temari.

Ino blinks, watching them a moment, catching the way the fiery Suna kunoichi motions to the table, and then jabs a finger into Shikamaru's chest, her cheeks pink with her frustration, her hands landing on her hips. Shikamaru turns his gaze from his partner, his hand rubbing the back of his neck and he says something that makes her recoil softly. Temari licks her lips, her shoulders slumping slightly, and the look on her face is something Ino recognizes immediately (but she doesn't like to think too long about it).

She can't look at them anymore, so she turns her head, the heavy knot of unease still lodged in her throat, and she clings to Chouji's arm more surely. In the rash of joyous noise around them, she is lost, her world narrowing to a pinprick focus, and when Chouji chuckles beside her, his hand coming up to brace beneath her chin, raising her gaze to his, Ino thinks her lungs might burst beneath this weight.

"It's my birthday, Ino," he says softly, smiling. And then he flicks her chin, laughing as he leans back, and for just a moment it is enough to anchor her, and she releases the breath she was holding, watching him retreat back as he watches her tenderly. "You're not allowed to be sad."

Ino blinks, pulling back from her lean against him, her hands still wrapped securely around his arm. "I'm not sad." And then she scoffs for good measure, her throat dry.

He lifts a single raised brow and it's all she needs to feel guilty suddenly.

"He's being vague again, isn't he?"

She stares at him, blinking dumbly. "Who?"

This time it's his turn to scoff, though it's lined with laughter. "Don't play stupid, Ino. It doesn't suit you."

She pokes him in the ribs, earning a short yelp and a deadly glare. It makes the smile return easily to her face, and she narrows her eyes at him playfully. "Stop being so nosy."

He laughs again, this time louder, boisterous, genuine. "Never thought I'd hear those words from your mouth, Ino."

She smacks his arm good-naturedly. "Alright with the sass. I think you're taking this birthday thing a little too far."

Chouji laughs, his chest bubbling with the sound, and then he's looking down to his plate, his brow furrowing. He glances back at Ino. She's laughing at something Kiba is saying, watching as the man grapples with Naruto along the other bench, her hand still locked around Chouji's arm and he suddenly realizes how very not Ino she seems tonight. How very...subdued.

Chouji looks back at his plate, eyeing the lone piece of meat he was ready to devour, and with a heavy, knowing sigh, he picks it up with his chopsticks and plops it down onto Ino's plate. She glances to it, her laugh ebbing, her mouth pursing in thought, before she looks at Chouji.

She raises her brows at this last piece of meat he's offered her, her hand clenching reflexively along his arm. "What's this?"

"Just…" He stops, shaking his head, looking elsewhere. "You're not allowed to be sad," he repeats, this time softer.

Ino stares at him a while longer, the noise in the room slowly dimming to a hum, and even she can tell that this is no longer about Shikamaru. This isn't about anything but her. And that's when the terror sets in.

He finally looks at her, and something flares hot inside her. Anger, or pride, or maybe just the slightest touch of self-preservation that makes her callous - makes her brittle to the world. She narrows her eyes at him.

Chouji leans back in his seat with a defeated slump. "Are you okay, Ino? Is it… is it your head? Your… I mean, are you okay?"

Swallowing the tight knot in her throat, Ino releases her hold of Chouji's arm, watching as his gaze lowers, his face faltering with something akin to loss.

She doesn't care.

Because she isn't sick, dammit, she isn't… she isn't hurting. She isn't broken or breaking or dead. It's just a headache. It's just a stupid headache, and some voices, and fuck - she knew she shouldn't have gone to the hospital. Keep it in the clan. Keep it tight, keep it closed. Don't let them see you break.

It's just your mind, afterall.

Ino grits her teeth.

Just… fuck what the Hokage wants and fuck what Chouji thinks and fuck this entire mess if it means - if it means -

She glances back to Shikamaru in time to see Temari brushing past him, a hand over her eyes while his gaze is on the floor, hands securely and safely in his pockets. He sighs, and it takes his whole body.

Ino frowns at their teammate, and Chouji holds his tongue, his hand moving over Ino's.

"Ino, don't - "

But she is already standing.

Shikamaru catches her eye just before he leaves the building, his features hardened in frustration, his shoulders tight with unease. She moves - and Chouji's hand on her wrist stills her.

She glances back down to Chouji, her free hand reaching up to rub at her temples. She doesn't notice the concerned glance Sakura sends her way, or the way Chouji rubs his thumb along her pulse point comfortingly.

"You need rest, Ino. You need… you need time."

She isn't sure whether Chouji's talking about her or talking about them but it doesn't even matter, because the white light is edging across her vision and she's dropping back down into her seat and she's just so fucking angry because - because -

"It's your birthday, Chouji," she expels on a breath of pain. She shakes her head and pulls her hands from her temples. "And I'm not allowed to be sad." She ends with a crack to her voice, though she desperately hopes he doesn't hear it, and when she looks back at him, blinking away the hot sting of salt on her lids as she smiles haltingly, she also hopes he doesn't see her shaking fists.

Shikamaru, she thinks, but this insanity of hers is a one-way street.

There is no answer at the end of the far walk.

He finds Ino at the bar, already four cups in before he even gets there. From behind, she looks exactly the same as she always does, except perhaps, for the slight slump of her shoulders - unnoticeable by anyone other than either he or Chouji and fuck he didn't think he had it in him today to comfort her. Not after Temari had...well, not after Temari.

Shikamaru thinks maybe some troubles are worth having but not this. Their goodbye had been stilted and full of half-truths. She had called him distant. He had called her suspicious. She had thrown out Ino's name once, almost in a crazed, desperate denial - but once had been enough. He wasn't going to listen to it anymore, because it was pointless, and untrue, and...and now here he was, looking for her.

As if Temari hadn't already called it and this - this is where Shikamaru decides maybe she had reason to be suspicious.

He thinks back to when they were children, to when Ino was especially down and he would step up behind her and cover her eyes with his hands, tell her it was okay to cry, and that no, the world couldn't see her, just go on, stop being stupid about it - "it's okay to cry, I'm here, aren't I?" - and she would hold onto his wrists while she sobbed, her nails digging half-moons into his skin and he'd wince, grimacing, but he never pulled away, never until she was ready, just watching the way their shadows intertwined on the ground before them and somehow never questioning it.

Shikamaru moves before he can stop himself and then his hands are reaching around her form, and she stiffens, her shoulders going taut, until he folds his hands over her eyes and stills behind her, his breath brushing the top of her ponytail. They stay like this for many moments. Enough for Shikamaru to wonder at the way their shadows still fit seamlessly.

And then Ino is pulling at his wrists, but not in any way she used to. This time it's irritably and sharply - this time it isn't half-moons biting at his skin but angry, irretrievable loss.

(When they were children, maybe...maybe...)

"You can't do that anymore, Shikamaru," she says sullenly, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye when he settles at the bar next to her. "We're not children anymore."

This he knows. This he knows more than she will ever understand.

And this he mourns.

Ino sighs, swirling the sake in her cup slowly as she eyes the drink. "Sakura saw Sasuke today."

He can't help the dark chuckle that leaves him, the gruff scorn staining his tongue.

Ino's pink cheeks flash a hot red as she narrows her gaze to him. "It isn't what you think."

"You miss him," he says with a shrug, turning fully to the bar so that he doesn't have to look at her when he says it. "Even still." He's gotten so good at feigning disinterest.

Rolling her eyes, Ino throws back her glass of sake. Beside her, Shikamaru pours himself a cup. "I told you," she presses, slamming her cup back down on the bartop. "That isn't it."

He raises one speculative brow and watches her chest puff out in indignation.

"She waits and waits and fucking waits for him. Endlessly. And he comes back - what - once every few months? A year? Two?" She shakes her head, reaching for the bottle, throat already dry for another pour. "While Sakura wastes away - stagnant, stuck without him. It's pathetic. It's...not the Sakura I know." She grimaces at the sip she takes. "It's not the life I ever wished for her." Ino grips the neck of the bottle tightly, staring down at her half-empty cup. Or was it half-full? She couldn't rightly tell at this point, and truthfully what did it matter? Half-full or half-empty, it was still never whole. Never wholly full, never wholly empty. Just this liminal mid-point of agonizing indecision. And dammit, why is she even thinking about this shit? What is wrong with her? Why does it fucking matter?

(Because he does, she reminds herself, years later. Because he matters.)

Ino shakes her head, gritting her teeth. "And then one day Sasuke shows up and flicks her fucking forehead and everything's suddenly okay. Life is good. She's back in love. She's whole again."

Something about half-full or half-empty cups always kind of stuck with Ino because it sounds suspiciously like love (love in the way she knows it, at least) and what she really wants to do is just chuck the whole damn cup through the window and never have to look at it again but then -

But then, here she is.

(The trick is to never stop pouring. You can't have a half-empty-half-full anything if you just keep pouring - overflowing, past the rim and down down down -

The kind of love that doesn't stop.)

Shikamaru takes a swig of sake. "You're jealous."

And where the fuck did he get that one from?

Ino's attention swerves to him so tightly she almost falls off her stool. "Excuse me?" It's a hiss of air that leaves her.

"Because he does come back. Because he comes back to her."

Ino's cup very nearly shatters in her hand. "You're not fucking listening." And then she scoffs, shaking her head as she spits her words heatedly. "I won't live like that. I won't waste my life waiting. Not for anyone." She stops, pulls a sharp breath in, watches him with meaningful eyes.

He has to look away at the blazing blue of her gaze.

She releases a rueful laugh, digging the heel of her palm into her eye, her shoulders shaking with the heavy mirth of it. "And what a fucking joke. Because you're still not listening." She drops her hand, watches him intently. "Maybe that's been the problem all along."

He looks back at her to see her tear her gaze from him, her throat constricting with the tight swallow she takes, the gleam of wetness over her eyes barely discernible just before she turns from him.

He grabs for her wrist, for anything, for those half-moons that used to dot his skin.

(For the comforting darkness of their linked shadows.)

She stops, eyes closing, breath pulling tight in her chest. "You can't do that anymore," she repeats simply.

It's okay to cry, he thinks, but he isn't sure who he says it to, and it doesn't matter anyway, since it's no longer a comfort and they're no longer children and now - now - Shikamaru knows exactly what he mourns.

He releases her reluctantly and before he can say another word she is already leaving. She doesn't wait for him.

(She already said she wouldn't.)

Chapter Text

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Smokescreen

Chapter Two: Rupture

"This is where her ending really starts. Ino knew it then, like she knows it now. Love is transient for shinobi like her." - Yamanaka Ino and Nara Shikamaru. She is losing her mind while he is losing her.

* * *

"So are you two…?" Ino lets the question hang in the air, along with her motioning hand.

Sakura sends Ino a piqued look from her side of the table, one eyebrow raised. "Are we…?"

Ino rolls her eyes and throws a thumb in Kiba's direction while he's busy grabbing drinks from the bar. "Are you two banging now, or what?"

The hiss that escapes Sakura's lips leaves Ino feeling mildly satisfied. She smirks in response, lounging back along the booth seat.

Sakura stabs her chopsticks into her bowl of ramen. "Not that it's any of your business but - "

"But you are," Ino interrupts, waggling her eyebrows.

The growl that brews in the other kunoichi's throat reminds her too much of Kiba for it not to send a clutch of tenderness to her heart. Her smirk softens out into a cheeky grin as she plops her chin into her palm, elbow resting along the table. "Do you love him?"

Yes, she hears in her head almost immediately, in a guttural, aching sort of voice that could only ever be Sakura.

But Sakura is disinterestedly twirling her chopsticks around her bowl, eyes on her noodles, and the faint dusting of pink that lines her cheeks reminds Ino that such a 'yes' was not hers to hear. She feels intrusive suddenly, her chin coming up off her palm as she leans back, lips opening as though to speak, and then closing mutely, her throat tightening.

"It's not like that," Sakura says instead of the truth that Ino already knows, and Ino wants to shake her suddenly, almost brutally.

Sakura sighs, a tender laugh falling from her lips, and her eyes are so agonizingly green and ardent and naive (always naive, Ino's known, and yet, she wouldn't change her for the world). "We're just...taking our time. You know, after Sasuke, I just… I just… "

Ino finds her center easily enough. It's called anger, and she welcomes it too often these days. Her hands clench into fists as she draws them back over her lap. "How nice that must be," she says so lowly she almost seethes it.

The other woman eyes her in startled confusion.

But Ino catches herself. She catches herself before she becomes something she hates, and this is Sakura she reminds herself - stubborn, meddlesome, blinded, tender Sakura - and this is not what she wants. This is not who she wants to be to her, because they all deserved something real, something present after the war.

They all deserved someone to come home to - Sakura more than most.

Ino knows this, even if it hurts, even if she won't admit to wishing for it desperately herself.

"Okay, who likes pineapple?" Kiba asks brightly as he arrives with three drinks in hand, and Ino stands stiffly, jostling Kiba with her suddenness so that the mixed drinks slosh over his hands. He gives her a narrowed glare but says nothing, and Ino is grateful, because she must leave. Get out and away and home (or to him, but she won't let herself think it) and -

Ino. Sakura's voice is clear once more, resonating in the space between her ears, and she puts out a hand to stall her.

"Don't - just… don't."

Sakura blinks startled eyes at her and something like understanding passes between them.

"You two - you two have fun," she says stiffly, and then she's stalking away, Kiba's faintly incredulous growl of "What? What did I say?" trailing after her and she hopes beyond all else that Sakura hadn't seen the sheen of wetness along her lids just before she turned.

She hopes, even still. Even when she knows the truth.

He tells her one day that he… he thinks this might be more than friendship.

He thinks this because he can't rightly name the color of her hair anymore, and because he knows the sound of her footsteps, even when he isn't listening for them, and because when they spar he finds his shadow reaching for hers even without his bidding and all this - all this - tells him it is more.

He'd be a fool to think otherwise, and let it be said that Nara Shikamaru is not a fool.

Ino blinks at him, her mouth parted, watching as he stands before her, panting heatedly, his words lingering in the air between them.

His hands curl and unfurl - from fist to flutter - and suddenly it seems the easiest thing in the world to kiss her.

To press lips to lips and just… breathe together. To know the warmth of her. To know the slick taste of her. To just…

He's already leaning in, one hand braced along her shoulder, tugging her gently to him, and there's a moment, a half-instant of recognition, when he's reminded why he's never kissed her before.

(And why he won't ever again - not if he plans to do right by her.)

Something shifts in her eyes, a shadow (a curse, he calls it, years later - when she is too pliant and soft to be Yamanaka ever again).

"Shikamaru," she says, a flutter of confusion lining her voice, her eyes glancing around as though unfamiliar, and he is already leaning back, already sliding his hand from her shoulder to lay limp at his side.

Because she doesn't remember. Maybe just this moment, maybe all the moments before, but it doesn't matter.

He won't take advantage of her like this. He won't kiss her unless she is present for it. He won't touch her until she asks him to (if she ever does).

He won't tell her how much he wants her until she's ready to know just how much he means it (and hopefully, to want him back as well.)

"Why are we on the training grounds?" Ino asks, glancing at their surroundings.

The thing is, it's not so difficult to blend your shadow to another's. It's when dusk comes, when twilight breaks across your forms as damning and dark as memory (this memory that she is losing), that shadows begin to lose their hold.

Shikamaru is losing his hold in such a twilight.

Even still, she smiles up at him, unaware, and in the time it takes for her to shake the momentary confusion off, she is already running across the field back toward the village, waving him after her in affectionate impatience and he -

He has already lost sight of her shadow.

He's been taking missions with other shinobi, and while he knows Ino isn't dumb enough not to notice, he also knows she's too proud to say anything about it. And so time passes, and he hasn't met her shadow in weeks now, and before he knows exactly how to get out of it, the Hokage is sending them on a mission to Suna, and Shikamaru spends more time chatting up Chouji along the way than he thinks he's ever done in his entire life with the man.

Ino stalks behind them heatedly, feigning disinterest.

(But again, he knows her just a little bit more than either would admit to, and she isn't going to be the one to point it out.)

By the time they arrive in Suna, her ire has mellowed into a low simmer, and he isn't entirely unaware of the way she rubs at her temples or blinks frantically beneath the sweltering sun. He stops them in the atrium of the Kazekage's tower and turns to her abruptly. She nearly collides with his chest in her inattention. Chouji comes to a stop beside them, a single brow raised.

Ino blinks up at Shikamaru, her lips thinning into a frown. "What?"

A frustrated huff leaves him as he stuffs his hands into his pockets. "Why don't you get some rest before we see the Kazekage?"

She narrows her eyes at him. "I'm fine."

"Except you're not."

Her frown harshens, and something overtakes him, something that never really lets go. "Ino," he says softer than he's ever said before, one hand escaping from his pocket to grasp at her elbow, holding her there before him. "It's okay if you're not. It's okay if - " And then he stops, looking down at where his fingers wind around her elbow, wondering how she hasn't shaken his touch from her yet. "You should rest. Some things can wait."

She watches him in silence, her brows furrowed, ignoring the sweat beading across her forehead that comes from something stronger than Suna's sun. Chouji takes that moment to step up to Ino, planting a hand on her forehead and gauging her temperature nervously, though she lets him, her eyes still on Shikamaru, and something in him rattles at her easy acceptance of their teammate's touch, but he will not voice it. Either way, he is grateful for Chouji

"Mmm, you don't have a fever, Ino," Chouji muses, his hand slipping away. "Why are you sweating so much? Maybe you should lie down."

Her eyes flutter against Shikamaru's determined stare, before she closes them in defeat, turning into Chouji and dropping her head to his shoulder, her arm still held in Shikamaru's tentative grip. They stand like this for many moments, until Shikamaru finds his courage and moves to brush the long strands of her golden hair past her bare shoulder, his fingers inches from her skin but then -

Across the atrium, Temari stands watching them. He catches her gaze before he can touch his fingers to Ino's hair, and Chouji shifts as well when he notices Shikamaru's pained look, glancing back over his shoulder at the kunoichi. Ino pulls from her lean against Chouji when he moves and for a moment, when her eyes lock with Temari's, she is ripe with equal amounts shame and indignation and pride and guilt and none of it makes any sense to her. Not when Shikamaru's hold tightens over her elbow and he starts pulling her along, in the opposite direction of Temari, her spluttered resistance going unheeded and for a split-right-down-the-middle second, she sees something in Temari's eyes that looks strikingly like grief.

It doesn't suit the kunoichi, and now Ino is angry again for an altogether different reason (she hasn't stopped to think about why anger tastes so familiar on her tongue these days and she doesn't really want to, truth be told). She tugs her arm from Shikamaru but he holds fast, looking ahead. "You should go to her, Shikamaru," she says, and he stills at that.

She can hear Chouji's sigh at her side.

"We have nothing left to say to each other." And then he is moving again, and this is not what he came to Suna to do, but somehow he always knew it would be this way. He'd be fooling himself, otherwise.

"What? I don't… I don't understand. Why not?" She follows dumbly behind him, trying not to notice the way his thumb brushes along the skin of her arm and how he trembles so.

"Ino," Chouji whispers, almost warningly.

She huffs in impatience. "What?"

"Shikamaru ended it with Temari weeks ago."

This has them both stopping, Shikamaru's fingers clenching tight around her elbow once, and then releasing, his hand falling limp to his side.

Ino stares at Chouji, breathless, and then she glances back at where the Suna kunoichi had last stood, only to find her suddenly gone and fuck, she hadn't expected it to hurt this much.

But she imagines that's simply an extension of knowing Shikamaru like she does. Her gaze snaps to him instantly, and he keeps his head turned, but she doesn't need to meet his eyes to understand.

He is hurting, maybe in ways she will never be able to soothe, and suddenly she feels all at once selfish and emboldened and… and keenly saddened. She reaches for him herself this time, and when her hands wind around his and hold him there, her words dying on her lips, she begins to wonder if maybe some things are worth forgetting.

But then Shikamaru pulls his shoulders back, swallowing tightly, his gaze still turned from hers. He doesn't curl his fingers around hers, and she can't rightly tell if she is grateful for that or not. But he tugs her along, nonetheless, his simple "Come on" more a croak than anything, and she falls into step behind him easily.

She means to say "I'm sorry" at some point along the way, but she never really gets there.

Maybe because she never really means it (and this is where she discovers exactly what it is she saw in Temari's gaze).

But he doesn't ask for an apology, and this she should have known from the start, even though the quiet affection of it still startles her to breathlessness.

She's tired of this. Just… absolutely and utterly done. She doesn't have the time to play these sorts of games (she doesn't have any time at all, not if the slow slip of white into her vision or the growing throb of painful heat behind her eyes is any indication).

And most of all, she's tired of being scared.

She's Yamanaka Ino, after all. And she will not live like this.

"Why isn't it me?" Ino asks, her voice thunderous as she marches into the clearing where Shikamaru is training.

He stills in his crouch, senbon held between his knuckles in preparation for a throw. He looks up at her, eyebrows rising as he stands. "Ino, what are you… ?"

"Why isn't it me?" she asks again, stopping just before him, her hands going to her hips. Yes, yes because this is easier. Anger is always easier with Shikamaru (though she never likes to linger on what that means.) Her brows angle down with a sharpness, her face pinched in frustration, but the slight quiver of her tightly pursed lips is all Shikamaru needs to see.

He sighs, turning his gaze as he stuffs his senbon into the pack on his leg before he straightens, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Can we not do this right now?"

"Then when? When I can't remember why it matters so much? When I've forgotten how this makes me feel? When I've forgotten you?"

He clenches his jaw, hand sliding from the back of his neck to hang uselessly at his side. "That's not going to happen, Ino."

"You don't know that."

He falls silent. She stares at him with her fists clenching at her sides, and then she raises a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, and Shikamaru takes a cautious step forward and she's just so fucking sick of this wary back-and-forth with him. This way he hovers around her, never letting her forget, never giving her peace, and yet, always out of reach.

"Ino, are you okay?"

"I'm not fucking okay!" she yells, dropping her hand from her face, glaring at him like this is his fault. And it is. It's entirely his fault, because she wouldn't be like this if it wasn't for him and maybe part of her is okay with that - the crazed, reckless, needful part of her that knows his shadow better than anyone, that knows just how well it bleeds into her own when he doesn't think she's looking - but more than anything she's just… she just…

She's not ready to let this go. She's not ready to give this up to madness (if she wasn't already mad before.)

"I'm not okay because I like you, Shikamaru, do you understand? I've always liked you, even when I didn't like you, and that's way too fucking often lately. And I don't know, maybe I've always just… pushed it back, you know? Never thought too much about it, because you're my friend, my teammate. You're Nara Shikamaru and I'm Yamanaka Ino and nothing in the world could ever change that. Nothing. But I still…" She stops, pulls a deep breath in, lets it sit in her lungs until she remembers how to exhale, and this - this is what she hopes (desperately and daily) that she never forgets. "I said I wouldn't wait for you, but I'm also not going to hide from you. And you can… you can take that how you will. I just… needed you to know." She swallows tightly, her shoulders slumping as she stares at him, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth. "I needed you to know before I - if I ever got to the point where I… I couldn't tell you anymore." Her voice cracks with the last words, her fists taken to trembling, and she has to look away, blink back the wetness at her lids.

God, what a stupid… stupid wish.

Ino digs the knuckles of one hand into her eye socket, huffing her frustration, and just before she pivots to walk back, to walk away - up and up and out of there, just… away -

(From this. From him.)

- Shikamaru has her by the wrist.

Ino looks down at where he holds her, watches the white stretch of skin over her taut knuckles and the determined curl of his fingers around her pulse point.

She hates the way the air stalls in her chest, but he doesn't have to know, she reminds herself, swallowing thickly, blinking up at him in practised ease.

"It is you," he says, without any other explanation, his eyes staring unnervingly into hers. As though she should have known. As though it's always been. As though it were nothing to say as such. "It is you, Ino," he repeats in answer to the question that had her storming onto the training grounds in the first place, and her throat goes dry.

She shuffles before him, blinking steadily at him. "What are you trying to say?" Because she needs to know. She needs to know.

And then he sighs, and she's angry all over again, and suddenly, she could laugh. Because isn't this just so 'them'? Isn't this them inside and out and all the way across the fucking universe? Inexplicably - he sighs, and she blusters. It is so very 'them' she thinks she might burst with the ardent affection it stirs in her, heated even as it is.

"You know what I'm trying to say."

And this is where she smirks, minute as it is. Because yes, she finally thinks she does. But even still: "No, I don't think I do, Shikamaru."

A bubble of frustration sounds in his throat. "Why are you so - "

And then she has a finger in the air to stop him. "Don't you dare say 'troublesome', Shikamaru, or I swear to God I will - "

"I'm going to kiss you," he says in exasperation, his fingers tightening on her wrist as he steps forward.

Ino clamps her mouth shut and stares at him.

He stares back, brows furrowed, eyes on her mouth. He licks his lips in anticipation and glances back at her eyes. They stand like this for longer than Ino thinks means anything good. Long enough for her heart to clench in her chest. His hand doesn't move from her wrist, but he also doesn't step closer.

Something in her flares - perhaps insecurity, or maybe desperation, but either way it has her pulling her wrist from his grasp and crossing her arms, straightening her back, steadying this rabid rage of her heart against her ribs. "Well, are you going to or not?"

Shikamaru frowns, the intensity in his features faltering for a moment in favor of aggravation. "Don't be so impatient."

"Don't be so hesitant," she quips back.

Shikamaru gives her a withered look. "I tell you I'm about to kiss you, and you antagonize me. Why is this so familiar?"

Ino rolls her eyes. "And yet you still haven't kissed me."

"Will you just… just give me a second."

"Why? You've had a lifetime, Shikamaru."

He rubs a hand down his face. "This is ridiculous."

Her skin prickles with the anxiety, her fingers clenching over her crossed arms, and the tightness in her chest is both aching and comforting, because she wants nothing more than for him to kiss her in this instant. But she isn't sure whether he'd be doing it for him, or for her. And she won't take a pity kiss. She won't accept anything less than his genuine, unfiltered affection, because she plans on giving exactly that herself and she doesn't have time to be invested in anything less.

She will have all of him, or none of him, and this she can live with - because she will have to.

"Ridiculous?" she nearly spits in question.

"Yes, ridiculous!" And she doesn't expect the harsh expel of breath that leaves him with the words, or the way he looks at her wildly, darkly (or the way her spine tingles at such a look). "I'm trying here, Ino, I really am and I - "

"I don't have time for 'try', Shikamaru. You of all people know that."

And here is where he stills, silent, probably because he does know, and she hates that she must remind him of it. But she isn't waiting anymore.

"You're either in this with me, or you're not. No 'maybe's, no 'sort of's, no… " She pauses, steadying her breath, licking her lips before continuing. "No 'trying'."

Shikamaru keeps his dark gaze on her, his chest heaving.

Ino shakes her head, her hands going into the air. "And maybe you're right. Maybe this is ridiculous. Maybe it's been crazy from the start. But I don't know how to not be this way, how to not like you, to not think about you - to not think about why you know exactly how I take my tea and exactly when to cut off my sake and exactly how many senbon I keep in my thigh-pack and exactly how to fit your shadow to mine and I don't want to not think of these things. I don't want to forget the way your hand feels in mine or how it feels to wake in the hospital with you asleep at my bedside and if you tell me that you're 'trying' one more time, or that 'maybe' you feel something for me then I don't think I could fucking take it, Shikamaru, I don't think I can - "

There is no 'maybe' to how he fits his hands to her cheeks and pulls her to him. There is no 'maybe' to how the breath shudders from him in a single swift exhale just before he presses his mouth to hers. There is no 'maybe' to the soft press of his tongue against her lips or the way he winds his hands into her hair and presses his chest so tightly and so assuredly into hers that she stumbles back from the fervency of it.

But most of all, there is no 'maybe' to the way he breaks from her, hands unforgiving in their grip, lips bruised, eyes demanding.

There is no 'maybe' when he tells her "It is you, Ino, and I'm not fucking saying it again."

She is breathless and limp in his arms when he smirks at her, before he leans in again, mouth opening over her own gasping one, tongue slipping in with a deft confidence that has her stumbling back and into the tree at her back, where he presses into her, his hands still cupping her face, so desperate in his hold, and when she finally finds herself again, her hands are already curling into his shirt, her back arching against him and now, finally -

There is no 'maybe' to them.

There is just this.

There is just…

Her sob against his lips is swallowed so tenderly and so wholly by his mouth she begins to think such madness is welcome.

It's been weeks, and even still, he doesn't know how they ended up like this, with Ino straddling him in his bed, his hands in her hair, his lips pressed to hers, and he finds the coil of desire in his gut is more ache than release because he doesn't know how they ended up like this and maybe he should have.

Maybe this is happening all wrong.

Maybe this is just her desperation, just her loneliness.

(Except he will never know what loneliness, what sorrow such insanity brings - not fully, not like she knows.)

"Wait, wait," Shikamaru says as he breaks from her mouth, one hand tugging on her hair as his other settles down to her hip, like an anchor (because some part of him is still drowning).

Ino growls impatiently above him as she braces her hands on either side of his head, her hips rolling into his meaningfully.

Shikamaru hisses in response, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips as he shuts his eyes in some semblance of control.

"What?" Ino asks, more a demand than anything.

He takes a soldiering breath, his fingers gripping at the material of her skirt lining her hip. "I just… I just want to make sure…" His eyes flutter open, dark and hooded.

Ino raises a brow, glancing at his lips - wet and pink and begging. "Of….?" she prompts, purposely baring the pale expanse of her neck, another roll of her hips punctuating the question, but this time slower, more intent.

Shikamaru bares his teeth this time, and then he is surging up, taking her with him, nearly knocking his nose into hers as she steadies herself in his lap. He sits staring at her, his hands moving to rest along her thighs as she straddles him. "Ino," he says lowly.

At some point, she knew. She knew she was living on borrowed time.

It doesn't take Tsunade's letter or Sakura's worried glances to tell her. Indeed, it doesn't even take the slowly ebbing pain or the unexpected invasion of white to her vision.

No.

It takes a memory.

Her father is looking at a picture of her mother, his fingers gracing the edge of the photoframe, and there's a smile that's all at once tender and devastated. He blinks, brows furrowing, his fingers sliding from the edge of the frame.

"Such a pretty smile," he says, and for a moment she thinks some things last. Some things stay constant.

Inoichi turns to her. "What's her name?" he asks.

This is where her ending really starts. Ino knew it then, like she knows it now.

Love is transient for shinobi like her.

(Even still, she wants him more than she's ever wanted anything in this life and she's smart enough to know it marks her downfall.)

Ino sighs, her hands settling along his shoulders. Her eyes drift between his, taking note of the way he stares at her in careful consideration, even as he pants beneath her. She smiles then, because she loves this boy - man, she reminds herself, and when did that happen?

She knows what he asks.

"I'm doing this because I want to, Shikamaru."

He furrows his brows, his lips thinning into a line.

Her hands wind into his hair and she melds closer to him. He sighs in contentment.

(It's the most beautiful sound she's ever heard and for many nights, she goes to sleep dreaming of it.)

"This isn't fear talking. This isn't… I'm not rushing into this because I'm afraid I'll lose my chance when I really… when I finally…" She swallows thickly, takes a deep breath.

It's mostly true. Somewhat. Perhaps a little.

Maybe only a touch.

(Because of fucking course she's afraid of missed chances, of time cut short. But mostly she's afraid of never even making such a memory for fear of losing it. Mostly she's afraid of regretting what she didn't do, and not what she did -

She promises to never regret him.)

"I want this because I want you, Shikamaru. I have for a long time now."

His fingers tighten along her thighs.

She looks at him beneath the shadow of fluttering lashes. "Don't you?"

Shikamaru blows a breath through his lips that rattles the air in his lungs and he leans up to kiss her, deeply, almost sloppily - definitely desperately.

He pulls away on a heated breath. "For longer than it'd probably be appropriate to admit," he answers, chuckling lowly, and then groaning when she rolls her hips into his again, her mouth going to his ear.

"Then show me."

He does. With his hands and his mouth and every part of him that is hers.

(With his heart).

Hers.

He's with her when she receives the news at the hospital. He's with her when Tsunade keeps her steady brown gaze on Ino and tells her that she has no answers for her.

Ino should have known this from the start, though. Who better to treat her failing mind than her clan members? She should have kept it in the family.

She looks at Shikamaru, her eyes watering without her bidding.

Family.

Ino swallows down the bile at the back of her throat and nods at Tsunade. "I understand," she says.

What she understands most is that this isn't going to go away with some simple chakra manipulation. What she understands is that this is far greater than her father or her grandfather or any of her other clan members have ever faced before.

(The war had done enough already, it shouldn't linger like this - it shouldn't be killing them still.)

She likes to think she has no regrets. Everything she did she did to save her friends, her village, her…

Shikamaru wraps a tentative hand around her elbow and turns her slightly. "Ino."

He says her name and she is a genin again, so young, so stubborn - a head full of Sasuke and nothing else - nothing like the horrors she wakes screaming from in her nightmares these past years.

Nothing like Asuma's eyes drifting closed beneath the soft green glow of her useless chakra, or the way her father's voice had broken when he told her he loved her just one last time.

"Ino," Shikamaru says, and she is back again, present - the room swimming into her vision.

"I'm sorry, I just… I need to…" She drops down from the medical bed, her eyes searching for the door.

Oh Ino, she hears in Tsunade's voice. You deserved so much more.

She doesn't like the sound of that. She doesn't like how definitive it sounds. She snaps her sharp blue gaze to the older woman, and in the shudder of recognition that passes over her features, Ino finally understands exactly what she meant when she said -

No answers.

There is no going back. There is no regaining of those memories. There is no escape from the coming pain.

Her mind will not be hers by the end of it.

(And even so, she still wants him more than she wants sanity and maybe that's exactly the point where madness sets in because if that isn't insanity than she doesn't know what it.)

"Please leave," she says, voice a deadened lull.

Shikamaru and Tsunade look at each other, and before he can speak, Tsunade is sighing, laying a comforting hand on Ino's shoulder and then walking from the room. In the time it takes for the door to slide shut behind her, Ino is already falling to her knees.

Shikamaru watches, rooted in place, as she wraps her arms around herself and releases that first shuddering exhale. He doesn't give her time to wail. He doesn't wait for her sobs. Instead, he's on his knees beside her, instantly, with the harsh thud of bone falling to tile and he doesn't care, doesn't grunt in pain, doesn't do anything but pull her against him, his eyes sliding shut and she's so suddenly small in his arms, so delicate, so not Ino, and her sobs sound deliriously like laughter - the kind of laughter that sets deep in your bones, thrumming, aching - and if he presses her any harder into his embrace he might just feel the way her lungs quake in her chest and her heart hammers against her ribs and then suddenly he is moving a hand over her eyes (except they weren't children anymore, never would be again, and yet - his hand has always known how to reach for her) but she doesn't push him away this time, doesn't gently pull his hand from over her eyes, and he has only a moment to breathe his relief because then he can feel the wetness of her tears along his palm and he doesn't think there is relief enough in this world for such stark sorrow, such inevitable loss, and if this is all he can do, if this is it, if this is the shadow he must play to her coming twilight then - then -

"It's okay to cry," he breathes into her hair.

Dimly, Shikamaru catches sight of the way their molded forms cast a dark shadow in the far corner.

He keeps his hand to her eyes -

"I'm here, aren't I?"

- always.

Chapter Text

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: The final chapter. I hope I did you right, anon request. :)

Smokescreen

Chapter Three: Chasm

"It means dust collecting on kunais that should never be given to rust, and a flak jacket forgotten in the bottom drawer, and a wife (wife, he thinks these days, because how could she not be?) who will one day lose all remembrance of why such things are important." - Yamanaka Ino and Nara Shikamaru. She is losing her mind while he is losing her.

* * *

She runs a finger along his bare side and thinks of rivers. Long and winding. There's something to be said about rivers, how they will let you into their depths if you tread far enough,if you only dare to brave a current that means to take you and will not (will never) let you go.

Ino smiles, because she feels like drowning these days and she thinks maybe that's a good thing.

It's like he can hear her smile in the dark, because even with his eyes closed, he releases a questioning grumble and winds his arm tighter around her naked waist as he nuzzles further into the pillow beneath their heads. "What?"

"Nothing," she says. And for once, it might be the truth. Because when she lays like this with him, when their bedroom is doused in the dimness of dusk, when her hand is busy trailing rivers along his side - when that raging current takes her and doesn't let go - there is nothing left in the world to keep her.

Shikamaru huffs contentedly enough, and peeks one eye open at her.

His eyes are dark, always have been, and yet, she seems to only really notice now. Dark enough to cast shadows, and somehow that is all the more fitting.

But her hair is still brilliant against the pillow and her blue eyes are still piercingly bright and though she has never thought herself to be the light to his dark (in fact, it's rather the opposite if she's honest with herself) she can't help but reach through the warm swallow of dusk as though the sun will rise through his skin, and when her hands move to cup his cheeks and she stares at him and he blinks both eyes open to stare back and the river has now become a flood, this - this - is the edge she's been standing at all along.

"I want nothing in this life but you," she says earnestly.

Damningly.

Shikamaru's brow furrows, his throat constricting, and in the long, agonizing moments he takes to stare at her, she finds all the reasons why drowning has always been better than forgetting.

And then he's surging toward her, lips seeking hers, and he pulls her against his chest desperately, keenly, a rough sound of longing reverberating in the back of his throat, in his chest, against her breast, in the very heart of her, and when he presses her back against the bed so that he can follow, and when her hand slips to the back of his neck as he deepens the kiss, and when his barely concealed sob breaks against her lips - she swallows that threatening tide back.

The kind of current that takes you and takes you and -

Ino startles at the familiarity of such 'madness'.

Shikamaru finds her in the flower shop. In the flower shop she said only days ago that she had hated. But she says many things these days.

"Oh, Shikamaru!" she says brightly upon noticing him. "Good, you can help me." She comes from around the counter to drag him by the wrist behind her. He lets her.

"I'm trying to get a bouquet together for Temari. When is she coming again?"

Shikamaru's brows knit together, his throat going tight. "Ino."

"I know, I know," she interrupts, swatting at his arm. "I don't care that you find it annoying, I want to do this for you guys. It's been...how many months now?"

He looks down, his hands going into his pockets. "Ino, Temari and I haven't been…" He huffs, looking back up at her. "Not since we…" He motions between the two of them, and then stops, shoulders slumping.

Ino purses her lips in hesitation, brows furrowing.

Perhaps today is not one of those days she will remember loving him.

So he will remember for the both of them.

"Nevermind," he settles on finally.

In the silence that stretches between them, Shikamaru wonders if she doesn't suddenly remember - if she doesn't remember how they had woken beside each other again that morning, how he had gripped at her naked warmth and anchored her to him, how she had sighed, pressing her forehead to the hard plane of his chest and just… breathed..

"Oh, Shikamaru!" And it begins again - the rupture. "Good, you can help me," she repeats, as though she has only just seen him.

This time, her hand on his wrist is a stranglehold when she drags him back behind the counter.

But he finds it more troublesome to explain her fracturing mind than it is to simply...let her tug him along. "What do you need?" he asks on a weary sigh.

Ino had said she was fine. She was capable. Nothing would get in the way of her mission. Nothing has before, and this is no different, she had said.

Even when he was watching her out of the corner of his eye as they stood before the Hokage's desk, and even as he caught sight of Sakura's fingers tightening over the file clutched to her chest, and even as Tsunade shamelessly downed a saucer of sake and then released a tremulous sigh that had nothing to do with the alcohol - Shikamaru knew this was a bad idea.

And yet here they are, battling enemy nin in a forest he can't be bothered to remember the name of, for a reason he doesn't even care for, because now, suddenly, Ino is very, very not fine - and he doesn't have room in his head for anything else.

(He should have stopped her. When they had turned to leave Tsunade's office and Sakura's tentative whisper of "Hokage…" nearly halted him in its solemnity. When he closed the door on the image of Tsunade pressing her hand over her eyes and shaking her head. He should have stopped her many times over. But Ino had been so desperate to prove her usefulness, her aptitude, her reliability. She had been desperate to prove how very Yamanaka she still was, how much of a shinobi she still was, and perhaps that was the first hint that she truly wasn't anymore - could never be again.)

The problem with this kind of realization though, is that it often comes too late. This is what Shikamaru thinks when he watches in dawning horror as she freezes in her perch along the tree branch above the clearing, her hands still held mid-sign, the nin whose mind she had possessed convulsing on the forest floor, blood seeping from his ears as he foamed at the mouth, and she is still just… frozen. The sudden shock of the jutsu has jarred her brain into some arrested state and she stares down into the clearing with wide, unblinking eyes, forehead glistening with sweat, breath lodged in her throat, just completely and utterly unmoving - even as an enemy nin barrels toward her from an adjacent branch, kunai aimed for her throat.

He doesn't have time to release his shadow hold of the nin across from him, or time to move toward her himself, or even time to consider all these possibilities, before he finds himself reaching for a kunai fixed with an exploding tag and in the haltingly breathless moment when he sends it flying, he is suddenly - inexplicably - angry with her.

The rage bubbles up through his chest and hooks its claws into his throat, before he bites down the instinctual roar in favor of a desperate gasp when his kunai hits home.

It blows the branch she is perched on right at the juncture where it meets the tree, and through a billow of smoke she comes sailing down to the forest floor - but not without the graze of the other nin's kunai along her pale throat and the severed ends of her hair fluttering down after her.

He doesn't reach her in time to catch her, and the hollow thud as she hits the dirt slaughters any anger still left in him - from the pivot of his ankles to the roof of his mouth.

She is unconscious when he finally reaches her, and the cloud of smoke has left a layer of ash along her pale face. He swipes a thumb along her cheek, eyes fixed to the fine arc.

Her shorn off ponytail settles over his knee as he drags her to his lap - a reminder.

He clutches the strands between his trembling fingers and feels the anger ripe and unmeasured once more.

"This isn't a game, Ino."

She doesn't look at him, only sighs as she continues staring at the curtain pulled around the other half of her hospital bed, the half where his chair isn't, so that she doesn't have to look at his face when he says it.

"I know what I'm doing, Shikamaru. I'm not stupid," she manages through clenched teeth, her hands clutching at the sheet pooled in her lap.

He tsks at her, leaning back in his chair as he crosses his arms. "Could have fooled me."

She doesn't take the bait. Some part of him resents her for recognizing it as bait in the first place, but then, he's loved this woman too long for her not to have picked up a few things over the years.

It's that anger again, so easy, so right. She's being reckless.

He tells her as such.

Ino finally turns, but it isn't a face he recognizes. It's a face somewhere out of a story he heard once - the one where the girl loves the boy more than she probably should and all she gets for it is a long fall down a dry well and the boy's face silhouetted in sunlight as he stares down at her, a belatedly sad sort of smile treading across his lips.

But it's a stupid story, and he doesn't believe such stories anyway, doesn't even believe in the kind of love that delivers you to dry wells in the first place, because how could that be love at all?

Except maybe he isn't the boy in this scenario. Maybe he's been the well all along. Maybe it's fate that's staring down at them from its innocent perch along the edge, dipped in sunlight, an agonizingly pointed smile bearing down on them.

Maybe he had the story wrong from the start.

"Shikamaru."

It shouldn't jar him like it does - the whisper of his name on her lips. And even still…

Even still.

He swallows tightly, any words he might have been thinking flailing at the end of his tongue, unspoken.

(Perhaps it is best this way, he thinks.)

"I never needed your approval."

It's the truth, he knows. But it's the kind of truth he always thought they'd each secretly agreed not to share.

Even still, it stings all the same.

His eyes narrow. "That's not what this is about."

"Then what is it about?"

She sounds so calm, so complacent, so… plainly curious. It throws him, and angers him in equal measure, and God is this what it felt like to her all this time? This anger? This… this rage of knowing what must be said but not knowing how to say it and definitely not knowing who to say it to (which of them needed to hear it the most - that's the rub) and he thinks he finally understands now, in some miniscule, diluted sort of way -

How very and inevitably maddening such love is.

"You're not… you can't… "

(Exactly what to say and how to say it and the courage to say it with meaning.)

"Ino, you're going to get yourself killed at this rate." Or the rest of us, he doesn't say, because it doesn't need saying. She recognizes the spaces between his words well enough to read such sentiment without him voicing it.

And she does read it, far easier than he expected. He sees it in the way her shoulders straighten and her nostrils flare. He sees it in the way her knuckles turn white.

"You don't get to lecture me about his, Shikamaru. Not you."

"Then who?"

She glares at him, and this is somehow familiar, even more so than the stretch of skin at the small of her back or the birthmark just under her right breast or the sound she makes when she buries her face in his neck, a yearning sort of keen.

She tears her gaze away and rests it back on the curtain, that damn curtain that he wants to rip from the wall.

"This isn't about you," she says lowly, almost accusingly, and all at once he is the girl from the story - falling, falling, falling - a dark and unrewarding descent.

He knew this from the start - knew this like he knew the danger of dry wells and yet-

And yet he still thinks he's being led to water.

It isn't about him, has never been about him, but he sees her tears all the same and when she finally turns over to curl beneath the sheet, her back to him, when he finally catches sight of his own reflection in the window across the room, Shikamaru discovers it wasn't really her he was angry with in the first place.

She's rummaging through drawers in the moonlit space of their bedroom when he goes to her. From the threshold he watches as she pulls her flak jacket from the back of the bureau and moves to fix it over her black long-sleeve.

"Ino."

Her name in that familiar breathy whisper stills her in the faint light, the jacket half pulled over her chest, her fingers tightening on the material. She sucks in a deep breath, sliding the jacket the rest of the way down her waist, slowly, with the temperate wariness of someone who expects the inevitable.

(When she pulls her shortened ponytail out from under the flak jacket, his stomach clenches uncontrollably.)

"What are you doing?" he asks, as though either of them don't already know.

It makes her angry, instantly and uncontrollably. She snaps her heated gaze to him in the mild darkness of their room and Shikamaru is already sighing as he pinches the bridge of his nose.

"I'm going with you."

He never expected any other answer. But even still - even still he must deny her this.

"You can't."

She stares at him, chest heaving. He stares back. And maybe at some point it will become easier, but he can't see that far - it is a curve he hasn't calculated yet, or perhaps, one he won't calculate, because it means dust collecting on kunais that should never be given to rust and a flak jacket forgotten in the bottom drawer and a wife (wife he thinks these days, because how could she not be?) who will one day lose all remembrance of why such things are important.

So, no. He doesn't think it will ever become easier to watch the mind of the woman he loves slowly fall to pieces.

(They never warned him about insanity of the heart, either.)

"I can help." The words are ice on her tongue.

"Not like this."

"It will only get worse."

And stop. Because neither of them have ever said the like before, and he certainly never expected it to be her. Ino was good at denial. An expert, at this point.

But this - this was her admitting there was no bending this will, no halting this flood.

For all her power and all her capacity, Ino would drown. She would drown, and drown painfully. She doesn't expect to ever be 'better', if there were such a thing in the first place.

"This may be… my last chance." Her voice cracks, her lips dry, and she shakes her head, her hands going to her temples, bracing the pain between her palms.

(It will never be better.)

"It's now or never. It's now or...or…" She stops, choking on the word, the air rattling through her lungs as she closes her eyes to the sharp sting of salt at her lids.

"Then it is never," Shikamaru answers for her, because he knows now that she cannot see it herself. Will not see it herself.

No, there is no 'better', but they had well passed 'good' months ago.

She was a breaking, aching shell, and if only one of them could rightly see it then dammit he will be the one. He will be the one to say it.

"There are no missions for you anymore, Yamanaka Ino."

She stills, her hands dropping from her temples to quake in fists at her side. "I have some left in me yet."

"No," he answers, sighing, "You don't."

"You can't just…" She pulls a sharp breath through her nose, nostrils flaring. She takes a dangerous step closer to him. "It isn't up to you."

"It isn't up to you either." He pulls a scroll from his pack, handing it to her stiffly. This isn't how he wanted to say this. But in the end, nothing has turned out the way they wanted. So why should this be any different?

Ino snatches the scroll from his hand, rolling it open furiously as she stares at the print, the red thumbprint of the Hokage bright and blaring in the bottom corner, the copper tang still insultingly fresh.

"You've been retired, Ino," he offers softly, his own chest rising with his heavy breaths, his own hands clenching into fists at his side. "By order of the Hokage, you are no longer a shinobi of Konoha."

She stares at the opened scroll, fingers digging into the paper, her chest heaving, the sharp brilliance of her now uneven blonde hair sliding over her shoulder when she snaps her gaze to his and levels him with a wrathful glare. "You can't do this."

"I didn't."

"Don't give me some bullshit technicality! You may as well have!" she yells, throwing the scroll clear across the room, the flutter of its falling pages deafening in the space between them. In the silence that follows, she watches as Shikamaru closes his eyes, breathes deep, pinches the bridge of his nose.

Like some problem he can solve, given enough time.

(If they only had enough time.)

"Ino," he pleads on a quaking breath.

"Get out."

Shikamaru looks up at her, but she is looking out the window, her arms crossed over her thin frame, shaking, fuming, jaw clenched tight over grinding teeth.

"Ino," he tries again, stepping closer, hand out-reaching.

"Get out," she growls lowly, surely, without invitation for argument.

Shikamaru stills. And then he draws back, his own shoulders going rigid. He shakes his head, sliding a hand through his unkempt hair roughly, his teeth grit as the frustration rises in his constricted chest. "Fine," he spits out.

"Fine," she echoes, just as hotly.

He stares at her, and then he does exactly as she asks.

He gets out.

(Something she will never have the chance to do herself.)

"Perhaps you were better off with Temari."

Shikamaru looks up when she says it, watches the way she stares out the tea house's window through the rain, her fingers thrumming along the edge of her tea cup.

If she's expecting him to say something to that, he doesn't know what it is, so he only stays quiet, glancing back down to his own tea.

She sighs, and for a moment Shikamaru forgets the other customers at the surrounding tables, forgets the heat of the cup at his fingertips, forgets even the downpour just outside the window, forgets everything but the way the air shudders past her chapped lips on that sigh - like everything he ever knew lay pressed between her lips - a ragged exhale as felt as it is heard.

"I liked her. She was… a good woman," Ino says without resentment, without even reason to be resentful because maybe she was lying when she said she wanted nothing in this life but him.

She was lying because, in truth, she wanted nothing but this:

Shikamaru always looked best with his face to the sun.

And the thing was, Ino brought the kind of ambling dusk to his life that she'd wish on no one, especially him that she loved - especially him, with dawn at his feet.

"I liked her, too," Shikamaru agrees. Because it's true. Always would be. And at the same time -

"But I always liked you better." He glances up at her as he says it.

She stays with her gaze out the window, but he can see the way she swallows tightly, the way the wetness shimmers along her eyes. She doesn't answer him, and maybe that is best, because he doesn't know what to say past that.

He doesn't know what to say beyond dawn and dusk and every shadow in between.

He doesn't know how to tell her she is the sun he looks to.

(They each want nothing in this life but - )

"Would you believe me if I told you I was scared?" Ino picks at her rice, her eyes on the bowl.

Shikamaru stops eating across from her. Their kitchen window is open, and in the dim light of dusk, he can still see the dark rings beneath her eyes, the way she clenches her jaw tight.

He scoffs, and it snaps her attention to him, her eyes narrowing.

He continues eating.

Her throat flexes imperceptibly, and then she slams her chopsticks down on the table, pushing from her seat. "I'm going to bed."

Before she can make it through the threshold, his arms are around her waist and he is yanking her back to him. She stumbles with the force of it, the sob she had kept clenched tight in her throat making it to air and when he buries his face in her neck she finally slumps against him in defeat.

"Yamanaka Ino isn't scared of anything," he says into her skin, almost exasperatedly.

Ino looks up to the ceiling, blinking fiercely against the threat of wetness at the corner of her eyes. "You can't know that."

"I know you." His hand slides across her stomach, settling along her hip. He plants a kiss on her bare shoulder.

Shutting her eyes, Ino finally pulls from him, her hands going to her temples, and he cannot tell whether it is pain or memory or perhaps both. "Maybe you used to," she answers simply, her breath a quaking whisper. And then she retreats into the bedroom.

He watches her go, and can't bring himself to join her that night.

He sits at the kitchen table and stares at her uneaten rice in the moonlight.

"Fight," she demands of him, giving him only a moment's comprehension before she is on him, striking with a kunai aimed at his left shoulder, and he barely makes the dodge in time, the sharp hiss of air from her near miss reverberating through his ears.

In some way, he supposes he should have known this was what she asked of him when she told him to meet her out on the training field. The trees lining the clearing are still familiar, as he thinks they may always be, because there is only so much of their youth that can be lost to memory and madness. The rest is here, ingrained in them. In the green, in the hard earth, in the whistle of wind through branches that used to know the weight of their genin dreams.

Ino's hair, cut to her chin and jagged. Her skirt, shorter. Her frame, lithe and child-like and untested. Her eyes, blue like the bottom of his painted sake cup when he is trying to forget such things, such long-ago memories.

They are rooted here. It seems fitting that she seeks to break here as well.

Because break she will.

Shikamaru knows it with a keening sadness, because her throws are just a touch too wide and her fists are just a touch too off-center and her eyes are just a touch too glazed.

Glazed in a way he recognizes, in the way memory leaves her - abruptly and without warning.

Suddenly, he is the enemy, one he cannot rightly name, because she hasn't told him all her demons, but he knows her well enough to recognize the change and this - this is it.

It isn't sparring anymore. Not when her kunai grazes his cheek and her fist lodges just between his lungs. Not when he falls to one knee, his own attacks long since ceased, and not when he calls her name in a broken remnant of remembrance.

"Ino!"

She heeds him not.

And then he's knocked back, his refusal to fight her in this state only spurring on the heated animal in her, this blank visage of rage, and she isn't Ino anymore, nor even Yamanaka, and something in him knows this already, in a jarringly inevitable kind of way - in the way that marrs her features with ruthlessness and keeps the memory of her smile pressed to his lips solely and intimately his.

She's straddling him then, her thighs keeping him pinned down, her eyes heated and desperate on his - those eyes that are no longer hers, lost to the madness - and even as he looks up at her, his jaw bruised, his eyes pleading, she has no answer for him but this.

Her fist, raised high and unyielding.

When she unleashes her rage (her fear, he corrects - because that's exactly what it is - white hot and blaring) he does not blink, does not raise a defense.

(He never had such defenses for her in the first place. He'd been taken from the very start.)

Her roar splits the air as her fist dives down.

There's a fragmented moment - a split-right-down-the-middle second - when her fist is sailing toward his face, when their eyes flicker toward meeting, when he sees something pass over her features like a sudden, crippling shadow - and the rush of air is sharp and stinging and the trajectory of her fist shifts just enough to -

Her punch slams into the dirt at his ear instead, her knuckles splitting against rock, and they have not released their gazes.

No longer looking through strangers' eyes.

Ino releases a gasp, a long held clutch of air that seems to hurt more than it helps, because then her face is screwing up in pain, and then she's raising her fist, slamming it down again, the sharp crunch of rocky soil splintering to his ears. And then again. Again and again and again and - he can only watch her.

Abruptly, he realizes that she is crying, and then he is moving, halting her with his hand on her arm just as her last punch lands, his other hand going around her neck, and then he is flipping them, straddling her, his chest tight and throat raw, his breathing labored, and she arches, her head pressed back into the dirt as she wails, so keening and desperate he thinks she may have broken him with such a cry.

(If he wasn't broken for her from the start.)

"Shh," he hushes her, in some paltry attempt at comfort, even when he knows it is pointless. Even when her knuckles are split raw and open, her blood marring his shirt as she clutches to him, and he presses his forehead to hers - breathes her in, breathes her out - and in the space between his mouth and hers he thinks they've lost something for good this time.

Maybe even themselves.

"Make it stop, Shikamaru," she wails, her eyes shut tight to the tears, her fingers curling into his shirt, and he can do nothing but breathe against her, slumping into her, his fingers gripping the back of her neck, his forehead slick with sweat as it braces against hers.

"Make it stop!"

He would if he could.

"Shh," he says instead. Because it is all he can say. And so futile. So utterly useless and inadequate. Just so… so fucking inadequate.

"Shh."

His tears on her cheeks. Her blood on his shirt. This was them, inside and out.

(He would if he could.)

Inside and out and out and out and -

Their lungs were bursting with their futility.

At some point, it all becomes a little blurred. The pressure of her warm mouth on his, the way she draws her fingers along his collarbone, the scent of her hair lingering over his pillow - the way the sun cuts along her lithe form so that she only ever lives in brightness -

Not shadow.

Shikamaru looks at these memories like he's looking through glass and perhaps they've always been just as fragile.

"Ino."

She's sitting with her back to him, staring ahead, maybe out the window, maybe at nothing at all. He can't rightly tell, since she doesn't move her head to respond, and it's dark enough out to only cast a dim reach of moonlight over the table where her hands rest limply. He thinks perhaps this is supposed to mean something - this stillness of hers, this moonlit silence, this halted breath of tenderness that makes him pause a few steps behind her.

She was never meant to sit subdued in a hospital. That life wasn't for Ino. Couldn't be, and yet -

And yet here she is, that brilliant blonde hair (cut short like so much of their lives) strikingly dim for the first time he can remember, and when he steps closer, just a bit into her peripheral, a tentative hand landing on her shoulder, she turns and blinks up at him.

Or rather, in his general direction, her eyes glazed over somewhat and he begins to wonder if he isn't the only one looking through glass-tinted memories.

"Shikamaru."

But she says his name - his name - and he breathes a sigh of relief, because he doesn't know how long this will last, and just the thought of it has the words lodging in his throat, festering unsaid, his hand along her shoulder tightening past the point of comfort.

It's not fair, he realizes belatedly - to grieve so much for something that perhaps never should have been his in the first place. But more than anything, it isn't fair to her. He knows this, somewhere past the hurt and the indignation. He knows that this isn't about him. Never was.

(She is right, in the end - she is right and right and right and he has never hated being wrong so much as now.)

But he's so far in love with her that he's forgotten to separate the two, and if he thinks real hard about it, he'll find it's not something he wants to apologize for. Because they didn't deserve this. Either of them.

They deserved each other, this he knows for sure, this he knows in his bones - but never this.

Never -

"You've come to see me." She says it so resignedly, so low it almost doesn't even qualify as a whisper. More a soft release of breath.

He only nods, his throat tightening.

She smiles, her eyes crinkling, and he thinks the moonlight suits her.

"I was waiting for you," she says as she turns back to the window. It's so dark out. It's so dark and he doesn't even know what she's looking at and suddenly he wonders if she even knows what she's looking at and he can't think that right now, can't think anything, so he just grips at her shoulder - some semblance of assurance he doesn't even feel himself, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter because -

This isn't about him.

He should have known this from the start. He should have done a lot of things, really. Like look at her sooner. Don't make her wait. Don't make her question. Show her in every way he can. Brush her hair for her. Clean her kunais. Make her favorite tea on rainy days. Tell her stories. Bandage her wounds. Kiss her. Love her. Tell her he loves her.

(Remember her - for the both of them.)

"Were we in love, Shikamaru?"

She asks it so plainly, so unassumingly, and he can't help the heartache that colors his words when he looks away and nods. "Yeah. Yeah, I think we were."

He doesn't see the smile that graces her lips - like it isn't through glass that she sees him anymore. She reaches a hand to brace along her heart. "I think I always knew that - here."

Shikamaru looks down at her, his heart lurching in his chest.

And then her smile falters, and he can see the wetness lining her cheeks.

(The wetness that must have been there this whole time, had he the heart to admit to it.)

"I just seem to have forgotten it, here," she whispers, her hand moving from her chest to rest along her temple.

Shikamaru hangs his head, his breath catching in his throat. "Ino." It's all he can say. It's all he can say and it isn't enough. Will never be enough.

Ino.

(Mostly, his heartbreak follows from the realization that he will never be enough. Not for this.)

"Remind me," she demands softly, taking a deep breath, her lips quaking as the tears fall in earnest now. She takes his hand from her shoulder and covers her eyes with it. "Take me back." Her voice cracks, her shoulders shaking as she finally cries beneath the cover of his palm, where the world cannot see her grief.

He leans down to wind his other arm around her chest, his cheek braced to hers as he releases a ragged exhale, and finally - finally he understands what she sees through that dark window and an even darker night.

There are no shadows here.

(He was never going to reach her in the end.)

She must know, he realizes - in the terrible, bruising way that all dying things know.

His throat is rife with things to say, things he knows should be said, but he isn't even sure if she would believe him at this point, or if he even believes himself and so he settles for this:

"It's okay to cry."

(So fucking inadequate - always.)

He barely gets it out before his own voice breaks, his tears sudden and hot against his lids. He feels her trembling in his arms and wonders, not for the first time, if this has always just been cowardice on his part.

Because when her eyes are covered thus she cannot see his own collapsing heart. And maybe that was the point from the start. Maybe shadows have only ever been his own comfort, and suddenly, he is achingly, grievously sorry beyond words.

For everything. For a lot of things. Maybe for nothing at all. Maybe for thinking that 'sorry' could ever be enough.

There are some places his shadow cannot reach. There are some memories that will always be lost. There is such a madness that does not heed to love.

He holds her closer and does not let the darkness take her.

But in the end, his hands over her eyes have only ever been a smokescreen.