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: blue ruin :
: part iii :
by fierymetis
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A/N: Not much to say here, other than this will be the third and final part of Blue Ruin. You can look forward to a companion-fic in the near future. I’m still tossing ideas around, but this is what I’ve got so far:
It’s set in the same universe as Blue Ruin. Some of the scenarios of Blue Ruin will be referenced and/or further explained in it. It’s going to be Sasuke/Naruto, for sure. At the moment, its rough title is The Cigarette Lighter Love Song, but that could still change. It’s still in the early stages.
Lyrics are from “Cheers Darlin’” by Damien Rice.
I’d like to dedicate Part Three of this fanfiction to everyone who’s been reading this along the way, and, especially those that have been reviewing. Thank you all so much!
-
The first thing that Temari did when she stumbled out of his room in the morning was apologize. He told her it was nothing, but, somehow, it felt like a lot. Then he’d handed her a glass of water and two aspirins — both of which she accepted gratefully; she must’ve had a killer hangover — before pointing her in the direction of the bathroom and suggesting she take a shower and wake up fully.
Now she was curled up beside him on the couch, wrapped in his yellow blanket and still tired-looking, despite her shower and the coffee he’d made her drink.
“Shikamaru . . .” she began slowly, letting the sentence hang.
“Hm?” He wasn’t looking at her. He was still thinking about the night before; about sleeping next to her and breathing her in; about wanting her and hating himself for it.
“Thanks.”
“It’s nothing,” he repeated, shaking his head a little. She seemed distracted (though that could just be the hangover, couldn’t it?), and he wondered if she even remembered what had happened last night. Not that anything had happened — nothing monumental, anyway. Immediately, Shikamaru scolded himself mentally. He would never learn, would he?
A silent moment passed. Eventually, he broke it:
“Do you want something to eat?” He glanced toward the kitchenette, but doubted that she was hungry.
“No, no . . .” she leaned into him and sighed a little. Her smudgy eyes were swollen, and when she blinked them, it looked like slow-motion. Every movement she made was deliberate, thought over carefully. “Come here. Just sit here with me. Be my pillow for a little while.”
He tried to smile and push a few strands of hair away from her face, but her expression hardly brightened.
Temari half-closed her eyes and he put his arms around her, pulling her a little closer and breathing in deeply. The smell of smoke and alcohol lingered in her hair, masked slightly by the smell of the green-apple shampoo that he kept in the bathroom.
Her breathing slowed and he wondered vaguely if she had fallen asleep or was just resting there in his arms. He brushed a strand of blonde hair away from her face. She was lush and hard and beautiful in a way he had never seen before; in a way that no one else could ever be.
Temari’s gray eyes fluttered open, as if she could feel him looking at her. A moment passed, and she sat up the rest of the way, regarding him thoughtfully. Her gaze strayed to the coffee table; to the clear glass vase filled with once-pretty flowers, now dry and dead, that had been so artfully arranged (though not by his hand), and the framed picture that was lying face-down beside it. The vase was just as Ino had left it, the frame nearly so. Shikamaru frowned a little, wondering why he bothered to keep those things there at all.
“She’s pretty,” Temari commented dryly, righting the picture to examine it more closely. “Who is she?”
“Ino,” he replied simply.
“Ah.” The blonde set the picture down and leaned back into the couch. “I’ve heard about her.”
Shikamaru almost wanted to ask who had told her, but decided that it would probably be better if he didn’t know. The fact that people were still talking about their break-up bothered him enough — he didn’t need to know exactly who was doing it.
Temari drew her knees up to her chest, black jeans frayed where they touched the scuffed boots. Just a girl. A girl that could do so much better than him, he felt guilty just looking at her. Around her wrists, a rubber band encircled the flesh, patterns drawn in blue ink still visible. No rings on those fingers. Nails bitten to the quick. Details. Things he should’ve noticed.
She sighed, smiling a little, and lay back on the couch. Blonde hair, pulled up into several ragged ponytails, spread out over the arm of the couch like a shabby halo. Shikamaru thought absently that he would like to braid that hair, the way he had once braided Ino’s.
He wanted to tell her that he found her impossibly alluring; body bruised and scratched from an incident that she hadn’t told him about; eyes still swollen and bloodshot. He wondered what she would say in the face of that.
She moved to her knees, reaching for both his hands, but stopping halfway. “Just so you know, I trust you.”
“You —”
(Shouldn’t?)
He watched her take a breath, perhaps steeling herself for the next turn of conversation. He found that he could not bear it.
Before he might think to do otherwise, Shikamaru leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her dry lips. Her mouth opened with a rush of warm breath, and her arms ran over his shoulders to rest lightly, almost hesitantly, at the nape of his neck.
That was when it hit him.
Drunk. He was kissing a drunk girl. Well, maybe just an extremely hung-over girl, but it was really the principal of the thing. He jerked his mouth back from hers. She looked a little dazed, and ran her tongue over her lower lip, but said nothing.
He wondered what she would think later, when her mind was better disposed toward the contemplation of such things. But, his mind whispered, by tomorrow, she would be wasted again, wouldn’t she? There was only now, and if he wanted to kiss her, well, it was only kissing.
“You can kiss me, if you want.” Temari said, before he say anything else. Her gray eyes had cleared somewhat, as if the effects of the alcohol and whatever else she’d done the night before were burning out of her. “Maybe I should just stop saying stupid things.”
Shikamaru leaned forward, but stopped just short of her. Temari smiled ruefully.
“Kindergarten,” she said. “I remember.”
He opened his mouth and waiting for his brain to supply the appropriate response, one that would smooth over everything that had just happened and make things as they were two nights ago, but no words came.
Despite all of his efforts, this proved impossible.
“So, Sakura told me that you have a new girlfriend.”
A Thursday afternoon, five days after the incident in Shikamaru’s apartment that he was still trying to put from his mind. He’d bumped into Naruto in the hallway outside his apartment, and their pleasantries had taken a rather unexpected turn.
Shikamaru paused for a moment, trying to conjure up a proper response. He kept flashing back to his conversation with Sakura a few months previously; to her remorse and pity. In the end, all he could come up with was, “When did she tell you that?”
“Yesterday,” the blonde replied, flashing a vulpine grin. Shikamaru couldn’t decide whether he was being characteristically clueless or willfully sly. “She says that she saw you two having lunch together down at Ichiraku’s last week.”
“Did she?” Shikamaru raised an eyebrow, trying not to appear too amused.
Naruto nodded, blue eyes shining with something suspiciously close to mischief. “And she told me that Ino told her that she saw you and some” — he made quotation marks with his fingers — “‘hot blonde’.”
/ A boy you can fear/
“Ino said that?”
The blonde nodded, still grinning. “Yep. Apparently, she saw you two last week, on a date. You walked right by the flower shop while she was on shift. She even ran out into the street after you’d walked past to make sure.”
“She said that we were . . . walking?” Shikamaru asked.
“Yeah.”
“Just walking?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Then how did she know we were on a date?”
At that, Naruto laughed. “Does it matter? C’mon, Shikamaru — you of all people should know that, by Ino’s logic, a boy and a girl can never ‘just walk’ together.”
/ Or your biggest mistake/
“Or ‘just have lunch’.” Shikamaru was smiling openly now. He fished around in his pocket for a celebratory cigarette as Naruto’s soft laughter filled his ears, busying himself with the matches. Funny, how the last time one of their conversations had turned to Ino, he’d been bitter and angry for days after. He had a distinct feeling that it would be different this time.
“Naruto,” a cool, male voice said. Shikamaru glanced up. A dark-haired man had appeared at Naruto’s side. He was tall and handsome, and Shikamaru thought he knew him. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah,” Naruto replied, his grin faded a little, but still lingering on his face. He offered a small, brief wave. “I’ll see you around, Shikamaru.”
The two men brushed past him, and Shikamaru stood there, watching them, for a moment. Just before they disappeared around the corner, he called after them.
“Naruto!”
The blonde stopped and looked over his shoulder. The expression on his face told Shikamaru that he knew what he was going to say. He said it anyway.
“Thanks.”
/ Cheers, darlin’ /
“It’s raining,” he pointed out lamely. “Do you want to die of pneumonia?”
Rain flattened her hair, pasting it to the skin of her scalp. Water trickled down her face and neck, following the clean, shapely line of her throat and disappearing neatly below the line of her jacket.
“Won’t you take an umbrella, at least?”
“You take one,” she said. “I didn’t say you had to walk in the rain with me.” She continued to walk at a constant pace, her sandaled feet stomping heedlessly through quickly-forming puddles and splashing noisily. When she lifted her legs, the hem of her skirt parted slightly, showing a glimpse of small, white ankles and round calves.
“After the last visit, before I moved in with Tenten, I used to dream of rain,” Temari mused aloud, lifting her face to the sky and absorbing the storm eagerly. “I’d lie in my bed at night sleeping and dream about thunderstorms . . . water everywhere, nice and cool and blue . . .” She stopped suddenly, and laughed. “Sometimes I think that I visited Konoha more for the rain than to see Kankuro. You have no idea how good you have it.”
“If you love water so much, why didn’t you move here sooner?”
She scoffed huffily, like he was the one who wasn’t making any sense. “Don’t get me wrong. Suna is beautiful in its own way. You just have to be there to understand — the afternoon sun, peeling everything extra away from the land so it’s sky and sand and nothing else; sand getting everywhere, consuming everything, making you feel smaller than when you look at the stars or stand by the ocean; the longing for water in the desert . . . things like that.”
“Sounds interesting,” Shikamaru conceded, awed into sincerity by her unexpected poetics. “Shame I’ve never had a chance to visit.”
“You should,” she said, smiling wider at him. “Especially in winter. The desert is all ice-crusted and harsher than any other time of year. It’ll be a sight to see.” She stopped suddenly, knitting her brow. Her steely eyes danced with a strange fever-light. “Suna is my home, and it always will be. But as long as I’m living here, I’ll enjoy all this water as much as I can. You, too.”
/ And I lied, I should’ve kissed you
when we were running in the rains /
He wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, and he tried desperately not to figure it out. He swallowed hard and thought about how close she was and how far away at the same time.
As though she could sense his indecision, Temari broke the silence that he’d created. “How about coming for another stroll with me the next time it rains?”
This, he could answer. “You won’t have to wait long,” he said, glancing up at the leaden clouds. “May is one of the rainiest months in Konoha. But if I’m to accompany you again, I insist that we use umbrellas.”
Temari laughed. “And doesn’t that sound familiar?”
He smiled back, and then they were both grinning and laughing and it was as easy and silly as if they’d been friends for a very long time. Shikamaru recalled his own words.
Friendship is underrated. Friendship is cool.
At least, that’s what he told himself.
Two hours before her flight was scheduled to depart, Shikamaru arrived at her apartment to find the whole place in a shamble, a though a cyclone had just swept through. She was sitting cross-legged on her rumpled bed, busily stuffing personal effects into a small duffle bag. He noted that she traveled light, always ready to shred the excess and leave all the baggage behind.
“I heard from Naruto,” he said by way of greeting. The blonde had apparently been friends with Temari’s youngest brother, Gaara, for years. They’d met as kids at summer-camp or something like that. Funny, how everything is connected. “It’s urgent, isn’t it?”
She gave him a what-do-you-think sort of look, and went back to her packing without a word.
“Are you planning to come back?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, not looking up. “I’m not very sure of my future plans at the moment, to be honest. In case you didn’t realize, my youngest brother just OD’d on God-knows-what and is currently catatonic. That kind of situation is not exactly conducive to long-term thinking, if you know what I mean . . .”
“Temari,” he intoned firmly, catching her wrist to draw her attention. Her bone was surprisingly fine; his fingers curled around the white wrist effortlessly. She made a sharp intake of breath at the contact, but did not recoil. Their eyes met unflinchingly over her half-packed bag.
“I want you to write me,” she said abruptly, and, just like that, the conversation changed. “Here.” She reached into her sack with her other hand and pulled out a thin stack of white envelopes, held together by a green rubber band. “Ten in all. Write me, if you can. They’re already stamped and addressed.”
Indeed, the top envelope showed her loopy handwriting on its front, her name and address penned in three lines of austere black. For a brief moment, he was taken aback. It was just such an . . . un-Temari thing to do. She noticed his bafflement and pressed the envelopes into his hand without a further word. He realized suddenly that he was still holding her wrist — the distance for once negated — and let go hastily. It didn’t matter. She was already somewhere he couldn’t touch.
“Why letters?” he asked, almost awkwardly.
“I like letters,” Temari said firmly, frowning a little at him. “You can call if you want, but I won’t accept the charges.”
He nodded slowly, and stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching her bustle around the apartment, stuffing objects into her bag. Suddenly, she froze, one hand poised to zip up the duffle bag.
“Do you know why I’m doing what I’m doing?” she said quietly, dropping her eyes. “Well, do you?”
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s because I love my family, and when you love that much, you don’t want to have to think back years down the line and know that you couldn’t do anything for them. Do you understand that?”
Shikamaru found that he had nothing to say in reply, so, as usual, she got the last word.
Distance calculated in rooms and cups of coffee and secret smiles. Distance in thin air and words unspoken and small gestures of the hand. Time as a measurement of distance, and even that seemed inadequate.
The distance between Suna and Konoha was roughly five-hundred miles. Half a thousand. There are all manners of ways to close this distance — letters notwithstanding — but the reality was that the physical distance did not matter. Distance is relative. There is no distance in touch, only in the mind, and the distance between Suna and Konoha was a relationship, was words exchanged and laid down on paper, and as long as that relationship existed, there was no distance, the distance was insubstantial, not worth considering . . .
But, should the bond break, the chasm would open up beneath his feet and he would fall into the void.
Shikamaru found it difficult to concentrate on the screen, partly because his three companions were continuously chattering back and forth — “I’ll be he’s the one that did it.” “She’s going to die next!” “How could anyone be so stupid?” — and partly because his thoughts kept inexplicably straying back to Temari, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop them.
It had never been so strange to be at the bottom looking up.
He ended up walking out of the dark theater in the middle the movie, just when the rather well-endowed blonde girl decided to take a candle-lit bath with the door half-open, rolling his eyes at the screen as he did so.
After fifteen minutes of sitting in the lobby, he was bored and tired of just thinking about Temari, so he did something that certainly felt like a good idea at the time. He wrote her name on the bathroom wall in his sloppy, lazy handwriting with a black Sharpie.
Wish you were here.
“Hey, it’s me. I didn’t get any of your letters, so I don’t know if they got lost or if you didn’t bother to . . . shit. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to be back in town on Sunday, and I know I said I wouldn’t accept the charges, but call me back, okay?”
He didn’t call her back. Instead, he spent the rest of the night awake, thinking about how she would be back on Sunday, and how every day had been a Monday since she’d been gone.
When he finally managed to force himself to call her back, he didn’t waste time on greetings.
“You should meet me.”
"Fuck a duck, Shikamaru!” Temari shouted through the phone. “I’ve been calling your for a week!”
“I know.” Shikamaru replied calmly. “But you should still meet me.”
A brief, irritated pause on her end. Then —
“Fine. The bridge in the park. At ten.”
He nodded, dimly aware that she couldn't see him, and hung up.
Shikamaru walked on slowly, past a lake thick with algae, where a rider-less boat floated along in the dimming light. An older couple strolled by the bank, arm in arm, as a jogger in spandex huffed his way around them, mp3-player bobbing against his bicep. Normal people with normal problems.
The path continued over a courtyard whose walls were carved with berries and birds, vines so intricate they nearly looking alive, blooming roses, and less-familiar flowers. Shikamaru stopped to lean against a tree, its roots exposed and tangled like the pattern of veins beneath his skin, the pewter of the trunk wet and dark with frozen sap.
Three boys with low-slung pants passed, one bouncing a basketball of off his friend’s back. Shikamaru had half a mind to call out to them and ask for directions to the bridge, but decided against it. It would be better if he took some time getting there, so he could have his thoughts all organized and put-together. Shikamaru trudged silently along down a winding trail that led through trees and bushes, crunching leaves and twigs, his hands in his pockets, gripping his skin through the thin backing of his coat.
In the cover of the patchy branches, two men were twined together, one of them in a suit and overcoat, the other in jeans and a brightly-colored jacket.
By pure coincidence, Shikamaru stumbled across what could only be the bridge that Temari had told him about. It was an old, stone thing that arched across a still body of water. Strange, that he’d lived his entire life in Konoha and had spent countless afternoons in this very park as a boy, and had never seen the bridge before.
As he picked his way slowly, almost tentatively, up a small hill and onto the bridge, he noted that Temari was nowhere in sight. He sighed heavily and walked all the way to the center, leaning slightly over the edge and gazing into the clear, still water below.
“Hey,” a familiar voice said. He turned to see Temari leaning against a nearby tree. She sighed a little as she strode across the bridge to meet him in the center. “I didn’t think you’d show up.”
He shook his head a little, finding it difficult to look at her.
“I didn’t get any letters.” Temari said.
“I didn’t send any.”
“Ah.” It was impressive, how many emotions she managed to convey with that one, simple sound — anger, disappointment, a touch of regret and more that Shikamaru didn’t have any names for. He wondered if she had been hoping that they were just lost in the mail.
“I know you’re pissed —” he began, trying to remember everything he’d wanted to say while walking here.
“Damn right, I’m pissed!” Temari said fiercely. She was angrier than he’d ever seen her, and it burned him to know that he was the cause of it. “Did it never occur to you that I might’ve given you those envelopes for a reason? Maybe I wanted to talk to you, Shikamaru! Hell, maybe I thought —”
“Temari.” His voice was calm, kind, even. He spoke the way one might speak to a frightened animal.
She rounded on him. “What?!”
“Temari, you . . .” he trailed off, shaking his head a little. In truth, he couldn’t remember what it was that he had wanted to say. All he could do was flash back to their rainy-day walks of a million years ago and conversations that Temari had wasted on him about music and God and a thousand other subjects.
“I what?” she demanded, but she seemed to be losing some of her fervor.
“You make me wish I gave a darm about The Ramones.”
“Oh.” She blinked a few times, and he wondered what images were flashing before her eyes; how many of them featured him. “Shikamaru, I . . .” she looked like she was trying to smile as she trailed off.
“Yeah?” A bit surer of himself now, he took a few steps toward her. She leaned lightly against the side of the bridge, watching him slowly close the distance between them.
Temari gave an odd laugh that sounded half-nervous, half-excited. “Kindergarten?” she asked, her voice betraying just how much the question meant to her.
“No,” Shikamaru replied, shaking his head. “More like high-school.”
She visibly relaxed and he sidled up beside her. He could smell her — some sweet musky perfume over cheap, supermarket shampoo. He thought it might’ve been green-apple and wondered if the smell if it had made her think of him.
Temari half-closed her eyes and he made to kiss her, but then she shook her head and pulled away from him, as denying and serious as he had been the morning after the concert. Was this how she had felt?
“No,” she said suddenly, straightening. “No. It won’t work.”
“What?” he asked, the mixture of curiosity and fear within him making him shiver. He told himself that it was the cold.
“While I was in Suna, I had a lot of time to think,” Temari explained, a little sadly. “I thought about you, and I thought about me. A lot.”
He wanted to ask her, Did you think about us?, but, in spite of himself and all of his fears, he wanted to hear what she had to say.
“You’ll start to find things about me that piss you off, and I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped, because that’s what happens with me!”
“Okay.” At that moment, he would’ve agreed with anything she had to say. He remembered that night in her apartment, what she’d said to him, and it made him ache inside.
Temari sighed, frustrated, angry and resigned. Too many emotions to be hidden away in one girl. She turned away from him, taking quick, sharp steps across the bridge.
“Temari!” he half-shouted, moving to follow her. She stopped and shook her head, still facing away.
“What do you want, Shikamaru?!” she sounded like she was choking. “I mean, first you’re all muted ex-girlfriend angst and friendship, and then you don’t write me for months, and then you ignore me for a week and then you want it to be like high-school when we’re not even done with kindergarten! Fuck!” She said all this very fast and finally turned around to face him. She took three steps toward him, then looked down at her feet, like they were betraying her. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Not long-term or short-term, however long that is. But . . . for right now, I want you to stay.”
Right then, he wanted more than that. He wanted her to stay forever and never, ever go again, but he didn’t tell her that. That particular confession would come later. Maybe.
“Fuck.” Temari swore, brushing a few strands of hair angrily away from her eyes. “It won’t work!”
“We can make it work,” Shikamaru insisted, more passionate and adamant about this than he had been about anything in the last year. He softened his voice. “We can try.”
Something ignited in Temari’s eyes, and he liked the look of it burning there.
“You . . .” she began slowly, “are an idiot.”
“Okay.” Shikamaru repeated, and then she was shaking her head and laughing and leaning against the side of the bridge for support. Eventually, she slid down until she was sitting on the cold stone and he was sitting beside her.
“Okay.” Temari agreed.
He kissed her, and he could feel her smile against his mouth.
She waved the bottle at him, green liquid sloshing around inside.
“You actually drink this shit?” she asked incredulously.
“On occasion,” he admitted.
Temari shook her head, disapproving. “It looks like I got here just in time.” She pushed herself up onto the counter, setting her messenger-bag down beside her. She pulled it open and fished around inside, eventually coming up with a mostly-full bottle of light blue liquid. The label on the bottle read ‘Tarantula’.
“Do you always carry alcohol on your person?”
“Shut up and drink.”
She uncorked the bottle and took a deep swig before offering it to Shikamaru. He shrugged and took a drink.
“So?” Temari asked.
“Well, it’s no Blue Ruin . . .”
The cracked plastic seats rocked steadily with the clank of train wheels, and Shikamaru leaned forward a little, looking around Temari and out the window.
Temari’s breath clouded the glass, and she absently traced patterns in the foggy area with one finger. She had insisted on the particular seat, and he’d grudgingly agreed — she liked looking out the window and she didn’t like the prospect of being forced into sitting next to a stranger. Who was he to deny her that joy? Shikamaru smiled to see her so intent, and opened his mouth to ask her if she preferred rain or snow, when a familiar voice broke into his thoughts.
“Shikamaru?”
He turned away from the window, and there she was: white-blonde hair pulled into a tight bun and twisted in place with a chopstick the way children do with pencils in school; smoky eyeliner applied thickly around her eyes; mouth slick with lip-gloss. She was holding a messenger bag under one arm and he noted that she was wearing that same purple leopard-print coat. Luckily for Shikamaru, no one ever died of irony.
“Ino.” he said, a little surprised by her presence, but even more surprised at his own lack of emotion upon seeing her. He’d expected to feel something . . . but, no. And it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Been a while, huh?” Ino asked, peering around him at Temari. Shikamaru wanted to turn and see if their gazes had met, but forced himself to keep looking at Ino.
“Yeah, it has,” he agreed, suppressing a grin. Ino’s blue were focused at a lower point than Temari’s face would’ve been and they were a tad wider than a moment before — he fancied that her gaze had settled on the shiny diamond ring on Temari’s finger. It was really a nice ring — it cost him four months of his pay, after all, and Temari had objected fervently when he offered it too her (“It’s too much, Shikamaru! Too much!”). It was only fair and fitting that Ino should look at it.
A dark-haired man appeared at Ino’s side. He was tall and pretty-looking and not at all what Shikamaru had built up in his mind. He didn’t say anything, but Ino looked at him, smiled a little and turned quickly back to Shikamaru.
“So . . . it’s good to see you.” Ino finished awkwardly.
“You, too.” Shikamaru nodded. And it was, in a way.
Ino and her boy-toy shuffled down the aisle and took their seats. When he looked at Temari, he found that her face was blank, unaffected — the perfect reaction. It was good to see her that way.
Shikamaru smiled and leaned in to kiss her. Temari laughed and he stopped just short of her.
“You’re not trying to prove a point, are you?”
“Not in the least.”
“All right, then. Go ahead.”
Shikamaru pressed his lips to hers and settled into his seat. At some point before they reach their destination, Temari would probably ask him about Ino and expect him to tell her every little detail of their time together. Shikamaru would have to supply the information, because by then he knew her well enough to know that she would assume the most obscene thing unless she was given details. Darn pushy woman.
Right now, though, he still had two hours and all those precious miles of snowy train-ride to bask in the glorious knowledge that, when it all comes down to it, there is no distance at all.
: finis :
: blue ruin :
A/N: I like the way this fanfiction turned out — I really do. This has me very excited to get started on the next installment of this series, and I hope you’re excited, too.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this story!
Reviews (positive, negative, neutral or otherwise) are redeemable for free huggles™ from the author!