Themes 12 and 25 - Shika/Tema/Yuya
Two more themes, following directly after the Origins Story, I'm sorry there isn't much Temari in these stories, she has a greater role in the ones that are forthcoming, just wanted to post these so I don't keep people impatient and then give you a ton to read at once.
Please enjoy 12 - Alone and 25 - Looking
Theme: 12 - Alone
Fandom/Pairing: Naruto - Shikamaru/Tayuya/Temari
Title: Abandoned
Author: Lady Zip
Rating: PG 13 (violence, tayuya-speak, angst)
Disclaimer: I wonder if Kishimoto-sama would accept a soul as a royalty payment…
He likes to try to trick me with logic. To flip my words and intentions around so that I’ll tell him what he’s looking to know. So I’ve gotten into the habit of not talking.
I told him how to say my name, because for a while he was mispronouncing it, which was really irritating.
I told him the name of the city I was born in, because he kept asking stupid stuff like what it was like in the Sound. I figured that if I said something it would shut him up by surprise. It worked.
When my hands healed a little and I could move my arms, I asked for my flute. He told me it was broken but he would see what he could do about getting me another one to play with. I huffed and shut my eyes again and ignored him as he rambled off questions of no value.
I watched him once while he was asking me things, instead of pretending to sleep, and found him whittling at a stick with a pocket knife, uninterested, watching the clock. An hour each day to try to get me to tell him what he wanted to know and he seemed utterly bored.
“Do you even want to be here?” I asked him. “What are you questioning me for when I don’t answer you?”
He shrugged and picked another chunk off of his stick with the blade.
“I’m getting paid to ask you dumb stuff, every once in a while you answer, and when you’re ready and you realise that it’s your best option, you’ll tell me what my superiors want to hear. No sense rushing things.”
Best option my ass.
And I hate that him saying that makes me wonder about it anyway.
It’s late, and I should be sleeping, but I’m wide awake, thinking, wiggling my toes in at the bottom of the bed and being vaguely grateful that I can still feel them. The air is hanging heavy, there’s an odd pressure to it that puts me on edge.
All my awareness does me no good with him though. I jump when the shadow passes over my bed and my eyes can’t find him until he tilts his head and the blank, fearsome reflection of his glasses outlines his face. He steps up to me, smiling in that disarmingly friendly way and I cuss him out quietly for it.
“Fuckin hell Kabuto, can you be any more creepy!? Took you long enough to get here you sonofabitch; what was the fucking hold up?”
“I’m sorry. These sorts of plans are a sensitive thing Tayuya.” He says softly, tugging a kunai blade from his belt.
I profer my wrist to him and he slices my hospital bracelet cleanly away, cuts down the wires that hold my legs in traction, although the pain of having them jostled is near enough to set me reeling. He lets my left leg land with a particularly weighty thump and I let my eyes roll back for a dizzy moment as the pain swells and fades.
I tilt my head forward again and feel the scrape of metal against my throat.
And he’s frozen there, kunai cold and firm against my pulse, pinning me to my pillow and looking utterly furious. It takes me near a minute to register what he was about to do, and another minute more to realize why he’s stopped.
Shikamaru, standing in the dark doorway, pulling his hand - Kabuto’s hand - back to his chest.
“You think you can pull that shit trick more than once in this place?” he asks, and Kabuto only glares at me, with force and hatred and purpose that makes my stomach churn and my head swim.
He came for me…. He came for me…. He came to finish me…
And in an instant I’m alone.
The next time Shikamaru comes to see me, in the morning with my legs strung up again and the hair thin cut at my throat bandaged awkwardly, he hands me a little wooden flute. It’s not the quality of my own instrument but playable and close enough to the right weight for me to cope with its other misgivings.
He doesn’t ask me questions, because he knows he doesn’t need to, but perhaps I still play a good enemy, by making him wait for the confession.
He’s walking out the door, back turned to me, when I speak. I don’t want him to see the defeat he knew would come behind my eyes. I have nothing left to defend, cornered, checkmate, and the words come in place of the tears that I can’t allow.
“Deep in the forest, out toward the south, it’s only one of many…”
Theme: 25 - Looking
Fandom/Pairing: Naruto - Shikamaru/Tayuya/Temari
Title: Say The Words
Author: Lady Zip
Rating: PG-13 (angst)
Disclaimer: I wonder if Kishimoto-sama would accept a soul as a royalty payment…
Our first real conversation was about games.
It began as a bleak thing, an argument of strategy, focused on her defeat in the forest. She told me I couldn’t be half so smart as I looked. I told her that I didn’t think I was terribly smart either, I just thought of it like a game, like Shogi, to make it simple.
And Tayuya laughed at me. Outright, loudly, both derisive and delighted. Then she snorted like a disgusted noblewoman and told me that Shogi was a shit game and she preferred Go.
The following week I brought my board, plunked it down on the table and asked her what her handicap was. She said six. I gave her nine. She kicked my ass.
It’s been three years since the first game.
The score is 149 to 111 in her favour. (Where a woman in isolation containment in prison learns new Go strategies is beyond me…)
I used to imagine that it was her constant betterment of me that brought me back every week, but there’s more than one game played between us and the second holds more sway than the first…
Today she asks where I’ve been and I tell her I had to take a long mission.
I lie without a thought, and wonder why I can’t tell her. Why I’ve never told her…
I look at what I can’t touch and lie to her beautiful face while she smirks at me, annoyed and relieved at once, and asks me if I’m ready to have her win round 261.
I sit down across the board from her and grip my hands into fists on my knees. I let her lay out the handicaps alone nowadays, scared of that electric brush of fingers if I try to help her, terrified of repeating that moment months ago when she first held my hand.
Barely a moment, her fingers slipping roughly between mine, and the urge to kiss her had swelled so powerfully in my chest that I thought it might break.
She asks what the mission was about and I pull a typical story out of my ass again. Sometimes I say it’s classified, sometimes I say it was a team training thing or I was busy with examiners duties. Today, the most common excuse seems best.
“Some escort mission for a delegate from Sunagakure.”
One part of that is true.
Sunagakure.
Temari.
The hinge at which all of my lies rest.
I went to Suna, to see her, to visit my girlfriend. I stayed for ten days, trying to make my best impression on her family…
“So did you have a decent trip anyway?” Tayuya asks, laying down the first stone, the usual question and her favourite opening move.
“Eh, it was alright.”
It was wonderful. I hadn’t seen her in weeks. We laid in her bed all morning the first day that I was there. I put her up against the shower wall and made her late for lunch. She dug her fingernails in my back and moaned my name the way I love her to and I still haven’t healed…
“Anything exciting for a change?” Tayuya asks, tilting her head at me curiously beyond the curtain of her bangs. She never thinks a mission is any fun unless I or my team mates have had a scrape with untimely death.
“Not by your standards.”
That’s not true, and she would have thought it was hilarious.
She likes making people ill at ease. It amuses her. She takes sheer delight in seeing how people recoil when she swears as casually as if she were the sun spitting out daylight. She would have laughed until she couldn’t breathe to see me stroll out of Temari’s room in my underwear and straight into her brothers coming up the hallway.
I thought Gaara was going to kill me. Kankuro too. They might still if I don’t make good on what I promised her…
Tayuya snorts. “You always go off and then come back without a fucking story to your name. Tell them to give you a mission that isn’t so damn boring. You’ll die young if you don’t keep your pace up.”
“I guess it just wasn’t really the sort of trip you bring home stories about...”
I asked her to marry me the day I left. I’ve never been so scared…
“It’s such a fuckin cop out, you never have anything good to tell me.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She said yes.
Tayuya sticks her tongue out at me and pokes me in the forehead.
"Never any good news." she says smartly. “Come on, quit bein’ all thoughtful and make a fuckin move, huh?”
Good news.
She's right. It's good news. I’m god-damn engaged to a woman I love and I can't bring myself to say those words to her…
Because it's bad news for her and I isn't it? Whatever we have here - underneath the games and the lies - my life outside these walls is set to destroy it.
“I’m sorry.”
I lay down a stone, thoughtless and aimless, looking at what I can’t touch with that ache in my chest starting low and deep all over again.
She conquers me and I come back for more.
Yay! Writin!
Please enjoy 12 - Alone and 25 - Looking
Theme: 12 - Alone
Fandom/Pairing: Naruto - Shikamaru/Tayuya/Temari
Title: Abandoned
Author: Lady Zip
Rating: PG 13 (violence, tayuya-speak, angst)
Disclaimer: I wonder if Kishimoto-sama would accept a soul as a royalty payment…
He likes to try to trick me with logic. To flip my words and intentions around so that I’ll tell him what he’s looking to know. So I’ve gotten into the habit of not talking.
I told him how to say my name, because for a while he was mispronouncing it, which was really irritating.
I told him the name of the city I was born in, because he kept asking stupid stuff like what it was like in the Sound. I figured that if I said something it would shut him up by surprise. It worked.
When my hands healed a little and I could move my arms, I asked for my flute. He told me it was broken but he would see what he could do about getting me another one to play with. I huffed and shut my eyes again and ignored him as he rambled off questions of no value.
I watched him once while he was asking me things, instead of pretending to sleep, and found him whittling at a stick with a pocket knife, uninterested, watching the clock. An hour each day to try to get me to tell him what he wanted to know and he seemed utterly bored.
“Do you even want to be here?” I asked him. “What are you questioning me for when I don’t answer you?”
He shrugged and picked another chunk off of his stick with the blade.
“I’m getting paid to ask you dumb stuff, every once in a while you answer, and when you’re ready and you realise that it’s your best option, you’ll tell me what my superiors want to hear. No sense rushing things.”
Best option my ass.
And I hate that him saying that makes me wonder about it anyway.
It’s late, and I should be sleeping, but I’m wide awake, thinking, wiggling my toes in at the bottom of the bed and being vaguely grateful that I can still feel them. The air is hanging heavy, there’s an odd pressure to it that puts me on edge.
All my awareness does me no good with him though. I jump when the shadow passes over my bed and my eyes can’t find him until he tilts his head and the blank, fearsome reflection of his glasses outlines his face. He steps up to me, smiling in that disarmingly friendly way and I cuss him out quietly for it.
“Fuckin hell Kabuto, can you be any more creepy!? Took you long enough to get here you sonofabitch; what was the fucking hold up?”
“I’m sorry. These sorts of plans are a sensitive thing Tayuya.” He says softly, tugging a kunai blade from his belt.
I profer my wrist to him and he slices my hospital bracelet cleanly away, cuts down the wires that hold my legs in traction, although the pain of having them jostled is near enough to set me reeling. He lets my left leg land with a particularly weighty thump and I let my eyes roll back for a dizzy moment as the pain swells and fades.
I tilt my head forward again and feel the scrape of metal against my throat.
And he’s frozen there, kunai cold and firm against my pulse, pinning me to my pillow and looking utterly furious. It takes me near a minute to register what he was about to do, and another minute more to realize why he’s stopped.
Shikamaru, standing in the dark doorway, pulling his hand - Kabuto’s hand - back to his chest.
“You think you can pull that shit trick more than once in this place?” he asks, and Kabuto only glares at me, with force and hatred and purpose that makes my stomach churn and my head swim.
He came for me…. He came for me…. He came to finish me…
And in an instant I’m alone.
The next time Shikamaru comes to see me, in the morning with my legs strung up again and the hair thin cut at my throat bandaged awkwardly, he hands me a little wooden flute. It’s not the quality of my own instrument but playable and close enough to the right weight for me to cope with its other misgivings.
He doesn’t ask me questions, because he knows he doesn’t need to, but perhaps I still play a good enemy, by making him wait for the confession.
He’s walking out the door, back turned to me, when I speak. I don’t want him to see the defeat he knew would come behind my eyes. I have nothing left to defend, cornered, checkmate, and the words come in place of the tears that I can’t allow.
“Deep in the forest, out toward the south, it’s only one of many…”
Theme: 25 - Looking
Fandom/Pairing: Naruto - Shikamaru/Tayuya/Temari
Title: Say The Words
Author: Lady Zip
Rating: PG-13 (angst)
Disclaimer: I wonder if Kishimoto-sama would accept a soul as a royalty payment…
Our first real conversation was about games.
It began as a bleak thing, an argument of strategy, focused on her defeat in the forest. She told me I couldn’t be half so smart as I looked. I told her that I didn’t think I was terribly smart either, I just thought of it like a game, like Shogi, to make it simple.
And Tayuya laughed at me. Outright, loudly, both derisive and delighted. Then she snorted like a disgusted noblewoman and told me that Shogi was a shit game and she preferred Go.
The following week I brought my board, plunked it down on the table and asked her what her handicap was. She said six. I gave her nine. She kicked my ass.
It’s been three years since the first game.
The score is 149 to 111 in her favour. (Where a woman in isolation containment in prison learns new Go strategies is beyond me…)
I used to imagine that it was her constant betterment of me that brought me back every week, but there’s more than one game played between us and the second holds more sway than the first…
Today she asks where I’ve been and I tell her I had to take a long mission.
I lie without a thought, and wonder why I can’t tell her. Why I’ve never told her…
I look at what I can’t touch and lie to her beautiful face while she smirks at me, annoyed and relieved at once, and asks me if I’m ready to have her win round 261.
I sit down across the board from her and grip my hands into fists on my knees. I let her lay out the handicaps alone nowadays, scared of that electric brush of fingers if I try to help her, terrified of repeating that moment months ago when she first held my hand.
Barely a moment, her fingers slipping roughly between mine, and the urge to kiss her had swelled so powerfully in my chest that I thought it might break.
She asks what the mission was about and I pull a typical story out of my ass again. Sometimes I say it’s classified, sometimes I say it was a team training thing or I was busy with examiners duties. Today, the most common excuse seems best.
“Some escort mission for a delegate from Sunagakure.”
One part of that is true.
Sunagakure.
Temari.
The hinge at which all of my lies rest.
I went to Suna, to see her, to visit my girlfriend. I stayed for ten days, trying to make my best impression on her family…
“So did you have a decent trip anyway?” Tayuya asks, laying down the first stone, the usual question and her favourite opening move.
“Eh, it was alright.”
It was wonderful. I hadn’t seen her in weeks. We laid in her bed all morning the first day that I was there. I put her up against the shower wall and made her late for lunch. She dug her fingernails in my back and moaned my name the way I love her to and I still haven’t healed…
“Anything exciting for a change?” Tayuya asks, tilting her head at me curiously beyond the curtain of her bangs. She never thinks a mission is any fun unless I or my team mates have had a scrape with untimely death.
“Not by your standards.”
That’s not true, and she would have thought it was hilarious.
She likes making people ill at ease. It amuses her. She takes sheer delight in seeing how people recoil when she swears as casually as if she were the sun spitting out daylight. She would have laughed until she couldn’t breathe to see me stroll out of Temari’s room in my underwear and straight into her brothers coming up the hallway.
I thought Gaara was going to kill me. Kankuro too. They might still if I don’t make good on what I promised her…
Tayuya snorts. “You always go off and then come back without a fucking story to your name. Tell them to give you a mission that isn’t so damn boring. You’ll die young if you don’t keep your pace up.”
“I guess it just wasn’t really the sort of trip you bring home stories about...”
I asked her to marry me the day I left. I’ve never been so scared…
“It’s such a fuckin cop out, you never have anything good to tell me.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She said yes.
Tayuya sticks her tongue out at me and pokes me in the forehead.
"Never any good news." she says smartly. “Come on, quit bein’ all thoughtful and make a fuckin move, huh?”
Good news.
She's right. It's good news. I’m god-damn engaged to a woman I love and I can't bring myself to say those words to her…
Because it's bad news for her and I isn't it? Whatever we have here - underneath the games and the lies - my life outside these walls is set to destroy it.
“I’m sorry.”
I lay down a stone, thoughtless and aimless, looking at what I can’t touch with that ache in my chest starting low and deep all over again.
She conquers me and I come back for more.
Yay! Writin!