*

Back at the Leaf, the trio had always met Asuma at the new Korean barbeque joint around corner, for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that Chouji had somehow earned them all a verified frequent flier discounts at the place.   The restaurant had ridden in on the trendy new wave of Asian-themed eateries, although it hadn’t made the biggest splash of the lot: if not for the insanely cool grills artfully placed in the centre of all the tables, the grease and super-savory delights were just a little too indulgent for the sado-masochistic, self-deniant yuppies.

Asuma had watched a couple practicing meditation on the perfectly-manicured lawn outside with a suspiciously raised eyebrow, shaking his head over his lighter.

“One day,” Shikamaru threatened blandly, poking at the strips of meat sizzling on the grill.  “They’ll make this place non-smoking.  What’ll you do then, I wonder?”

“You know,” interceded Asuma, hand still cupped over the lighter and cigarette dangling haphazardly from his lips.  “This is all bullshit.”  He raised one arm, indicating outside and the couple placed there.

Shikamaru looked at them carefully, impeccable posture from years of parent-paid ballet lessons, good skin, toned whatever.  Whatever trace spirituality that still lingered in the act was quashed by the superficiality of it all.  But, hey, Shikamaru wasn’t an unfair person. 

“Maybe,” he said, dangling another piece of meat over the grill.  “We’re all just horribly biased against the Disposable-Incomees.”

Asuma grinned ruefully.  “What?  For stealing our land, ostentatiously changing our neighborhoods and marrying our women?  Never.”  He had an incredibly agreeable smile on his face suddenly, like the notion of a stake-and-torch overthrow was totally on the menu.  “That’s not what I’m talking about, though,” Asuma conceded.  “I mean, this,” he gestured to the lawn.  “The belief, the spirituality.”

The topic seemed a little heavy for such a lovely day.  Shikamaru looked at him a little ruefully for the introduction of such heavy subject matter, and leaned back, having always been one relatively okay with backing down from intellectual challenges. 

“You know what I mean,” Asuma began, waving the unashed cigarette at him, causing an ember-lit streak to linger in Shikamaru’s line of sight.  “The framework lacks –”

“—Perfection?”  Finished Shikamaru with a hard roll of his eyes, conceding to the bait.  “You’re right, I guess.  Something’s gotta give for the rest to fit.  To prove something, you ultimately have to disprove the vehicle with which you arrive with your proof.  Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem—”

Asuma looked at him, dumbstruck.

“—Or something like that,” Shikamaru sighed, leaning his head down on the table.

Shaking his head, Asuma broke out into a delirious grin; in the distance, Shikamaru watched as storm clouds rumbled on the horizon, ominous and overcast.  The general vicinity had a certain flatness to the topography and the Leaf had been notorious for its view of miles and miles around (Naruto had once attested, wide-eyed, that he had seen Akamaru run away for three days that one time he and Kiba got into a rare and ridiculous fight).  Imminent storms were basically a non-existent phenomenon.  You always saw them coming.

“So,” his teacher croaked amusedly.  “You don’t buy, I guess.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” He began absently. Two blocks down the straight lane, Shikamaru spotted Chouji and Ino step onto the sidewalk, the thought occurring to him that somewhere, somewhere it had to be written in stone, the universal law that Ino was perpetually late for everything.  

Asuma frowned.  “It does.  You need to believe in something.  If there’s an issue with the framework, then make your own.”

Shikamaru looked at him wearily.  “What’s with all this?  You’re being very…”

Grinning, Asuma interjected:  “Sagacious?”

“I was thinking more ‘obnoxiously cryptic’,” corrected Shikamaru, lifting another piece of meat to his mouth as the doors swung open behind him, Ino’s telltale nag and the rustle rustle of Chouji’s potato chip bag seeming to fill the expanses of the restaurant.

“Hey,” Asuma said, chuckling around the smoked-down cigarette as he slid over to make room.  “I’m trying to leave you with some life-long philosophy, here.”

“Move over!”  Ino said by way of greeting, thumping Shikamaru rather brutally in the stomach.

He sighed, sliding over.  “Depends on how long the life is, though.”

That had been on Monday.

 

*
 

Mr. Narita had not been pleased.

When the two passed back through the parkette, shoulders hunched unaccustomedly to the bitter cold, he had still been there behind the junked-out stone chessboard, pockmarked from acid rain years and bird-beak staccatos, taking a brief moment of delicious glory after he had wiped the proverbial floor with T&T’s tiny form.

In chess, anyway.

“You know,” he commented darkly, glowering as the two passed through his park-bench vicinity with heads tucked low into their collars.  “That sure doesn’t look like a sandwich to me.”

This was growing old.  Any moment now, Shikamaru was sure the gods would stop shitting him.  “No,” he agreed over one shoulder, slowing down in a marginally-friendly way, but still keeping decent pace.  “She’s just a remarkably anthropomorphic one, believe me.”

Ino had come to a confused halt, staring between the elderly man on the bench and Shikamaru’s receding back for one befuddled moment before deciding that the only way to deal with people of the less-than-sane persuasion was to not make any sudden movements and back away slowly.  Appropriate offerings also did wonders, if the black and stormy days of Sakura’s weepy period were any indication.

“Get back here, you little worm!”  Mr. Narita hollered suddenly, coming to the quick decision that the relative trade-off between the effort it would take to make an equally snappy comeback to Shikamaru’s snappy retort and the subsequent 7.0-on-the-Richter migraine this kid gave him every time he opened his mouth was just simply not worth it.  “You owe me a game, damnit!”

Shikamaru heaved a sigh, slowing to a standstill.  “Sorry old man,” he offered abortively.  “I’m…”  Walking the green mile?  Breathing my last few breaths?  Please, Mr. Narita, pray fervently for me?  “…On a mission.  I’ll owe you.”  At Mr. Narita’s sudden intake of breath:  “—Again.  I know, I remember.”

“Hold on,” Ino interjected (loudly, as was her modus operandi), believing that she was entitled to answers, or something.  She decidedly left one of the four remaining coffee cups (she had mixed one into her latte, which, for some unfathomable reason, was a piddly excuse for caffeine for a heavy-weight like her) squarely on the worn stone chessboard in front of Mr. Narita, who looked at her with a blend of jealous distaste (for being a chessmate-stealing bitch) and also mild curiosity.  “Where exactly are we going, again?”

“Listen, I’m late for an execution,” Shikamaru stated, a profound note to his voice.  “So safe trip home, alright?”

Shikamaru supposed that it had been a rather crappy reaction, but, to be fair, Ino’s had been a rather crappy request.  And one was always entitled to grade-A asshattery when propositioned thusly.

Even so, she had asked nevertheless.  And this was how it went.

 

*
 

“So what’s this favour I keep hearing about?”  Shikamaru asked warily, leaning back into his chair with an air of cautious disapproval.   “A kidney?  My liver?  Although, to be fair, you owe me a lot of money.”

“No, not the first-born-child kind,” Ino agreed, glancing back over at the espresso  bar.  She fiddled with the hem of her skirt and raised an eyebrow. “Are our drinks ready yet?”

“No,” Shikamaru interjected blandly.

Ino frowned over the tabletop at his brusque reply.  “You don’t have to be rude.  How the hell would you know if you don’t go over there and pick them up, anyway?”

Sighing, Shikamaru leaned forward, pointedly glancing at his watch with an air of “time’s ‘a wastin’” before looking back at her expectantly.

But if the past twenty-something years had been any indication, Ino had never been one to take a freaking hint. Departing from the table, she made her way back to the counter, returning after a few testy moments with her latte and a cold coffee.

 Brilliant. 

If Shikamaru had any intention of drinking the stuff anyway (which was, by the way, oozing hippie in all places – volcanic ash, high-altitude, shade-grown Arabica beans that they didn’t pay the poor farmers pennies for every six-dollar latte, rainforest friendly, etc. etc.) he would have noticed that his snappy comment to the barista had resulted in his coffee being poured first and sitting, losing heat and subjected to the elements, upon the counter while Ino’s latte was lovingly being steamed.  And his?  Lukewarm as hell.  And $3.99, too.

But, anyway.

“Favour,” Shikamaru prompted in a not-so-subtle way and Ino gave him a sidelong glance from her cup, head tilted back in mid-gulp.

“Fine, geez.” She placed it down in front of her with a huffy sigh, scowling equally at him and her latte with a disdainful frown.  “Hey, this stuff?  Tastes like crap, you know.”

“Listen, did you spend several hundred on a plane ticket to come and prevaricate on my borrowed time?”

Ino gave him a withering look.  “And you’re an asshole, you know that?”

“Favour,” Shikamaru pressed on, not to be swayed.

Something weird happened then: a hush washed in, the sky obscured with a chill veil, clouds moving towards them, and the lighting suddenly changed – with the fluctuating illumination, so did the expression on her face. 

In later moments of backwards rumination, Shikamaru would have lamented the fact that he had stayed seated, wished he had stood up at that very moment and walked through that door without looking back, but inevitably these things don’t go away with careful amounts of regret and you get by without them.

She said: “There’s someone I need to find.  Will you come with me?”

 And if he had been listening – really listening, rather than staving off immense incredulity at the sheer notion of her ridiculous request – Shikamaru would have heard a note of something else tingeing the edges of her somewhat-familiar voice, an air of guilty sadness that he didn’t really comprehend.  His mind, though, working on a sleepy default of shrewdity, filed the notion away for later.  It would bite him in the ass, eventually.  Everything always did.

What he should have known then was that something was wrong – very wrong – and that the only time he had seen that look on her face had been one day, so and so many years ago, when she had forgotten to feed Sakura’s pet fish.  He should have known the moment the vigilant voice echoing through the recesses of his brain went absolutely rabid and resounded with a precise and booming: careful.

But he didn’t. 

Instead, Shikamaru looked at her incredulously across the short expanse of the table, thinking of a number of retorts consisting of an abortive string of words that would roughly equate ‘Are you freaking crazy?’  Because there was work and there was life and sundry other things that didn’t stray too far from the above subheadings, and Shikamaru was sure Ino’s little treasure hunt would consist of a lot of missed days and considerable effort and lots of things with which Shikamaru was not openly comfortable.

Ever voluble were his subsequent soundless mouth flaps, and in the end, he opted for a very simple: “What?”

Ino gave a vaguely feral growl.  “Ugh… Shikamaru, I’m asking you for this one favour.  You can’t help me this once?”

“No,” he said with a resounding note of finality, moving his coffee cup to the side.  “This is crazy.  You know it is—” At this, she gave him a mildly shifty look. “And you’d better fess up to exactly what it is you’re really here for—”

“Just stop, okay?”  She interjected pettily, popping open the lid of her latte to dump in one of her free cups of coffee, courtesy of Shikamaru’s unintentional goodwill.  “It’s a guy.  Alright?”

 Shikamaru paused.  Stashed somewhere in the back of his memory was receiving an email from his mother (“Because,” read the sarcastically dripping text.  “God forbid you should deign to check your voicemail once a millennia.”) about Ino’s joyous engagement to that Eiki-fellow.  She had been elated.  Shikamaru had been pleased, but clearly not enough to go home or, god forbid, call her with any jubilant congratulations.  He had left home indefinitely for his own reasons.  Plus, it just wasn’t his style.

Shikamaru watched her, prompting her with his silence.  Eventually she gave in.  “He… um… doesn’t live in the Leaf anymore… I have something I need to ask him.”  She lapsed back into pale silence, avoiding his gaze intently.  He accredited it to the deduced fact that apparently the engagement had fallen through and mentally conceded to the fact that, yes, he really should check his voicemail more often.

Sighing, Shikamaru leaned back against his seat.  “What does this have to do with me?”

Ino wasn’t wasting any time.  “He’s holed up near here, some weird backwater town without an airport.  I need your help.  Well, mostly your car.”

“Ino,” he pronounced slowly.  “I can’t just up and leave any day I want.  I have a job, mind you.”

Looking affronted, Ino leaned forward.  “Oh right, that little set-up you got through pseudo-nepotism.”  She looked a little bitter.

“Asuma wasn’t related to me.”

Ino waved a flippant hand at his comment.  “Same difference.”

 Ino had always been able to wear his patience to a hair-thin thread in her own, thankfully patented way.  Apparent broken engagement aside, there was really only so much sympathy one could feel for this girl.  “Ino,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose agitatedly.  “The answer is no.  Now I have to go, but I’ll walk you to the subway station.”

At which point he promptly gathered up his stuff and made his way past the gawking barista and out the front door, Ino protesting affrontedly at his heels.

 

*

 
Fine, so he was being an utter asshole.  Fine, so this was more like breaking through utter asshole and falling flat on your ass as son-of-a-bitch supreme.  And fine, considering that he was leaving a girl (who, let it be mentioned, happened to be one of his oldest acquaintances ever) alone and, god forbid, homeless in the big city, this was likely more akin to spending all your childhood afternoons with Satan, with the teacups and the hair-braiding and golf games and all.

“Shikamaru!”  Came her pissed-off yell from behind him and he didn’t feel particularly compelled to turn around.  But he did, partially because she did sound a little whacked-out insane what with being out in the cold and the fact that it suddenly started to rain, but mostly because he suspected she was about to take off her shoe and toss it at the back of his head.  He had already evaded one shoe-related encounter today and wasn’t about to let his efforts go to naught.

“Please,” Ino said somewhat desperately, and her untied shoelaces merely confirmed his suspicion.  “There’s something I really need to know.”

 Shikamaru rolled his eyes.  The rain clouds were converging now, a confluence of chill dirty grey all along the cluttered horizon, and maybe if he hurried, he’d beat the rain.

“Chouji can’t help you,” he backtracked hopefully, although deep down knew that the suggestion made very little sense whatsoever.  If her runaway bridegroom was in the near vicinity, even Ino could make the logical choice and come to ask him.  Just because it was logical, though, didn’t make it anymore palatable for him. 

“Shikamaru,” she confessed cryptically.  “For reasons I can’t really tell you about now, you have to come with me.”

“What?”

 “Please,” Ino repeated and Mr. Narita glanced up at him pleadingly, suddenly sympathetic to her cryptic cause – or at least, the desolate note to her plea.  “Chouji can’t come.  He’s got something he needs to deal with back home.  So just say ‘yes’, okay?”

“No,” Shikamaru decided bluntly, turning tail and stalking off in the opposite direction.  The storm clouds loomed ever closer and he feared the probable risk of being utterly soaked.  The morning had started out so beautifully, too.  Until he woke up, at least.

She gave a frustrated growl and turned to Mr. Narita beseechingly.  “What do I do now?”  Ino appealed to him weepily.  “Chouji and I have nowhere to stay!”

So Chouji was here too?  This made Shikamaru pause a little in his tracks and almost – almost – turn around.  But in the end, it was the tone in Mr. Narita’s voice, as he yelled down the paved walkway:  “You get back here, you monster!  Don’t you dare leave her alone!” In a voice that might have described some war-camp atrocity and made the old lady feeding pigeons two benches down jump a solid foot in the air. 

People were staring now, and Shikamaru was not going to be made into a girl-ditching spectacle if he could help it.  He marched back and promptly grabbed her by the elbow, stage whispering agitatedly:  “Fine, we’ll get you guys a hotel or something and then sort out what’s going to happen, okay?”

Ino smiled at him smugly, and then brutally whacked him in the arm that held her captive.  “Sounds good to me,” she said, totally singsong, as he winced from the pain and let go.

 “Fine,” conceded Shikamaru, rubbing his sore arm.  “Let’s find Chouji first, okay?  I’d like to talk to someone with some sense.”

Above them, the sky was made luminous for a brief moment in time and then came the lagging thunder, like the precedence of senses: first light, then sound, before the onslaught of cold and bitter rain from the bruised and looming sky. 

It had caught up to them, after all.

 
 

*

Thoughts?  More? Reviews = Part of balanced diet.  C'mon folks, hit me ♥.