Their hands don’t fit together perfectly.
Hers are too small, her nails too sharp when she lets them grow out between manicures digging into the backs of his hands when she squeezes too tight. They hurt. He never complains. She never apologizes. He wouldn’t want her to anyway.
His knuckles are slightly swollen and crooked in places, a few of his fingers reset in their joints one too many times, treated too late for a medic nin to make pristine. They bend hers slightly out of shape when he tries to force their hands to fit together, to insert himself into the perfect smooth spaces between her fingers and pretend it won’t bulge her out of proportion.
If it strains her hand, she never mentions it.
He doesn’t apologize. She wouldn’t want him to anyway.
But she does want him.
He’s known since before that mission off the coast of Wind, when a large section of cliff their client was standing on broke off and slipped straight down into the ocean, breaking the rough waves in a pillar of brown foam that burst and plumed on impact.
Shikamaru was in that plume, choking on cliff-debris and sea-spray, trying to keep their elderly client above water. Going blind. Hoping Ino was still out gathering intel and wouldn’t catch him in this mess. She doesn’t need more alarming visuals to build nightmares out of, he'd thought. She doesn’t need reminders of how things go wrong, of how Shikamaru isn’t perfect, makes mistakes, chokes on blown-apart sandstone he’ll need to have Ino clear from his lungs as soon as he saves this old man’s life.
It took a while to get clear of the falling boulders so he could water-walk the unconscious man out of the choppy, ochre-clouded ocean and cliff-walk them back up to safety with extra weight slung over his shoulders. It took even longer for him to notice the man’s thin puff of white hair stained red. And then to lay him out on his back on the rocks and feel for a pulse.
He’d taken one of those falling rocks to the head. His skull was dented, soft, like a cantaloupe someone dug their elbow into.
Dead.
By the time Ino returned, he was buried under the largest flat slabs of pale stones Shikamaru could find nearby, a long lump Ino took one look at, followed by a quick assessment of the fully soaked and dirt-caked visage Shikamaru had taken on, paired with the new shape to the coastline, and started massaging her forehead one-handed.
The old man had no family. No one to return a body to. Shikamaru didn’t plan to carry his death with him for the rest of their journey home.
“Idiot,” she said, voice suspiciously tight, and Shikamaru felt his second mud-skin pull when he coughed. She winced and waved him closer, prioritized clearing out his lungs like he knew she would.
That night, they sat shoulder-to-shoulder in a cave-like crevasse closer to the desert than they’d been camped previously, Shikamaru no longer caked in debris but not quite clean anymore, either, slick with sweat from their hike after Ino enforced another ocean bath (less dangerous this time, just annoying). His lungs burned every time he breathed, a lingering symptom from hacking up gravel via Ino’s medical intervention.
In the darkness, Shikamaru forced his hand into hers once again, twisting her fingers out of their elegant shape.
Her head had rested on his damp shoulder, her hair dusted in a fine layer of sand that smelled like the sun. Pulling off him only inches, she looked up at him in the dark with blue eyes that burned like the base of a candle wick. He angled his face down toward hers, made the distance between faces shorter, brushing the end of his nose against hers as if by accident, carving out a path of least resistance as her dehydrated lips cracked open and her breath caught in her chest.
Do it, he thought. As he always does, when she’s on the precipice of taking. Of asking. This is the problem with living as Ino’s main source of stability. He has to remain stable. He can’t change. He can’t give her what she doesn’t ask for. He can’t ask for what she’s not offered. He can’t do what he is constantly challenging her to do for him, flexing muscles under her hand, walking around her house shirtless, leaning deep into her personal space on flimsy pretenses like reading over her shoulder or swiping an eyelash from her eye.
There in their quiet cave, he could see the lust in her eyes. The longing. This is where words like ‘yearning’ come from, he’d thought. From expressions like that. From feelings like this.
Do it.
But of course, she didn’t.
She never does.
She dug her nails into his hand instead. Turned her head and closed her eyes to sleep.
It hurt.
He squeezed her fingers tighter. Pushed her nails in deeper.
Shikamaru never complains.