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Sitting down to lunch was a peaceful relief, because Naruto had been nattering on all morning about the most mundane things, and Shikamaru needed a break and the sensible conversations that arose from being with his friends.
Until Ino – nosy, busybody Ino with her weird agenda that Shikamaru is certain stemmed from a lack of stimulation at home – ruined everything.
“When was the last time you did anything romantic for Temari?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. This was not the way lunches with his old team were meant to go. Usually they talked about safe topics – work, and the kids, and the past – and bringing up romance was definitely not a safe topic. “What?”
“When last,” Ino repeated, as though Shikamaru were both deaf and dim, “Did you do anything romantic for Temari?”
In an effort to not admit that he didn’t have a clue, he dodged the question. “Depends what you call romantic . . .”
Ino sent Chouji a pointed look.
Chouji, the traitor, just shrugged and said, “I took Karui out for lunch a few days ago. And got her flowers yesterday. Don’t try to redirect onto me.”
“Well?” Ino demanded, rounding on Shikamaru again.
“Where did this come from?” Shikamaru asked with a frown. “Why must you always stick your nose into my marriage?”
“Sai and I were talking-“
That was never a precursor to good things. Shikamaru and Chouji exchanged looks.
“Don’t look at each other like that,” Ino said hotly. “I actually talk to my spouse. You two are hopeless, lazy idiots.”
“I’ll agree with you on two out of three of those points,” Shikamaru allowed. “But can’t you aim your mad inclination to interfere with everyone’s lives at someone else?”
“You, clearly, need help the most.”
“I do not.”
“You do! You have no idea when last you did anything romantic for Temari. Knowing you, it was when you proposed.”
“Can’t have been then,” Chouji mused, continuing on with lunch as though Ino was not completely off her rocker. “Temari called it ‘the least romantic proposal in history’.”
“She still said yes,” Shikamaru grumbled, feeling victimized.
“Sai does romantic things for me all the time,” Ino claimed. “And romantic doesn’t have to be big, fancy gestures. It can be little, thoughtful things too.”
“Like staying late at work so you don’t have to put up with him?”
Ino sent him a withering look, and he knew he was one smart ass remark away from a good slap upside the head.
“Like cute messages or doing nice things.” Ino dug around her weapons’ pouch for a moment, before coming up with her phone, and quickly finding something to support her deranged argument.
“Look, Sai sends me thoughtful little messages.” Ino thrust her phone at Shikamaru and Chouji. “See? Just this morning he sent ‘Went past a lilac bush and thought of you’.”
“Because lilacs are poisonous?” Shikamaru’s remark was replied to with a sharp slap to the head, but he considered it well worth it.
“No,” Ino snapped. “Because lilacs are beautiful.” She sniffed. “Chouji, what was the last message you sent to Karui?”
“Uh,” Chouji shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Phone.” Ino held out an expectant hand.
Chouji gave it up without protest.
“Hm,” Ino navigated her way swiftly to where she wanted to be. “’Will be home late, keep dinner warm. Love you’. Well, at least there’s a ‘love you’ on the end.”
Chouji looked faintly proud of himself.
“I guess you’re not a complete lost cause.” She tossed his phone casually at him, and levelled a glare at Shikamaru.
“No,” he said flatly.
“Come on. You can read my messages to Sai.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Give me your phone, Shikamaru,” Ino growled.
“No.”
“How else will we know if your marriage is falling apart?”
“If my marriage falls apart you’ll find my dismembered body in a shallow grave,” Shikamaru retorted. “Everyone knows that.”
“Give!”
“No!”
“I’m trying to help!”
“You’re trying to be a nosy busybody-“
“Here,” Chouji sighed, pulling Shikamaru’s phone from his pocket. “Now stop yelling, please. I’m trying to enjoy lunch.”
Ino snatched the device out of Chouji’s hand with glee, and settled into her seat. Shikamaru sank down further, with a deliberately loud, unimpressed groan.
“’Out of milk’,” Ino rolled her eyes. “That’s the last thing you sent her?”
“It was a logical thing to send,” Shikamaru defended. “We were out of milk.”
“You’re hopeless.” Ino absently read a few more messages. “’Working late’. ‘Had dinner with Naruto’. Why does Temari put up with you?”
“I want to say a lack of options, but,” he shrugged helplessly. “She could do better.”
“Yes, she could,” Ino rolled her eyes again, somehow managing to scrounge up even more dramatic flair to the action. “Send her a sexy text.”
“A what?”
“Sai sends me nice messages all the time!”
“Sai is following a book – and you know it!”
“It doesn’t matter! At least he’s putting in the effort.” Ino thrust the phone towards him. “Go on.”
“What, now?”
“Yes, now, then at least I know you’ve done it.”
Shikamaru made no move to take his phone back. “What would I even say?”
“I don’t know! How do you two usually flirt?”
“We don’t.”
“You should try it.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“If you’re so desperate to ‘save my marriage’,” Shikamaru made finger quotes, hoping that would convey how utterly stupid Ino was being, “Then you send her a message.”
“I will,” Ino replied, with a flippant head toss.
Shikamaru sighed. He hadn’t expected her to actually do it. Score one for Ino.
“What are you wearing?” Ino muttered to herself as she typed. Triumphantly, she slapped the phone down onto the table. “There! Now we see what she replies.”
“It’s going to be ‘let’s talk about a divorce’,” Chouji offered helpfully.
“She’s working anyway; she won’t reply,” Shikamaru slouched in his seat.
As he finished his sentence, the phone buzzed.
Ino threw him an indulgent, gloating look.
“That could be anyone,” Shikamaru muttered.
“Read it,” Ino growled.
With a loud, reluctant sigh, and a muttered, “Troublesome,” Shikamaru picked up the phone. “Huh.”
“What?” Ino and Chouji edged in closer.
Shikamaru presented the screen.
Who is this?
“Are you kidding me?” Ino sent him the most unimpressed look ever. “You’re so unromantic she doesn’t think you’re even capable of flirty text messages?”
A second buzz heralded the arrival of another message, and Chouji and Ino pressed in eagerly to see.
I know it’s not Shikamaru, so it’s either Ino or Naruto.
It’s Ino, Shikamaru replied.
Temari’s reply was near instant. Hey, beautiful ; )
“That’s not fair,” Shikamaru grumbled. “Why does she flirt with you?”
“Because I took initiative,” Ino snapped. “Wake up and do something!”
Shikamaru nearly flung the phone in Ino’s face when it began ringing. “Now look what you’ve done!”
“Answer her!” Ino demanded.
Shikamaru, impossibly, sunk further into his seat, answering with a despairing groan, “What?”
“You don’t sound like Ino,” the voice on the other side answered, and Shikamaru could hear Temari’s grin.
“It’s my phone, Tem, who were you expecting to answer it?”
“What’s brought about this sudden desire for Ino and I to have an affair?”
“Your husband is an unromantic, lazy dumbass!” Ino yelled helpfully, as though that were a suitable answer.
Shikamaru sighed, and turned the phone on speaker, and set it on the table. “You’re on speaker, Tem.”
“So, any reason my workday is being interrupted by the most out of nowhere text I’ve ever gotten in my life?” Temari asked.
“Just Ino doing her best to make my life miserable. As usual. All I wanted was a nice quiet lunch after Naruto has been so loud all day. I have one blond screaming at me at the office, and then another over lunch, and then when I can finally go home-“
“Careful, there,” Temari interrupted. “I might not like what you say next.”
“All I suggested,” Ino put in. “Was that he put a bit more effort into, well, you. Is it too much to ask to be treated nicely? To be appreciated? Wouldn’t you like it if one day Shikamaru made dinner, and did the laundry, and made sure Shikadai was ready for school the next day-“
“If he did all that I’d kill him immediately for being an imposter,” Temari sounded casual about this.
“See?” Shikamaru muttered. “Being lazy is what keeps me alive.”
“But wouldn’t you like a little message every now and then?” Ino pressed. “A little ‘thinking of you’ when you don’t expect it, maybe a nice ‘I love you’, or something similar?”
“He interrupts enough of my day without adding stupid text messages to the list,” Temari replied, and Shikamaru sat up a bit straighter, looking infinitely more smug.
“She agrees with me,” he pointed out. “So shove off, Ino.”
“You need romance, Temari,” Ino leant closer to the phone. “You need to be wooed, and swept off your feet. You deserve it.”
“I already got an alliance and a kid out of him; I’ve got what I needed.”
“Hey!” Shikamaru exclaimed indignantly.
“Oh, relax, I’ll keep you around,” Temari said dismissively. “Be a pain to break in a new man. You might as well stay. You’ve got a few good qualities.”
“But romance is not one of them,” Ino pointed out. “Come on, Shikamaru, just try put effort into something, once in a while. Chouji does. Sai does. Even you can manage to be nice, on rare occasions.”
“Please stop talking, and never again interfere with my personal life,” Shikamaru muttered.
“Can I get back to work now, or do you need to analyze Shikamaru’s behaviour a bit more?” Temari asked.
“I think we can take it from here,” Ino said, with a bright smile. “Have a good day!”
Shikamaru sent Ino a look, which she duly returned. There was a long, brooding silence between them, while Chouji finished his lunch, and shamelessly took advantage of Shikamaru’s distraction to eat his as well.
“You know,” Ino said, after a while, in an innocent voice, “You could make her dinner.”
“Please shut up.”
“Or take her out someplace nice. Give her some flowers. Get her chocolates.”
“Doing nothing got me this far in life, I’m not changing it now,” he muttered stubbornly.
“Fine, do nothing,” Ino shrugged. “I’m just saying that maybe if you were nicer to her, she’d be nicer to you.”
That was a load of bullshit if he’d ever heard it. Shikamaru snorted. Temari wasn’t nice, it was as simple as that. He turned his attention back to lunch, only to find it had been eaten. He sent Chouji a resigned, sideways glance, and Chouji made an apologetic gesture.
“Since you’ll be hungry later anyway,” Ino put in, relentless in her quest to drive Shikamaru insane, “Take your wife out to dinner.”
“So, how was lunch with the team?” Temari’s eyes positively gleamed with mischief, and Shikamaru wondered if she had been specifically waiting for him just so she could tease him.
He closed the front door just hard enough to let her know he was aware that she was messing with him.
“Did you talk about anything interesting?” she continued, not even bothering to hide her sharp smirk.
He briefly considered opening the door again and leaving, but instead just slumped against it, cocking an eyebrow at her. “Why do you take so much joy in my suffering?”
“You’re hardly suffering. Your friends are looking out for you.”
“My friends are insane.” He sighed. After a pause, and after Temari just studied him with her head tilted and her eyes afire, he wondered softly, “Does it bother you?”
“What?”
“That . . . I dunno, that I’m just me. That I don’t do all things Ino talks about.”
“Are you seriously worried about that?”
“Yeah, a little,” he admitted. “Sometimes it still feels unreal to have you here with me, since you could have done so much better.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, gauging how serious he was. Pulling sincere emotional moments out of Temari was one of the biggest challenges Shikamaru ever faced, and there was never a guarantee she would play along.
After a silence that stretched on too long for his comfort, she shrugged and turned away.
“You have nothing to worry about,” she threw the comment flippantly over her shoulder as she left the room.
“Do you want to elaborate on that?” Shikamaru asked, pushing off the front door to follow her.
“Do you want to die in your sleep tonight?”
Shikamaru smiled, shaking his head slightly. Ah, when Temari got defensive it led to some of the best conversations in his life. “Come on, Tem, talk to me. What can I do to make our life more ‘romantic’?”
“You can shut up, for starters,” she growled, coming to a halt in the kitchen.
He stopped a short distance away, and waited patiently. Pushing Temari to open up never worked. Doing absolutely nothing was his best choice. So, he stayed still, just watching her, while she eyed him up and down, and weighed her words, and sorted her emotions.
“Fine,” she sighed. “But if you laugh at me, I’m going to kill you.”
He nodded, and stayed silent.
“I don’t need the same things Ino needs,” Temari said, with a shrug that she tried to pass off as casual. “Her ideas of romance are . . . classical. The usual. I don’t care about flowers and chocolates and whatever crap men think they have to do these days.”
He lifted his chin slightly, not interrupting.
“People think those are the only ways to say ‘I love you’, or whatever. You do other things that mean the same. And say the same things to me.” Temari drew in a deep breath. “I don’t need flowers because I can watch you training Shikadai, and that means more and lasts longer. I don’t need dumb little messages every day because I know you’re working to keep this village and everyone in it safe, and that’s how you show love. I don’t need you to take me out to dinner a certain number of times a month, because whenever we’re together and I look at you, you’re already looking at me. That’s what I need, Shikamaru. Just you. We have our own way to appreciate other, and our own ways to say I love you.”
He nodded slowly, that happy light twist starting in his chest whenever Temari gave him moments like these – the soft ones, that she handed out so sparingly, but made them so worth the wait. He breathed out slowly. “Thank you.”
“You’re a dumbass.”
“I’m a smartass.”
“You’re an ass.”
He couldn’t help it then, chuckling a little. God, he loved her so, so much. “Okay, okay. I’m an ass.”
She grinned at him.
“I’m an unromantic, unappreciative ass. But,” he returned her grin, caught in the forest fire green of her eyes. “That aside, what do you want for dinner tonight?”
“If we go out Ino will know, and she will gloat.” Temari mused for a moment.
“We could make Shikadai go out and bring us food.”
“Good plan. Maybe you are a smartass, after all.”
“I am.”
She let her grin fade into her soft smile again, gazing fondly at him, and Shikamaru didn’t care what Ino thought about him; he had won at life, because he got to see Temari smile every day. Whatever he had done in life to get this point, he wouldn’t change a thing.
He did think, though, that maybe he should listen to Ino and take after Chouji, and so a few days later he tentatively sent Temari a message, wedged into a corner in Naruto’s office, hideously embarrassed at his own behavior.
And lack of imagination shamed him into repeating Ino’s ‘flirty’ text, and before he could second guess himself, he sent off So, what are you wearing?
Temari had the day off, so he hoped maybe he would brighten her day or make her smile at whatever she was doing. Sitting on the porch, perhaps, watching the deer and drinking tea. Maybe lying in bed reading.
The reply was surprisingly swift. Not much at all.
He smiled to himself. Maybe Ino was right after all, and he should do this more often. He was about to reply when another message came through from Temari.
Because you didn’t do the laundry like I asked, you useless, dimwitted moron.
Romance was overrated, he thought.
Temari loved him, and he was head over heels for her, and they didn’t need any conventional means to let each other know.