Title: fallings of a mourner

Summary: Shikamaru Nara curses his haunted mind. - Asuma befriends it. It's a downward spiral of revenge from then on.

I don't own any of the Naruto characters.

Reviews are welcomed.

fallings

of

a

mourner

''My downfall is more subtle than I thought'', he mumbles quietly enough to taste the cynicism embedded in his tongue.

The first spark of disillusionment begins with a simple touch. The lingering eyes travel down his prickling spine, causing him to snap his neck back with nothing but doubt stares back at him. The faint, yet undeniable existant scent of cigarette smoke is still there [and it isn't his - he only smokes outside]. In the darkness, an invisible, familiar hand reaches out and presses down his shoulder. It's a firm grip of memory that drowns him to this state, the memory of a father.

He refuses to forget, much less forgive.

He sees him. All the edges are so clear: he struggles to find it to be a simple delusion. He knows it is, just a hidden wanting in his foolish mind, but he didn't think it would pain him. As the night dances down upon him, he sees a dim reflection in the blue moonlight. It's him, dressed in his Jonin outfit, smirking right at his student whose wide, focused eyes calmly blink in a repeating pattern. The corners of Asuma's chapped lips quiver upwards, smiling further at the sight of Shikamaru's perplexed state, who's trying to solve this situation like it's another damn equation.

"I'm a little harder than most puzzles, boy. Gonna take longer to figure this out, I'm warning ya before you start complaining." Shikamaru's eyes harden to stone, his breathing hitched to a pause and into a brief deprivation of oxygen. He attempts to the challenge, counting the different scenarios on how to play his actions and its every possible effect but he loses all valuable thought to the surrealism. For every offense he attacks with swift precision, there is always a defense to match.

"You can at least act like you miss me," he smirks, waving the cigarette around casually - as if the ghost of his dead sensei appearing in front of him carried rationality like a cup of sake.

He cannot win this battle, but he cannot make an ally of the enemy. This is a war with no victor - there is nothing to gain, but everything to forfeit. He runs through Sun Tzu's guidance

He's only human, he tries to reason.

With little he has left, he must not lose his sanity.

"This isn't real," Shikamaru bluntly says as his breathing slows and his chest pounds in a surging panic. He brings his hands to his head as he looks the other way. He can't face the man he's failed to save. He can't face his mistake when it comes back in detail. "This isn't real," he says again, trying to reassure his slipping confidence. Asuma sits on the edge of the bed, the creaking of wood glide under his feet and his body sinking down on the cotton layers. "You're right like always, kid. It's always been kinda annoying but'' - he pauses, shaking his head as his eyes warm fondly - ''... it's you. You're good that way." Shikamaru flinches, the raspy, yet easing voice echoing through the walls is a replica at its most advanced. He doesn't notice how hard his hands shake but he swears there's still cracks of dried blood stuck under the fingernails from that night.

But such hallucination is too life-like for him to simply ignore, so he gnaws the inside of his cheeks in attempts to distract himself instead. Oh, how he craves for blissful ignorance, to become free and utterly stupid from the numbing pain. He isn't a man of peculiar faith, but he prays silently for this sickness to end anyhow.

Asuma continues to roll his tongue but he won't listen. He won't risk falling deeper than he already has. He separates himself from his room, dark eyes empty as he knows the man who seems all too real is nothing more than a dead man.

A dead man.

A raw, aching cry is halfway caught in his sore throat and out spits a bitter laugh instead. He brings his calloused hands to his head, running through his thick raven hair for a minute to pass by. His quivering exhales are thick from remorse meanwhile, his estranged lungs urge for a temporary killing cure.

Just another smoke to yellow his fingertips and forget everything, his bitten lips urge. Asuma's worst habit has found root between his teeth and a silver lighter. When his throat rumbles and ruptures into a ground-breaking coughing fit, he feels alive only in ruins.

It's his worst habit.

Shikamaru needs to cut ties, but he's afraid his selfish desires have a strange taste for this kind of false intimacy.

In the end, it is a haunting of his own craft. He is on the verge of fading, the verge of surrendering to the madness closing in. Shikamaru knows the outcome for prodigies whose necessary sanities become unattached and he's just another episode from being another accurate tragedy of an intellectual on a psychological breakdown.

He must not lose his sanity, the little he has left of.

His father finds him resting in solitude, surrounded by pondering silence and gray curls of fading entrails. His hand trembled weakly, the cigarette almost falling off the cliff of his hands.

'What will you think of me now?', Shikamaru asks calmly on the wooden porch, still dangling a burning cigarette with eyes distant. He stares at the his family's forest without focus, in and out of reality.

"You need to put this misery behind you", his father replies, eyes cruel on the self-inflicted burns at his son's forearm.

"I wasn't fucking asking you."

He can't escape this hell, not even if his eyelids drop to the darkness and finds refuge in loneliness instead. His mind replays everything down to Asuma's last words and the list of mistakes go on, as do the feelings of self-hatred. He just waits for the second where he grabs the kunai from the counter and slits his own throat. The white sheets soaked in blood and his gray body put to a permanent sleep by unforgiveness - it's the inevitable end for those who grief too much.

The minute passes, cutting off bleak thoughts and twisting into a cold rage. The image of Asuma is gone but the memories are still fucking there and things aren't easier. There's an itch in his hands, a temptation to shatter all things breakable in a spiral of consuming agony beneath an emotionless facade he wears well. He wants to draw blood, whether it be his as a punishment for his ignorance or someone else's, to express the damages to a physical means.

A quiet bloodlust is hidden behind his eyes and vengeance screaming in his veins but buried within his breast, a heart is lacking.

There is only one remedy and it calls for a slaughtering and two graves - one for his vendetta and one for his past, naive self.

He knows what he needs to do to stop this dystopia, so he plans, plans, and plans till his head is spins in a calculating, numbed function of mental mechanics. He hunts out the smallest details and pulls the strings it to make it all more painful, all more agonizing for the man who broke his life's stability.

He is just as patient as he is a factor to his own decaying mercy: it's what makes him a damn good shogi player. That, and a mighty fine gambler.

All he needs are the right cards tucked in his hands, not the strength or power that embodies most victors.

Shikamaru wraps his slim fingers around bruising neck, staring down at fluttering, violet eyes slipping away to a sweet suffocationp. He can feel the body growing limp under his, the struggle ending at the last breath of a corpse.

But perhaps a nick to the throat is just as pleasurable as it quick, he muses with a quiet, morbid fascination.

The thrill of the thought crawls and rumbles. This obession is like white thunder that leaves him in the heavy rain, wondering how long before only darkness lurks.

It's all for Asuma, but there is an alter motive (like always, because one reason isn't enough to satisfy man) to serve. He needs to know how far he'll go, how far his knowledge can strip off all his humanity and grow new skin, one where he wears cold-blooded.

It's an unhealthy obsession of a poisoned mind. This dominating flaw in his design will consume him until his bones are picked clean.

Looking at the blank ceiling, a thin veil of sweat coats over his pale skin. The room is a scattered mess with the walls violently torn open and Shikamaru is alone once again. He sighs, shifting out of his thin, airy sheets and walking towards the bathroom. He needs a cigarette, but he needs cold water to awaken his senses more.

He disregards the rapidly flickering, onyx entrails that stretch from his body and lets them shroud his whole room in total obscurity. They whisper relentlessly, quiet for only their master to hear but loud enough for him to flinch. 'Feedusfeedusfeedusfeedusfeedus', is all he hears and the darkness has never been this tempting, this enticing. He is vulnerable to the sweet-lipped corruption, and he's too drained from dancing with his demons to prevent the downfall.

'So be it,' he thinks without a shred of passion. He is only human until now, and now he is becoming God.

He fears of what he might become if he breaks free.

He flicks the lights with a graceful slide of his hand before it temporary blinding him into a haze of white. It takes a few seconds to recover his vision, but his surroundings eventually come about.

The mirror doesn't replicate his image and reveals a stranger of sadder proportions. Faint residue from exhaustion rest under his eyelids and his tight skin is a ghastly tint, glistening as beads of water drip down. His loosened, sleek hair swept back spills down to his shoulder-blades like a river of ink. He pulls off a towel from a hook and wipes the moisture off his face slowly. Setting down the towel, he raises his eyes up only to avoid himself.

His reflection glares at him with black, paralyzing eyes that carried a dangerous animosity. Another illusion of two separate men torn in one body clashes to peace of the mind. A sudden surge of raw anger breaks free and it twists his stomach to where all he sees is fire.

He finally snaps and finds himself surrounded by a cracked mirror with a broken image, and knuckles bleeding sore. Blood drips in steady repetition onto the marble sink, flowing through with water, intricately spreading until it becomes a pool of red. He brings his hand to the side of his forehead, holding it as the pain erupts, screaming and screaming inside his mind. He grimaces, clenching his jaw as he sees a flash of black in the far right that wasn't there before.

"Get out of my head, Asuma." His voice is steady with torment.

His vision becomes fog on glass - either from tears or a state of unconsciousness ambushing him, he doesn't quite know what's in control anymore.

Asuma rests on the bathroom wall with blood peeking through the layers of clothes, something white and oh so damn familiar dangling his bleeding lips - for once, his mentor is at his most real. He would have laughed once more at the demented irony that had graced itself before him if it weren't for the harsh gasps smothering him.

He wears a damning, disappointed gaze that pours salt on Shikamaru's bleeding body and mind. He swallows down a sob, the despair rising like bile caught between a sore throat.

"You gotta let me go, kid. You're falling into places you're too smart to fall in."

"Fuck you," he spits out and throws a shard of glass at Asuma, cracking it into pieces more useless than before. "Fuck you," he repeats heavier this time, his voice trembling harder to where he almost chokes on air because Asuma is nothing and he doesn't get a say on what he's doing. Not anymore.

He lost himself trying to find salvation in the flames of grief, and it burns worse than pressing cigarettes at his arm. A dark power surging through his body like tremors of a fever.

The shadows eat him alive. Asuma watches.

Author's Note:

I'm debating if I should add another chapter, one where Shikamaru kills Hidan. Tell me what you think of the reviews. Constructive criticism is always appreciated.