A/N: Welll here's my newest Better With Three! - haven't done one of those in a while- but here is the long-written installment finally becoming edited and written on a computadora! Its not exactly your typical better with three either. God when am I going to do that sweet-smutty Naru/Saku/Sasu that everyone harbors deep down for?

The answer is soon. Maybe. When life is a little less in my face. Anyway here is my newest attempt to screw with Naruto characters by subjecting them to my weird rambles…

Warnings: M for Sex! Gotta have sex! This is Shikamaru we're talking about. (Or am I the only one who thinks he is secretly the biggest player ever?)

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Or any of Kishimoto-Sensei's characters. If I did, they'd all have seriously messed up love lives by now.

Rigged Rivalry

And i never wanted anything from you,

except everything you had,

And what was left after that too.

X

When Shikamaru goes to Suna, he puts his life on the line.

It's very troublesome.

It's not that he doesn't deal with troublesome things often. Quite the opposite— he's a ninja. Only usually troublesome things are to be avoided at all costs, and there is a certain relish to the danger of this exceedingly troublesome activity, something that teeters on the edge of actually not very troublesome in the least.

-Nothing is quite like the scorn of a she-devil wrapped in sand and glowing blue-hot edges.

Shikamaru goes to her bed, on theses periodic diplomatic envoys the hokage deems necessary to force him to. Her brothers know, and accept with a kind of concealed disdain mixed with hints of protective anger, though they say nothing.

Shikamaru scoffs at them. She would break their fingers like twigs if they tried to protect her. She has more strength in her limbs than her brothers have puppets and sand. She has more life than them too.

They are an interesting dynamic, the three noble Suna siblings. They are violent and temperamental towards each other, glaringly sullen even in the best mood. It is a puzzle, but Shikamaru has other things to think about when he arrives in the windswept sand shithole of Suna wearing the Leaf headband.

Things like foreign papers and deceiving diplomatic smiles, stacks of treaties and water distribution stipulations. Things like the way her tongue feels against his teeth.

Shikamaru gets taken in by her long lashes and sharp-toothed smiles. He lets himself feel her nails through his mesh shirt and her scent around his head. He lets her because he is lazy, because she is a spitfire sunset and relentless, because he is homesick for green and can sometimes find it in the blue of her eyes.

He lets her because it is amusing to leave her room in the morning, hickeys on his neck and kisses on her lips, and see the scandalized looks on the faces of those they pass in the streets, eyes sharp with mistrust and disapproval because Konoha shinobi will never ever be the favorite people of Sand, no matter how much their new Kazekage seems to adore them.

Too much of Suna blood has trickled from Konoha blades for that.

He lets her because she is unfathomable and damn near unstoppable and that has always been something he's admired.

In both of them, these blonde and blue-eyed devil women.

Perhaps he lets her because he is an indecisive bastard, lazy and uncaring and happy as long as he's amused. People forget that Shikamaru doesn't have a very large heart. Ninja don't have especially generous ones in the first place, and Shikamaru tightened his up even more when something left that he never thought he'd lose. Perhaps he lets her because this is a war his paramours fight on their own, and though he is the prize, he cares little for the outcome.

If they are honest, everyone in this war knows the outcome is long decided anyway.

But shinobi are rarely honest, and he lets her. Shikamaru has never been adverse to the losing side.

Perhaps because he is always with the winning.

They fall onto her crisp-clean sheets that smell of lavender and chamomile oil. Temari doesn't seem like it, weathered and eroded and snap-sparking, but she loves the things of beauty, of soft and girly-sweet, the things she can bring up to her nose or eyelids on dirt-stained missions and smile at for a few brief moments.

Shikamaru revels in the silkiness of the fabric, and he always pretends there are no grains marring that smooth expanse of white weave. He ignores that sand sticks to everything in Sunakagaure. It annoys the hell out of him, but on a few occasions it doesn't—sand smeared across stomach and thighs and breasts, wet and sticky and friction-sharp—so he doesn't complain often.

Temari takes him strong, (because she always takes him, he is a thing to be achieved, a goal she desperately craves) demanding and dominant and forceful as always, and he moans around the sand on his lips and jasmine-lavander-wet scent in his head. She revels in the sounds that she pulls from his throat. Temari brands him with her teeth and tongue and longs to hold him within her, tight and hot and aching, forever.

Only, Shikamaru will leave the next day.

X

When she comes she slumps her weight onto his chest, caging him underneath, and she can feel the sand sticking to her narrow collarbones like pin-sharp needles. When he comes he jerks up into her- grasps her hips until they are white-marked and blue-black- grits his teeth and doesn't make any sound beyond a harsh, throat-wrenching groan. She listens for syllables,

But can never pick any out.

A flitting expression of frustration always crosses her face.

Then again, what she doesn't know is that he never calls out anybody's name.

Later, they will sit in her bed naked and wet and he will brush her hair.

He is like a servant, like a slave, but he likes her hair. Soft and golden-smooth it is, like wheat and suns rising, like beams sparkling through a window-pane, like everything he doesn't care about in the troublesome world.

He combs through the thick strands like he is paying homage, because even if it is small, he still has a heart somewhere.

And Oh, Oh, Oh,

Doesn't she love all of it? She does. All of that small and serious little beating heart under his cage of ribs. Every inch of that pinched and blackened and soot stained blood vessel.

(It is soot stained, because he smokes it even smaller; 10, 20, 30 packs a day, and maybe his hands shake a bit, maybe his fingertips are yellow against her skin, but that is just another thing that is lovable, so perfectly lovable, my forever darling)

But someone else loves it as well, just as much, as perfectly much, and that heart is too small for two.

It is a shame there really was only ever one owner.

Their actions are water through a sieve, and Temari drew the short stick, because she will never hold anything but droplets.

Such a shame, shame, shame.

He understands them completely. Genius is cruel and sees even the things it would be better off without, but even though he understands he is too lazy and too strangled and perhaps too apprehensive to break the monotony, the patterns that all three have fallen into against their better judgments.

He is nothing but careless and they are too prideful to admit the winner and too headstrong stop.

X

He leaves her at the end of his mission, treaties signed and peace ensured, diplomatic duties done. (Sand on his skin and jasmine in his nose) She watches him dress from the bed, hair for once calm and practically straight as it floats around her head- shining in just-brushed glory.

Eyes are glowing blue sunrises tracing the movement of a shirt over collarbones, the slide of vest over bone shoulders. Shikamaru stands over the sand-streaked bed and blinks; once, twice, like in the afterglow there is something that blends two people together.

Like maybe he doesn't have all the answers to anything at all, like maybe his heart is even too small for one.

Temari sees the gauze fall in shimmery curtains over his eyelashes and something cuts a little, shallow-sharp and prickling.

She hurries to smile, a pointy grin that sets images clear and defines the fuzzy edges his traitorous eyes see.

(Temari wouldn't mind cutting out his eyes, really. After all, the only thing she needs is his heart)

He is dressed, and it is time to leave. Shikamaru whispers a short goodbye because ninja are terrible at farewells, always have been, and brushes her lips with his mouth before he leaves.

She kisses back fervent and memorable, because she must at least be memorable, but shudders when his shadows vanish. It is a tremble almost in disgust, almost in longing, when she runs her tongue over the fleshy walls of her mouth that taste like him.

X

The noble, royal, daughter of Suna can leave sand under his fingernails and images in his big smart head. She can take him hostage to her body while he fulfils duties. She can try and try and try, and he will never resist, yet she will never succeed.

She will fade to dim while another kunoichi with teeth sharp and eyes snapping takes up the space she filled and then some. While another brands his skin with heat and skin sliding rough and throats moaning slick and Shikamaru does anything but resist.

He is, of course, quite happy to float through life like a kite with cut strings and watch the clouds for faces that he doesn't really see anymore, because he cant remember their shadows.

These sales and battles are for his lovers and the ownership changes every time. All there is to do is shave the others skin from his muscles and wrap him in their own sheets.

But Temari watches the door close with a click that sounds like a gavel and feels the never-failing knives behind her eyes and the ever-growing vow to succeed swelling through her limbs.

Shikamaru will go home to the green he couldn't find in her eyes this time and be lost to her while he does the duties to his village, the village that made her peoples blood drench the streets, the village that killed something he thought was immortal, the village that means more to him than anything and nothing to him at all and most of all the village where she doesn't belong.

And it's such a perfect shame, because Konoha is the only village that Shikamaru will take.

The only time she can belong is when he visits in the façade of papers and files and compromises, when he smiles-sweet and spills lies to the council she belongs to, the brother she will die for, the country she lives for. She breathes him in anyway, but these few snippets of thread don't make the whole blanket, and never will.

The match was set from the first play, but Temari is fool and courage and love, just like her rival, and they are perfectly unshakable in the exact same way.

X

Five thousand miles is a long distance to cover and before two of them her sand will have fallen from his skin to mix with millions of other grains and her scent will have faded to running-sweat. By the time he steps through a gate and sees all the green he missed the bruises she left will be bitten over.

Such a perfect shame, a perfect love, a perfect war, and a perfect little tiny heart that she never had a fighting chance for really, when you think about it, think about it, think about it.

X

Temari gets up from the bed to go brush her teeth until they bleed. No matter how many times they kiss, she can always taste the flowers in his mouth.

Fin

A/N: Yeah so in case you didn't catch it, (and if you didn't you prob weren't really reading it at all) that was a Tema/Shika/Ino.

I know some Tema/Shika fans are adamant that Shika/Ino is terrible and probably feel a little put out after reading this…Sorry? Please don't skewer me.

Feel Free to review! I love them all.

Thankyou for reading! –LuteLyre :D