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kinkfestTitle: Shogi (How to Win a Tactician’s Heart)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sumthinlikhuman
Pairing: Nara Shikamaru/Sabaku no Gaara, one sided and sidebar Akimichi Choji/Nara Shikamaru
Rating: M
Warnings: a little sprawling, some use of the F WORD, use of the word ‘COCK’, rampant Japanglish
Prompt: Naruto, Shikamaru/Gaara: Stalemate – Who actually makes the first move?
Summary: Shikamaru feels like he’s lost; Gaara doesn’t really get it.
Notes: Not as true to the prompt as I would have liked, but as true to it as I could get it. SORRY.
Romancing the Kazekage, he finds, is like Shogi in that he knows all the moves, all the possible outcomes—he will win, or in this case get what he wants—but he cannot always account for unexpected variables.
Such as: the Kazekage’s nosy older sister, always wandering about, ready to jump in at a moment’s notice should her “precious baby brother” cry any offense—not that he ever does.
Such as: the Kazekage’s glaring older brother, always poking his nose in where nobody wants him, ready to threaten and sneer and malign a Hanin at the drop of a grain of sand whether the insult is warranted or not—it never is.
Such as: a damn fool mission in Amenokuni that leaves him bedridden for the better part of the month and leaves Ino to run his correspondence between Konoha and Suna, ready to flirt and smirk her way into any damn bedroom she pleases—not that she’s fool enough to try her tricks on the Kazekage, if only out of dulled respect for surviving things that killed him for a time.
On the Shogi board, the variables come from the player’s own hands. He can counteract them easily.
There is only one variable coming from anyone’s hands in this case, and he’s not entirely sure whether he approves or disapproves of that variable.
-----
Suna is blindingly hot, and Shikamaru can feel the burn rising on his arms, but he’s much too lazy to move out of the sun. Three Sabakunin have been around already, asking if he’s quite alright and if there’s anything they can bring him and if he wouldn’t rather come inside where it’s cool and they could perhaps offer him a refreshment—he is, there isn’t, and no thank you—when the Kazekage’s official bodyguard—also known as his infernal older sister—tracks him down.
“He wants to see you.”
“Nn,” he grunts at her, and squints at her silhouette against the cloudless sky. Elsewhere in the village he can hear Naruto’s breakneck voice and feels the headache coming on already; he wishes one of the Hyuuga had been sent with him, if only for the peace it would bring him.
Temari-ujyo—he smirks at the nickname he’s given her, even if it isn’t all that funny—kicks a toe at his ribs. He rolls away and frowns, rubbing his nose; it hurts. “He means now. Not later.”
“I’m not one of his shinobi,” Shikamaru grumbles.
Temari-ujyo rolls her eyes. “You might as well be, amount of time you spend in his office. C’mon, y’ overgrown baby.”
-----
In Shogi, there are certain rules. As much as he can, Shikamaru applies these rules to life, and for the most part, they fit. Asuma-sensei taught him that, when he was very young. Romancing is one of the things, in Shikamaru’s life, he applies the rules of Shogi to.
Sabaku no Gaara, Kazekage of Sunagakure and the whole of Kazenokuni, has never before played Shogi, and Shikamaru knows this. It should come as no surprise that, unlike Shikamaru, he does not play by the rules.
“I don’t understand.”
Shikamaru can see the headlines between the allied shinobi now: Jounin murders Kazekage; blames irrational, childish idiocy. He inhales—clean, dry Suna air and the rasp of cigarette smoke—and exhales—cloudy, dry breath reeking of the smoke. Gaara watches him with those powerful eyes—Shikamaru thinks of oases, the blue of the sky just before it blurs at the horizon, the wings of a particular bird he saw once in Mizunokuni—and he must take another deep breath to calm his nerves.
“Because,” he slowly explains, “it isn’t possible.”
“You spend a majority of your time in transit between our villages, and more of your time in Suna than in Konoha these days than any other Hanin. The next logical step is to affiliate under dual citizenship.”
“The Godaime Hokage won’t approve of it.” And he barely chokes down his opinion on the woman, but just barely; Gaara knows it anyway. Everyone knows, really, even the old bag herself.
“Then make her approve of it.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder, haven’t you ever heard that before?” Gaara doesn’t need to glare. Shikamaru chomps on the end of his cigarette, then stubs it out in one of the little clay pots Gaara’s taken to scattering around his private office just for these reasons. “You’re being troublesome.”
“Talk to her.”
“Or what?”
“Or I will.”
Shikamaru doesn’t like the vaguest idea of that.
-----
He wonders if packing up his belongings and preparing for the trials set forth to make him a dual-citizened shinobi are a sign he’s won this particular round or bent to Gaara’s feint.
The Shogi board goes into its box and Choji frowns from his spot on the floor.
“What are we going to do without you?”
“I’m moving to Suna, Cho,” Shikamaru grumbles around a cigarette—it’s his thirteenth since the morning—and shuffles the box around into another box, things that are going after he’s settled into his new home. He looks at his friend then, smiles as best he can. “I’m not dying. You’ll still see me. Take all the missions so Ino doesn’t; Kami know I don’t want to see her coming around, showing her big nose in my business.”
“You’ve got business?”
“I think we’ve had this talk.” But the talk wasn’t really a talk, it was just Choji picking the wrong time to come over on one of the rare occasions Gaara was over for unofficial business and could stay in the village proper rather than the dignitaries’ suites.
Choji frowns a little, taps his fingers against the tatami, and Shikamaru has been in the field long enough that he isn’t sure whether it’s just an unintelligible rhythm or one of their private codes. He packs, and Choji sighs.
“I don’t want you to go, Shika. Who am I going to go get udon and tempura with while you’re in Suna romping about?”
“I’m not going to—don’t be troublesome, Cho!”
“I’m only saying—”
“Well, don’t.” Choji looks up at him, frown giving him creases next to his mouth, and Shikamaru frowns right back for a moment. After a while of staring, Choji sighs, hauls himself to his feet as he shakes his head.
“You know,” he says as he reaches the door, “for a genius, you really are an idiot.”
-----
Gaara stands in the door to these new apartments he’s given Shikamaru as listens as Shikamaru tells him, “I think Choji might be in love with me.”
“You’re just noticing?” Shikamaru glares, but Gaara just looks bland. “Do you love him?”
“That’s like—” He scrunches up his nose and taps the pack of cigarettes and stares at Gaara’s sandals. “That’s like if you loved Kankarou.”
“Close familial incest. You consider Choji your brother.”
“I consider most of my friends my family.”
Gaara steps into the room then, shuts the door behind him. “Am I not your friend then?”
Shikamaru looks up at Gaara, and the aquamarine of his eyes is greener than normal, more alive. He smirks at the Kazekage. “I suppose not, since we’re screwing.”
-----
Shikamaru thinks he might have lost.
The heat of Suna presses down around them, but he doesn’t even care any more. Gaara’s skin gleams, alabaster white with pebbled sand-brown nipples and little sunspots on his shoulders and across his nose; his eyes are bright, pupils blown wide, the lids dragging with long lashes curling away from his flushed cheekbones. None of that compares to the flex of his thighs as he rides Shikamaru’s cock.
It isn’t the first time Shikamaru’s thought he’s lost, it’s just the first time he’s ended up on his back about the whole thing.
He grips Gaara’s hips tight and does not think of anything except the firm, sleek muscles under his hands and the sweat pouring off their bodies and Gaara’s uninhibited, blissed out expression and the soft, quiet sighs Gaara gives every time he sinks down on Shikamaru’s cock—that tightness, tight as the first time they did this, more than anything, feels like a glorious defeat, and Shikamaru, wrapped up in the feeling of Gaara’s body, is more than willing to admit that defeat.
“Fuck,” he sighs, lifting his hands to run his nails down Gaara’s chest and watch the blood raise in eight long, broken furrows. “Fuck, yeah. Like that?”
“If I didn’t,” Gaara whispers, grabbing Shikamaru’s hands and throwing them off in mild distaste, “you wouldn’t be doing this.”
Shikamaru sighs a chuckle, squints his eyes shut for a second, breaths heavily. “You so sure about that? Bet I could get you to do it if I really wanted to.”
“That would be unethical.”
He rolled them then, pressed Gaara back into the mattress, rocked into him almost viciously for a moment before he said, against the Kazekage’s neck, “A lot of what I do is unethical.”
“It would be troublesome,” Gaara hissed, and Shikamaru threw back his head and laughed for a moment, before he settled back and pulled Gaara with him. Their chests pressed together, slick and sticky with sweat, and Gaara’s breath rattled in his throat as he began to ride Shikamaru again.
With his arms around Gaara’s waist, encouraging the young Kazekage’s feverish movement, he thinks he’s lost himself entirely.
-----
“Teach me to play Shogi,” Gaara says one night after their done fucking. Shikamaru stares at him in the moonlight. Gaara stares right back, and Shikamaru is not entirely sure he knows what to do about this unexpected variable.
“Why?”
“I want to understand,” Gaara tells him, “why you always think you’re going to defeat everything.”
“You don’t need Shogi for that,” Shikamaru tells him, and closes his eyes.
Gaara climbs into the bed, another unexpected move, and says, soft and gentle against his shoulder blade, “Because I want to know how to beat you.”
Shikamaru drags one of Gaara’s hands around to his front, presses it against his heart, and informs him, “You already do.” Because he has long since lost this game.
Author:
sumthinlikhumanPairing: Nara Shikamaru/Sabaku no Gaara, one sided and sidebar Akimichi Choji/Nara Shikamaru
Rating: M
Warnings: a little sprawling, some use of the F WORD, use of the word ‘COCK’, rampant Japanglish
Prompt: Naruto, Shikamaru/Gaara: Stalemate – Who actually makes the first move?
Summary: Shikamaru feels like he’s lost; Gaara doesn’t really get it.
Notes: Not as true to the prompt as I would have liked, but as true to it as I could get it. SORRY.
Romancing the Kazekage, he finds, is like Shogi in that he knows all the moves, all the possible outcomes—he will win, or in this case get what he wants—but he cannot always account for unexpected variables.
Such as: the Kazekage’s nosy older sister, always wandering about, ready to jump in at a moment’s notice should her “precious baby brother” cry any offense—not that he ever does.
Such as: the Kazekage’s glaring older brother, always poking his nose in where nobody wants him, ready to threaten and sneer and malign a Hanin at the drop of a grain of sand whether the insult is warranted or not—it never is.
Such as: a damn fool mission in Amenokuni that leaves him bedridden for the better part of the month and leaves Ino to run his correspondence between Konoha and Suna, ready to flirt and smirk her way into any damn bedroom she pleases—not that she’s fool enough to try her tricks on the Kazekage, if only out of dulled respect for surviving things that killed him for a time.
On the Shogi board, the variables come from the player’s own hands. He can counteract them easily.
There is only one variable coming from anyone’s hands in this case, and he’s not entirely sure whether he approves or disapproves of that variable.
-----
Suna is blindingly hot, and Shikamaru can feel the burn rising on his arms, but he’s much too lazy to move out of the sun. Three Sabakunin have been around already, asking if he’s quite alright and if there’s anything they can bring him and if he wouldn’t rather come inside where it’s cool and they could perhaps offer him a refreshment—he is, there isn’t, and no thank you—when the Kazekage’s official bodyguard—also known as his infernal older sister—tracks him down.
“He wants to see you.”
“Nn,” he grunts at her, and squints at her silhouette against the cloudless sky. Elsewhere in the village he can hear Naruto’s breakneck voice and feels the headache coming on already; he wishes one of the Hyuuga had been sent with him, if only for the peace it would bring him.
Temari-ujyo—he smirks at the nickname he’s given her, even if it isn’t all that funny—kicks a toe at his ribs. He rolls away and frowns, rubbing his nose; it hurts. “He means now. Not later.”
“I’m not one of his shinobi,” Shikamaru grumbles.
Temari-ujyo rolls her eyes. “You might as well be, amount of time you spend in his office. C’mon, y’ overgrown baby.”
-----
In Shogi, there are certain rules. As much as he can, Shikamaru applies these rules to life, and for the most part, they fit. Asuma-sensei taught him that, when he was very young. Romancing is one of the things, in Shikamaru’s life, he applies the rules of Shogi to.
Sabaku no Gaara, Kazekage of Sunagakure and the whole of Kazenokuni, has never before played Shogi, and Shikamaru knows this. It should come as no surprise that, unlike Shikamaru, he does not play by the rules.
“I don’t understand.”
Shikamaru can see the headlines between the allied shinobi now: Jounin murders Kazekage; blames irrational, childish idiocy. He inhales—clean, dry Suna air and the rasp of cigarette smoke—and exhales—cloudy, dry breath reeking of the smoke. Gaara watches him with those powerful eyes—Shikamaru thinks of oases, the blue of the sky just before it blurs at the horizon, the wings of a particular bird he saw once in Mizunokuni—and he must take another deep breath to calm his nerves.
“Because,” he slowly explains, “it isn’t possible.”
“You spend a majority of your time in transit between our villages, and more of your time in Suna than in Konoha these days than any other Hanin. The next logical step is to affiliate under dual citizenship.”
“The Godaime Hokage won’t approve of it.” And he barely chokes down his opinion on the woman, but just barely; Gaara knows it anyway. Everyone knows, really, even the old bag herself.
“Then make her approve of it.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder, haven’t you ever heard that before?” Gaara doesn’t need to glare. Shikamaru chomps on the end of his cigarette, then stubs it out in one of the little clay pots Gaara’s taken to scattering around his private office just for these reasons. “You’re being troublesome.”
“Talk to her.”
“Or what?”
“Or I will.”
Shikamaru doesn’t like the vaguest idea of that.
-----
He wonders if packing up his belongings and preparing for the trials set forth to make him a dual-citizened shinobi are a sign he’s won this particular round or bent to Gaara’s feint.
The Shogi board goes into its box and Choji frowns from his spot on the floor.
“What are we going to do without you?”
“I’m moving to Suna, Cho,” Shikamaru grumbles around a cigarette—it’s his thirteenth since the morning—and shuffles the box around into another box, things that are going after he’s settled into his new home. He looks at his friend then, smiles as best he can. “I’m not dying. You’ll still see me. Take all the missions so Ino doesn’t; Kami know I don’t want to see her coming around, showing her big nose in my business.”
“You’ve got business?”
“I think we’ve had this talk.” But the talk wasn’t really a talk, it was just Choji picking the wrong time to come over on one of the rare occasions Gaara was over for unofficial business and could stay in the village proper rather than the dignitaries’ suites.
Choji frowns a little, taps his fingers against the tatami, and Shikamaru has been in the field long enough that he isn’t sure whether it’s just an unintelligible rhythm or one of their private codes. He packs, and Choji sighs.
“I don’t want you to go, Shika. Who am I going to go get udon and tempura with while you’re in Suna romping about?”
“I’m not going to—don’t be troublesome, Cho!”
“I’m only saying—”
“Well, don’t.” Choji looks up at him, frown giving him creases next to his mouth, and Shikamaru frowns right back for a moment. After a while of staring, Choji sighs, hauls himself to his feet as he shakes his head.
“You know,” he says as he reaches the door, “for a genius, you really are an idiot.”
-----
Gaara stands in the door to these new apartments he’s given Shikamaru as listens as Shikamaru tells him, “I think Choji might be in love with me.”
“You’re just noticing?” Shikamaru glares, but Gaara just looks bland. “Do you love him?”
“That’s like—” He scrunches up his nose and taps the pack of cigarettes and stares at Gaara’s sandals. “That’s like if you loved Kankarou.”
“Close familial incest. You consider Choji your brother.”
“I consider most of my friends my family.”
Gaara steps into the room then, shuts the door behind him. “Am I not your friend then?”
Shikamaru looks up at Gaara, and the aquamarine of his eyes is greener than normal, more alive. He smirks at the Kazekage. “I suppose not, since we’re screwing.”
-----
Shikamaru thinks he might have lost.
The heat of Suna presses down around them, but he doesn’t even care any more. Gaara’s skin gleams, alabaster white with pebbled sand-brown nipples and little sunspots on his shoulders and across his nose; his eyes are bright, pupils blown wide, the lids dragging with long lashes curling away from his flushed cheekbones. None of that compares to the flex of his thighs as he rides Shikamaru’s cock.
It isn’t the first time Shikamaru’s thought he’s lost, it’s just the first time he’s ended up on his back about the whole thing.
He grips Gaara’s hips tight and does not think of anything except the firm, sleek muscles under his hands and the sweat pouring off their bodies and Gaara’s uninhibited, blissed out expression and the soft, quiet sighs Gaara gives every time he sinks down on Shikamaru’s cock—that tightness, tight as the first time they did this, more than anything, feels like a glorious defeat, and Shikamaru, wrapped up in the feeling of Gaara’s body, is more than willing to admit that defeat.
“Fuck,” he sighs, lifting his hands to run his nails down Gaara’s chest and watch the blood raise in eight long, broken furrows. “Fuck, yeah. Like that?”
“If I didn’t,” Gaara whispers, grabbing Shikamaru’s hands and throwing them off in mild distaste, “you wouldn’t be doing this.”
Shikamaru sighs a chuckle, squints his eyes shut for a second, breaths heavily. “You so sure about that? Bet I could get you to do it if I really wanted to.”
“That would be unethical.”
He rolled them then, pressed Gaara back into the mattress, rocked into him almost viciously for a moment before he said, against the Kazekage’s neck, “A lot of what I do is unethical.”
“It would be troublesome,” Gaara hissed, and Shikamaru threw back his head and laughed for a moment, before he settled back and pulled Gaara with him. Their chests pressed together, slick and sticky with sweat, and Gaara’s breath rattled in his throat as he began to ride Shikamaru again.
With his arms around Gaara’s waist, encouraging the young Kazekage’s feverish movement, he thinks he’s lost himself entirely.
-----
“Teach me to play Shogi,” Gaara says one night after their done fucking. Shikamaru stares at him in the moonlight. Gaara stares right back, and Shikamaru is not entirely sure he knows what to do about this unexpected variable.
“Why?”
“I want to understand,” Gaara tells him, “why you always think you’re going to defeat everything.”
“You don’t need Shogi for that,” Shikamaru tells him, and closes his eyes.
Gaara climbs into the bed, another unexpected move, and says, soft and gentle against his shoulder blade, “Because I want to know how to beat you.”
Shikamaru drags one of Gaara’s hands around to his front, presses it against his heart, and informs him, “You already do.” Because he has long since lost this game.
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