Current mood:	still sick
Current music:	"This Place is a Prison," The Postal Service

NHS2 thing...
Still sick, and trying to write. Yeah. Not exactly my most brilliant plan, but I needed to wake up a little and shrug off some angst. The writing style is strange and choppy...but...it's something.

Sooo...narutohs2 drabble. Inspired by the song "This Place is a Prison" by The Postal Service. If you haven't heard it and want to, I'll put it on Yousendit.





This Place Is a Prison


“Go home, Chouji.”

“Home? Hell no. Not with you like this.”

It was hellishly hard to live when his own home had become a prison. Chouji had two homes, and, as far as he was concerned, they were just two holding cells. He had his home with his father and brother---one of which was missing, and the other of which wouldn’t disappear. He had his second home, with the drunken second-father, the overbearing adopted-mother, and the pseudo-older-brother he couldn’t quite place into a category.

Both were prisons. Both had walls. Chouichi built walls of self-importance, walls that boxed Chouji in and made him feel like scaling them was hopeless. Shikamaru built mazes. One moment he’d want his friends near, pulling them close only to push them away the very next moment because he didn’t need them; he was self-sufficient; he was lonely; he was alone; he needed them more than anything else but they were too damn domineering…

Shikamaru kept adding twists and turns to his maze until even he didn’t know how to get out of this mess in his life. Like every man, he was too proud to ask for a map.

So Chouji sat with him, hands loose in his lap, and watched. Watched him drink, watched him cry, watched him slip, and slide away from being the boy he knew and loved. He had always professed, quietly and confidently, that he would take a bullet for Shikamaru. He’d die for him. And…in a very real way…he was. Because parts of himself eroded away with every argument, with every time he tried to comfort him only to be pushed away, with the salty crust of tears that had begun to gum up the works. Some of them were Shikamaru’s tears. Most of them were his own. Simple dehydration.

Though Shikamaru drank until his words became hateful and slurred together, he wouldn’t stop him. That was his choice. This pain brought on by self-medication was his to deal with and his alone, so Chouji just watched, protected, and waited until he asked to be helped up again. If Shikamaru died, he would crawl into the grave next to him. They were a matching set.

He probably didn’t know that.

He waited, watched, and prayed for the strength to carry him silently.

Chouji wanted to lean in and brush the hair from his eyes, but he was sober, so his hands were still. A part of him---a big part of him; he could admit that to himself, even if he’d never admit it to anyone else---wanted to pry Shikamaru’s thin fingers from the smooth glass of the bottle’s neck. He’d take it from him and gulp it down himself. He’d have a reason to brush away his hair, then, if he was a little buzzed on the outside and raw on the inside. Maybe even reason enough to touch his cheek, his neck, maybe even kiss him. Just one kiss, dry and rasping and barely even there as familiarly chapped lips met. Comfort. Release. Something.

Maybe that one soft kiss would make him feel a little better---wanted, needed, desirable; less like a piece of trash that Temari spat her gum into, wadded up, and tossed away---even if he’d hate him the moment he realized that his hands weren’t a woman’s hands. The moment Shikamaru realized that big buddy Chou was touching him instead of Temari, with her heavily lashed, biting eyes…it’d be all over, then.

Not that it wasn’t all over already. The good days of their friendship were over, and they were just rolling the credits so that they could point out the names and realize what their parts had been all along. Akimichi Chouji as The Well Meaning, Afflicted Best Friend Who’s Going to Get Fucked Up By Life. Nara Shikamaru as The Over-thinking, Taciturn, and Heterosexual Genius Who’ll See Exactly What He Wants to See. Also starring Sunano Temari as The Girl Between Them, double-rolled as The Plot Device That Screws Everyone Over. God willing, she’d also play Shikamaru’s Salvation, but Chouji didn’t hold out much hope for that. Most times, God wasn’t willing to dispense big roles like that to inexperienced players, and face it---they were still kids. Kids can’t save each other’s souls. They can’t mend each other’s hearts either, but like any vandal, they can break, break, break.

Had it really been a movie, Chouji would have cried through it. He was a sucker for the movies where the good guys didn’t make it.

“Fuck…Chouji, just---just go home.”

“Stop, Shika. Please. Nobody’s worth you doing this…”

“She is.”

Yeah, of course she was. Of course she was worth the drunken arguments, and watching with hazed eyes as Chouji steeled himself to leave. Of course she was worth everything: sixteen years of friendship, down the drain in a multicolored, sick twist of one bad summer, one big secret, and girls, girls, girls.

They’d been better off when the girls had cooties.

He said that. Shikamaru laughed---brokenly, bitterly, a sob of a laugh as his shoulders shook and his long hair fell into his face again.

Sooner or later, when Shikamaru put up a wall emblazoned with GO HOME, he would cave and actually leave. Switching one cell for another…it happened more than he’d like to admit. One day, he’d push him over the edge, and Chouji would wash his hands of everything.

Until then, he’d pace the length of his chain and try not to think about that single dry kiss he ached for.

What does it take to get a drink in this place?

What does it take?

How long must I wait?