History

A/N: The reviewer asked if Shikamaru has low self-esteem, since he seems so insecure. That is not the case. His insecurity stems from what he considers his bad luck with relationships. He’d given a lot to his relationship with Kiba and it didn’t work out. Now he is in a new relationship, giving his all again, and he fears that Kiba’s return is an indicator that somehow history will repeat itself.

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Warning: unbeta’d; angst; humor; romance; yaoi

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It was 7PM. Outside of Shikamaru’s bedroom window the setting sun still shone in a cloudless blue sky. The wind whipped through branches on trees that bore fresh green leaves. It was an image that evoked picnics in the grass and kids riding scooters, and yet all Shikamaru wanted to do was go to sleep and shut it out of his mind.

He closed the blinds and settled on his bed with a sigh, clad only in red plaid pajama pants, a seasonal gift from a female colleague who was always asking him to take down his hair for her. Shikamaru always politely declined; he only ever wore his hair down at home. It was an unspoken rule and one of the ways he maintained mystique.

He closed his eyes and rested his folded hands on his chest, allowing his weary mind and body to sink into the comfortable pillows and mattress beneath him.

It was then that someone knocked on the door.

Shikamaru’s eyes opened lazily. Given the day’s events, the person or persons standing on the other side of his apartment door could be anyone, so there wasn’t any point in panicking. Still, he couldn’t stop the tightening of his stomach and the unbidden rush of adrenaline.

Shikamaru got out of bed and walked to the front door. Thank goodness for the combination of a peephole and the slowly decreasing sunlight of a May evening.

Relief and a different kind of anxiety surged in Shikamaru at the discovery of Neji standing on the other side of the door.

Shikamaru opened it slowly. The warped version of him visible through the peephole hardly did Neji justice, though in the spirit of the situation seemed oddly appropriate.

Hopeful eyes settled on Shikamaru. “May I come in?” Neji asked.

Shikamaru opened the door wider and moved aside to let him in.

Neji rounded on his lover as he closed and locked the door. God, he looked so fucking good standing there, shirtless and wearing pants that looked like a candy cane and made Neji ache to lick him like one.

He rarely found himself in situations where he had to maintain so much control over his reactions. To say the day had been trying was an understatement, particularly at that moment.

Neji held up the bags in his hand. “I brought us something”, he announced, trying to focus his thoughts.

He pulled a bottle of white wine from one bag and some warm containers of take-out from the other.

“I didn’t know if you’d eaten. I haven’t, but I didn’t want to eat alone”, Neji confessed. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Shikamaru eyed the food and the wine. As last meals went, he thought Neji could have done much better. Since it didn’t seem like a very Neji-like last meal, Shikamaru assumed it wasn’t one.

He stretched his arms above his head, a gesture meant to relax him. “No, I don’t mind”, he responded, smiling.

Neji’s control was already dissolving. The whole way over in his car he thought of taking Shikamaru in his arms and fucking the memory of that other man from his body, if not his mind or heart. Even now, as his arousal increased at the sight of his lover’s drool-worthy body stretched toward the heavens, he could feel the chasm between them.

“I’ll get some plates and glasses”, Shikamaru announced, lowering his arms and moving toward the kitchen.

He was almost across its threshold when strong arms wrapped around his waist from behind, pressing him back against a very firm body. Instantly, Shikamaru felt some of his tension drain away.

“Shikamaru”, Neji spoke in a desperately needy voice. He lowered his head to the smaller man’s throat, kissing the pulse now beating madly there.

Shikamaru closed his eyes, leaned his head to the side and silently thanked God that Neji Hyuuga was there holding him in his arms, where Shikamaru wanted to be the most.

“Say my name again”, he entreated.

“Shikamaru.” Neji’s voice was breathless, an urgent turn-on. “You smell like cookies”, he announced as he rained kisses over the man’s neck and shoulders.

Shikamaru couldn’t help but smile as he turned to face Neji, wrapping his own arms around the man’s neck and giving in to the urge to kiss him before he had a chance to talk himself out of it.

Their coming together was intense. Neji wrapped his arms tighter around Shikamaru, pressing their bodies impossibly closer, as he slid his tongue into his mouth and tasted him for the first time since the early morning hours. Shikamaru tasted clean and sweet and smelled like cookies and all Neji wanted to do was pull his pants off his body, trap him against the wall and puncture him repeatedly until they screamed out their orgasms in unison.

A hand desperately gripping the waistline of the pants he wore stopped Neji’s attempt to remove them in its tracks.

“Wait”, Shikamaru pleaded breathlessly. His body was so warm, ridiculously warm, and taking off the pants seemed like an excellent remedy, really.

But they couldn’t. Not yet.

Neji looked at him with questioning eyes.

“Neji, we need to talk about what happened today”, Shikamaru announced.

Neji rubbed the tip of his index finger across Shikamaru’s bottom lip. “We don’t need to talk about it now”, he murmured.

Shikamaru nodded. “Yes, yes we do—“

“Don’t leave me!” Neji interjected, pulling his finger away.

Shikamaru’s brows furrowed as Neji continued. “Is that what you want to say? That you want to go back to him?”

“Is that what you think?” Shikamaru asked him, stunned. “Neji, I-I thought you wanted to break it off with me.”

“Are you crazy?”

Neji was stunned. How could Shikamaru think that he would want to leave him?

He stepped back from the wide-eyed Shikamaru, still panting. He reached behind himself to release his hair from its band, tossing the thing aside.

“Shikamaru”, he called as he slowly unbuttoned his shirt. “I thought you might hate me after today. Somehow, I thought I should have been stronger, cleverer for you.”

Neji left his shirt unbuttoned but didn’t remove it, opting to remove his shoes and socks instead. “He was so close to you. He’s a big guy, and he seemed fearless. I felt like a failure standing there.”

Neji unbuckled his belt and removed it from his pants, watching his lover’s face for his reaction. “I had my balls in my mouth. I wanted to stake my claim, to tell him you were mine and drag you away from him.”

Neji shook his head as he dropped the belt to the floor. “But I didn’t”, he continued.

Neji slowly slipped his shirt off his shoulders and let it fall to the floor, pleased that Shikamaru had become visibly flustered.

Now they were even. Well, more or less. Neji still wore boxers beneath his trousers but beyond that, the two shirtless barefoot men with their hair unbound stood face-to-face.

“I felt like a disappointment to you. I was going to tell you tonight that, that I’m sorry and to not hate me and to forgive me for being weak—“

“Stop”, Shikamaru interjected, shaking his head. Neji’s confession-cum-striptease had had a disarming effect.

He took one of Neji’s hands in his own and placed it against his jumping erection. “You haven’t done anything to feel like a failure about”, he continued.

Shikamaru’s eyes fluttered shut when that hand began to move, cupping and squeezing the tent in his pants.

“I don’t want him”, he declared as Neji kissed and sucked at his neck and jaw.

“Who do you want?” Neji asked, taking Shikamaru’s hand and pressing it to his own hyper erection. “Say it.”

“I only want you, Neji.”

The tent in Neji’s pants was threatening to become a hole again. God dammit. It was both sin and shame how easily Shikamaru reduced him to a mindless sex machine.

Neji moved his lover’s hands to the waistband of his trousers. “Show me”, he told him.

Shikamaru didn’t hesitate. He unbuttoned Neji’s trousers and slid them down his legs along with his boxers, waiting for Neji to step out of them to push them to the side. Then he got on his knees in front of him. Entranced by the scent of Neji’s musk and the sight of Neji’s bouncing, jutting erection, he grabbed the base of the hardened flesh with one hand and stuck out his tongue, using it like a fishing rod to try to catch the pre-cum sliding out of its tip.

Neji buried a hand in Shikamaru’s hair. “Fuck, Shikamaru”, he exclaimed at the highly erotic sight. “I’ll come right now.”

“Then come”, Shikamaru answered him, looking up into those moonlit eyes.

Oh, boy.

Neji was in heaven. Shikamaru could be very cheeky. It was a side of him no one but Neji ever saw, a highly erotic side that demanded sexual satisfaction. Neji was completely helpless against it.

“I’ll come after you take off those pants and bend over for me”, Neji negotiated.

Shikamaru licked the pre-cum from the tip of Neji’s erection, slowly so he wouldn’t miss any and even stopped to stick the tip of his tongue into the slit before getting up from his knees to stand in front of him. He framed Neji’s face with his hands and kissed him hard and fast, injecting his tongue into his lover’s mouth and letting him share the taste of his own cum.

“I’ll take them off right now and bend over for you IF”, Shikamaru emphasized that last word as he stepped back away from Neji, “you answer me one question.”

Neji quirked a brow. “Hurry up”, he told Shikamaru as he advanced on him, erect and predatory, his hair draping wildly around his shoulders. “I swear there’s a powerful homing beacon lodged in your ass.”

Shikamaru chuckled as he backed slowly into the living room.

“Today at lunch”, he began, and Neji stilled. “You were talking about a possible furlough and might-have-been furloughs and the resources you may have had to employ in order to prevent them. To what resources specifically were you referring?”

Son of a bitch.

To be fair, Neji should have known the question was coming. Nothing ever got by Shikamaru, and he knew this. The fact that it was coming now, at the end of the bizarre day they’d had while Neji stood naked and hard in Shikamaru’s living room, though, could hardly have been predicted.

Blind-siding--one of Shikamaru’s many special gifts.

“You’re not allowed to ask me a question like that while you’re still wearing pants”, Neji stonewalled.

“They don’t come off until I get a decent answer”, was Shikamaru’s response.

Neji closed the space between them, wrapping an arm around Shikamaru’s waist and pressing a kiss to his lips in concession.

“We’ve had this discussion before, Shikamaru”, he began, his expression serious. “Being a manager for our company is what it is. I expect that cutting my teeth there should both educate and re-educate me.”

Neji swallowed a compulsion to bite his lip. He knew that what he wasn’t going to tell Shikamaru would be more revealing than anything he actually said, but the question demanded an answer all the same.

“Now I haven’t been management long enough to fully understand why anything I’ve done in that capacity should make me feel shame but I can honestly tell you this. Since we’ve been together I have been faithful to you.”

Shikamaru’s face fell. “Oh, Neji”, he murmured, looking away.

Neji framed his lover’s face with his hands, forcing him to meet his gaze and shook his head. “No”, he exclaimed. “No pity, no sorrow.” And no disappointment. “We discussed this.”

“But Neji—“

“Shikamaru”, he interjected, looking into his eyes. “No matter how any of it goes down I won’t betray you. Do you understand that?”

“You’re not just telling me what I want to hear?” Shikamaru asked.

Neji resisted the urge to feel heartbroken. “After what your ex put you through, do you honestly think I’d come here and beg you to stay with me if I were cheating on you too?”

Shikamaru shook his head and covered the man’s hands with his own. He’d been anxious about many things since they’d begun dating but, surprisingly, not about Neji being unfaithful.

Hell, it wasn’t as if Neji even had the time. The two men were always together when they weren’t working, and that usually meant that Neji had some part of his anatomy buried deeply in some part of Shikamaru’s.

Neji pressed a light, sweet kiss to Shikamaru’s lips.

“Margin call”, he announced, smiling at the prospect of Shikamaru being naked.

Shikamaru’s face split into a broad smile. “Fair is fair”, he responded.

He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his pants and slipped them over his ass and down his muscular legs, then stood up and stepped out of them.

He felt the combination of cooling air and heated skin against his erection and gasped.

Shikamaru backed away from Neji again and surprised him by bending into a backbend.

The sight of Shikamaru’s erection jutting out from his bent body like a lever might have been entertaining if Neji wasn’t preoccupied with trying to figure out how they could do it while Shikamaru was in that position.

Neji crouched behind his lover, studying his body. “How long can you stay like that?” he asked.

“Not sure”, Shikamaru answered. “We’d have to give it a test run.”

Neji quirked a dark brow. As sexually playful as the pair was, they’d never had sex in that position. Logistically speaking, it didn’t seem feasible; although Neji had made that claim many times in the previous month only to have Shikamaru prove him wrong.

Neji had negotiated that Shikamaru take off his pants and bend over in exchange for an answer to his question. He hadn’t specified in what direction to bend.

The flexibly-gifted Shikamaru had taken license with the terms of the negotiation, but the ever-resourceful Neji was not about to let that stop him.

I have got to be the luckiest bastard in the solar system.

He stood up. “I’m going to get lube. I’ll be right back.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Thirty minutes later, a very post-coital blissfully happy Shikamaru lay swaddled in the arms of his lover on the living room floor.

“You’re amazing”, Neji declared. “Just when I think I’ve got you figured out you go and defy the laws of physics in a whole new way.”

“And it only cost me the use of my legs”, Shikamaru responded, smiling.

“That’s only temporary”, Neji said.

“You’re only saying that because you were on top”, Shikamaru replied.

“Actually, it’s wishful thinking”, Neji corrected him, pressing a light kiss to his lips. “I’m ready to go another round.”

Shikamaru smiled up at his lover. “You’re insatiable”, he declared.

Neji tightened his hold. “I am for you”, he responded.

He watched as his lover practically purred at being snuggled in his arms and smiled. When they were together this way it was as if they were on their own plane of existence. Neji found it liberating to be with a man and be incapable of thinking of anything or anyone but him while in his presence.

Perhaps he truly was evolving from his chronic workaholic persona. He certainly hoped so. As he thought back on the past year, he realized that he hadn’t been fair to his previous lover. Neji constantly made work a priority and it had turned him into someone very different from the person he’d been when they’d first met, someone who made the redheaded man feel unwelcome in his life, and unappreciated. Their breakup had been marked by a very callous exchange of words. Neji didn’t realize it then, but his ex had been acting out of hurt, not just because he’d felt rejected as a lover, but also as a friend.

Neji deeply regretted the hurt he’d inflicted on him. And looking at Shikamaru now, curled against his body and wearing a sated expression, it was clear to Neji that forgiveness for his sin had come in the form of Shikamaru’s entry into his life, and that if Neji wanted to hold on to this new good thing he would have to make real changes, permanent changes, so as not to repeat his unfortunate mistake.

Shikamaru was his angel sent from Heaven, and Neji was determined not to let him get away.

“Hey”, Neji gently called to his angel, who looked up to find pale eyes scrutinizing him.

They lay there together that way, content to watch each other silently as the rest of the world faded from their consciousness.

The knock on the door moments later almost went unnoticed.

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Both men scowled as realization dawned.

“Who the hell could that be?” Neji asked.

“Given the day’s events, anyone”, Shikamaru answered. “We should answer it.”

“Well, when you do, tell them their timing sucks ass”, Neji responded as he unwrapped himself from his lover and got up from the floor. He extended a hand to Shikamaru.

“I just hope they’re…the patient sort”, Shikamaru said, taking Neji’s hand and standing up on shaking legs with a pained grunt. “I just spent the past half-hour being fucked hard in a strange position. I won’t make it to the door any time soon.”

Neji rolled his eyes. “Oh all right”, he relented, turning to pick up their trail of clothes from the floor and handing them to his lover. “Take these with you to the bedroom. Hopefully, whoever it is will leave once they get a whiff of the room.”

Shikamaru handed him back his candy-cane pajama bottoms. “Put some pants on”, he told Neji, “or they might never leave.”

Shikamaru gave Neji another quick kiss as he made his way down the hall toward the bedroom with a turtle’s pace, bracing one arm against the wall and wincing as he walked.

A smug and smirking Neji watched until Shikamaru was out of sight before he slipped the pajama pants on. The someone on the other side of the door knocked again as Neji approached, this time longer and with more force.

Neji placed an eye to the peephole in the door and frowned.

Stalker.

Shikamaru’s old flame stood on the other side.

Neji’s initial response was angry protective rivalry. That emotion dissolved quickly, however. He realized that the man had probably followed Shikamaru home from work, hoping he’d be alone or without Zabuza at the very least, and waited nearby all this time--only to make his move moments after Neji finished rug-burning the object of his interest on the floor behind the couch. The room reeked of their latest encounter. In fact, so did Neji.

He smirked. This situation would likely draw the man’s ire, but Neji wasn’t all that worried. Whatever—whoever--the man thought he was to Shikamaru was irrelevant. The choice had been made.

Of course, the situation was potentially risky. But Neji was acting from a position of strength. The objective was to get the man to leave—without violence--and to convince him that there was no reason to revisit the train of thought that led him back to Shikamaru ever again.

Neji took a deep, calming breath.

I’ll play it cool, he thought as he unlocked and opened the door.

But not too cool.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

A/N: LOL, I guess as long as the freak in Neji can appreciate the freak in Shikamaru they can stay together!

I only place-marked the lemon in this chapter in favor of the one in the third, which is in fact a lemon and one I think you will appreciate.

Now the showdown between Shikamaru’s old life and his new one really begins. Stay tuned for the third and final chapter of History and please leave a review with your thoughts!