All characters belong to Masahi Kishimoto

Temari did not love Shikamaru.

She had read the stories and had long ago concluded that Love was too gentle, too fickle to survive in her world. Love blossomed among vibrant flowers and dallying fireflies; resided by quiet beaches where soft words accompanied even softer smiles. Love danced through lives, pulling along the hearts of thousands until it inevitably blinked away, leaving nothing but a cold darkness in its wake.

Love was nothing more than the moon.

Her life was too harsh and unyielding for Love's rose gardens and moonbeams. Her brothers, like the sandstone cliffs that towered overhead, were indivisible foundations that had compacted and molded to hers through the course of their lives, jointly weathering each loss and every wound until their souls represented a blend of striae in a single enduring peak. Distinctly unique and vivid, each color and pattern boldly vying with the others for dominance while simultaneously aligning every edge and contour.

Quite simply, after years of hardships and suffering, they just fit.

Which is why she couldn't understand why Shikamaru seemed to fit just as well.

Yes, if Love was the moon, then, she decided, Shikamaru was like the water that seeped into the ground of his homeland. Like a lazy brook that slowly meandered through his beloved forests, he would pick his way through and around every obstacle, following the path of least resistance until he reached his goal. Like the rain water that slowly wore away the hardest rock until it had carved its own place.

Maybe it wasn't that hard to understand after all.

After all, it was the same flexible patience that tore down her every defense, forcing her to reevaluate the priorities and values in her life. There was no protection from the rain in the desert.

He changed her. During their first and only battle against one another, when his strategic mind overcame her raw power, when he yielded to her superior endurance, when she first learned that, sometimes, there were costs that were too high for a simple victory. The first time that she noticed how his eyes seemed to peer right into her soul.

During their first battle as allies, when she found herself less focused on the fight than she was on proving her dominance, her principles, or (perhaps) just proving herself to him. She changed when she smiled at him with her usual taunting grin, daring him to prove her wrong. Or rather afterwards, when he gave her a slow, sheepish smile in response, a sign of acknowledgement that she didn't even know she had been missing.

It could have been the way that small smirk softened the heavy planes of his face, and made her wonder what he sounded like when he laughed.

Perhaps a bit of his water had seeped into her heart.

She changed after a chance encounter between the two gave Temari a glimpse of the emotional vulnerability behind those eyes. When it was her turn to peer into his soul and find herself startled by the naivete she found there. She had forgotten that he was still a boy.

It could have been during the years spent as colleagues, the long nights spent arguing evaluation criteria over empty take out containers. When she touched his hand for the first time while absently reaching for papers in the library that he had been using as a pillow. She had been unsurprised to find the skin soft beneath her fingers, and looked over and found him staring up at her expectantly, questioningly. She had slapped him in the back of the head and told him to get back to work while she nervously wiped the sheen of sweat on her kimono.

She would always be crueler than most.

Or maybe it was even later, the second time she touched his hand, when, during a battle in the war, she pulled him out of the enemy line of fire. She had been shocked to find a firm grip and hard calluses, and couldn't help but turn a startled look into those same chocolate eyes, wondering when the boy she had known for years had become a man, and when she had started waiting for him.

At some point, small pinpricks of green began to erupt from the ground.

It had to have been before she became the ambassador for her country as she worked to achieve the peace of which she had dreamed since she was a child. Before she could go to the grave of the man she had once called "father", and learned how to forgive. Before she acknowledged that, while she would always remain a part of Suna, the desert also held its oases.

Temari did not love Shikamaru, because love could be taken away. Shikamaru was a part of Temari, and she somehow knew that, no matter what happened, he always would be.

Shikamaru did not love Temari.

His life had been built with too much order, too many formulas to accept something so intangible and chaotic as Love.

Love was something for poets and fools, for people who couldn't see the intangible lines of action and reaction as they pulled each individual along the course of their lives.

Shikamaru's world was too predictable for love.

He had learned long ago that life was a series of probability formulas linked to each individual's actions. Like a game of shougi, every player had a role in any given outcome, and, like a game of shougi, he could see them all. He found that there was an 83.9% chance that Iruka-sensei would give them a pop-quiz on Thursdays, and began to skip those classes, knowing that there was still 60.2% chance that he would be given a make up quiz as a result. There was a 56.4% chance that Ino would talk about Sakura in a conversation versus a 71.0% chance that she would talk about Sasuke, and an 95.1% chance that Chouji would smile at him when they saw each other for the first time each day.

The formulas deepened and compounded as he began to form his own bonds.

He could feel the warmth shine through Chouji's eyes when he truthfully admitted to his rotund friend that he would find true love- probability could not be denied, after all. He savored the slight swell in his chest when his sensei looked down on him in approval. And he felt the twinge of pain when his father forgot to attend his academy graduation.

After years of familiarity, he had grown accustomed to the patterns of his precious people.

Which is why it came as a surprise when he could predict the formula to her actions so clearly.

He began wondering if there was a similarity between this stranger and his teammate Ino, but swiftly had to dismiss the theory when she fired scathing, yet level-headed responses to his intentional slights. He compared her fighting style to Naruto, but found her too consistent. She, too, lived in a formulaic world. He found himself intrigued enough to block out the world and its distractions, curious to see how far he could read through her pattern.

He found that, at the end of their fight, he still couldn't understand why. He couldn't understand why he felt compelled to prove himself to this girl from Suna. Months later, he couldn't understand why he found himself wondering if her eyes remained the same shade of blue-green when she was in the desert.

When they finally did get the chance to fight together, he was surprised to find their probabilities had begun to twine, and, for the first time, he found himself unable to focus entirely on his own outcomes. For a few blissful minutes, he had found himself more engrossed in their banter than possibilities, more focused on her smile than the details of their situation.

He never missed details.

Over the years, their formulas began to sync and compound. Each time she returned, he began to unravel another dimension to her character, another variable to her personality, but the lines between them continued to tangle. He pretended not to notice the way that her body seemed to open up to him when they spoke, the way that they could hold entire conversations without speaking, the way she smiled around him more.

The way that he couldn't help but smile back, especially if their lips were already touching.

He had long ago stopped trying to trace where her patterns stopped and his own began.

Shikamaru did not love Temari, because love did not fit into a world of proofs and absolutes. Temari was a base variable in Shikamaru's formula, and he somehow knew that, no matter what happened, she always would be.

Written for Naruto LoveFest on Deviant Art. Similar entries were written for teams NaruHina, SasuHina, KibaKarui, GaaMatsu, ChouIno, and YahiKonan.