Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: The final chapter. I hope I did you right, anon request. :)

Smokescreen

Chapter Three: Chasm

"It means dust collecting on kunais that should never be given to rust, and a flak jacket forgotten in the bottom drawer, and a wife (wife, he thinks these days, because how could she not be?) who will one day lose all remembrance of why such things are important." - Yamanaka Ino and Nara Shikamaru. She is losing her mind while he is losing her.

She runs a finger along his bare side and thinks of rivers. Long and winding. There's something to be said about rivers, how they will let you into their depths if you tread far enough,if you only dare to brave a current that means to take you and will not (will never) let you go.

Ino smiles, because she feels like drowning these days and she thinks maybe that's a good thing.

It's like he can hear her smile in the dark, because even with his eyes closed, he releases a questioning grumble and winds his arm tighter around her naked waist as he nuzzles further into the pillow beneath their heads. "What?"

"Nothing," she says. And for once, it might be the truth. Because when she lays like this with him, when their bedroom is doused in the dimness of dusk, when her hand is busy trailing rivers along his side - when that raging current takes her and doesn't let go - there is nothing left in the world to keep her.

Shikamaru huffs contentedly enough, and peeks one eye open at her.

His eyes are dark, always have been, and yet, she seems to only really notice now. Dark enough to cast shadows, and somehow that is all the more fitting.

But her hair is still brilliant against the pillow and her blue eyes are still piercingly bright and though she has never thought herself to be the light to his dark (in fact, it's rather the opposite if she's honest with herself) she can't help but reach through the warm swallow of dusk as though the sun will rise through his skin, and when her hands move to cup his cheeks and she stares at him and he blinks both eyes open to stare back and the river has now become a flood, this - this - is the edge she's been standing at all along.

"I want nothing in this life but you," she says earnestly.

Damningly.

Shikamaru's brow furrows, his throat constricting, and in the long, agonizing moments he takes to stare at her, she finds all the reasons why drowning has always been better than forgetting.

And then he's surging toward her, lips seeking hers, and he pulls her against his chest desperately, keenly, a rough sound of longing reverberating in the back of his throat, in his chest, against her breast, in the very heart of her, and when he presses her back against the bed so that he can follow, and when her hand slips to the back of his neck as he deepens the kiss, and when his barely concealed sob breaks against her lips - she swallows that threatening tide back.

The kind of current that takes you and takes you and -

Ino startles at the familiarity of such 'madness'.

Shikamaru finds her in the flower shop. In the flower shop she said only days ago that she had hated. But she says many things these days.

"Oh, Shikamaru!" she says brightly upon noticing him. "Good, you can help me." She comes from around the counter to drag him by the wrist behind her. He lets her.

"I'm trying to get a bouquet together for Temari. When is she coming again?"

Shikamaru's brows knit together, his throat going tight. "Ino."

"I know, I know," she interrupts, swatting at his arm. "I don't care that you find it annoying, I want to do this for you guys. It's been...how many months now?"

He looks down, his hands going into his pockets. "Ino, Temari and I haven't been…" He huffs, looking back up at her. "Not since we…" He motions between the two of them, and then stops, shoulders slumping.

Ino purses her lips in hesitation, brows furrowing.

Perhaps today is not one of those days she will remember loving him.

So he will remember for the both of them.

"Nevermind," he settles on finally.

In the silence that stretches between them, Shikamaru wonders if she doesn't suddenly remember - if she doesn't remember how they had woken beside each other again that morning, how he had gripped at her naked warmth and anchored her to him, how she had sighed, pressing her forehead to the hard plane of his chest and just… breathed..

"Oh, Shikamaru!" And it begins again - the rupture. "Good, you can help me," she repeats, as though she has only just seen him.

This time, her hand on his wrist is a stranglehold when she drags him back behind the counter.

But he finds it more troublesome to explain her fracturing mind than it is to simply...let her tug him along. "What do you need?" he asks on a weary sigh.

Ino had said she was fine. She was capable. Nothing would get in the way of her mission. Nothing has before, and this is no different, she had said.

Even when he was watching her out of the corner of his eye as they stood before the Hokage's desk, and even as he caught sight of Sakura's fingers tightening over the file clutched to her chest, and even as Tsunade shamelessly downed a saucer of sake and then released a tremulous sigh that had nothing to do with the alcohol - Shikamaru knew this was a bad idea.

And yet here they are, battling enemy nin in a forest he can't be bothered to remember the name of, for a reason he doesn't even care for, because now, suddenly, Ino is very, very not fine - and he doesn't have room in his head for anything else.

(He should have stopped her. When they had turned to leave Tsunade's office and Sakura's tentative whisper of "Hokage…" nearly halted him in its solemnity. When he closed the door on the image of Tsunade pressing her hand over her eyes and shaking her head. He should have stopped her many times over. But Ino had been so desperate to prove her usefulness, her aptitude, her reliability. She had been desperate to prove how very Yamanaka she still was, how much of a shinobi she still was, and perhaps that was the first hint that she truly wasn't anymore - could never be again.)

The problem with this kind of realization though, is that it often comes too late. This is what Shikamaru thinks when he watches in dawning horror as she freezes in her perch along the tree branch above the clearing, her hands still held mid-sign, the nin whose mind she had possessed convulsing on the forest floor, blood seeping from his ears as he foamed at the mouth, and she is still just… frozen. The sudden shock of the jutsu has jarred her brain into some arrested state and she stares down into the clearing with wide, unblinking eyes, forehead glistening with sweat, breath lodged in her throat, just completely and utterly unmoving - even as an enemy nin barrels toward her from an adjacent branch, kunai aimed for her throat.

He doesn't have time to release his shadow hold of the nin across from him, or time to move toward her himself, or even time to consider all these possibilities, before he finds himself reaching for a kunai fixed with an exploding tag and in the haltingly breathless moment when he sends it flying, he is suddenly - inexplicably - angry with her.

The rage bubbles up through his chest and hooks its claws into his throat, before he bites down the instinctual roar in favor of a desperate gasp when his kunai hits home.

It blows the branch she is perched on right at the juncture where it meets the tree, and through a billow of smoke she comes sailing down to the forest floor - but not without the graze of the other nin's kunai along her pale throat and the severed ends of her hair fluttering down after her.

He doesn't reach her in time to catch her, and the hollow thud as she hits the dirt slaughters any anger still left in him - from the pivot of his ankles to the roof of his mouth.

She is unconscious when he finally reaches her, and the cloud of smoke has left a layer of ash along her pale face. He swipes a thumb along her cheek, eyes fixed to the fine arc.

Her shorn off ponytail settles over his knee as he drags her to his lap - a reminder.

He clutches the strands between his trembling fingers and feels the anger ripe and unmeasured once more.

"This isn't a game, Ino."

She doesn't look at him, only sighs as she continues staring at the curtain pulled around the other half of her hospital bed, the half where his chair isn't, so that she doesn't have to look at his face when he says it.

"I know what I'm doing, Shikamaru. I'm not stupid," she manages through clenched teeth, her hands clutching at the sheet pooled in her lap.

He tsks at her, leaning back in his chair as he crosses his arms. "Could have fooled me."

She doesn't take the bait. Some part of him resents her for recognizing it as bait in the first place, but then, he's loved this woman too long for her not to have picked up a few things over the years.

It's that anger again, so easy, so right. She's being reckless.

He tells her as such.

Ino finally turns, but it isn't a face he recognizes. It's a face somewhere out of a story he heard once - the one where the girl loves the boy more than she probably should and all she gets for it is a long fall down a dry well and the boy's face silhouetted in sunlight as he stares down at her, a belatedly sad sort of smile treading across his lips.

But it's a stupid story, and he doesn't believe such stories anyway, doesn't even believe in the kind of love that delivers you to dry wells in the first place, because how could that be love at all?

Except maybe he isn't the boy in this scenario. Maybe he's been the well all along. Maybe it's fate that's staring down at them from its innocent perch along the edge, dipped in sunlight, an agonizingly pointed smile bearing down on them.

Maybe he had the story wrong from the start.

"Shikamaru."

It shouldn't jar him like it does - the whisper of his name on her lips. And even still…

Even still.

He swallows tightly, any words he might have been thinking flailing at the end of his tongue, unspoken.

(Perhaps it is best this way, he thinks.)

"I never needed your approval."

It's the truth, he knows. But it's the kind of truth he always thought they'd each secretly agreed not to share.

Even still, it stings all the same.

His eyes narrow. "That's not what this is about."

"Then what is it about?"

She sounds so calm, so complacent, so… plainly curious. It throws him, and angers him in equal measure, and God is this what it felt like to her all this time? This anger? This… this rage of knowing what must be said but not knowing how to say it and definitely not knowing who to say it to (which of them needed to hear it the most - that's the rub) and he thinks he finally understands now, in some miniscule, diluted sort of way -

How very and inevitably maddening such love is.

"You're not… you can't… "

(Exactly what to say and how to say it and the courage to say it with meaning.)

"Ino, you're going to get yourself killed at this rate." Or the rest of us, he doesn't say, because it doesn't need saying. She recognizes the spaces between his words well enough to read such sentiment without him voicing it.

And she does read it, far easier than he expected. He sees it in the way her shoulders straighten and her nostrils flare. He sees it in the way her knuckles turn white.

"You don't get to lecture me about his, Shikamaru. Not you."

"Then who?"

She glares at him, and this is somehow familiar, even more so than the stretch of skin at the small of her back or the birthmark just under her right breast or the sound she makes when she buries her face in his neck, a yearning sort of keen.

She tears her gaze away and rests it back on the curtain, that damn curtain that he wants to rip from the wall.

"This isn't about you," she says lowly, almost accusingly, and all at once he is the girl from the story - falling, falling, falling - a dark and unrewarding descent.

He knew this from the start - knew this like he knew the danger of dry wells and yet-

And yet he still thinks he's being led to water.

It isn't about him, has never been about him, but he sees her tears all the same and when she finally turns over to curl beneath the sheet, her back to him, when he finally catches sight of his own reflection in the window across the room, Shikamaru discovers it wasn't really her he was angry with in the first place.

She's rummaging through drawers in the moonlit space of their bedroom when he goes to her. From the threshold he watches as she pulls her flak jacket from the back of the bureau and moves to fix it over her black long-sleeve.

"Ino."

Her name in that familiar breathy whisper stills her in the faint light, the jacket half pulled over her chest, her fingers tightening on the material. She sucks in a deep breath, sliding the jacket the rest of the way down her waist, slowly, with the temperate wariness of someone who expects the inevitable.

(When she pulls her shortened ponytail out from under the flak jacket, his stomach clenches uncontrollably.)

"What are you doing?" he asks, as though either of them don't already know.

It makes her angry, instantly and uncontrollably. She snaps her heated gaze to him in the mild darkness of their room and Shikamaru is already sighing as he pinches the bridge of his nose.

"I'm going with you."

He never expected any other answer. But even still - even still he must deny her this.

"You can't."

She stares at him, chest heaving. He stares back. And maybe at some point it will become easier, but he can't see that far - it is a curve he hasn't calculated yet, or perhaps, one he won't calculate, because it means dust collecting on kunais that should never be given to rust and a flak jacket forgotten in the bottom drawer and a wife (wife he thinks these days, because how could she not be?) who will one day lose all remembrance of why such things are important.

So, no. He doesn't think it will ever become easier to watch the mind of the woman he loves slowly fall to pieces.

(They never warned him about insanity of the heart, either.)

"I can help." The words are ice on her tongue.

"Not like this."

"It will only get worse."

And stop. Because neither of them have ever said the like before, and he certainly never expected it to be her. Ino was good at denial. An expert, at this point.

But this - this was her admitting there was no bending this will, no halting this flood.

For all her power and all her capacity, Ino would drown. She would drown, and drown painfully. She doesn't expect to ever be 'better', if there were such a thing in the first place.

"This may be… my last chance." Her voice cracks, her lips dry, and she shakes her head, her hands going to her temples, bracing the pain between her palms.

(It will never be better.)

"It's now or never. It's now or...or…" She stops, choking on the word, the air rattling through her lungs as she closes her eyes to the sharp sting of salt at her lids.

"Then it is never," Shikamaru answers for her, because he knows now that she cannot see it herself. Will not see it herself.

No, there is no 'better', but they had well passed 'good' months ago.

She was a breaking, aching shell, and if only one of them could rightly see it then dammit he will be the one. He will be the one to say it.

"There are no missions for you anymore, Yamanaka Ino."

She stills, her hands dropping from her temples to quake in fists at her side. "I have some left in me yet."

"No," he answers, sighing, "You don't."

"You can't just…" She pulls a sharp breath through her nose, nostrils flaring. She takes a dangerous step closer to him. "It isn't up to you."

"It isn't up to you either." He pulls a scroll from his pack, handing it to her stiffly. This isn't how he wanted to say this. But in the end, nothing has turned out the way they wanted. So why should this be any different?

Ino snatches the scroll from his hand, rolling it open furiously as she stares at the print, the red thumbprint of the Hokage bright and blaring in the bottom corner, the copper tang still insultingly fresh.

"You've been retired, Ino," he offers softly, his own chest rising with his heavy breaths, his own hands clenching into fists at his side. "By order of the Hokage, you are no longer a shinobi of Konoha."

She stares at the opened scroll, fingers digging into the paper, her chest heaving, the sharp brilliance of her now uneven blonde hair sliding over her shoulder when she snaps her gaze to his and levels him with a wrathful glare. "You can't do this."

"I didn't."

"Don't give me some bullshit technicality! You may as well have!" she yells, throwing the scroll clear across the room, the flutter of its falling pages deafening in the space between them. In the silence that follows, she watches as Shikamaru closes his eyes, breathes deep, pinches the bridge of his nose.

Like some problem he can solve, given enough time.

(If they only had enough time.)

"Ino," he pleads on a quaking breath.

"Get out."

Shikamaru looks up at her, but she is looking out the window, her arms crossed over her thin frame, shaking, fuming, jaw clenched tight over grinding teeth.

"Ino," he tries again, stepping closer, hand out-reaching.

"Get out," she growls lowly, surely, without invitation for argument.

Shikamaru stills. And then he draws back, his own shoulders going rigid. He shakes his head, sliding a hand through his unkempt hair roughly, his teeth grit as the frustration rises in his constricted chest. "Fine," he spits out.

"Fine," she echoes, just as hotly.

He stares at her, and then he does exactly as she asks.

He gets out.

(Something she will never have the chance to do herself.)

"Perhaps you were better off with Temari."

Shikamaru looks up when she says it, watches the way she stares out the tea house's window through the rain, her fingers thrumming along the edge of her tea cup.

If she's expecting him to say something to that, he doesn't know what it is, so he only stays quiet, glancing back down to his own tea.

She sighs, and for a moment Shikamaru forgets the other customers at the surrounding tables, forgets the heat of the cup at his fingertips, forgets even the downpour just outside the window, forgets everything but the way the air shudders past her chapped lips on that sigh - like everything he ever knew lay pressed between her lips - a ragged exhale as felt as it is heard.

"I liked her. She was… a good woman," Ino says without resentment, without even reason to be resentful because maybe she was lying when she said she wanted nothing in this life but him.

She was lying because, in truth, she wanted nothing but this:

Shikamaru always looked best with his face to the sun.

And the thing was, Ino brought the kind of ambling dusk to his life that she'd wish on no one, especially him that she loved - especially him, with dawn at his feet.

"I liked her, too," Shikamaru agrees. Because it's true. Always would be. And at the same time -

"But I always liked you better." He glances up at her as he says it.

She stays with her gaze out the window, but he can see the way she swallows tightly, the way the wetness shimmers along her eyes. She doesn't answer him, and maybe that is best, because he doesn't know what to say past that.

He doesn't know what to say beyond dawn and dusk and every shadow in between.

He doesn't know how to tell her she is the sun he looks to.

(They each want nothing in this life but - )

"Would you believe me if I told you I was scared?" Ino picks at her rice, her eyes on the bowl.

Shikamaru stops eating across from her. Their kitchen window is open, and in the dim light of dusk, he can still see the dark rings beneath her eyes, the way she clenches her jaw tight.

He scoffs, and it snaps her attention to him, her eyes narrowing.

He continues eating.

Her throat flexes imperceptibly, and then she slams her chopsticks down on the table, pushing from her seat. "I'm going to bed."

Before she can make it through the threshold, his arms are around her waist and he is yanking her back to him. She stumbles with the force of it, the sob she had kept clenched tight in her throat making it to air and when he buries his face in her neck she finally slumps against him in defeat.

"Yamanaka Ino isn't scared of anything," he says into her skin, almost exasperatedly.

Ino looks up to the ceiling, blinking fiercely against the threat of wetness at the corner of her eyes. "You can't know that."

"I know you." His hand slides across her stomach, settling along her hip. He plants a kiss on her bare shoulder.

Shutting her eyes, Ino finally pulls from him, her hands going to her temples, and he cannot tell whether it is pain or memory or perhaps both. "Maybe you used to," she answers simply, her breath a quaking whisper. And then she retreats into the bedroom.

He watches her go, and can't bring himself to join her that night.

He sits at the kitchen table and stares at her uneaten rice in the moonlight.

"Fight," she demands of him, giving him only a moment's comprehension before she is on him, striking with a kunai aimed at his left shoulder, and he barely makes the dodge in time, the sharp hiss of air from her near miss reverberating through his ears.

In some way, he supposes he should have known this was what she asked of him when she told him to meet her out on the training field. The trees lining the clearing are still familiar, as he thinks they may always be, because there is only so much of their youth that can be lost to memory and madness. The rest is here, ingrained in them. In the green, in the hard earth, in the whistle of wind through branches that used to know the weight of their genin dreams.

Ino's hair, cut to her chin and jagged. Her skirt, shorter. Her frame, lithe and child-like and untested. Her eyes, blue like the bottom of his painted sake cup when he is trying to forget such things, such long-ago memories.

They are rooted here. It seems fitting that she seeks to break here as well.

Because break she will.

Shikamaru knows it with a keening sadness, because her throws are just a touch too wide and her fists are just a touch too off-center and her eyes are just a touch too glazed.

Glazed in a way he recognizes, in the way memory leaves her - abruptly and without warning.

Suddenly, he is the enemy, one he cannot rightly name, because she hasn't told him all her demons, but he knows her well enough to recognize the change and this - this is it.

It isn't sparring anymore. Not when her kunai grazes his cheek and her fist lodges just between his lungs. Not when he falls to one knee, his own attacks long since ceased, and not when he calls her name in a broken remnant of remembrance.

"Ino!"

She heeds him not.

And then he's knocked back, his refusal to fight her in this state only spurring on the heated animal in her, this blank visage of rage, and she isn't Ino anymore, nor even Yamanaka, and something in him knows this already, in a jarringly inevitable kind of way - in the way that marrs her features with ruthlessness and keeps the memory of her smile pressed to his lips solely and intimately his.

She's straddling him then, her thighs keeping him pinned down, her eyes heated and desperate on his - those eyes that are no longer hers, lost to the madness - and even as he looks up at her, his jaw bruised, his eyes pleading, she has no answer for him but this.

Her fist, raised high and unyielding.

When she unleashes her rage (her fear, he corrects - because that's exactly what it is - white hot and blaring) he does not blink, does not raise a defense.

(He never had such defenses for her in the first place. He'd been taken from the very start.)

Her roar splits the air as her fist dives down.

There's a fragmented moment - a split-right-down-the-middle second - when her fist is sailing toward his face, when their eyes flicker toward meeting, when he sees something pass over her features like a sudden, crippling shadow - and the rush of air is sharp and stinging and the trajectory of her fist shifts just enough to -

Her punch slams into the dirt at his ear instead, her knuckles splitting against rock, and they have not released their gazes.

No longer looking through strangers' eyes.

Ino releases a gasp, a long held clutch of air that seems to hurt more than it helps, because then her face is screwing up in pain, and then she's raising her fist, slamming it down again, the sharp crunch of rocky soil splintering to his ears. And then again. Again and again and again and - he can only watch her.

Abruptly, he realizes that she is crying, and then he is moving, halting her with his hand on her arm just as her last punch lands, his other hand going around her neck, and then he is flipping them, straddling her, his chest tight and throat raw, his breathing labored, and she arches, her head pressed back into the dirt as she wails, so keening and desperate he thinks she may have broken him with such a cry.

(If he wasn't broken for her from the start.)

"Shh," he hushes her, in some paltry attempt at comfort, even when he knows it is pointless. Even when her knuckles are split raw and open, her blood marring his shirt as she clutches to him, and he presses his forehead to hers - breathes her in, breathes her out - and in the space between his mouth and hers he thinks they've lost something for good this time.

Maybe even themselves.

"Make it stop, Shikamaru," she wails, her eyes shut tight to the tears, her fingers curling into his shirt, and he can do nothing but breathe against her, slumping into her, his fingers gripping the back of her neck, his forehead slick with sweat as it braces against hers.

"Make it stop!"

He would if he could.

"Shh," he says instead. Because it is all he can say. And so futile. So utterly useless and inadequate. Just so… so fucking inadequate.

"Shh."

His tears on her cheeks. Her blood on his shirt. This was them, inside and out.

(He would if he could.)

Inside and out and out and out and -

Their lungs were bursting with their futility.

At some point, it all becomes a little blurred. The pressure of her warm mouth on his, the way she draws her fingers along his collarbone, the scent of her hair lingering over his pillow - the way the sun cuts along her lithe form so that she only ever lives in brightness -

Not shadow.

Shikamaru looks at these memories like he's looking through glass and perhaps they've always been just as fragile.

"Ino."

She's sitting with her back to him, staring ahead, maybe out the window, maybe at nothing at all. He can't rightly tell, since she doesn't move her head to respond, and it's dark enough out to only cast a dim reach of moonlight over the table where her hands rest limply. He thinks perhaps this is supposed to mean something - this stillness of hers, this moonlit silence, this halted breath of tenderness that makes him pause a few steps behind her.

She was never meant to sit subdued in a hospital. That life wasn't for Ino. Couldn't be, and yet -

And yet here she is, that brilliant blonde hair (cut short like so much of their lives) strikingly dim for the first time he can remember, and when he steps closer, just a bit into her peripheral, a tentative hand landing on her shoulder, she turns and blinks up at him.

Or rather, in his general direction, her eyes glazed over somewhat and he begins to wonder if he isn't the only one looking through glass-tinted memories.

"Shikamaru."

But she says his name - his name - and he breathes a sigh of relief, because he doesn't know how long this will last, and just the thought of it has the words lodging in his throat, festering unsaid, his hand along her shoulder tightening past the point of comfort.

It's not fair, he realizes belatedly - to grieve so much for something that perhaps never should have been his in the first place. But more than anything, it isn't fair to her. He knows this, somewhere past the hurt and the indignation. He knows that this isn't about him. Never was.

(She is right, in the end - she is right and right and right and he has never hated being wrong so much as now.)

But he's so far in love with her that he's forgotten to separate the two, and if he thinks real hard about it, he'll find it's not something he wants to apologize for. Because they didn't deserve this. Either of them.

They deserved each other, this he knows for sure, this he knows in his bones - but never this.

Never -

"You've come to see me." She says it so resignedly, so low it almost doesn't even qualify as a whisper. More a soft release of breath.

He only nods, his throat tightening.

She smiles, her eyes crinkling, and he thinks the moonlight suits her.

"I was waiting for you," she says as she turns back to the window. It's so dark out. It's so dark and he doesn't even know what she's looking at and suddenly he wonders if she even knows what she's looking at and he can't think that right now, can't think anything, so he just grips at her shoulder - some semblance of assurance he doesn't even feel himself, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter because -

This isn't about him.

He should have known this from the start. He should have done a lot of things, really. Like look at her sooner. Don't make her wait. Don't make her question. Show her in every way he can. Brush her hair for her. Clean her kunais. Make her favorite tea on rainy days. Tell her stories. Bandage her wounds. Kiss her. Love her. Tell her he loves her.

(Remember her - for the both of them.)

"Were we in love, Shikamaru?"

She asks it so plainly, so unassumingly, and he can't help the heartache that colors his words when he looks away and nods. "Yeah. Yeah, I think we were."

He doesn't see the smile that graces her lips - like it isn't through glass that she sees him anymore. She reaches a hand to brace along her heart. "I think I always knew that - here."

Shikamaru looks down at her, his heart lurching in his chest.

And then her smile falters, and he can see the wetness lining her cheeks.

(The wetness that must have been there this whole time, had he the heart to admit to it.)

"I just seem to have forgotten it, here," she whispers, her hand moving from her chest to rest along her temple.

Shikamaru hangs his head, his breath catching in his throat. "Ino." It's all he can say. It's all he can say and it isn't enough. Will never be enough.

Ino.

(Mostly, his heartbreak follows from the realization that he will never be enough. Not for this.)

"Remind me," she demands softly, taking a deep breath, her lips quaking as the tears fall in earnest now. She takes his hand from her shoulder and covers her eyes with it. "Take me back." Her voice cracks, her shoulders shaking as she finally cries beneath the cover of his palm, where the world cannot see her grief.

He leans down to wind his other arm around her chest, his cheek braced to hers as he releases a ragged exhale, and finally - finally he understands what she sees through that dark window and an even darker night.

There are no shadows here.

(He was never going to reach her in the end.)

She must know, he realizes - in the terrible, bruising way that all dying things know.

His throat is rife with things to say, things he knows should be said, but he isn't even sure if she would believe him at this point, or if he even believes himself and so he settles for this:

"It's okay to cry."

(So fucking inadequate - always.)

He barely gets it out before his own voice breaks, his tears sudden and hot against his lids. He feels her trembling in his arms and wonders, not for the first time, if this has always just been cowardice on his part.

Because when her eyes are covered thus she cannot see his own collapsing heart. And maybe that was the point from the start. Maybe shadows have only ever been his own comfort, and suddenly, he is achingly, grievously sorry beyond words.

For everything. For a lot of things. Maybe for nothing at all. Maybe for thinking that 'sorry' could ever be enough.

There are some places his shadow cannot reach. There are some memories that will always be lost. There is such a madness that does not heed to love.

He holds her closer and does not let the darkness take her.

But in the end, his hands over her eyes have only ever been a smokescreen.