From Shadows

Temari rolled her eyes as Tenten held up a mirror in front of her face. As if she'd trance herself with her own pendant like that. Keeping the crystal swinging, the Sand kunoichi calmly walked up to Tenten and raised her arm so that the crystal was now behind the mirror and in front of the weapon specialist's face. The blonde heard a brief gasp and then the mirror shuddered slightly. Tenten had already been half tranced before, and though the shock to her system brought her somewhat back to awareness, her mind still wanted to slip back to sleep.

"Back and Forth." Temari said.

"back...and...forth..." Tenten echoed dreamily. "Back and forth...back and forth..."

"Sleep." Temari snapped her fingers and the mirror dropped, revealing a drooling brunette. Temari smiled smugly, when suddenly all of the emotion drained from her face.

"Shadow ****..." The blonde droned quietly. After a moment, a flicker of awareness returned to her eyes and she turned to Tenten once again.

"Follow." The younger woman obeyed the quiet command easily, and the two darted out across the rooftops. Just a couple of minutes later, the two woman stumbled into the bedroom of one Nara Shikamaru.

"Geez, what took you?" The genius chastised the blonde. "I nearly fell asleep waiting for you to show up." Temari stayed quiet, staring straight ahead blankly alongside Tenten.

"Ah well, not I was in a rush." Shikamaru said. Then he paused. "That's not Ino Temari."

"She wasn't home..." Temari droned back.

"So you just grabbed Tenten?"

"We've taken her before..."

"You took her before, because you got annoyed when she tried to get you back for the preliminaries." Shikamaru sighed. "Ah well, it's not that big of a deal. I'll snap her out of it later. Just really need to destress today is all. This whole week has been a total drag."

The shadow ninja gestured towards his desk. "Temari, you can sort out all of the reports that I have to do for the next few days, right? Knock them out as fast as you can so that we can do something fun after."

"Yes..." Temari slowly moved off to her task.

"Tenten...come here." Shikamaru brought the young woman over to his bed. "I was planning on doing this with Ino. It always is nice to just make her quiet down and help me unwind for a while. It's not the same with you, I don't really get to bicker with you at all. But at this point, I don't care all that much. So just sit with me here and be my stress ball for a bit, okay?"

"Yes..." Tenten droned back.

For the whole while that Temari worked on her papers, Tenten sat with the lazy genius, letting her knead her entire body to his heart's content. By the time Temari returned most of the day had passed by, and then things got very fuzzy...

Tenten snapped out of her trance back in her bedroom as the sun was sinking over the horizon. There was a sticky note reading 'Thanks. I'll grab you again when I turn the tables on him.' taped to her right boob, and lipstick all along the left.

"Okay...guess day one is wash then. Right! I'll just have to try twice as hard tomorrow to make sure nobody manages to get me!" She said determinedly.

The next morning she woke to a pair of spiraling eyes...