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“Kakashi-sensei is the most irritating—” Sakura’s hiss warbles into a grumble as she looks over the scrolls with one eye and the numbered scroll with the other eye, “What kind of moron works in accounting? They can’t do simple math?”
“What’s wrong?” Shikamaru sounds tired, but the way his fingers twitch from the caffeine of his fifth coffee tells another story.
“I don’t know who he hired in the accounting department but the numbers for the amount of grain we’re supposed to be receiving are wrong. They don’t even look right. According to this agreement,” she hands him a scroll and rummages through the paperwork at the corner of the desk, “We should be receiving double the amount of grain for half that price.”
“Because of trade with Tea,” he frowns and glances at the abstract, “We’re trading lumber for grain, that way we’re minimizing the cost of production—why are you looking at me like that?”
“Shikamaru,” Sakura starts with something akin to exasperation washing over her features, “Have you been listening to a word I’ve said in the past forty minutes?”
“Is this a rhetorical question?” The question leaves Shikamaru’s lips before his brain processes his response.
“If,” she starts with a dry drawl and crosses her arms underneath her chest, “If you were listening to me, you would’ve heard that Tea is doubling their exports on grain because of overproduction, not because we’re weighing grain in terms of lumber and making up the difference with what’s leftover. The accounting reports are wrong because the person punching in the numbers didn’t read the agreement properly. So now, we’re stuck with an overpriced bill and accounting department that can’t read.”
Shikamaru gives her a blank look and groans, “You could’ve just said that we’re getting more grain because of overproduction, Sakura.”
She takes her scroll on the left side of her table and whacks the back of his head with it.
It’s only by sheer luck – and the fact that Sakura is his friend – that his head doesn’t roll off his body.
.
“Are—Are you serious?” Sakura looks at him wide-eyed and puts her slice of sashimi back on the plate. They take an early dinner because the accounts are not going to recalculate itself, if anything, there are plenty of overnight restaurants from them to order from, “What do you mean Temari and you broke up?”
He shrugs, “It’s just that. After the war, after tou-san died, we just became different people. We wanted different things,” he pauses and to take a sip of his sake, “She didn’t want to leave Suna and I needed to—we needed to rebuild. It wasn’t fair to either of us.”
The head medical ninja listens. She listens to the words not said in his explanation, she listens for the nuances in his voice and the pauses in between words. From her long stand-stilling relationship with Shikamaru, she knows there are things he may never explain, that he may never explicitly tell her, but she has known him long enough to read in between his lines and figure out what he’s actually telling her.
The thing with geniuses – Sakura will never verbally acknowledge her newly found fame, the only sane member of the infamous Team Seven and World’s Greatest Medical Ninja – is that they feel too much, think too much to the point where it completely overwhelms their cognitive functions.
“Do you ever think,” Sakura thinks and it’s a heavy thought, “That you’ve given too much to Konoha?”
It could hardly be called treason, for it is the exhaustion that climbs into their bones and nightmares that wrack their brain, (because blood should be inside the body not out) and wraps around them like cobwebs.
“Sometimes,” Shikamaru nods and picks up his bowl of rice, “Sometimes I think that we are the results of war. We were born in the middle of one and our youth was spent training to survive the impending one. Peace is relative. You say you, but not we. Don’t you think you’ve given up a lot for Konoha?”
She blinks at the sudden question – it’s not sudden, it’s a redirection – and presses her lips together. She takes another bite of her sushi, “I used to. I used to think that, because we’re both war veterans and we aren’t even twenty, but I don’t know life outside of this. I don’t know how to function without—” she waves her hands around their office, their office high up the ground and right underneath the Hokage’s, “This.”
This, an inappropriate word that seemed to capture the essence of a moment—or a set of moments.
.
They are diplomats, high-ranking shinobi, politicians, tacticians, war veterans and they are tired. Breathe for Konoha, die for Konoha, but live for themselves—they didn’t know how. They didn’t know how to be normal, even in the aftermath of it all. Shikamaru and Sakura have been working together for years, in the same office, it has only been one, and sometimes, they wonder if everything has been done for a reason.
The Gods exist because fate does too—they have seen it first-hand.
“So Sasuke?” Shikamaru sounds nonchalant, even if the words come off blunt, “He left the village again.”
“I know,” Sakura shrugs and pours them a cup of tea, “He wants…to do some soul-searching. Teenage angst leads to more confusion than anything.”
But he can read her just as she read him.
She let him go.
“You,” he almost smiles, “When did you get so wise Sakura.”
She laughs, “I’ve never been stupid, Shikamaru.”
“No,” Shikamaru shakes his head and hums, “No, you haven’t.”
.
When it’s nightfall, Shikamaru pulls out a cigarette, lights it with Asuma’s lighter, and places the stick in between his lips.
Sakura fixes him with a stern glare and tense jaw. She sighs the same way she gets when she has a difficult patient, “You know, we’re inside.”
He looks at her.
“You can get cancer if you want,” she scowls, leans over, and grabs his cigarette from his lips. Her thumb barely, just barely, brushes the bottom of his lip and pulls back to put out the embers, “But I want to live.”
Sakura pauses mid-snuff to stare at the red thread attached from her thumb back to Shikamaru’s mouth.
A red thread and even redder lips.