Chapter Text
It’s half-past four when Asuma dismisses them for the day and Shikamaru sags against one of the thick pines crowding the edge of training ground 32. His shoulder throbs beneath his chunin vest from a punch he’d seen coming but been too slow to dodge. He presses his fingers into the muscle there and watches Ino and Chouji move through their cooldown stretches.
And because Ino’s never failed to notice someone's eyes on her, she calls him out. “Get over here. You’ll be sore tomorrow if you just sit there!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
She arches into some pose that does– interesting things to her ass and Shikamaru would rather slit his own throat than explore that further.
“Barbeque after you two are done?”
“Sounds good,” Chouji calls back. He’s balancing precariously on one foot, and Ino shoulder checks him because she’s always been a bitch, but Chouji doesn’t budge. They’re smiling at each other then–all teeth and fifteen years of friendship–and when Chouji delivers a kick to the back of her knee that makes her crumple, she comes up laughing.
“Not me,” she says finally, brushing dirt off her increasingly short skirt–Shikamaru’s convinced she’s taking a centimeter off every month to see if she can give Asuma an aneurysm by the end of the year.
“Clan business?” Chouji asks.
“No, thank god. I’m meeting Sakura for dinner. We’re having an intervention about that new guy she’s seeing.”
“The chunin or the guy from the hokage’s office?” Chouji’s as bad a gossip as Ino, just less likely to run his mouth. Sometimes it feels a bit unfair that he’s considered ‘the nice one’ on team ten.
“The chunin,” Ino confirms, “I’m pretty sure she’s, like, one bad hospital shift away from letting him fingerbang her in a supply closet–she can do better.”
Chouji nods like he understands the gravitas of a fingerbang and Shikamaru does–nothing. Any reaction right now is a bad one.
“Grow up, Shika,” says Ino, because she’s a fucking bloodhound.
“I’m just surprised she’s over the Uchiha.” It’s a half-truth, and not a particularly nice one. Talking about Sasuke was a quietly agreed upon taboo among the Rookie nine. Ino has him on the defensive though and Asuma punched him a lot harder than he needed to–he’s not feeling particularly nice.
Ino looks at him like he’s stupid and even Chouji looks faintly disappointed.
“Why do you care anyway? Isn’t it Sakura’s business?”
Ino stalks over to him and jabs her finger into his chest. It’s disheartening that he can feel the sharp outline of her manicured nail so acutely through his flak vest, he thinks she might draw blood.
“You can’t date my best friend.”
“I thought Chouji was your best friend.”
Her eyes narrow. “You can’t date him either.”
“Well, shit.”
Chouji finally finishes stretching and moves to join them. “Sorry buddy. I’ll let you pay for dinner if you want, though.”
Dinner with Chouji is as expensive as he expected, but it’s worth it to ensure Chouji says nothing to Ino about how distracted Shikamaru is at the restaurant. The last thing Ino needs to know is how many loops Shikamaru’s highly-praised, genius-level intellect does around the phenomenon of sex with Haruno Sakura.
Two weeks later, Chouji breaks his nose in a spar and Asuma frogmarches him to the hospital. Not for the first time, Shikamaru considers how useful it would be to have a medic on team ten, thinks about how much work it would be for him, and decides the hospital is fine. If it really comes down to it, he can always just die.
Sitting next to him in the waiting room, Asuma hums to himself and pencils relevant information about his student into the inane check-in form they have to fill out because neither of them are in a stretcher. Shikamaru commandeers the nearest chair and tries to look as unaffected as possible with his head tipped back and a wadded up hand towel covering the better part of his face. It’s Ino’s towel, and it smells like freesias and blood. She’ll probably make him pay for cleaning.
It’s a bad omen when Kakashi rounds the corner, sans porn. Shikamaru doesn’t have to wait long for the other shoe to drop because Sakura’s right on his heels. Her hair is bound in a loose braid, and that’s notable because she hasn’t worn it that long since before the chunin exams. He knows he hasn’t consciously seen her since learning about the chunin–Watanabe Hiroshi–who might still be dating her. But the last time he really saw Sakura, her hair had barely reached her chin.
They’re in some kind of argument. Sakura’s got her arms crossed over the tension-taught lines of her body and Kakashi–well, Shikamaru can’t read Kakashi, but he’s there, watching her mouth move.
Shikamaru’s never seen them interact without Naruto or Sasuke as a buffer. He’s also never seen Kakashi give anyone but the hokage his full attention, and even that is hit-or-miss depending on how insubordinate he’s willing to appear. He files away the interaction for later, when he can’t feel his heartbeat in his nose.
There’s one terrible moment when Sakura’s eyes go glassy and her lip trembles, and Shikamaru knows he must be supremely fucked up when all he can think about is what sort of face she made when she let that chunin stick his hand up her skirt.
And then Kakashi’s leaning in, blocking Shikamaru’s line of sight like he can sense that some horny teenager is having inappropriate thoughts about his one remaining student. It makes him feel even worse because Kakashi reaches up to ruffle her hair, and Shikamaru realizes that this is a good moment for team seven, or what’s left of it. They don’t get many of those.
The moment passes. Sakura’s pouting and she looks impossibly fond even as she combs through the mess Kakashi made of her braid. Like the final nail in his coffin, Kakashi turns abruptly and waves to him and Asuma. In the split second when Sakura turns to see what’s caught his attention, Kakashi shunshins away with all the unnecessary speed of an underutilized anbu.
Shikamaru decides that he doesn’t like Kakashi much at all.
Sakura walks over, looking faintly embarrassed. It’s on the tip of his tongue to tell her that if she’s going to be shy about messy interpersonal displays, she should really consider having them anywhere besides the very public lobby of the very public hospital, but he thinks better of it.
“Hey Sakura, Kakashi pulling the old disappearing act on you again?” Asuma asks, all pleasant and smiles.
“Something like that,” she laughs, “I’d ask what you’re here for, but you’re not being very subtle.”
There’s a non-zero chance that Sakura has something more important to deal with than a functionally cosmetic injury, but that chance is shot when Asuma passes the intake form to her and says something humiliating like, “you’d think three years a chunin and this one would have learned how to dodge.”
In the hospital or die equation he’d puzzled out earlier, death is looking exceedingly tempting.
“Alright senpai,” she says, because she’s developed a strange sense of humor apparently, “let’s get you into an exam room.”
Shikamaru stands a little too fast and with all the blood loss, he goes a little light-headed.
“Do you want me to wait here?” Asuma asks.
“Nah, Kurenai’s waiting for you, right?”
Asuma frowns. “She wouldn’t mind. Is he actually good to get home on his own?”
Sakura’s expression goes thoughtful and her hands are gentle as they shift the bloody towel away from his face. A fresh stream of blood hits his mouth and she quickly presses the fabric against his nose again. She shoots him a sheepish little smile that makes his stomach flip.
“He should be okay. If he isn’t, I’ll walk him home myself.”
Asuma seems satisfied with that and Shikamaru’s a little too preoccupied with hating Ino for putting the concepts of Sakura and sex together for him to protest.
He follows her out of the waiting room and up the stairs to one of the open rooms. He keeps his head tipped back as he walks and relies on basic ninja grace to not trip over his own feet on the stairs. The speckled ceiling tiles have seen better days, he thinks.
“So, Chouji’s got a pretty mean left hook?” she asks.
Shikamaru shrugs–an awkward single shoulder motion. “Guess so.”
“Well, you can take a seat on the table over there. I just need to make a note and then I’ll get a better look.”
He has a brief reprieve to situate himself before she’s hovering in his face again. He doesn’t think he’s ever paid this much attention to someone’s mouth before. It’s humiliating.
“Okay, let me see. Don’t worry about the towel, you’re free to bleed in here.”
Shikamaru’s starting to feel queasy from the copper taste of blood in his teeth, but he holds still as she inspects his nose, and doesn’t even flinch when she gently prods the sides.
She winces in sympathy. “He got you pretty good. This is a nasty one, but I can set it without surgery.”
“Good,” he says, hating how weedy and nasal his voice sounds.
“Okay, I’m going to count to three, and you’ll feel some pressure.” Both her hands are framing his nose now, cold and clinical. “One-”
There’s a horrifying crunching noise, very similar to the noise he heard when Chouji hit him, but she must be dulling his nerves with medical chakra because the shock hits him harder than the pain this time.
He glares down his unbroken nose at her as she heals the worst of the swelling. “Was that necessary?”
Her answering smile is puckish and she finally steps away to wash her hands in the sink. He can breathe a little easier now with her face across the room. That’s probably just his nose, actually.
“Patients do better when they don’t see it coming.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a beat where he doesn’t know what to say, and then, “so I’m good to go?”
“Your nose will be a little tender for the next couple of days, but I think you’ll make a full recovery.”
“Great.” The paper table-cover crinkles as he slinks back onto his feet. “Thanks.”
She’s still looking at him like she’s trying to figure him out, and Sakura’s a bit too smart for him to let her do that. With about as much charisma as he’s capable of wielding he asks, “were you serious about walking me home?”
“Do you think you’re going to pass out?”
“Probably not.”
Shikamaru knows when he’s being evaluated. It’s never comfortable, but he’ll deal with it.
“Sounds kind of troublesome then, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but I think you should.” The last of his confidence sputters out. It occurs to him that she’s at work, and he’s asking her to just–leave. “If you’re not busy or something.”
“My shift ended half an hour ago actually.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t apologize like he should, but she plows on like he has.
“It’s alright. I was held up anyway, and you looked too miserable for me to let you bleed out in the waiting room like that.”
He snorts at that and wishes he hadn’t. She hadn’t been lying about the tenderness.
“Let me go clock out. I’ll meet you back in the lobby.” She’s halfway out the door before he can fully process what he just agreed to. Fucking hormones.
The walk to the Nara compound from Konoha Hospital is twenty-seven minutes. He can make it in four if he’s really missing his bed, but this isn’t that sort of walk. He is, however, really missing his bed.
Sakura seems content to amble along at a civilian pace, so Shikamaru falls in step beside her. They walk in silence for the first minute or two–long enough for Shikamaru to wonder if she regretted agreeing to this. More than long enough for Shikamaru to regret proposing this.
She takes pity on him when they pass a group of kids playing ninja outside the crumbling stone wall of the academy.
“Look Shikamaru, I’m just going to say this. I know we’re not close, but I see you about as often as I see Naruto–and he’s been with Jiraiya-sama for almost three years now. Why the sudden interest?”
She’s right, of course. And that stings, because they aren’t close, but he’s always been a friend by association. He didn’t make any special effort to avoid her after Sasuke deserted, he just–didn’t try. Not trying is a dangerous habit to get into, he knows, but at the time, his greatest failures were coinciding with her greatest tragedies and none of that felt–good.
It’s also not fair to her that the only reason he’s reaching out now has nothing to do with the guilt of being a bad friend or any desire to rekindle a relationship. It’s all just circumstance. She’s always been pretty, he’s known that for a long time. But then Ino and Chouji sat around talking about her sex life and suddenly that prettiness felt–actionable. And whatever that was–whatever hormonal part of himself was invested in that sort of prettiness—would have faded if Asuma hadn’t corralled him into the hospital on a day she happened to be working.
Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence.
He’s not going to tell her all that.
“It wasn’t intentional–I’m not a very social guy,” he starts, “and I don’t know. Ino and Chouji were talking about you the other day, and I thought it might be good to…catch up?”
She’s frowning and it doesn’t take a genius to know she’s not impressed. “That doesn’t sound like you. What were Chouji and Ino talking about?”
“Sakura, I didn’t get my nose broken to talk to you. Choji got a good hit in, and you were there. Is it impossible that I felt a little bad about not talking to you for three years?”
She pulls a face and Shikamaru thinks she’s going to fight him on it. Ino would fight him on it–the Sakura he knew in the academy–Ino in miniature–would definitely fight him on it. He’s starting to realize he doesn’t know the person Sakura has grown into all that well when she doesn’t.
“Okay. Talk to me then.”
Suddenly that seemed easier by miles.
“Was studying medical ninjutsu as bad as I think it is?”
There’s still a chance she decides he’s not worth it, and she leaves to do god-knows-what with god-knows-who.
But by some miracle, she bites. “Worse. You’ve got the brain for it, but you don’t have the patience for it.”
She seems very sure of that–of him. He wants to be irritated, but she doesn’t mean it as an insult.
“What about Chouji or Ino?”
“Oh, Ino is a lost cause. She did try it once to make a point, but the fact you haven’t heard about that should tell you how well that went…and then I’m not sure about Chouji. You know him better than I do. I have this strange idea that he’s squeamish, but I really don’t know. How was he when he broke your nose?”
“Well, he was the one who stole Ino’s towel while she was laughing herself sick.”
“Ah, he has good instincts then.”
He finds himself smiling in spite of everything.
“Was my nose really that bad?” He asks, feeling along the recently re-aligned bridge. “You made a noise, but it took you less than five minutes to fix it. Are you just that good?”
It’s a small victory when he’s able to coax a smile out of her in turn, even at his own expense. “No. If it was actually bad, you’d have needed surgery. But, shinobi are easier to work with when they think they’re being brave.”
Few truer words. “Well, thanks. It did help.”
She hums. “Is Ino going to be pissed that you bled all over her towel?”
“Um…probably?
“I could exaggerate it a little the next time I see her–earn you a few sympathy points.”
“I think Ino would see through that.”
“You don’t think I’m a good liar?”
“Well, you are Kakashi’s student.”
He means it as a joke, but it doesn’t land like one.
Anbu identities are confidential, but it’s sort of an open secret that Kakashi returned to his old post in the wake of team seven. And everyone knows that Sakura landed an apprenticeship with the Godaime. Those seem like two separate things because Sakura’s chakra control puts her on track for medic-nin no matter who she trains under, but the point is that they’re not.
“Not really.” Her voice starts to go a little funny and the possibility that he might actually make her cry lops his breath off. But bullied child to medic-nin, Sakura’s always been good at putting herself back together. She does it before he can figure out if he imagined it entirely. “I don’t want to talk about Kakashi-sensei.”
The statement itself is more damning than she probably realizes. Shikamaru was more than happy to step away from team seven’s untrodden land mines, but then he thinks about how she looked at the hospital, and how she looks now and–he doesn’t know. There’s something that itches at him–makes him think of Ino’s crusade with her skirt and Kiba’s wet dreams about Kurenai.
He’s lost her good humor, and he doesn’t think she’ll be any happier with what he’s started to figure out. He respects her enough to be circumspect about the things he’s not quite comfortable naming.
“What do Ino and Chouji say about me?”
He sighs because he didn’t really think she’d drop it, but he’d held out hope. And because he doesn’t think he can upset her much worse he says honestly, “that you let your boyfriend fuck you on your shift.”
That’s an exaggeration–sort of–but it’s also the point. It’s not the nicest way he could have put it, and he’s starting to think that if she wants to kill him, he’d let her take a shot. At the very least, she shouldn’t be entertaining his insanity like this.
She stops walking, so he does too. And she looks thoughtful again. They’re back in the exam room, and she’s trying to figure him out. Shikamaru is grateful that they’ve stopped in one of the less-frequented residential districts, because he’s going to let her this time. He’d prefer not to risk an audience.
He watches the tectonic shift in the planes of her face as she comes to the correct conclusion about him.
“I didn’t,” she says. And that’s that. An end to this bizarre fascination. He can stop thinking of Sakura and her mouth and her thighs and the things she doesn’t do. “Tsunade would dismiss me if she even thought I would do something like that.”
“Right. That makes sense.”
If he’s really lucky, he can avoid her–consciously this time–for a few more years and she might forget he ever opened his mouth.
But, she keeps talking. “My parents are merchants, you know. They sell silk in Kiri.”
She pauses, like that should mean something to him, and then continues on like she’s talking to a child. “It takes a long time for two civilians and a cart of silks to get to Kiri.”
He does catch on then. And she smiles, but there’s no warmth there. She looks predatory and dangerous like every Kunoichi on the covers of magazines he’s sworn he doesn’t own.
“So when I want to let a chunin fuck me, I can do it after work, in my home, in my bed.”
And there’s a lot that Shikamaru’s hormone-riddled brain can do with that, but it’s another thing to realize that Sakura still isn’t moving. Another thing entirely to realize that there’s a wooden board nailed into the wall next to the front gate of the house she’s stopped in front of.
It reads Haruno .
“Have a good night, Shikamaru. Don’t be a stranger.”
And then she’s gone.
Fuck.