AN: My first attempt at a 'shippy fic. Meh. It's all pretty subtle. You could see it as friendship, if you like. No skin off my nose.
Team Ten (reassembled after Ino finally passes her chuunin exam) comes back from a B-rank mission one day. It's pretty routine—although Shikamaru managed to get his shoulder and back ripped open pretty nastily. Sakura isn't surprised to learn that he's a real pain in the ass as a patient, whining about every little thing, jerking away in surprise when she tries to get a grip on his uninjured shoulder.
"How on earth did you manage this?" she mutters, prodding the gash with chakra-infused fingers. "Couldn't you have dodged?"
He rolls his eyes as though explaining is simply far too much effort. "It would have gone through Ino's chest if I'd dodged," he grumbles.
Sakura shakes her head and deftly peels away the mesh undershirt. He gripes all the way through, shifting under her hands. She rolls her eyes and ignores him, too used to his usual attitude to take him seriously. It's a pretty nasty wound though, one of the worse she's seen him take over the last year or so of running higher-ranked missions.
"She was out?" Sakura asks, more for the sake of making conversation than anything else.
Shikamaru shoots her a look, but he nods. "Of course."
"But she's all right, right?" she asks, a bit nervously.
"She's as well as she ever is," he says, and Sakura shifts uneasily under his sharp gaze. Shikamaru has lazy brown eyes that shouldn't be as sharp as they are. It's only when you know how smart he is that you get the urge to shift under that look, fidget like one of Iruka-sensei's students caught sneaking out of the classroom.
She finishes up silently, infusing the stitches with a touch of chakra to make the mess heal faster and slathering salve over it all. Then she wraps bandages around it.
"You should talk to her," he says, as she's wiping her hands off on a spare bit of bandage and she jerks in surprise, dropping it.
He's watching her again, sitting up and pulling the ripped shirt back on. "She misses you, you know," he goes on, taking her silence as an invitation to unsettle her further. "She's actually quiet sometimes, now. It's eerie."
Sakura tries to swallow past the lump that's suddenly in her throat.
He reaches back for his chuunin's vest, growling something rude when the careless movement strains the recently bandaged wound. With a put-upon sigh, he turns and grabs it with his good arm, looping it over his shoulders.
"I'd never seen her cry before, not even when Uchiha left," he says quietly, back to her as he pauses in the doorway. "I don't particularly want to see her cry again." Then he turns back, meets Sakura's eyes, sighs. "Girls are so troublesome," he says, and slouches out the door.
Endnotes: Er...yeah. Not much to say about this one, either. Except that I'm a hopeless Shikamaru fangirl at this point, and he sneaks into just about all the Narutofic I write these days. Fair warning. He's such a pain in the ass.