Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi, I only borrow once in a while.

A/N: Finally, the hinted-at companion to Turning Blue. Please READ IT FIRST to understand the references in this one. There are some mentions of flower symbology in here. It's nothing big, no matter how it might sound, but if you're curious, I will put the explanations at the end of the story. The music for this one would once again be "Turning Blue" by The Swallows. It just fits the intended atmosphere perfectly. Music-wise, at least.

Please enjoy!

Breaking Down

(by: DancingPetal)

She was standing in the middle of the deserted and dimly illuminated corridor, in front of a window that allowed her to see the sea of little beds with sleeping infants of the newborn nursery. She looked tired and broken, but there was a small smile on her face as she watched the tiny children, one hand placed gently on the glass as if she longed to touch them.

Shikamaru approached her silently, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his Jounin trousers and stopped next to her, mirroring her stance by facing the window.

"How is he?" Sakura asked in an almost-whisper because everything else would have sounded like yelling in the silence of the hallway.

"Good," he replied earnestly, just as quietly. "He and my mother told me to say thanks."

The smile slipped from her face as she shook her head. "No, Shikamaru, I don't want that."

"We're grateful, Sakura." He turned his head to look at her and she shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. "Thank you."

"What's there to thank me for?" she burst out, refusing to look at him. "He lost his ear!"

"If it hadn't been for you, he could've lost much more than that," Shikamaru said calmly.

"If I had been earlier and higher on chakra, I could've saved his ear," she retorted angrily, but it was obvious that the anger wasn't directed at him, but at herself. The hand on the glass window balled into a fist.

He turned to face her. "It's not your fault, Sakura. We don't blame you."

One corner of her mouth lifted unamusedly. "That's not the same thing, you know."

"No." He smiled. "But it's both true."

Sakura snorted, but he could see how her arm trembled with her effort to keep her emotions in check. Her voice quivered as well when she said, "Tell that to the kid who died because I wasn't fast enough."

He ignored her bitter words and swept his gaze over her ashen face and tense body that seemed ready to burst into pieces at the slightest touch. Shikamaru wasn't a person fond of bodily contact, but he knew she had to snap at one point, so he pulled one hand out of its pocket and gently placed it on the small of her back.

A visible tremor ran through her body and she inhaled sharply, then she broke down. He could almost hear her shatter, but he didn't pull his hand away because it was the right thing to do, no matter how troublesome it was for him.

She slumped forward, leaning her forehead against the hand that rested on the window and took another breath, this one deep and shuddering so that he could feel the vibrations under his fingers. Tears splashed softly on the floor with little dripping noises, but other than that her crying was soundless. "Every time I lose someone, I feel insufficient, not good enough," she whispered and there was a hint of desperation in her voice.

"You can't save everyone," he replied logically, but his hand pressed soothingly against her back.

"But I need to try," she said louder, "I simply have to." Another breath. "I tried and failed."

"That's only one side of the coin," he said calmly.

A stangled almost-laugh escaped her. "I know. But at times like these-" Her voice failed pathetically, and she gulped a mouthful of air and swallowed. "- it's so hard to turn it around and focus on the other side."

Shikamaru felt a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "Well, that's probably why I'm here."

This time, she really laughed even though it sounded drowned in between silent sobs. But she had begun to mend back together again, the pieces sliding back into place and he knew that she desperately held onto the light topic that presented itself like a piece of floating wood to a drowning person. Another sob-laugh slipped through her lips. "Yeah, you're like an angel sent by the kami." Her shoulders shook. "Disguised like this so you can walk among us humans undetected."

His smile deepened at her silly humour and he tipped his head back to look at the ceiling. "If that's what you want to think."

Sakura turned her head so that he could see her face, tear-streaked and with a watery smile, but her eyes were more alive again. "I'd like to see you with wings," she whispered.

He didn't know what to say to that and didn't even bother to wrack his brain for a suitable answer. Instead, his eyes roamed over her face and picked up on the dark purple shadows under her eyes, the paleness of her skin and the hollowness of her cheeks. She was physically and emotionally exhausted, talking nonsense and already fighting to keep her eyes from drooping. She looked absolutely horrible and the dim light in the hallway only accentuated her state.

The smile lingered at the corners of his mouth as he pushed his hands back into his pockets. "Go home, Sakura."

She straightened up, keeping a hand on the glass to support herself. "I will. Thank you, Shikamaru." Her smile was beautiful, almost drunken from tiredness.

It reminded him of a few days ago when he had found her in the park in the middle of the night. Only that back then she had looked ethereal, now she looked terrible. Judging by the ironic smile on her face, she was thinking about the same situation. She took a few steps forward until she was in front of him, then stood on her toetips again and pressed her lips against his stubble-covered cheek.

Her breath puffed warmly over his face as she pulled back, smelling like coffee, while her hand curiously came up to stroke over the stubble. Her eyes were fixed on her hand, but he was staring at her face. His cheek tingled and he wanted to reach up and trap her hand to stop the tickling but instead, he noted a small wound on her lower lip where she probably had chewed away chapped skin and a small red pimple right under her right temple.

He suppressed the urge to shake his head. The woman was decidedly too exhausted to think straight. "Go home, Sakura," he repeated and her eyes snapped to his, the pupils constricted into small black dots so that the green of her eyes was all the more obvious. Then she blinked and pulled her hand away to press it to her temple instead. "Right. Home." She took a step back, smiling one last time. "Good night, Shikamaru."

"Yeah, you too." He lifted two fingers in greeting, then she stepped around him and strode down the corridor, her steps much louder than usual. He looked after her until she had disappeared around a corner, then he turned to watch the infants for a little while longer before he would go back up to his father's room to listen to speeches of praise for the young medic who had patched him up.

One and a half days later, right after breakfast, there was a knock on Sakura's door. She had just put her freshly dried plate back in the cupboard and now hung the towel back to its place before answering the door. When she opened it, she found Shikamaru standing on her doormat with a boquet of flowers. Her eyebrows shot up, but she silently stepped aside to let him in.

He looked uncomfortable as he quietly slipped out of his sandals. Then he straightened up and held the boquet out to her. "It's a thank you from my parents," he said and his voice was slightly annoyed. "My mother insisted that I bring it."

Sakura accepted the flowers with a smile. "You didn't have to choose them, did you?"

He snorted. "Fortunately not."

"Didn't think so." She grinned. "Come on in. Do you want a cup of tea?"

"Yeah, thanks."

He followed her into the small kitchen which was a separate room from the living area, evidence of how good her pay had to be for her to be able to afford such an apartment. While he seated himself at the table, she poured a cup of tea for him, then rummaged through one of the cupboards to find a suitable vase for the boquet. Pulling out one made of milk glass, she filled it with water and then put it on the table to place the flowers in it.

Shikamaru watched her as she arranged the flowers, pushing them back to the places where each would be accentuated in a way that still upheld the beauty of the whole composition. He had seen Ino do it countless of times and noticed the difference in the way the two women worked. Ino looked concentrated and open when arranging the flowers, all guards down, while Sakura had a far-away look on her face, as if she was seeing some secret within the boquet, a little smile on her face.

Her fingers brushed over one of the smaller flowers at the outer ring of the boquet and she shook her head. "Kami-sama, I should tell your mother that I've merely been doing my job."

"Don't bother, she won't listen," he answered before taking a sip of his tea. She still looked a bit disbelieving so he asked, "This is about flower meaning, right? What are those?"

She threw him a glance before lightly brushing her forefinger over one of the white flowers in the center. "This is a zinnia and this one a chrysanthemum." The finger danced over another white flower to the yellow and deep pink ones that weaved a circle around the white flowers in the center. "These are daffodils and, of course, roses. And these," she brushed over the outer ring of two sorts of small white flowers, "are irises and alyssums."

He looked at the tiny alyssum blossoms that almost vanished next to the much more striking roses and daffodils, then gave up on trying to understand flower arrangement. Sakura seemed to be overwhelmed by the boquet and he had an inkling that it was some sort of female code that his mother had made him transmit to her. It was definitely more than a simple thanks.

Sakura sighed, then grabbed her own cup from the counter and sat down across from him. "So, how's your father?"

"Good. They allowed him to leave this morning."

She smiled. "That's nice. I would've liked to check up on him once again but that they let him leave probably means that everything's healing properly."

One of the corners of his mouth lifted in a smirk. "Believe me, it's better like this for you. He would've asked you to marry into the family if you did that."

She stared at him. "You're joking."

He placed his left elbow on the table and leaned his chin on his fist. "Only halfway," he said uncaringly, lazily. "It wouldn't have been his idea, but it could have happened. What do you think why I'm here with a bunch of flowers?"

Her tea cup hovered forgotten in the air, somewhere between the table and her mouth. "You mean your mother?"

"I told you I wanted to escape from her nagging in the park the other day," Shikamaru replied, answering her stare with an amused gaze of his own. "She told me to see if you're okay after you were so exhausted in the hospital."

Sakura's mouth had opened a fraction and she didn't even seem to realize that she was staring so long it could be considered rude.

"So," he said, his lips curling slowly into a grin, "are you okay?"

Still speechless at the idea he had introduced about his mother's intentions, her eyebrows lifted to form an upside-down vee over her nose and she opened her mouth wider, as if to say something, then hesitated. Eventually, she threw a look at the cheerful boquet on her table, then gazed down at her tea before her shoulders slumped and she smiled. "Yes, I'm fine," she replied warmly with a hint of lingering disbelief in her voice.

"Good."

At his nonchalance, she burst out laughing. "Oh, please tell me it's a joke!"

He only shrugged, but his grin was still in place.

When her laughter quieted down, she became more serious than before. Gazing down at her tea with an unreadable expression, she seemed to contemplate a thought that didn't make her happy in the least. Shikamaru straightened up from his lazy position and took another sip from his own cup, waiting for her to organize whatever she wanted to say in her head as he usually did instead of asking her about it. He knew that she would talk about it without any incentive as long as he let her come to terms with what she was thinking herself.

He couldn't see her eyes properly because her eyelashes hid them and the rest of her face was carefully blank – the automatical workings of their ninja training. When she was so deep in thought that she wouldn't be in control of her face, the immediate ingrained reaction was to make the face go blank to hide everything. She was good at it, probably a remnant of the time of deep grief after Sasuke's defection and during Naruto's absence.

But even though her face didn't betray any sort of emotion, she looked much better than the last time he had seen her. The shadows under her eyes were gone and color had returned to her cheeks. She was still pale but it was the natural complexion of her skin instead of the sickly white tone under the fake light in the hospital corridor.

His gaze returned to her eyes when they lifted from her cup. Her brows were knitted together and she looked troubled. "Your parents think too highly of me. I – don't like it."

When he only looked at her, she bit her lip for a second and took a quick breath before she continued quickly, "I – I'm very grateful and honoured, don't misunderstand, but patching up your father was no unmanageable feat and now they think I'm exceptionally talented while I'm nowhere near the level of Tsunade-shishou or Shizune-san. I've failed so many times because of so many stupid things so I don't deserve their admiration. I just – don't deserve it."

Shikamaru took in her miserable appearance. It wasn't that she was so averse to praise, he thought, it was more that something was still gnawing at her from the inside. Hospital work demanded a lot of inner strength from the doctors, meant a lot of psychological pressure. She had always been a compassionate person with a healer's complex – she wanted to save everyone and blamed herself if it didn't work. It was such a common, simple reason that he almost smiled. In many ways, she was not as exceptional as some people wanted to believe.

"Who died that night?" he asked quietly because he wanted her to get rid of the memory that haunted her.

She looked at the tabletop. "A kid from the border village where the explosion happened. He was only fourteen but already taller than me. Not handsome, but lively."

When she paused, he asked, "Was he a shinobi?"

"No." Her voice was court and pressed, and he could see that she had tangled her fingers so forcefully that the knuckles were white spots under her skin. "He was a civillian. Only in the wrong place at the wrong time. He-" She took a deep breath. "He was still alive when they brought him in. His legs were gone, his left hand was gone. One of the squad had protected his face, but the rest of him was – it was just… We couldn't heal him. We tried, but – his clothes and his skin were – we couldn't tell which was which -"

She had worked herself up and was trembling violently by now, even though her eyes were dry. "Sakura," he said sharply and her eyes snapped up to meet his.

She stilled, then a last tremor ran through her and she closed her eyes. "I'm sorry." When she opened them again, they were calm.

He looked at her, scrutinizing, searching. "Was that why you were at the newborn nursery?"

Placing her elbows on the table, she pressed the balls of her hands to her eyes. "Yeah," she breathed in a half-sigh. "Whenever I – lose someone, I go there. It's calming, in a way. To see all the tiny babies, alive and breathing. Existing. It's so entirely different from – death that I can leave everything behind for a few moments."

A few moments.

Shikamaru knew that a few moments were not enough to make your peace with something like death. Making your peace was an agonizingly slow process that involved more than just escaping from the images in your mind for a couple of minutes. Even if you could push them away, to the back of your mind, they would come back in the second you were vulnerable, with your guard down. He had learned to cope with the images. But had she? Could she, when weekly, daily, she was confronted with new ones?

"It haunts you," he stated in a calm, steady voice that betrayed nothing of his deperate wish for a cigarette.

She looked at him but at the same time looked through him, her face hollow and careworn. "I see their faces every night. I remember every single one of them."

So she was even stronger and at the same time more broken than he had suspected. But he had never met a medic who wasn't so he wasn't surprised. She had the advantage to have friends who helped her patch up again when it got too hard, became too much, though it seemed she had already realized the first steps to keeping sane herself. Remind yourself that there are still people to live for. Friends, colleagues, newborns.

"I go to the cemetery once a month," she said softly, fiddling with her teacup. "I bring every one of them a flower until I'm ready to let them go. It's hardest when they've been alone in life or when they've been only kids."

Second step. A ritual connected in some way to the memories of the deceased. She brought flowers, he smoked. He grimaced as his fingers brushed longingly over the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his trousers.

Her sharp eyes had picked up on it. "Do you visit him often?"

He stared at her with a set jaw, contemplating whether to answer or not. He distinctly remembered Ino's nagging on the subject before he had started to simply avoid answering or lie directly into her face. But Sakura was holding his gaze calmly, only waiting for an answer, no expectations involved and he recognized the technique he himself used when she wasn't sure if she should voice her thoughts or not.

"No," he finally admitted. "I never go to his grave. Ino and Chouji visit often, though."

A small smile curved her lips. "How often do you smoke, then?"

Shikamaru felt the corners of his own mouth lift in response. "Too often."

"I really should take a look at your lung soon. That addiction will affect your stamina."

That she didn't tell him to stop was a definite first for any medic who knew about it. Both of them didn't comment on it any further, instead quietly sipping their tea which wasn't even hot anymore. The silence between them was companionable and lasted until their cups were empty.

"So, what did your mother say after I walked you home the other day?" Shikamaru leaned back in his chair, comfortably shoving his hands into his pockets.

"She disagrees with your piercings." Sakura grinned cheekily. "But I told her I like them a lot. So badass."

He chose not to comment on that other than raising his eyebrow. "Well, what about your date?"

Her grin dimmed. "They took it surprisingly well. Apparently, my father had been of the opinion that Rui wouldn't have made me happy anyway. He was rather worried I'd accept him if he asked. My mother was a bit crushed in the beginning, but she got over it." The corner of her mouth lifted into an ironic smile. "She's currently trying to find another potential son-in-law."

"I bet she'd get along wonderfully with my mother," he snorted. He sighed and brushed his fingers through his ponytail. "I should probably get going or else she's going to show up on your doorstep to drag me back home. I'm supposed to check the herd in our southern grounds today."

Sakura followed him to the door where he bent to put on his sandals again. "Tell your mother thank you for the flowers. And say get well soon to your father."

"Yeah, yeah," he sighed, straightening back up. "Thanks for the tea."

"You're welcome." She smiled at him, looking somehow better rested than before, and one corner of his mouth lifted into a crooked smile.

He bent down and pressed his lips gently to her cheek, full-out smirking when she stared up at him in shock and bewilderment as he pulled away. "My turn today. Thank you, Sakura."

He slipped out into the hallway of her apartment building, lifting two fingers in his usual greeting before he soundlessly disappeared down the stairs, uncharacteristically high-spirited. She sighed softly, grinning to herself, and closed the door. "You're welcome." Shaking her head, she went back into the kitchen to clean the cups.

A/N: Please say 'Aww…' for Shika and Sakura! I hope that this will turn into a series of one-shots but that depends solely on Lady Inspiration. Maybe my muse would be easier to handle if I gave her a name? Anyway, please cheer for her.

Flower Symbology Used in This One-shot:

Alyssum – worth beyond beauty

Chrysanthemum (White) – truth

Daffodil – respect, regard

Iris – faith, hope, wisdom, valor, hope, light, power

Rose (Deep Pink) – gratitude, appreciation

Zinnia (White) – goodness

... Comments pretty please?