"Sakura. Marry me."

Is this déjà vu? Is that what I'm feeling right now? She checked the date on the calendar discretely. Nope, it's definitely not yesterday, which means he's asking me again.

"Sasuke-kun, I already told you no. No doesn't mean 'try again later'."

"I always get what I want."

"This is sounding more and more creepy, you know."

Sasuke was starting to look frustrated. "Genetically we are a much better match than you and the Nara."

"Whoa, down boy. I'm not looking to match my genes with anybody's for a long time. Also, stop insulting Shikamaru. It makes you look desperate." Sasuke was definitely annoyed now and she felt that this was a good point to prod him into laying down on the exam table so that she could start the procedure. Tsunade had looked at her painstaking notes yesterday, telling her with pride that she couldn't have done a better job herself. Sakura felt a small measure of satisfaction at her words, despite her on-going battle of irritation at the woman for pawning Sasuke off onto her in the first place.

She cut him off before he could reply or, god forbid, ask her to marry him again. "No talking while I'm working on your eyeballs."

Sakura brought herself into a shallow meditative state before she attempted to touch Sasuke's chakra with her own. Breath in. One, two, three. Breathe out. One, two, three …

He didn't flinch as she placed glowing hands on his eyelids, reaching tentatively for the broken and narrowed pathways. For the very first time in her life, Sakura was thankful that he was such a stoic individual. This was a very tedious procedure for any patient.

She concentrated on repairing every single micrometer that was torn, strengthening the pathways against future damage. It was this fusion of healing and fortification that made the process so complex and she had to stop after three hours, exhausted but happy with the headway she had made. Sasuke had barely twitched the entire time.

If only all my patients could be like him.

"What would make you agree to marry me?"

Right, forgot that.

"Sasuke-kun, I'm not interested in dating you, let alone marrying you." She saw his brow crease in slight confusion at her words. "You would be better off trying to find a woman who is interested in those things."

"I don't like other women."

"Sasuke-kun." She put her hands on her hips, feeling weary. "Do you even like me? We've barely spoken since you got home and it's not like you were a great penpal when you went off on your little adventure."

He shifted minutely on the table, which may as well have been a glaring beacon of discomfort from him. "You're my friend?"

Sakura was not impressed. "That sounds more like a question than an answer. I want to be your friend, Sasuke-kun. But you make it very difficult when you keep asking me to marry you." She wrote down the status of their progress on the first day of treatment, neatly charting the improvements she had made. She was about to dismiss him for the day when there was a knock on the door. Shizune popped her head in and waved for her to leave the room.

Sakura excused herself to Sasuke, who just grunted. She rolled her eyes and closed the door behind her, leaning against it and looked at Shizune curiously.

"Tsunade-sama wants you to give him a full physical."

"What, right now? Didn't she already do that when he got home? Not to mention the healing I did when he was in Suna?"

"A full panel, including sexual history and STD testing."

Sakura could feel her jaw drop. She hissed, "I can't believe she sent you here to tell me this. She did it on purpose, I just know it."

Shizune shook her head in amusement. "While that may actually be true, Sasuke has made his intentions to restart his clan known to the Council. They were the ones who requested this through Tsunade-sama."

Sakura clenched her hands around the clipboard and it creaked ominously. "I'll do the damn tests, but I'm not releasing anyone's medical history to them, no matter who they are. Meddling old bastards."

The older woman just patted her shoulder. "Good luck, Sakura-chan."

"Yeah," she muttered. "I'm gonna need it."

Sakura swept back into the room, tossing her clipboard onto the counter and wondered how to proceed. It's not as if she had never examined someone she knew before. Just last year Tsunade had forced her to run the entire ANBU squad through a battery of STD tests once she realized how they tended to relieve stress on and off missions. Sakura had been quietly amused to see that Genma had an elaborate butterfly tattoo on his inner thigh. She had raised an eyebrow when she saw it and the man had just smirked at her, not at all embarrassed.

Neji's insistence on going commando was a surprise too …

She stared at Sasuke, lost in thought, until even he got uncomfortable. "Sakura. What."

Snapping out of it, she opened a drawer to find a blank questionnaire sheet and attached it to clipboard. She brandished it like a shield and said, "Sasuke, the Council has requested that you receive specific testing now that you're interested in reproducing." Sakura tried to be as clinical as possible to relieve some of the awkwardness that was pretty much guaranteed. "Please understand that I will be asking these questions as your medic and not your friend."

His face was blank. "Okay."

She first asked and jotted down all the information that she already knew from previous exams, including allergies (none), medications (none), chronic diseases (Naruto doesn't count) and hesitated when she got to the short section titled "sexual history". I'm a professional, I can do this.

"Age at first sexual intercourse?" Just read it right off the sheet. If you can ask Neji these questions, you can ask Sasuke.

"Fifteen." At his bland answer, Sakura nearly dropped her pen. She had expected him to reply negatively, absolutely sure of his inability to interact with women in a meaningful way. Then again, he was a very pretty boy …

"Was it consensual?"

Sasuke just looked at her, annoyed that she would even question his ability to protect himself. "I'm not easy to subdue. Yes, it was consensual."

"Ah. I see." She did not see. This was turning all of her theories about Sasuke on their head. For all that she had told him that this was a professional exam, she wanted to know exactly what happened, because Sakura was baffled. Still, she reigned in her curiosity and cleared her throat, moving on to the next invasive query.

"Number of sexual partners?"

"One." At least that made more sense. Sasuke off traveling the country-side, visiting bars and picking up women casually did not fit what she knew about him. She could just imagine it now: Hey baby, wanna see a magic trick? And then he activates the curse seal and grows those creepy hand wings.

"Are you currently sexually active?"

He scowled at her and said, "No, obviously not."

Sakura blithely ignored his attitude. "There's nothing obvious about sexual history, Sasuke-kun. That's why we have this sheet."

"You can ask."

"Hmm?"

"You can ask who it was." She stared at him in surprise. Was he offering information without wheedling? What sort of bizarro world had she traveled to this morning? First the repeated proposal and now Sasuke was trying to be cooperative? It was unreal.

"That would be very inappropriate of me, Sasuke-kun."

"But you want to know." His dark eyes gleamed and Sakura knew she had been caught; obviously she had not hidden her curiosity well enough from her observant former teammate.

"Of course I do, I'm nosy like that. I won't ask, though."

"Fine. I'll tell you. It was Karin. Once was enough."

She couldn't help it, he had offered. "Enough for what?"

"To get her to leave me alone."

She squinted at him. "Are you saying you slept with her only so she would stop chasing after you? That seems like it would have the opposite effect."

Sasuke shrugged one shoulder elegantly. "It worked."

She grinned at him unkindly and very unprofessionally. "Maybe you were so bad in bed that even your pretty face couldn't save it. Karin seemed to be a woman who knew what she wanted. Clearly a good sex life is one of those things."

He scowled at her again, offended at the implication that he was bad at anything, but didn't reply. The grin stayed on her face as she scribbled down his official answers and then said, "I have to do a blood test and a physical exam. Please remove your pants."

Sakura placed her clipboard down on the counter and snapped on some gloves, only to turn and see that Sasuke had stripped entirely naked. He raised an eyebrow at her bewildered look, saying only, "This seemed more expedient."

"For what?"

"For whatever you need to do to me." Sakura wasn't sure, but she thought he had tried to inject something that almost sounded like humor into his tone. Considering what she knew of Sasuke, the idea was difficult to comprehend. She conducted the examination with lightning speed, trying to clear her mind back to medic mode while she essentially fondled Sasuke's genitals.

This is the weirdest day of my life and it's not even lunch time yet.


Sakura was half-heartedly poking through the unappetizing cafeteria food in her office when Shikamaru entered without knocking. He hesitantly held a cloth-wrapped bento out to her and said, "My mother sent me here."

Taking the bento eagerly, she giggled at his tone. "Yoshino-san is so thoughtful." He grumbled and threw himself into the big comfy chair in front of her desk, muttering to himself. "Bad day at the office, dear?"

Shikamaru had his eyes closed and he draped a forearm over his face. "I might just defect if I have to proctor another Chunin Exam." He realized too late what he said and scrambled up, looking at her with slight unease. "I didn't mean-"

"Relax. I'm not going to burst into tears because you say certain words, Shikamaru. Give me some credit."

He sighed. "I'm sorry, this whole thing is just very troublesome." Sakura smiled at him and he could feel his pulse pick up just a tiny bit. She was such a pretty sight to see in the middle of a terrible day, which is why he had not needed any convincing when his mother had pressed the food onto him before he left the house this morning.

"Surely you must be used to it by now? This is what, your sixth time?"

Shikamaru groaned and rubbed a hand over his face. "Don't remind me. I'm just sick of the politics. The Exam starts in three days and the village representatives are still squabbling over what color chairs their respective kages are going to have for the viewing."

She paused in the middle of her hunt through the vegetables for more snow peas. "You're joking." Sakura looked at his face and raised her eyebrows when he said nothing. "Wow, and I thought my day was ridiculous."

He leaned forward and snatched one of the onigiri out of the second tier, deftly avoiding her flailing chopsticks. He took a bite, hoping it was something other than Sakura's favorite umeboshi. "Oh? Do tell."

"Well, I found out that Sasuke-kun isn't a virgin."

The rice in his mouth suddenly tasted like dust and he found it difficult to swallow. Sakura kept nibbling at her vegetables. "Why do you always say these things when I'm eating?"

"Mostly for the entertainment value. It's so hard to fluster the great Nara Shikamaru, after all."

"Not for you." He busied himself with finishing the onigiri after saying it, proving his statement true by being flustered at telling her she did fluster him. He was a mess.

Sakura took pity on him and didn't comment, just picking up on the previous thread of their conversation. "The Council, in their wisdom, requested that Sasuke-kun be given a full physical that included sexual history since he wants to have babies so quickly." She set down her chopsticks. "He was strangely blasé about it."

"Are you sure you should be telling me this?" He tapped his chin. "I'm pretty sure there are rules against it."

She dismissed the idea. "Sasuke-kun has given me full permission to discuss his medical history with anyone I deem appropriate. He left it up to my discretion as to who that may be."

"I'm sure he didn't mean for you to gossip about him."

"Pft, you're the only one I had planned on telling. He's a frustrating patient and you know you're my favorite person to talk shop with." Sakura batted her eyelashes at him prettily. Shikamaru sighed again, giving into the inevitable. So much of her life up until now had revolved around the broken pieces of her team. It would be unfair to insist that she not speak of them, even if he did feel a flickering of unreasonable jealousy.

Her voice was quiet when she spoke, "Just in the interest of full disclosure, he proposed again today."

Ah, there was that jealous fire, coiling in the pit of his stomach. Shikamaru was pretty sure between the Uchiha and the Chunin Exams, he was going to develop an ulcer.

"It probably burns him up that you said no to him again." There, he said it confidently, with absolutely no hint of the uncertainty he felt deep, deep in his heart.

Sakura just nodded, taking it for granted that he would just know she would refuse after yesterday's conversation. "He certainly doesn't like to take no for an answer. But he's always been like that."

"I'm growing more and more convinced that having Naruto take him off your hands is the best idea."

"I knew you'd see it my way." She stood from her desk and walked around the edge, dropping herself onto his lap heavily. He huffed at the impact, but didn't complain when she tucked her head under his chin. "I was amazed that Sasuke-kun even answered my questions. He was always such an intensely private person before he left."

"Hmm?" Shikamaru was distracted by rubbing his cheek on her hair, feeling it catch the stubble he had been too lazy to shave that morning.

"Apparently he did have sex with that Karin girl, but it was so that she would go away."

He paused in nuzzling to parse her last sentence. "… seriously, your team is so fucked in the head." Shikamaru grunted as she thumped him hard on the chest, flak vest barely taking away the sting of impact. "And we haven't even mentioned Sai yet."

"Don't start in on him. He hasn't even called me Ugly in months!"

"He shouldn't call you Ugly at all. Seriously, was he raised in the wild?"

Sakura shrugged. "Might at well have been. I try not to lose my temper with him, but sometimes it's a struggle. He just doesn't really grasp even the basics of social interaction. Honestly, he's like the opposite of Sasuke-kun, who knows but doesn't care."

"You're Konoha's preeminent collector of emotionally damaged men."

She wound her arms around him and kissed his neck, sending shivers down his spine. "What does that make you?"

"An anomaly?" Shikamaru turned his head toward her and they spent the next several moments lost in each other, kissing softly. His pulse was beating fast and he felt as if he were about to suffocate from just the feeling of being with her, to have permission to touch and kiss and taste. He had never considered himself a passionate man, but Sakura stirred something in him that was more than just the usual hormonal fog of lust.

She broke away from his lips with a reluctant sigh and laid her head on his shoulder. "As much as I enjoy being scandalous in my office, I have rounds to do." She shifted out of his lap with a final lingering kiss, nipping gently at his lower lip. He closed his eyes in enjoyment; when he opened them, she had stepped back into her professional medic mode, clothing unwrinkled and demeanor serious. Her eyes were happy, though, and he would take that as a win.

"Of course, Sakura-sama. I'll leave you to your subjects." She swatted him and wrapped up the empty bento box for him to take.

"Tell your mother thank you for me. Will I see you tonight?"

He winced and rubbed the back of his head. "Probably not. I have to meet Temari and the rest of the representatives for an entirely specious 'harmonious get together' to celebrate our hard work. It will probably end in tears and bloodshed."

Her eyes shone. "Too bad. I'd like to see that."

"Actually, now that I think of it … no one said I couldn't bring a date."

Sakura gave him a grin that was razor sharp. "Afraid some of those tears will be yours if I leave you alone?"

"More like I would just appreciate an extra body to shield me from Temari's upcoming rampage."

She fluttered at hand in his direction faintly. "You say the nicest things, Shika-kun. I'll be your guardian tonight, dear maiden." Sakura kissed his cheek briefly and then pushed him out of her office.


Note: I would just like to make it clear that Sasuke's feelings about being "capable" of fending off unwanted sexual contact does not reflect how I personally feel.