Note: As always, thank you to everybody who reviewed. :)
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eleven: mission possible
The third consecutive time that Neji, Sakura, and Shikamaru are paired together for surveillance missions of varying natures, Sakura decides that maybe it's time to be suspicious. After all, when her shisou isn't getting drunk on sake or taking a leaf out of Shikamaru's book and taking naps on important papers of state, Tsunade has a very sharp – and when the situation calls for it, devious – mind.
And, for Kami's sake, if Tsunade is picking up on certain…things, then Sakura knows that she should be worried. In terms of perceptiveness, the Godaime falls behind Kakashi, Ino, Naruto, and Tenten, who are part of the group who knows her best. Sakura shudders to think at the havoc that would ensue if Ino, or worse, Naruto found out about the highly secret…things…going on in her mind in regard to Shika and Neji.
She cracks an eye open from her spot on the bed and glares at the two men, who are sitting on the floor nearby and innocently playing a game of shogi, completely unaware to the mental confusion they are causing her.
Damn them.
Sakura buries her head in her pillow and curses fate. After they get into bed, their shared weight dipping it down quite a bit and making the springs creak alarmingly, before taking respectable distances away from her, she curses herself for not hating – or feeling uncomfortable in the least – with the situation she is in.
A few weeks later, she has a somewhat awkward discussion about this with her shisou.
When Sakura is finished scrutinizing her boots as her face turns different shades of red, she chances a glance up, to see that Tsunade is regarding her with one eyebrow raised. "Sakura, do you want me to stop assigning you missions with them?"
Sakura knows the right, proper answer, but her eyes drift downwards again as she scrunches her toes, uncomfortably aware of the faint blush again spreading to her cheeks. "No."
Tsunade's voice, when it comes, is uncommonly gentle, and she reaches a hand out to lightly brush the shoulder of the young woman who has become like a daughter to her. "You, Nara Shikamaru, and Hyuuga Neji are the three most brilliant minds of your generation, an excellent team, and a valuable asset to our village. That's all I will assume and all I will explain to others, unless you wish to tell me otherwise."
Next month, Sakura is assigned another mission with Neji and Shikamaru. She holds the paper gently, looking at the two names written in Tsunade's precise handwriting, and understands what her mentor has been trying to tell her.
She bows her head a little, a small smile gracing her features. "Thank you, shisou."
-
twelve: headache
Sometimes life gives Shikamaru a migraine.
Well, maybe it's not life in general. Whatever it is, though, it leaves the brilliant tactician nursing splitting headaches at least once a week; headaches that come on at the drop of a hat, and lingers for days.
The obvious solution would be to see Sakura and demand a cure. However, Shikamaru finds out the hard way that migraines are one of the approximately four things that medical chakra has next to no effect on. He decides that fate hates him.
Tsunade herself recommends "natural" or "holistic" healing methods, and tells him to relax.
Now, Shikamaru wouldn't have a clue what "natural" or "holistic" methods were even if they hit him on the head. So, albeit grudgingly, he turns to the two other genii in his lives and asks them to help.
Neji recommends that he meditate. Shikamaru is skeptical – after all, if somebody told Neji that they were slowly bleeding to death from a wound in their foot, he would tell them to meditate, concentrate their chakra, and block out the pain from their mind. In happy little headache-free Hyuuga Land, meditation solves all.
So Shikamaru tries that. It doesn't work. Despite all the time he spends zoning out and sleeping, he is medically unable to clear his mind and empty it of all thought. It's just impossible.
Fed up, he goes to Sakura and asks her what she thinks he should do. She recommends eating a healthier diet and learning how to let go of the stress in his life.
So Shikamaru eats baby carrots six times a day and a tomato every morning with breakfast. This would be all right, but then he realizes something startling. He has no idea about how to "let go" of his stress.
When he tells Neji and Sakura about this, Neji gives him a blank look, as expected. However, Sakura claps her hands excitedly and suggests that a "romantic getaway" would help all three of them unwind.
As she chatters excitedly, Neji and Shikamaru have time to exchange looks of great trepidation. Then Shikamaru's head twinges painfully, and as he rubs it, he decides that whatever girly horrors Sakura has planned – if they get rid of this damned headache – would be worth it.
Their first day at the hot springs resort does not go extremely well. Neji gets hit on by several old women, and is reduced to wrapping several towels around himself, so that his feet and face are the only parts of bare skin visible. Sakura loses their room reservation to some pervy old man who paid a huge amount of money for the room that she had reserved beforehand, and it takes the combined efforts of Neji and Shikamaru to drag her away from the scene before things can get too scary. The hot springs are a little too hot for Shikamaru's tastes, which leaves his skin red and rather uncomfortable. And his head still hurts, to boot.
That night, they curl up on the slightly-too-small-but-still-extremely-soft bed and stare at each other disconsolately.
"We've tried meditation, improved diet, and hot springs," Sakura sighs. "Shikamaru, you're a medical mystery."
"Just the kind of compliment I had hoped never to receive," he groans from under his pillow.
Neji breaks the contemplative silence he has been maintaining for the past few minutes. "Maybe we need to try a new method," he suggests.
"Like?" Sakura prompts.
Neji raises an eyebrow at Shikamaru. "Maybe you need to forget about the pain, and then it will forget about you."
"…Is that some kinda Chinese proverb or something?"
Sakura giggles. "I think that was Neji trying to hit on us."
"It was nothing of the sort," he replies, sounding mildly affronted.
"Let me guess, Hyuugas don't hit on people," Shikamaru mutters.
Neji sniffs aristocratically. "We do not. We go about our courtships with more finesse."
Sakura leans back, after almost placing her elbow on Shikamaru's pillow-covered face. "Finesse? Why, this should be interesting."
After that close call, Shika removes the pillow and manages to give Neji a suggestive look through the headache. "Blow my mind with your finesse, Hyuuga. Sakura, do your worst. Maybe then I can forget about this damned headache."
Neji and Sakura exchange glances, and mutually decide to respond to the obvious baiting.
The next morning, Shikamaru wakes up with no headache to be found.
Content, he flops back down into bed and snuggles up against the two pleasantly warm bodies. "I think we finally found a cure," he murmurs.
"Reenacting Icha Icha Paradise at its best?" Sakura replies sleepily. "I suppose it could have been worse."
Neji interrupts himself from his beauty sleep long enough to give Shikamaru and Sakura withering looks. "I suggest that you two go back to sleep before I ensure that both of you mysteriously develop migraines."
Sakura smirks. "I wouldn't mind – after all, then I would be deserving of our amazing migraine cure. Hardly something to complain about, don't you think?"
Shikamaru settles back into bed, resting his hands behind his head as he smiles contentedly up at the ceiling. "Certainly not."
-
thirteen: heads or tails, you lose
Times like this, Neji wonders why he ever lets himself get roped into these atrocious "game nights" at the Inuzuka complex.
Ordinarily, he'd never even be caught dead near the Inuzuka area – he spends enough time "dissuading" Kiba from his fervent pursuit of Hinata, after all. However, he had made the mistake of meeting Shikamaru and Sakura for dinner on the same Friday that the game night was being held, and, ignoring his protests, both of them had dragged him over to join the party.
Sakura and Shikamaru had assured him that it wouldn't be that bad, and that it would do him some good to get out and socialize more. Merely passable logic, at best, and he would never have succumbed to such faulty reasoning if it hadn't been for the fact that Shikamaru had him in a shadow bind and was guiding his limbs along with ease, and Sakura wasn't following along behind them, hand curled into a decidedly menacing fist.
Honestly. They acted like he was a completely backward, antisocial disgrace to human society. Which he really isn't. If only people would listen.
"This is your idea of entertainment?" Neji asks, leveling a disdainful glance at Kiba.
Kiba gives him a toothy and entirely inappropriate grin. "Sakura did lose the card game miserably, after all. This is the penalty."
Neji opens his mouth, a sharp retort ready, but Sakura interrupts him, smirking at Kiba. "Honestly," she purrs, reaching out and wrapping one arm around Neji's shoulders and the other around Shikamaru's. "I'd take these two over paying you twenty ryou and going on a date, any day."
Ino punches the air gleefully, as the rest of their companions look on, avidly interested in the interaction. "Oooh, burn!"
Kiba colors and crosses his arms, sticking his nose in the air. "Prove it."
Before Neji can do anything to protest, Sakura pulls him and Shikamaru in close - narrowly avoiding knocking their skulls together painfully – and proceeds to give the rest of the Konoha Eleven something to talk about.
It is a pretty damn awesome kiss, Neji has to admit, but a considerable part of his enjoyment is muted by the subsequent, unmistakable blinding flash of a camera going off, followed by Naruto crowing gleefully that this picture will make delightful Christmas greeting cards.
"Naruto, you – "
Sakura watches, resigned, as Neji tears himself away from their embrace to start chasing a giggling Naruto and the offending camera around the room. "Think that this worked?" she asks Shikamaru.
Shikamaru nods, then yawns. "He does look happy."
"…He's trying to kill my best friend."
"Which is when he's at his happiest."
Sakura considers this. "True."
"Should we do this more often?" asks Shikamaru, as he watches Neji throw a nearby Christmas tree across the living room, said tree almost poleaxing Chouji, Lee, and Tenten.
Sakura laughs. "Yes. It'll be fun."
-
fourteen: memory; photograph
Neji and Shikamaru have resigned themselves to the fact that Sakura is a compulsive taker of pictures. She sees every aspect of life as a potential photo op – Shikamaru cannot count the amount of times they have simply been eating ice cream at the store, when she suddenly whips out her camera, crams them together at record speed, and takes a picture, just for kicks.
For the life of him, Neji cannot understand why Sakura is so hung up on it. Said impromptu pictures usually range from looking somewhat odd to downright freakish. He is usually squashed in the middle, looking pained at the sudden collision of Shikamaru and Sakura's heads against his own, while Shikamaru looks confused on his right, ice cream on his nose, and Sakura beams enthusiastically up at the camera on the other side of him. Somehow, she is the only one who manages to come out of these pictures looking good.
Sakura has countless picture albums in her closet – pages and pages are devoted to photographs of herself and Ino, ranging from early childhood to last week, making silly poses in the dressing room of a nearby store, trying on evening gowns far too expensive for either one of them to afford. There are several solely reserved for Naruto's antics, like that one time when he had lost a bet to Kiba, and had to go through one whole day wearing a garish pink and purple jumpsuit.
Neji and Shikamaru don't know that she has every single one of the pictures she's taken of the three of them together stored in a small, somewhat-worn looking dark blue album with golden embroidery. They are immortalized within these pictures, going on their first date, eating ice cream for the second, fourth, and twelfth times, Neji and Shikamaru wearing aprons and looking murderous, and even a snapshot of the destruction they had wreaked during their reenactment of the Great Shinobi War, among a multitude of others.
Sakura will never tell them the reason behind her complex, partly because she doesn't even like to admit to it herself. But if the three of them are separated from one another, for whatever reason, she will always have the memories stored within this little album, to be treasured forever.
-
fifteen: take a hint
Neji would rather be anywhere but here.
Here. Sitting around Sakura's mother's kitchen table with Shikamaru at one side of him, Sakura on the other, and Mrs. Haruno on the opposite side of the table.
"You know Neji and Shikamaru," Sakura says evenly, sounding very composed. The hours that she had spent in front of the mirror rehearsing this are showing. Now, she inhales, exhales, and slips one of her arms through Neji's and the other through Shikamaru's. "Recently, they've both become…very important…people in my life."
Mrs. Haruno gives them a blank look.
"Very, um, special," Sakura elaborates. "Special in many different ways. The three of us are, uh, extremely close."
Neji is sure that Mrs. Haruno is a very sweet elderly woman who had surely been an excellent mother to Sakura. That knowledge, however, is not enough to stop him from wanting to bang his head against the table when the usual look of oh-my-god-I-get-what-you're-talking-about-now does not slide across her face. Next to him, Shikamaru looks somewhat pained.
Sakura's nerves have had enough. "Mom!" she shrieks, grabbing Neji and Shikamaru's hands under the table and then pulling them up into her mother's range of vision. "Take a hint already!"
Mrs. Haruno smiles. "Oh, dear, why didn't you just say so? That's lovely. Such handsome boys."
Shikamaru sighs. Neji rubs his head, feeling a headache coming on. Sakura deflates visibly. "Oh, Mom…" Her voice is caught between exasperation and affection.
Later, as they are leaving the Haruno household, Shikamaru stretches. "That was easy," he says.
"Sure, positively easy. A party. With cake," Sakura grumbles good-naturedly.
"Laugh while you two still can," Neji tells them grimly. "My uncle's next."
Sakura and Shikamaru pale.
Neji smirks. "Why do you two look so scared? It'll be a party. With cake."
-
sixteen: on top
If there's a low point to being one of three very intense, intelligent people in one relationship, it's that heated debates do not usually bode well for any of the parties involved. If two of them are "debating" (or, what any sane person calls yelling, simply using intellectual vocabulary and logic interspersed with the usual insults), the third person (usually Neji) walks into the bedroom and locks the other two out until they agree to play nice again.
However, things get a bit more complex when all three are involved. Shikamaru may be the laziest individual this side of the Fire Country, but when roused, he is extremely stubborn, and usually refuses to back down until all other parties have seen the wisdom of his point of view. Neji is completely ruthless to the opposition, and takes joy in brutally slaying all of their points before pointing out his strategy for victory. Sakura just gets…intimidating, and frankly, scary.
There's a reason why they try to avoid debating about anything with the potential to get too heated. The three of them have been hailed as the brightest of their generation – so, naturally, when they turn on each other and fight to see who can come out on top, they end up losing sleep, staying up all night talking, consuming too much coffee, and one of them usually ends up breaking something before the entire process is over.
It's really a pity that, between them, a discussion about the merits of sweet and sour chicken versus teriyaki can get nasty. There was one memorable time when Sakura and Shikamaru teamed up against Neji, defending the merits of sweet and sour, and forced the repulsed Hyuuga to eat three whole pieces out of the bucket.
The neighbors had become thoroughly fed up with the chant of, "EAT IT!" halfway through Neji's second piece. A complaint to the awake and ever-irritable landlord ensues subsequently.
And then Neji, Sakura, and Shikamaru end up evicted.
Again.
So they're sitting on the sidewalk at ten-thirty at night, disconsolately clutching all their earthly possessions and the bucket of sweet and sour chicken, which Neji keeps shooting baleful glares at.
"Something tells me we have got to stop doing this," Sakura sighs, looking into the depths of the chicken bucket.
"Yeah, we've got no place to kiss, have sex, and make up now," adds Shikamaru, a gloomy expression on his face. In response to the withering stare Sakura gives him, he looks toward Neji helplessly. "Am I right?"
Silence.
Shikamaru elbows Neji in the ribs.
Neji turns away and looks as dignified as a man sitting on the sidewalk can look. "I am not speaking to you."
"But…why?"
"You two got us evicted. And you made me eat the stupid chicken."
"I knew it was about the chicken," Sakura says, throwing her hands up in the air.
"That aside…where are we going to go?" Neji asks the nearby light post, studiously avoiding looking at the other two.
Shikamaru considers. "We could always sleep in front of Hokage Tower," he tells the mailbox. "We'd be awoken by Tsunade's smiling face first thing in the morning, too."
The three of them take a moment to process this thought, and then shudder simultaneously.
"We'll live through it," Sakura assures at last, getting up and holding her hands out to Neji and Shikamaru, helping them up. "It's not like she didn't do worse in her day."
Neji snorts as they begin to make their way toward the tower. "I can't imagine anything worse than getting evicted out of three consecutive apartments. In less than one year."
Sakura takes a moment to consider this. "No, but she and Jiraiya had sex on her grandfather's desk while he was out to dinner once. Or…twice. Or three times. I can't remember."
Sakura walks another few paces before she realizes that she is alone. Neji and Shikamaru are where she left them, looking pale and considerably nauseous.
"Disgusting." Neji says with emotion.
"Nauseating." Shikamaru adds, shaking his head.
"Any more gems of wisdom?" Sakura asks humorously.
They shake their heads, before adding in unison. "…Ew."
Sakura laughs. "I have to say, this is the strangest end to any one of our debates. We're currently homeless, on the streets of Konoha at night, discussing our Hokage's sex life."
"Just a day in the glamorous life of the genii," Shikamaru says dryly, eating a piece of chicken.
"Don't forget the chicken."
"As if we could forget the chicken."
Neji glares.
-
seventeen: garden vista
The day after this memorable eviction, Tsunade does what she should have done quite a while ago. First, she yells at them for being idiots. ("Any sane shinobi should know that forced ingestion events should be done only at bars! Only! Sakura, after all our lessons, I'm especially disappointed in you!" Sakura hangs her head and has the courtesy to blush crimson.) Then, she kicks them out of her office.
Then, she opens a catalog kept in her drawer, and begins to search.
Now, nearly ten hours later after these events, Neji, Sakura, and Shikamaru have been blindfolded, gagged, and had their wrists locked behind their backs with a sealing jutsu, as an armed guard – including Genma, Kakashi, and Yamato, who are all trying hard not to snigger – escorts them through the empty streets of Konoha. Tsunade leads the odd-looking party, still lecturing the three of them about being more discreet.
After at least ten minutes of walking, Tsunade orders the party to come to a halt, single file.
Frankly, when the blindfold and gags are removed, Shikamaru rather expects to come face-to-face with an elaborate torture device intended to punish the three of them for being bad Konoha shinobi. What he doesn't expect to see is…
"A house?" Even Neji can't keep the incredulity out of his voice.
Sakura blinks to make sure she isn't hallucinating. Yes, it is indeed…a house. A small house, but large enough to comfortably accommodate three people. A house with a white picket fence and a pretty, well-kept garden.
Neji, Sakura, and Shikamaru blink.
Tsunade sighs. "It's made of solid concrete, so Sakura won't be able to punch through it unless she really, really wants to. The walls are relatively soundproof, so the neighbors won't be bothered by your eccentricities. Either way, they aren't even close enough to hear. The bathtub is big enough so that the three of you won't flood it. And it's already well furnished, so that I don't have to inflict the horrors of the three of you furniture shopping on any merchants in the Fire Country. There's a pretty garden to keep you three entertained so that instead of staging shinobi wars, you can water flowers. It's completely idiot-proof."
"I love you, shisou," Sakura declares emotionally. Neji and Shikamaru nod fervently in the background.
Tsunade waves her hand, looking somewhat mollified. "Yes, yes. Enjoy it, you three. Now just give me some peace."
With that, the Godaime Hokage lifts her hand, and the armed squad disappears with a word, as does she, leaving the stunned new homeowners in front of their new house.
"Think it really is soundproof?" Shikamaru voices at last, looking up at the house in wonder.
"Do you think she got an extra soft king size bed?" Neji wonders, tilting his head.
Sakura smirks mischievously. "I'm sure she wouldn't want us to wait to find out."
As she grabs their hands and pulls them up the steps to their new house, Sakura reminds herself to bake something delicious – preferably tiramisu soaked in sake - to thank Tsunade for being so amazing.
Tomorrow morning.
-
eighteen: disheveled; in the rain; thunder
They have been on their feet for seventeen hours straight, are operating on less than four hours of disturbed sleep, and with very little in terms of nutrition powering them. This is hardly an ideal situation even under the (comparative) best of circumstances, but, well, Sakura is trying to come up with reasons why things could have been worse.
So far, she's failing. The only pro to this situation is the sheer delightfulness of her company.
"I feel like I've just eaten a hallucinatory mushroom," groans Neji, his eyes bloodshot, as he staggers over and narrowly avoids tripping on a protruding tree root.
"This…is…so…freaking…troublesome…" Shikamaru manages as he presses on, head ducked against the onslaught of rain and wind.
"Shikamaru…if I die…I am passing the ownership of my side plot in the Hyuuga gardens to you."
"Why would I want a freaking garden, Hyuuga? The stupid mushrooms are what got us into this stupid situation in the first place."
Sakura blinks, and draws her arm wearily across her eyes; wiping away the flecks of rain and mud as yet another boom of thunder crashes above them. "I think we're all losing our sanity."
"This is a rather undignified way to go," sighs Neji.
"I hate our propensity for attracting freak storms," Shikamaru mutters darkly.
Sakura, ignoring the throbbing pain in every muscle from the knee down, as well as her neck and back, looks up to see a flash of lightning cutting through the dark sky. She stops dead. "Guys, we're walking toward the lightning's current path."
"The usual reserves of my intellect seem to have abandoned me, but instinct tells me that we shouldn't be doing that," Neji says dryly – or as dryly as a sopping wet shinobi can manage, anyway.
Shikamaru directs a longing look toward the base of a somewhat drier-looking-and-not-nearly-tall-enough-to-attract-lightning tree. "Maybe we should stop there and wait things out."
Sakura opens her mouth, and almost suggests that the most reasonable thing to do would be to start heading in the opposite direction – the way that they had just come from – in order to escape the lightning, and hopefully be reunited with the rest of their team. Then her muscles choose to remind her that they have been walking, running, and using chakra for far too long to be remotely healthy, and she exhales, her shoulders slumping and the rain making tracks down her face. "Hopefully that should work."
Without further argument, the trio settles themselves at the base of said tree, using the thick outer jacket of Neji's robes to shield themselves from the worst of the mud. They are still freezing and cold, now every muscle below Sakura's hips is hurting mercilessly, Neji still feels kind of like he is hallucinating this entire experience, and frankly, Shikamaru thinks that the situation has only decreased two irritation points.
Sakura closes her eyes and lets her head fall against Neji's shoulder, not really caring about mission propriety at this point, and Shikamaru follows her lead, leaning against her and closing his eyes, his breath escaping his body in a long, tired sigh.
Neji rests his head against the damp tree bark. "At least we're probably having more fun than everybody else," he murmurs, almost to himself, and half-asleep already.
"What was that, Neji?" Sakura yawns.
She doesn't get a response – his fatigue has already caught up with him, and he is snoring lightly, head tilted against the tree.
The rain is still pouring in torrents, the wind threatens to rip a few nearby branches off, and Sakura is fairly sure that she hasn't been in a worse state in several months. Maybe it's the hallucinations kicking in, she muses, as she tucks her head against Neji's shoulder again, feeling the warmth of Shikamaru's body against her side, but she feels much more secure than she ought to.
-
nineteen: bubbles; stay
Neji used to find solo missions (which he gets quite a lot of since he was appointed ANBU Captain) a welcome change from the various stresses involved in operating within the customary three-to-four-man cell. He liked working at his own pace, he liked not being held back by anything or anybody besides his own mind, and he liked the freedom that came with making decisions considering only his life, and not putting anybody else's in danger. There was a time when the Hokage assigned him more A- and S-ranked solo missions than any Konoha shinobi save Hatake Kakashi.
As time goes on, however, to his horror, he finds his usual zest and joy for receiving potentially life-threatening, high-stress solo missions, is decreasing. An attribute that he lays sole responsibility for on the shoulders of Shikamaru and Sakura. Damn them – after all, they are the reasons why, upon receiving the mission summons, he doesn't look around discreetly before punching the air in triumph. Instead, he folds the piece of paper and slips it carefully into one of his many pockets, daring to sigh quietly.
He tells them about it after they are finished with dinner. "A month long, recon and subsequent assassination in Mist," he states matter-of-factly, feeding a small piece of fruit to their parakeet, who gobbles it up eagerly. "I leave the day after tomorrow."
"You're going to make the bird get fat," Shikamaru replies, collapsing onto the sofa. "And these solo missions you keep getting assigned to are so damned troublesome."
Sakura emerges from the kitchen, drying her hands on a odd-looking purple dishtowel. "For once, I agree with Pineapple Head's sentiments," she says, tempering her words with an affectionate look toward said Pineapple Head, before tilting her head and giving Neji a critical look. "I'm afraid you're going to overwork yourself one of these days."
Neji joins the other two on the sofa, where Shikamaru rests his head on his shoulder and Sakura takes his hand. He takes a moment to enjoy their presence, before exhaling, his breath ruffling Sakura's hair. "I can hardly walk up to the Godaime and refuse this mission purely on the reasoning that I would rather not be separated for so long from the ones that I love."
"True," Shikamaru muses. "Maybe Sakura could break some bones for you?"
Sakura can't help but laugh as she looks at the both of them. "Tsunade would eat all three of us alive."
So that plan is scrapped, and the night before Neji's month-long departure, they indulge in their customary ritual for whenever one of them has whatever reason to leave. Thankfully, this new house has a bathtub large and circular enough to accommodate all three of them – the previous one had been dreadfully lacking, and the three genii had been promptly evicted after they accidentally flooded said bathroom, causing roof leaks for the unfortunate residents of the bottom floors.
Neji closes his eyes and inhales deeply, the soothing scent of lavender oil pervading the steam rising from the hot water. "Shikamaru, you have most excellent taste in the selection of bubble bath," he murmurs.
Shikamaru leans back against him and wiggles his toes experimentally, seeing how many bubbles he can pop with each individual toe movement. "What can I say? It's a gift."
Sakura pauses in the addition of more bubble bath to give them a disdainful glance, and mutter something that sounds suspiciously like, "Men."
A comfortable silence falls over them, until finally, Neji breaks it by sighing. "It almost saddens me to think that this is the last moment of relaxation that I am going to experience until this time next month."
Sakura paddles over and settles herself against his chest, closing her eyes sadly, so that Shikamaru can see the miniscule bubbles clinging to her eyelashes. "I wish you could stay," she voices at last.
Shikamaru sighs, doing his best to wrap a comforting arm around Neji and Sakura's shoulders, despite the slippery water. "You speak for all of us."
-
twenty: take it in your stride; walk
They find peace walking through the streets of Konoha at night – it has become somewhat of a tradition for them. Sakura has to admit that she loves the people of her village dearly, and the distinct majority of them have been extremely supportive of her slightly unconventional relationship with Neji and Shikamaru. The three genii still receive their due share of staring when they walk down a street together, though, and while Sakura doesn't mind that as much, it makes Neji jumpy and paranoid, and Shikamaru finds parting the crowds of people who mysteriously surround them, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of Konoha's only trio, extremely troublesome.
They never run into any problems of that sort at nighttime. The streets are deserted, the breeze is cool, and the silver light of the moon shines gently down on them as they make their way wherever they want to go, free to hold hands without the scrutiny of random strangers.
They usually end up lingering in one of the various meadows near the genin teams' training areas. Tonight they are in Team Gai's usual haunting grounds, which Shikamaru has always privately considered the most scenic of the lot. There is a small, grassy hill nearby, and it is a simple matter for them to scale the elevation and lie in a triangle, heads almost touching, hair mingling in the center in a cloud of pink, dark brown, and black.
After a while of lying in peaceful silence, Sakura reaches out and twines her delicate fingers in Neji and Shikamaru's. Their hands are cool to the touch, and she sends a soft blanket of heated chakra to each one. "Better?" she asks.
Neji's eyes drift closed as he looks up at the moonlit sky. "Always."
"Couldn't ask for more," Shikamaru adds.
Sakura smiles, because they aren't talking about cold hands anymore, and they all know it.
¤
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