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Her voice is a low rasp, wrought thin and haggard from endless fighting. She's tired. She's more than tired. She can barely stand. But she does.
Somehow, they've won.
It was difficult to tell at first. There had been nothing ahead of them, and nothing behind. Desolation in every corner. The world had felt hollow, and quiet. A whistle would make them twitch. But they lived. The Rabbit Goddess was gone. Madara was gone. Obito was gone. It was - over.
He looks at her face, exhaustion writ in every fiber of her being. Still, there's something like a smile there.
"Hey Shika," she says.
"Yeah?"
"Can you believe I've never slow danced?"
What a question for the end of the world. He leans his head back and looks to the sky. There's no Sharingan moon, not anymore. There's an eternal night slipping slowly into morning. It's cold out. He shivers.
"Really?"
It makes sense. There had been no one to slow dance with her. There had been no real reason to slow dance either. Even before the war, or whispers of it, there was training. Constant training. Getting better, faster, stronger. To bring that idiot boy of hers home. To help those who needed it. To protect. Where would she have found the time to dance between her training regimen and her shifts at the hospital? Where would she have found a dancing partner?
"I swear!"
Her lips are chapped, cracked with fresh blood. The strain of her smile makes her mouth the barest bit bloody.
Shikamaru had watched his parents dance, as a boy. Had watched his father take his mother's hand and draw her close, watched the two of them rock back and forth to old records. That was one part of marriage he never thought was troublesome. Dancing seemed easy. Just - being next to someone you wanted to be next to for a little while. That's all it was.
When he was still small enough, his mother would whisk him into her arms and she would sway them side to side. HIs father would ask, "May I cut in?" and he'd wrap his arms around Yoshino, with Shikamaru between them, and the three of them would move to the slow, soft music.
Shikaku is dead, now. Shikamaru doesn't know where his mother is. She's the de facto head of the Nara family until the village regroups. It's one of the reasons the matriarchs of the clans were evacuated with the civilians. He knows that somewhere along the way, many of them had to fight anyway. The Zetsus had found the shelters, had started raiding them.
The clan matriarchs wouldn't be so easily cowed. While they may not have had the exact same jutsu, there was still an Ino-Shika-Cho to be found there, or something like it.
Shikamaru hasn't ever really been big on praying. He hadn't even started when Asuma died. He had been in too much shock to start when his father was taken from him, too.
In the seconds between Sakura's breaths, Shikamaru reaches out to whatever god Naruto and Sasuke haven't tried to murder and prays for his mother's life.
"I -," Sakura says. She sounds shy, suddenly. More like the girl who followed Ino around in their childhood, and less like the woman who just punched a diety in the face. "I kinda want to actually."
Shikamaru turns to look at her, takes in the way she looks. There's blood and grime in her hair, but the worst of her injuries were healed by that miraculous seal of hers. Other than the smell of smoke and ozone and the mess in her hair and on her face, she looks like she looks any other day.
"Let's do something about it, then."
He's careful, so careful when he takes her into his arms. She's immeasurably strong, probably strong enough to kill the heavens in her own right, but she is still something to be handled with care. She steps into him, and her forehead buts gently against his chin.
Shikamaru whistles, and the sound is low and melancholy.
He leads, and she follows. Their movements are a little jerky at first, but as he whistles, she gets the tempo and adjusts.
The sound of his song and their feet dragging along the cold hard earth is the only noise in this hollow place. He can hear her breathing, in and out, shallowly. There's a minuscule change, a hiccup and then she's a little higher, wrapping her arms around his neck, cradling his head close to her. Shikamaru whistles his song in her ear, and tries to feel her heart beat through their flak jackets.
She holds him like she's going to let go soon, too tight and somehow hesitant all at once. He thinks of his mother, and his father dancing barefoot around the kitchen. He presses his lips against Sakura's cheek as she slides back down, still holding on. Somehow, having their first dance on a battlefield seems fitting for the two of them.
He can feel her palms on his shoulders, heavy and cold. Her whole body is cold. He doesn't know how to fix it. He holds her, he whistles in her ear and he hopes that it's enough.
Shikamaru's never loved anyone the way Sakura loved Sasuke and Naruto. He wonders where the two of them are, and whether or not they were worth it. He's got his own ideas about Sasuke and his revolution. He's got plenty of thoughts on Naruto and his too forgiving nature. If either of those two idiots survive their final spar, he's going to dress down the both of them. They needed sense knocked back into them. And Sakura deserved a break.
Once this was all over, she didn't have to chase after either of them anymore. She didn't have anything to prove. She had stood beside them as an equal, had beaten back the end of the world with her own two hands. That was enough. He wanted to lay her down and let her rest. She earned it.
Sakura breathes, and Shikamaru knows this time is up.
He can't help but feel he's wasted it. But she asked something of him, and he delivered. He hopes it will be enough.
She is limp in his arms, barely able to hold her head up. Her eyelids are shut, but her breathing is still there. Shallow. So, very shallow. Featherlight against his cheek. She's cold, and getting colder by the minute.
The pale white bone in her side has begun to slowly crack the skin around it. There is little of Kaguya left in this world, and little of her chakra still to fuel it. Sakura's Byakugō had fought it much longer than others might have been able to. All of her chakra had been centered around combatting the All-Killing Ash Bone. She had only succeeded because the jutsu was in a world without a master.
But Sakura was moments away from being out of chakra, and the ash bone was still in her body.
Shikamaru is a Nara. They taught the first populations of Konoha the art of medicine, how to bind wounds and heal them. He has some level of expertise. But there had never been anything like Kaguya, and there had never been anything like this technique. Even from where the ash bone barely presses out of Sakura's stomach, he can feel its dense, dark energy desperate to suck up his life, too.
He can't save her by taking it out. Even if he did, there would be no one around to close her wound once he died.
The silence becomes loud when he realizes he's stopped whistling.
He's careful, so very careful as he brings them both down to their knees. He lays her on her stomach, so the bone can't dig further into her body. He presses his hand to her cheek, and leaves his other hand wrapped around hers. She is cold now, but she will know some warmth as she dies.
Shikamaru tries to think of words to say for the dead, but finds that nothing comes out of his mouth when he opens it. There is a wracking sob, and tears, tears again running down his face. He doesn't know what he will say to her parents, if they survived this. What he will say to the rest of her team, the remaining Konoha Eleven, or to Tsunade and Shizune, if they survived as well.
He hardly wants to say it out loud himself.
Sakura's blood pools lazily onto the ground beneath her as the bone eats at her chakra. From her side, slowly, her skin begins to harden and crack, bleeding until it turns to stone. She will be nothing but ash in his hands.
He reaches takes his hand off her head, and wipes at the blood on her cold cracked lips, trying to make her lovely for the shinigami. He moves her bangs out of her eyes, just barely brushing his thumb over her Byakugō. He doesn't know how to say goodbye. He doesn't think he will. He'll gather her body and return it to the others, so that if she does have any living relatives, they can claim her and bury their dead. If no one is left, he'll do it himself. Sakura had always liked the Nara forests; he could bury her in one of the meadows, far away from Hidan, on the expansive grounds his clan commanded. She would like that, he's sure.
He rubs a little at her seal, where he's smeared blood onto it, trying to remove the sudden stain he's made. The purple seal turns blue, and begins to bulge out from her forehead. Shikamaru balks, and leans back, unprepared for a fight but knowing he won't let the last dredges of Kaguya's evil mar the moment Sakura finally leaves for the Pure Land.
The blue bulge pushes, strains against Sakura's skin until finally, it comes off her face in a pop and lands on the ground between he and Sakura. The thing wriggles, blue and white, and no larger than Shikamaru's thumb; it's Katsuyu.
"Shikamaru-san, thank goodness," the slug gushes.
His jaw drops. He hadn't known that this was a part of the Byakugō. Some kind of failsafe, some kind of last ditch effort to protect the lives of those who were contracted with Katsuyu and Shikkotsu Forest. His mind pushes forward, wondering how it works, and why, and what he did and -
"There's no time," Katsuyu says in a little voice. "I can't heal her own my own. I need your help."
The slug moves faster than anything the size of a finger ought to be able to, but it rests on the deteriorating skin at Sakura's lower back. Shikamaru raises his hands without thinking, leaves his fingers on Katsuyu's small body, and gives every last shred of chakra in his system to the summons.
He'll discover later that Katsuyu is the base of the Byakugō, sealed in this form onto the user's forehead, and is the site themselves for the accumulated stored chakra. That the chakra therefore stored was of two sources; the user, and of Katsuyu. He'll learn that when the user of the Byakugō reaches their last moments, the slug will remove themselves from the seal in a final attempt to save their life.
For now, Katsuyu gets larger, fatter as they absorb his chakra until they are the size of Shikamaru's hand. They manipulate his chakra in their system and feed it back into Sakura, not healing her per se, but weakening this last vestige of Kaguya's might until it is nothing.
It takes everything left in Shikamaru. He stays awake, keeps his vigil over her out of sheer stubbornness. They leave her on her stomach, he and Katsuyu, careful not to agitate the ruined skin and organs that the ash bone had pierced. The most his chakra could do was destroy the ash bone; he doesn't have enough to finish the healing.
Though their chakra signatures are weak, Shikamaru is still a Nara and Sakura is still the Godaime's apprentice. It doesn't take much longer for a clever sensor to find them. And then the search party does come, it's not a sensor that finds them at all. It's actually one of Kakashi's ninken.
Chouji is there, with a hand on his shoulder, gently tugging him back so Ino can get to work repairing what the palm sized Katsuyu could not.
They don't separate them on their way back to base camp. Even when Sakura has to undergo reconstructive organ therapy, he's allowed to sit just outside her tent. He can't stand to be too far away from her. Ino tells him that it's a byproduct of him pouring all of his chakra, of scraping up the last of his reserves and giving it to Sakura through Katsuyu. He was physically a part of her now; his life was coursing through her body. It had made sure she survived.
There would be time for jokes about legendary soul bonds and pulpy romance novels once the rebuilding was done. For now, Ino throws her arms around his neck and thanks him for saving Sakura's life in the same breath she curses him for nearly losing his own.
Even though he can't stand to be away from her for too long, he can peel himself away from her side when his mother is found. Shikamaru throws himself into Yoshino's arms and he cries again. His mother, his mother who survived the Third War and was an ANBU assassin before marrying his father, who protected the civilians of Konoha in underground trenches filled with shadow; his mother holds him tight enough to bruise.
She sits with him at Sakura's bedside, rolls her eyes at him when he tells her how he saved her life.
"She's got shadow blood now," Yoshino says, waving a critical eye over Sakura's prone form. She's stable, but sleeping. She's been that way for days. She's the only person to survive an All-Killing Ash Bone. No one knows what to expect when she does wake up. If she ever does wake up.
Yoshino puts a hand on Shikamaru's shoulder and squeezes lightly.
"You'll have to teach her how to use it, when the time comes."
They get more visitors as the base camp regroups, collects bodies and identifies survivors. The process of planning the rebuilding goes by slowly, but it gives families enough time to reunite. Sakura's mother did not survive the war, but Haruno Kizashi thumps Shikamaru hard on the back when he's told how his daughter survived the impossible.
Yoshino sees his uselessness and takes on the mantle of the Nara clan head seamlessly. She's one of the highest ranking former ANBU still alive, so she's put in charge of Jounin Command under the Rokudaime, Hatake Kakashi. All the titles seem silly to Shikamaru, considering the lack of a hidden village to back them up.
But there are countless civilians and shinobi moving rubble and gathering water. Konohagakure will survive, because it is more than the titles she gives to those who live there.
He stays by her side for weeks through her healing. He's there when Shizune checks on her, and when Ino does. He's there when the rest of their graduating year comes to visit, bringing news of Naruto's survival and Sasuke's four hundredth change of heart. Something about Sakura nearly dying in the wilderness with only one witness had jarred the both of them out of their obsessions with the other. Shikamaru thought it was about damn time.
She had been there with them, Team Seven, threatening to tear apart a vengeful goddess. If they fought like that together, they should have died together. Neither of them had even realized it when Sakura hadn't followed them towards their final fight. Maybe they were expecting her to patch them up like she always did.
He stares them down when they come to visit, Naruto looking grief stricken and Sasuke with his tenketsu blocked and weaponless, looking contrite. They don't flinch under his gaze, but they are uncomfortable; they know what he did for her while they were too busy trying to die with each other. The two of them both think, in their own way, "It should have been me instead of Shikamaru". They're both wrong.
Shikamaru stays by her side. And when she blinks her eyes open and looks at him after a month of uninterrupted rest, her voice is just as raspy as it was that day he gave every part of himself he had to give to make sure that she saw dawn.
"What's that song, Shika?" she asked, fingers twitching for his. "Sing me that song. Our song."
He presses their palms together, and tenderly presses his lips to the back of her hand.
Shikamaru whistles, and the sound is reedy. High. Hopeful.