Work Text:
“Have you ever wanted children?”
Sakura dropped the thermometer she’d been holding, catching it with her other hand and promptly shoving it inside her boyfriend’s mouth. “What the hell!? You can’t just- I’m in the middle of giving you a physical! Do you have no sense of romance at all!?”
“It’s been on my mind.” Shikamaru used his tongue to flick the glass tube over to the other side of his mouth, away from the raw skin where he was still healing from getting too close to an enemy katon. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Well maybe you should have asked me at a more appropriate time!”
“Troublesome. Now’s as good a time as any, right?”
Fingers clenching, Sakura reached for whatever was closest just to have something to occupy her hands with. The clipboard gave a creak of protest at the tightness of her grip. “Why’ve you got kids on the mind, of all things?”
“My elders have been badgering me about it,” Shikamaru told her.
“Oh…”
“You look like that wasn’t the answer you wanted.” He leaned in a little closer to peer up under the bangs she had left hanging in front of her face today.
She didn’t answer him at first. This was a place of work, after all, and she did take her job quite seriously. Just because checkups weren’t quite as high energy and didn’t require as much of her chakra as surgery or fieldwork didn’t mean it wasn’t important. Both of them remained silent as she slowly recorded the thermometer’s results and made a few other notations in her chart.
“Most people”-she blurted finally-“talk about kids because they want them. Family and love and the future, that kind of stuff.” She stopped when Shikamaru reached out to grab one of her hands but refused to look up until he huffed and chucked her under the chin with his unoccupied fingers.
“I never said I wasn’t also thinking about all that,” he murmured.
This time when she peeked he was wearing a smile that made her flush, feeling a bit silly.
“Well you could have led with it,” she said. He chuckled, pulling the clipboard away from her and dragging her in close.
“Quit stalling, woman. I don’t want to give anyone else any answers until I talk to you about this. We’re not...I know I haven’t given you a ring or anything yet but we both know this is it. You’re it for me. I don’t want anyone else. Whether or not we have kids doesn’t matter as much to me as keeping you does. So if you don’t want them then I don’t want you to feel guilty or something.” He scrubbed at the back of his head, clearly feeling awkward yet forging onwards anyway. It was just cute enough that Sakura couldn’t help leaning in to press a soft kiss against his cheek.
“You’re it for me too,” she whispered.
Red creeping in to his cheeks, Shikamaru grinned. “Yeah?”
“I don’t need a ring to make me stay. And I don’t need some fancy ceremony to love you forever, I would do that regardless. Whether we get married or not really only matters to your elders.”
“Bunch of tiresome old windbags,” he grumbled.
Sakura took a deep breath and looked down at her feet for a moment, gathering her courage. Then she looked up again and hoped that her face looked as confident as she was trying to make her voice sound. “So kids, huh?”
“There never seemed to be a good time to bring it up.” Shikamaru gave an apologetic shrug.
“We do get interrupted a lot. Even at home. I suppose here where patient privacy is all but revered would be your safest bet. Still, you could use a little more tact!” Her hands found their way to her hips almost by muscle memory, bottom lip pushing out in an irritated pout if only to hide the smile that tried to take over her face. Her partner rolled his eyes.
“Geez,” was all he said, fingers drumming against the pocket where she knew he kept his cigarettes, a nasty habit that showed up again and again in times of stress.
Before she gave any sort of answer Sakura needed to ask an important question of her own. Right from the start of their relationship the two of them had clicked together like matryoshka dolls, crafted just for each other, a perfect fit, but there were still things they’d never bothered to talk about after all these years. Just because they agreed on lots of things didn’t mean they were guaranteed to keep that record for every new subject that came up.
“Do...you even want children?” she asked him. “You’re always happy to babysit little Mirai but I could never tell if you do like kids or if it was just...she looks so much like Asuma-sensei…” Bringing up his old teacher felt like a low blow; she just couldn’t think of any better way to bring up her point. Thankfully he looked far from offended.
“I don’t think I’d mind having some of my own.”
“Okay but not minding and actually wanting them are two different things,” Sakura pointed out.
“True.”
Shikamaru took her hands in his own again and the smile he gave her was the same one he had worn the day he asked her out for their very first date, a quiet happiness one might almost call shy if a man so laid back could ever be shy about anything. Just seeing that particular curl of his lips made Sakura realize that she already knew the answer he was about to give. Or rather, she knew the gist of it. Nothing could have prepared her for the actual words he murmured softly in to the space between them.
“I think about it sometimes, you know? A little girl with my hair or maybe a boy with your eyes. Watching you teach this new life how to walk and how to talk and not to touch the stove when it’s hot. How good it would be to...to come home from a long mission and then both of you would smile at me and the whole world would be okay again.” He met her gaze and let her see that his eyes were just as misty as her own. “So yeah. Yeah I’d like kids. I want your kids, a family with you, a little you to dote on and a little me that I could teach the Shadow Style to. I just didn’t know how to ask in case you didn’t want any, you know? Because how do I say that you’re enough? Yeah I want kids but I want you more, I want you to be happy.”
“All that? All that would make me very happy,” Sakura whispered.
“Yeah?”
Pressing her face in to the crook of his neck, Sakura nodded, her voice a little choked when she replied. “Yeah.”
“I was never sure. You love your job so much; sometimes when I thought about bringing it up I didn’t because I wasn’t sure you would ever want to give all this up.”
“Having kids doesn’t mean I have to give up working any of my jobs.”
Shikamaru huffed out a laugh. “You and I both know that every nurse in this hospital would go in to spasms of overprotectiveness the second they realized you were pregnant. They won’t let you take so much as a step inside the building unless it’s for a check up and you wouldn’t see a single sheet of paperwork until at least a couple months after the birth - let alone missions!!”
Picturing it, she realized that he was right. Sakura did her best to suppress the shudder of horror as she came to terms with just how utterly bored she was likely to be for several months of her pregnancy. Still, a little boredom for a few months was such a small inconvenience when the reward was a lifetime of raising and loving and supporting a little piece of both herself and the man she adored. Almost anything would be worth that.
“Tell you what,” she said, shifting her weight to a more confident stance. “I’ll make you a deal. You help me hide the pregnancy from all these nosey nurses for as long as possible and I’ll let you name the first one.”
“Shikadai - if it’s a boy.” His entire face flushed when she blinked at him with surprise.
“You’ve been giving this quite a bit of thought, huh?”
“Just a little.” Under his breath he muttered something about troublesome women who sussed out all of his secrets with nothing but a smile. “You, er, you said the ‘first’. Does that mean you wouldn’t mind more than one?”
A cherry flush rose up on her own cheeks to match his. “I don’t exactly want a whole classroom to myself but yeah. More than one sounds...it sounds good. Listening to children play together in another room, a whole big family sitting around the dinner table, that sounds like a good life.”’
“Life with you will always be good,” Shikamaru assured her.
“Smooth talker,” she accused him.
He didn’t bother to refute the claim. Pulling her down for a kiss was easier, a much more pleasant distraction. Sakura easily allowed herself to sink in to the affection for a few moments before she pulled away suddenly with a gasp.
“I am supposed to be giving you a physical, mister! Ooh you are a sneaky genius!” Her eyes narrowed, watching her partner look away with a nervous chuckle. “Seemed as good a time as any my left buttuck! You were trying to distract me to get out of having your checkup, weren’t you?”
“We did need to talk about it,” Shikamaru pointed out.
“Hmph!”
One hand snapped out to grab the clipboard he had taken away from her while the other dug in to the pocket of her hospital coat for a pen, glaring to cover the way she still wanted to smile. What a ridiculous man. His eyes grew wide when she reached for the thermometer again as if wondering where she was going to put it this time and it was hard not to laugh at such an expression.
Doing her best to keep a level, authoritative tone, Sakura cleared her throat and said, “I’m going to need you to lie down on the bed.”
“Ah crap. Don’t take anything off, alright? At least not until we actually make some kids!”
That was too much. Sakura nearly dropped her pen with the force of the laughter that burst out of her, growing only louder when Shikamaru shouted over the noise to demand whether she was being serious or not. For perhaps the millionth time she was reminded of just how grateful she was for the places life had led her. She wondered, briefly, how it was that she got so lucky. To be blessed with such an amazing partner in her life, to know they both couldn’t wait to create new life together, to set both feet on the path to their future and know that he would always be walking beside her no matter what came next.
She couldn’t wait to hear the patter of little feet following after them.