A/N: Please note that this is a repost of an old story for archival purposes.
*sigh* This is the one I am the least willing to resurrect, but since the whole point of this exercise is to provide a record of my writerly past, it is the most important.
Listen well, young writers. This, AHM, is a deadfic. It died an ignominious death. But if this fic had never lived or died, I would never have moved on to bigger and better things. The shame of this story's abandonment hammered into my head the importance of a work ethic. It drove me to complete a 21-chapter story which, four years after I had abandoned AHM, gained over 1,000 followers and became a top story in its fandom.
Failing to complete a story isn't failure as an as a writer; it's learning. Build on that and go forward.
Warning for gore and violence. Diverges after manga chapter 345, apparently. Predates a lot of the stuff in the manga/anime, so the fates of Sasuke and Itachi are a bit different.
Originally published: 08-11-07, Updated: 09-20-07
A Healer's Mission
1: Prologue
-o-o-
She was almost too late.
The valley they had fought in was once a forest. Now it was a smoking crater. Both were exhausted—bloody, trembling, sweaty. But Sasuke stood, and Naruto was on his knees.
She drove chakra into her legs, forcing the muscles beyond endurance. Ash scattered as she blurred through charred and broken forest.
Sasuke picked up his katana. Naruto glared up at him, too exhausted to even form a seal.
Please, let me make it, she begged silently.
The sword rose. Sasuke's arms shook with effort.
Please… She cleared the last tree. Her heart stopped at what she saw.
Naruto flung his head up and looked Sasuke square in the eye, though she could see him trembling all over. The Uchiha's face was crystalline, expressionless. The blade whistled down.
A medic nin must be calm.
"Naruto!" her voice screamed, knowing it wouldn't stop the blade.
A medic nin must be strong.
She felt tears streaming back across her face, stolen by the wind as she flung herself toward them.
A medic nin must never, ever be injured in battle.
Steel met flesh.
It is the most important rule.
Blood, warm and scarlet, darkened the ashen ground.
For if the healer died, who would heal?
She met his cold red gaze, watching it fade to obsidian, seeing what might have been shock tauten his serene features. Her fingers curled around cool metal; the razor edge sliced her palm. Blood, warm and scarlet, trickled down to join the darker stain spreading from her stomach.
It was the first time in years that she had seen him up close.
Strange, her mind thought hazily.
He's still beautiful.
Sakura smiled.
-o-o-
2: Fight
"Sa—Sakura-chan?" She turned her head to look down into bright blue eyes. Naruto looked frightened, bewildered.
"Stupid," she cuffed him lightly on the head. "You're not allowed to die yet."
The slight movement shot pain through her waist and knifing up her spine. Her nerves finally caught up with what her eyes were seeing—namely, the sword skewering her torso— and seared her vision into sharp white. With a moan, she crumpled.
The sword, still clenched in Sasuke's hands, tore into her viciously as her weight dragged at it, adding new adjectives of agony to the sickening message her body drove into her senses. A scream caught in her throat and was strangled as she found it suddenly impossible to breathe. Sakura plucked at the steel helplessly with one hand; she felt nauseated.
"Sasuke!" A sharp rebuke, edged with raw pain—Naruto.
Sasuke blinked and dropped the sword like it had burned him; Sakura fell. Someone caught her clumsily just before she hit the ground. She closed her eyes, feeling the warmth pool around her torso. Pain faded into something grey and fuzzy and not entirely unpleasant. Mmm…
"Sakura-chan? Sakura-chan?" Naruto's panicked voice brought her back, and with awareness came agony. Her hand tightened convulsively on the katana; she felt blood running from her fist. The fresh pain of the cut brought her fully awake. She could sense Naruto hovering over her, his fear a tangible presence.
"Naruto," she gasped, not opening her eyes. "Take it out."
"But you'll bleed to—"
"Do it!" She took a deep, slow breath, trying not to move. "I think I can… I can heal myself. But I need you to do this first, okay?" She kept her voice calm, hoping to soothe the blond, though she knew what she was about to try was next to impossible. She had no regenerative jutsu like Tsunade's; she would have to repair the damage manually, and that required concentration and chakra, lots of it. She had wasted a lot of hers getting here.
Not wasted, she reminded herself. I got here in time.
Sakura bit back a scream as the steel slid from her body. She even managed to smile when Naruto grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight.
It was the wrong thing to do.
Naruto's grip redoubled, and his voice cracked. "Sakura-chan…"
She pulled her hands from his and, using chakra to quell the numbing grip of shock, shakily formed the familiar hand seals. As the warm, healing chakra covered her hands, she lowered them and pressed them against her stomach.
So much damage…Sakura forced herself to concentrate. Rebuild the organs…purge the blood…knit the muscles and tissues back in perfect order…hiss at how close it had come to the spine, then move on to reconnect the severed tendons...
As long as she blocked the pain, as long as she kept her eyes shut, she could pretend it was someone else's life she fought for. She had done it countless times, sometimes for strangers, but more often for friends. Those were the times that worry chewed at her gut, wondering when the damage would be too great—wondering how much she could save, this time.
It wasn't enough. She could feel her chakra waning long before she could afford it to. The long run and the wound itself had weakened her. Tremors ran down her arms as she reached the limits of her stamina. Then two callused palms settled over her hands, and a surge of bright, warm chakra flowed into them. Her eyes flew open to search Naruto's serious face.
"It helped Obaa-chan bring Gaara back," he said simply. "Let me help you, too."
She nodded without a word and closed her eyes again.
It was an eternity—hours? Minutes?—before her professional mind was satisfied. The injury was not entirely healed, but it was no longer fatal or crippling. The patient would make it. Sakura sighed and opened her eyes. She would make it.
She pushed Naruto's hands away, cancelling the healing jutsu. He studied her expression. "You did it?"
Sakura smiled reassuringly. "I'll live."
He heaved a sigh and sat back. "Don't do that, Sakura-chan," he complained wearily. "I'm not worth dying for."
"I'll be the judge of that," she replied archly. "I couldn't have done it without your chakra," she added in a softer tone. "Thank you, Naruto."
"No problem, Sakura-chan…" he mumbled, beginning to droop. "I…owed you..." He slumped forward over her and lay still.
"Naruto?!" Sakura jerked upright with a chill of fear, ignoring the ache in her freshly healed side and the dizzying headache from chakra overuse. Stupid, she cursed herself. Of course he was injured! Her hands fluttered over his limp form, looking for a wound that was potentially deadly.
"Chakra exhaustion," a voice stated as she turned him over and found, to her immense relief, that he was still breathing. She started as she recognized the voice.
"Sasuke-kun," she said simply, without agression or affection.
"He had completely drained his chakra reserves," Sasuke continued in a neutral voice, sounding almost bored. "He shouldn't have been able to give you anything without killing himself."
She smiled down at the unconscious shinobi fondly. "He is Konoha's most surprising ninja." She glanced over Naruto's injuries with a critical eye. None of them were life-threatening. It was a good thing, because Sakura didn't have the strength to heal a paper cut at the moment.
Her eyes flitted again to Sasuke, crouched comfortably a dozen feet away. He seemed better off than Naruto, if only just. He had not retrieved his katana; it lay in the dirt out of reach, where Naruto had thrown it. It looked like Sasuke hadn't moved since he'd dropped the sword. Maybe he hadn't.
"Why?" Sakura voiced her thoughts.
The Uchiha blinked and stared at her.
"Why are you still here?" she elaborated.
Sasuke stared for a moment longer, then looked away. Sakura sighed in quiet frustration. Stupid uncommunicative Uchihas "Are you going back with us?"
"No." He gazed off somewhere beyond the ruined trees, where the sun burned the horizon.
"Do you want to kill us?"
The eyes snapped back.
"…No."
"Then what do you want?" But the Uchiha turned away and refused to respond.
Giving up on him, Sakura struggled to roll the unconscious blond into a more comfortable position. She was dead tired herself, but wary of falling asleep. As much as she wanted to trust her former teammate, as a shinobi she knew it would be inexcusably stupid. No matter what he said.
Sakura hissed quietly as she saw the dark, angry burns on Naruto's side.
Chidori
She opened the pouch at her belt and took out the burn salve Hinata had given her. 'Just in case', the Hyuuga had said softly, pressing it into her hands with a shy smile. Sakura was grateful for it now. She gently applied it to the worst of the burn. She frowned at the wound beneath them. It was deep and jagged; without help from the kyuubi's power or a medical jutsu, the scarring would be thick and painful and probably hinder Naruto's agility. She made a mental not to heal it more effectively later.
"Itachi is dead."
Sakura paused, then resumed her ministrations. "You killed him."
"Tch." Sasuke sounded disgusted. "He was nearly blind from the mangekyou. It was pathetic."
Unsure how to respond to that, Sakura put away the salve and picked up a roll of bandages. For a long while, silence settled over them. Any bird or insect that might have sung had long ago fled the destruction. A breeze swirled ash in cloudy eddies over the singed grass.
Naruto's deep, harsh breathing sawed at the silence. Sakura felt his cracked ribs and reassured herself that none of them had caused internal damage. She bound up the slash on his arm, trimming the end of the bandage with a kunai. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that a kunai had also found its way into Sasuke's hand. He held it idly, occasionally scratching its tip into the dirt at his feet, but she knew it was a safeguard.
Against her.
Her lip twitched.
In addition to the more serious injuries, Naruto had managed to collect more cuts, bumps and scrapes than the old practice dummies at the academy. She spent some time going through them and wrapping the deeper gashes. None posed a threat individually; collectively, the cuts threatened to drain more blood to than he could afford to lose. Which certainly wouldn't help him recover his chakra. She massaged her temple absently, wishing she'd brought her soldier pills.
"You can sleep," Sasuke said suddenly.
Sakura looked up, surprised. In the gathering dark his face was little more than a pale blur; she could make out none of his expression.
Not that it would have made much of a difference.
"Sleep," he said again, not unkindly. "I won't kill you."
"That's comforting," Sakura retorted wryly, resisting the urge to remind Sasuke of exactly who was better at keeping his word. "But you're not the only missing-nin after our necks." There was always the Akatsuki. Not to mention that Tsunade would probably be after them next… Sakura cringed and shied away from that thought.
It wouldn't be the first time she'd pulled an all-night shift. The first time…
Her smile turned wistful despite herself.
"Do you remember that first Chuunin exam?" she voiced her thoughts, not really expecting an answer, just filling the silence. "That was the first time I really had to keep watch all night. It was just after Orichimaru…" she broke off and shrugged, cutting off another strip of gauze with her kunai and tucking it under securely. Everything had changed with the Sannin's appearance. It had been the death of Team Seven, even if they hadn't realized it at the time.
"You're a medic nin."
She stopped to stare at him. She wasn't sure what threw her more—the fact that Sasuke was actually trying to make conversation, or the question itself. It had become such a part of her; she could barely imagine herself as anything else. Sakura set Naruto's arm down gently. "That's right—you wouldn't know."
"Should I have?" Cold, disinterested, laced with arrogance, as if trying to make up for a moment before.
She didn't deign to answer.
Sakura put her medical supplies away. It was getting to dark to see, and she was running out of bandages, anyway. The kunoichi dragged her legs into a sitting position that wasn't too uncomfortable; they still ached from the forcible boost in chakra she'd used earlier. Sakura lifted Naruto's shoulders and position his head in her lap. The hand with the kunai she rested over his torso, protecting his vitals; the other she ran through his blond spikes, absently checking for injury as her more feminine side enjoyed the softness. Even with all the dirt and tangles, Naruto's hair was the softest she'd ever touched. It was almost…furry.
She let her eyes slide half shut. Too alert for sleep, but it lent her a kind of semi-awareness that allowed her body at least some of the rest it so badly needed. Her breathing slowed, and her eyelids drifted down a little further.
"You're good."
Sakura's eyes snapped open. Had Uchiha Sasuke just…complimented her? Grudgingly, yes, but directly, no pretense or putting down. A small smile that the twilight hid touched her lips.
"One of the best."
