aberrant

chapter one

The neon light of the sign flickered milky yellow. The radiance didn't push far, irresolute against the 10:07 pm darkness. It was not the only light illuminating the streets and sidewalks by any means—bolder street lamps and more dazzling billboards and signs broke through shadows—and it still wavered without confidence. The thin, man-made tubes twisted and formed words that promised "FRESH HOT PIZZA OPEN FOR 24 HOURS".

Eating so late wasn't necessarily the healthiest option—especially for someone in her field, who should know better—but who was she to argue with her stomach when it nagged and complained so bitterly? She'd been too busy all day to pay attention to any basic human comforts. Who had time for salads when she was in the midst of her MS-1*? Formaldehyde over fruit. Lectures on the glycolysis cycle in biochemistry over enjoying a nice book in a jazzy, coffee shop.

Waiting for the two slices of pizza she'd already paid for, Sakura absentmindedly pulled out her phone to glance at the time. She felt herself pale when the screen turned on, burning her eyes in the nighttime. Her dad had texted a loving "goodnight and good luck with your studies!" an hour and a half ago.

The cutesy panda icon blowing kisses at the end of his message just poured salt in the guilt wound.

If she forgot to call her dad again tomorrow, she'd probably have to end herself. At least her fellow peers could use her cadaver to study…except for Yuuma. If that creep tried to wiggle his way even an inch close to her dead body she'd have to rise again faster than Jesus and kick his ass.

Just the thought of Yuuma irritated her, and in her deep seeded annoyance she thoughtlessly clutched her phone in a death grip, silicone phone case squelching weakly beneath her might.

An awkward, forced throat clearing drew her attention back to the moment.

A young man—roughly around her nineteen years—was staring at Sakura owlishly from behind the safety of his opened to-go window. His index and middle fingers were extended and pressed against the sliding glass that had existed as the only divider between him and the clearly upset girl.

When her gaze drifted over and their eyes met, he blinked twice. Slowly.

"…Two slices of cheese pizza for Haruno Sakura…" The pizza boy said meekly. His voice seemed to only just find its strength in the middle of his sentence before tapering off quietly at the end once more.

Her lips parted, and she showed just a bit too much teeth than was necessary when she offered up a smile. It was instinctively meant to act as a peace offering to the brown haired pizza boy, but he eyed her with heightened wariness. Fighting the sigh that threatened to huff out, Sakura transferred her phone from her dominant hand to her left, freeing the former to grab the triangular shaped box the worker proffered.

As soon as she had the box, the pizza boy pulled his arm back in like a snail receding back to the safety of its shell.

"Have a good night," He fumbled out, as the window was quickly closed shut.

Sakura snorted bullishly at the sequence of events, smirking to herself as she cast her eyes down to look at the white and blue box; however, she quickly checked herself. There was no point in gloating with a smirk when all she'd done was make a random pizza boy nervous. And besides, if the lukewarm bottom of the box said anything, it was that she was the real loser that evening. The pizza wasn't even fully warm.

So much for that lie they had scrawled out in neon. Fresh, hot pizza her ass.

Rolling her eyes, she slipped her headphones back over her ears. Whatever, if she'd wanted fine dining she should've stayed away from a place with the name 'Atomic Boy Pizza'. This was typical fast fare on a Tuesday night.

Turning her attention back to her phone, she opened up her favored music app and perused the selections. She made sure her headphones were properly plugged into the jack before pressing play on a classical music playlist. The sweet sounds of Yo-Yo Ma urging melodies from his cello filled her headspace. The classical music would make her short walk home so much more cinematic. The somber cello danced gently in the folds of her brains, and in the cool night air she could almost imagine the stars twinkling beyond the low hanging city smog.

Damn, would she sound bougie if she said that out loud? Sakura suppressed a groan.

She stopped her trek abruptly at the crosswalk, eyes boring into the little red hand that glows petulantly back at her from across the street. She hated waiting at those things, especially when the traffic was next to nonexistent at that hour; however, her father's careful warning about not jaywalking whispered in the back of her memories. Sakura decided to wait the few additional minutes it would take for the right to go, and the cello sighed softly into the shell of her ear.

A small eternity passed before the little, green walking man strolled blithely in place of the hand.

Sakura nestled her small box of pizza into the safe crook of her arm, crossing the street with pep in her step. She was beyond eager to get home and eat while finally relaxing for the first time that day. Her feet were tired, her shoulders ached, and her stomach still complained now and then as it impatiently waited for the purchased food.

She had reached the other side of the street, sidestepping a discarded piece of gum that sat—dingy white in the streetlight glow—when something felt like it pricked at the back of her neck.

As if called to attention, the hairs on the back of her neck went up in unison.

The chill that shook down her spine and caused her muscles to tense confused Sakura. Using her thumb, she deftly hooked the arch of her headphone and shoved them off her head and down to rest around her neckline. Now—with all of her senses freed up to answer to the strange fight or flight response that had activated in her body—Sakura glanced around her for some sign of trouble. She turned her head to look behind her, left cheek brushing abruptly against the earpads of the headphones. This was a stress response, with muscles contracting beneath the surface of her skin causing goosebumps to ripple to life on her entire epidermis. But where was the cause of stress?

It could have just all been in her head. Sakura knew that emotion could affect the body strongly, and she could just be reacting to the pushed down, subconscious paranoia that came with walking alone at night. But that didn't feel right to her. It had to be more than that.

She was barely mindful of the fact that she had all but stopped walking any further. Blinking and squinting into the night as she cast one last look around her in a three hundred and sixty degree sweep, she paused as her eyes locked onto the narrow alleyway that was directly to the right of her. The light of the streetlamps didn't reach into its depths, and it stretched on between the long line of buildings, leading to a dead end.

A single, pink eyebrow arched. It wasn't typical for her to get so spooked like this, but she was only human and susceptible to paranoia like everyone else. Normally, her brain didn't notice such things, as it was too loud with reciting medical terminology and wondering if it was a bad sign that cadavers no longer bothered her.

Her stomach reminded her that there was something more important to focus on. Something like pizza. Shrugging to herself, Sakura began to walk on as unconcerned as before; however, it would seem to her in hindsight that fate had refused to let her get away. A sound came from the alleyway—faint, but lingering. It was a haunting sound, the sound of a ghost not yet ready to leave the body but not able to stay in the earthly world much longer. Sakura inhaled sharply through her nose, eyes wide. No matter how many times she heard it, Sakura would never get use to the death rattle.

She practically flew to the side of the building, pressing her back against it. Slowly, cautiously, she began to creep to the opening of the alleyway. Her fingers fumbled for her phone to find the flashlight button to turn the beam of light on. Peeking out round the corner of the grey building that led to the entrance of the alleyway, she let the thin ray of artificial light probe through the darkness. It wasn't until her light danced across muddied fingers laying prone upon the wet ground that a puff of breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding exploded from between her lips.

The little girl in her wanted to take it slow and make sure there wasn't anyone else around, and that the supposed person who left this dying heap of flesh and bone wasn't still lurking and waiting for someone else to hurt, but the medic in her couldn't abide by that. Sakura slunk low into the alley, dropping her pizza box carelessly and ripping the audio plug for her phone's headset jack to make better use of her phone's flashlight without the hindrance of a cord getting in the way.

She crouched beside the figure, and moved the light over the person in a head to toe scan so that she could get a good look at the exterior problems. The interior would come second, if it were obvious that the problem wasn't simple and easily fixed. Some instinct in her whispered that it wouldn't be.

He was a male, roughly her age by the looks of it, with blonde hair—well, mostly blonde. The amount of blood spattered and congealing on the right side of his head wasn't nearly the same sunshine yellow she imagined it typically was. A pool of burgundy beneath his body reflected ominously under the glare of her flashlight. Someone had left him partially hidden by a garbage dumpster and discarded piles of cardboard boxes and bottles—or maybe he had wandered there himself, like a dying dog looking for its last moments of secluded respite? Sakura placed her phone on a nearby box in order to free up her hands. The box wobbled slightly beneath its burden, and the light reached only to the shoulders of the young man from its new position, but Sakura was in her element. In the time it would take her to call an ambulance and get "professional" help for the boy, it might be too late. She'd have to take matters into her own hands.

Haruno Sakura was in the top of her class for a reason, and naturally far more adept than any of her peers. It wasn't necessarily cheating, from her point of view. It was just Darwinism, a predisposed affinity that allowed her to succeed so much more in these dire moments than any other MS-1 student could dream of.

Sakura slowly brought her hands to the injured boy's sternum area. She touched him just with her fingertips first, closing her eyes as they made contact with the battered fabric of his shirt. It was damp, with blood and sweat or both and more. Her eyebrows drew together, furrowing and pinching the skin between them so that a minute crease appeared.

She gently pressed her hands fully flush against him.

With her eyes closed, she could feel her energy pool into the dainty conductors that were her hands. She had never been able to explain the way she could heal herself and others, nor her additional strange quirks. In the past, when Sakura had tried to put into words what this energy looked like, she had always imagined that it was a shade of translucent green—maybe similar to the jade of her eyes.

She had never really done something like this before, though. Sakura had always had those abilities for as long as she could remember, and for just as long she could remember her father telling her not to use it unless absolutely necessary. She learned from him that she should not reveal this to anyone, unless she wanted to find herself on the other side of the medical table. Up to this point, Sakura had never used her healing gift so publicly and unguarded…but she couldn't abandoned this person. Besides, her inner thoughts coolly reminded her, it's not like he'd be cognizant enough to know what was happening given his current state. And if anyone happened to see the pair, they wouldn't really see. It would just look like a worried girl trying to help some poor boy. Her healing skills weren't palpable to the eye, as far as she knew.

Her energy funneled in through the boy's very pores, enveloping and passing through every white blood cell and vein. First, she would make sure his heart and brain will capable of sustaining themselves while she began her impromptu procedure. She felt for his heart first, as well as the area around it. That romanticized organ was doing well enough, given the dire circumstance. There was nothing inhibiting it, or any direct damage she would need to address above everything else. She moved on, separating her hands and moving them in opposite directions so that she could multitask.

Her left hand went to his head, while her right went down to his abdomen. Sakura hissed a curse at her discoveries. His head had suffered blunt trauma with minor gashes, while the latter revealed a significant amount of penetrating trauma. She remembered when she had been shining the light over his face that she had seen the purpling skin as blood spilled into the soft tissue from beneath the surface here and there on cheeks and forehead. His face was mottled with dirt and ecchymosis. Her closed eyes squeezed tighter as she forced herself to concentrate.

Sakura sent her energy to seek out and repair the damage in each region. She could sense the size, depth, and width of the abdominal injury and assumed that he must have been stabbed once—if not at least three times. She shivered at the thought, and didn't allow herself to dwell on the how's and why's of how he had gotten the rest of his injuries.

As Sakura stemmed the internal bleeding, she began to feel at least a smidge more confident. She could sense her energy forcing his wounds to close their gaping mouths as she sewed them shut with his own biomolecules. And though his swollen spleen was healed and brought back to normalcy, she didn't congratulate herself just yet. She worked quickly and efficiently, and wanted to leave no room for error. She didn't know exactly how long it took her to patch him up to a point of comfortable survival, but after most of the heavy lifting was done Sakura let herself exhale with some relief. At this point, she was no longer concerned about him dying. In fact, the way things looked medically, his body would last him a good long while after this…so long as he didn't get into the same trouble she had found him in. She passed a hand over his arms and legs, finding no serious damage and deciding to come back to the cuts and bruising a second later.

Gently lifting him a bit, she turned him to his side while cradling his head in order to address the death rattle she had heard earlier. A death rattle was typically made by a build up of saliva and mucous in a person's throat and airway when they could no longer swallow. She wanted to turn him on his side to allow those excess secretions to drain more easily from his mouth.

While one hand still cradled his head, her other arm was wrapped gingerly around and slightly under him in order to keep him steady. She maintained energy only in the hand that held his torso, just out of precaution so she could continue to monitor him. Opening her eyes finally, Sakura looked down at her patient. She had shifted both him and herself closer to the light, and could see bubbly saliva and lukewarm blood dribbled out of the side of his mouth as it drained from his throat. It dripped and pattered into the pool of blood that awaited it below with open arms.

Death didn't scare her—she couldn't let it—and she was happy that she had been able to help someone else defeat it that night. Unbeknownst to the boy, they had been sort of teammates. He had held on just long enough for her to come and help him chase away the untimely Reaper.

Her fingers twitched.

Sakura looked to her right hand in confusion, the one that was cradled around the boy's torso and still activated with her probing, healing energy. She winced as a sudden sort of energy buzzed through her bones of her fingers. She pushed her green force deeper into him again, investigating. The discovery shocked her almost as much as when she had initially found him.

His body was alight with an almost foreign, newfound energy. She couldn't imagine it had anything to do with her energy probing around him, it felt so, so…so different. Sakura could practically see his organs improving themselves even further, past the point she had brought them to. His entire system was like an effervescent glass of champagne, bubbling and popping with something. She withdrew her green energy back into herself, as fast as if a dog had just tried to bite her. It made her want to drop him completely, but she resisted the urge. Instead, she moved to at least set him down a bit more tenderly, her left hand shifting to the low base of his head in order to support his head more effectively.

She looked back to his face as she did so, and almost screamed. Eyes as red as the blood her hands had been smeared with glared at her through the darkness, catching the light of her phone's flashlight like a cat's. And his pupils…his pupils were skinny and slit, so unlike anything she had ever seen before. The boy grabbed Sakura's left wrist with surprising strength. Her hand jerked in the motion, and the palm of her hand moved and slid slick against the leftover spit and blood that remained on his cheek.

The sound he made in his throat then was no death rattle, but instead an almost animalistic growl.

"…Who…are you…?"

A/N

Hello, hello~ I haven't written in quite some time here, so hopefully this prodigal daughter's return won't be too unwelcome. :)

*MS-1 is a student's first year in medical school.