Chapter One

The Art of Losing Chakra

Time was running out.

Sakura glowered at the clock over her shoulder, listening to the incessant mechanical ticking of the secondhand as it ground out the time she was losing. It was almost as if it were mocking her from its high perch on the wall. She swiped the back of her hand across her brow, catching the bead of sweat that had begun to drip into her eyes and refocused her chakra into her hands. The soft, glowing green light was fading with her rapidly depleting energy, but she was determined not to give up.

"Hold on Naruto, don't you dare close your eyes." The medic looked down at her golden-haired friend whose mouth was dripping a line of liquid scarlet. This was too familiar a scene for Sakura and she tried to squash the onslaught of fear that crept into her mind, peppering the back of her eyelids with images of Naruto dying during the war. This wasn't the same, she told herself. Naruto's heart was still beating, albeit faintly as she held her glowing hands over the torn flesh of his side. His breath was a strangled wheeze that failed to get the right amount of oxygen moving through his perforated lungs.

Sai stood in the shadows, hands clenched at his sides as he watched in helpless silence. Sakura had noticed as soon as he came in–half dragging Naruto's limp body–that he was bleeding from a gash on his head that painted the right half of his face crimson. She made him stand because she was afraid that he might have a concussion, and judging by the color draining from his face and the slack look of his limbs, Sakura feared if he sat down he'd fall asleep and she couldn't allow that without looking him over. As if on cue, Sai swayed, stumbling as he caught himself and leaned heavily against the wall for support.

"You called Shizune, right?" Sakura asked him.

Sai nodded. "She's on her way."

"Good." Sakura didn't want to admit to her dark-haired comrade that she needed help. It had taken every ounce of her self-control not to berate him for bringing Naruto to her house instead of the hospital in his condition, but still, she didn't want him to worry more than he already was. In his defense, Sakura reminded herself that the mission had been S-rank and no one was technically supposed to know the duo had been summoned to Suna. Next to Tsunade, Sakura was the best medical-nin in Konoha, so it wasn't like the boys weren't in good hands. She just wished she'd had more medical supplies on hand, but would make do with what she had until Shizune arrived.

"He's going to be okay, right?" Sai asked for the hundredth time–which to Sakura was just another indication that his head injury was as serious as she thought.

Though her fair face was draining of color, Sakura forced a smile and said, "He'll be okay." She looked down at Naruto and noticed that his breathing had eased some. She couldn't hear the wet gurgle of blood in his lungs now, and that sent a small spark of revival through her own tired limbs. "Tell me what happened," she told Sai. Now that Naruto was on the mend, she needed to keep Sai talking to prevent him from passing out where he stood.

"It was an ambush," he told her. "We were attacked by a group of rogue ninja just a few miles away from the gates of Konoha." Sai leaned forward, bracing his palms on his knees.

"Dizzy?"

"A little," he said.

Sakura bit her lip, casting a glance at Naruto whose bright azure blue eyes now seemed to hold some semblance of awareness. His head shifted a little, tongue coming out to wet his bottom lip as he raised his hand and pressed his knuckles to the line of congealing blood that had dripped down the side of his face. "Sakura?" he breathed, blond brows knitting together to create a small crease on his forehead.

"Hey Naruto, how are you feeling?"

"Like someone stabbed me through the side with a chakra sword," he choked out.

"Yeah, you look like shit, too," she teased. The blond chuckled, face contorting as he winced from the movement and the pain in his chest. "Lie still," she told him.

It was then that Sakura heard her door open and a lean figure blurred through the living room until she joined them in her kitchen. Relief lightened the swell of tightness in Sakura's chest to see her arrive. Shizune's short crop of dark hair was pulled back into a knot at her nape, and dark shadows underscored her even darker eyes. Her mouth parted as she took in the scene before her, inventorying the amount of blood that Naruto had lost as a pool of it expanded across Sakura's oak table.

"He should have been taken to the hospital," Shizune remarked. "Looks like you've got him on the mend. How are you holding up, Haruno?"

"Thank you for coming," Sakura said, hating to agree with her initial assessment. "I'm fine but Sai has a concussion, will you–" Sakura didn't need to finish her sentence. Shizune had already dropped her medic bag on the kitchen counter and summoned healing chakra into her hands as she cradled either side of Sai's head between her glowing fingertips.

"What happened?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder at Sakura.

"Ambush," Naruto choked out. "They must have known we'd be coming back to Konoha today because they were waiting for us a few miles outside of the gates. There was probably about thirty of them all together. Sai and I should have been able to take them out no problem, but they had a handful of nin that were actually good fighters. I think one of them was using a genjutsu, which is how I ended up with this wound."

Naruto was definitely feeling better, Sakura noted. His ability to function at the speed of sound always baffled Sakura, but she was grateful to hear his energetic string of banter now. "Do you have any idea what they were after, or who they were?"

"They seemed pretty hell-bent on taking me down, but Sai summoned his ink dragon and we managed to get away. Couldn't say who they were, though. They weren't dressed in issued clothing or wearing hitai-ates, so my guess is they're rogues."

"What were you doing in Suna?" Sakura had a feeling it was futile to ask, but she had to try.

Naruto grinned. "Can't tell you that, Sakura-chan."

Sakura rolled her chromatic, jade-green eyes towards her ceiling and noted a cobweb sweeping down from the blades of her fan. It had been a while since she'd been able to give her house a thorough cleaning, and now that spring was here, it was well overdue. She blew out a huff of air that ruffled a pink strand of hair from her forehead. "Tsunade-sama will want to know about this. I imagine she'll want to dispatch a team to scout the area for Sai and Naruto's attackers."

"As soon as you're done stitching me back together, I'll go tell the old lady what happened," Naruto tried to joke.

"You're not going anywhere, except maybe the hospital. I need to get an IV drip and some blood into your system to replenish what you've lost."

"I'll go," Sai said. "I'm feeling much better now."

"I'll escort him myself," Shizune told Sakura with a closed-lip smile. She knew the pink-haired medic would worry about Sai making the trip to the Hokage tower alone in his condition. "Don't forget to rest Sakura, you've depleted a lot of chakra."

"Thank you, Shizune. I really appreciate all you've done."

"I'll leave my med bag here. There's a saline bag you can use, but you'll have to go to the clinic if you want blood. Unfortunately, that bag isn't equipped with a cooler," Shizune said with a hint of a smile. She wrapped an arm around Sai's shoulder and led him towards Sakura's door.

After Sai and Shizune had exited the house, Sakura looked down at Naruto, assessing the wound on his side. The newly healed skin was closed and pink, slightly inflamed from the size it had been and how long it had taken Sakura to close it. His shirt was ruined. She'd had to cut it from collar to hem to expose the bloody wound. Absently, she ran her fingers over the scar below his ribs, positioned just below his heart. She'd done that in the war in effort to save his life even then. She'd been saving his life since before she could even remember–all of her teammates for that matter–and the constant worry she felt for each of them pulled heavily at her heartstrings. The life of a shinobi was dangerous to say the very least, but this was the path she had chosen without an ounce of regret. She was just happy her skills as a kunoichi were being put to good use for her teammates.

"I'm okay, Sakura," Naruto spoke softly, catching the look in her eye. "Thanks to you."

"Come on," she said, sliding her arm around his shoulders as she helped him sit up. "Let's get you into my bed and I'll get the IV going."

"You know, that would sound a whole lot better if we could just skip the whole IV part," he teased. Sakura flicked him in the ear for suggesting such a thing, but laughed anyway, helping him walk slowly across the threshold of her bedroom.

Naruto was a hopeless flirt, but their relationship was that of life-long friends that had experienced the highs of absolute joy, and suffered in the doldrums together in their absolute lows. Naruto would always be special to Sakura, but their relationship, as unique as it was, could never be anything more than friendship. She loved him in her own way, but the romantic feelings just weren't there. Sakura thought it was because Naruto was the one good constant in her life that she couldn't afford to lose.

She helped peel the rest of Naruto's ruined clothes from his battered body and laid him back in her bed, propping him up with pillows. "Hope you weren't particularly attached to that shirt," she said, tossing it in her wastebasket.

"Nah, plenty more where that came from."

Sakura returned to the kitchen to grab the med bag Shizune had left, and opened her supply closet and retrieved a metal pole to hang the saline pouch from. Believe it or not, this was not the first time she had to set up in-home medical care for her teammates. Kakashi was absolutely the worst for showing up unannounced with critical injuries that should have been examined at the hospital. 'Why go to the hospital when I have a perfectly capable medic on my team that can tend to my aches and pains in the comfort of home?' he'd said to her one day. 'Besides, the nurses at the hospital have exceptionally cold hands, and they're always so rough.'

It was true that she was probably less rough with her teammates than the slew of nurses and doctors that worked at the hospital, but that was because they were hers. Perhaps she had inadvertently spoiled them, but truth be told, she didn't mind. She liked that they trusted her–preferred her to look after them than to have someone else tend to their wounds.

"Okay," Sakura began after she'd hooked Naruto up to the saline bag, "under no circumstance are you to move from this bed before I get back. If you do, so help me gods, I will crush your skull between my bare hands."

"Aw, come on Sakura that would just defeat the purpose of you healing me." Naruto scrunched his eyes up and his mouth slipped into a wide grin as he looked up at her.

"I mean it, Naruto. Don't move. You need to rest, even if you have a relentless amount of energy and the world's greatest chakra reserve." Sakura knew that the Nine-Tails chakra fueled Naruto and he would be fully healed by morning, but he still needed his rest. Without it, he wouldn't recuperate the way his body needed.

Sakura rose from the side of the bed, glancing down at herself. Her white T-shirt was covered in Naruto's blood, as was her kitchen table, but both things were so miniscule in comparison to the fact that he was now on his way to healing. Sakura felt the strain in her aching muscles, but she knew she would muster enough energy to make it to the clinic. She pulled a red windbreaker from her closet and shrugged into it, zipping it so as not to scare the civilians she might pass on the street.

"Hey Sakura?" Naruto asked as she approached her bedroom door.

With one hand poised on the doorframe, she turned to look at him over her shoulder. "Yeah?"

"Can you bring me back some ramen from Ichiraku's?"

Sakura grinned, shaking her head a little. "Yeah, Naruto, I'll bring you some ramen."

~/~

Naruto was sleeping peacefully in Sakura's bed as she tiptoed across her bedroom floor and closed the door quietly behind her. She'd retrieved the medical supplies she needed from the hospital, stopped by Ichiraku's to pick up Naruto's favorite dish to-go, and headed back to her house all within less than an hour. He'd practically inhaled his meal by the time she finished hooking him up to the transfusions, and ran her chakra-laden palms over his body to check for any other wounds she might have missed. Once Sakura determined that she'd healed Naruto to the best of her medical abilities, she decided to let him rest in peace and slipped out into the cool, spring evening to get some fresh air.

Sai hadn't checked back in, which wasn't entirely abnormal for the former Root agent, but Sakura had to wonder if perhaps he was still holed up in the Hokage tower with Tsunade. Sakura knew that her team members had been summoned to Suna by the Kazekage himself to transport 'classified documents' from Tsunade. Sakura didn't know what was in those documents, but she wondered if the transport hadn't been an undercover operation in disguise. After all, Sai and Naruto hadn't been attacked going to Suna, but rather on their way back–mere miles from the safety of their own home. The thought didn't bode well with Sakura.

Sakura drew a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the cherry blossoms for which she was named, and lightly pinched a delicate petal between her thumb and index finger. Her backyard wasn't very big, but she enjoyed the feel of the grass beneath her bare feet as she walked around, inspecting the new blooms in her vibrant garden. Her picket fence could use a fresh coat of paint she thought with a sigh, collapsing on the wrought-iron bench positioned beneath a low-hanging branch of the cherry blossom tree. She needed to sleep, but willed herself to hold on just a while longer–until she heard from Sai at least. Sakura reclined against the back of the bench, stretching out her long legs and crossing her ankles. It had been warm that day, but now that the sun was beginning to sink below the horizon, coloring the sky in shades of rose and amethyst, Sakura began to feel the chill in the air.

"You know," a low voice broke through the din of her thoughts and drew her attention to the branches above her head, "you almost blend in to the background with your hair. Stealthy camouflage Sakura-chan."

Sakura wanted to roll her eyes but she was too tired. Konoha's legendary Copy-nin was perched on a tree limb, one leg drawn to his chest, the other swinging freely as his right hand gripped the branch above his head. "Get down from there before you break something. I don't have the energy to heal another soul," Sakura scolded him.

With the ease of grace, Kakashi dropped to the ground in front of her with barely a sound. He sat beside her on the iron bench without an invitation–not that he needed one. Hatake Kakashi had been a part of her life since he'd been assigned as her sensei after graduating the Academy. They were both jonin now, but Kakashi was still their team leader. A second passed before he turned to her, silver brow furrowed over his one visible dark eye. "You're bleeding."

"Not mine," Sakura said, unzipping her windbreaker so Kakashi could see the stain on her T-shirt. He must have picked up the scent of blood with his superhuman sense of smell. "Naruto almost died again. Sai brought him to me this afternoon with a perforated lung. He lost a lot of blood, needless to say, but he's healing now. He's asleep in my room."

"They're back from Suna sooner than I expected," Kakashi commented as he reached up to run a hand through his thick mane of tousled hair. It was always 'artfully' messy, but Sakura noticed the spring wind had tangled his silver-white strands in an unruly bird's nest. She surmised her shoulder-length locks probably didn't look much better.

"Do you know what they were doing there?" Sakura eyed him suspiciously. It was common courtesy that they would inform one another before leaving for a mission if they weren't assigned as a group, just to avoid the whole worry aspect of their departure. Sakura knew their compliance was probably mostly for her benefit, but it had become part of their team's unique ninja code. Plus, they would take turns checking on each other's houses and apartments to collect mail, water plants, and take care of animals. She knew that Kakashi had been on his own mission with Genma, but perhaps there was a possibility that Naruto had told their old sensei what he and Sai were up to before they'd set out.

"Afraid not," he remarked.

Sakura could feel him studying her from the side, and looked up to meet his eye. Though she could only see a small portion of his face (as he kept most of it hidden behind a mask) she thought he looked tired. His shoulders were slumped more than usual, and Sakura noticed he was holding himself in a strained, unnatural way. She narrowed her eyes at him. "You are hurt, aren't you?"

"Bah, I'm fine," he said dismissively.

"Out with it," she demanded, pushing herself up from the bench and propping her hands on her hips as she stood in front of him.

Kakashi couldn't help but smile beneath the folds of his mask. Sakura saw it, knew that his eye was creasing because of it. Gods, she thought he could be so damned stubborn sometimes–then again, so could she. "I think I dislocated my shoulder."

Annoyance flared in her gut and gave Sakura the energy to roll her eyes this time. "Only you would climb a tree with a dislocated shoulder. Stand up."

Kakashi made slow work of it, sighing as though her offering to fix him was taxing on him instead of the other way around. "I didn't use my left arm to climb the tree," he retorted.

Sakura wasn't tall enough to reach his shoulder with their height differences, so she climbed up onto the iron bench and motioned for him to step closer. He obliged, and she slid the green flak jacket off his shoulders and let the heavy contraption drop to the bench beside her with a thud. She could see it now, the slight protrusion of his left shoulder as the bones pulled away from his body at an odd angle. The black jonin shirts were rather form fitting, and did little to hide the musculature of the person wearing them. This also meant it was easy to see where his bones needed to go in order to be put back in place.

Sakura took his left arm, lifting it above his head as she worked the joint a little, feeling along the grooves of his shoulder with her other hand. "You should have told me you were hurt." Of course, if she'd been on top of her game, she would have been able to see it the moment he'd landed in front of her. Kakashi's body posture was relaxed most of the time, but she knew the difference between his casual stance and his pained stance when she saw it–even if he was trying to hide it from her.

"If I recall, you told me you didn't have the energy to heal another soul," he said, using her words against her.

Sakura slammed his shoulder back in place in response, smiling sweetly at the masked-nin in front of her as a low sounding groan grated up the back of his throat. "All better," she said, batting her eyelashes at him innocently.

~/~

Kakashi rolled his shoulder, testing the feel of it. He would never tell her, but she'd hurt him more than he let on with the little grunt of pain. Kakashi was no stranger to pain, physical and emotional alike, and masked it just as well as the mask he wore to conceal his face. The pain ebbed when Sakura summoned her healing chakra and pressed her small palms to the round of his shoulder. He stood entirely still, breathing in the scent of her shampoo as it coalesced with the scent of the cherry blossoms blooming above them. He watched her work her magic, admiring that she had to stand on the bench just to reach his shoulders without straining. He liked that she was small. But looks alone were often deceiving–true to the fact that Sakura could take on a man more than three times her size and flatten him into a pancake with minimum effort on her part. If he were being honest with himself, he liked that about her too.

"How did this happen?" Her large green eyes glanced up to his.

Kakashi reached up to scratch the underside of his masked chin, dragging his nails along the corner of his jaw. "Well," he began, drawing out the syllable, "there was this bridge…"

Sakura swatted at his good shoulder in annoyance. While she had changed so much in maturity from the young genin that had been assigned to his team almost nine years ago, she still had very little patience for his bullshit and Kakashi found it endlessly amusing. He liked to push her buttons if only for a chance to see that spark of indignation light up her eyes.

"How does that feel?" She drew her hands back from his shoulder but made no move to get down from the bench. Her hands rested on her hips now, head tilted slightly as she waited for Kakashi to respond.

"Much better, thank you."

"Have you already sent in your mission report?"

"Not yet. You were my first stop, actually," he admitted. He could have gone straight to the Hokage office and had Tsunade put his shoulder back in place, but he had a feeling the seasoned honey-blond wouldn't be quite as gentle with him as Sakura had–and yes, she had been gentle despite the unavoidable burst of pain.

Sakura's eyes flashed up to his and something unreadable passed through her expression–so quick he had to second guess if he saw it. He watched her climb down from the bench, pulling her knees to her chest as she loosely wrapped her slender arms around them. Kakashi finished testing out the durability of his shoulder before sliding his hands in his pockets and sitting back down beside her. He watched her bite her bottom lip, drawing it in with her perfect set of teeth as a small crease, thin as spider silk, formed between her brows.

Kakashi swallowed. "What's on your mind, Sakura? I can tell when something is bothering you."

She turned her face to his. "Am I that readable?"

Kakashi thought for a moment before he responded. "Maybe I just know all your tells."

She chuckled at that. "I'm worried about Naruto. I know he's going to be fine, but it's the nature of the mission that bothers me." Sakura paused. "I find it odd that Sai and Naruto were summoned by Gaara to deliver some top-secret documents, but they didn't get attacked until they were almost home. Doesn't that seem a little odd to you?"

"Did you ask Naruto about it?"

"He said he couldn't tell me anything and he didn't recognize the nins who attacked him."

Kakashi rubbed the back of his head, fingers getting caught in the tangled strands of his hair. He probably needed a shower. He and Genma had spent the last two nights camped out in the woods on their trek home, and Kakashi had forgotten to bring basic grooming materials. As an afterthought, he hoped his two-day-old deodorant was still holding up. Sakura wasn't pinching her nose or leaning away from him, and his own superior sense of smell hadn't picked up on anything 'flower-wilting' so he assumed he was fine. "If it will make you feel better, I'll talk to Tsunade-sama when I turn in my report, see if she has any inside information."

Sakura turned to him with a smile. "Would you?"

Kakashi nodded. "I can't promise she'll tell me anything, but I'll ask."

"Thank you." The pink-haired kunoichi leaned against his side, resting her head on his newly healed shoulder. He was really second-guessing that shower now, but decided not to move as one look down at Sakura propped against his arm showed him that her eyes were closed. Within the minute, her breathing had changed. Fleetingly, he wondered just how much of her chakra she'd exhausted today in healing Naruto. Had heeling his shoulder really pushed her over the edge?

Though he knew Sakura would be remiss to learn he hadn't woken her right away and rushed off to the Hokage tower for answers, he couldn't bring himself to draw away from her warmth just yet. She had obviously exhausted herself and needed to rest; his bicep was as good as any pillow though probably not as comfortable. Kakashi decided it wouldn't hurt to let her sleep a moment curled up on his shoulder.

He wasn't sure when it had happened, but something had begun to shift in their relationship. It had been a long time since he had been her teacher–though 'teaching' hardly felt like the appropriate term to describe his methods of training. She'd grown up since then–in more ways than one–and somewhere along the line Kakashi had stopped thinking of her as his subordinate, but rather his equal. Her medic abilities were highly regarded in all of Konoha, and she was a fierce ninja. He honestly felt lucky that she had chosen to remain on his team, and at times wondered why. He hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to her as a genin, and the regret of that tasted sour on his tongue. There was so much he wished he could change about the past, but if admitted it, dealing with the ghost of old wounds was made easier by the pink-haired girl that was currently asleep on his shoulder. He didn't know how, but in some way or another, over the course of these long hard years, she'd worked her way through the fissures of his hardened exterior, and warmed a place in his heart.

Kakashi laid a masked cheek to the top of her head, feeling the warmth of her skin penetrate through to his. He drew a breath and released it slowly, happy to just be home.

Okay guys, this is my first attempt of EVER writing FanFic. I want to thank my sister-in-law for introducing me to Naruto and fueling my new obsession. She also happens to be a writer, and her stuff is incredible. If you haven't yet, be sure to check out her stories and leave her some love. (loonymoony17)

Things you should know: I shamelessly ship Sakura and Kakashi, so I hope you enjoy my view/creation of their relationship. And if you feel so inclined to leave me a review or let me know what you think, I'll certainly appreciate it!

Stay tuned, and happy reading!

~Sparrow