Warning: Manga spoilers, to an extent. I've obviously changed some things that occurred in the canon. This takes place post-war. Don't be worried if some things aren't explained at first; they will be. The POV is rather omniscient but focuses primarily on Sakura's perspective, so it will attempt to follow her train of thought, which means that some expositional information won't be given out until she thinks about them.

Please do review. It's always much appreciated, and I thank you for reading!

The Idiopathies

one : co-morbid

The first time it happened, she went down like a felled tree. Which was a saving grace, as it turned out, because at the same time her knees hit the ground a Fuuma shuriken lodged itself in the midsection of the shinobi at whom she'd been aiming a punch. It would have split her right between the shoulder blades, she realized faintly as the world spun. We survive, she thought blurrily, primarily on luck. Or the intervention of gods. Or the absurdity of a universe which, like a child with toys, has not yet decided to throw them away.

Her vision twisted. She wondered briefly if this was the Sharingan at work, if Sasuke was snooping around somewhere, snickering at her like some evil elf. Not, she thought wryly, a very accurate depiction of Sasuke, especially now, but Itachi was dead and Madara was gone, and who else had a Sharingan that might be used against her? But this wasn't a genjutsu, anyway. This was something else.

The stones underneath her knees shivered. Above her, a spasming shadow. Another enemy shinobi fell in front her, eyes blankly turned towards her knees as a shadow retracted from his neck. "Sakura-san." It came to her from far away. She screwed her eyes shut and swayed on her knees—put her hands on the ground for support. On all fours. Heaving, suddenly, not with sickness, but like she couldn't get enough oxygen in her lungs. She could feel something vibrating in her bones, but it felt oddly good—oddly strong. Her brain was searing and yet did not hurt. Rattling breaths—they were hers. "Sakura," again, with more urgency. "Ne—are you alright?"

She lost herself then.

When she woke, Sakura was somewhat surprised to find herself in the hospital. Not that this was an irregular occurrence—she frequently fell asleep at her desk or in the staff room after a long shift—but because the last thing she remembered was battle. Am I hurt? She tore the sheet, loosely tucked as per regulations, away from her body. No—a quick personal once-over showed her nothing was wrong. She was still wearing her field clothes and all of her gear was stacked on the bedside table. Her head hurt like someone had knocked her around, but there was no evidence of trauma. What happened?

"You're awake."

The unenthusiastic tone deserved its usual sarcastic response. "Evidently," she answered Shikamaru, who was leaning against the wall with a cigarette behind his ear. "How long have I been out?"

"Two hours."

This was a shock. "Oh." She frowned. "And the rogues?" Rogues were becoming ever more common these days, an unfortunate consequence of the war and general chaos of the previous years' rebuilding efforts. Thankfully, that usually meant that they were less capable than those you previously experienced on missions—there were more of them, but your chances of running into a true S-class were slim. She often felt sorry for them; what reason would so many have to go rogue? Their villages were weakened by conflict; their leaders were corrupt; distribution of social goods and needs was broken and inequitable. In states like that, the poor civilians died or revolted, the wealthy civilians took control, and the shinobi, if they had a scrap of individuality left, took flight. If they didn't, they stayed to serve a corrupted state.

Shikamaru shrugged. "Dispatched- knocked out, most of them, and we left them to their own devices. No serious injuries on our part. No point in killing them. Except for the one impaled by his friend's Fuuma, but that's not our business."

Okay, so that was good—at least no one had needed her. "I don't—what happened?"

"Lee carried you here. In record time, but that's Lee."

"No, I mean, did I—how did I get hurt?"

Shikamaru paused and, to her immense surprise, looked slightly confused. Uncomfortable. "I'm unsure. You, ah, collapsed. For no apparent reason."

"Collapsed? Embarrassing," she muttered. Glancing up, she noticed that he was still in his field togs as well. Had he stayed with her for two hours? He'd led the mission, but still, for Shikamaru this was decidedly odd behavior. "Was it—did I faint?" She couldn't recall seeing or doing anything that would have made her lose consciousness. She had a memory of the Fuuma shuriken, but only that it had decidedly not gone through her.

"Not…exactly?" Why was he phrasing it like a question? Shikamaru sighed and shook his head, looked down at the toes of his boots. "You were on your hands and knees, and shaking. You didn't hear an enemy nin come for you—I had to take him out."

"That's unacceptable," she said, wincing.

"No," he said, seeing her face, "you really didn't hear anything. It wasn't just him. You were blind to us—just staring at the ground, breathing hard. It looked like panic."

Sakura processed this, fingering the hem of her shirt. "It sounds like a panic attack, yes," she said slowly. "That is—that's embarrassing." She couldn't get it out of her head—a jounin, an ANBU medic nin, apprentice of a Hokage and Legendary Sannin, practically the adopted child of the White Fang and sister to the two most famed nin in Konoha and, at this point, probably beyond—she'd suffered a panic attack in the middle of a battle? "It wasn't a genjutsu?" she offered, although she knew that if it had been she would have been able to tell.

"I don't believe so." He walked closer to her, which was alarming in and of itself—Shikamaru, she well knew, tended to stay separate from hospitals and people in hospitals. "Look, you also—you said to me, when you were shaky—low, and sort of, ah, frighteningly—you said, 'let me go.'"

"Frighteningly? Frighteningly, how?"

"Well, you know—" He rolled his eyes at the ridiculousness of it and pitched his voice lower, turning it into a sort of dark, animalistic growl. "Let me go. Like that. I wasn't holding you. Nor was anyone else. So you don't remember, at all, what you felt?"

She shook her head, nonplussed. "No, not in the slightest. I have a killer headache now, but that could be any number of things—including," she added morosely, "the aftereffects of a panic attack. I'm sorry you had to see that."

He was still frowning. "That's what you think it was? Panic attacks don't usually involve guttural roaring, as far as I know."

"Well, what do you know?" she asked testily, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. "What did the medics say?"

He ignored the slight. "They couldn't find anything wrong."

"Then nothing's wrong," she said simply, looking under the hospital bed for her shoes. Shikamaru handed them to her from their perch on the side table. "Thanks," she murmured, and when he continued to look at her as if her head had been cut off, she sighed. "Look, who looked at me—" She leaned over the bed, shoes in hand, and flipped her chart open—"Shizune? You had Shizune come to see me over a panic attack?" She scowled. "Well, there. I couldn't have done it better myself. If she didn't find anything, I'm fine." She shoved her feet into her boots with greater abandon than was probably warranted. Shikamaru looked on with a raised brow. She huffed at him. "Well, what? No problems, no worries."

"Sakura." He looked uncommonly alert, and serious. "That was an easy mission. Not ANBU and not high-rank. And we were coming home. What if you'd panicked during a serious strike, or during a stakeout? I didn't tell Shizune what you said—ne, what you growled at me. I just told her you blacked out." He shifted on his feet and sighed again. "Get it checked out. Keep an eye on it."

She grabbed her pack from the floor, hefted it onto her shoulders, and signed her own chart with great flourish. Gave Shikamaru a look that one could only give one's team leader if one was Sakura. "Who," she said archly, throwing the clipboard back onto the bed, "is the medic now?"

Shikamaru had little choice but to follow her out of the room. He was itching for a cigarette.

Now, she knew he was right.

She was at home. Wasn't she? It was night. Yes? Everything was dark—her bedroom—I'm in my room—benefited from muffled moonlight sifting through the linen curtains at her window. All the trappings of her home life were illuminated by slivers of silver. But as she looked, they refracted, split; she blinked twice to restore them, only for it to happen again. She closed her eyes. I can't breathe. What time was it? How could she know? The clock. The clock. The clock.

She forced herself to turn her head; she felt like her neck needed to be oiled. Her bones, her joints, her very framework creaked. She felt the grinding of her muscles like a tooth being drilled. The clock. It was two forty-five in the morning. The clock. The clock. The clock. The red numbers shattered in front of her. She closed her eyes again. The world swam.

Her head, again, was searing—she remembered now, she could remember the feeling of heat and pain slicing her skull into slivers. She remembered falling on the ground. She remembered—

Hello again.

All was black when she opened her eyes, shocked at the voice. There she was, long-haired and young, black and white. A thirteen-year-old girl, still, but this time with a different voice: lower, more mature. Deadlier? Certainly more serious.

"Oh." Sakura found herself saying it rather than wanting to. Her stomach gave a lurch, but otherwise she felt fine—no more gasping, no more fractured vision. It was just her and her, black on a black background.

Her Inner put a hand on its—her—hip. Are you going to remember this one?

"This what?"

This meeting. You didn't remember the last. When that ridiculous Lee brought you to the hospital like a noble green steed.

"No, I—oh. Oh," she said, with dawning comprehension. "The panic attack."

If that's what you want to call it.

Sakura twisted her lips into a wry smile. "What would you call it? Or, we. What should we call it?"

Look, I can't help what it takes to get you here. You fight it.

Sakura felt distinctly nauseated now; her late dinner of rice and chicken stirring itself nastily in her stomach. "I was telling you to let me go? Out loud? That's what Shikamaru heard?"

You don't like what I have to show you.

Bile at the back of her throat. She swallowed it down. "And what do you have to show me?"

And, suddenly: fire. Black fire and acid rain wearing away the Hokage carved into the mountain. Her parents' house up in flames. She was in the middle of the street, watching it all burn. She ran into the house as raindrops sizzled on her skin, shattering the door into splinters that seemed to aim for her eyes. "Father. Father! Mother—" When had she ever cared for her parents this much? Her heart seized as she ran through the kitchen, flames licking her mother's favorite copper pots. No one downstairs. She took the hallway to the rooms in leaps and bounds, slid the door open to her parents' room—

Tsunade, Kakashi, half-burned already, blackened pools forming underneath charred skin. Sakura felt bile rise at the back of her throat. Empty sockets where their eyes should be and no face, really, to even bother covering with a mask, oh Kakashi, Kaka-sensai, no, no, no—Tsunade made bald by fire and with a hand, eerily, and painted fingernails, still scrabbling at the floor with an awful skinny sound. Panic was rising, rising, rising in Sakura, right to the top of her chest; her throat closed, tears sparked at the corners of her eyes—

Sakura woke with a start, back to the silvery corners of her room—she took a moment to notice that she had twisted herself into sweaty sheets and wasted no time scrambling to the bathroom and heaving into the toilet.

Her head throbbed. Her arms shook. She felt another rush of—of something, something that started in her chest and swarmed in her head like angry bees, like Shino's bugs—and heaved again. Misery in the form of unwanted tears slid down her cheeks; she scrubbed them away with the back of her hand and waited for the next round. Food poisoning, she thought. Naruto didn't cook the chicken right. He never does.

You know that's utterly wrong.

Startled out of sickness, Sakura jerked upright, as if she'd heard Inner speaking to her from across the room. The sour taste in her mouth thickened. Carefully, she spat into the toilet bowl and, still gripping the sides of it, turned around to look into her room across the hall.

Nothing. No one.

"Well, why would she be there, anyway?" she asked herself in a whisper, horrified to hear that her voice was several steps higher than usual. You're up here. Right?

No answer.

Hello?

Nothing, thank goodness. Or maybe not thank goodness. Sakura turned back around to face her mess; quickly, she ripped toilet paper from the roll, wiped the rim of the bowl, and flushed it all. Then she sat back on her heels and stared. What is this?

"Sakura-chan, you're sick?"

Of course someone would have heard—Naruto and Sai slept just doors away. She didn't look at him. "I think it's over now," she said.

With no qualms whatsoever—one thing to love about Naruto was that he never asked if you needed companionship, it was all just so willingly given—the next Hokage slumped to the tile floor, perpendicular to her, and started rubbing her back. He put a glass of water on the floor. The fact that he'd already gotten it for her before even entering the bathroom almost brought her around to crying again. "Was it my cooking?" he asked sheepishly.

Now she turned to look at him: Naruto was sleep-dazed, his eyes half-lidded and his hair a shock of blonde. When she met his eyes he grinned a little, that lopsided stretch that she could never keep from grinning back at. "I don't think so," she said, and wished her voice could've come out less tight. "That feels good, though. Thank you."

"'S nothing, anytime, Sakura-chan." Naruto was forever addressing people by their actual names—funny, Sakura though, how people rarely do that. But Naruto had always known about the power of names and naming. Not in a clan sense, but in a personal sense. He called people out by naming them. Sakura-chan. Sasuke-teme. It was a way of—of—not staking his claim, but of reminding her that he had stock in her and vice-versa, that she held claim to a piece of him, a deed to him which had her name scrawled on it in blood and history and memory.

Sakura swirled some water around her mouth and spat again. Emptied the whole glass and the sour taste in her mouth eased a little with that and Naruto's hand on her back. Dreams. Whatever made her pass out during the mission was unrelated to her confrontation with Inner Sakura today. There was no reason—no reason, she thought vehemently—for Inner to come back in such a surge and with such violence. Not after so many years of keeping it all buried. Unless foul play was involved—some genjutsu, which seemed deeply unlikely now that Shikamaru, Shizune, and herself had all checked up on her—this was just a fluke. A nightmare left over from her fainting spell, or moment of panic, or whatever.

Naruto's hand was still making soft circles at her back. "I've got to brush my teeth," she said finally.

"Mmkay," said her roommate, eyes still closed, stilling his hand. He kept it resting comfortably on her foot when she stood and brushed vigorously at the sink, plucking at her toes to tickle her, which she promptly kicked him for. He snickered. "Will you sleep alright?"

She looked at herself in the mirror. Hair a mess, hanging down in crippled waves to right above the curve of her breasts, quite plainly visible in a well-thieved old shirt of Naruto's—not that she could bring herself to care around her old friend, not anymore. She should cut her hair again. Her eyes roved, taking in the changes of the past couple of years: a more defined face, a light scar above her temple, and circles under her eyes left over from the mission. Her eyes were green and watchful. Her arms were strong, gripping the sink. She wrinkled her nose, made a face. "I'll be fine, Naruto, thanks."

Another "mmkay." He forced himself to his feet again and looked in the mirror with her. Grinned and placed his chin atop her head. "You're still so short, Sakura-chan."

"You've gotten less cute."

"Hey!"

She smirked and made to walk away, but at the last moment he snagged her in a hug from the back, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and dragging her back to the mirror. "Take a look," he said, softer than was customary for Naruto. "We're older."

She did look. He was smiling at the thought, as if he'd never really believed it would be the case—as if he was close to the life he'd imagined. Sakura supposed he was. The thought made a bubble of her breath, one that rose into the tips of her in a soft, pleasant way. "Better than the alternative," she said, and batted him away when he kissed the top of her head. "You're getting all romantic, baka, get off. Don't you have a girlfriend to woo?"

He followed her out of the bathroom and sighed. "It's more like wooing her father, really."

Sakura laughed. "Then if you do a successful job, you'll have wooed two Hyuugas for the price of one."

"I don't want to date Neji!" he joked. The whiskers turned up. Thank all the gods, all of them, for Naruto's smile. "Haah... g'night, Sakura-chan."

"Good night."

She closed the door and padded back to her bed; the clock read three-fifty AM. Determined not to re-vision her horrific nightmares and anxious to leave waking life with as pleasant an image as Naruto smiling at his doorknob and thinking of Hinata, who probably stood for no such visions of hell, Sakura passed a chakra-laden hand over her head, putting herself neatly and blessedly to sleep.

She woke up starving—unsurprising, considering her early-morning purge-fest—and late.

Tsunade wasn't happy about her tardiness. "What is the point, I ask you," she said testily, gripping her tea probably too tightly, "of asking me to wake up early for a morning meeting when you're not going to be here on time?"

Sakura huffed. "I'm ten minutes late, shishou, when did you even come into your office? Thirty seconds ago?"

"All the same. I think you've been spending too much time with your old teacher."

"I, also, get lost on the road of life."

"Oh, shut up," Tsunade said, but Sakura saw her suppress a smile. "Take a seat. Reports?"

"Nothing exceptional," Sakura answered, flipping through a paper-clipped packet, "and this is all second-hand, remember, I was away for four days. A couple civilians came in from travel emergencies—rogue nin, attacking merchants. That, at least, seems to be getting worse. They had guards with them and the rogues didn't press them, so they came in for shock more than anything else. Four nin came back from missions with minor injuries—two chuunin, one jounin, one from an ANBU mission. ANBU had a kunai in his hand, removed easy, no resting recovery time. The two chuunin had minor poisoning—gas, it says, nothing special." Sakura paused in her litany, briefly, but enough so that Tsunade flicked her eyes up. "Jounin was unconscious."

"From what?"

Fuck me, I can never trick her. Sakura shrugged. "Doesn't say. Fainted. Shizune checked it out and couldn't find anything."

Tsunade elegantly raised an eyebrow and leaned back in her chair. "A jounin fainted? What, pray tell, does a jounin have the right to faint for? That's not an acceptable reaction. That's genin-level stuff."

Sakura felt her mouth turn down at the corners. "You already know it was me, shishou, don't play."

Her mentor snickered. "But it's such fun! You think you can go to the hospital—as a patient—and not have word come back to me? Fool," she said fondly. "Shizune let me know as soon she was done looking at you."

Sakura sighed as her stomach made an angry growl. "What'd she say?"

With a shrug and a sip—"That she didn't see anything. You stood up too fast, maybe, or just had a moment after four days of work. It happens."

"It's embarrassing."

"Well, sure. But you work yourself too hard. It was only a matter of time before you conked out at some point."

But in the middle of a punch? Sakura wanted to ask. She pushed it aside. "Alright then. That's all for this week. Is there anything I should know about, pre-shift?"

Tsunade tapped a fingernail on the desk. "I don't think so. Hospital-specific, you'd have to ask Shizune. But I'm getting a little concerned about these rogues tailing the civilians. And even more concerned about the civs hiring guards from other villages. Why not ask for chuunin—or even a genin team? They'd probably be more use than sellswords."

"Don't they ask?"

"They don't. And we have some to spare. I think I'll start offering them as B-class missions. It'll be less for the merchants than what they pay their guards from out of town, so it should be attractive in that sense."

Sakura slid the week's report to Tsunade's side of the desk and stood to take her leave. This was a matter for a council. She wondered, briefly, if her parents hired shinobi when they left town. "That'll take a lot of shinobi out of the village all at once."

Tsunade smiled at her, maybe a little grimly. "Don't you know, Sakura," she said, "you don't have to think like we're still at war. I wouldn't leave the village unprotected just to force chuunin on our civilians. We do have a system for dispatching people on missions, you know."

Sakura blinked and chuckled at herself. "True. Sorry. I wasn't trying to say that you weren't prepared."

"Don't apologize," said the Legendary Sucker, waving her out the door. "It's hard to think, but you've never really lived out of war. This is your chance to learn what it's like before we get sucked up in another."

She was still tucking in her medic's shirt when she ran into Shikamaru. "Oof—sorry, Shika-san. Back already?"

He rubbed his stomach. "Eh... you might have to get a room for me after that. Did you know that your elbows are essentially kunai?"

She prodded him in the chest. "I can arrange a hospital room for you if you'd like."

"Yare, yare, always the threats." He raised his hands above his head surrender-style and she smiled too sweetly at him, continuing down the hallway. To her surprise, Shikamaru followed her fast clip, walking with an apparently lazy shuffle that somehow propelled him as quickly as she was going. "I'm getting Ino for an early lunch. So troublesome. She insists that we have 'family dinners.'"

"Hardly dinnertime."

"I'm getting to that," he said. "I slept through the last one—" Sakura snorted—"I know, but I did, so now I have to treat her to lunch."

"Oh, lunch." She sighed, pouted for emphasis. "My poor, empty stomach. No Chouji?"

"He's away. A-class to Suna at the behest of the Kazekage. Some kind of clan exchange."

"Oh, the behest?" Sakura laughed and turned around to face him, pulling on her gloves and pressing into the door to the recovery ward to open it. "How elegant."

"I've been writing a lot of diplomatic couriers for the Hokage," he said. "It's a pain in the ass."

"But it's done much to improve your vocabulary," she teased. He sighed, disengaging from the banter, and followed Sakura down the hallway lined with open doors, walls whitewashed. Peeking into the rooms he saw some shinobi sleeping—they'd take any chance they could get—as well as civilians reading or talking to family members. Sakura stopped at the only closed door, looked inside through the small, rectangular window on the door, and sighed, dropping her face back down. "Neji-san."

Shikamaru looked at her with raised eyebrows. "You don't like Hyuuga Neji?"

"No, no, he's fine, a good leader. Quite the gentleman," she said, inexplicably. "But as his medic…"

Shikamaru 'tch'd. "You're often on his ANBU team, that's right. Bet he doesn't ever stand to be treated on missions."

She giggled—a light sound that Shikamaru realized he rarely heard from her anymore, after everything. "At least you recognize that it's more 'troublesome' to wait to get home and die."

He snorted. "Thanks, I think. So what's wrong with the fearless leader today?"

Sakura gave him a look. "That's none of your business, Nara-san. Doctor-patient confidentiality." She checked the clipboard. "But, it looks like nothing serious. Routine checkup and rest following a long mission. Now get out of here, go have lunch. I'll see Ino after but give her hair a yank for me anyway."

"I won't," he said immediately. He paused—took the cigarette from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. "Do you want anything?"

Her hand was on the door. She glanced at him almost suspiciously. "Shikamaru, why are you being so nice?"

He tutted and looked like he was about to retort sarcastically; then he didn't. He looked at the ceiling instead. Probably looking for patterns in the tiles, Sakura thought, bemused. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

She blinked. "I'm fine."

Shikamaru mouthed his cigarette a little. Sighed. "Just checking up on a teammate. Don't have to be so defensive."

Sakura stared at him. "How much—" How much did I scare you? "Um."

He suddenly started walking away—that was so Shikamaru, just to shuffle past when he wanted to. She snarled at his back and he waved a hand in goodbye, not turning around. "I'll get something to bring back for you," he said, and before she could say "Th-thank you!" the door was swinging behind him.

Neji couldn't see her face, but he watched her hands—they were small, but limber, and obviously knew what they were doing. He wondered if she even thought about it anymore or if healing was now so natural that it had embedded in her memory, a physical code that she only had to tap into in order to work miracles.

This was the way their healing sessions usually went: silently. They'd have blazing arguments in the field—or quiet, terse ones, depending on where in the field—about him being treated at all. But when it got down to business, he respected that she knew what she was doing and she respected his insistence on privacy and peace. It was one of the key aspects of their occasional partnership, particularly in ANBU. He'd recently been informally named as the best ANBU squad leader to come to the fore in ten years, a fact of which he was not a little proud of, but he had to admit that his frequent appeals to the Hokage to get Haruno Sakura on his team were part of that honor. He hadn't lost a single team member since his idea to pull her onboard for difficult missions. After watching her save the life of the Kazekage and then having his own life saved by her quick thinking and skillful surgery in the war, not asking for her would have been foolish. And—somewhat surprisingly—the Hokage always accepted quite quickly. He'd known that Sakura's work at the hospital was very important, and he'd also had a sneaking suspicion that creating an 'ANBU medic' went completely against the Hokage's idea of what a medic should do, which was to stay alive. But Sakura had accepted the porcelain mask with a fierce smile and had worn it well over the past year, working closely with every revolving squad-member.

She spoke, jolting him out of his thoughts—not that he actually, physically jolted. "Can you keep a commentary on how this feels?" she murmured. "I'm going to go deeper into the muscle. You've got a tear here that needs fixing but I don't want to strain you."

He nodded, then remembered that she was bent over his left shoulder and wouldn't have seen. "Yes."

"Start now." She put a hand lightly on his back and he moved forward obligingly, leaning over his knees on the hospital bed. "Any pain?"

"None." It felt quite nice, actually. Her hands were cool on his skin but the sensation of chakra running over his muscles was something close to warmth. Very different from in the field, where it took on a heat, almost a sear, that was a little uncomfortable (although generally nothing compared to the injuries that warranted her touch). "A little now. An ache, not sharp." He supposed the difference was that here, in the hospital, she didn't have to conserve anything for fighting. She could temper and mold her chakra to one purpose only.

"That's a good thing," she said quietly. "I'm repairing the tear, but it'll be tender for a while. Did this hurt before?"

"Not that I noticed."

She snorted. "Well, pay more attention. It's not a little nick. It's close to a tenketsu, too. Sparring too heavily with Hinata?"

Neji frowned at his forearms. "Perhaps," he said in rare conversationalism. "I may have overreached to get away from her. She's becoming formidably fast."

He felt rather than saw Sakura's smile. "You have to get fast if you're gonna deal with Naruto." He stiffened and winced; the movement had forced Sakura's chakra deeper than it was supposed to go. "Neji-san! Don't move when I'm doing that, I could seriously hurt you!" She removed her chakra from his back and settled the other hand on his shoulder, gripping it firmly until he relaxed again. The warmth returned a moment later. "I wasn't insinuating anything bad," she chuckled. "I was talking about his kage bunshin."

"They've been sparring?"

"Er… of a sort." This time she removed her hand before he could turn around and face her, and this time she really laughed—laughed!—at his glare. "Neji, Neji-san, I'm kidding! I'm kidding, I'm sorry, you just—" She dissolved again into chuckles and smiled broadly at him. "They are sparring. Not like Naruto would ever land a punch on her."

"You're not being very professional," he complained, and even to him it sounded like whining, so he wasn't surprised when she rolled her eyes.

"You're haven't been very conversational," she retorted. "One more time. Relax. I'll be done in a second." For the third time, he felt the shimmering of her chakra in his shoulder. Medics, he thought absently, should enter into the massage business. Much more money in that, and a much more pleasant business. Shinobi were forever using their talents for one purpose. The smart ones 'retired' and made thousands providing services to civilians: personal guards, physical trainers, even business strategists. "Not to worry," Sakura was saying, her mouth positioned in the space between his ear and the bedframe. Her hair, up in a ponytail, was tickling his back distractingly, but he didn't say anything against it. "Naruto's so terrified of Hiashi-sama I doubt they've done much besides kiss yet."

"Haruno, please stop this conversation," he muttered, wishing only for silence. The comforting feeling of her chakra combined very oddly with the severely disturbing notion of Uzumaki Naruto kissing his cousin. "You are not helping."

"That is exactly what I'm doing," she said, withdrawing at last and wiping a hand on her forehead—she had been concentrating after all, apparently. "The more you get used to the idea—dare I say, the image—of Naruto giving your dear cousin mouth-to-mouth—"

"Hn."

"—the easier it'll be when you finally come across it in the streets."

"The streets?" He regretted the upward tilt to his tone immediately; she looked too pleased with herself. "Hiashi-sama would die on the spot."

Sakura, who'd had her fair share of encounters with the Hyuuga patriarch and his uncanny ability to unravel her temper completely, grimaced. "Maybe then he'd finally go to the damn hospital."

"Still wouldn't be willingly."

Sakura laughed again, shaking her head in wonder and making some notes on his file. "Neji-san! Did you just make a joke?"

He leaned back against the bedframe again and favored her with a small grin. "Probably not. How did it look?"

She reflected for a moment on how nearly dying can change a person; had she ever heard this man joke before the war? "It's fine back there. You need to be gentle on that left shoulder is all—just for a week or so, ice and rest and so forth. I'd still recommend that you stay in the hospital for another night—don't give me that look—just in case. You were gone for a long time."

"Am I not usually the one giving orders?"

She scowled at him. "You're not my taichou in here," she said menacingly, "and don't forget it. If I say you stay another night, stay another night. I'm giving you the minimum prescribed time for hospital rest after a high-intensity mission."

"Minimum sentence, you mean," he muttered when she turned back to the clipboard, hoping that she'd hear and make a big deal of it, but no dice. Neji assumed she wasn't in the mood, which was a shame, because hospital stays were tedious and arguments with Haruno Sakura at least tended to be interesting. "Before you leave."

"Mm?" she asked, tucking the clipboard back on the bedframe. She had what he considered the mild audacity to lean by the foot of his bed. He gestured to his eyes. "Oh! Right. Thanks for reminding me. Just a quick look, then." She scooted closer to him on the bed and placed two chakra-infused fingers at his temples; a thumb went softly to each cheekbone. She closed her eyes. "I'm ready when you are."

"Byakugan."

Through his kekkei genkai he saw her chakra move fluidly from place to place, darting like streams of rabbits. It always looked only jerky, chakra did, despite how it often manifested in attacks. The diamond at her forehead circulated a vast amount, compressed well but pulsing with energy. He wondered if she got headaches, looking at her face, which was screwed up in concentration as her chakra traveled to his optic nerve, to the engorged veins around his eyes, over the retina—always a weird sensation—and then back again. He deactivated as she removed her hands. "It all looks fine," she said, frowning, not really noticing him. "I wonder, then, what it is about the Sharingan—I mean, there's no wear on your visual system, none at all—but it's very interesting, you know, I can see exactly what changes are being made in the way the sensory input goes to the brain. It's almost like your chakra splits the signal so it goes in two different directions from the nerve—I wonder why you don't get visions or hallucinations—"

She was awfully close, one hand at her chin in thought and the other resting on his shoulder from where she'd dropped it from his temple, and Neji looked at her, interested in her medical meanderings until he saw something hard and angry flit across her face. Her eyes seemed to literally darken, and her face set; her hand on his shoulder gripped a little tighter. Lost in a bad thought, he told himself, and coughed delicately. "Sakura-san, I don't think this looks particularly professional, either."

"Hm?" Sakura looked up and he got a face-full of green; she nearly brushed noses with him. Letting out a noise that sounded something like "gleep!" Sakura sprang back. She stood, admirably stonefaced despite the shock of their proximity and no traces remaining of her curiously hardened eyes of just seconds ago. "Apologies, Neji-san. Thanks for letting me do that with the Byakugan. It's awfully instructive."

"Of course. The family is anxious to see your reports on it."

"It's funny that kekkai genkai users know so little about how it all works," she murmured, gathering her things from the counter opposite his bed. "No offence."

"None taken. Nara is outside, by the way," Neji intoned. "Presumably waiting for you."

"How did you—ah." She tapped her temple. "Magic eyes."

"Quite."

"Well, good," she said, walking towards the door. "I'm starving. Rest, Neji-san. I'll come in again tomorrow morning and spring you from your cell."

"Hn."

"And I'll take that as a goodbye!" She pushed the door open and he saw her grin widely, clutching her stomach. "Shika-san, you're a prince among men, thank you so much—"

"Yare, yare, it's just a bento—"

Neji watched the door swing closed, and open, and closed again, pendulum-like, until Sakura's voice faded down the hall.