Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, or any of the characters therein. I do not make any money from writing fanfiction.
Author's Note:
Boom. New story. Yeah, I'm surprised too.
It was a beautiful night. A full moon cast liquid silver over the gardens and a soft breeze gently stirred flower petals, filling the air with their delicate sent. The summer night was cool, calm, and tranquil.
And Sakura was fucking bored.
With a deep snort of disgust Sakura slammed her window shut and turned to face her dingy little office. How dare everything look so perfect when she was stuck working? Was it too much to ask for a nice long bought of miserable rain? She flopped down into her patched-up swivel chair and moodily started playing with a pen.
It wasn't that Sakura didn't like her job; quite the opposite was true. Healing was her calling and she knew it. It was what had spurned her to become a better ninja and to be not just able to pull her own weight, but a serious mother-fucking asset to any team she was placed on. Not that she had a permanent team, what with Sasuke still not ready to return to the village after his brother's death and Naruto off training with Killer Bee. But her current duties as a head of the emergency ward came with a shit-ton of paper work and some really god-awful hours.
She looked over at her desk. The piles of paperwork loomed higher than she could ever remember them looming. Seriously, were scrolls able to breed?
She stared down the mountains of paperwork gloomily. This wasn't what she was meant for. She had taken the post for the experience – and an experience it certainly had been – but these days for every hour she spent doing hands-on healing, she spent four doing paperwork and wading though the bureaucratic mess that was Konoha's medical system.
She rubbed her tired eyes and glanced at the clock. Three-fifteen in the morning. She still had another four hours and forty-five minutes to go until she could go home and collapse into bed.
Resigning herself to another lonely night of boredom, Sakura slumped forwards and opened the first scroll on the pile. The numbers on the clock slowly changed as the room's lonely light burned on. Hers was the only window illuminated on that floor of the hospital wing.
Around two tedious hours later Sakura's concentration was broken by the loud ring of her telephone. That was unusual. Not unheard of, mind you, but unusual. Sometimes rookie medics hailed her down so she could find the paperwork that they had lost, or sign a form that could have been slipped into her mailbox or something else that could definitely have waited until her rounds the next day.
With a long suffering sigh Sakura dropped her pen and picked up the receiver.
"Hel –"
"Sakura-senpai!" a young voice wailed out of the earpiece in near hysterics. A tumultuous bumble of people running about and panicked voices filled the background. Cringing, Sakura moved the receiver a little farther away from her ear, but the blind panic in the voice at the other end made her answer sharply.
"What is it?"
"Men came in. It's, it's... They're wearing m–"
"Where are you?" she cut in sharply.
"Ward four"
"I'll be right down." Her heart was decided to do double-time. Had there been any teams scheduled back tonight? "Keep everyone calm and follow procedure."
There was no answer.
"Hello?" She waited a heartbeat. "Did you hear me?"
A different voice answered. This one was calm, male, and deathly quiet.
"Remain where you are."
The receiver clicked and the phone went dead. Sakura was rooted to the spot, the dial tone filling the office. Woah. Jeeze. Stay where she was? Who did that person think he was? Although her position demanded that she work in all four emergency wards, she was assigned to ward four. That was her ward.
Scrambling up, Sakura threw on her white medic's coat with the head medic insignia on the back and raced out the door, not bothering to lock it behind her.
She had expected to find ward four in chaos. She had expected to find a team (or teams) of injured soldiers bleeding out on the floor, nurses running around barking orders, administering bandages and healing those they could. Failing that, she had expected to have to deal with a gaggle of inexperienced medics who had never seen a brain peeking through a cracked skull or bones protruding out of some poor sod's chest before.
What she didn't expect was to find silence.
The ward was empty. At least it seemed so, so far.
Unnerved, Sakura darted forward, peering into rooms as she went. Emergency surgery? Empty. Waiting room? Empty. Break room? Deserted. Reception desk? Not a soul in sight.
Where the hell is everyone? She wondered. The sound of her shoes on the polished floor filled the room up to the ceiling.
Something was wrong. Something was massively wrong. There was always staff on. The emergency ward never closed, not even on Christmas. Binders were open, charts half filled... Here and there papers were scattered on the floor as if someone as dropped them in surprise and then not bothered to pick them up.
This was crazy. Whatever had happened to the staff, Sakura had to contact someone to get some backup to figure out just what the hell had happened. There had been plenty of people in the room five minutes ago, she was sure of it. She had heard them over the phone.
She spotted a phone on the wall and ran over, slipping a little on some loose papers on the way.
No such luck. The phone was dead; not even a dial tone met her ear. Slamming the phone down in frustration, Sakura turned to stomp away to go get someone herself.
But something made her pause.
One of the papers that she had slipped on had flipped over when she had regained her footing.
There was a dirty boot print on it.
I chill went down Sakura's spine. The ward seemed even quieter than possible. Her little flats weren't that big nor were they dirty. She crept closer, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up in alarm before she even knew why.
The print wasn't from a standard issue Konoha boot.
Mind flying a mile a minute, Sakura made some quick decisions.
Someone (or someones her mind interjected) who were most likely not from Konoha had been in here. There were no other signs of them being there, so they had been careful to leave no trace of their presence lest a casual onlooker pass by and raise an alarm. They had kidnapped (or killed, her mind whispered to her again) the entire medical team that had been on that night. True, it had been a skeletal staff, but the trespassers had to have been incredibly skilled to have neutralized all the medics before even one had let off a jutsu in self-defence.
Questions such as why infiltrate a hospital ward? and had other areas of the village been infiltrated? raced through her mind before one thought overwhelmed them all.
She had slammed that receiver down pretty damn hard.
Five minutes, now probably six or seven, wasn't that long. If there was someone left in the ward, they definitely would have heard her by now. She had to get out now if she was going to get out all.
She mentally flicked through her options. It would be unwise to go back the way she came in case someone had been following her since they heard her come in. She would walk right into them. To get out the other exit she would have to walk through the entire ward, giving someone ample opportunity to attack or ambush her. She was confident in her combat skills, but she didn't want to take on the enemy not knowing how many there were or how they had managed to defeat the entire medical team and move them to wherever they were. That left the exit into the hospital greenhouse. It wasn't far, and if she could get there she could make it to the Hokage Tower and find somebody to raise an alarm... after she had lined her pockets with a few fresh poisons in case anywhere else in village had been attacked, that is.
Right, it was time to get down to business. She had a medical team relying on her and a duty to perform. A secret thrill ran though her stomach; it had been too long since she had been on a mission that posed any real danger.
She quickly masked her chakra to make her harder to follow. Now whoever was following her would know that she knew she was being followed, but it still beat being a sitting duck. She siphoned off a bit more chakra to create a cushion of invisible resistance under her feat. The cushion would muffle all noise that her feet made, a trick she learned from Tsunade. Only people with uncanny chakra control could use this technique flawlessly while maintaining a chakra mask. Her tail would have a hard time pursuing her as she sprinted along without letting his chakra mask slip or making some noise. She, however, could sprint along like a gazelle while making as much noise as an owl gliding through the night.
Which she promptly did.
Right. Left. Peek around both corners. Straight. The exit was just up the next hallway. Sakura had taken two steps down the hall when the tinkle of a glass vial breaking froze every muscle in her body. It had come from up ahead. Two doors down, the medical storage room was open just a crack. She heard nothing else.
Did she dare risk searching the room with her chakra to figure out how many people were in there? Doing so while keeping her chakra masked and maintaining the cushion under her feet was within her ability, but it still came with risks. If one of the ninjas in the room was a sensory type, even if her chakra was masked there was a possibility he could be tipped off to her presence if her chakra touched him at this close of range. She could just run past the door. But what if they got away? They would have next to no intelligence on these people. The whole situation was so bizarre. What could they possibly want in the supply room anyway? This can't have been why they broke in.
She would risk it. She had to. With extreme caution she sent a tendril of chakra forward.
There were two people in the room and they were scurrying around a lot. What the heck were they trying to find? Intrigued, Sakura leaned closer to the wall and scooted up the hallway, intent on overhearing them. Just as she drew level with the door, her eyes flew wide and her heart gave a painful pump as the edge of her chakra flared, alerting her to a masked presence behind her far too late.
Her muscles tensed as a needle went into the back of her neck and everything went black.
One thing was for certain; her paperwork wasn't going to get done tonight.
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