It was only a job, but as Sakura walked into the stark hospital room she felt a strange warmth. It wasn't white, the room, more an off color orange in the fractured light of the early morning. She glanced at the patient.

Long lashes were pressed against tanned cheeks, strangely feminine beneath the mass of eyebrow. His face, normally distorted by rabid enthusiasm, was quiet and undisturbed by dreams. He looked sad almost, careworn. Sharpish cheekbones, but smooth, young skin, not dark, but a warm color, pale now with sickness. His body too was smooth, skin pale but still warmer than hers. Muscles were tight and well-formed, full of health, the shape not marked by a single deformity other than the occasional faded scar.

Very healthy, she thought. Unusually healthy. She was tempted to run her hand down his body to confirm it. Tempted a little to trace with her thumb the curve of his jaw.

Nice, she thought. Rare. When called upon as a physician she liked to think she separated emotion from her work. She had a good reason to think so: she was a renowned physician. So it didn't matter that she knew the man, that she'd spoken to him and been unspeakably annoyed with him. With absolute detachment she ran her long white fingers over his chest.

She caught sight of a thin, snakelike scar that ran along his side and traced it, her hand eventually resting, flat-palmed, on his sternum. He shifted slightly beneath her but didn't wake. She glanced at him uneasily, and then turned to her healing.

She closed her eyes and cleared her mind completely.

It was like a glass of water being emptied or an hourglass turning over. Thoughts flowed, siphoning off into nothingness and evaporating. There was nothing; no beginning or end. And in that emptiness the energy was tapped from the source in her body. It sparked hot in her chest and spread, burning, through her arm. At her fingertips it paused as though it met a barrier. She forced it a little, and it was like a dam bursting. It rushed in and she felt it drawn to the abdomen. Tentatively moving now, it enveloped a tiny weakness in the intestine, bringing it together whole again, knitting flesh and sinews together. Thin tendrils of chakra reached out to explore the other organs, pausing to envelop and heal some of the more serious tears.

The damage was reparable.

The streams of energy slithered around the body and suddenly drew back as though confronted by a blazing heat. A mass of fire burned there, pulsing and throbbing like a living sun, too hot to touch.

It was an accident. She hadn't meant to touch it, but it had its own eerie kind of gravity. It surged, it shot through her body. Her own tiny threads of chakra tensed and clumped together, trying to gather enough strength to resist. It was far stronger than her; it was ravenous; it was consuming. Like a mass of tiny snakes, her own chakra writhed in agony. Slowly, very slowly, the fiery mass curved inward, like an amoeba taking its prey, and encircled the feeble pulse. The sensation of being sucked in, of being embraced, filled her. She struggled violently until it burned away the need to struggle. She felt herself slipping.

Another part of her body, the conscious part, continued to resist. Her physical body twitched and her breathing grew heavy. The skin on the palm of her hand had grown red.

The burning heat, sweet and irresistible, fading into heat, a helpless engulfing warmth. Wanting to immerse itself, the core called more energy from her body.

Now beads of cold sweat stood out on her brow, her eyes still closed tightly. Her skin grew pale and clammy.

Darkness, flames dissolving into darkness, falling, Immersing, merging. Like a drop of water sizzles into steam, so did her soul begin to dissolve. Closer, closer, the flames engulfing her now. Now even against the black of her eyelids she could see herself being extinguished.

A strange sort of longing filled her. She wanted to be consumed. Burnt to ashes in this blaze. The wonderful furnace raged all around her now. Soft pops and sizzles assailed her ears. Was her skin already burning? She could no longer feel him against her hand. She had no hands. Wisps of hair fluttered before her eyes. Embers flew every which way. She felt them settle on her, felt the scorching and wrinkling of her skin.

She had no legs. There was nothing to stand on in the darkness. No voice, no ears, no eyes. Where there should have been sight there was only a vague perception of red.

Now her hair was gone; she could no longer feel it. She was a disembodied head, floating faceless in space. The flames raged on, and soon even that began to fade away.

"SAKURA!!"

There was a burst of green light and suddenly she was lying on the floor of the hospital room.

Shizune turned and slapped her hard.

"What the hell were you doing!?"

Sakura stared at her dazedly. Shizune, her face set in anger, turned to the patient and quickly began running a diagnostic check. Her eyes widened, and she uttered a little gasp of fear and shock.

Sakura remained there, hair straggly, eyes dull, in the corner of the room. She felt very tired and cold. And she felt…empty. That was the word for it. It was as though she had been deprived of something. She felt empty. Soft and fragile like ashes. Her skin was still a horrible clammy gray.

Apparently satisfied now with the results of the examination, Shizune turned to the small, lifeless being lying on the floor.

"You little fool," she snarled. "Didn't you know how dangerous it is to come in contact with a person's life force?" Sakura looked back at her dully." You could have extinguished his life force. You could have killed him!"

He could have killed me.

"You're just lucky that didn't happen this time." Sakura nodded. Shizune looked at her doubtfully.

"Sakura… maybe you need to take a break or something. I'm going to ask Tsunade-hime to take you off hospital duty." Sakura seemed to recover a little.

"W-wait," said Sakura franticly. "I'm okay. It was just an accident." With sudden force, she stood up. "I'm perfectly capable," she said, looking Shizune straight in the eyes.

Shizune laughed gently.

"You're barely standing," she said, and as if to illustrate her statement, Sakura's knees gave out and she pitched forward. It was only by chance that she caught the edge of the bedside table and stopped the fall.

Shizune glanced down at her and then offered her hand. Sakura took it, and Shizune saw that she was shaking badly.

Quietly, without any resistance Sakura allowed herself to be led out of the room. She felt tired. She felt exhausted. Her footsteps sounded on the cracked linoleum floor, echoing loudly thorough the hall. A part of her brain woke to life, trying desperately to cope with what had happened. Trying to think, trying to rationalize. Sly strands of chakra mixed with these thoughts, slinking in between the fibers. Silently, without warning, the memory was repressed.

Sakura began her Monday with a walk. It was an early morning habit, not mind-bendingly interesting or exciting. It just helped to keep her sane. She liked the feel of the dewy grass on her bare feet, liked the smell of the pre-dawn quiet. And yes, quiet was a smell. It was a taste too. In a strange way, it didn't exist, so it could be anything.

It almost felt as though she were floating as her feet carried her away from the village. Through the mountains ran a small obscure trail, tree-lined and grassy. The trees thinned as she climbed further up the mountain, but the grass remained ever thick and soft. It wasn't a particularly difficult trek, only long. After some time, the slope leveled out. She always started early, waking maybe at four. She needed to get there before the sun rose.

She was almost on time, for the sun was just peeking over the edge of the horizon when she reached the top. Normally she liked to get there a little before, so she could watch light spill over and bathe the clouds in a rosy glow. But even so, it didn't matter. As the sun rose, a cool breeze blew and she inhaled deeply, knowing that she, of all the people in Konoha, had been the first to be touched by the sun.

*~*~*~

The trip down was less enjoyable, because by now her stomach was rumbling. And the day had already become hot. It was summer after all. She liked this, the warmth, the heat, the sudden explosion of smells, not all pleasant. It bothered her a little though when she spotted the dingy off-white building that was Konoha's hospital. That had been unfair. Shizune needn't have taken her off the staff just because of a minor infraction. Come to think of it, what had she done? She had a dim recollection of a patient with black hair. Black, and a weird warm feeling. A soft pulsing. Oh she thought suddenly.

She looked up at the person she'd bumped into. "Sakura!" said Genma. "Heard you got fired."

She shoved him, not hard, but with enough force behind it to show that she could hurt him if she wanted. "Who told you that?" she said. What sneaky, conniving person had fed her business to the second biggest rumor-mill in Konoha?

"Ino." Ah the first biggest.

"Don't worry," he said, flashing a smile that made him look surprisingly handsome. "You won't be idle long. Got an important mission coming up with yours truly."

Oh, she thought again. Really? She'd been expecting one to come up actually. What had really caught her attention was Genma's boyish enthusiasm. Wasn't he usually a little more together? More cool and collected?

"Will Shizune be with us, too?" she asked, perhaps a little too obviously.

"Ahaha. No. Nice try though." he said. "She's not really my type. In fact," he said, leaning a little forward, "There's some one—" He stopped abruptly, looking confused. He looked as though he'd meant to say something else entirely.

"Some one else?" offered Sakura helpfully. Genma shook his head, his expression worried. Unconsciously, he took out a senbon from his bag and placed it in his mouth.

"No, it's just, I had the weirdest feeling just now. Like I was repeating myself." He shook his head again. "Sakura, your hair."

"Huh? What about it?" She ran her hands through it nervously. "Is there something in it?"

"No, no," he said. "It's just … distracting. Pink. It's too pink."

What?

"Forget about it. It's nothing, it's nothing. Say hi to Kakashi-kun for me, huh?" He turned back and waved at her before disappearing into the crowd.

What? Too pink? Nobody'd told her that before. Self-consciously, she ran her hands through her hair again. What was he on? she thought, so confused that she walked straight into the nearest store, just to get her bearings.

It turned out, luckily, to be a book store.

Inside it was cool and dark. The store was empty of customers. She felt suddenly for her wallet and, yes, she'd remembered to bring it. She felt calmer because of it and realized that, a couple of novels would probably be good for her soul. Lovelorn romance and whatnot. She browsed quickly through the shelves, not really paying attention to author or genre. Out of habit, she picked a novel she'd read before, just because she was so bad at guessing at an author's merit. Wasn't there a saying, "Better a known evil than an unknown one?" She brought up her selections (three books) to the counter.

The girl at he register looked at her strangely.

"Having trouble? You know, I've got something you'll like…" The girl pulled out a book from the shelf behind her and held it out to Sakura. So surprised was she by this assertiveness on the part of the other girl that she took the book without any protest and paid for it.

"Hey," said the girl. "Aren't you going to look at it?" Sakura turned and looked back at her; she was already at the door.

"Nope," she said. "I trust you." She didn't really, but it seemed like a better thing to say than, 'your aggressive marketing tactics caught me at an off moment.'

*~*~*~

There was an increasing pain in her chest as the Hokage briefed her. It was Anbu level: an S-class mission. Her mouth felt dry and she nervously tugged at her shirt. At the center of the Fire country, a small but vital group of interconnected villages were slowly being starved out. Supplies to the area had been cut. All trade had ceased. Farmers' carts, laden with produce, went there and came back with neither produce nor farmer.

Sakura nodded grimly in acknowledgement of the tense situation. All the leaders blamed each other, some accusing outright, some quietly insinuating. In the end, thought Sakura, it might turn out to be nothing more than just a group of bandits. Something told her though, that this was the work of ninja.

There was not much for her team to do but investigate quietly and to return for further instructions.

"So team seven will be doing just that," said Tsunade. I understand that Naruto is too ill to be moved so, we'll just have to make do."

"Nobody makes do with out me!" Enter Naruto, irate-looking and heavily bandaged. He turned to Sakura. "You'd seriously leave me out of such an important mission?" Both Sakura and Tsunade sighed, knowing that there was nothing they could possibly do to stop him.

"Right, right,"said Tsunade. "Just go."

"All right! I won't let you down," he said cheerily.

"By the way," said Sakura, a thought occurring to her. "Who's our leader for this mission?"

"Yamato."

*~*~*~

Darkness swallowed them

Hunting at night was Sakura's ultimate fear. The forest pressed close on either side of them, an immense suffocating blackness. The night was cloudy, better for their cover but…

Yamato pressed a reassuring hand to her back. She couldn't see his face, just the shadowed indentations where his eyes were and the general outline of his face. Behind them she could just barely hear Naruto and Sai making their way through the bushes.

They stood at the edge of Mikazuki, the most important village in all of the Land of Fire, its economic center. Its mines produced the precious iron ore that just barely bound the country together.

There was no sign of activity in the city. No lights were lit, no people walked the streets. An awful silence hung over it, as though it had been swept by an epidemic.

She felt cold.

Yamato motioned to the others and Sakura's body grew taut with fear. She didn't like this place. But there was no choice.