Author's Note: I'm trying to keep myself to a weekly update schedule. We'll see how that goes. This week almost didn't happen. This chapter was intended to be longer, but it's kind of a monster and I think this was a good place to end it.

Beware, for ahead lies pseudo-medical crap. Some of it is stuff I actually know, some of it is wikipedia'd, and some of it is simply made up. There's a brief explanation of medical jargon at the end of the chapter.

I forgot to mention this, but I don't own Naruto. I own this idea, though, so don't steal it ;P

But What Of The Physician, Hippocrates?

Chapter 1

When Sakura reached the stream, she forgot modesty entirely and started pulling off all her clothes. She deliberately ignored the fact that anyone could find her in her altogether, and while she was convinced her teammates wouldn't dare approach her less friendly people might, and then she'd have to fight naked, and wouldn't that be embarrassing?

Then again, if they were male, she might be able to count on the blood rushing out of their head so fast they fainted.

The image caused her to snort in amusement despite herself, and she set her clothes to the side and slid into the water. The water just brushed the base of her ribcage, so she hunkered down on her haunches. Okay, she hadn't forgotten modesty entirely.

The brook was run-off from the mountains, and so it was cold but clear. It was exactly what she wanted. The frigid water stimulated her skin in a way that reminded her she was flesh and blood as it rushed past, and she relished the feeling of her body bracing against the surprisingly strong current. It made her feel strong and in control, and these were things she'd been having trouble finding in herself lately.

She scowled, submerging her face down to her mouth and blowing bubbles into the water. Stupid Sai. He just had to bring up the one thing she'd been trying to escape.

Sakura liked to think that it had to do with the stress. She wasn't lying when she told Sai that she, on a more or less weekly basis, performed high-level jutsu that very few people had the control and discipline to master. On a daily basis she had to use more jutsu than anyone she knew did when they weren't out on a mission. Most ninja knew how to break things, and break them well, but to know how to fix them was another matter entirely. Medics were presented with a thousand broken pieces and were expected to put them back into a whole. Sakura danced with death so often that her footsteps were sure and practiced and routine, and whether she won or lost there was always another chorus to be honored. So it was understandable if she got a little stressed out at times, right?

But if Sakura was really honest with herself—and she thought she was, but often she wasn't—she knew she could handle the stress. She thrived in adversity. She had to. What she couldn't handle, because it was simply so mind-boggling, was that she was sometimes in more danger treating patients than she was on missions.

It was something she had been completely unprepared for. Oh sure, she had anticipated poisoned shinobi lashing out at their hallucinations. She expected them to thrash powerfully when they were in tremendous amounts of pain. She knew they could get belligerent on some medications.

It was hospital policy that ANBU be present for all procedures involving Jonin-level or higher or ANBU ninja, because terrible accidents could happen when treating walking weapons that were not fully cognizant of their surroundings. They had happened. But she was no small matter to be dealt with herself and between these assurances she had thought she'd be fine.

These policies did not extend to Genin or Chunnin, however.

Genin she had very little to worry about, for the most part. For one thing they rarely sustained serious enough injuries to be rendered incapacitated or delirious, and for another they were not well trained enough to land a hit on her. When one trained to avoid Princess Tsunade's iron fists, one becomes rather quick enough to avoid even an unanticipated attack.

Chunnin, however, were another story. They were exempt from the policy because the resources could not be spared, and they were not seen as being capeable enough to cause significant damage. Even Sakura had—very, very briefly—gone about treating them with this confidence, with a blasé and superior attitude she was ashamed to look back on. She figured, because she was a Jonin, and because they were not, and because she had been trained by one of the Sannin, that they would be no trouble.

Really, she should have known better. Had she really forgotten that she, herself, had killed a member of the Akatsuki—perhaps the most dangerous criminal organization in the world—against all expectations of her? Had she truly forgotten that underestimating any shinobi could be very last thing you ever did?

Apparently, she had, and she was in for a very rude awakening one day.

It came when she was eighteen. The day after she was made Jonin she went into work with the hangover of the century, but she grinned for hours in spite of the awful feeling. This time, this promotion, was different from the last one. This was better. This was something shared. Yes, she had celebrated her promotion to Chunnin, but not with the people who mattered most.

Naruto wasn't there to yell and cheer like a total dork when she was panting so hard, staring at her opponent, that it hurt. Kakashi wasn't there to put a heavy hand on her shoulder when she was exhausted and triumphant and tell her that even though he couldn't claim that he'd thought when they were twelve that she would be Team Seven's first Jonin, he could say that he now knew she deserved it the most. Sasuke wasn't there, either time, but Sai was and when he came up to her after she'd gotten patched up and told her she'd done well, Ugly, she smiled and wrapped her arms around him and knew he wasn't a replacement, he was better, because he always meant what he said.

More importantly, they weren't together to get roaring drunk afterwards. Well, Kakashi didn't drink. But watching Sai babble in a slurred, inebriated way about every person that passed their table was more than enough to compensate for that. To that very day she was grateful to Naruto for… well, doing whatever he did to get their teammate intoxicated for the first time. She was a little fuzzy on the details.

The next day, through the headache and the nausea she felt like she could walk on air. She felt powerful. She felt invincible. So she went about all her duties—even the most disgusting ones—with a blend of confidence and bliss that frankly weirded out the nurses. Anyone who whistled while changing bedpans could not be normal.

Shizune approached her, looking somewhat harried, somewhere near the middle of the day with a file in her hand. "Sakura, I'm having a bit of trouble with this case. Would you mind taking a look at this patient and giving me your input?"

Please. She could take on anything today. Whichever Akatsuki member was causing them the most problems, she was all over that. Where was Uchiha Itachi? Bastard wouldn't even know what hit him. "No problem," she said, taking the file and stumbling over a trash bin, upsetting it with a hollow clatter, as she turned around.

She heard Shizune sigh behind her. "Tsunade's rubbing off on you," she remarked in a dismayed tone of voice. Sakura was in a rather magnanimous mood, so she pretended she hadn't heard that.

She scanned through the file as she walked up the stairs to the second floor. Hyuuga Himori. 26. Chunnin. Male. Transverse fracture of the diaphysis of the humerus. Hairline fracture of the phalanx. One-inch deep kunai wound between the 9th and 10th ribs. Those were all standard fare for mission injuries. She pushed open the stairwell door and walked down the hall. Torsion of ACL. That was common of Hyuuga who attempted techniques like Hakkesho Kaiten without fully mastering it. Pretty much run-of-the-mill stuff, although he was going to be in for a while with that ACL injury. What was Shizune concerned about?

Her eyes skipped down the file. Boring, boring, boring—oh. Unidentified purple-colored rash on the neck and chest. Huh. That was different. That was where she'd start.

Sakura pushed open the door to the patient's private room. (He was Hyuuga, after all, and they were rich enough not to have to share). "Good afternoon, Hyuuga-san," she said, her attention still on his file. She didn't receive a reply, but this didn't really concern her. She walked over to the bed and her attention shifted from his file to the monitors he was hooked up to, going through a mental checklist of symptoms that could be connected to a rash. Nothing told her much. Heart rate and blood pressure were normal. O2 levels were a little low, but certainly not low enough to cause too much concern. She placed his file down and finally looked at her patient.

Sakura was of the opinion that if you saw one Hyuuga, you've got a pretty basic layout for the features of all of them. Himori did little to change this view. He looked a lot like Neji, but his hair was shorter he didn't have the hard, unforgiving, slightly haunted look around his eyes that marked the clan's prodigy. He was awake, but he wasn't looking at her. He didn't seem to be looking at anything, really—like he was thinking about something miles away. Sakura considered him, sorting through his symptoms, but she had a fractured picture at best. Several theories introduced themselves and then were rejected. Was it a disease? But little seemed to have been affected aside from his skin. His body was, in general, functioning normally. Allergy, perhaps? It would have to have been very recently formed (it wasn't in his file), but allergies were rare among shinobi. Chakra helped regulate immune response. Could he have been poisoned? Not likely; most poisons were introduced through an infected weapon breaking the skin, and whoever had treated him when he came in would have noticed marks on his skin around the point of entry, treated him and made a note of it.

Something buzzed in the back of Sakura's head, like an idea she hadn't considered. Sakura frowned. Was she missing something? But when she tried to coax it out into the open it refused budge, so she shrugged. Probably it was just another headache. She seriously needed some coffee.

She returned her attention to her patient. "Well, Hyuuga-san, I need to have a look at that rash of yours," she told him. The man gave a little start, as if having just realized she was there, and finally turned his attention on her.

"Who are you?" he asked.

This was where, when she looked back on it, she should have been tipped off. Konoha ninja knew who she was. It came with being Tsunade's prized apprentice. If you knew who the Hokage was, you knew who Haruno Sakura was, and if you knew who Haruno Sakura was you could identify her on sight—there was nothing subtle about her appearance. If she wasn't on a shift or a mission she was with Tsunade, helping with paperwork or fielding Council members' concerns or generally doing whatever the Godaime didn't want to do or didn't have time for. If Shizune was Tsunade's right hand, Sakura was most certainly her left. For a member of the Hyuuga clan—a very prominent family, and therefore in the Hokage's business a lot—to look her in her distinctive features and ask who she was—well, something was off.

Apparently, none of this occurred to her. Later on, she wasn't sure what to blame: her hangover or her euphoria or modesty or just being plain stupid, but nothing seemed to connect the way it should have. So instead of being put on her guard, she smiled and said, "I'm Haruno Sakura, Hyuuga-san. I'm here to find out what's up with that rash of yours. If you'll excuse me, I'll have to open your shirt up a little to have a look." And she proceeded to do just that; she untied the first and second ties of his standard hospital-issue shirt and exposed his chest to her scrutiny.

She wasn't sure it could be qualified as a rash. It was purple, certainly, but the skin was neither raised nor did it look raw. It also didn't cover area like a rash. It appeared to start at his neck, and spread in dusky tendrils down and across the upper part of his chest, spidery little fingers of it reaching off towards his arms, down toward his solar plexus. If she didn't know any better, she'd say that looked like… Curious, she focused chakra to her hand to take a better look, but she never made it that far.

Lightning fast, her wrist was caught in a hard grip and her chakra flow was abruptly broken. She gave a cry of alarm and looked up to his face.

He'd activated his Byakugan.

You could never differentiate a Hyuuga's pupil from his iris in its rest state. Only when the weapon was activated could you sort of tell the difference, and right now, Himori's eyes were so dilated they nearly pushed out the iris entirely.

Right then everything clicked into place. He'd inhaled poison. What he had wasn't a rash—she was seeing the poison spread down his respiratory system and outward along the blood vessels. And now he was hallucinating.

Oh, shit! But it was far too late. Before she had even the slightest chance to react she was thrown across the room, slamming into the wall and knocking the breath right out of her.

Pain exploded behind her eyes—her brain did not appreciate being jostled when it was already hurting—and for a few precious second she was completely disoriented. Through the haze she heard the screaming of his monitors, and when she was able to focus again she saw he'd launched from the bed, ripping out his IVs, and only her reflexes saved her from his palm hitting her full in the face. She flattened onto the ground and he hit the wall; she could feel the plaster shudder and crack from the impact. She tried to get standing but only just managed to scramble away on her hands and feet as he made a swipe for her.

And now she'd backed herself into a corner. Literally. Fuck. Himori whirled toward her and his eyes were all blazing intent and she had to defend herself. She stood up quickly and raised her fists, ready to fight, always ready to fight. But something in her reminded her that he was her patient and he was badly injured, and the medic in her balked and reminded her she was to do no harm. She slipped out of her stance, lowering her arms. For a moment, she hesitated.

Her indecision was all he needed, and he lunged for her. Because fight was currently in limbo, flight kicked in, but a half a step back and she'd hit the wall and he was under her defense and his palm was aimed straight at her heart, and she had a brief memory of her first Chunnin exams and she could see death coming for her, white-eyed and delusional, and—

And suddenly he wasn't there anymore. Someone—some Jonin she'd seen in the hall, probably visiting a friend—had grabbed him from behind and was currently wrestling with him. Himori was thrashing wildly as her rescuer immobilized his arms, locking them in his own behind the Hyuuga's back. Other people were rushing in, and she saw a nurse jab a needle into his arm and he went still, and then he was blocked from her sight by the mass of bodies suddenly filling the room. There was shouting, she dully noted, and the monitors were still going crazy, but it all seemed to wash together in a blur of noise.

The terror she hadn't realized gripped her fled her body in one swift rush, and she collapsed to her knees, her heart hammering from the adrenaline.

"Sakura!" came a voice, clearly through the buzz, and she looked up to see Shizune's anxious face. The older woman knelt down in front of her. "Are you all right?"

Sakura drew in a couple of shaky breaths. "I'm," she started, but no voice went into the word. She tried to speak again, but again nothing came out, so she tried to stand, but she was trembling too hard and she fell back down.

Shizune hauled her to her feet and dragged her from the room, supporting the brunt of the young woman's weight. Sakura stumbled down the hall with the other kunoichi's help and was deposited into a seat in the hall. Probative chakra was in Shizune's hand in an instant, and she checked her heart, her head, and scanned through the younger woman's body, checking for damage.

Finally she stopped, and she breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, you're okay, mostly," she said. Sakura nodded dully. She'd tried to say this before, but her voice had apparently taken a field trip. "What happened?"

Sakura took several long, deep breaths, and Shizune waited for her to calm down. When she stopped shaking, Sakura spoke. "He was poisoned. He inhaled it somehow. He was delusional, didn't know who I was, so he attacked me," she replied, trying to remain clinical and largely failing.

Shizune sucked in a breath. "Alright," she said. "I'll take care of this. You need to lie down. Doctor's orders," she said as Sakura opened her mouth to protest, "so no arguing. Go the call room. I'll find you in a little bit."

And then she was off down the hall, shouting orders. A large part of her (that stubborn, battle-hungry part of her) wanted to disobey, to dive right back in and help, but the clinical part of her knew that she would simply be in the way. Her head was throbbing, for one thing, and for another she was—and she hated herself for it—irrationally scared of going in that room again.

Either way, she was not exactly in a frame of mind to be of any use.

She didn't really remember getting up or the walk down the hall to the call room or even collapsing on the first bed there and virtually passing out. She only knew that those things had happened because she woke up there some time later, groggier than she ever remembered being.

She rolled over in the cot to look at the clock. She'd been asleep for three hours. Apparently Shizune hadn't found her later. Her shift was over an hour ago, and now she was—

She sat bolt upright. She was late for training. Like, forty-five minutes late. Absurdly out of character late. Kakashi was probably already there late.

Oh, hell.

She shot out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the hospital in a flash, and rather than running the whole way to the training fields and being out of breath on top of being absurdly tardy, her hands flashed through the seals for the teleportation jutsu and she reappeared seconds later at their appointed field.

Kakashi was already there, though he seemed to have just arrived, because she could hear Naruto's routine conjecture that he was a liar, why did he even bother coming up with those lame excuses? being delivered to an entirely impassive audience.

Naruto cut himself mid-rant to peer around the older Jonin. "Hey, Sakura-chan! You're really late. What's up?"

Sakura opened her mouth, all ready to tell him he wouldn't believe the day she'd had, which would prompt him to ask what had happened, and then she'd tell them, because it felt like it was going to burst out of her and she always told them what was bothering her, because these were the people she trusted most. But then Kakashi turned his head so that his one exposed eye could look at her over his shoulder.

It wasn't even anything in his look. He didn't look any different from how he normally did, really. If the tiny part of his face that she could see showed any expression at all, it was detached curiosity, nothing more.

It was something about the way his back was turned to her, about how she was looking at her insanely powerful teammates—the Copy Ninja, the Kyuubi host, an ex-ANBU—and a vow she'd made to herself a long time ago.

Today was, she realized, the lowest point in her career since she failed in that first Chunnin exam. She had felt weak and powerless and frightened in a way she hadn't since she was thirteen and the boy she'd loved had left her, and then everyone had left her, and she had no direction. Yesterday she had been promoted to Jonin and today she cowered like the whimpering little girl she had sworn she'd never be again. Self-loathing gnawed at her from the inside, like a parasite eating her stomach and intestines. These were the some of the people she respected most in the world.

How could she possibly tell them about today?

She couldn't.

So she plastered on a fake smile—the one she'd taught Sai, all those years ago—and said, "Oh, just got caught up at the hospital."

And it was sort of the truth.

Hyuuga Himori didn't make it, she remembered. His exertion caused the poison to spread more rapidly and he died before they could find an antidote.

She also remembered that Shizune had forced her to fill out an incident report. She probably would have, anyway, once the shame lost a little of its bite: she'd always been a bit of a stickler for the rules.

With the way things were going these days, though, if she filled out reports for every incident she was supposed to she wouldn't see a single patient. Outright war was not quite upon them, but Konoha was under a good deal of pressure these days. Sound was relentless in its aggression, and though they had not heard from Akatsuki in a long time it was not wise to assume they'd gone completely underground, even considering it's sharply declined membership. ANBU and high-ranking Jonin were on missions all the time as violence escalated, and though hospital policy had not changed there simply were not enough resources to actually follow it. Jonin were guarded only on rare occasions and Sakura had even had to treat ANBU ops without any protection.

She'd learned her lesson (she was pretty smart) and she never let her guard down around people who could possibly pose a threat, which was a lot of people. And she still got attacked, with increasing frequency as the hospital staff became strained under increasing load. Hyuuga Himori was not the worst assault she'd been subjected to. As a result, it seemed like she spent the majority of her time these days impossibly tense and anticipating attack from every angle. And then she'd go and take it out on her teammates, and while she knew they could take it it made her feel guilty and on top of everything else…. She felt like a tightly wound coil, ready to snap at the least provocation, all the damned time.

So this stress-free little escort mission they were on? Virtually godsend, in her opinion.

Why, why did Sai have to bring these things up?

Sakura sighed. It would do no good for her to blame her teammate. It wasn't like he knew any better. She blew bubbles into the water again.

She was starting to go numb in the chilling water, and her fingers were starting to prune a little. It was well past time to be getting out, she surmised. She clambered out of the water and reached for her pack for a towel she'd swiped from a hotel ("Ninja," she'd retorted, when Naruto teased her about her minor degree of kleptomania), drying off methodically. She refused to hurry. If anyone was staring at her, well, she hoped they enjoyed the performance. She'd break their arm for it. Or something.

After a minute she pulled her clothes back on and headed back to camp. Then it was off to home.

Back to the hospital.

She couldn't even pretend to be glad about that.

A/N: Transverse fracture of the diaphysis of the humerus: A perpendicular break to the long part of the bone in the upper arm.

Hairline fracture of the phalanx: Tiny crack in a bone in the foot.

Torsion of ACL: A tear, of varying severity, of one of the major ligaments of the knee caused by rotational force. It's a common injury in sports that involve sudden turns. I knew several people who did this playing soccer by planting their foot and turning their body, but their foot didn't follow. It usually requires surgery and a long recovery period.

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