Foundations

Chapter 3

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As one of the top medics in the country, an ANBU medic, and the Hokage's apprentice, Sakura was used to being woken up abruptly and going straight into work mode. So when an ANBU messenger knocked on the door with a summoning to the hospital, it was mere seconds before she'd tugged out of Shikamaru's arms, thrown on her uniform and was sprinting across the rooftops.

The muggy air did nothing to rectify the lack of sleep that she was feeling, and she had to rely on years worth of training to stand on her own two feet. She was used to sucking it up for the sake of her patients.

"What happened?" she barked in her customary no-nonsense tone, oozing authority as she swept into the the hospital room. The room held the patients poisoned by the rebels - people that had been fine only mere hours ago.

"A relapse, Haruno-san, a bad one. The poison came back, it's burning their organs from the inside-out," a brown-haired nurse supplied from where she was currently attempting to put an IV in a man who was writhing in agony.

"Hold him down," she ordered a few of the closest doctors, before turning to the brunette. "Get more nurses, and make up more of the antidote." The nurse nodded, scurrying through the door. Turning to the male patient who was being restrained with some difficulty, she examined him closely, using her chakra like an x-ray.

The poison that she had removed the day before was now back, buried deep in the linings of the man's kidneys and intestines, burning away tissue at an alarming rate. But the poison was different. It had the same basic compound as the one she had already removed, but was behaving in a different manner.

Ok, Haruno, you know this. You studied poison for years - you're a specialist. What are you missing? What ingredient would you not detect, that would hide from you within the cells?

As she thought, she scanned the man's body as thoroughly as she could, using more chakra than she probably should seeing as she wasn't at full capacity.

"Any idea what it could be?" asked one of the nurses holding down the man's ankles, sweating slightly from the effort.

"I have an idea," Sakura muttered, "but if it's what I think it is, this isn't good. I need a sample to confirm it though." As more doctors swarmed into the room, she gave the order to keep the patients as stable as they could, repairing the damage as it was created while she extracted a minute amount of the substance and began examining it at a table in the corner.

"Can't you just extract the rest?" questioned a young male nurse, watching her closely as he knitted together the cells of an elderly woman's lungs. Sakura shook her head distractedly, releasing a soft curse as she concluded what the deadly substance was.

"It's an Ember flower. That's what was in the poison. It wasn't extracted with the initial poison because it's effects aren't immediate - it was hiding within the cells of the body. It can't be extracted because it's already merged, which means it needs to be neutralised."

A look of confusion passed between a few of the nurses as Sakura waved over a doctor, scribbled him down a list of ingredients, and sent him off to the greenhouses.

"I didn't think Ember flowers were still around. I haven't seen one used as a poison in years," grumbled an elderly doctor, examining one of the patients for himself.

"No," Sakura began, lost in thought as she stared at one of the patients, "neither have I."

"The flower's from Sound."

The Kazekage's pen stilled, and slowly he raised his gaze to the haggard looking woman slouched in the chair across from him. Catching his questioning gaze, Sakura sighed and scrubbed a hand over her face agitatedly.

"The Ember flower was used as a poison years ago, often in controlled doses for torture by the Sound ANBU. When Sound fell after the death of Orochimaru, the whole land was torched and the flower was thought to have been killed off. It's incredibly hard to grow, it needs precise conditions and lots of time. Whoever these rebels are, they're connected to Sound in some way."

Mulling over this new information, Gaara leant back in his chair and thrummed his fingers on his desk in a quiet, steady rhythm. It was several minutes before he spoke again.

"It makes sense, I suppose. Oto is a waste-land, unprotected and uncontrolled - the perfect place for a band of rebels to create a hideout. The concerning question is why they felt the need to come all the way here just to kill a random selection of civilians."

"I doubt that's all they're here to do, Gaara." Sakura spoke softly, watching the young leader's face tighten in concealed anger. "For now, the important thing is that their poison is no longer effective. The patients are all fully healed, but they had to be kept in induced comas to alleviate the pain. Once they wake up, we can find out more about the rebels."

The redhead nodded slowly, before looking up at the sound of a knock on his door.

"Enter."

The door swung open, and Sakura smiled tiredly as Kakashi strode into the room. Leaping at him quickly, she threw her arms around his neck and dragged him down to her height. Her ex-sensei merely chuckled, patting her on the back lightly before pulling away to politely greet the Kazekage.

"It is good to see you again, Kakashi-san. I'm sure Sakura will catch you up on what has been happening." The silver-haired man bowed in acceptance, and aqua eyes turned to Sakura. "I have a meeting with my counsel regarding our next move, so go rest until I call for you again."

"Hai, Gaara-sama."

The two members of Team 7 then turned and headed out from the office, back into the baking heat of Suna's streets.

"Well, guess you have a lot to tell me then," Kakashi prompted, leading the way towards the main streets of the village. "Know if anywhere around here does ramen?"

It had been a while since Sakura had been on a hunt.

Call it whatever you like, tracking or tailing or searching, but a hunt was what it was.

ANBU was all about stalking their prey, and as part of the powerhouse that was Team 7, Sakura was familiar with hunts. As she strapped her weapons pouch over the thigh of her tight, black pants, she counted poisoned kunai and exploding tags with little thought. A smooth down of her red vest, a pull of her fingerless gloves and she was ready to go.

Shortly after returning to the guest suites with Kakashi - following a lunch where she had consumed her own body weight in noodles - she found herself cuddled up on the lap of her favourite grumpy ninja, who complained that her cat-like behaviour was making it difficult to try and read through 3 months supply of sentry records. Hoping that there had been an unusual sighting in the records that had been overlooked was a long shot, but they didn't have much to go on.

That was until the Konoha ninja were summoned to Gaara's office, where they received news that a bandage splattered in the blood of one of the rebels had been found at the fight sight, and finally they had something to track. The group had then headed back to their temporary home to prepare, with strict orders to meet Temari and Kankuro at the gates within 20 minutes.

It only took Sakura and Shikamaru 10 before they were ready to leave their room.

Just as she turned the handle, Shikamaru's palm lay lightly on her shoulder, bringing her gaze up to his face. His expression was blank, already in mission mode, but his eyes were narrowed minutely.

"Are you sure you're ready for this? You've barely stopped since we got here, and I know your chakra's practically drained so don't even bother lying to me."

Sakura snapped shut the mouth that she'd opened to argue his statement, and she pouted slightly.

"I'm fine, ok, I promise. I'll take a soldier pill on the way down there and I'll be good to go. Besides, the likelihood is that we won't even find anything, and if we do the report says there's only around ten of them - that barely requires effort for a team as big and skilled as ours." Sakura refuted, crossing her arms and raising a brow in defiance.

Shikamaru merely raised his hands and sighed in defeat, before following his girlfriend out of the room.

"Hey Tem! Hey Kankuro!" the pinkette called as they approached the gates, waving at the siblings that so far she had been too busy to see. The two called out warm replies, taking turns to hug her, before she and Kankuro started their usual routine of teasing and insulting the other. That usually went on for a while, so Shikamaru leant back against the wall of packed sand behind him to wait for the other team members.

"She still running rings around you?"

An eye cracked open to stare down the smirking blonde where she stood playing with her fan.

"Wow, no reply. Jeez, you really are fucked aren't you?"

The Nara rolled his eyes heavenward and - as he often did - questioned his choice in friends. Before Temari could start pressing him for details on their (non-existent-in-the-near-future) wedding in a scarily accurate replication of his mother, the other ninja appeared and grouped around Kakashi, awaiting instructions.

With a smirk that promised she wasn't done irritating him yet, Temari turned towards the eldest ninja of the group.

"Right, you all know how this works so let's not waste time. Akamaru and my dogs will take point, Neji and Hinata, you two keep an eye out - we need a warning on anyone in our vicinity. Shino and Kankuro, I want you to cover our backs and make sure we're not being tailed and led into a trap. Temari up front with me, you know the land so you can try give us an idea of what we're dealing with if it comes to the need to fight. The rest of you, keep sharp, we don't know who these rebels are, or what they want. Got it?"

His command was met with a series of 'yes, sir', and a loud bark from Akamaru. Nodding to himself, Kakashi bit his thumb and summoned his pack, holding out the bloody bandage for the group of nin-dogs to smell. After a few minutes of sniffing around the sand, the group caught the scent, and Akamaru and Shiba led the group Westwards, out of the villages border.

In all honesty, Sakura hadn't had much hope at all that they would find anything. She'd assumed that the rebels, after making a surprisingly brash move, would have retreated until the initial retaliation from Suna had died down.

This, however, was careless at best and suspiciously concerning at worst.

The camp was messy and abandoned, a fire-pit still warm in the centre, surrounded by a few utensils and a mat that were strewn across the ground.

The problem was, there shouldn't be a camp at all. These men were hunted rebels, they should know better than to leave behind a single speck of evidence that they were there. So why had they been so careless? There was no sign of a struggle, no scent of blood in the air, so why had they just not cared enough to hide their location?

"None of this adds up."

Shikamaru was the first to have spoken in several minutes, and his slow, even tone that indicated he was thinking a mile a minute immediately grabbed everyone's attention.

"The strike on Suna was sloppy. It was pointless," he elaborated, aware that all eyes were on him even though he was busy grimacing at the horizon. "They didn't take anything, they didn't even outright kill anyone, just poisoned them with a substance that they knew would give away their point of origin."

The tactician was on a roll now.

"And the bandage, maybe that could be passed off as a lucky break on our side. But the fact that it led us to this? A camp that they didn't even bother to hide?" The Nara shook his head slowly, his grimace hardening into something deadlier. "They're not here to overthrow the Kazekage, or steal for their own gain."

He raised his eyes suddenly, meeting the quiet gaze of everyone in the team, before fixing finally on Kakashi.

"They're trying to get our attention."

With the new revelation of the rebel's motive, a complete rethink was needed before they decided what move to make next.

The risk that the group were being led into a trap of some sort was too great to act recklessly, and opened up a lot of questions about who exactly these men were.

Sakura had spent the last couple of hours in the Kazekage Tower with Gaara, Shikamaru, Kakashi and Kankuro, attempting to come up with a plan. The exhaustion had finally caught up with her, though, and so she had left the men to their plotting with the sole aim of burying herself in bed until the morning.

However, as she entered her room, she immediately knew something was amiss. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end and the muscles in her legs tightened mechanically. Pulling a kunai from her pouch, she crept silently through the shadows as she searched the apartment.

Upon entering the bedroom, her grip on the kunai loosened, and her arm fell to her side as her carefully controlled breath left her in a rush.

There, sat innocently on the bedsheets, bathed in cool moonlight, was a single Ember flower.

A/N - Don't know why this took so long, but it's the main set up chapter for the plot so I wanted to be happy with it before I put it up (not that I really am, but whatever). I swear I'll update 'frat boys and she-devils' soon, it's just so hard to swap between Deidara/Sakura and Shikamaru/Sakura as they're such different characters - but it's coming, I promise!