Words: 2,909

Warning(s): Mentions of war, death, and some foul language


For some reason, Sakura missing their meeting was something Sasuke never accounted for.

Three hours had passed since Sasuke had witnessed Sakura sobbing her heart out outside the medical tent. Makeshift dummies fashioned out of broken tree limbs were now scattered around Sakura's chosen training field. Since scorch marks and gaping holes in the earth were already a consistent theme of the décor, he couldn't imagine anyone complaining about a couple suddenly scraggly looking trees.

Complaining about an absent sparring partner, though, that was a completely different story.

Grinding his teeth, Sasuke pushed off the tree he had been leaning against. He was angry—livid, actually. Despite the fact that Sakura was only meeting him to train, Sasuke couldn't help but feel that he had been stood up. This, in turn, only made him angrier. Why should he care Sakura was a no-show? It was her loss, not his.

It was just because he put so much time into preparing for their session, he told himself. Sasuke had spent an hour thinking about the best way to teach the chidori to her. Half the techniques Kakashi had used with him wouldn't work with Sakura, simply because she didn't have the sharingan. Visualization had always been a key part in understanding a jutsu for him, though, so he thought if she could give Sakura a target for her chidori, it would be easier. Thus, the crude tree-mannequins.

Which, apparently, had been a total waste of time. Sasuke felt like an idiot. He'd dedicated far too much time preparing for this session, and he had been waiting for an hour after the agreed time to boot. Enough was enough, he was going home.

Rage fueled his steps as he stalked away from the training ground. Raccoons stumbling back to bed in the early hours scampered out of his way just as the waking birds flitted out of his reach. Animals seemed to have honed their survival instinct to a level even shinobi couldn't hope to reach, and, to them, Sasuke screamed "danger."

Why would Sakura use him like this? She'd lied to him once with a poisonous kunai clenched in her fists, and Sasuke had lost it. This time felt eerily similar. He felt the way his control was frayed within a centimeter of snapping. Did she want to hurt him?

While he was used to seeing only the darkness in people, expecting and anticipating their eventual betrayal, something about his thoughts felt wrong. Wrong enough to stop him in tracks. Wrong enough to make him think.

As terse as their relationship was, would Sakura really go through all of this to hurt him? Sakura, the woman who had cried not even a week ago as she administered emergency care to the wounds he and Naruto had inflicted upon each other? Sakura, the woman who fought with her life to save people she'd never met?

No.

There has to be a piece missing, Sasuke decided as he strode out of the shelter of the forest near his and Naruto's. Perhaps another patient had gone into a critical state. It would be just like Sakura forget she was supposed to be resting when someone was in danger.

Suppressing a sigh, Sasuke spread his chakra out over the Alliance's makeshift camp. Several nin close by jumped in response, but, upon realizing his chakra was searching and not violent, settled for sending him dirty glares. They immediately dropped their gazes the moment he looked their way, though.

It didn't take long for Sasuke to find the familiar glow of Sakura's chakra, as he expected. Even with the years they'd spent separated, Team 7 could identify each other blindfolded while wearing sound canceling earplugs.

Sasuke's head swiveled to his right, where, about thirty paces away, Sakura's chakra was barely perceptible—even to him. Panic gripped his heart in its icy claws, his vision suddenly narrowing to nothing but the tent in front of him, and Sasuke charged forward without a second thought.

There was a very good chance that Sakura's body had finally given up. She hadn't rested for the better part of two days, and she had been pushing herself to her limits the entire time. Sasuke had seen chakra depletion cases before; he'd even endured it a time or two himself. It was often coupled with intense tremors, dehydration, and a deep ache that refused to leave for days.

But the worst part, the scariest part, was the fact that limbs would simply refuse to function anymore. A shinobi dying of thirst would be unable to grasp the water right next to him, or even be completely unable to speak. Organs started to fail in the worst of cases.

And the last time he'd checked, Sakura was shaping up to be the worst case of chakra depletion ever.

Praying he wasn't about to find her comatose body lying on the floor, Sasuke threw open the flap of Sakura's tent.

Pink hair sprawled across the scratchy, flat pillow the Alliance provided. Sakura's calves dangled over the edge of the bed, as if she hadn't had enough energy to fully climb into it, and she hadn't even attempted to pull up the covers around her. The standard, long-sleeve shirt all shinobi wore had been discarded on the floor, but her matching black pants dangled off one of her legs. A small puddle of water exuded from where her pants touched the floor. Clearly Sakura hadn't even possessed the energy to get all the way out of the clothes he'd last seen her in.

More concerning though was that she was still-startlingly still. Dread filled his limbs like lead, halting his movements forward. The small rise and fall of her chest Sasuke's sharingan detected did nothing to dispel his anxiety. The low chakra levels he had detected earlier already told him she was alive. But was she..."here"?

Stealing himself, Sasuke reached out to shake her awake. Either she woke up, or the two best medics in the Nation were out of commission.

And he had failed to protect someone precious to him again.

His fingers were surprising steady as they wrapped around Sakura's bare-ice-cold-shoulder.

"Mmmph. Hmmmm," Sakura grumbled sleepily, slapping his hand away before nuzzling her head further into her pillow's scratchy fabric. Her left hand twitched out from beneath her pillow and searched briefly for something before falling still once more.

Sakura was exhausted, and probably shouldn't be moving anytime soon, but she wasn't comatose. Just sleeping. A breath Sasuke didn't know he had been holding escaped his lungs in a painful whoosh, and suddenly the world expanded and snapped back into focus.

This damn girl. Sasuke raggedly drug his hand through his hair as his heart rate slowed to something resembling normal. This annoying girl. He collapsed heavily into one of the spare chairs next to Sakura's bed, rubbing his temples slowly.

Seven chairs in total formed a semi-circle around Sakura's bed which seemed to serve as a desk since the tent had little space for anything else. A couple papers stuck out from under Sakura's torso and thighs—probably remnants from a late night meeting—and Sasuke had to wonder when it last was that Sakura had actually gotten any sleep. If her bed had become her makeshift desk, did she sleep sitting up?—or did she have a cot somewhere amongst the other medical staff?

Had she even slept since the war had ended? Sasuke could feel another headache coming on, along with the stiffness in his neck that always accompanied too much stress, and he massaged his head more thoroughly. Knowing Sakura, she probably hadn't.

A shuffling noise interrupted Sasuke's train of thought, and Sasuke looked up to see that Sakura was once again looking for something in her sleep. Her hand patted the area closest to her knee gently, making vague scratching motions as if to pull something toward her. Having no luck, the kunoichi whimpered, and pulled herself into a half fetal position on her bed. Papers crinkled as she moved—Sasuke hoped none of them were too important—and in the end her feet still hung off the side of the bed.

It was quiet for a moment after Sakura settled down, but then Sakura's feet were rubbing together in circles, catching on the half-dry pants still on one leg, and she tried to snuggled deeper into the hard bed.

She's cold, he realized. As soon as he figured out what was making her so restless, Sasuke's feet were moving, and he was at the edge of her bedside before his brain could catch up to his actions. He was halfway into gently rolling her off the papers and her blanket when his mind screamed for him to stop.

What the hell was he doing? Sasuke dropped the edge of the blanket as if burned and retreated a couple paces from the bed. First, he spent hours preparing a chidori lesson—a technique he already knew and had nothing to gain from—for Sakura. Not to mention the fact that he had been decently miffed when Sakura didn't show up. Then, he went and got in a blind panic because Sakura might be in danger. Fine, the chances had been rather high, actually, but the fear that had gripped him was far outside the range of acceptable. Now, he was covering Sakura with a blanket? Because she had looked cold?

How much softer could he get? This was the girl who'd turned her back on him and tried to kill him.

But when Sasuke reached inside himself for that familiar ball of rage and hurt, the one he used to stave off feelings of loneliness and homesickness and other weak emotions, he couldn't find it. There were scraps of it left: cuttings of a much larger yarn ball that imparted a slight distrust of Konoha or justified anger. Still, it was nothing like the white-hot rage of betrayal he was so accustomed to carrying with him—accustomed to drawing on.

There, as he watched Sakura shiver on the bed, desperately searching for something that was no longer present, Sasuke finally gave up.

He was confused, definitely. Part of his identity, the only part of his identity he consciously acknowledged, had just disappeared. For all that he was fully clothed, Sasuke wanted to wrap himself in more clothing—more layers. He felt horribly exposed and uncomfortable in his own skin, but for once Sasuke didn't try to shift his uncomfortable emotions into anger.

No doubt it was the woman before him who was to blame for this sudden shift of personality. The woman before him, the dobe, and even his old sensei had all played a major part in tearing down the comfortable walls of hatred he had shielded himself in. Yet, instead of making them into his new tormentors, shifting the blame from Konoha's shoulders to theirs, Sasuke felt only a dull sort of resignation.

Sasuke had spent the majority of his life running and shrouding himself in malice, but Sakura and Naruto had spent the majority of theirs chasing after him in an effort to bear his burden—to share their light. And while he might have had a head start, he always knew that, eventually, his old friends would catch up to him.

Sighing, Sasuke removed the damn pants from Sakura's ankle-forcing himself to think about Sakura's health and not what he was doing-and draped it over one of the chairs to dry completely. Once they were gone, he shifted Sakura as gently as she could off of her papers and into the center of the bed. He stacked the pamphlets, maps, and diagrams on one of the chairs. Then, he wrapped each edge of the blanket around her pale form like a spring roll. Everything below Sakura's chin was smothered in a blanket, and a faint smile hovered on her lips.

Perhaps it was still the relief talking, or maybe it was just buried aspects of his personality suddenly come into the light, but Sasuke couldn't help but think she was cute like that: encased in a blanket with a tranquil expression on her face. She hadn't looked this at peace around him since they were genin.

Softly stroking an errant hair out of her face, Sasuke silently vowed to do better by her. For as long as she allowed him by her side, and probably even if she didn't, Sasuke refused to let her carry such a heavy burden alone.

-x-

"Let me get this straight, Uchiha." Shizune held Tonton protectively against her chest as she stared him down. "You want me to gather all of our best medics, so that you can donate your chakra?"

Hearing the Konoha medic say it made it sound even crazier than it seemed when he first thought of it, but Sasuke didn't waver. Images of an exhausted Sakura combined with his promise repeated in his mind, and Sasuke was determined that this would be his first step to making things right.

"Aa."

The older woman watched him warily, silently listing out the benefits and disadvantages of this arrangement. Sasuke knew she didn't trust him. He knew the only reason she was even still talking to him was because she was desperate. But, if the way Shizune's brows furrowed was any indication, her mistrust of him was currently outweighing the necessity of his help.

"I'm not gathering our best healers in one place so you can wipe us out in one blow," she finally declared, subtly shifting her hold on her pig so she would have a better shot with the poisoned senbon he knew were concealed beneath her sleeve. "I'm not that big of an idiot."

"Then take me to them one by one, or under guard, or even in chains. Hell, bring the dobe along if you have to," Sasuke crossed his arms and squared his shoulders, "Or combine all four. I don't care what you have to do to feel safe, just do it."

This took the medic by surprise, enough to shift her attack stance back into more relaxed, defensive position—at least, as relaxed as any defense stance could be. Desperation had coated his voice, and he knew Shizune had heard it. He absolutely loathed the fact that she heard it because that made his feelings more real, and he wanted not to care so, so badly. Caring hurt, opened up new possibilities of loss, and it scared him that Naruto and Sakura had already pulled him this far back in—into their lives, their country, their hearts—in such a short amount of time.

It would be so much easier to be aloof, to pretend he was offering his help out of boredom, or of mutual goals, but his cool façade just wouldn't stay in place. For better or for worse, Sasuke was a different person now. A better person, hopefully, and he would see this plan through even if he had to do it in chains.

"And I'm supposed to believe you're just doing this out of the kindness of your heart?" Shizune's expression was more probing than distrustful, but her lip still curled in distaste. "Despite Sakura's undying devotion to your redemption, I'm just not seeing it."

Undying? Present tense? Even if he had a hard time believing that Sakura held anything for him than a grudging tolerance, his palms suddenly felt sweaty and his throat went dry. He couldn't think about that now, though. Clearing his throat discretely, Sasuke pushed that the revelation to the side to be dealt with another time.

"Not out of the kindness of my heart," Sasuke clarified,"For now, let's call it equivalent exchange."

The confusion cleared from Shizune's expression, as if Sasuke had finally done something that she could understand. As if the only side of him that made sense was the side the one that bargained only for his own personal gain with little regard for others. It was everything he had wanted to be only moments ago, everything he was only days ago, so Sasuke tried not to think about how—or why—that hurt.

"So, what do you want then, Uchiha? Amnesty for your crimes?" she snorted, and Tonton joined in. "That's far above my position, and I wouldn't even grant it if I could."

"Just let Sakura sleep." Shizune froze and then blinked rapidly, as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing, but Sasuke didn't give her time to interrupt him. He couldn't risk losing his nerve. "I'll give my chakra to any medic who needs it as long as no one wakes Sakura before she's ready."

The air between the shinobi shifted significantly. For once, the gaze upon him wasn't laced with distrust and badly concealed hate. Neither Naruto nor Sakura was standing before him, but all Sasuke felt was interest—a desire to understand. Something in his demand had changed the way Shizune viewed him, it was clear in the way she cocked her head as if dissecting his very essence with her probing brown eyes.

Then it was gone, hidden behind a professional expression, and the elder Konoha medic nodded decisively.

"I can guarantee her twelve hours."

Sasuke hesitated, wanting to let her wake up naturally, but then silently relented. If the medics ran themselves too ragged for her, or if another patient died, Sakura would only blame herself.

"Deal."


Yikes, sorry I'm a day late. Guess it balances out having the chapter early last week?

But for real, the weekend getaway went great-except for the whole "my laptop screen doesn't turn on anymore" issue. So I spent the school week sharing with Eric, and today I purchased a chromebook! It's working out. I think. Keyboard's a little weird, though, I keep hitting the "=" instead of "backspace"

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2lazy2login (Sept 25): Glad you're still liking the story! It's fun, but difficult to write about them.

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*edited: 2018/01/21