Author's Note: I apologize for the long delay in writing this chapter. Several factors combined to the lateness of it: school, financial troubles, and severe writers block among them. I cannot promise any kind of regularity in future chapters, but the next few chapters should flow easier and I will try my hardest to get chapters out as soon as possible.
Also, I was asked to write commentary for the last chapter of this fic. I basically ramble about my process and the themes I use and such. If anyone is remotely interested, it is at my LJ: http(colon)(double slash)flibbergibbet(dot)livejournal(dot)com(slash)12556(dot)html.
I don't own Naruto or any related characters or settings.
Onward!
But What Of The Physician, Hippocrates?
Chapter 3
It wasn't the first time Kakashi had attempted to pry into affairs he didn't have any right to. Nooo. Far from it. It also wasn't the first time he'd attempted to look into hospital records.
It was simply the most difficulty he'd ever had doing it.
Admittedly, the previous hospitals he'd filched private records from were civilian hospitals. This one was a shinobi hospital, and it was like they wanted to keep prying ninja eyes and prying ninja fingers out of confidential documents.
Ridiculous.
He had to duck into a random hospital room at one point in order to avoid detection, which was a little awkward because someone was in it and wondering why the hell the Copy Ninja was paying them a visit in the middle of the night, well past visiting hours. Kakashi merely waved at the fellow shinobi and popped right back out once the coast was clear. Picking the low-tech physical lock on the filing cabinet was no problem; the complicated bit of sealing on the documents themselves was a different matter. But Hatake Kakashi was not called a genius for nothing. He suspected some of the reason people called him that was sarcasm, but a good deal of it was because he was naturally gifted and really damn smart. So there.
When he finally broke through the seals, he leafed through his team member's patient records in the dead of night, senses on high alert for any interlopers and trying to convince himself he wasn't invading Sakura's privacy. Well, okay, he was, but he didn't really care. It wasn't like he was spying on her or anything, even if he had thought about it (he blamed Jiraiya entirely). He quickly looked over patient records from before their most recent mission, moving backward from the most recent.
She certainly was a busy girl, he noted. She had six surgeries in the two weeks before their mission and was assigned primary responsibility for twenty-three people. It seemed like these numbers had been increasing steadily. Was this the problem?
It could be, but gut instinct told him it wasn't. Sakura responded to increasing pressure by adapting, meeting the challenge by approaching it in a different way when things stacked up seemingly out of her control. When a half a dozen enemy nin seemed to spring out of nowhere, instead of trying to plough through all of them the same way she would a couple, she changed her strategy to adapt to increased numbers. He was sure that a mere thing like a few more treatments were well within the realm of her ability to adapt. Physically, these things didn't affect her performance in training: she still had more than enough chakra and stamina to keep all of them on their toes. His answer wasn't here, he decided.
So where was it?
He was going to have to come at this from a different angle. Something had changed, right? Something had set this all off. It wasn't always like this. He hadn't noticed it at first, but now that he thought about it there was a distinct shift in her behavior, and if he remembered correctly it seemed to be just about the time of her Jonin exam, a year and a half ago. There had to be some sort of precipitating event, then.
What had happened?
He stiffened, suddenly. There was a noise from outside—footsteps and voices a little too close for comfort.
He'd have to continue his little information hunt later. Careful to leave everything as he'd found it, including the seals, he returned Sakura's records to the filing cabinet and stole out into the night.
There was not a single part of Sakura that did not object to waking up that morning, it seemed. She was normally a morning person, who woke completely in a short amount of time even when danger was not breathing down her neck. But she'd had several bad dreams the night before, dreams she'd forgotten upon waking except for the lingering and odious feeling of unease. She'd slept poorly.
So she woke in a fog, her alarm sounding as though it was hidden under a pillow across her room, and it was her internal clock that truly roused her. Her eyes felt heavy, and Sakura knew with certainty that if she remained in bed sleep would drag her down with weighted hands for another couple of hours. It was infinitely tempting.
Nothing but her sense of duty could have dragged her out from between her warm sheets and into the bathroom, shuffling like a toddler the whole way, the cold tiles a shock against her bare feet. She showered like an automaton, her motions guided solely by routine, because her mind was having a difficult time following her body off her pillow.
Sakura sighed, frustrated with herself, and in a huff reached for the shower knob and snapped it all the way to cold. She yelped a little at the shock, but at least she was finally awake.
When she stepped out of the shower she toweled off quickly. She meant to go right into her room, but she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and she paused to look closer.
"I look like hell," she observed.
A wonderful start to the morning.
The civilian wing of the hospital was in a separate building than the shinobi wing. The two opposing structures stood on either end of the central quad of the medical center, staring each other down across a green patch of no-man's land. When Sakura pushed open the door to the civilian hospital, she felt the tense foreboding of wandering into enemy territory.
She felt eyes on her from the moment she stepped in. It was to be expected. Shinobi were virtually never in this building. There were plenty of places in town where the shinobi interacted with the larger civilian population of Konoha, but this was not one of them. There was no need for nin to come here. It was a hospital for and run by people without ninja skills. The forehead protector Sakura wore on her head marked her clearly as an outsider, someone who Did Not Belong. Without thinking, she tugged on it self-consciously.
She'd only been in this building once or twice, so she had no idea where she might go about finding the Dean of Medicine's office. Cautiously, she stepped up to the welcome desk. "Where can I find Mitokado Ken's office?" she asked the woman sitting behind it.
The sandy-haired receptionist looked at her dubiously over a pair of half-moon glasses. "Sure you aren't lost?" she asked, with barely a hint of a question.
So much for 'Welcome.' Sakura tapped down hard on her ire, but she couldn't help a frown or the shortness of her tone. "I have an appointment," Sakura informed the woman flatly.
The receptionist looked a little startled by Sakura's tone. It seemed to remind her that the woman she was addressing was a kunoichi, someone with powers she couldn't understand but that were undoubtedly dangerous. In a more subdued tone, she said, "I'll call him."
Sakura nodded and retreated to sit in one of the uncomfortable seats that sat in rows through the room. She hadn't quite meant to be so undiplomatic, but this was her punishment for a trumped-up crime, and she was in a foul mood. Normally when she was in a bad mood and people ticked her off, she broke things. Her violent mental roommate counted this reaction an improvement.
At this time of morning there were very few people in the fairly small waiting room, which Sakura noticed also served as the hospital's emergency room. Across from her was an elderly man who every once in a while released a string of deep, phlegmy, hacking coughs. In another row sat a middle-aged pair, the woman bouncing her leg over her knee and the man reading some sort of magazine. A couple of seats down sat a young mother and her snuffling toddler.
It was decidedly counter to Sakura's idea of an emergency room. The one she worked in was an increasingly busy facility in those tense times. In the shinobi wing, every case that came through the ER doors was genuinely an emergency. The idea of a person using such a place for the free healthcare because she was a paranoid mother with a child with a cold was a strange notion. Sakura couldn't help but think of the sacrifices she and her friends made daily for such a measure of peace for the civilians they protected.
She waited fifteen minutes. To pass time, she closed her eyes and went over katas in her head. "There is no substitute for doing," Tsunade had once told her when she was young and impatient, "but it is important to think about what you're doing, too." Years ago, such a thing was an infuriating waste of time in her path towards being worth something. It helped to calm her now.
Mid-way through the ninth kata, she was interrupted. "Haruno-san," a stern male voice called.
Sakura was not exactly surprised by his appearance so much as she was jarred out of her meditative state by reality, but either way she started ungraciously. She stood quickly and bowed. "Mitokado-san," she said, and as she rose he bowed in return. There was a vague sort of resemblance between him and his uncle—both had small eyes and jaws that were built into scowls. The nephew's hair was chestnut brown but graying at the edges, cut close to his head and firmly held in a neat, smooth style with some product. Perhaps Sakura was just used to men with unruly hair, but this feature in particular struck her as unnecessarily uptight.
He was sizing her up too, and either condescending looks ran in the family or she fell short of his expectations. Without preamble he asked, "Are you ready to start?"
She replied in the affirmative. Without another word he turned and went through a set of double doors. Sakura assumed by lack of instruction that she was to follow.
She half expected him to dump her off somewhere and let less important people show her the ropes, but instead he pointed out the various parts of the hospital as they moved through the winding, confusing corridors. He indicated each place in a clipped, matter-of-fact tone. "Pulminology." "Neurology." "I.C.U." "Pharmacy."
He stopped in front of what was evidently a break room and knocked on the glass. The door opened and a short, dumpy sort of nurse wearing scrubs in an awful shade of maroon appeared. What struck Sakura immediately was the sharp juxtaposition she and the Dean of Medicine made. Tall, lanky and severe-looking, Mitokado was the antithesis to this woman, who was shorter than Sakura, overweight in a matronly sort of way, and wore a bun that completely failed to control her wispy grey hair and bobbed around as she moved. Her face had clearly smiled often and readily in her life, the evidence writ without regret in the lines of her face.
She turned kind, dark eyes on Sakura. "Ah, Mitokado-san, is this the new blood?" she asked, smiling pleasantly.
He gave one curt nod in response. "Haruno Sakura has agreed to come over from the shinobi wing as a favor, to help with the flu season overflow," he said.
Sakura bit her tongue very, very hard. He made this all sound voluntary on her part, but she knew for damned sure that he knew this wasn't the case at all. Plus, something about the way he enunciated the word "favor" gave her the impression that he didn't consider it much of one at all. It set her teeth on edge.
The nurse completely missed the sudden tension in the hallway. "It's a pleasure to have you," she said with all apparent sincerity. "I'm Yakumoto Akane, the head nurse." She held out a bundle of clothing in the same shade she was wearing to Sakura. "I found a set of scrubs for you to wear, but looking at you now," Yakumoto gave Sakura's slight frame a brief once-over with her eyes and a wink, "I think they're going to be a little big," she concluded. Sakura supposed that was meant to be a compliment on her figure, though it was a little hard to take it that way.
Still, she forced a smile. "I'm sure they'll be fine." Sakura gathered them into her arms and tried not to imagine how washed-out they'd make her complexion, or how badly they'd clash with her hair.
"Come this way," Mitokado said suddenly, and went off down the hall. It took a second for either of the women to follow, though Yakumoto recovered first, probably used to his behavior. Sakura trailed behind and glared at his back. Impatient jerk. Her opinion of him, already low out of personal bias, slid every moment she spent in his presence.
You've got to stop, she told herself. Don't make this any worse than it has to be by holding a grudge. If you were giving a tour to some underling far below your standing, you'd be a little impatient, too.
This, of course, was the real source of her problem. Sakura hadn't been jonin for very long by most standards, but she was influential and powerful because of her familiarity with the Godaime Hokage. She was in high standing in the shinobi community and respected by much of it (and if they didn't respect her, they respected her fists). Here, she was just another low-level nurse, just like she'd been just another academy student, just another one of Sasuke's tittering fans. Here, she was nobody. Again.
She tried to find some other grounds on which to criticize him. She wanted to think that she wasn't this rude to subordinates, but the fact of the matter was that she'd scared the pants off of quite a few novice medics in her time. She resolved to swallow her pride and give Mitokado the benefit of the doubt.
He escorted them to the woman's locker room. "Locker number 42 is yours, go ahead and get changed," he said.
"Thank you," Sakura replied, without feeling, as she went past him through the door he indicated.
It was a long and narrow room, lined with lockers on two walls, a long bench in the middle of the room the only place to sit. A couple of moldy-looking sinks were positioned at the far end of the room, under small windows paned with frosted glass. There were no mirrors. It was an extremely claustrophobic space, probably more so when there were other people in it.
Sakura slung off her bag and began undressing methodically down to her underwear, removing clothes and weapons in the same efficient manner. She removed all of her weapons cases—the kunai pack at her hip, the shuriken on her thigh, the senbon she hid in her boot, her skirt filled with all kinds of unpleasant medical things, the scrolls in her vest—and placed them carefully in her pack before pulling on the borrowed scrubs. They were big (she had to roll the pants up twice to avoid stepping on the hem), and she'd have had plenty of room to stash some weapons, but for all kinds of reasons she couldn't carry them around here. She didn't like the feeling of being caught off her guard, even if she wasn't anticipating being attacked, but she let it go. Her fists were far and away the most dangerous weapons she owned, anyway.
Her locker didn't have a lock on it—she noticed that the ones that did had different varieties of locks, and concluded that each nurse brought her own in from home. Probably a way of saving a little cash. Great. Sakura let out a suffering sigh and removed a seal note from her pack before stuffing it and her clothes into the just-barely big enough locker and shut it. Her hands worked through a series of four seals and she felt a hum of chakra go through the metal when she slapped the seal onto the gap between the locker door and frame. It was a basic seal that any shinobi could crack, but she wasn't exactly anticipating being robbed by an A-class missing nin. Mostly she was trying to keep the other nurses out of her stuff for their own safety.
When she emerged, Yakumoto gave her a once over. "I was right," she remarked, "they are too big for you. I'll have to get you another set tomorrow."
"That's fine," Sakura said.
"For today there's no helping it," Mitokado said, "but tomorrow and in the future you will be required to wear close-toed shoes. And—" here he paused, his gaze on her hair. Finally he tapped a finger to his head. "The forehead protector needs to come off."
The command caught her off-guard. "What?"
"You cannot wear it here," he clarified, speaking as though she were exceptionally simple. "Some of the equipment we use here utilize magnetic currents. Metal can disrupt them, or be thrown about and put our patients at risk."
"How often am I going to be around such equipment? I'm just here to help out with flu patients, I'm not going to be using any of that," Sakura protested. She didn't fully know why, but for some reason the idea of relinquishing her forehead protector, even just for a day, was so abhorrent she couldn't comprehend it.
Mitokado frowned. "Regardless, you can't wear it."
Sakura opened her mouth to reply, but knew something exceptionally rude would have come out, so she forced herself to shut it. Her objections were so visceral, so raw, that she was having a hard time coming up with an argument.
Before she could say anything more, Mitokado spoke. "Haruno-san, I don't know what impression you're under, but I don't care who you are close to or what rank you hold. While you are in this hospital, you are not a ninja, or even an off-duty ninja. You are one of my employees, and you must do as I say." With that, he extended his open palm to her expectantly.
It took every ounce of willpower Sakura possessed to stomp down on the intense flash of fury that seared through her, hot enough to make her see red for one stark instant. She could not entirely hide the violence of her reaction: even Yakumoto noticed. The old nurse took a hesitant step away from Sakura, who suddenly was tense and dangerous and not at all like the lovely young woman Yakumoto pegged her as. She cast nervous glances between Sakura and the Dean, completely at a loss of what to do in this situation.
Finally, with edgy and jerky motions, Sakura pulled out the knot of her forehead protector and yanked it free of her hair, holding it out and focusing on the way it gleamed in the harsh fluorescent light, because she refused to look into Mitokado's face as he reached out and took it from her.
"Benefit of the doubt" be damned. In that moment, Haruno Sakura thoroughly and totally despised Mitokado Ken's guts.
Tap-tap-ta-tap-tap.
Oh, great.
There was a pause, and then, louder:
Tap-tap-ta-tap-tap.
Sakura groaned.
It just figured that the one person she most wanted to avoid after she'd gotten home from her shift and collapsed on the couch was also the one person least likely to be put off if she just ignored the incessant knocking on her door.
One could hope, right?
"Sa-ku-ra," Ino singsonged, tapping out a matching rhythm on her door. "I know you're in there."
Sakura groaned again and pulled a pillow out from under her head and stuffed it over her face. "Go away, Ino," she mumbled into it.
There was a rush of air by her head as it was displaced by a body, and then the pillow was yanked out of her hands. "Not likely," Ino told her.
Sakura glared halfheartedly up at her rival and friend before deciding that the day had been too taxing. She simply couldn't muster the energy to kick Ino out. "What's up?" she asked casually, as though she hadn't been diligently ignoring Ino's presence outside her door.
Instead of replying, Ino gave Sakura a once-over, taking in Sakura's haggard expression, her mussed hair, her too-big scrubs. "Forehead," she remarked, "know that I say this with all love, but that is a terrible color on you."
Sakura laughed, quick and ironic, because of course she'd thought the same thing herself. "I know," she said.
Ino sat herself down on Sakura's coffee table—which Sakura hated, but again decided she couldn't be bothered to get mad about it. "You look terrible, in all honesty. Why on earth are you wearing those… things, anyway?"
For a second, Sakura debated giving an evasive answer. It would drive her friend crazy, but Ino would get the hint and let it drop after a few minutes of nagging. She didn't generally talk to Ino about her problems because Ino was a better talker than she was a listener. On the other hand, Ino understood the depths of her insecurities and fears, and she just couldn't contain how angry she was anymore. It all spilled out in a disjointed rush, about the assassination and her punishment and Mitokado and how unfair it all was, and how worthless it made her feel, and how fucking pissed she was that he made her feel insignificant.
And Ino, to her credit and Sakura's gratitude, said nothing throughout Sakura's tirade, let Sakura get it all out, let Sakura yell through her to the people she was really mad at, and didn't say anything for long minutes after Sakura had finished, allowing her to blow herself out on her own. In the end, it felt as though a great weight had unearthed itself from her chest and had evaporated, wafting away like so much smoke. Sakura felt much calmer.
Finally, Ino stood and said, "Well, come on then. You promised to have dinner with my team tonight, and you need to look half-way presentable, at least." It was a return to her regular, bossy self. Sakura appreciated the normalcy, so she obeyed Ino's command without protest.
It wasn't until after she gotten ready and out the door, when Ino was filling her in on new developments in Tenten's love life, that Sakura realized the trade she'd made. On the upside, Ino's supportive silence as Sakura ranted and raved had been exactly what she needed to get everything off her chest. On the other, by tomorrow all of Konoha would know all the gory details about her probation and shame.
