"I have him at 105.68! Is the bath ready yet?"
"No time, just cut his clothes with a scalpel."
"-a BPM of 203! He needs an oxygen mask and he needs it now!"
"Fill it with water from the cafeteria if you have to, just-"
"Would somebody get me a goddamn oxygen mask already!"
Sakura gritted her teeth and tried to block out the tense yells and white nurse uniforms that were bustling around her in the cramped hospital room.
Kakashi squirmed weakly under the onslaught of numerous hands, their brusque touch invasive and distressing in his semi-conscious state. His black, sweat-soaked ANBU tank was abruptly sliced open, the cold metal of the scalpel glinting as it ghosted over his pale, shuddering skin. Violent hyperventilations that had a desperate, sob-like breathiness to them wracked his body. Hot tears spilled out of his tightly shut sharingan as his back arched with agony, muscles that were already quivering with exhaustion falling into another bout of spasms.
Seeing him like this was completely surreal and terrifying. A nightmare.
"Sah!... Sah!" Kakashi's head rolled weakly from side to side as he tried to speak, only able to slip a single syllable in between wet gasps. "Sss-Nngh!" His pleading cry was interrupted by a loud whimper as the latest round of tremors intensified into more powerful convulsions.
"Shhh," Sakura's throat felt tight and her mouth felt dry but the reflexive cooing spilled out anyways.
She gently brushed some pale strands of sweaty hair out of his eyes, rubbing her thumb soothingly over the pained crease between his slanted brows. He had been calling out the names of people she had never met or heard of for the last fifteen minutes. Crying out in a lost, pleading voice that broke her heart to hear and sounded far too young, too hurt to be Kakashi.
But it was when she had heard hers and Naruto's names thrown into the jumbled mix that the familiar pinching had started behind her eyes. Somehow knowing that, out of the entire group of people he begged for, only herself and Naruto were there made it impossibly more painful to hear.
She threaded her fingers through his damp silvery locks again but paused, frowning, when her fingertips brushed over his sharingan.
The thin skin of his flinching eyelid was so translucently pale that the faint blush of purplish veins could be seen dusting across the glistening membrane. Heat that was as palpable as a thick blanket pressed upon the palm of her hand, an inch away from his feverish skin.
But it was not this that startled her.
It was the fluctuating press of tingling chakra, ebbing and flowing like a tide, against the skin of her hand. She immediately began to wonder why his chakra was acting so strangely, but Kakashi interrupted her revelation.
"Sah... Sas," He gasped weakly as his limbs stilled and his eyes rolled back into his head, wet lashes fluttering feverishly under the yellow light, "Sas-huh... Sasuke..."
Sasuke.
Sakura stumbled back, her head reeling.
Sasuke? But Sasuke had- Sasuke was... Why would Kakashi call for Sasuke when he'd left them? Could it be that her stoic, unflappable team leader was secretly just as torn up over the betrayal of their teammate as she was? Sakura quickly shook her head.
There wasn't time for this; she had to think about it later. Preferably when one of her friends wasn't dying on a hospital cot before her…
Stepping back up to the side of his cot she placed her palm over his sharingan again, this time paying close attention to the chakra current. Something was wrong here, and she had a feeling that if she didn't find out what it was then things would get a lot worse.
So, ignoring the fact that his grimacing face had now relaxed into limp unconsciousness, his diaphragm had started spasming rapidly in small up-down movements that were really just an imitation of the taking in of air, and the frantic bustling of nurses around her-Sakura shut everything out and steeled herself, forcing her mind to reach that level of focus and intensity that saved lives.
His chakra washed over her hand in waves.
A faint tickle, almost like the prickle of static-electricity, pressed against her skin briefly before fading away. A couple of seconds later it cycled back again, brushing against her hand like a shy caress. With wide eyes she traced the ebbing flow with her hand, following the current down his slender neck to the center of his chest.
Of course! That was the source of the problem, his chakra coils! Her palm hovered over his slick skin, steady and unshaking. Now if she could just…
Sakura closed her eyes, mentally rejecting the worried cries and the jostling press of bodies around her, and focused on tracing his chakra flow with her mind's eye.
The young medic imagined that she could see his pure translucent-blue life energy sparkling through his chakra pathways, rushing out quickly one moment and lulling down into a thin trickle the next.
…
She had never seen chakra flow like this. It was completely unheard of in the medical world.
For one wild moment Sakura allowed herself to desperately wish that Tsunade-shishou was in her place-that she could just curl up in a corner and cry while someone else took care of it...
But the Hokage wasn't here right now.
And Kakashi was dying.
Sakura pressed her lips together and forced her mind to search for a solution, ignoring the wild flurries of fear beating around inside her chest.
She thought about his sharingan, how it flickered to life with the surges of chakra and then petered out into black again when the wave of energy had passed. To have a kekkei genkai, that didn't even originally belong to one's body, switching constantly on and off at such a rapid pace-it would have to put a tremendous strain on the body…
Enough strain to cause a dangerously high fever and a persistent bout of seizures.
Sakura's eyes snapped open. If she could somehow regulate his chakra flow his heart-rate might slow down, and his fever and seizures go away!
But how could she do that? Her head reeled desperately as she racked her memory, searching in her vast stores of medical knowledge for some way to do it. Think! Think!
Seconds passed, and a slow, aching burn had started in her throat, her eyes smarting as she strained herself, scouring her mind for the answer.
But, as the machines beeped warning sirens around her and the fleet of medical personnel scurried over the tiled floor, their uniform shoes squeaking frantically-it soon became apparent to Sakura that she had absolutely no idea.
Nothing like this had ever happened before.
There were no medical observations or theories to fall back on.
She was on her own. She was on her own and she had to think of something, she had to find a solution because Kakashi was-
"The bath is ready! We used the water from the cafeteria, just like you-"
"Good. He's almost ready." The head nurse knocked away the hands of two young nurses fumbling nervously with Kakashi's pants button and zipper.
Without any hesitation or gentleness, her hands fisted in his waistband and, with one powerful jerk, his pants were yanked down to pool around his ankles. A loud ripping noise tore through the air and the small button popped off with the force of her tug, arcing through the air wildly.
It was almost comical really, in a surreal, horrifying way, to see him like this-lying limply on his back with his shirt torn open to his chin, his arms tossed up over his head as if he were falling down some enormous slide, his pants tangled around his sandals, his leg-wrappings and underwear glaringly obvious under the harsh overhead light.
Sakrua might have even laughed, if he hadn't looked so much smaller lying there, stripped of his dignity and clothes, spread-eagled on the twisted, sweaty hospital sheets, his lean body still shuddering with the after-effects of seizures even in unconscious.
She watched with a dizzy sort of detachment as the nurses gathered around his cot and burrowed their hands under him and began to lift him from the crumpled sheets.
She ground her teeth together and tried to breathe slowly, closing her eyes. This was just too much-why, why was it all happening at once?
Her throat tightened and she wanted to cry from the stress and the helplessness, from the unfairness of it all. How was she supposed to fix this?
For the first time she found herself being the one who had to make the calls and save the day, the one who took it all on herself and brought everything together in the end… She was in Kakashi's place and he in hers.
How many times had he protected her or rescued her? So many times that she had come to simply expect it of him. Was it possible that, as steady and reassuring as he always seemed, Kakashi actually felt just as helpless and scared as she did now when he was forced to swoop in and save the day?
Sakura was knocked out of her whirling thoughts when one of the nurses brushed roughly past her, checking her on the shoulder as she swept past and out of the room.
A tightly packed cluster of them shuffled after the woman, hunched over with the effort of carrying Kakashi's one-hundred percent muscle, shinobi body out of the room. His head swung limply under the flickering yellow lights as they jostled him with their clumsy movements, expression blank and vulnerable as his white hair spattered the linoleum floor with droplets of sweat.
And suddenly, at the sight of him helpless and unmoving in their hands, her wild fear was replaced with something slower and sadder. Kakashi...
He was always so strong.
Never showing even the smallest expression of pain or fear-regardless of the odds. He was always pushing her to be stronger, carrying or protecting her when she wasn't quite strong enough. For Sakura, he was a solid wall that was always one comforting step behind her, ready and waiting for her to fall back onto him whenever she stumbled.
Never in her life could she have ever imagined him needing her.
It wasn't that she still thought of herself as a lower rank than him. No, her level of prowess matched and even exceeded him in some areas. It was just that, over the years and countless missions, she had fallen for his act.
She had started to think of him as invincible-an unstoppable force of will that was hardly even human.
But, it was painfully clear to her now-the man lying on the cusp of death before her was not him.
She admired, respected, and maybe sometimes even loved her sensei's fierce, dependable warrior persona. But...
This Kakashi, vulnerable and human in his pain, was all the more precious.
She had to save him.
...
...
"Naruto, calm down!"
Shikamaru watched as Yamato grabbed desperately at Naruto's shoulders, only to be shaken roughly off as the Jinchuriki growled and continued with his angry pacing.
The blonde ran his hands through his already disheveled locks again, gritting his teeth in a furious expression of frustration as the sounds of panicked yells and strangled whimpers ricocheted off the white walls of the public hospital.
Their team captain gave up trying to console the younger jounin, shoulders slouching dejectedly in a very Kakashi-esque gesture, and dragged his feet exhaustedly over to look out through the window at the falling darkness. Ino sat on the edge of her plastic seat, tense and silent with her wide eyes fixated on the flickering yellow light spilling out of the doorway three doors down the hallway. Chouji sat beside her hunched over with his elbows resting on his thighs and hands dangling uselessly between his knees, peering up from his sad perusal of the sterile floor every few seconds to glance worriedly at the girl beside him. Sai sat on his knees before the coffee table, seemingly focused on the important task of tearing a ripped out magazine page into tiny little pieces and arranging them on the smeary wooden surface.
They had only been here for fifteen minutes and it already felt as if countless hours had passed.
The frantic sound of Kakashi's raspy breathing, already painfully loud in the small enclosure, suddenly picked up it's pace.
Shikamaru let his lids slide closed despairingly and flexed his numb fingers slightly in their cramped position under his armpits. There was absolutely no way that the Copy-ninja was getting any oxygen now, not when he sounded like that.
He felt his own chest tighten at this thought and decided to distract himself, shifting from foot to foot as he leant against a nondescript wall in the waiting room.
How long had this, whatever this was, been bothering Kakashi? Why didn't the man say anything?
After they had cut off Hijame's head and sent it back to Konoha, via summoning scroll, they had all lined up in front of a very exhausted Sakura and she had healed all of their potentially dangerous injuries. That would have been the perfect time for the famed jounin to mention his ailment…
Shikamaru chuckled softly to himself as he remembered how Kakashi had doggedly bullied the exasperated medic into healing his broken pinkie finger but childishly refused any treatment for his bruised ribs.
Sometimes he just didn't understand Team Seven's jounin-sensei.
If Kakashi had rejected the healing of his ribs because he didn't want to waste Sakura's chakra, as he had so vehemently argued, then why did he bother begging her to heal his pinkie finger?
The shadow-user's lips quirked into a half-hearted smirk, he could never tell if the stoic man was trying to be funny or actually believed in what he was saying.
Shikamaru wondered if it was some weird, demented mixture between the two…
Most likely.
Shikamaru already knew that Kakashi thought of himself as having a different level of importance than the rest of his team. And it wasn't the common egotistic, self-serving attitude of most commanding officers either-Kakashi was completely and totally occupied with serving and protecting the people around him, even if in doing so he disregarded his own safety and well-being.
Shikamaru had suspected that the older man had this attitude for a while, silently observing the Copy-ninja's selfless actions on the battlefield whenever they happened to be assigned a mission together.
But it was the night of the surprise ambush that had solidified his suppositions.
Kakashi had rushed ahead, tearing down enemies with such a level of reckless speed that he hadn't even taken the time to pull out a weapon.
This led the shadow-user to an interesting and mildly disturbing conclusion-Kakashi thought he was of less importance than everyone around him.
And, this struck Shikamaru as particularly odd, if not strangely endearing, considering all of the experience, talent, and knowledge that the man possessed. If someone, anyone with a semi-logical thought process really, were to weigh the worth of Konoha's Copy-ninja to the worth of any one of them individually, then they would easily conclude that Kakashi was the more valuable.
So why would-
Shikamaru's head snapped up at the sound of heeled feet shuffling noisily on the linoleum floor.
He frowned at the glimpses of bare skin that he could see peeking through the gaps between the nurses shoulders as they carried Kakashi across the hallway. They shouldered open the door and, waddling under the weight of the shinobi's muscled body, moved into a room directly across from the previous one.
Sakura followed timidly after them with unfocused, wet eyes and determinedly pursed lips. Shikamaru frowned. This didn't look good at all. He'd had the faith that everything would turn out okay, that Sakura and the team of medics at this hospital would be able to pull together and find a solution… But now…
Naruto stopped his pacing on a dime, his spine stiffening as his head rotated levelly, tracking the unconscious form of his sensei into the room.
There was a couple seconds of shocked stillness as the door swung silently on its hinges, a tangible whoosh of air for every steady swing, and then Naruto was striding purposefully into the room after Sakura.
Nobody made any move to stop him.
...
...
Maybe, maybe an irregular chakra flow was like an irregular heartbeat?
Sakura desperately fought to hold on to the idea and not dissolve into mindless tears of hysteria as they dumped Kakashi's unmoving, mostly naked body into the tub of cool water on the floor.
A great wave of water splashed out, sheets of tepid liquid ringing as they slapped over the linoleum floor. A creeping puddle slid over to wash over her shoe, dousing her foot with tepid water that she was sure felt immeasurably colder to Kakashi's feverish body than it did to her.
She scooted backwards to stand numbly by the doorway, trying to make room for the bustling nurses as they knelt over her sensei and spread the cool water over his burning skin, desperately trying to control the fever.
Sakura struggling to hold onto her train of thought. She needed to solve this, the answer was right there in front of her, but she just had to unveil it.
His spastic chakra flow was like an irregular heartbeat. Like when... like-
She had the bizarre urge to laugh. The tub was too short for Kakashi. His legs dangled over the thin metal rim at the knee and his left arm, still partially sleeved in a thin strip of black fabric from the destroyed ANBU tank, hung awkwardly over his head. Only the sight of his neck, craned backwards to an almost unnatural degree and balanced on the sharp edge of the tub, kept her from giggling.
At least they had left him his mask, she didn't think she could bear to have his face revealed to her as he-
-like when someone's heart was failing!
When someone was having a heart attack they had ventricular fibrillation and their heart muscles didn't contract properly. The contractions fluctuated in strength, just like Kakashi's chakra flow.
When the heart beats became too irregular they used an electric defibrillator to even it out. The heart was given a great shock and reestablishes a more regular heart beat…
If Kakashi's irregular chakra flow could be thought of as an irregular heartbeat-then maybe a great shock to his chakra coils would have the same result as a great shock to the heart!
Sakura felt dizzy with relief, the room tilting blurrily around her for a moment before righting itself. She had something! It may not be right, and it was all based on supposition and frantic observation-but something deep inside her told her that this was it, that she had found the answer she needed. Time was running out and she had to act fast.
All she needed was a great burst of powerful chakra and-
-Naruto stumbled into the cramped room, slipping on a puddle of water that had spilled out of the impromptu bath.
Naruto! Sakura found herself grinning maniacally at him, Naruto has a nearly infinite amount of chakra!
"Naruto! I need you to help me."
She actually did laugh this time, earning a tearful, confused look from her friend as she grabbed his arm and dragged him through the cluster of kneeling nurses.
Without bothering to apologize, the pressure of Kakashi's rapidly depleting time weighing heavily on her, Sakura roughly pushed a young nurse to the ground and took her place.
Without a second's hesitation, she plunged her arms into the sloshing water and wrapped her arms around Kakashi's thin waist. Waves of stinging water splashed into her face and down her front as she heaved his deathly still body out of the metal tub.
Heart beating fearfully fast in her ears, she lugged his heavy frame out and dumped him on the floor, accidently spilling the rest of the bath water onto the floor with a great clang when Kakashi's foot caught on the edge of the tub.
Several of the nurses shrieked in wild disamy as gallons of liquid rushed over them in their sprawled positions on the floor.
Sakura crashed to her knees beside her sensei's sprawled form, yanking down Naruto beside her with one hand and checking Kakashi's chakra flow with the other. Naruto cried out like he'd been hurt, not understanding why she was acting this way. It was clear that he thought she had lost her mind and didn't understand that she was trying to help Kakashi-but there wasn't enough time to really explain.
He tried to struggle out of her grip, but Sakura's hand remained steadfastly fisted in his shirt, holding him in place. She strained her senses, looking for any trace of Kakashi's light, prickling chakra. His heart fluttered rapidly beneath the palm of her hand.
There! Kakashi's chakra flow was faint and sometimes non-existent, but it was there!
"Sakura! What are you doing?" Naruto cried.
Ignoring him, Sakura used her chakra strengthened hands to grab Naruto's wrists in a crushing grip and pinned them to Kakashi's motionless chest.
"Sakura! Don't-"
"When I count to three I want you to send the biggest rush of chakra that you can out of your hands and into his chest, okay?" she interrupted him in a tense, low voice.
Naruto blinked, his face pale and scared looking as tears spilled down his whiskered cheeks. Nurses shrieked and wailed around them, the splashing of water ringing distantly in Sakura's ears.
"One." Sakura moved her other hand to hover over Kakashi's closed sharingan.
"B-But, he's-"
"Two." Naruto stilled, squeezing his eyes shut as a choked sob tumbled out. Steeling himself.
"Three!"
Kakashi's back arched off the floor.
Naruto's chakra, wild and potent, jolted through his chakra and oxygen starved muscles. His eyes opened wide, white and rolled back in his head, his silvery hair spilling haphazardly over the slick tiled floor. Sakura could see the outline of her sensei's mouth opening breathlessly beneath the tight material of his mask.
She trembled faintly-there was no sign of any chakra flow at all!
"Again!" She snarled, "Do it again!"
She slammed her own chakra down into Kakashi's chakra coils along with Naruto this time.
His body bucked wildly under their hands, his ankles jerking up and down, beating a hectic tattoo on the water-slicked floor. Sprays of stinging water droplets splattered about them as his body thrashed violently.
And suddenly it was all over.
Kakashi lay still and cold beneath them, and the only sound in the silent room was the halted dripping of water plipping as it connected with the wet tile.
Everyone was silent for an immeasurable moment in time, the nurses looking on with wide, apprehensive eyes, Naruto squeezing her hand against the wet skin of Kakashi's chest, and Sakura squeezed her eyes shut, searching desperately for…
Naruto let out a shaky sob of relief when Sakura cried out loudly, flinging herself over her sensei's prone form, exhausted sobs shaking her shoulders as she hugged him tightly. Naruto breathed heavily next to her, looking at her with wide, disbelieving eyes, his mouth cracked in a relieved, breathless grin.
Kakashi's chakra flow was regular.
Enjoy!
~Flintyminty25