'The difference between coffee and opinion is that I asked for coffee.'

Warning: medically stuff ahead. Read at your own risk.

"And you've definitely tested it?"

"Multiple times, Nohara-sensei. There aren't any traces of manganese in her bloodstream and the chakra scan hasn't revealed a lowered uptake of dopamine in her basal ganglia."

Nohara Rin bit her lip in contemplation, trying to figure out why the symptoms were getting worse and not better. Currently, the only working theory was that it was Lewy-Body dementia, a disease that caused severe hallucinations, functioned like Parkinson's, and the hallucinations got worse with levodopa treatment, which is what was happening.

The first medic that had looked at Namikaze Kushina's case hadn't been aware of her jinchuuriki status, and Rin had wondered if maybe that had caused some problems with the diagnosis. On the other hand, having little to no material to go on, even Rin wasn't really sure what the problem was.

Theoretically speaking, the Kyuubi should have been able to nip any problems, mental or otherwise, Kushina was having in the bud. The fact that it hadn't was a cause for major concern, with sirens blaring in the distance.

Rin signed a form for another blood test and handed it over to one of her assistants.

The medics hadn't ruled out poisoning, but carefully examining the jinchuuriki's movement had enabled everyone involved to firmly conclude that she'd definitely not been alone for even a minute where she wasn't completely healthy.

Rin had talked about the possibility that this disease, whatever it might be, had been working on Kushina for a while now.

But then, Naruto was completely healthy, which made the probability of Kushina having been poisoned or something before he was born unlikely.

So far, all the symptoms pointed to Lewy-Body dementia—the odd sleep patterns, the hallucinations, the rigidity, the disorientation, the memory loss…it fit like a glove. But there was no medical proof.

Rin sighed as she hung up her lab coat and left the hospital, tired after goodness knows how many hours of work. Hopefully, by the time she got home, Obito's grandmother would have already prepared dinner so that she could have something to eat and crash immediately.

That woman was a blessing in disguise, truly.

She unlocked her apartment door and walked in, taking off her shoes and calling out, "Tadaima!"

She could hear some shuffling before Obito stuck his head out of the bedroom door frame and gave her a lopsided smile. "Okaeri nasai!"

Usually, this would be the moment when all her work troubles and worries would be shoved to the back of her mind, to be perused when she switched her medic mind on again.

But usually, Minato-sensei's wife isn't suffering from a degenerative neurotic problem and extreme hallucinations.

She walked over to him and hugged him long and hard, tired and frustrated and worried, but mostly just glad that she had someone steady to hold onto.

That had always been the thing about Obito—he'd always been there, no matter what happened. She couldn't even begin to fathom what her life would be like without him, even if his recovery wasn't going smoothly and he sometimes refused to take his medication on time, and mostly just forgot that it was a six hourly thing until his sides started tearing themselves apart in pain. A world without Obito…

She shook her head, getting rid of such morbid thoughts, and took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of pinecones, winter primrose and burning wood, with just a hint of antiseptic, blood and sweat.

She sighed into his shoulder and then pulled away abruptly when she heard his grandmother walking towards them, presumably having woken up from her nap.

"About time you got home, Rin!" said Obito's slightly-nutty grandmother. "Honestly, the hospital can do without your dainty booty wiggling about there. Now, come sit down. Obi-chan refuses to eat without you."

"Hai, obaa-san," Rin helped Obito walk to the kitchen, one wobbly-hobbly leg at a time.

They sat down to a modest spread, and after the obligatory itadakimasu, Rin began eating, careful to slow her pace so that Obito didn't feel that he was holding everybody up—his motor functions were getting better, but they were nowhere near the level they used to be.

She tried really hard not to think about Kushina's case, but it was in vain—her medical file kept popping into Rin's head, and slowly, the food became bland in her mouth and her movements became mechanical as she became thoroughly distracted.

"Kunai for your tongue?" Obito said, a bit of food smearing his left cheek.

Rin gently wiped it away for him before sighing. Obito's grandmother loudly proclaimed that she was going to bed.

When she'd left, Obito gave her a soulful gaze with his one functioning eye and said, "Rin?"

She sighed again, this time with far more weariness in her voice than before. "I just don't have time to give this case my all Obito-kun—there's far too much research, and with my workload at the hospital…I can't devote the necessary time to figure out what's wrong with Kushina-san. And you should have seen Minato-sensei. I've never seen him look so defeated before…and Kushina-san looks so terrified all the time…"

She trailed off, remembering today's check-up; it wasn't going well, suffice it to say.

Rin needed to figure out what was going on. She knew this with everything she had, but she also knew that her tired brain wouldn't be able to click the pieces together, and with the village on high alert and with the huge influx of patients, she just didn't have the luxury of mulling over Kushina's illness with the appropriate level of scrutiny.

"Talk me through it," said Obito softly, stroking her hair and massaging her head at the same time.

Rin bit her lip; normally, patient confidentiality would have prevented her from divulging any information, but this was Obito and it was about Kushina.

Besides, he knew the basics.

"Her hallucinations have gotten worse since yesterday, and it's astonishing how rapidly her mind is degenerating—this can't be a long-term illness, so Parkinson's is unlikely. But at the same time, there are very few other viable illnesses with such rapid degeneration. And that's not even thinking about the hallucinatory factor…and Minato-sensei and I agree there's foul play involved."

"How come?" asked Obito, his eyebrows scrunched up. "I thought that she hadn't been alone since October the 4th. You were there with her the whole time—I mean, you're not exactly blind."

Rin heard the veiled bitterness and instead of letting it go or sympathising with him, she felt a spike of irritation at her fiancé. Depression was one thing, but Obito had been indulging in self-pity far too long, and Rin was far too tired to be pleasant about it.

However, as was becoming frequent, she suppressed the urge to snap at him—Obito didn't need that. He needed a supportive environment for optimum recovery, and by Kami-sama she would give it to him.

She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "We went through it bit by bit actually, trying to figure out exactly how the events played out. It was pretty fast paced, but we've all kind of pinpointed half a minute where Kushina-san was completely alone."

Obito looked thoughtful. "Minato-sensei went after the masked bastard, you were being attacked by the masked bastard, Naru-chan was nearly skewered…but Kushina-baba had Sarutobi-san with her."

Rin sighed again. "We thought so, but Kushina-san said that Biwako-sama had had a concussion and couldn't have seen anyone suspicious-looking. That's all we've been able to work out, and it doesn't help at all. We're no closer to figuring out what exactly is wrong. Any injection puncture search would be useless because she heals so fast, so we can't even be sure if she was injected with poison. We don't know if someone hit the water supply so that it only affects—well, jinchuuriki. She's such a unique case that we don't know what the enemy's done, or even who the enemy is, or their specialty."

Obito pursed his lips in thought. "Would it help if you knew the attacker's identity?"

Rin sighed. "Probably only infinitesimally. There's a chance it isn't poison and is just an effect of the Kyuubi. No one really knows what happens when you transfer the most powerful bijuu from one container to another…Kushina-san is the only one in that category, when Mito-sama gave her the Kyuubi, so this neurotic degeneration might be because of that. Or maybe it's a coping mechanism? Her body was put through lots of stress, with the birth and the running and the Boiling Rain and the rebuilding and taking care of Naruto-chan. Considering this happened after the baby, this might even be a compounding effect of post-natal depression and a genetic predisposition to neurotic degeneration."

Obito blinked at her, completely lost. "Huh?"

Rin sighed, her irritation spiking again. "The point is, Kushina-san is the only Uzumaki I know. Her kekkai genkai is the only one of its kind in Konoha. She is the only jinchuuriki to have received the most powerful bijuu through a transfer."

Obito nodded. "So you can't compare her problem to anything like her, cause she's ridiculously one of a kind."

Rin hummed in agreement, getting up to put her plate away. "It could be poison, a genetic predisposition, multiple problems hitting her at the same time…or maybe it's a latent disease that's only manifesting itself now. Lots of diseases have symptoms that exhibit themselves differently from person to person."

She rinsed her plate and took out a dish cloth. "So she very well could have Parkinson's. But the medication is making things worse, so I'm more inclined to believe it's Lewy-Body dementia. There's also the theory that the Kyuubi wants her to d-die or go insane so that she's easier to manipulate."

Obito frowned from his seat. "I thought the Kyuubi would die if she did."

Rin shook her head, turning the knob of the tap and filling the sink with water. "Common misconception. If Kushina-san d-dies, the Kyuubi will regenerate somewhere else. It's chakra, and although I'm not completely clear on the intricacies of it, I do know that the seal on Kushina-san doesn't bind the Kyuubi to her."

Obito scratched his cheek, deep in thought.

"You know what you need?" he said after quite a long pause.

Rin looked over at him tiredly, wiping the last of the plates and putting it on the drying rack. "What?"

"You need one on one time with your books and a lab," he said. Rin suppressed the urge to strangle him.

"I don't have the time, Obito-kun! Were you not listening?" she seethed quietly, mindful of Obito's grandmother.

"Then you need someone to do your leg work," he pushed. "What about one of your assistants?"

Rin slumped into the chair next to Obito and took a hold of his right hand. "Obito-kun, she's the Kyuubi's jinchuuriki. Only people who already know that can help me with this, and Biwako-sama is the only other even remotely qualified medic that knows about the secret. There's no one that can take on this case without being told, and if word gets out…Minato-sensei doesn't have the time to vet someone with enough medical prowess, and what we're running out of is time."

"Aki-hime is sort of medically trained. And she can be trusted to know about Kushina-baba's 'tenant'. She good enough?" Obito asked contemplatively. "Obviously, she isn't fully qualified, but she's better than nothing, right?"

Rin sighed. "I'll ask Minato-sensei. Honestly, Akito-chan is brilliant, but she's seven. I doubt there's much she can do."

Obito gave her a faint smile. "You'd be surprised."

Not for the first time this evening, Rin felt her eyes droop. Obito leaned on his crutches heavily and hoisted himself up. "Time for bed?"

"Time for bed."

Rin slept blissfully.

Namikaze Naruto had been in the world a grand total of nine days when the crisp morning air of October the 19th wafted through the open window of the Hokage office.

Scritch scritch scritch went Minato's pencil, and click click click went Kushina's knitting needles.

Naruto blinked awake and felt hungry. Also, he soiled himself.

He started whining and Kushina made to go near him when she stopped herself abruptly. With trembling hands, she set her knitting needles down. "How long have I been knitting?" she asked quietly.

Minato looked up, his eyes unfocussed, as though he was still reading the six-page document in his hands. "About half an hour. Is everything all right?"

Kushina shook her head and pointed at Naruto's crib. "Naru-chan needs a nappy change…and milk."

Minato nodded and got up to cater to Naruto's needs.

Kushina huddled into the corner of the office she'd claimed as her own.

She'd been knitting for the past half hour without any yarn.

Please, she thought, tears threatening to fall out, whatever happens, don't let me forget my family. They're all I have left. Please.

Naruto stopped whining after a while. Minato smiled down at his son, deliberately forced himself to look at his slowly hollowing wife, and tried to keep it together.

One more day trickled by.

"What do you mean, Kushina-ba-chan has Parkinson's!?" I asked, horrified.

Rin-chan was giving me a tired but sympathetic look. "I'm not completely sold on that diagnosis, but it's the one we're treating her under the assumption of."

I looked at her uncomprehendingly. "Is it helping?"

"Not at all. I think it's making it worse actually."

"Then stop giving her the medicine."

Rin froze for an instant. "What? No, no we can't do that."

I raised my eyebrow at her. "Who made the diagnosis?"

Rin grumbled under her breath and it gave me all the clues I needed. "Hokori-sensei? She may be the expert on neuroticism and psychiatry, but she isn't the only authority on nerve degeneration, as far as I'm aware. And I've got dirt on her if she's giving you trouble with her patients."

Hokori-sensei was a blonde dumpy sort of woman who had cute dimples and a nasty habit of trampling on others to get to the top. She was perfectly polite to those that mattered and to her patients, but she was known throughout the hospital staff as someone who made life difficult for you if you were in her bad books. Minor hospital drama, like giving her patients priority for blood tests, currying favour with higher ups so that her ward got better equipment, things like that. And if there was anyone you didn't even think about crossing, it was Hokori-sensei.

But if the medication was hurting Kushina-ba-chan, Hokori-sensei's diagnosis could go hang itself on the Eiffel Tower.

Rin-chan's eyes widened. "You've got dirt on Hokori-sensei?"

I wasn't proud of it, but I'm pretty sure I have dirt on everybody in Konoha at this point.

Except Hiroyuki-san.

That geriatric woodcarver gives literally zero fucks about everything. You gotta love that guy.

I nodded, and Rin-chan looked gently disapproving. "Akito-chan, that's not very nice. Besides, we're not sure whether the medication is really the reason the symptoms are getting worse, or if it's the natural progression of her disease, and we can't risk taking her off it and realising that it was suppressing the worst of the symptoms without us knowing."

"Or, alternatively, it could be hindering her recovery process," I pointed out.

"It's 50-50, but you're not wrong," Rin-chan allowed, smoothing back her chin-length brown hair and adjusting her clipboard. "However, her brain scans do show a low level of dopamine, so the medication is supposed to help with that. Whether it's Parkinson's or something else, the medication is only targeting that. Theoretically, it should be doing no harm."

I thought about this. Parkinson's disease wasn't something I knew much about first-hand, but misdiagnosis I knew plenty about—my grandfather died because of misdiagnosis and wrong medication being implemented. He got jaundice because of the medication and died of a stroke, and quite frankly, history was not about to repeat itself in my book.

"Look, Rin-chan, I get that, but if it's hallucinations, mind-altering drugs aren't the best way to go about fixing this, especially if we're overthinking this."

Because that happens so often it's actually ridiculous.

"On one condition," she said, pulling open the ICU ward door. "You help me figure out what it is, and I'll stop giving her that medication."

Reasonable request, but I was surprised. "Why do you need my help?" I mean, I'm seven and not even a fully qualified medic. Kami-sama, some people my age couldn't read, let alone help with medical research.

She gave me a sad smile and ruffled my hair (recently tamed and secured via a triple-interlocking braid, courtesy of Okaa-san) affectionately. The tiredness was palpable, but so was her kindness, so it was okay.

"Akito-chan, I know this is far too much responsibility, but you're probably the only option I have. I don't have the necessary amount of time to dedicate to this, and due to certain…issues regarding the patient's confidentiality, no one else is actually qualified, legally, to handle this case. You," she said, pointing at me with a smile, "on the other hand, do have time, and Hagane-sensei can attest to the fact that your ability to discern discrepancies and figure out diagnoses is on par with most mid-level trainees."

I blushed; who knew Hagane-sensei talked to Rin-chan about me? And the praise was nice, but the fact of the matter was that I'm not mentally seven, so their commendation of my skill needs to be taken with a grain of salt—now that I think about it, it makes a weird kind of sense that she'd ask me to help with Kushina-ba-chan's case. I know about her (sometime between tickling and making tea, Kushina-ba-chan had spilled) jinchuuriki status, and that goes a pretty long way to give me a better idea as to what's going on. On the other hand…

"I know this is a lot to ask, but Akito-chan, we don't really have all that many options." Rin-chan waved an assistant over. "Is that for me?"

The assistant was holding a sealed envelope and, when he handed it over to Rin-chan, she placed a thumb on the seal and injected a small pulse of chakra into it. The seal broke and she scanned the paper inside.

"Still no traces of manganese…but it's the perfect match otherwise…maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way…" she muttered under her breath, low enough so that only I could hear, being very much in her personal space. "And the chakra scan's come back clear too…but it's so obviously LBD…"

She marched over to the file storage room and motioned for me to follow her.

She unlocked it with a key that was hanging around her neck, and when she switched on the lights, I could see shelves upon shelves filled to the brim with thick folders. I wonder how far back the files go—are there some medical files of patients from the founding of Konoha? It was a pretty big room after all, and the files at the back looked about ready to crumble if anyone so much as looked at them strongly.

"Akito-chan," she called, waving me over to where she was, in front of a fortified steel safe with specialised chakra seals. "This is Kushina-san's file. There're some papers in there for reference, mostly just my scribblings along the margin whenever I got the time between patients. You should start from there."

She handed me a relatively large file and locked the safe, using her chakra to reactivate the seals.

I opened the pages and saw a bio data sheet, then flipped over to find her medical history and routine checks' readings. Her blood tests were carefully stowed away a few pages later, and I was astounded to find that she'd had at least ten blood tests done in the past week alone. Her brain scans followed, along with her chakra scan readings. Observations from six different medics—three specialists, a nurse and two non-specialists—took up more than fourteen pages, and their handwriting was tiny.

This was going to be a lot of work.

I looked up at her with a reassuring smile, because even though this should have been overwhelming, it really wasn't.

It was like putting my hand in a custom-made glove.

Rin-chan relaxed, and her smile was far less brittle than it had been before.

Success!

Deep under the earth, in an undisclosed location, water dripped between the cracks of the rocks, tippling down drop by drop, keeping in time with a masked man's heartbeat.

Black Zetsu was majorly irritated.

The masked man would need years to recover from the damage that blasted Yondaime had doled out.

Black Zetsu cursed the blond-haired bumbling fool—who'd asked him to turn his henchman's torso to mince and nearly completely destroy his spine anyway?

Fucking heroes. Always butting their noses into my perfectly destructive schemes.

The Kyuubi weaved its chakra around and around, and the problem was nearly fixed.

Mind you, the problem might have become worse, because the humans had been messing around with her dopamine levels, and then, just when he'd gotten used to it, they'd stopped.

Stupid bipedal nitwits.

Oh, what was this?

Another dimension to the whole thing?

The Kyuubi twitched in irritation.

Why did he even bother?

It's been two days since I've been tasked to help Rin-chan with Kushina-ba-chan's case, and I will quite frankly say that I have absolutely no idea what's going on.

In the margins, Rin-chan scribbled possible case of manganism and then circled perfectly normal manganese-level readings in the blood test. Then there's another note saying, cortical basal ganglionic degeneration, but it had a frowny face drawn next to it.

I huffed and tucked my bangs behind my ears, sitting in Shisui-chan's makeshift tent with an oil lamp illuminating the pages in the middle of the night. It's a full moon night and it's really quiet. Shisui-chan is breathing evenly, poring over his homework and occasionally scratching something into his notebook. He's doing extra reading up on tenketsu points while I whittle away my brain cells trying to figure out why Kushina-ba-chan's brain is deteriorating without any forewarning.

Shisui-chan shifted his sitting position and I started re-braiding a lock of my hair in absentminded agitation. There's something blatantly obvious I'm missing here.

I squinted at another scribble in the margin which said suspicion of poisoning strong but it was scratched out and replaced with patient monitored, no contact with contaminated foods/drinks, air? And then, just after that, an arrow pointed to the toxicity level of her blood, which wasn't that above average—certainly within the normal range.

On the pages with the chakra readings of her brain stem and surrounding areas, Rin-chan had carefully written Lewy-Body Dementia and then circled it several times angrily, and then drawn an arrow to a perfectly normal dopamine uptake density.

I'd done a lot of background reading, but if this had Rin-chan, who'd been a medic for nearly three years, and five other medics, who'd been in the profession upwards four years, completely stumped, what exactly am I capable of contributing?

I'd gone to see Kushina-ba-chan the day I found out she'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease with Itachi-touto, and she'd run to the opposite end of the room, as far away from us as possible, and tried to warn us away from her. The fact that bright, vivacious and all-around absolutely mental Uzumaki Kushina would cower in fear of herself kind of hurts my brain.

And my heart.

And maybe even my kidney, though that might have been Sa-chan's kick when I stood too close to Itachi-touto.

There's possessiveness, and then there's Sa-chan's possessiveness of Itachi-touto.

…I've got my hands full with that one…

But back to the matter at hand.

I keep doing this, drifting off into memory lane because the information in front of me makes little to no sense.

When we'd gone to see Kushina-ba-chan, we did see her tremors and spasms, the involuntary facial twitches, and the times when she trailed off in the middle of her sentence, blinked, and restarted the whole conversation because she didn't remember having it.

I'm not okay with this.

I'm really not okay with this.

"Aki-senpai," said Shisui-chan, breaking me out of my thoughts. "You've been glaring at the same page for nearly an hour. Do you want to talk it through?"

I puffed out my cheeks to stall.

It's not like I don't trust Shisui-chan—in fact, I'd say that I trusted him more than I trusted anyone in my whole life, both of them—and he was probably the best person to bounce ideas off of, what with him being a genius and everything. In addition to that, he knew about Uchiha Inabi and Ureshi. He knew about them, how they were behind the Boiling Rain.

Which, by the way, is the reason Minato-sama saw it fit to get a seven year old on board with this.

The first thing I'd done when Rin-chan had handed me the medical files was to go to Minato-sama and figure out why in Kami-sama's name he wanted a seven year old to help out with such a sensitive case.

"Akito-chan," he'd said, gaze solemn with bags under his eyes, and Naru-chan in his lap trying to rip the hair out of his father's scalp, "Barring me, you're the only one who knows the full story, and unlike me, you have a greater understanding of the medical aspect of this…case. I won't say that I expect you to figure out a cure, but we've reached a dead-end that we need time to get out of, and time is the one thing we don't have. You, on the other hand, do. Anything you figure out will be something that nobody else does, because you have both Rin-chan's side of things and my side of things, not either/or."

I guess that's true—I know exactly what happened when Kushina-ba-chan presumably acquired the illness, I know who the culprit was and their specialty, I know basic medic-nin stuff because of how much time I've spent at the hospital, plus all that extra reading they'd dumped on me, and I know that Kushina-ba-chan is a jinchuuriki and have a vague idea of how that might affect things.

The last two though, Shisui-chan doesn't have.

But still, if I do slip up, Shisui-chan wouldn't blab. I know that better than I know my views on Frozen.

So I shrug and crick my neck, rubbing my lower abdomen (Sa-chan might have bruised me, that brutal little pomegranate!) and said, "Well, all her vitals are normal."

Shisui-chan put away his homework and looked at me, shuffling closer. "What?"

I sighed. "All her vitals are normal. All her blood tests come out normal or within the normal range, her latest brain scan reveals that the original abnormality that caused them to think Parkinson's no longer exists, the full-body chakra scan shows only a minor elevation of chakra at her lymph nodes, typical of when someone has finished fighting off an illness…but Rin-chan believes that to be because she's an Uzumaki, and I agree with her. Other than that, there is nothing to suggest that anything is wrong."

Shisui-chan scrunched up his eyebrows. "So she cured herself?"

I tucked my bangs behind my ears and gave him a worried frown. "No, because she's still paranoid, her tremors are getting worse, her memory is going fast and she's still having hallucinations."

"Genjutsu?" Shisui-chan suggested.

I shook my head. "Tested multiple times, and they've even checked for mass genjutsu, in case it was us who were seeing things, but no. No internal or external genjutsu. They even tried a day of isolating her with Minato-sama and the best chakra sensor in the village, but the symptoms persisted."

"And they vetted the sensor?" he asked, scowl deepening.

I nodded. "So there's something that's wrong, but none of the scans—believe me, I don't think I've seen a check-up this thorough in my whole life—show anything abnormal. Not even in her pinky toe."

Shisui-chan sat and thought, and I sat and thought with him. Laying out all the facts like that wasn't making me feel any better, but everything was much clearer in my head and I felt less overwhelmed.

"You said the brain scans changed," he said finally. "That's not normal, I take it."

"No," I said. "It wasn't the medication that helped because the dosage given wasn't that high—the medic hadn't gotten peer reviewed for the treatment, so they had to give only a preliminary diagnosis and treatment programme. It could have been her tenant…"

"What's 'her tenant'? Is that medical jargon?" Shisui-chan asked with an endearing head tilt.

"Don't ask. Not my secret to tell."

"Right," he said slowly, blinking away the hurt this caused him. "Right, sure. Okay."

I moved closer to him and grabbed his hand. "If it was a secret I could tell you, I would. But it's not mine, Shisui-chan. Honest. I can give you hints to work it out though. So long as I don't tell you what it is, you can figure out the secret for yourself."

Genius Akito, pure genius. Plausible deniability.

But really, the truth is that I just couldn't see Shisui-chan in any pain, especially not because of me.

Not if there was a way to fix it.

He gave me an amused smile, the temporary shadows disappearing completely. "Make it cryptic. I like a challenge."

I shot him an amused smirk and said, "She is a successor of Mito. She's a chakra monster. Minato-sama had to be present at her labour. Her chakra chains are primarily used for restraining. She doesn't like foxes all that much."

Shisui-chan would've instantly gone into thinking mode if I hadn't cleared my throat. "But back to the matter at hand."

"Oh yeah," he said, shaking his head to clear it of thoughts. "Right, so if the brain scans weren't supposed to change, has anything else changed that wasn't supposed to?"

I gave him a clear-eyed look. "The brain scans were done on a day prior to all the other tests. So, ostensibly, any major changes wouldn't have been recorded."

"So nothing's changed then?" he asked for confirmation.

I looked through the files. "Nope."

"What do they think she has then?" he asked, as frustrated as me already.

"Several diseases come to mind, but the symptoms all vary, and not all the symptoms are manifesting, and sometimes, the symptoms don't correlate and cancel each other out."

I bit my lower lip. "The primary candidate is Lewy-Body dementia, because levodopa is making her hallucinations worse. Right next to it, there's manganism, but her manganese levels are normal. In fact, over the past twelve blood tests, her manganese levels are decreasing—"

But why? My eyes went wide as several dots connected and suddenly, a plausible theory existed. But something still wasn't clicking…

"Shisui-chan," I asked hurriedly, "What was Ureshi-nee-chan known best for?"

He looked surprised but it didn't slow him down. "Poisons, but…well, there was that one time a few summers ago when Inabi-oji-san came over to our house for dinner and he collapsed in the middle of drinking his miso soup. We took him to the hospital—you remember I told you about that?"

The memory was there, but now it was the forefront. "Yeah, you said he got food poisoning."

Shisui-chan nodded. "Yeah, but the thing was, none of the medics knew what was wrong with him. They did quite a few tests, but until Ureshi-nee-san showed up and gave him an antidote, no one could do anything."

I hummed. "She did like testing her new poisons on him…"

"Yeah," Shisui-chan said gravely. "At first I thought it was just food poisoning, and that's what Ureshi-nee-san said it was too. "Food poisoning with a ringworm twist" is what she said. I didn't think it was a big deal, but now…what if she—"

And together, we both said, "Mixed two diseases."

"And no one would suspect a thing!" I exclaimed. "Her manganese levels have been decreasing, lending no credence to the manganism theory, but most of the other symptoms fit! The dopamine problem is virtually non-existent, so it could be LBD! Manganism's an obscure disease, LBD is more likely, but whatever it is, it's making her go mad! And if she goes mad—"

If she goes mad, and Minato-sama doesn't execute her—he'll never execute her, he loves her—she won't consciously hold the Kyuubi back anymore. When she stops holding the Kyuubi back, it can take over her mind. If that happens then…

Kami-sama, the possibilities are endless.

Destabilise Konoha, remove Minato-sama from the Hokage seat, use the cure as a bargaining chip, start anarchy, release the Kyuubi, extract the Kyuubi for the Akatsuki and the Juubi…

Resurrect Kaguya early.

No.

No no no no no no no no no no no no nononononononononononononononononononono—

I jumped to my feet.

That is not happening on my watch.

"Where to?" Shisui-chan asked, gathering all the loose papers of the medical file, not even asking me to explain myself to him.

"Minato-sama."

And together, we ran.

Minato-sama waited till Shisui-chan had been escorted out of the room by an ANBU before hearing her out, and the more words that poured out of her mouth, the more his frame stiffened and his face set scarily.

"So you're certain it isn't Parkinson's, but some obscure disease that's been…twisted, for a lack of a better word, to seem like it's Parkinson's," he repeated for confirmation.

I nodded. "Or any disease really, not specifically Parkinson's. Ureshi-ne—Ureshi was really good at messing with diseases, at least as far as we remember."

"She modified a disease, and somehow injected it into Kushina…without her realising it too…but how?" Minato-sama muttered almost to himself, folding his fingers in front of him and frowning in contemplation.

I cleared my throat and he snapped out of it, looking at me expectantly.

"Minato-sama, I don't think it matters how. What matters is a cure. She heals too fast because of her…Uzumaki-ness, so we don't know where she was injected, but again, it doesn't matter. It's a poison, but it's a disease, and we have yet to identify the base disease, not to mention how she modified it, or with how many diseases she mixed it with," I said, but even with all the problems, just the fact that we'd identified what exactly it was we were dealing with seemed to be enough to keep me giddy.

Judging by the minute relaxation on Minato-sama's face, he was feeling the same way.

"If it's a poison, and an untraceable one at that…thank you Akito-chan, I'll take it from here," he said, giving me a grateful smile.

I placed a hand on my heart dramatically. "Minato-sama! You give me a smile like that, and I'd even blow up the Hokage Monument for you!"

"Let's leave the mass demolition of a historical landmark for another time," he said with an amused half-grin.

I pouted. "Spoilsport."

"Multiple diseases at the same time, with similar symptoms? Bloody hell!" exclaimed Obito, leaning on his crutches, gripping it with white knuckles.

Rin grimaced at the crass language, but she agreed with him. She had no idea how Akito-chan had figured that out, but it didn't matter—it made sense.

"It's untraceable," she said quietly. "We need a poison specialist, Minato-sensei."

Namikaze Minato looked at his pale wife, who looked like a wraith in the corner of the room. She'd taken to rocking backwards and forwards, muttering to herself, blinking slowly and giggling intermittently for no reason, patting the air as though there was an invisible wolf sitting in front of her.

"Who do you propose?" he asked wearily, minutely tightening his hold on Naruto for comfort.

Rin bit her lip in contemplation. "I know that he's busy with testing the aquifers and the damage to the water supplies after the Boiling Rain, but…Orochimaru-sama is the leading poison specialist in Konoha. If anyone can figure it out and find a cure, it's him."

Minato thought about this. Orochimaru already knew of Kushina's jinchuuriki status, he was a Kage-level Jounin, he could multitask so it wouldn't be compromising the masses for Kushina, and most importantly, Kushina would be okay again.

He locked away the oncoming hope and anguish tightly and gave Rin a smile. "I'll summon him immediately and you can explain the situation to him now, before your shift starts again."

Obito stood in the corner, staring in morbid fascination as Kushina's face went slack. "Is that normal?"

Rin followed his gaze and her eyes were filled with pain.

"No, Obito-kun. That's the whole point."

OMAKE

Orochimaru felt like singing.

Oh, there had been many times when his intellectual mind had found a proper puzzle, it was true, but no other puzzle had ever been handed to him directly from the Hokage, no other puzzle had had such a debilitating time constraint, no other puzzle had given him this much emotional blackmail material, no other puzzle was complex in its medical aspect and no other puzzle had saved him from looking at bloody aquifers.

Kami-sama! He was so glad he had a distraction from that boring job!

Orochimaru wasn't a man that let boredom affect him all that much, but after the aquifers, he was quite seriously contemplating defection, no matter how much easier it was to get live test subjects from the Orphanage.

Luckily, no one seemed to have noticed his body abductions either.

And, as luck would have it, he'd found an underground clan, the Iburi Clan, that had a really interesting kekkai genkai…

So much experimentation, so little time.

Orochimaru decided to skip to the door in sheer joy.

See, the aquifers had made him forget, but it was back.

His zeal for learning, excavating, disassembling, discovering—oh he would do this project, and do it in record time.

His pride was on the line, and while a part of him knew that the Yondaime had manipulated said pride to get the job done quicker, Orochimaru couldn't care less.

He loved a challenge!

He giggled happily.

Oh, there was Anko, looking at him as though he was going insane.

Silly child, he thought. I'm not going insane; I'm already there.

This chapter was so fast because I wanted to apologise to the Guest Reviewer whose day I ruined by posting an A/N instead of a chapter. Hey, I was having a pretty terrible week too, so I can empathise.

Also, I love you all, really I do. The supportive comments were...just, thank you. I'm so deeply touched that I...well, I updated faster.

And yeah, lots of medically stuff, not a lot of action or…well, plot progression was there, and all of it was necessary. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope at least half of it didn't go over your heads! So yeah, ummm…here's Orochimaru! And they're on the right track for a cure now! But who knows, maybe the disease has progressed too far to fix…oooh…

EDIT: Got rid of the sentence that said she was the only jinchuuriki to have given birth successfully. I was under the misguided assumption that Mito had had babies before becoming the jinchuuriki. My bad! :)

Also, I'm still not satisfied with the summary of this story, and if you've been keeping track from the beginning, you'll see that I've changed it four times so far. So, if anyone can think of a better summary, please leave it in a review!

Edited 4/03/2017