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stone feet magnet to the river deep
-o-
"Don't let her near him –"
Sakura ignored the older man's gruff commands –which spoke to her Suna jounin escort rather than directly to her– and moved to the other side of the patient's cot. She asked the woman at his head for his history and took the written notes from the protesting man's hand.
She had arrived in Sunagakure moments ago and already she was on scene with a patient. No time to do more than strip off her travelling pack and tie her hair back from her face. She had sand in her mouth, grit between her teeth, felt a dusting of it coating her body and resting on her eye lashes. Her body was stiff from constant moving and the thrumming in her blood came from an old batch of Nox she'd reserved just to give her an edge. Her concentration on the patient didn't suffer from the affronted man.
Her escort said in her defence, "Captain Tairou, she's here by the order of Kazekage-sama."
"I don't give a damn!" The man started, but he frowned and stopped trying to pull the notes back from Sakura's hands, seeing that he had not been very successful in moving her grip an inch. "She's the disciple of that monstrous Hokage. I know it already."
Sakura put the notes aside, satisfied she had gotten all she could from the information, written and verbal. She made a series of hand seals and she told the same woman to shift her hold to the patient's shoulders. "Keep him down for me."
The angry man, Tairou, glared at her directions and then relayed what she had said to another staff member. Tairou was well into his middle years, scruffy and disagreeable. He looked like he hadn't seen much action outside of a four walled room in awhile, and probably wasn't the type to have participated in the Suna-Oto Invasion but someone who might have very loudly, very happily vocally supported it from behind his desk.
Sakura made her assessment of him with a quick glance and then went back to her patient.
"You were right about some of the foreign components in his blood system, but I'm curious about the extent of the epidermal pustules. However, for the moment, I think I have a more immediate option for treatment." Her hands glowed with chakra. "It won't be very pleasant."
"This girlie is an upstart genin bitch," Tairou said to the same escort, unimpressed.
"This girlie is a Jounin special class, but I have better measuring sticks if you'd like to get into a contest," Sakura offered, hands still busy and her eyes focused on her patient.
The Suna medic holding down the patient smiled at the volley. Speaking to Sakura, she said, "shit, have you met Temari-sama? You two should definitely meet."
Tairou turned red in the face, displeased with the show of budding camaraderie from his subordinate. He almost yelled, "we don't even know if these Konoha dogs aren't responsible for this attack! They could be the ones poisoning our people. That Slug Princess is a bastard undertaker. This might very well be her work!"
"How about we save lives and then get into politics." Sakura put one hand at the patient's neck, to dull his awareness of the procedure she was about to start, and then with the other, began to extract foreign elements from his blood stream. A moment passed and she brought both hands to work in his middle, one for extraction, the other for regeneration of healthy tissue.
Speaking to Tairou again, she told him exactly what she wanted the other members of her team and his team to start as a new course of treatment for the other patients.
His glare lessened as he watched her work, and he was only a little affronted and reluctant to listen, or perhaps he was distracted. In her peripheral vision, she saw how he looked between her hands.
"Or I can stop, if you'd like," Sakura said to break him from his stupor. "I wonder which the Kazekage would find more offensive, my leaving or your refusal of my aid?"
Her jounin escort made a point to pressure the man into obeying Sakura and Tairou managed to finally leave them, mumbling as he did.
"We'll find out who's behind this," Sakura assured the other woman, who was younger and perhaps less biased than her superior. The woman's smile had become more reserved, but Sakura appreciated her determined nod.
The patient was on the verge of experiencing systemic organ failure.
Sakura held the isolated remnants of poisoning agents that had been in the patient's body suspended in the air within her chakra. When she had removed as much of it as she could, she had it sent to a lab to be identified. She started patching what she could to keep his systems from shutting down.
With the patient temporarily stabilized and heading to a manageable recovery, she continued the same treatment of a physical removal where is was appropriate until the only patients remaining were those too ill to go through the procedure without major risk.
In the lab, as was her norm, she began to deconstruct.
-o-
"Wouldn't you prefer to rest?" Temari asked Sakura, eyeing her very plainly. "You've been working for two days. I don't think anyone has seen you take more than a few minutes to stand still, let alone sit."
"This might be my last task for the evening." Sakura assured.
They were inside an antechamber, basking in the glow of red clay walls and orange, stained glass windows. She was standing between rows of white bricks. Each brick was linen wrapped and varied in size. They were the bodies of victims from the poisoning, prepared and ready for death rites. Some were civilians, others were not. Some had been there awhile, others were fresh. Her heart drummed in her head as she picked out the shinobi from the civilians. One of the bodies had a seal over its eyes, another had a seal around its elbows. She thought, bloodline limits.
"I'll need as much as the original poison as possible, so I apologize for this offence, but it is unavoidable," she told Temari.
"You've explained yourself already. Do what you must."
Temari, respectfully, looked away from the bodies as Sakura worked, and Sakura thought how much of an influence Naruto must have had to rouse such devoted trust from a such a hard woman. It almost made her stomach turn.
Sakura went to work and soon the ill feeling left her in favour of a burning curiosity.
She had lived with guilt already, hadn't she?
-o-
Shinobi poison was a strange thing. It worked like the fantasy of a wizard's potion more than a proper poison, but Sakura had always enjoyed the challenge of understanding their structures and their symptoms. More than that, she liked countering their effects.
She was isolating the separate agents she had taken from different patients when she slowly became aware of an unfamiliar presence with her and the team in the room. An old woman was watching her. Sakura eased from her leaning to turn in her seat and return the gaze.
Wordlessly, the woman moved from the shadows and crossed the room without making her presence obtuse in any manner. Others moved around her and the Suna nin were polite enough to nod and not directly address her, as they seemed to think letting one go about unimpeded was a better curtesy than interruption.
"Can I help you?" Sakura asked, but the woman was more interested in the books Sakura had open on the countertop around her.
She read what Sakura had determined to be the initial make-up of the poison, and then read her theoretical antidote. She 'hmmed.' "What a curious similarity."
Sakura narrowed her eyes. "What does that mean?"
"I'm only alluding to you and that woman, girl, don't be touchy."
"Ah. Another fan of my Hokage."
"Not the word I would use."
"Fan?" Sakura humoured.
"Hokage. No privileged, self-absorbed coward like that Princess should be a leader of men."
Sakura seemed her lips and smiled a grimace. She wondered if it were those characteristics where the woman saw overlap between she and her mentor. Or was it her style of countering poisons? Either way, she felt it was time to encourage the woman left the lab. "I should return to my work. Unless you can take over from here?"
Suna nin were rough. They could be abrasive and Sakura allowed herself to enjoy the opportunity to cut her normally uptight rigidity a little slack. She raised an eyebrow as the woman sniffed.
"Do as you please, the Kazekage seems to think you've earned it." And then, as a parting, "we'll see."
-o-
From eyewitness accounts, the man on the table had been walking through a primarily civilian sector of the village when he become overwhelmed by a coughing fit. He had struggled to remain standing, clutching at his chest and moaning as he began coughing up blood. Within minutes, he died and did not respond to attempts to resuscitate him. It was a suspicious death and, being he was a shinobi, the Sunagakure Criminal Investigation Division opened an inquiry.
Before the end of that day, the village hospital had six other similarly bizarre cases, but no deaths from bloody coughing fits. That was – until the fourth day, when one of the patients expired in the very same manner. By week two, eighty-three individuals were in hospital and another two dozen had perished.
The Kazekage suspected the village was under attack.
Sakura, standing over the opened corpse of Patient Zero, nodded in agreement to Gaara.
An hour ago, she had finished administering the first course of successfully tested antidotes. Gaara had watched as she had purposefully poisoned her own tissue to test her antidotes. After that, he had been a little more open to her company and so she had graduated to helping in ascertaining just what exactly was the method behind the deaths and illnesses.
She and the Kazekage were the only two in the room aside from the body. They were each wrapped in ceremonial protective robes, almost entirely invariant in beige shades but for the black ink sealing out possible deadly agents. In front of their faces, suspended from under their hoods, were veils that allowed them to see each other and speak with one another without too much obfuscation.
"Do you see these burns on this tissue here, and again here and here?" Sakura asked Gaara, her voice quiet in a very quiet room. She was nervous to speak too familiarly or loudly with Gaara – she hadn't quite forgotten his old nature – and so she softened her words with calm purpose and professionalism. He nodded, not minding her slight but unintended patronizing, and she continued her explanation of their nature.
"These marks are from a chakra burn?" He asked as a point of clarification. "Not some other caustic agent?"
His medics and investigators had been chasing an incomplete lead for nearly two and a half weeks. It wasn't news she had been eager to share, and she was glad it was the two of them in the room when she told him.
"It's no wonder Tairou doesn't like you. No one would wish to look so incompetent," Gaara mused, his face impassive but his tone bordered on humorous.
"My mentor killed his parents, so there's that as well." Sakura reminded, helpfully.
"I killed his niece," Gaara said. "He can adjust his attitude."
Sakura didn't comment further on that. She said, "if you ask him to examine these burns again, more thoroughly, I'm sure he will come to the same conclusion."
Suna was understaffed and overworked. She wasn't surprised the misidentification in the analysis had been made. It could happen to anyone in a similar situation. Sakura just happened to have fresh eyes and a thorough team, all of them ready to track down information and analyse minor bits of details. Between Sakura, Shizune, and Tsunade, they had elected three other medic-nin to go to Suna: a member of Sakura's regenerative specialization team and Shizune's disciple, a communicable disease treatment and management specialist, and the final member was an Aburame Clan jounin who had a strong background with toxins and venoms.
They were, she realized, the right group for the investigation.
"We've determined an environmental link between outbreak locations to be steam vents," she said. "Those affected inhaled the invasive agents, most likely. They would be able to travel through the air with enough concentration for a small radius. But more than that, I believe I can tell you from where the poison was most likely manufactured."
After identifying the ingredients used in the poison, Sakura had been able to map out the points of origin for each agent. "And, knowing that, we have an advantage beyond the antidote," she told Gaara.
"You're supposing we can deduce who is the one to have made the poison."
"I believe so. Would you like to hear my theory on why this is happening and from where the attack has originated?" Sakura asked, half expecting Gaara to turn her away. He had his own staff members and advisors for such things. "Although, I would consider this a sensitive matter."
He surprised her when he nodded. "We'll discuss this in my office. I will hear your thoughts."
The office of the Kazekage was centrally located at the heart of Sunagakure, up several stories in the top floor of a domed tower. The room was open and large, fixed with shelves, a bar, a lounge area, a long table that seated a dozen, and his work area. The walls were rough and made from sand, and one side of the room was almost completely open to a balcony. No windows or doors, but an open wall. The wind came in freely and rustled papers, blew sand about. Gaara had no trouble moving the sand right back out, and seemed to enjoy the breeze as he shut his eyes when it stirred its way inside.
He poured her a drink and they sat on the stiff cushions of his lounge.
"I'll hear you, but do not expect that I will agree with your findings."
"Of course. It's actually...a bit troublesome for both Suna and Konoha if I'm correct. I'm hesitant to share it at all without consulting my own master. But then...it's only a thought."
"If it involves your village, then I won't be inclined to act rashly."
Sakura smiled a very small curl to her mouth, surprised once more by Gaara's calm and thoughtful demeanour.
"I believe the origin of the poison is Grass country. And, I'm not confirming my knowledge of any such actions, but I think the attack might be in response to movements our countries might have taken in contested territory in recent years."
Gaara stared at her and she explained her awareness with a half truth. She said, "I might have been on a team examining remains that might have come from such a territory. After a fire, determined to have been started by Oto nin."
The reasoning she offered satisfied him.
Another breeze came through the opening and Gaara shut his eyes to take a deep breath, his mind turning over behind his closed eyelids. Sakura coughed discretely into her hand and tried not to impose on his thoughts. He must have been debating the fallout of such a thing, if it were true.
"And the point of the poison coming from the steam vents," Sakura started, returning to an earlier aspect of her investigation.
"Perhaps it means they have an insider," he filled in for her.
"Or that the attacker is within the city, disguised." Sakura coughed more, trying to clear a tickling in her throat. Something wet hit the palm of her hand and she frowned at the thought she had spit up from her coughing. Her hand trembled as she lowered it from her face.
She didn't quite register what the red on her skin meant until Gaara started coughing over his words as well.
"Neither option – is very – appealing –"
"Kazekage-sama," Sakura said, her mouth drying and words failing her.
Gaara had come to the same conclusion as she, his eyes wide at the blood in his own hands, fresh and saturated from his lips. He flung his arm out and the sand in the air around them repulsed from the room with a palpable wave, but it was too late. The poison was already in their blood streams and slowing their movements.
Sakura very coldly remembered humility as she realized, she had been wrong about the steam vents. The poison came on the air, and the two of them had just been hit with a potent dose.
-o-