Until Spring
I
Day 50 | Day 51
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Disclaimer
I do not own any of the publicly recognized figures in this Fanfiction. Naruto is owned by the destroyers of worlds and incompetent people.
Content Warning
This fanfiction is filled with the fuckery of my mind. This fanfiction is explicit and M-rated.
Chapter Warning
Medical Horror
Day 50
It was a buzzer that woke Sakura up. It was soft and wailing, like a bird- but far too shrill.
Then years of experience in a hospital shook her awake, her eyes glistening with exhaustion and fear.
Orochimaru.
It was like a sucker punch in the teeth. The threats, the manipulation, the hopelessness- All of it leading to this pinnacle moment where she hurriedly shifted herself, medical gown askew, into the wheelchair before pushing her weakened arms into getting patient-bedside.
All for… Orochi-fucking-maru.
Who was looking decisively worse than he had only a few hours ago. His pale skin had turned translucent, his veins were strikingly blue and the rot strikingly black. A sheen of sweat had made threads of black hair look like an ebony spiderweb against his forehead and there was an odor wafting off of him. Toxic.
Sakura was out of breath when she slid her wheelchair against the metal bed frame, her hands shaking and her mouth ground into a thin, pinched line. It was awful, a feeling burning in her lungs so heavy and painful that she had to take a second keeled over.
It had been the first time she had moved in over a month by herself.
Almost two months-
Sakura was in so much pain. Mentally, physically- It was sickening and she felt the weakest she had ever felt. Worse than her fights as a genin, worse than when she had been beaten down again and again.
Yet she was here. Alive despite being here.
Sakura's hands clenched, her fingers numb but not trembling, before sitting up straight. She was alone, except for Orochimaru. And she wondered just what that meant when regarding Kabuto-
But that was something she couldn't think about right now, the serpent seal streaking up and down her bare legs in burning paths. Reminding her, telling her to get to it.
A few thoughts slid in like vermin, unstoppable but brisk in their intrusion, questioning if the snake was a part of Orochimaru or a part of Kabuto? A sick mixture of both or its own great and terrible entity?
But thinking took time, thinking took effort, thinking took energy. All three of which she did not have.
Sakura, hands sweaty and shaking, placed the tips of her fingers into the bare skin of Orochimaru's chest, his ribs arching against her every strained breath. She could feel his brittleness, like a papier-mâché monster.
Putting aside the fact he was who he was, Sakura slipped her chakra into his skin and into his blood, carefully threading his chakra with her own so his body wouldn't fully reject her. It felt...strange. Cold. It left an odd taste in her mouth.
It left an odd feeling in her bones.
Sakura bit her tongue and focused on getting in and playing clean-up with Orochimaru's insides, which were-
Awful. The sensation itself was black and murky as if his insides were liquefying.
Had they waited until the very last moment to get him medical attention? Kabuto was knowledgeable, sure, even from an enemy's standpoint, she had once been impressed with him. But now, as she peered into Orochimaru's chest cavity with her chakra, she began to wonder.
Or the lizard just wanted the snake dead, too cowardly to kill his own master. Just with a thousand more steps.
Sakura started with his heart and arteries, the blood and muscle affected by the damaged chakra channels which caused a weakening in the pumps and valves. If that wasn't corrected first, there would be the threat of brain death- which was just as bad as a real death.
Threading her chakra against the anahata point, Sakura began to work the spiderwebs of chakra channels spanning over Orochimaru's heart. The channels themselves were falling apart- like cotton candy wisping and melting into a phantom network.
It made Sakura pause- a deep-seated ache curling around her. It wasn't sensible. It was too fucking late.
But she still threaded her chakra into the channel, pushing her abilities as she sunk herself into fixing...whatever the hell this was.
Orochimaru's chakra, at least, accepted her. There was no rejection, no tremendous thrashing against her invasion. It made it easier to, you know, rebuild a delicate, flexible chakra channel arching over an already weak-as-fuck heart.
That being said, the rebuild itself was very, very slow. Sakura was above her peers in having the knowledge and how-to of pulling this shit off, but she was unpracticed. Hell, Tsunade was unpracticed. Some small, viciously black part of her was anxious for the ambitious title of being the one to pull off the impossible.
A striking little demon built inside her from years of being ignored and assumed weaker. Assumed lacking because she didn't have a tailed demon or bloodline limits- Just a flesh and bone woman.
It fueled her. In the wrong way, she surely knew that, as she poured herself back into the work that had once fueled her back in Konoha. Deliberate and skilled as she twisted and molded arches and synapses back into the anahata point. The strained structure had become more… firm, the wisping edges coiling back into a purposeful isometric lacework under Orochimaru's ribcage.
Yet, hardly any progress.
She was strained when she pulled away, feeling the edges she had just bound together fray slightly- a warning of completely unwinding if she were to leave it for long.
Sweat had gathered in every pore, and Sakura felt clammy and faint. But, most importantly, pissed off.
Not only had she just aided the enemy, but he didn't even have the gratitude to stay fixed.
Sakura sighed, her body unevenly sprawling back into the corner of the wheelchair, head falling uncomfortably back until she was strained and looking at the ceiling.
She wondered if they were looking for her. Naruto would be, and so would Sai and Ino. Kakashi. Tsunade-
Sakura waited for her eyes to sting, but nothing came. There wasn't even a burn behind her nose, just a cold feeling that came from her exhaustion. The notion was subtle and inflexible within her mind: she hoped that they never found her.
Day 51
Sakura woke up stiff and surly in the wheelchair, propped up haphazardly by her own elbows and one foot while her neck ached; arched wrongly against the back of the chair.
It was a slow process to right herself into a straight, seated position. And when she did, she was looking right at Orochimaru- his skin translucent still, but his heart rate was still moving at an even speed.
Though she knew it to be impossible, she found herself relieved that he hadn't woken up. She didn't know what she would do if he had- or if he would. Or, when he would?
No- she didn't want to think about it. If she were successful, he would eventually awaken and when that day came she was unsure of its consequences.
Groaning as she adjusted herself against her seat, the smell of sweat wafting from under the sparse gown and the back of her legs seemed to stick to the plastic. She felt gross, inside and out.
The ache in her arms made it hard to pull herself forward and the drain on her chakra from the day before- if her circadian rhythm wasn't super fucked up- made her pores sting as she pressed her hand against Orochimaru's sternum again and brushed her chakra against his.
It was certainly...better than the day before. But the loose 'threading', as she had coined it, had begun to tear up and fragment, threatening the stability of the vessels.
Great. Good.
Fuck.
Sakura let herself fall back into her wheelchair, her head aching and her body heavy. She was hungry and she wanted to be clean before she resumed the healing process again. And, at least for now, the snake seal seemed to be subdued as it trailed almost lazily along her shoulders- as if a real snake was trapped just under her skin.
It would, at least, give her a chance to rummage around this place.
Now that she wasn't accosted by Kabuto or sinking her bodily resources into Orochimaru, she actually let herself look around. According to her training, she should have been scoping the place immediately- but that seemed… stupid. As weak as she was, the place could have been decked out in reasonably attainable weapons and what would that have done?
But now?
The space was aseptic and white. So white, that even with the low-light hovering just above Orochimaru, the space glowed. Against the wall to her left were a sink, an autoclave, tools on shelves in sterile packages, and a very large industrial freezer that Sakura figured held medications and antibiotics.
To the right was, in almost a comical split of the room, a living space. Like a medical madman's bachelor pad.
There was a couch decked out with a blanket of all things, next to a barren side table with a small lamp. Next to all of that kick-in-the-teeth oddness, was a small kitchenette. A small fridge, a stovetop, and a microwave-
It was...gimpier than her own back in her, surely foreclosed, apartment. What did she expect from a holding room?
Either way, her hands slid to the wheels and forced her way into the odd living space and into the kitchen.
Sakura had the track marks to prove that she hadn't been eating for the last month and a half. Just a drip, injectable nutrients. But she didn't have that now, the gaping wound on her inner arm a grieving reminder.
Sakura eyed the mark before placing her hand against it, fully intending on healing the forgotten wound-
Then, pressure. Heavy against her shoulders and around her ribs, mimicking the feeling of being constricted.
Oh.
When her hand fell away the squeezing stopped.
Oh.
There was a certain coldness that crept up the back of her legs and up her spine, a crawling freeze that made her tense. She couldn't heal herself. The most basic response to her body, and she couldn't fucking do it?
Her interest in eating evaporated and she rolled back and away from the kitchenette area and to her own doorway. A blatant and unmistakable numbness slicking her senses back.
Whatever. No reason to heal if they weren't going to live. Dead girl walking, surely.
It was hard to convince herself as she laid face down on the cot, stress making her eyes burn and her fingers shake.
O
It wasn't sleeping, but Sakura couldn't say that she was awake either. An in-between that coddled the numbness in her mind and body.
But time had passed. And Sakura reasoned that she was going to have to get up sooner or later, the snake's activity becoming less languid and more… there was no word for it. Active? Menacing? Foreboding?
She could just feel it as it slithered patterns over her spine. It was agitating her. It hadn't moved before, at least, not too much when she was alone. But now, in the presence of Orochimaru and duty, it crawled along her nerves and through her flesh. Like trailing fingernails.
Sakura pushed herself from her cot and rolled herself over to where her wheelchair sat against the metal frame.
It was too early to attempt walking, the muscles starved and small, but she could feel the potential there- right against her bones. Training would be out of the questions she was sure, but motility in general? No, she would regain that-
If the gas exposure from before hadn't completely stricken her. Paralyzed her? Made her invalid?
Invalid. The word tasted bad in her mouth.
It was a word that she hadn't used since her days as a stupid twelve-year-old. It was a crude word, one that invalidated everything a ninja was- but she couldn't help herself. She was...ruined. She felt ruined.
"For now."
The ghost of an old voice hummed in her head. Her inner, long quiet as she focused more on her work and her training, back again.
"...For now."
Sakura's lips thinned to a hard line, explicitly reminding herself of her fight with Ino during the Trails. She wasn't crazy. She wasn't insane- A laugh cut her off.
"For no-"
"Shut up."
Her voice sounded frail in her own ears, almost unrecognizable. Choked out and dehydrated. But...angry. And there. Just as, apparently, her inner was still there. What a fucking headache.
Sakura rolled her eyes at herself before pulling herself into the wheelchair, nearly missing as it rolled brakeless across the floor. It was a good distraction from the intrusive idea that she was no longer anything. Frustration replacing morose melancholy in a fiendish blitz.
When she was righted in her chair, anger on her tongue, she pushed herself out of her room and around Orochimaru's pale husk and back to the kitchen, wasting no time in opening the cabinets.
In one of them were cans of evaporated milk and canned nutrient-dense, unflavored soups. The packaging familiar- as if she had the same brand back in her apartment in Konoha-
No, it was. Mocking, the colored flower insignia stared back at her. It was incredibly odd- so odd that Sakura closed the cabinet door, leaving her hand on the pull bar, but slowly opening it back open-
Yep. There it was. Imprinted with Konoha branding.
Sakura let the cabinet sit open as she moved to the next one, and the one after that. There were a plethora of canned foods with pull-tops, a rice cooker, bags of enriched white rice, cheap black tea, and several bottles of unopened vitamins with labels scrawled 'Haruno- take 1 a day'.
And every single thing was a Konoha brand label.
It was a mockery- that Sakura knew. It was an explicit way to tell her that they had their roots in deep- and her abduction was probably so far planned out it made her teeth itch. It made her blood freeze.
Every bit of her felt violated. There didn't need to be pictures of her, there didn't need to be an illustrious map of her routine, and there didn't need to be recordings of her- All they needed was to copy her grocery list. There were cans of soup that she only bought in cooler months- something she would have been normally buying around this time. Seltzer water she would drink before long missions...A small package of crackers she hadn't been able to buy for at least a year and a half.
Sakura nearly didn't make it to the sink when she vomited up green foam and stomach acid, panicking, making her body electric. Who had it been? Who espionage her so well that she would be copied in such a vicious way?
Rocking her brain, Sakura could come up with no one.
Was she such an awful ninja that she didn't notice being stalked? How could she be stalked? How much more did they know about her?
Sakura felt ill, sicker than sick, but she still took out a can of soup. It was a thick and brothy puree of vegetables and savory fruits, a kind that she specifically bought to thwart the odd urinary tract infection. It was heavy in her hand as she rolled it between her fingers, a force of habit causing her to stare at the sugar content on the back.
Figments of an old eating disorder she'd spurned on when she was twelve and chasing Sasuke. Another particularly awful memory.
Before opening the can, fully intent on drinking the contents cold, the label was shredded and tossed spitefully back onto the counter. Fuck them, they weren't going to burrow further under her skin. She'd be damned.
…
'For now.'
Author's Note
Hey everyone. So here is a longer chapter- with bits I like and with bits I hate. So, I really enjoyed writing Day 50 because I was able to explore the use of chakra healing in a more in-depth sense.
Day 51? Fuck that one. I just wanted to make sure I got more context and then ended up slipping and falling down the hole of remembering that Sakura literately has a second soul and she had an eating disorder as a child? Actually, I take it back.
I like 51. Day 51 can stay because I get to explore Sakura. As a character. There are so many...things I remember connecting to Sakura with when I was a kid. And now that I am an adult and dying of work- I appreciate her. Even though I literately ship her with a villain. Not to mention a villain that can even respect the scientific method.